What the Cats Are Singing

The Kiffness (left) and Rufus George
All screenshots are the property of The Kiffness and are used here in admiration of his work.

With no kitties sharing our home these days, my husband and I often revert to vicarious feline-time on YouTube. Bob recently found David Scott, a South African musician, producer, and parody artist who goes by the name of The Kiffness. He is the founder and lead singer for the band of the same name that features Mathew Gold on vocals, Mvelo Shandu on bass, and Raiven Hansmann and Clem Carr on keyboard and sax.

Our fascination with The Kiffness began with Lonely Cat, a bluesy collaboration of cat vocalizations, human voice, strings, horns, keyboards, and percussion in three-four time. After repeatedly noting that sometimes he is alone and sometimes not, George the cat raises his eyes to heaven and punctuates his dilemma with, “Hello?”

Bob and I chuckled. We binged. We danced. We savored endorphin-releasing belly laughs. Soon, though, I pondered Lonely Cat’s heart-wrenching tale. In true blues fashion, he mournfully meows, “Said he’d be back soon, but I guess he just lied…”

Was Lonely Cat really left alone for days, I wondered, or, since some cats can be quite melodramatic, maybe just a few hours?

It doesn’t matter, for that’s the beauty of the blues—the story is in the telling.

And when it comes to stories that animals tell in simple sounds and expressions, no one is more attuned to primal temperaments than The Kiffness.

For example, there’s the casual indifference he attains in Alugalug Cat. When you don’t know what to do, and you don’t know what to say, Alugalug suggests a dismissive hand wave and, “Hey, luga luga luga, please go away.”

Kitty Eilish doing a Billie Eilish “Bad Guy” parody with The Kiffness.

Then there’s disdain. To experience the indignity of being a cat subjected to a bath, check out Bath Cat, featuring Kitty Eilish doing a Billie Eilish “Bad Guy” parody.

Anxiety? Try Hold onto My Fur (I like it when the dog is barking).

Frustrated? Meet Mozart Cat, a reincarnation of the great composer, who, despite finding his way back to a piano, is struggling with the mind of a cat.

Xylophone Cat likes to collaborate at 5 a.m., Mumble Cat likes to scratch and rap, and Numnum enjoys lapping milk to a Balkan melody.

The Kiffness, though, doesn’t limit himself to cats.

Haiku howls an Ancient Husky Melody.

Haiku the Husky pays homage to the lineage of canines who ran wild and free in Ancient Husky Melody. He implores his fellow huskies, “Don’t forget, once upon a time, you were not a pet.”

Losing My Mind features a Lulabelle, a dachshund with a built-in siren, and a nameless twerking chihuahua.

Opera Dog examines his existence in a soprano aria that questions, “Am I a Good Boi?”

And, not to be outdone by any cat or dog, Ginger the Cockatiel offers a magical cure for sadness in “Kookee Kookee”

Ginger’s Kookee Kookee restores faith in humanity.

“Is There Any Video This Musician Can’t Remix into Internet Gold?” Beverly L. Jenkins asks in an article published on Inspire More. She answers her own rhetorical question with, “We think not!”

For The Kiffness, apparently, any and every sound can be used to make music. He explains the process quite well in How to Make a Song with Your Neighbor’s Cat.

Going beyond cat jams and dog howls, however, is a talented musician who knows neither artistic nor geographical bounds.

His global reach is evident with remixes like the one with the Jamaican Brushy One String doing Chicken in the Corn; Bilal Göregen performing the Ievan Polkka; and Batzorig Vaanchig, a Mongolian throat singer, yodeling In Praise of Genghis Khan.

His unique sound is an intuitively eclectic mix of South African house music; Zulu-inspired Mbaqanga; Mongolian electronic; Caribbean reggae; American rap; and ballroom classics, like waltzes and cha-chas.

Yes, cha-cha. Watch for the cha-cha cat in It’s a Beautiful Day.  

The Kiffness and Rashawn thank God for sunshine and pain in “A Beautiful Day”

That remix started out when The Kiffness saw a video of then-10-year-old Rushawn Ewears singing a song, in his classroom, by the Jamaican gospel artist Jermaine Edwards. The master of the remix, The Kiffness grabbed a ukulele and the rest made music history.

Rashawn, now 17, has been signed to Sony Music in the UK, alongside Edwards. Thanks to Edwards and The Kiffness, Rashawn receives the royalties he is due on his rendition of the song. In early 2023, “It’s a Beautiful Day” reached number six on the Spotify Viral Chart and has had over six million YouTube views.

Attributing the success of this remix to his fan base, The Kiffness said his fans sent him “this particular video at least 1,000 times. My initial thought was that I liked Rushawn’s delivery and I really enjoyed the message.”

The message: Whatever happens, I thank the Lord for this day.

The Kiffness doesn’t preach, but he does exude spirituality.

For example, in the midst of the 2020 shutdown, he and his wife, Jute Scott, created A South African Blessing, based on the “Irish Blessing” by J.E. Moore, as a tribute to healthcare workers.

The Kiffness (David Scott) and Jute Scott

It’s obvious through his videos that The Kiffness loves rugby, hates war, and believes in the energy of music to help and heal.

Since 2021, when he dropped the Cat Jams EP, he pledged 50% of its streaming revenue to his local SPCA. That donation has now exceeded $7,000.

His song, Oy U Luzi Chervona Kalyna with Andriy Khlyvnyuk of Boombox, raised over $100,000 for Humanitarian Aid in Ukraine

And in 2021, he created a parody of Miriam Makeba’s The Click Song to help people pronounce the names of newly changed locations.

But parodies got him in trouble, too.

Like his take on the South African anthem for a song Nkosazan’ Dlamini Trafficker. Not everyone laughed. Mayor Mzwandile Masina of Ekurhuleni, a large suburb of Johannesburg, claimed it was racist but backed down after discussing it with The Kiffness.

Lockdown Rhapsody, a lampoon of Queen’s hit is a brilliant take on the COVID lockdown. And in Johnny Depp vs Amber Heard, The Kiffness assumes the persona of Jack Sparrow in a parody of the traditional Sea Shanty, “The Wellerman.”

According to his biography, The Kiffness originally studied medicine at the University of the Witwatersrand. But once he found music, he switched to studying it and philosophy at Rhodes University, while working as a DJ and playing in a jazz band.

