I'm a writer?

"You're a writer"

was how she began the conversation as she approached to where I was squatted at the lowest display of the magazine rack. It was a plain declaration, quietly stated without ambiguity or any hint of sarcasm - the word "writer" turned upward like a half-smile. In the instant that I was yanked from my mumbling thoughts to the world of human communication it became a statement of inarguable truth. Just as surely she could have said "you're bearded" or "you're in the library", I couldn't have argued. I, bearded, was in the library and this was a librarian defining me as a writer. Logically, she can recognize those who fill the volumes she tends: “Writer” is to “Librarian” as “Vintner” is to “Wine Merchant”, since wine bottles, like library books, are meticulously cataloged, browsed though rarely sampled, and eventually sold from a musty cellar.

For supporting evidence, the librarian cited my writing for edible Cleveland. She didn't say which of the two articles I’d published with the magazine she had read. In fact, she didn't say she had read either. Perhaps my bio with accompanying photo caught her eye on the contributor page located within a couple of bored page flips from the front cover of the complimentary quarterly. There, my name, she may have recognized from my library patronage. My face, in profile, with dark slit eyes, feigning interest in something far off or in the stimulating conversation of someone just out of the frame, with it's handlebar mustache, a subnasal cry to be recognized and remembered, perhaps 15 months later by a librarian in rural Ohio. I’m seated at a table that is not visible in the photo, my elbow resting presumptuously on the red-white checkered backing of a chair from an adjacent table. In my lap, my daughter confronts the photographer (wife/mother) with an unabashed gaze and a cafe spoon in her mouth. We are in Paris in a crowded and lively outdoor cafe setting, our first day on my first trip to France. I am enjoying a café au lait and a smug sense of worldliness. My daughter is early in the arduous process of consuming, as presented to her, a “hot chocolate”. The timeless moment of the photograph conveys endless contentment, both for the subjects of the photo and all who will experience it as the satisfyingly smooth weight of a richly-colored pebble snatched from a cool-running stream. Closely downstream from this moment, though already out of the librarian’s view, my daughter will extract the spoon from her mouth with the intention of returning it to the source of the crust already forming around the corners of her mouth. With a child’s calculation she manipulates limbs within the confine of space between daddy and chocolate, turning away from the camera while lowering her arm for the next spoonful. She thinks she is guiding the spoon, but the spoon is following the elbow, which is heading blindly to the cup. The cup, whose base is not quite settled into the confines of the circular indent of the saucer. The saucer, a suggestion of stability, is a false foundation. It’s slight concavity invites you to look beneath to the small circular rim it rests on (but you won’t until after). The saucer is a tight-rope walker with arms outstretched. And a bucket of molten chocolate on his head. The circus spectacle ends with predictable tragedy on my lap as a puddle whose extent will belie my understanding of European portion size. The conspiracy fulfilled, we return to our friend’s apartment so I can change pants.

It is in this apartment, at a tiny desk behind the louvered doors of a reading nook-turned-guest bedroom that I will begin writing for edible Cleveland, flirting with a new identity:

I am a writer

Markko of Distinction

Markko Vineyard for edible Cleveland from Steven Corso

TAKE 2

Coming from the west, from Kingsville, South Ridge Road crosses Conneaut Creek before climbing onto glacial moraine. Passing farms and woodlots, the road is soon transformed into the perfect country road, dropping your car from the quiet monotony of asphalt onto the exhilarating rumble and clatter of gravel and dirt – the roads of wagons and model-T's, Soon after you'll have to make a choice: To follow South Ridge is to make a right and pass under the freeway, otherwise you continue straight toward Conneaut on West Under Ridge Road.

Or you could turn left onto an easily-overlooked wooded drive marked with a simple concrete pillar. The pillar is a sign: Markko Vineyard 1968 – the sign you've arrived at the origin of northeast Ohio's European wine production.

Your wine merchant's shelves are populated with bottles labeled with exotic names from far-flung places. There are bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon from Italy and southeastern Australia; Chardonnays from France and Chile; Pinot Noir from California and South Africa; and Riesling from southern Germany and Oregon.

Despite the diverse array of wine names, all of the above wines and most drained from the nearly 32 billion bottles of wine consumed by earthlings in 2010 are varietals of one species of European domesticated grape - Vitis vinifera.

And although wine producing regions might seem like disparate places, they tend to occupy predictable locations on Earth. Grab a globe and let your finger circumnavigate and you'll discover that most of the wine we drink was produced on west coasts between about 35 and 45 degrees north or south latitude. Heavily influenced by westerly winds off of cool ocean water, these temperate places have similar climates: mild summers with warm, sunny days, cool nights and low humidity - indeed they often have no rain during their summer months. Winters are cool - but not too cold - and rainy. This so-called “Mediterranean climate” is that in which wild Vitis vinifera,evolved and was first cultivated over 8 thousands years ago.

And this is decidedly not the climate of northeast Ohio.

And yet Arnulf “Arnie” Esterer, Markko vineyard's vitner and co-founder (his partner Tim Hubbard died in 2000), has been producing these same varietals of vinifera grape wines in Ashtabula county for over 40 years.

Markko was the destination for me and my family – my wife, Tatiana and our two daughters ages 4 and 8 - one sunny, cool late September Saturday. Arnie is in his early 80's with slight stature, white hair and beard highlighting blue eyes. On this day, our first meeting, I'm impressed with Arnie's energy, sustained by continual fascination for what he does.

