Yesterday’s post prompted some additional recollections from my mother. Sometime during their last fight to save the hollow from being clearcut back in the late 80s, my parents were meeting with the lumberman/owner of the neighboring property in a lawyer’s office in Tyrone (the town adjoining our mountain). Of all the loggers we’ve ever met, this guy was the hardest to come to an agreement with because he viewed his role as divinely ordained: God had put the trees there for Man to use. Forest trees are a crop that needs to be harvested — a not-uncommon view at industry-funded schools of forestry, by the way. He once told me and Dad on a walk through the woods: “These trees are overmature. They want to be cut!” (See my poem about the incident.)

So on this particular day, Dad had to go to work after the meeting, leaving Mom to walk up the hollow. She mentioned this by way of making small talk after the meeting — what a nice day it was for a walk. The lumberman was aghast. “You’re going to walk? Aren’t you afraid of trees falling on you?”

It was a very telling remark, and we couldn’t help wondering how many other loggers suffered from such extreme arborophobia.

Fear of trees isn’t restricted to those against whom the trees might legitimately harbor grudges, however. Not long after we moved in back in 1971, a farm woman in the valley — another neighbor — asked Mom if she wasn’t afraid to be surrounded by trees. “I’d be terrified to live up there. What would you do if there was a forest fire?” Some years later, a writer-friend of Mom’s from State College expressed the same fear, adding by way of explanation that she was claustrophobic.

Well, I can see that. Besides, anyone who watches television with any regularity would be familiar with the raging, canopy-height forest fires that occur annually in many parts of the west. Here in the east, in most forest types including ours, fire really isn’t much of an issue. What forest fires do occur tend to be low-key affairs that scorch a few acres and kill a few fire-intolerant trees (read: trees that are not oaks) before they burn themselves out. It’s only in recently logged-over areas where the dried-out ground is deep in discarded limbs and branches that true conflagrations can occur.

Fear of forests in general is of course pretty widespread — just think about how many horror movies are set in cabins in the woods. It’s not altogether irrational to be afraid of wild places if you don’t know what you’re doing, or if there are aggressive poisonous snakes or grizzly bears about. Our black bears and timber rattlers are pretty hard to piss off, but to the extent that such things keep fools and lumbermen at bay, we could stand to have a lot more of them.

This morning, I found myself daydreaming about some of the famously strange trees of the world that I have yet to see: baobabs in East Africa, the Tule cypress, the fig trees whose roots are trained into living bridges in Cherrapunji, India, the dragon’s blood trees of Socotra Island… Then I remembered that I have actually seen some pretty great arboreal sights in my time: a cloud forest in Honduras, 2000-year-old bristlecone pines, Japanese maples at the moss garden temple in Kyoto, giant redwoods and sequoias, and an old-growth baldcypress-tupelo swamp forest in Arkansas came to mind.

And then I started thinking about some of our visitors here over the years to whom our own homely trees must’ve seemed a little exotic. In my last year of college, for example (1987 if you want to know), I was friendly with some grad students from northern China, and they invited themselves out in mid-October to see the fall foliage. It was a little early for our oaks, but they oo’d and ah’d over the flaming maples. The thing that struck them most of all, though, was the fact that all these trees grew on their own without having been planted, and that we also didn’t have to water them — they just couldn’t get over that.

Another time, my parents hosted a friend from Peru, a sociologist and poet who’d gotten a teaching gig in Kansas for the year and came out east to visit us. It was early spring, and he was agog at all the damage that an ice storm had wrought among the brittle black locust trees all along the upper edge of the field. After listening to my dad talk about disturbance regimes and forest succession for a while, he stopped and said, “But Bruce — how are you going to FIX them?”

Actually, the amount of standing dead trees and fallen woody debris in our woods might strike many native Pennsylvanians as a bit strange, too. Most forests, private and public, have been managed more intensively than ours; the market for hardwood being what it is, relatively few oak forests around here are allowed to age much beyond 80 years. In fact, our former neighbor Margaret, who grew up in the 1920s and 30s when the hollow was still recovering from being cut-over in the late 19th and early 20th century, told us before she died in 1991 that she thought the hollow had become very messy. She couldn’t remember ever seeing so many logs on the ground.

And since the majority of Americans now have grown up in the suburbs, they are probably used to seeing pretty well-groomed stands of trees. One exceedingly urban colleague of my dad’s at Penn State years ago simply refused to believe him when he told her that we had to carry a chainsaw in the back of the car, because trees regularly fell across our mile-and-half-long access road. This didn’t happen in any of the local parks, as far as she knew. “There must be something wrong with your trees!” she insisted.

It’s all in what you’re used to looking at, I guess. One thing about forests almost anywhere in the world: they’re very good at confounding one’s expectations. And the older they get, the stranger and more perverse they become.