I, for one, think his medicine is his music. It heals the soul. And with all those endorphins coursing through your neurosystem, maybe the body, too.

Give him a listen. You may find yourself ditching your favorite book and dancing instead to what the cats are singing.

The Declaration of Independence

Back by Popular Demand!
Originally posted July 4, 2022

IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.

The unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America,

Mickey Blanchett

WHEN, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

That, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

Lucky Hanley
(photo by Diane Hanley)

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and, accordingly, all experience has shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states.

To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

Beamer Baclawski

He has refused his assent to laws the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature; a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, for opposing, with manly firmness, his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the legislative powers, incapable of annihilation, have returned to the people at large for their exercise; the state remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

CiCi Brannen

He has endeavored to prevent the population of these states; for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands.

He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.

He has made judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies, without the consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to the civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation:

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us;

For protecting them, by a mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states;

For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world;

Mister Gray Farrell

For imposing taxes on us without our consent;

For depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury;

For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses;

For abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring province, establishing therein an arbitrary government, and enlarging its boundaries, so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these colonies;

For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments;

For suspending our own legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of his protection, and waging war against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation.

Tank Martino

He has constrained our fellow citizens, taken captive on the high seas, to bear arms against their country, to become the executioners of their friends and brethren, or to fall themselves by their hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.

In every stage of these oppressions, we have petitioned for redress, in the most humble terms. Our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have we been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred, to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends.

We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare, that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states;

that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain is and ought to be totally dissolved …and that, as free and independent states, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do.

And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.

<Signed>

Rocky Baclawski

New Hampshire:
Josiah Bartlett, William Whipple, Matthew Thornton

Massachusetts:
John Hancock, Samuel Adams,
John Adams, Robert Treat Paine, Elbridge Gerry

Rhode Island:
Stephen Hopkins, William Ellery

Connecticut:
Roger Sherman, Samuel Huntington, William Williams, Oliver Wolcott

New York:
William Floyd, Philip Livingston, Francis Lewis, Lewis Morris

New Jersey:
Richard Stockton, John Witherspoon, Francis Hopkinson, John Hart, Abraham Clark

Pennsylvania:
Robert Morris, Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Franklin, John Morton, George Clymer,
James Smith, George Taylor,
James Wilson, George Ross

Delaware:
Caesar Rodney, George Read,
Thomas McKean

Maryland:
Samuel Chase, William Paca,
Thomas Stone,
Charles Carroll of Carrollton

Virginia:
George Wythe, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Harrison,
Thomas Nelson, Jr.,
Francis Lightfoot Lee, Carter Braxton

North Carolina:
William Hooper, Joseph Hewes,
John Penn

South Carolina:
Edward Rutledge,
Thomas Heyward, Jr.,
Thomas Lynch, Jr., Arthur Middleton

Georgia:
Button Gwinnett, Lyman Hall,
George Walton

What is your cat reading?

Send book reviews, feline adventures, and cute pictures to Pat@PattiMWalsh.com

Chick Stories

A memoir of adventures lived, laughter shared, and lessons learned with my girlfriends

Travesties, tragedies, and comical calamities abound
in a series of essays rich with historical and cultural context.

Learn More.

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Crack, Bam, Dot—Creating Chaos Out of Colorful Order

When a neighbor recently invited me to play mah jongg, I balked. Having played once, more than a decade ago with my friend Claire, I didn’t want to appear foolish. So, I sought out Mr. Beamer Baclawski. He’s a fanatic, doesn’t suffer fools quietly, and did teach me to play Rummikub.

Beamer Baclawski prepares to play mah jongg.

I started with the basics. What is the correct spelling of the traditional Chinese game of luck and strategy?

“Mah jongg,” my feline friend trilled. “That’s the way the American Mah Jongg League (NMJL) spells it. And if it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for me.” But he added that it’s capitalized only when referring to items copyrighted by the NMJL.  

To begin our lesson, Beamer had me dump 152 colorful, domino-like tiles onto the table between us. He carefully pawed through them, creating groups of suits, winds, dragons, flowers, and jokers. He then quoted actress Julia Roberts.

“Mah jongg,” he said, “is creating order out of chaos based on the random drawing of tiles.”

That order, he quickly added, is determined in the U.S. by the official NMJL Hands and Rules Scorecard. Studying it, I suspected more chaos than order.

Creating order out of chaos

Beamer would have none of my cynicism. To illustrate, he culled three suits and divided them into crak (characters), bam (bamboos), and dot (stones), noting that each suit has four sets of nine tiles.

We moved on to winds, flowers, and dragons.

There are four of each wind—east, south, west, and north; and two sets of four flowers—plum, orchid, chrysanthemum, and bamboo. Together, he said, the flowers are known as the Four Gentlemen because they represent traits of a good character. I like that.

I also liked that the dragons represent sincerity, filial piety, and benevolence. There are four sets of three dragons—red (zhong), green (fa), and white (bai). But they don’t look like dragons. For example, a white dragon might be called “soap” because it looks exactly like a fancy bar of soap.  

Add the eight jokers found in the American version, and you get a total of 152 tiles.

He instructed that the goal of mah jongg is to be the first player to form a valid hand by grouping (melding) sets of tiles according to the NMJL scorecard. While that may sound simple, it’s not. NMJL changes the rules every year.

Julia Roberts was right. This was chaos, and we hadn’t even started playing.

The 2023 scoresheet

Under Beamer’s direction, I washed all the tiles, meaning I mixed them, face down, with both hands, churning like a washing machine. Then I built a wall by stacking the tiles face down in two rows, 19 tiles long. The dealer, who is always referred to as East, then distributes tiles in a specific order, taking 14. Everyone else gets 13.

Because this was American mah jongg, we started with “The Charleston,” an elaborate scheme of passing tiles to the right, across, left, and then left again, across, and right. There are also optional passes and blind passes, but Beamer told me not to worry about them for the time being.

East begins by discarding one tile. Moving clockwise, each player takes a tile from the wall and discards one. Other players may steal it to complete a meld.

When I thought I understood all this, Beamer added a caveat—individual groups may add new combinations, eliminate old ones, or otherwise adopt the rules.