“We're trying to figure out which way to go, how to do it. We have so much to learn”, he says of his nearly half-century of viticulture.

A moment later he and my girls are playing with a litter of wiry-haried puppies and their Muppety mother. I ask him what breed of dogs they are.

“These are Markko puppies,” he tells me with a straight face.

Having wondered about the name of the winery, I ask a naïvely earnest follow-up:

“Oh you named the winery after this breed of dog?”

My first experience with Arnie's subtle sense of humor and I fall for it.

With a playful smile he invites me for a tour.

Having lived for a decade in the California Bay Area, and made my rounds of the area's wineries, I'd become accustomed to those that take themselves obnoxiously seriously. Where guests are greeted either by arcane ultra-modern architecture replete with acute angles, curvy glass whatevers and obscured doorways or by imposing classical facades, imperial gardens of sculptured hedges, naked statues and squirting fountains, and tasting rooms with all the quaintness of the Pantheon.

By contrast, Markko appears a ramshackle in the forest, where I'd rather expect the production of moonshine than Cabernet Sauvignon. The wine is pressed, aged, tasted, sold and shipped all from this unassuming facility from which no grape vines are visible. Of the 100 acre property, about 15 are vineyard.

“We're very small”, he admits, adding that much of the rest of the property is designated a conservancy, wooded with a big gully and Conneaut Creek, which flows westward a few miles to the south of Markko before a sharp turn brings it back through the northern portion of the property. Later he'll show me the vineyards. And later, I tell myself, the biologist in me will have to see some of this conservancy. But for now we head inside.

Markko's public entrance begins with a rustic front step of rough log and stone. This opens to a small, homey tasting room with a short bar and a large communal table. An adjoining outdoor deck is suspended in dense forest foliage of varied greens. Here one get's a sense of Markko's, and Arnie's, history and personality: decades of photographs, kitschy nicknacks (“Age Improves with Wine”), parched wine bottles and straw-wrapped jugs, dusty glasses, a cow bell all occupy the room's shelved spaces.

Linda, who's been working for Arnie for most of Markko's existence, is pouring my wine samples. Behind her, in direct sight of anyone tasting, hangs a wooden sign with a simple message:

“Wine is Good Food”

I ask Arnie about this and receive an animated reply:

“We're just producing food!”

In a sense, this little sign is the most succinct expression of Arnie's driving philosophy and business model.

“We've gotta get away from Pepsi and Coke”, he proclaims.

I tend to think of “wine versus beer” as the mutually exclusive choice I'm offered at dinners or parties. But Arnie sees wine as the beverage choice among many, and his vision is a northeast Ohio where people drink inexpensive, lower-alcohol, un-aged vinifera wines at ball games, fast-food joints, every post-breakfast meal.

“If this industry doesn't promote it as a food but promotes it as entertainment [we winemakers are] in trouble”.

He rattles off per capita annual consumption rates for several European countries that are in the tens of gallons, arguing that a broad base of everyday wine drinkers supports a region's wine industry such that “great wine” can be produced at quantities that result in affordable everyday prices. Wine “shouldn't be just the rich people's food or a snobby, aristocratic thing”, he tells me. This statement leads me to ask why Arnie established a European winery an hour drive from Cleveland during its culinary “pre-enlightenment”? In my pursuit of an answer I use the word “quality” in reference to wine. This word irritates Arnie, and my use of it set's him off on a half-hour debate, pitting cheap wine against expensive bottles, all the while demonstrating his preferred wine lexicon: The wine at the top of the price pyramid might have unique “artistic value”, he says, but if the abundant and inexpensive wine displays the “true varietal character” while revealing the “personality” and “beauty” of the region and the vintner, who is to say which wine is of higher quality?

Markko specializes in growing, as Arnie calls them, the World's five great wine grapes: Chardonnay, Riesling, Pinot Noir, Cabernet Sauvignon and Pinot gris, all selected from the European grape species Vitis vinifera. I'll refrain from trying to pull off sophisticated descriptions of the wine I tasted. Let it suffice to say: I liked Arnie's wine. But what is my reference point?

An obvious point of comparison are the wines that have been the basis of Ohio's wine industry for much of its history, namely, wines made from American grapes of the species Vitis labrusca - the most widely grown grape in the U.S., the Concord, is one variety of this species - or wines made of vinifera X American grape hybrids, as grape geneticists think Catawba likely is.

For those with a wine education based solely on vinifera curriculum, these wines can be an unpleasant surprise on first tasting. If not outright sweet these wines are off-dry at their driest. And the term “foxy” is also often used to describe musky aspects of their flavor. Methyl anthranilate is the predominant molecular component of Concord grape flavor which, isolated, has been the stand-in “GRAPE” flavor of KoolAid and lollipops. Not exactly a flavor profile of subtle complexities.

Other local wineries produce some vinifera wines but Markko specializes in only producing vinifera wines.

And when I casually ask Arnie for clarification, I get it:

“So you were one of the first wineries in the area to make wine from vinifera grapes?”

“The first,” he gently corrects

My tour continues passed a small, cluttered “chemistry lab”, where a developing wine's characteristics can be measured, through Markko's modest warehouse, which opens to a shipping dock. Outside is the circa 1950's German grape press, which looks like a cylinder of metal grate caging a deflated inner tube running its length. I watched grapes loaded in, pushed around the inner tube. Once full and cage door closed the inner tube is inflated, pushing the grapes against the metal grate. The muddy juice that's extruded is captured in a trough below the press that empties, by a hose running through the floor, to a settling tank in the cellar below.

