I’ve always felt a little sorry for the sun because it cannot cast a shadow.
What does it have to remind itself of its own eventual death?
What would the henge builders say about a god who never eats and a people who no longer believe in sacrifice?
What would the ancestors make of our craze for the living dead?
I see from the photo that it was snowing when I snapped this. I was intent on the flayed tree, this black locust savaged by a horny buck who must’ve bent it halfway to the ground to reach so far up its trunk. It’s O.K. with me; the tree isn’t one we necessarily want to survive. It’s one of the advance scouts for the forest’s never-ending attempt to take back the ground it lost 150 years ago to field and orchard.
Black locusts are good at that: rhizomatic, nitrogen-fixing, fast growing… the perfect native colonizer. As fast as we prune them out of the old meadow, they reappear, new sprouts capable of growing five feet in a year. The tree in the photo looks like a three-year-old to me. Armed for combat of a sort with its short thorns (nothing like those on a wild honey locust), a black locust sapling seems like good match for a deer’s antlers, which must be flayed themselves and then polished and honed: trees that live a single season and never sprout a leaf.
In the black cherry woods near the Far Field, time and rot have stripped all the bark from a tree brought down by ice five winters ago. Now its bare trunk burns with new life, albeit not the kind typically featured in parables about self-transformation. I look around for saplings in the openings the storm made, and spot a few, but almost none of them are hickories or oaks.
I have seen this forest devastated again and again: by gypsy moth caterpillars 30 years ago and by ever-more-frequent ice storms, the result no doubt of the changing global climate. Will stands like this ever revert to closed-canopy forest, or will they continue to thin until half the mountain is covered by savanna and dominated by fast-growing colonist species such as black locusts, black cherries, striped and red maples, and the alien tree-of-heaven?
It’s easy to get depressed and forget that whatever happens, however stark a desert we make, it will still be beautiful. On a cloudy late afternoon in the monotone winter woods, this allegedly dead tree was by far the most colorful thing.
2011 is the International Year of Forests. For the New Year’s edition of the Festival of the Trees, which will be hosted at the British blog Nature’s Whispers, we’re asking bloggers to share tree-related plans or resolutions, or simply to reflect on their relationship with forests. As for me, I hope to see our family’s 640 acres of mountaintop land given long-term protection through a conservation easement by next year’s end. Uncertain as the future of the forest may be, we need to give it at least a fighting chance.
Most climb Tussey Mountain for the views afforded by the numerous rocky openings along the ridge crest. To me, though, the broken rock itself is more interesting than the deceitfully smooth contours of distant ridges — to say nothing of the valleys and their bucolic-looking monocultures, which are probably less biodiverse than these boulder fields. Continue reading
Just like that, it’s over. After all the breathless anticipation and hype, all the bluejay jeers and scolding squirrels, it’s hard to believe how quickly the moment passes and the ground is littered with the fallen. I speak, of course, of the autumn foliage, which in many parts of the northern hemisphere reaches its peak of color sometime in October. In no other month do so many people focus on trees, and if you want to relive it, there’s no better way than to peruse the links in the latest edition of the Festival of the Trees — which was hosted this time not by a northern blog at all, but by one based in Bangalore, India: Trees, Plants and more. Week by week, Arati chronicles her harvest of tree-related entries from around the world. Continue reading
in response to a painting by Clive Hicks-Jenkins, Touched
Will you dance? I fear
the chance won’t come again.
Cold nights and dry days
have loosened our once-
youthful grip & put
a sunset color in our cheeks.
Let’s take a turn, swing
to the wingbeats of the rust-
voiced grackles. Let’s swirl,
break trail for the rain,
for everything good.
Later we can have a tete-a-tete,
escape the stares of those
golden-haired debutantes
& lie whispering together
in a golden bed.
We can dream of increase
in the sleek crops
of nightcrawlers.
But first we must part
from our parent oaks.