“Is all this necessary?” I asked, referring to the washing, stacking, passing, and changing rules.

Beamer pooh-poohed my frustration by explaining that the game was—and in many places, still is—a form of gambling. These rituals evolved to prevent cheating. And as anyone familiar with feline history and philosophy will attest, cats do not abide cheaters.

“Who devised this confusing game?” I asked. “Confucius?”

As a matter of fact, Beamer conceded smugly, the famous Chinese philosopher (c. 551–c. 479 BC) may have invented it, but probably not. Yes, the three dragons parallel his three noble virtues, and the clacking of tiles during shuffling sounds like the chattering of sparrows—and Confucius did love birds.

Chinese Philosopher Confucius (c. 551–c. 479 BC)

As if to prove his superior knowledge of the game’s name, Beamer chattered the game’s Chinese name—麻雀. It means “sparrow.” His pronunciation and enunciation were perfect. You know it as the sound cats make when fixated on, well, sparrows.

Beamer likes to think the game evolved during the Meow Dynasty. But experts have other theories. The most likely is that it developed from several similar games.

All agree, though, that one day in 1860, in Ningbo, China, Chen Yumen was playing Peng He Pai, when the wind blew the sailor’s cards into the sea. That prompted him to carve a deck of playing tiles. An English speaker, he used them to teach the game to Frederick E. Harvey, British Consul to Ningbo, in 1861.

Harvey’s accounts of mah jongg are the earliest chronicles of its history, although the Chinese did not call it mah jongg. That name was not used until 1920 when Joseph Park Babcock introduced it to the United States.

An American executive with Standard Oil in Shanghai, Babcock learned the game along with thousands of Western expatriates, including Russian Jews who had escaped the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917.

Boys Coloring Tiles. Photo by Pung Wo Co., China, c . 1924.
Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

Having witnessed its international appeal, Babcock imported the game. He gave it a name that he could trademark and that sounded Chinese. He wrote it as Mah-Jongg and published a set of rules. Eventually, his heirs allowed the trademark to fall into public domain.

Presumably due to its gambling nature, mah jongg had been popular among Chinese men. But when Babcock introduced his version to New York, the game caught on with women of distinctly different demographics.

World events had forced two disparate groups to converge in New York City—poor Chinese peasants and Jews escaping both Stalin’s antisemitism and the Nazi Holocaust. Many came by way of Shanghai. The refugees lived in crowded and insulated, yet overlapping, communities in the Lower East Side. With a surplus of time and a dearth of money, the Jews adopted mah jongg as easily as their neighbors’ foods.

In 1937, four Jewish women formed the NMJL. Viola Cecil, Dorothy Meyerson, Herma Jacobs, and Hortense Potter took the best of Babcock’s version, simplified scoring, and compiled winning hands.

The Chinese don’t have cards; they have set combinations. In fact, in Amy Tan’s 1989 novel and subsequent movie, The Joy Luck Club, Chinese women make fun of Jewish women who use cards. 

According to Annelise Heinz in ​Mahjong: A Chinese Game and the Making of Modern American Culture, the NMJL wanted the game to become a national phenomenon. Instead, it spread through their networks, cementing it as a symbol of cultural identity and assimilation. Decades later, however, their goal is coming to fruition, as men and women of diverse backgrounds enjoy the game. Heinz contends that mah jongg always has been a way to find community.

Mah-Jong at bathing beach, 1920.
Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

Not so in China, where the story began. An opposite scenario evolved.

There, as popularity soared among the privileged, resources dwindled to make tiles from ivory, bones, and bamboo. In the early 20th century, demand was so high that slaughterhouses in Kansas City and Chicago shipped cow bones to China to keep up with demand.

Yet by the late 1940s, tiles were nearly worthless. In the wake of the Communist takeover of China, Mao Zedong, chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, forbade peasants—but not elite CCP members—from playing mah jongg. The rationale? It was a capitalist game that encouraged gambling and independent thinking, according to The Private Life of Chairman Mao, by Zhisui Li.

Incidentally, although Mao’s prohibition was lifted in 1985, officials in China’s Jiangxi province outlawed unlicensed mah jongg parlors as recently as October 2019.

Neither Confucius, Babcock, nor Mao foresaw the craze that swept the world. The World Mah Jongg Organization estimates more than 600 million people play. NMJL counted more than 350,000 American players in 2019.

I suggest you not mention online mah jongg to Beamer. He hissed it away as simply a matching game that requires no strategy.

“On the advent and spread of the game Mah-Jong,” an article published by The Yale Review of International Studies in January 2019, reports that between 60% and 70% of all American players are Jewish. Thus, they comprise the largest demographic of mah jongg players in the U.S. The authors conclude that this supports the stereotype that mah jongg players are usually Jewish grandmothers.

Beamer deems that a fair conclusion. After all, Jewish grandmothers also carry a reputation for fabulous baked goodies. Incidentally, the four older women in Joy Luck Club—all Chinese immigrants—also met to play and eat.

So, it seems edibles are as integral to mah jongg as the click, click, click of tiles. Many a player will confess to buying and baking elaborate goodies that family members are prohibited from sampling—at least until after the game, when they may get leftovers.

On cue, an eclectic group of Jewish and Gentile grandmothers and non-grandmothers gathered at Beamer’s residence to start their weekly game. With their brightly wrapped cakes and cookies, they instantly generated chaos from the order he had just created, proving Julia Roberts right.

Well, half right.

Mah jongg may create order out of chaos, but mah jongg players proceeded to create chaos out of his colorfully ordered tiles.

Beamer suggests these additional readings:

What Is Your Cat Reading?

Send book reviews, feline adventures, and cute photos to:

Pat@PattiMWalsh.com

Chick Stories

A memoir of adventures lived, laughter shared, and lessons learned with my girlfriends

Travesties, tragedies, and comical calamities abound
in a series of essays rich with historical and cultural context.

Learn More.

Buy Now.

Newsletter:
Come to Think of It

Stories are meant to be shared. So are fleeting thoughts, poetic musings, humorous anecdotes, and existential questions.

Come to Think of It is a forum to engage, inspire, and challenge. To gather with friends. Come to Think of It.

Subscribe at PattiMWalsh.com/newsletter.