Andy, an intern at Markko who spent Ohio's last winter working the summer vineyards and presses of New Zealand, leads me down for an olfactory tour of the cellar, where I climb and scramble up racks of damp, yeasty barrels smelling this variety, now that vintage, coaxed into detecting differences with my amateur nose.

“Has Arnie told you about the black mold?”, Andy asks me, referring to that which is growing on nearly every undisturbed surface of the cellar. The question sustains my developing sense of history of this place: everything, including the mold, has a story.

Arnie grew up in Ann Arbor. His father, a German expat, and mother were both research biochemists. He went to the University of Michigan for mechanical engineering and wound up working for Union Carbide in Ashtabula. Wine-making became his hobby in the mid 1960's. When he was laid off from Union Carbide in 1972 (“I was gonna quit the next year”), wine-making became his primary occupation.

He tells me about a pivotal meeting with the man who would become his mentor, and who shaped the development of wine-making in the Finger Lakes region of New York – Dr. Konstantin Frank.

Frank was Ukrainian, born in 1899. He had studied agricultural science at the Polytechnic Institute in Odessa where he later became a professor. His research focused on growing vinifera grapes outside of their native environment. In the early 1950's he emigrated to the U.S. Not wanting to give up his career in viticulture, but unable to speak English, Frank got a menial job at New York's agricultural research station near Geneva. There he coaxed a local winemaker, Charles Fournier of Gold Seal winery, to plant vinifera vines and make European wine. In the early 1960's he bought his own land on Lake Keuka. Shortly thereafter his first vintage was released under the appropriately-named label Vinifera Wine Cellars. Soon he was the guru of eastern U.S. vinifera wine-making, and in a 1967 pilgrimage, Arnie the young acolyte wound up on Franks doorstep. Directed by his wife to the vintner's workshop, Frank greeted Arnie:

“Who are you? A somebody or a nobody?”

Arnie responded: “A nobody”

“Good, follow me”

One night while pressing grapes together, Frank gave Arnie his mission.

“He told me I should buy 100 acres, so I went and bought 100 acres”. Arnie left his apprenticeship and returned to Ohio to apply what he'd learned in the Finger Lakes.

As the sun descends its late-September arc, Arnie agrees to lead a small flock of visitors down the dirt road to his vineyards. I take advantage of the distance to learn more.

The explanation for how Mediterranean grapes can survive and produce here is largely a matter of air circulation, Arnie explains, and site selection for his 100 acres was the most important single predictor of his eventual success. On hot summer days, as air heats and rises off Markko's ridge-top vineyards, relatively cool air is pulled up the ridge from Lake Erie, cooling the grapes. approximating summer temps experienced by vinifera grapes in their native climate. As winter approaches, before the lake freezes, winds coming off the lake are warm relative to the chilly uplands, helping to lessen the severity of late fall cold snaps and early winter deep freeze. Once the lake freezes, the cold air moving inland keeps Arnie's grapes dormant into spring, preventing an early flowering that might be fine in a Mediterranean climate but would be in danger of a March or April freeze here. The ultimate value of Arnie's site - close to the lake and on a hill - is measured in air movement: up and down the hill, day and night, season by season, moving cold and hot and humid air and disease organisms through, not settling on, the vines.

In the vineyard as when drinking wine, the key is moderation.

The group reaches rows of trellised Chardonnay vines. To the north I can nearly see the lake except for the light clouds. Interstate 90 is roaring within earshot to the south and I strain to listen to Arnie explain a bunch of grapes he's holding in his hand. My amateur assessment is that the grapes are “bad”, many look shriveled, bruised, punctured, and scarred. I'm sorry for Arnie's loss as I would never buy this bunch of grapes in the store, but Arnie has insider knowledge obtained through millenia of vinifera cultivation plus decades of his own local application.

“This mold is not what you want”, he says, pointing to one afflicted grape, “but this one”, referring to that grapes's neighbor, “this is 'noble mold', this we like”.

He eats that grape. Then he offers us similarly nobly-moldy grapes for our own sampling.

We take them. And we eat them. Arnie had us eating out of his hand, almost literally.

“This is Arnie in his element”, I think, chewing on my grape and admiring what I consider Arnie's perfect uniform for a vintner: worn utility jeans and a shabby cardigan sweater over a flat blue flannel shirt - collar up. And from his crusted shoes to his deeply-soiled cap, his clothes are the embodiment of Markko's terroir, animated by the passion of its dedicated keeper.

The sun is getting low and there's a chill in the air now as we walk back down the dirt road to the winery. Arnie continues the education for those listening, but I am distracted by what looks like a trail heading into the woods of Markko. I decide to slip off for a quick look at the conservancy.

The gorge was impressive, arching around me, I was on a promontory with an abrupt 20 foot drop on three sides. But something else quickly caught my eye. An angry tangle of giants - grape vines of the native species common in northeast Ohio, Vitis riparia - emerging thick from the ground like trees with indecisive trunks growing this way, then bending back, branching out in different directions, quickly become woody tentacles, with pealing bark a monster's coarsely shaggy fur, extending dozens of feet into the canopy, weaving together as many trees in a shared fate during every foul wind and stormy night.