*
Update (10/27): I should explain what I’m up to here. Clive’s painting is his take on the Annunciation, a creative re-imagining of an oft-painted myth. Marly Youmans noted in a comment that she’d never seen an Annunciation in which Gabriel actually touched Mary like this, and the sunflowers and the abundant oak leaves were novel additions as well. Traditionally, the Annunciation is celebrated in March, but the leaves and flowers suggest late summer or autumn.
I thought it would be fun to try an intentional misreading of the painting. My first draft had them as a human couple, with Gabriel as an Edward Scissorhands kind of mostrosity, the wings actually deformed limbs from a partially reabsorbed twin. But the more I looked at the painting, the more I focused on the oak leaves. At first they were simply the occasion for the dance, but soon they took over and the figures at the center of the painting became something like leaf spirits.
Direct link to video on Vimeo.
It’s hard to get a video like this to look decent at low resolution. I tried uploading an allegedly high-definition version to YouTube, but I don’t see much of an improvement. I’m more pleased with the poem-like thing that came out of it — basically a flash-fiction piece, though here I’ve arranged it into lines for the hell of it. I don’t think there are a whole lot of white-collar jobs for illegal immigrants from rural Mexico, but who knows? Over at Big Tent Poetry, the prompt this week was to write a poem with something scary in it, and I suppose this qualifies, given how many Americans are afraid of Muslims and Mexicans — not to mention chainsaws.
Leaf Peeps
My friend Jesús has a glass
paperweight in the shape
of a mountain with one red
maple leaf trapped inside.
Jesús, I say, what do you need
a paperweight for? You have
no papers. He frowns,
then smiles. Sometimes I bring
the mountain to Mohammed
across the hall, he says.
We think it’s funny.
I take both of them on a ride
in the country to look at
the leaves. They keep asking
things I don’t know the answer to.
Which tree is that? Why
is that flower blooming now?
Jesus Christ, I say. Can’t you
just look & enjoy? But no,
they keep hollering to pull over.
I take their pictures with cows,
with a Dairy-Treat sign, &
with a chainsaw-sculpted Indian.
This looks like my friend Pedro,
says Jesús. He’s still in Michoacán,
sleeping with all our wives.
I’ll make the print into a postcard
that says, Wish you were here.
Mohammed laughs harder
than I’ve ever seen him.
They’re both familiar with
chainsaws—I’m disappointed.
It’s the one thing I know:
those whirling teeth,
their hungry search.
“We live on a continent of ghosts,” paleoecologist Paul Martin once wrote, “their prehistoric presence hinted at by sweet-tasting pods of mesquite, honey locust, and monkey ear.” The honey locust pods with their sweet pulp and indigestible seeds seem designed to tempt a very large mammal with indiscriminate eating habits — a ground sloth, a mastodon, a mammoth. Today’s critters might eat the pulp, but they don’t touch the seeds. Were it not for humans planting honey locust cultivars, the tree might still be restricted to wet areas, its seeds dispersed only by flood waters.
There’s something especially haunting about the locust’s formidable thorns, hard enough to make a serviceable substitute for nails, and growing several meters up the trunk. Nothing alive today presents much of a threat to the tree, but imagine bearing a yearly bonanza of tempting sweets on brittle wood and not having some way to keep a herd of hungry mastodons from trampling you or a ground sloth from ripping down your limbs.
The Appalachians are a haunted landscape in many ways, as I’ve written before. Their ecological communities are still reeling from the loss of such key species as the Eastern cougar, the American chestnut and the passenger pigeon in the 19th and 20th centuries. The forest itself is ghostly, a nearly transparent outline of its former self. And as species such as the honey locust and the Kentucky coffee tree attest, even the Pleistocene wasn’t so long ago. The Indians whose arrowheads may be found in abundance in the field a stone’s throw away from this tree in Sinking Valley, Pennsylvania, may not have hunted for mastodons, but their ancestors surely did.