Scrubbing for Wildlife

Mickey Blanchett studies the Florida scrub-jay.
Photo by Patti M. Walsh

Mickey Blanchett takes after housemate Rick when it comes to observing birds.

On a recent bus trip organized by the Calusa Nature Center to the Archbold Biological Station in Venus, Florida, Rick spotted horned owls, swallow-tailed kites, and caracara when everyone else saw cows. His wife, Nancy, is accustomed to people gathering around Rick when he has his finger pointed in the air.

“What are we looking at?” Someone will say as a small crowd gathers to follow his gaze. “Chimney swift,” he might say. Or grasshopper sparrow. Or black skimmer. It doesn’t matter. It’s usually something most people have never heard of. And may not even see.

Closer to home, Mickey enjoys the crows, jays, and wrens—even a family of bald eagles—in the nature preserve behind his home. He’d love one day to see a Florida scrub-jay, he thought as he studied a brochure that Nancy brought home. But he’d have to travel about two hours north, and, well, he yawned, that’s not going to happen.

See, the Florida scrub-jay is found nowhere else in the world.

Scrub Jay (Aphelocoma coerulescens)
Courtesy of U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service

I joined Rick and Nancy at Archbold to learn more about the threatened bird and the station that studies it. Once endangered, the jay’s population has doubled since the 1990s, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

A member of the crow family, the scrub-jay’s name says it all. It lives in the short scrub oaks found in central Florida along the Lake Wales Ridge.  

Sometimes referred to as the Mid-Florida Ridge and visible by satellite, the 100-mile spiny landmass is a relic beach dune, though it’s about 75 miles from the nearest shore. At 312 feet above sea level, the nearby Sugarloaf “Mountain” is the tallest formation in the area and one of the tallest hills in Florida.

Satellite image of the Florida peninsula with yellow arrows indicating the position of the Lake Wales Ridge.
Courtesy of U.S. States Geological Survey

Improbable as it seems, the white sands of central Florida are an extension of the Appalachians. Twenty million years ago (give or take a millennium or two), when tectonic activity lifted the mountains into existence, the same cataclysm heaved fine-grained sediments from the depths of the ocean to the top of the limestone that created the ridge that’s now home to the unique bird.

Beach sand, 75 miles from the nearest shoreline.
Time slips by, like 20-million-year-old sand.
Photos by Patti M. Walsh

A Florida native, Rick likes that about the scrub-jay. Averaging about 10 inches in length and weighing about 3 ounces, it’s an umbrella species. That means conservation efforts to protect it extend to other species that live among the short, scrubby oaks that grow in the sandy soil of the Lake Wales Ridge.

Our tour of the Archbold Biological Station was led by environmental education leader Dustin Angell. We learned that what looks like bare, sandy patches punctuated with scrub oaks, blueberries, and palmettos is really a very healthy habitat for these birds—and the things they eat.

Nancy, Patti, and Rick at Archbold Biological Station
Photo by Rick Blanchett

Their diet consists of caterpillars, insects, small lizards, and rodents. But the staple is scrub-oak acorns. A single scrub-jay can harvest and hide as many as 8,000 acorns a year. Remarkably, each jay remembers where it buried each corn. As an added benefit, acorns that are cached but not eaten become new oaks.

Four species of oak live here—sand live oak, scrub oak, myrtle oak, and Chapman’s oak. Related to mighty oaks that thrive in richer soil elsewhere, they reproduce by acorns as well as by clonal root systems. This backup system facilitates re-emergence after a fire. Controlled burns prevent the proliferation of pine trees that would otherwise turn a scrub habitat into a forest, as well as grasses that would cover the bare sand patches the jays need to hide their acorns.

Saw and scrub palmettos also benefit the jays. They use the scrub palmetto’s fibers to line their nests. Recently completed studies date the saw palmettos to be between 5,000 and 8,000 years old.

Scrub-jays are cooperative breeders. Each nesting territory is occupied by an adult pair and the pair’s offspring from previous years. Not only do the offspring babysit and help feed the nestlings, but they also watch for predators. If necessary, the family forms a mob—attacking the predator until it leaves. Rarely do scrub-jays travel more than two miles from where they hatched.

Environmental education leader Dustin Angell explains the importance of the Florida Wildlife Corridor.
Photo by Patti M. Walsh

Archbold Biological Station is a field station and natural laboratory for visiting biologists and students studying the region’s rare plants and animals. As such, it has played a crucial role in the campaign to conserve the Florida Wildlife Corridor.

Established in 2021 by unanimous, bipartisan support, the Florida Wildlife Corridor Act established a statewide network of nearly 18 million acres of contiguous land crucial to the survival of many of Florida’s 131 imperiled animals. It secures access to habitats for wide-ranging wildlife, including the endangered Florida panther, each of which needs 200 square miles. The black bear, incidentally, needs 60. Roads and other developments restrict the movement of these animals.

Mickey knows that when panthers, bears, and other animals have no access to natural prey, they turn to domesticated herds and human food. He also knows that feral and wild cats are a major threat to scrub-jays.

But he isn’t likely to pounce. He’s a fat cat, an armchair birder, who leaves the hard work to his housemates, Rick and Nancy.

Chick Stories

A memoir of adventures lived, laughter shared, and lessons learned with my girlfriends

Travesties, tragedies, and comical calamities abound
in a series of essays rich with historical and cultural context.

Learn More.

Buy Now.

Newsletter:
Come to Think of It

Stories are meant to be shared. So are fleeting thoughts, poetic musings, humorous anecdotes, and existential questions.

Come to Think of It is a forum to engage, inspire, and challenge. To gather with friends. Come to Think of It.

Subscribe at PattiMWalsh.com/newsletter.

Going Head-to-Head with Manatees

Photo by Martha Hustek

Pukka is not a people-friendly feline—unless, of course, he’s snuggling up with his housemates, Martha and Rick. Only then does he allow his true cat-onality to express itself. His prevalent feral spirit involves patrolling his environment, bringing home small rodents, and indulging a curiosity with another primitive mammal—the manatee.

Not that Pukka would actually jump into the waters of the nearby Blue Spring State Park, a designated manatee refuge. Heavens, no. One accidental dunk a few years ago in the backyard pool was enough of a water adventure for him. Instead, he sates his inquisitiveness by curling up with a good book and vicariously head-bumping the large, marine mammals sometimes known as sea cows.