It was easy to imagine this scene, a few hundred feet from Arnie's vineyards, as a secret gathering of angry natives plotting their attack on the European invaders. But that fantasy ignores a more complicated reality, a forced relationship between European and American Vitis imposed by vintners and wild American nature. All of Arnie's vinifera grapes are grafted on to rootstock of this American species. A parasitic insect native to the New World happily destroys European grapes at the root; any successful vinifera planting depends on the perseverance of American rootstock in the face of this challenge. If I wanted truth in metaphor, I'd have to do better than “angry grapes”.

I return to find Arnie, restating his mission:

“We're a demonstration. The point is to demonstrate some of the ways you can make wine in this region, drawing back to some of the very basics”, he reiterates to his guests. “These grapes haven't been grown here before. We roughly have 40 years experience. That's nothing in the wine business ”.

Correction and Commentary

I would like to correct a couple of elements of Ms. Wishard's most recent “Geauga Down Under” article regarding the Munson township shale gas meeting held at Notre Dame school.

First, the article quotes senator Eklund as claiming that “open pits for [storing fracking waste water] have been banned for some time”. The senator's claim is incorrect.

On the other hand, the article quotes ODNR Lead Inspector Tom Hill as saying that "[open] tanks or pits are used for fresh water, not brine”. On the contrary, Tom Hill correctly stated what Ohio law does indeed permit. To quote Ohio law:

“Pits may be used for the temporary storage of frac-water and other liquid substances produced from the fracturing process, but upon termination of the fracturing process, pits not otherwise permitted by this rule shall be emptied, the contents disposed of in accordance with law and the pits filled in, unless this requirement is waived or extended “

It is important for our elected officials to know oil and gas law, especially as it potentially impacts the well-being of their constituents. We, the future residents of shale gas extraction areas, have legitimate concerns about this waste. Although Ohio law still allows contents of frac-water to be kept trade secrets, chemicals that are known to have been used in the process include carcinogens, hormone disruptors and various other toxins. Open pits of this waste will allow some of these chemicals to become air-borne, especially during our hot summers. A 2012 Cornell University study documented two dozen incidents of livestock poisoning across six states due mainly to ingestion of exposed frac-water. Moreover, a number of studies, including those of the USGS and Penn State, show that this waste water can be highly radioactive. A 2011 report by the New York Times found that, of 200 Marcellus wells investigated, 42 produced waste water that was radioactive. For some, the water contained 1500 times the safe limit for radioactive radium.  Indeed, within the past week, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection announced plans for a year-long study of radioactivity in fracking waste water produced from its shale wells (much of which, incidentally, gets trucked to and disposed of in Ohio).

I'd also like to correct something that Senator Eklund falsely implied at the meeting: That “local control” means that locals – maybe farmers, school bus drivers, the local diner wait staff – will become oil and gas inspectors if townships are allowed to regain, from the state, the ability to have a say in drilling decisions. This is ridiculous.
“Local control” largely means that communities can use their zoning laws to tighten state law. For example, state law allows for shale gas wells to be located within 150 feet of any occupied building (school, house) and within 50 feet of any river or lake. Locals might rather extend these distances.
“Local control” also means that communities can opt out of allowing this kind of development in their area, forever or at least until they have a sense that it can be done without sacrificing the health and happiness of the locals.
In short, local control is democracy.

Seismic Threat

Seismic Threat

I was beside myself on reading the news that seismic testing trucks surveyed the western edge of Geauga county for oil and gas reserves along route 306 last Sunday morning, apparently without alerting locals, township trustees, or even the police chief. Granted, this type of testing has happened before in the county, along Auburn Road this past September, for example. But there is an audacity that has accompanied this shale drilling frenzy that never ceases to shock me.
The truth is: Locals just don't matter.

We repeatedly hear how our country is so deeply divided between right and left. But here, rolling slowly down our streets and peering through the ground beneath our houses, is the perfect unifying force. No matter your political leanings, your enemy is in your midst.

For the right, the enemy is the 'nanny state” in Columbus, which removed local decision-making from the shale drilling process with the passage of H.B 278 in 2004. Laws since adopted by state officials to regulate drilling will have to suffice for you and me. Bureaucrats in Columbus say that 50 feet is far enough away from your favorite fishing or swimming hole to extract oil and gas. Columbus has decided that 150 feet is enough of a buffer between the your house or your child's school and the drill rigs, gas pipe, diesel engines, and retention ponds. And they've also decided that you don't need to know each and every chemical used in the extraction process. Beyond your decision to lease your mineral rights, you need not worry about taking personal responsibility for yourself, your land, your neighbor, your community. Just sit back; Big Government will take care of everything from here.

For the left, we have the perfect nemesis: An arm of the fossil fuel industry that subverts democracy at every turn by paying off politicians to gain favorable legislation, by funding junk science that concludes their processes are safe (as recently reported), by spreading misinformation about their safety record and silencing victims and witnesses of their calamities with gag orders and legal threats.

Of course, the politicians and the industry are united by money and favor.
And so, we Geauga residents, no matter our political persuasion, are united by what we stand to lose:
The freedom to live in a cherished place of our own making.

So far I've seen mostly complacency from my neighbors. We should be following the lead of Cincinnati and Mansfield, Longmont, CO and Pittsburgh, PA and the growing number of other places where locals are coming together to retake control of their rights, resources, and destinies by passing legislation – under threat of lawsuits from both their state and the industry -  to regulate drilling in their communities as local residents see fit.