Update: See the follow-up post, “Arborophobia,” for some more reactions to our woods.

“The obvious,” Charles Simic once wrote, “is difficult/To prove.” (“The White Room,” from The Book of Gods and Devils.) This is my new favorite quote.

To prove used to mean to undergo or learn by experience, then to test, as in “the exception that proves the rule.” Prove/proof didn’t always have such an aura of certainty. Even today, we talk about proofing yeast or a manuscript.

The rest of Simic’s poem, by the way, concerns trees and secrets. We learn that obvious things are quiet because they are mute. Unlike trees, they are diurnal and have no stories.

Earlier this evening, Rachel finally got around to asking me what my politics were. It proved surprisingly difficult to answer. I believe in a politics of kindness, I said after a lot of blather. I admire certain anarchist, pacifist and ecological thinkers, but I revel in inconsistency. My own feet remain a terra incognita — forget about the ground!

The critters in the gallery are a bobcat, a fisher, and a pair of red-tailed hawks. (Click on the thumbnails to see the full-sized images.)

It as if winter has gone on strike, leaving nothing but a few scabs.

All five of the small depressions on top of the mountain are full; what we usually call vernal ponds have become distinctly hibernal. It may seem like an odd place for water to collect, but a mountaintop is the one place where water doesn’t really know which way to go, so some of it just stays put.

Maybe that’s generally the case with things on top of mountains — they stay because they can’t decide on the best route down. Not that I would know, of course.

This morning I helped our neighbors, Troy and Paula Scott, haul some cow and roadkilled deer carcasses to two locations on the mountain for a golden eagle camera trap, part of an ongoing project headed up by ornithologists Todd Katzner and Trish Miller to track the movement patterns of eastern golden eagles. Paula is the point-person for the project here in Plummer’s Hollow since she has the most expertise with trail cams, as my mom detailed in a recent column. There are various other locations around the state, but I believe ours may be the only one to include cow as well as deer carcasses.

My job was to drive the tractor with the 1000-pound cow in the front loader. It was a bit chilly, but that was good because it meant the ground was frozen and our tires didn’t dig troughs in the marshy part of the field on the way up. We planted my cow at the Far Field and the three smaller carcasses at the top of First Field, both in spots that Trish had earlier scouted out: open yet brushy, and near enough to the wood’s edge that the big raptors will have some place to land and survey the situation before dropping down to feed. Both spots are on top of the ridge, which is used as a migration corridor in late fall and early spring, and also for more local movements by golden eagles that don’t go any farther south than Pennsylvania.

Of course, eagles aren’t the only things that will come in to feed on the carcasses, so everything had to be staked down. This only added to the gruesomeness of the scene. Since we don’t have cougars, wolves or other large carnivores here, the birds would need help getting to the meat. Fortunately, Troy and Paula are expert butchers.

The deer were both pretty rank-smelling, despite the cold, but their green meat and maggots weren’t nearly as disturbing as what came out of the two cows. When Troy stuck his knife into the back of the calf carcass to make the first incision in the hide, milk poured out and formed a sizable puddle on the ground. This was a veal calf. It was literally full to bursting with the milk it had been force-fed before it cheated its scheduled death and managed to die a few weeks early.

The cow was six years old, and Troy thought it might’ve died giving birth. His son had picked it up a couple days before from a farmer in the southern part of the county. The flayed carcass was not without aesthetic appeal, and I even filmed part of the skinning for possible later use in a videopoem (something about love, perhaps?).

But then Troy sliced open the body cavity, and again the animal was overflowing — this time with semi-digested silage (the yellowish green substance in the above photo). Paula reminded us that of course cows do have four stomachs, so probably Troy had just sliced one or more stomach linings without realizing it, but still, it was hard to escape the impression that the cow, like the calf, had been stuffed as if for a roast while still alive. It was a sobering glimpse into the realities of modern industrial farming. Later, at the lunch table, when I told my parents about it, Mom observed that such odd and at times unpleasant jobs make up at least 90% of most scientific studies. This was science in the raw.

By now I’m sure you’ve heard about the mini riots that broke out at big-box stores all across the U.S. yesterday as desperate bargain-hunters, squeezed by a shrinking economy, fought over Christmas gifts. I’d like to think these incidents, played up by a conflict-addicted media, don’t represent the behavior or attitudes of Americans in general. In fact, for the small percentage of folks who still get up off the couch to go hunting for wild game, the opening day of regular-rifle deer season is a much bigger deal. And here in Pennsylvania, that falls on the Monday after Thanksgiving.