During a recent visit to central Florida, Martha and Rick took my husband Bob and me to Blue Spring to see the manatees. But not without first getting some advice.

According to Pukka, who conveyed his knowledge through Martha, Blue Spring is the largest natural spring associated with Florida’s St. John’s River. The longest river in Florida, it is noteworthy for its lazy northward flow, commercial and recreational use, and manatees.

“The number of Florida’s West Indian manatees there is growing like snowbirds flocking to the Sunshine State,” he meowed, adding that the local marine mammals are bigger than their Amazonian and West African cousins. They can grow to 13 feet long and weigh as much as 1,300 pounds. They also have paddle-like tails and wrinkled skin.

While manatees look roly-poly, Pukka continued, they are really quite lean. With only about an inch of fat beneath their leathery skins and a very slow metabolism, water temperatures below 68°F bring on cold stress syndrome, a condition comparable to hypothermia. It can be deadly. So the manatees leave the colder waters of the St. Johns River for the safety and comfort of the 72° Blue Spring.

Pukka emphasized that point by strolling out to the lanai and plopping in the sunlight that poured into it.

Acknowledging that sanctuaries such as Blue Spring are vital for manatees’ survival, we took Pukka’s advice and headed over to the state park. There, we trekked a one-third-mile boardwalk that parallels Blue Springs Run. The trail meanders through a lush hammock from the parking lot at St. Johns River to the run’s headspring.  

Blue Spring is a misnomer. The waters are green—emerald, crystal clear, and transparent. Beneath the mosaic-like ripples that fracture the water’s glassy surface, I spotted what looked like long, flat rocks that resembled the torpedo-shaped river rocks on Belle Isle of the St. James River in Richmond, Virginia.

Until they fluttered. As did my heart, as manatees performed a slow, mesmerizing aquatic ballet that corresponded to their cycles of sleeping submerged and surfacing for air. They spend about half of their lives sleeping.

Doing a quick count, I exclaimed aloud that there had to be at least a hundred of them.

“The official count today is 262,” a park visitor corrected me.

She knew because the Save the Manatee Club conducts and publishes a daily roll call. Founded in 1981 by former Florida Governor and U.S. Senator Bob Graham and singer-songwriter Jimmy Buffett, it is the world’s leading manatee conservation organization and exists solely to protect manatees and their habitats.

The day before our visit, the club had released 12 manatees into Blue Spring Run, an ideal location since the animals can be easily monitored in the spring and the surrounding waters.

The local manatee population has grown from about 36 animals when research began in the 1970s to as many as 500 animals today. Rehabilitated manatees sport GPS radio tags on their tails, which are monitored by the Manatee Rehabilitation Partnership (MRP). According to the MRP, some manatees seek out Blue Spring in the summer to give birth.

Temperatures in the spring remain a constant 72°F, creating a safe haven. Although there are many threats to manatees, including habitat loss, pollution, and algae blooms, more than 41% of manatee deaths are human-related, primarily due to watercraft collisions. We were able to see propellor scars on the manatees that floated below us on the walkway.

The trail ends at the headspring known as “The Boil,” which looks more like a simmer.

Most of this water, which began as last year’s rain, bubbles up from an aquifer that flows downhill from areas in north and central Florida through limestone bedrock. Each day, from a depth of 120 feet, more than a million gallons of warm water are forced up from the caverns, resulting in “The Boil.”

According to Journey North, a project funded by the University of Wisconsin—Madison Arboretum, that’s about 72,000 gallons every minute, or 4,333,333 gallons per hour. By comparison, a typical shower uses 30 gallons; a load of laundry, 40 gallons; and a car wash, 60 gallons.

The spring can be enjoyed by swimmers, paddlers, snorkelers, and certified scuba divers with a partner. The state parks, however, limit access when manatees or alligators are congregating.

In addition to the manatees and alligators, the park has a healthy population of various fish, including the alligator gar. Elsewhere in the park dwell the Florida scrub-jay, the state’s only endemic bird, and the endangered Anastasia Island Beach Mouse.

For centuries, the Blue Spring was home to the Timucua tribe. In 1766, John Bartran, a British botanist, explored the area for the Crown. It was settled in 1856 by Louis Thursby and his family. The Thursby house, built in 1872, remains a tourist stop at the state park.

In 1972, Blue Spring became a state park with the help of Jacques Cousteau, whose Undersea World series included an episode called “The Forgotten Mermaids.”

Mermaids?

Yes. While manatees are Florida’s official state marine mammal, anthropologists agree that manatees have inspired mermaid legends for millennia.

For example, in his epic poem The Odyssey (circa 8th century BC), Homer introduced the siren, a half-bird, half-woman creature who lured sailors to destruction by the sweetness of her song. She is similar to the half-fish, half-human creature that 4th century BC Babylonians called Oannes.

And on January 9, 1493, Christopher Columbus documented the legend, writing in his journal that:

“On the previous day, when the Admiral went to the Rio del Oro [Haiti], he said he quite distinctly saw three mermaids, which rose well out of the sea; but they are not so beautiful as they are said to be, for their faces had some masculine traits.”

Voyages of Columbus, 218

Okay. Stretching one’s imagination, manatees could be mistaken for humans from afar. After all, their forelimbs have fingerlike bones, their neck vertebrae allow them to turn their heads, they use their flippers to “walk” along the bottom while they hunt for food, and they scoop vegetation into their prehensile lips.

Perhaps as ironic as the mermaid similarity is the manatee’s relationship to the elephant. Although they resemble walruses or chunky porpoises and are sometimes referred to as sea cows, manatees belong to a group of animals called Sirenia (i.e., Homer’s sirens), which includes elephants.

With thick, wrinkled skin, bristle-like hairs, and a herbivorous diet, manatees probably descended from a four-legged, elephantine-wading mammal. Scientists theorize that as sea grasses began to grow, manatees choose water over land. 

Like elephants, manatees are intelligent. They have good long-term memory, show signs of complex associative learning, demonstrate discrimination and task-learning abilities similar to dolphins, and communicate with a wide range of sounds.