Can we come together as a community and decide what's best for ourselves? I've reserved the Log Cabin on Chardon Square - 7 PM on Tuesday, December 18. Anyone motivated to come with constructive ideas, proposed solutions, and New Year resolutions, please meet me there, at our county seat of public representation.
And / or contact me at my new email: citizens.uniting@gmail.com

Steve Corso
Claridon Township

To Ohio Oil and Gas Energy Education Program

Dear R

This email is a follow-up to an interaction we had after the meeting sponsored by the Eastern Geauga Landowners in Middlefield last week.

You had challenged me on a number of issues and referred me to the ODNR for clarification. I am here to report that I did indeed correspond with Michael Williams, a geologist with the agency. I asked him three questions that were points of contention between you and me. Quotes below are from his emailed response.

First, contrary to your insistence, Ohio “does not determine what type or volume of chemicals to be used in the drilling, stimulation or production of an oil and gas well.  Benzene and diesel fuel are not prohibited by Ohio law”. You vigorously denied that these two substances could legally be used in Ohio for well stimulation.

Another point you contested involved the temporary storage of flowback. Williams confirmed my reading of Ohio oil and gas law: “Ohio law does not require that all flowback be stored in steel tanks.  Temporarily flowback may be stored in open pits that meet the design requirements of the chief”.

To your credit, Williams did agree that you and the woman you pointed at who was listening in could indeed drink flowback (though he added, “...the experience [would be] very unpleasant”). However, given that flowback can also contain heavy metals and radioactive nucleotides – like radium, which can replace calcium in bones and emit highly dangerous alpha particles, and given that Ohio does not regulate what chemicals are used or in what concentration they are used, I'm not sure how he can say flowback is “drinkable”. As I informed you in Middlefield, benzene (for one example) is considered toxic at 5 parts per billion.

But I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt – in a sense – that you are well-informed of the entire process of shale gas extraction and the particulars of Ohio laws and rules governing it. One the other hand, this means that I am not giving you the benefit of the doubt that you are operating in good faith in your promotion of shale gas development.

OOGEEP honestly states its mission “to promote a positive public awareness of Ohio's oil and gas drilling and producing industry.” One should hope that a sense of ethical and social responsibility should preclude the communication of misinformation, the intentional omission of other information, and the scornful dismissal of legitimate concerns in the fulfillment of any organization's mission. But your talk, which I have watched twice now, is laden with all three.

Some examples from your talk and after:

While you communicated that those considering leasing their land “need to be aware” that a drill rig will be on their property and that water will be used to make drilling mud, you did not see any need to inform them that there may be an open pit of flowback on their property. This information might be valuable for your audience, especially those with children or farm animals that could be exposed to the hazards posed by such a pit. That landowners can specify in a lease that flowback be contained in tanks makes your omission all the more dubious. Why not tell them?

Why not tell your audience how much water will be used and where it might come from? Your obfuscation of water use – that less water will be used to frack a horizontal bore compared to enough vertical bores to access the same amount of shale – is a prudent deception in a room full of farmers during a summer of record drought.

There are plenty of legitimate concern regarding the chemicals that may be introduced into communities and bodies with the development of shale gas – carcinogens, mutatgens, hormone disruptors, substances that delay or otherwise harm mental development in children, and other substances of harm. Yet you refer to all these in an insultingly stupid Mary Poppins reference in your presentation. You really come across as not respecting your audience, let alone the doctors, pediatricians, parents, teachers, cancer survivors, health societies, etc. who have expressed real concern that these chemicals might have a generational health legacy in this country.

One final example of deception (of many) was your communication - to the gentleman chatting with you in front of me after your talk - that chemicals in flowback are not dangerous as they've been “spent”. I have a difficult time describing this as anything but an outright and dangerous lie.

Despite my beliefs regarding the wisdom of “our” energy “decisions”, I recognize the industry's right to promote itself, and I imagine you and the other people working for OOGEEP are probably good and loved people in your lives. But you must be told unambiguously that, in your role in promoting this untested technology that gave rise to the decade-old shale gas revolution, your conduct is unethical at best. That you are operating in public school makes my head spin. How is that anything but indoctrination of tomorrow's mineral-rights leasers and petroleum consumers?

I'd like to be optimistic about the future, but given the anecdotal and scientific information building around the shale gas revolution, and given that our government is polluted with industry money, and given the deceptive promotion of shale gas to a largely uncritical public, I am finding it difficult to feel good about my daughters' future, my country's future, and my planet's future.

Your slide of the house with all of the occupant's petroleum-derived products sitting in the front yard resonated with me, though not as you intended. If we are going to continue to gauge our quality of life and standard of living by the amount of (petroleum-derived) stuff we have, we are truly an empty people with a bleak future.

Thank you for your attention (if you made it this far!),

Sincerely,

Steven Corso

Geauga County landowner, farmer, educator, father of two healthy daughters, engaged citizen

Letter to Tea Party

Dear Geauga County Tea Party,

Recently you had a correspondence with Jessica Schaner, with whom I am acquainted through a mutual concern with shale gas development. She shared with me your email exchange and I offered to respond. Not that I'm an expert at anything in particular, but I have done a fair amount of reading since first learning about “fracking” shortly after my wife and I moved our family (two young daughters) here two years ago.