Both Black Friday and the opening day of deer season involve competition for a limited supply of the most desirable trophies, and the successful competitors are almost invariably those who plot out their strategy well in advance and arrive at their location at least an hour before daylight. But I think the comparison ends there. On properties such as ours, posted for hunting by written permission only, Monday will be fairly tranquil, with probably no more than a dozen shots all day long. The hunters will sit quietly in the trees, some of them perhaps communicating via mobile phones, but most waiting in a state of heightened alertness akin to meditation for more than twelve hours, with a break for lunch. If they do shoot, they will generally not need to shoot a second time.

And whereas Black Friday shopping only contributes to the growth economy that is killing the planet, deer hunting in the East is — in the absence of natural predators — an ecologically crucial activity, without which forests such as ours would over time suffer drastic declines. Just in the forty years that we’ve lived here, we’ve observed major shifts in the flora as the deer numbers have fluctuated, and have the data to show the success of our deer hunting program, now in its 20th year.

If I sound a little defensive, that is of course because the average suburban American — which is to say the average American — tends to be far more critical of hunting than of shopping. In part, I think it’s snobbishness based on negative stereotyping. Our hunter friends come from a variety of backgrounds and both sexes (we could have as many as five women and girls sitting in the trees on Monday, I think). They include a contributor to this blog, poet and professor Todd Davis, who hunts here with his teenage son Noah. Back in 2008, I even incorporated Todd and Noah into a poem about deer hunting. I can usually spot Todd’s blaze-orange vest from my front door.

I also think people have lost touch with where their food comes from, though the burgeoning locavore movement seems to be changing that a bit, thank god. Conscious vegetarians I respect, but all too many people who recoil at the thought of hunting have no trouble buying factory-farmed meat in the supermarket. Perhaps because so many of us lead such tightly regimented lives ourselves, and are politically so willing to embrace lengthy prison terms and even indefinite detention for other human beings, the specter of concentrated animal feedlot operations doesn’t fill us with horror as it should.

Of course, for those of us who don’t hunt, the first few days of deer season are a time to stay close to home, and wear safety orange when we do go for a walk. We’ve felt much safer here since we posted the property 20 years ago, though. I’m more worried about interrupting somebody’s hunt than I am about getting hit with a stray bullet. And since I love trees, including the many species that would never make it out of the seedling stage if we didn’t keep deer numbers in check, I think it’s a very small sacrifice to make.

It’s a tradition in our family to go out for a walk after the mid-day meal on Thanksgiving and Christmas, sometimes all together, but more commonly by ourselves or in smaller groups. This might seem strange to those for whom constant family togetherness is mandatory on such occasions, but, well, some of the holiday traditions of other folks seem strange to us, too: lolling around watching other people play sports, for example, or lining up outside stores on Black Friday morning. To each his own.

If I’d been smart, though, I would’ve tagged along with my brother Steve and his wife Pam, since they spotted both a golden eagle and a barred owl, while all I saw was a pileated woodpecker at close range and a couple mixed flocks of winter songbirds.

And Elanor and her grandfather claim to have met a giant space monkey: “Bigger than Jupiter, bigger even than the house!” (Apparently Steve showed her Jupiter through a telescope the other night, and it made quite an impression.)

When everyone got back from their walks, we had pie — apple and pumpkin. See? In most ways, we are pretty traditional. Though we do draw the line at inviting the neighbors over, killing them and stealing their land.* We have enough land, really.

After pie and the ritual dismemberment of the table, we staggered into the living room where Steve regaled us with information about total solar eclipses of the recent past and near future, Pam read choice details from old genealogies, Elanor did interpretive dances for all 250 birdsongs in an audio guidebook, and I dozed off and got a crick in my neck.

Happy Thanksgiving.
__________

*Yes, I stole that line from the Daily Show.

Wood smoke: must be from the Amish in Sinking Valley. I inhale greedily. On the other side of the mountain, the deep labored thrum of a locomotive is followed a long minute later by the whistle—an almost orgasmic release.

At this time of night, it would be perfectly reasonable to confuse a hawk with a handsaw. In the crawlspace under my floor, some small mammal scratches the cold-air return duct with restless, dreaming claws.

Ever since traveling the old pilgrim road to Santiago de Compostela with my family as a kid, I’ve had trouble disassociating shelf fungi from the ubiquitous scallop shells emblematic of St. James. You don’t have to look far in the damp forest for ersatz baptismal fonts seething with mosquito larvae. Yet spring, not fall, is the pilgrimage season, according to Chaucer.

Then there are the woodland puffballs, ready to disgorge their fertile smoke, waiting like penitents for the tread of paw or hoof,

or even the brush of a raptor’s wing. Any ridgetop forest as full of squirrels as ours makes a welcoming hostel for migrating hawks.

Gone are the spined micrathena spiders of July and August. Only the occasional marbled orb weaver stretches a web across the trails now, its orange abdomen almost camouflaged against the autumn leaves as it winds its silk road into a labyrinth.