When we returned home, Pukka trilled, reminding us that cats also communicate with a wide range of sounds. Just another reason, perhaps, why he likes going nose-to-nose with manatees.

Photo credits: Pukka and the Manatee by Martha Hustek; Blue Springs by Pat Walsh

Chick Stories

A memoir of adventures lived, laughter shared, and lessons learned with my girlfriends

Travesties, tragedies, and comical calamities abound
in a series of essays rich with historical and cultural context.

Learn More.

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Newsletter:
Come to Think of It

Stories are meant to be shared. So are fleeting thoughts, poetic musings, humorous anecdotes, and existential questions.

Come to Think of It is a forum to engage, inspire, and challenge. To gather with friends. Come to Think of It.

Subscribe at PattiMWalsh.com/newsletter.

Miss Kitty Does Mardi Gras

Miss Kitty knows that cool cats don’t read about Mardi Gras. They do Mardi Gras. Beginning with beads. Lots of beads.

Contrary to common belief, however, Miss Kitty believes that less is more. You’ll never see her draped with so many baubles that she can barely meow. She models her style on that of feline fashion icon Coco Cat Chanel, who said that before leaving the house, a feline should remove at least one accessory.

That’s why she sticks to a few strands of traditional Mardi Gras colors—purple, for justice; green, faith; and gold, power. She’s also a stickler for terminology. People often conflate Mardi Gras and Carnival.

Carnival comes from the Latin for flesh. It refers to the party and parade season that traditionally begins on the Feast of the Epiphany on January 6 and extends until Mardi Gras, which literally means Fat Tuesday. Mardi Gras is the day before Ash Wednesday, the Christian holy day that initiates the 40-day season of Lent that precedes Easter.

This year it is February 21.

The beads, cakes, and celebrations of Mardi Gras date back centuries to pagan rites of fertility. It grew out of the ancient Roman festival of Lupercalia. Observed in the dead of winter, it was an orgy-like festival of wine-induced madness that celebrated chaos, death, and rebirth.  

And it all began with a humble bean. An archetype of resurrection and reincarnation, the bean comes from a dead plant and grows into a new one.

For Lupercalia, a man was chosen to be a ceremonial king by being the one who got a bean that had been placed in a cake. (Sounds a bit like a contemporary king cake, doesn’t it?) For several days, he would enjoy as much sex, wine, and food as he could abide. Meanwhile, the peasants imbued in him all their failures and shortcomings. On the last day, he would be sacrificed to atone for their sins and his blood returned to the soil to ensure that the harvest would be successful.

Yikes.

Not coincidentally, it parallels the story of Jesus Christ. Knowing they could not destroy pagan conventions, the early Christians adopted the tradition—minus the orgies—as a prelude to the penitential season of Lent. That’s when the faithful traditionally give up sensual pleasures in preparation for the crucifixion, death, and resurrection of the Christ on Easter.

Speaking of Easter, Miss Kitty also reminded us that the precise date of Mardi Gras each year varies because it is determined by the complex calculations that determine the lunar feast: Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the vernal equinox. Mardi Gras falls 47 days before Easter.

This year it is February 21.

Whew. That’s a lot to take in, Miss Kitty tells us. That’s why she keeps it simple. Like her Mardi Gras attire.

“Dress shabbily and they remember the fur,” she said, paraphrasing Ms. Chanel. “Dress impeccably and they remember the feline.”

Chick Stories

A memoir of adventures lived, laughter shared, and lessons learned with my girlfriends

Travesties, tragedies, and comical calamities abound
in a series of essays rich with historical and cultural context.

Learn More.

Buy Now.

Newsletter:
Come to Think of It

Stories are meant to be shared. So are fleeting thoughts, poetic musings, humorous anecdotes, and existential questions.

Come to Think of It is a forum to engage, inspire, and challenge. To gather with friends. Come to Think of It.

Subscribe at PattiMWalsh.com/newsletter.

Purr-fectly Understandable

John Caskey, an avid reader of this blog, shared with us the article, “Your Cats Can Tell When You’re Speaking to Them,” which appeared in the January 2023 issue of Scientific American.

The author, Tanya Lewis, reported on a study published in Animal Cognition that found cats, like dogs, can discriminate speech addressed to them when spoken by their owners. When hearing the same sentences uttered by strangers, however, cats did not appear to discriminate between adult-directed speech (ADS) and cat-directed speech (CDS).

According to Ms. Lewis, CDS is like babytalk, in that it is typically higher pitched and may have short, repetitive phrases.

Researchers Charlotte de Mouzon, Marine Gonthier, and Gérard Leboucher, at the University of Paris Nanterre, recorded 16 cat owners uttering phrases such as, “Do you want a treat?” in ADS and CDS. They filmed each cat before, during, and after playing the recordings of the owners’ and others’ speech. Then they used software to rate the cats’ reactions.

The researchers concluded that felines “reacted distinctively to their owners speaking in CDS, but not to their owners speaking in adult tones or to a stranger using adult tones or to a stranger using either adult- or cat-directed speech.”

Previous research has shown similar findings in dogs. “There are still some people who consider cats independent—that you cannot have a real relationship with cats,” said lead study author Charlotte de Mouzon, an ethologist and cat behaviorist.

Kristyn Vitale, a cat behavior scientist a Unity College in Maine, agrees.

“Although cats have a reputation for ignoring their owners, a growing body of research indicates that cats pay close attention to humans,” she said. “Cats can very much learn that specific vocalizations have certain meanings.” She noted that the study by de Mouzon et al. was small and that future work could expand the research.

The findings mirror those presented in the Netflix documentary Inside the Mind of a Cat, produced by Martin Shore and released on August 25, 2022.

In it, Ms. Vitale demonstrated that cats look to their owners for emotional advice. She attached paper streamers to a desk fan as a social referencing test. When she turned the fan on and the streamers fluttered, her cat Carl modeled his own response to her reaction.

When she acted frightened, Carl tried to hide from the fan, but when she acted happy, he was comfortable and confident. She concluded that 79% of cats look to their owners for clues on how to react to certain phenomena.

Inside the Mind of a Cat also reported that cats may exhibit cultural differences, depending on where they’ve been raised.