Keep in mind that the initial concerns with fracking came not from activists, or documentary film makers, or scientists but rather from the mostly rural people living near the new type of wells (deep and horizontal) as they were established in the early 2000's, first in Texas and then in the Rocky Mountain and southern states, then in Pennsylvania beginning less than a decade ago.

To me the anecdotes are compelling because they stretch back to the early days of this type of drilling (the early 2000s) and they follow the development of new shale plays. The people claiming harm from drilling activities have been of no particular political persuasion – this is a non-partisan concern at the local level. They are often farmers or ranchers or otherwise hard-working Americans from “main street” of small town America. I have no motivation to doubt their reports. Still, these reports are anecdotes.

I am happy to have read in your email that you, as do I, demand factual and verifiable information. I'm an incurable skeptic. I have a science background and I tend to value peer-reviewed papers publishing analyzed data. I also demand journalism that rigorously cites its sources. So I would like to provide you with two links I find quite compelling.

First is Propublica, an independent journalism organization that has been following the fracking story since 2008. What I like about it is the fact that their (freely accessed) articles contain many live links to primary publications and reports from other science, government, and journalism organizations. Scroll down to the clickable titles of their 100 articles:

http://www.propublica.org/series/fracking

(I'll note there are other fine sources of journalism to visit as well – if you'd like me to offer more let me know)

Second is a link to links of 17 scientific papers looking into the potential or real health and environmental impacts of unconventional gas drilling. Science is playing catch-up here. It's a slow process and unfortunately is following up on the anecdotal reports (rather than preceding and maybe preventing possible problems), so there isn't much to see yet. Still, the papers linked provide ample reason for me to demand precaution from my elected officials.

Here is the link: http://www.grassrootsinfo.org/frackingdigest.html

My motivation in this is to protect the health of my family, especially two young, developing girls, and to protect my and my wife's emotional, psychological and financial investment in rural Geauga – a place we very much chose to move to from our previous urban existence.

I have never been politically active before this issue became my issue, and through my involvement I have thought a lot about government accountability, money in politics, the role of misinformation in political and economic discourse, and the erosion of representative democracy. I don't claim to know much about the Tea Party but it seems that some of these issues are Tea Party issues.

(See this report on gas industry money in politics:

http://www.commoncause.org/site/pp.asp?c=dkLNK1MQIwG&b=7868571)

Please check out the information I've sent and consider whether the Tea Party of Geauga County might want to take a tough stance on the changes happening in and to our community.

If you'd like me to come present my case at one of your meetings, I'd be happy to.

Thank you for your kind attention.

Steven Corso

Establishing farmer, part-time high school teacher, biologist, father of two (in no particular order)

Claridon Township, Geauga County

Where Oh Where is Sweet Little Pawpaw?

Miles-tall thunderheads build above the length of coastline. For now, the air is heavy and thick and scented by floral productions and botanical decay. In a forest clearing, a party of the region's inhabitants, wearing little clothing, are roasting meat outside of an open shelter. Across the clearing, their view of the forest greenery is dulled by the hazy air. A stream flows out from those dark woods. The people could follow that stream to find a stand of small trees growing on the steep bank. Having already shed their alien flowers, the trees are harnessing tropical energies, encapsulating them in thin green skins. When the fruits ripen, the people could return to find them - four inches oblong, singly or in clusters- among the tree's large, drooped leaves. Eating the sweet, custard flesh, and discarding the large lacquered seeds would complete the life cycle of this tree. And the satisfied people would be glad to have found the fruit.

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“...although credited...as edible and wholesome, one must be either very young or very hungry really to enjoy its flavor”.

That was how Clevelander Harriet Keeler described the food-worthiness of the fruit of Asimina triloba in her popular guide Our Native Trees, And How to Identify Them. A native New Yorker, Ms. Keeler settled in Cleveland following her graduation from Oberlin College in 1870. An educator in the area's school districts, she also published a number of popular field guides. Our Native Trees was published in 1900; I bought a facsimile reproduction in 2011.

Asimina triloba is colloquially known by several names, most often used is the name “pawpaw” or “papaw” - the latter is Ms. Keeler preferred spelling – and, of the hundreds of species covered, this was the first entry I turned to in the guide. I found her description of its fruit surprising and a little disconcerting. I very much enjoy the fruit as a middle aged man, even on a full stomach. And since returning to the area and buying 7 acres in Geauga county, I have been establishing an orchard of grafted, named varieties hoping one day to peddle them at some area farmer's market.

But pawpaws are not really known by any name at all. They are a “forgotten fruit.” Once widely eaten in the eastern U.S., it has been nearly deleted from the American psyche.

I had nevertheless assumed that a sizable clientele of pawpaw eaters would spring into existence once people had sampled my offerings. Was I mistaken? Could it be that the reason pawpaws are forgotten is because they're unpalatable to most everyone but me?

In its described distribution, Ms. Keeler highlights pawpaw's abundance in her neck of the woods,“... on the southern shore of Lake Erie.” True enough, the tree is fairly common throughout much of the deciduous forests of the eastern United States. Grab a U.S. map and the compass you used in high school geometry. Stick the compass point in the middle of Kentucky and stretch the pencil to Ann Arbor. The circle you draw includes most of pawpaw's range, with some spill over to the east and west-southwest. Within that circle pawpaw's distribution is predictable yet spotty, mostly occurring along rivers and streams as stands of clones, the result of a trees tendency to sprout new stems from its spreading root system.