13,000 years isn’t a very long time — not even for people. Artists were painting the European megafauna as early as 16,500 years ago in Altamira Cave, in what is now France. Today, their distant descendents spray-paint the rocks outside a small limestone cave at the foot of the aforementioned field, across the road from the honey locust tree.
Humans, too, evolved with megafauna, and I believe some of our behavior patterns still reflect this association. We tend to reproduce, for example, as if we expected a saber-toothed tiger to eat half our offspring. And in our nightmares we are stalked by monstrous things which often have no real counterpart in the world as we know it — or should I say, as we have made it, we and our ancient hunting partners, the dogs. Together we have tamed the earth, and orphaned ourselves in the process. Which is, perhaps, the scariest thought of all.
Written for the November 1 edition of the Festival of the Trees (deadline: October 29).
Direct link to video on Vimeo.
10/10/10 is variously Binary Day and 42 Day among geeks and Douglas Adams fans; a Global Day of Doing for greens; a day to try and record the world in photos and videos on Flickr; and among birders, the annual, international Big Sit bird count. For me, it was just a day to walk in the woods.
I approach videohaiku a little differently from regular videopoetry, as you’ll see. For one thing, I prefer the poem to appear as type, without audio. Also, the text can flow more directly from the imagery than with a regular videopoem. And finally, while some videohaiku makers use three short scenes in imitation of the three-line pattern that characterizes most English-language haiku, I prefer the style I’ve followed here: holding the poem until the end of a quiet, meditative scene or two. This resembles the effect of a poem on a scroll, or a haiku following a passage of prose (haibun).
I might get a second videopoem, haiku or otherwise, out of footage I shot today, but that will have to wait until tomorrow.
Part I of a two-part conversation with my brother Mark, a professional geographer. It’s become fashionable for writers to use the term “geography” loosely (The Geography of Love, The Geography of Childhood, The Geography of Home, etc.) but what is geography, anyway? Turns out it’s really all about memorizing state capitals and principal imports and exports. Or not. Listen and find out.
Podcast feed | Subscribe in iTunes
Theme music: “Le grand sequoia,” by Innvivo (Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike licence)
black birches in Plummer's Hollow
This month’s Festival of the Trees blog carnival at Kind of Curious features an unusually large haul of poetry, including poems by Daniela Elza, Nic Sebastian, Eric Burke, Dorothee Lang, Walt Franklin and Rob Kloss. I also enjoyed some of the more informational posts on topics ranging from nurse trees to the destruction caused by the recent tornadoes in New York City to the practical and legal implications of tree-hugging in the U.K. I’m not going to link to any of these individually, because John did all the work pulling the link-fest together — he deserves all the traffic. So go visit.
Don’t forget to bookmark or subscribe to the coordinating blog of the Festival of the Trees, and whenever you happen to blog about trees or get a tree-related item published on the web, try to remember to send us the link. Also, we still need a volunteer to host the festival on December 1, so let me know if you’re interested.
One final tree-related note: my mother’s nature column for October is all about last year’s devastating October snowstorm. I think I posted some of my photos here at the time, but Mom goes into much more detail than I did, so go for the photos if you want, but stay for the writing. That storm was about as much excitement as we ever get around here.
I went out in mid-morning while it was snowing heavily again. The forest was a palette of white, gold, and green. Black birch and witch hazel trees were bent over and a few black gum trees had broken in the woods both inside and outside the deer exclosure.
Large branches littered the Far Field Road along with occasional whole trees — red maple, sugar maple, hickory, chestnut oak, and a split black cherry. Once again snow piled up on the leaves and branches of standing trees, and after I had walked over to the Sapsucker Ridge Trail and across the black-locust-bowed Far Field, I heard the smash of a tree or large branch on the Far Field Road. Nervous about my safety, I tried to hasten along the ridgetop trail…
Snow on autumn leaves is a beautiful sight. But an excess of beauty can be a terrible thing.