Dr. Saho Takagi at the University of Kyoto, noticed that cats from Japan appear less comfortable in unfamiliar environments than cats from the United States. She attributes this to the fact that cats in Japan are primarily kept indoors and rarely encounter strangers. After running these same experiments with Dr. Vitale, they concluded that these differences could be handed down through generations.

So, John, it seems that cats can indeed tell when you’re speaking to them.

Science simply has confirmed what feline aficionados have known for millennia. Communicating with cats is purr-fectly understandable.

Chick Stories

A memoir of adventures lived, laughter shared, and lessons learned with my girlfriends

Travesties, tragedies, and comical calamities abound
in a series of essays rich with historical and cultural context.

Learn More.

Buy Now.

Newsletter:
Come to Think of It

Stories are meant to be shared. So are fleeting thoughts, poetic musings, humorous anecdotes, and existential questions.

Come to Think of It is a forum to engage, inspire, and challenge. To gather with friends. Come to Think of It.

Subscribe at PattiMWalsh.com/newsletter.

All He Wants for Christmas

When Mickey Blanchette went snooping for Christmas gifts, he donned his Santa hat. Then he found a stash of unwrapped copies of Ghost Girl.

He pawed through the book and was delighted to read about the two felines that lived in Companion Moon, the haunted inn that served as the focal point of the novel. Pretending to be mousers, they had wheedled their way indoors to chase non-existent mice. What they really wanted—and readily found—was comfort and warmth. So did everyone who visited the inn.

A creature of nine lives himself, he appreciated a central theme in the book, that where there is no death—where past, present, and future are indivisible—one has the freedom to live.

Mickey liked reading about Mo, a gray tabby, who liked to slink around, offering her nose for a scratch; and Willy, a black cat, who purred his way out of dark corners at the mere mention of his name. Along with the dog, Angus, and 17 ghosts, they led Bonnie, the 12-year-old protagonist, on a journey of self-discovery.

But Mickey seemed to focus not on Bonnie’s self-discovery, but on the journey exemplified by the old proverb that explains cats’ nine lives. “For three they play; for three they stray; and for the last three, they stay.” Like Mo and Willy, Mickey knows a good thing. He relates to unconditional comfort and warmth. Why else would he deign to wear a costume?

It may have to do with being a creature of nine lives himself. He seemed to especially appreciate a central theme in the book, that where there is no death—where past, present, and future are indivisible—one has the freedom to live.

Mickey was so intrigued with the cats, the cozy setting, and the timeless theme that Ghost Girl offers, that he asked for his own copy.

He also suggested it would be a perfect gift for a pre-teen on your holiday shopping list. Or for that matter, any adult interested in Celtic mythology. He tapped his paw on the back of the book, noting the endorsement of George Cinclair Gibson, Ph.D., author of Wake Rites: The Ancient Irish Rituals of Finnegans Wake.

According to Gibson, a Celtic scholar, “Young readers will find Ghost Girl a relevant and positive guide for their own lives. Older readers will find Ghost Girl an attractive introduction to the deep and profound mysteries and spiritual precepts of the Irish Celtic tradition.”

“And cats,” Mickey purred, “Will find it deep and profound.”

As he snuggled into his favorite bed for a long night of reading, he alternated his gaze between the book and me. I understood he wanted me to read Chapter 1 to him, and share it with you.

So, with compliments of Mickey, Click here.

Chick Stories

A memoir of adventures lived, laughter shared, and lessons learned with my girlfriends

Travesties, tragedies, and comical calamities abound
in a series of essays rich with historical and cultural context.

Learn More.

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Dreaming with the Crawdads

My friend Reggie turned me on to Where the Crawdads Sing. Seems she did the same for her feline housemate GiGi.

GiGi seemed disappointed that the book wasn’t a cookbook. After all, crawdads is simply another name for crawfish. And since Reggie loves crawfish etouffee, turtle soup, and anything cooked ala Creole or Cajun, so does GiGi. Maybe she wasn’t disappointed, merely lost in another world—one in which she’d have crawfish for dinner.

So I closed my eyes and joined her. First for memories of crawfish, then for the marshes and swamps where they thrive. Then for the marshes and swamps themselves. I conjured the scene painted by the opening lines of both Delia Owen’s bestselling novel and its movie version. I wish I could have written them. I know I have experienced them.

Marsh is not swamp.
Marsh is a space of light, where grass grows in water, and water flows into the sky. Slow-moving creeks wander, carrying the orb of the sun with them to the sea,
and long-legged birds lift with unexpected grace—as though not built to fly—against the roar of a thousand snow geese.

Then within the marsh, here and there, true swamp crawls
into low-lying bogs, hidden in clammy forests.
Swamp water is still and dark,
having swallowed the light in its muddy throat.
Even night crawlers are diurnal in this lair. There are sounds, of course, but compared to the marsh, the swamp is quiet because decomposition is cellular work. Life decays and reeks and returns to the rotted duff;
a poignant wallow of death begetting life.

Delia Owens

Critics praised Where the Crawdads Sing for its well-crafted plot, complex characters, and engaging mystery. For me, though, it was the setting that consumed my imagination.

Although the story was set in North Carolina, I read the book in Virginia, and watched the movie in Florida. But I experienced it as if I were in Louisiana, where critters emerge silently in flotsam-flecked swamps, blue herons noisily bark at any intrusion into their sunny marsh, and screech owls pierce the pitch-darkness of a thunder-filled night.

I got to know swamps and marshes up close. I could smell the difference.

Like Kya, I paddled, hiked, and fished the wetlands. I had a pirogue—a flat-bottom canoe—which was perfect for low-lying, muddy waters. I also had a friend with a small motorboat and a retreat on the Tangipahoa River. There, rustic camps still bury themselves among the hardwood forests, bald cypress groves, brackish marsh, and swampy bayous of the long, lazy river named after a local indigenous tribe. And though separated by a thousand miles and half a century, I pictured Kya’s cabin looking like one of them.

Thanks to my friend with the boat, I got to know the people who lived off the liquid land on that river. Names like Duke, Zelda, and Shelby were reminiscent of the Crawdads’ cast of characters—Chase, Mabel, Tate. Jumpin’ Bait & Gas could well have been the Bedico Marina 50 years back.