Despite its present obscurity in the U.S., pawpaw enthusiasts – mainly foragers, rare fruit growers and breeders, nursery managers and botanists – like to point out the quintessential “Americanness” of the fruit. Along with its nearly exclusive United States range (a few stands occur in southern Ontario), pawpaw appreciation has been recorded by Native Americans, New World explorers, early settlers, Founding Fathers and several presidents.

Although I've never read testimony of it, Johnny Appleseed would surely have encountered pawpaw as he pushed into America's 19^th century frontier – at that time Ohio was the wild west. His role in settling America was the establishment of apple orchards; Planted orchards supported claims of land ownership, and apples were a most important source of inebriating drink.

I have an allegorical image of Johnny Appleseed, somewhere in southeastern Ohio, stepping out of the direct sun of a young apple orchard to take a break from the hard work and the heat of an early Indian summer near a little stream. There he finds a stand of pawpaw trees with pounds of ripe fruit, so he picks and enjoys the sweet creamy flesh, as cool as the forest shade under which he rests. Rejuvenated, he returns to his work: planting rows of fruit trees native to Kazakhstan, his efforts helping to supplant the importance of the very fruit sustaining his work.

Today not much is as American as apple pie. To a people largely of old world origins, so is their most American of fruits.

But can pawpaw's obscurity be attributed to domestic cultivation of exotic fruits like the apple or peach, pear or apricot? Seems unlikely, as nothing else grown in the country's temperate regions can take the gastronomic place of pawpaw.

Asimina triloba is one of the very few members of the botanical family Annonaceae that can tolerate freezing temperatures. Tropical people enjoy fruits produced from many other members of the so-called “custard apple” family, but pawpaw is decidedly temperate - the seeds require a cold period in order to germinate. Where it occurs, pawpaw is often locally referred to as the state “banana”, as in “Ohio banana.” This tendency reflects the tropical characteristics of the fruit. The flesh is the color and consistency of pureed banana and is aptly eaten with a spoon, like an avocado. The flavor is often described as some cross of banana, pineapple, papaya and mango.

Given the tropical ancestry of the pawpaw, it makes sense that those attempting to describe the fruit would naturally turn to the produce of the tropics for comparative reference. But that tendency is only reasonable because these once exotic fruits are now so widely available. It's a testament to the global food market: people living a few miles from a productive wild stand have never heard of a pawpaw and wouldn't know what to do with one in hand. On the contrary, these same people can deftly remove the thick yellow peel of a tropical Asian fruit while driving to work. They can prepare a hot, stimulating beverage by grinding and steeping the roasted seed of an Ethiopian shrub. They can determine the ripeness of a football-sized fruit from Brazil by tugging on its green crown and smelling its scaly skin.

Fruits cultivated in and shipped from the tropics are routine, while a local native fruit with tropical ancestry is a mystery.

The shift toward globalized food choices accompanied increased alienation of people from local food sources. Of course this includes the dissolution of the once ubiquitous family farm. In considering pawpaw's anonymity, more important is the abandonment of foraged food. For most people today, foraged fruit might be an occasional opportunistic snack but not a legitimate, even important, source of nutrition.

Consider the folk song Way Down Yonder in the Pawpaw Patch – a musical piece of Americana dating back to at least the early 20^th century:

Where is sweet little (or dear little) Nelly (or name of other child singing song)?

Way down yonder in the pawpaw patch

Come on kids, let's go find her

Pickin' up pawpaws, put 'em in your pockets.

Assuming folk song lyrics make sense in the realities in which they were written and originally sung, the pawpaw was once a local commodity gathered from stands that everyone knew the location of. The fruit was brought home, often in the hands (or pockets!) of children, exercising a real and active role in their family's food economy – they worked on the family farm and they also gathered wild foods. Extra foraged foods were shared or traded with neighbors and sold at farm stands or local market-places along side produce grown on the farm.

We know this not from a song; Along with pawpaw, many other once-foraged foods now gather in the basket of rural America's recorded history. Chestnuts, mayhaws, elderberries, persimmons, hickory nuts, wild plums – the list is an ethnobotanist's dissertation. Some of America's wild-gathered plant foods went global – wild rice and blueberries come readily to mind - but many others did not.

In thinking about why some foraged foods, like pawpaw, are no longer eaten I am tempted by a background in ecology, at least for metaphors. One irresistible concept from this branch of biology is “optimal foraging,” which tries to explain the behavior of consumers. Simply put, evolution should favor consumers whose food choices give them the most energy gain for the least energy cost. Arguably, it's the reason we throw unopened pistachios back into the bag – the small nut isn't really worth struggling to open when I can just grab another whose shell is already parted. The concept operates in similar form in the other branch of inquiry beginning with the prefix “eco” (from the Greek oikos for “home”), economics, which is perhaps more apt here since human consumers are concerned with saving money as well as gaining energy. Keep in mind the adage from business: Time is money. For the forager, time is energy – energy spent rooting around for food. For those of us with a choice to forage for free food or go shop for it, the logical conclusion that money and energy are interchangeable is relevant.

Can I convincingly use these ideas to argue an hypothesis that pawpaws are forgotten for a reason other than a disagreeable taste? Let's see. I need scape goats. I blame demographic changes of the U.S. population beginning at the close of the 19^th century. And I blame the banana.