Imagine my delight to learn that the movie version of Where the Crawdads Sing was filmed in the same mysterious waterways I loved. That Kya really lived in a simple house like those on the Tangipahoa. That as Marsh Girl, she could indeed live there. That her environs looked familiar because they were. I know the remote reaches of Fontainebleau and Fairview-Riverside State Parks, Big Branch Marsh National Wildlife Refuge, and the Tchefuncte—and Little Tchefuncte—Rivers where the movie was filmed. I read that production was often disrupted by severe lightning storms, floods, heat, and bug bites. Been there, done that, too.

I didn’t know, but found it quite interesting, that the courtroom scenes were shot in the Historic St. Bernard Parish Courthouse in Chalmette, Louisiana, where the people are affectionately known as Chalmations. And Houma, known for its annual Shrimp and Petroleum Festival, was the site of the fictional Barkley Cove. It didn’t take much to transform the Cajun city into an early-60s fishing village.

While GiGi looks like she’s dreaming of crawdads for dinner, I’m dreaming of where they sing. That place, according to Owens’s character Tate, is “where critters are wild, still behaving like critters.” Where, according to Owens herself, marsh and swamp and water flow into the sky, where grass grows in water, and death begets life.

I opened my eyes. It’s time to read the book again.

Send your ideas and photos to
pat@pattimwalsh.com

Chick Stories

A memoir of adventures lived, laughter shared, and lessons learned with my girlfriends

Travesties, tragedies, and comical calamities abound
in a series of essays rich with historical and cultural context.

Learn More.

Buy Now.

Pickleball, Kitty?

While Kitty’s housemates Tania and Nancy were out playing pickleball, they had no idea that their feline housemate was practicing her own game.

That is, until they came home early one afternoon to find Kitty reading Pickleball Fundamentals and practicing her serves.

“Who do you think you are?” Tania asked Kitty. “Pickles?”

She was referring to the dog who has been credited with the name behind one of the fastest-growing sports in the United States. But Kitty corrected her.

“The dog was named for the game,” she purred, “Not the other way around.”

It all began, Kitty chattered, in 1965 when necessity, the Mother of Invention, met Joel Pritchard, the Father of Pickleball. Although Joel had been an army sergeant in World War II, a congressman, a member of the Washington Senate and House of Representatives, and the state’s lieutenant governor, he is renowned for his response to a hot day, bored kids, a welter of equipment—and perhaps a dollop of guilt.

As the story goes, Joel and his friend Bill Bell returned from a golf outing to a buzzkill chorus from their kids of, “There’s nothing to do.”

Kitty could relate to that. She loves to be played with. That’s why she took up pickleball. “That’s why a lot of people play,” she said.

According to Joel’s son Frank, in a story posted on the Pickleball Hall of Fame blog, Joel suggested making up a game to relieve the boredom. After all, that’s what he did as a kid. So Frank, being a hot, bored kid, challenged him to do just that.

Although the property on Bainbridge Island, Washington, had a badminton court, there were no rackets or shuttlecocks. But Joel found some ping pong paddles and a wiffle ball.

Joel’s wife Joan lightheartedly named the game “Pickleball,” a deliberate reference to the thrown-together leftover non-starters in the “pickle boat” of crew races.

But Joel and Bill were not to be deterred. They made paddles out of plywood, tinkered with the height of the net, and eventually replaced the wiffle ball with an injection-molded one. Thrown together or not, this pickle of a game needed rules. Dads (especially if they’re legislators) like rules. So, Joel and Bill enlisted another dad, Barney McCullum, to devise the do’s and don’ts.

Kitty thinks that since they were inspired by a game named after a food, they came up with silly rules, like, stay out of the kitchen, i.e., the non-volley zone, and “dink” your opponent.

“You must consider the strategic aspect of the game,” Kitty explained. “It’s like chess. You need to out-think your opponent.”

What began as a hybrid of badminton, tennis, racquetball, and ping pong to appease some bored kids evolved into a competitive sport just a few years later.

In 1968, Pickle-ball, Inc. was created, “to develop the game … [and promote it] in a lawful manner.” By 1972, the company sold paddles, nets, and balls that were created specifically for the sport. The organization also helped transition the game into a legitimate sport. To wit, it was named the official state sport of Washington in 2022.

Between 1972 and 2022, the number of players skyrocketed, thanks to enthusiasts who brought their paddles with them from the Pacific Northwest to California, Arizona, Florida, and other Sun Belt regions. In Hawaii, the game became known as pukaball. Puka (meaning hole) referred to the game ball but eventually became the name of the game itself.

Over the last six years, the number of pickleball players has increased by 650%, according to USA Pickleball Association (USAPA), the sport’s official organization. Likewise, the Sports & Fitness Industry Association (SFIA) estimated that in 2017 there were 2.8 million pickleball players in the United States. Earlier this year, SFIA estimated 4.8 million players, making it the fastest-growing sport in the U.S.

Ironically, the sport that was created for bored children is synonymous with retirees. Yet USAPA reports that players over 55 make up only 30% of total players; 29% of players are in the 18–34 category; and remarkably, 6–17 year-olds make up 21% of all players.

Alas, pickleball injuries have also increased. The Journal of Emergency Medicine estimated 19,000 pickleball injuries in 2017, with 90 percent of them affecting people 50 and older. Noting that she and her housemates live in an active-adult community, Kitty reminded them that many of those injuries can be prevented by stretching, staying hydrated, and not backpedaling.

“It was a niche sport that started in the sixties,” Kitty demurred. “But now that baby boomers discovered it, it’s the rage.”

Nancy and Tania agreed. One proof of its popularity is the availability of specialized equipment and clothing that incorporates fabric technology with style. Another is the number of tournaments offered, and the increase in venues where the game is played. It can be found in virtually every municipal parks-and-recreation program across the country.

The Florida community where Tania, Nancy, and Kitty live recently increased the number of pickleball courts from 6 to 12. The courts are in constant use. That’s because most people play the sport for fun, fitness, and to reduce stress.

Just ask Kitty.            

“If life hands you a pickle,” she said as she practiced a dink shot. “Start playing pickleball.”

Photos by Tania Batdorf

Chick Stories

A memoir of adventures lived, laughter shared, and lessons learned with my girlfriends

Travesties, tragedies, and comical calamities abound
in a series of essays rich with historical and cultural context.

Learn More.

Buy Now.