If I had to pick one fruit, available in the United States, that satisfies the same gustatory cravings as the pawpaw it would be the banana. According to Dan Koeppel, author of Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World, bananas only became widely available in the United States around 1890, when sea captain Lorenzo Dow Baker made a bundle of cash selling 160 bunches he purchased on a dock in Jamaica, just before returning to New Jersey. Imagine paying $2.00 for a single banana today - that's equivalent to the 10 cents paid by the first American consumers of the fruit. The willingness to pay such extravagant prices compelled Baker to keep them coming. Production in Latin America was expanded and preservation and transportation techniques, by boat and rail, improved. Availability increased. Prices decreased. By 1910 the banana was the most popular fruit in the country.

These developments coincided with demographic changes that favored banana consumption and pawpaw forgetting. The U.S. population was becoming urban. The 1920 census was the first to record a majority of Americans living in towns and cities. This was most pronounced east of the Mississippi River in pawpaw country. People living in urban areas along transportation routes would have had easier access to bananas, and the demographic shift represented a widening geographic and mental divide between people and pawpaw patches. This divide widened further with the expansion of suburbs and large-scale agriculture in the following decades. By the middle of the 20^th century our parents or grandparents were forgetting the pawpaw.

Today around 80% of Americans are urban and they shop at grocery stores. A foraging expedition to get pawpaws might be a fun excursion. But the money saved in retrieving free pawpaws is trumped by the time and energy expended to arrive at a patch. Bananas cost little money and running to the store costs little time. Foraging for bananas at the store is optimal.

Of course, I have to account for pawpaw's absence from the grocer's shelves. The stingy values of the global market favor some key characteristics of banana over pawpaw.

First, bananas are freaks of nature, producing fruit with no seeds. Their waste of energy is our benefit, as it means the entire volume of fruit within the skin is ours to eat. Pawpaws have numerous large seeds (a seedless pawpaw is the holy grail), and they only produce this fruit when their flowers are pollinated by a genetically-different individual. This can be tricky. Pawpaws flower in early spring, relying on several species of flies to transfer pollen. These flies are out foraging for carcasses freed from the melting snow. Pawpaw flowers are maroon – the color of rotting flesh – and have a yeasty, mildly-malodorous smell. Nevertheless, their pollinators are not particularly efficient; Pawpaw growers have been known to relocated road kill into their orchards to make them more…um...attractive.

Both bananas and pawpaws reproduce by cloning and this certainly favors banana growers. As soon as a banana plant produces a bunch of bananas, the mother stalk dies. Sprouting from an underground stem, a new plant grows up to take it's place, producing another bunch of bananas within a year. Pawpaws form clumps of continuously-spreading clones, hindering out-crossing as pollinators spend time among the flowers of one clone. In order to get a harvest, pawpaw orchard-keepers must control sprouting and plant different varieties near each other to insure exchange of pollen between dissimilar individuals. And a new pawpaw tree can take nearly a decade before it starts fruiting.

Finally, bananas, with their thick skins and our ability to control their ripening, arrive in stores looking pretty and almost ready to eat. And the relative homogeneity of tropical climates means year-round banana production is possible. Thin-skinned pawpaws are produced for about a month. Have you ever gone 11 months without buying a banana? Banana sellers hope your answer is “no.”

But the competitive advantages could be shifting. Banana plants are being decimated by an as-yet uncontrollable fungal disease in a banana pandemic. Meanwhile, a small but dedicated group of people are working to bring the pawpaw out of the patch and into the mainstream.

I found myself wrestling with the future of pawpaw in Frankfort, Kentucky in September of 2011. I was one of a couple hundred attendees of the 3^rd International Pawpaw Conference hosted by Kentucky State University and the director of its world-renowned pawpaw improvement program, Dr. Kirk Pomper. Attendees included all manner of folks from across the country and abroad, including the man who rediscovered the pawpaw for a nation of amnesiacs – Neal Peterson. His is a mythical story among pawpaw enthusiasts. With his first taste of a pawpaw in 1975, while a student of genetics in West Virginia, a life-long passion was born in an instant. His research uncovered James A. Little's pawpaw breeding program in 1905 and a 1916 contest sponsored by the Journal of Heredity to find the nation's highest quality pawpaw fruit. Despite pawpaw's absence from grocery stores, there were named varieties out there, and Neal traveled to find them and grow them himself. We were all at this conference thanks to the success of Neal Peterson.

But the conference was about the future of pawpaw, and many of the talks illuminated pathways to a planet of consumers. Naively, I had been thinking of pawpaw as a good addition to the slow food movement, a new component of diverse agroecosystems in the eastern U.S., an expanded diet breadth for locavores. But for some of pawpaw's admirers and growers, the world is their pawpaw patch.

Despite Ms. Keeler's apparent distaste for the pawpaws she tried, I'm confident they will be rediscovered and enjoyed again. For me the question is not if, or even when – it's how? Will we pull flash-frozen pawpaw pulp-in-a-plastic bag from our grocer's freezers? Will we drink it as a nutraceutical ingredient, in a beverage we may not even like, for some alleged marketed health benefit? Will we pick some up in April as a fresh fruit, shipped in from an Argentinian grower? Will we enjoy it for the month or so that our local farmers can supply it?

Just as our forgetting pawpaw demonstrated our values, so will our rediscovery of it.

Who knows, maybe after reading this you will spend the time and effort to follow a wooded stream in search of your own little pawpaw patch? By late September their fruits are out there for you to find.

A final celebration of our tropical summer.