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.

It was part of an annotated set of photos of a golden eagle that had been trapped, fitted with a radio transmitter, and released on our property (see my blog post at the Plummer’s Hollow site and my mother’s much more thorough column).

I clicked through to the Flickr stats page, which I rarely remember to look at. Here’s what I saw:

Wherever people were coming from, they clearly weren’t taking the time to browse through the whole set. I scanned down to the list of referring sites and saw that the aggregator site Reddit was the culprit. Someone had posted the link to the pics section, and it had gotten enough up-votes to briefly land on the Reddit front page. This resulted in a highly amusing and somewhat revealing comment thread there, which I’ll get to in a minute. But first, for the uninitiated: what’s Reddit? A recent article at Slate should get you up to speed.

Reddit has become the most exciting place on the Web in the last few months, the center of an earnest yet jokey brand of cultural and political activism. … [W]hile Digg is all but dead today, Reddit not only survived the social media shift but has thrived in the age of tweets. Reddit’s traffic has exploded over the last few years—in 2011, visits doubled, and in December the site recorded 2 billion pageviews. It did so by turning inward, and by becoming more than just a place that amasses links to outside sites. On most days, the most popular posts on Reddit consist of stuff that Redditors themselves created or captured to share with other Redditors: image macros, animated gifs, pictures of cats, extremely geeky cartoons, weird Photoshop memes, and Facebook found art. There’s a lot more substantive stuff, too, including two discussion forums that I find consistently fascinating.
“The Great and Powerful Reddit: How the site went from a second-tier aggregator to the Web’s unstoppable force,” by Farhad Manjoo

So this is a loose-knit online “community” of mostly progressive and/or libertarian, politically active geeks. What would they make of the photo?

Some shared links to other photos and videos of eagles, and many focused on the hunting or killing potential of the talons. “I’m certain plenty of eagles are capable of killing humans,” said a user called wackyninja. “Considering a Golden Eagle will prey on small deer, I’d say that yes, they could kill a human,” AdmiralSkippy agreed. (Golden eagles have been known to take, or attempt to take, very large prey indeed.) “Here’s a picture of batman riding a shark while holding a lightsaber,” cheetahlip chimed in.

“That is a beautiful fucking bird,” opined bang_Noir. Some other Redditors got into a somewhat arcane discussion of what it might be like to have an eagle land on one’s arm. Bigcitycrows, apparently a falconer, wrote:

If you ever want to know what it feels like to have a bald eagle land on your arm, put on the thickest glove you can find, then gently rest your car door closed on your forearm through the glove. Again SLOWLY and lightly push the door. It feels weird and far-off, because it’s through the padding, but a painful increase in pressure. If you want to know what it feels like to have a golden eagle lose her footing and hold on for dear life trying to regain it, swing the door closed.

A number of other comments amused me for one reason or another:

“That Owl, Looks surprisingly happy.” Reply: “Which is why that picture is so goddamned creepy.”

“I’m still impressed they can catch prey so well. I never had any luck with those talon thingys at the arcade.”

“That is such a marvellous bird. The head is pure design win.”

“Polly want a small furry mammal?”

“You’re on the front page way more often than should be possible.”

“Talons be with you.”

“I really am surprised that all other birds just haven’t committed suicide knowing they might be compared to an eagle at some point. All kinds of eagles are friggin’ monsters!”

“So long as they don’t figure out how to use door handles, we’re safe.”

“And here I was, just scared of bears. (looks up)”

“What a cutie :)”

“I guess I’ve never seen an up-close image of an eagle or something because I just stared at this shit for 20 minutes.”

“Damn nature! You scary!”

“Where is your god now?”

“That’s some straight up gangster shit”

“I handled birds of prey like this once for high school conservation club. Birds are incredibly intimidating at first, but once they trust you, they’re all like, ‘Yo.’”

“I saw Golden Eagle and instantly thought of Angry Birds”

Fear and awe mingled readily with humor, which is as it should be, I think. I was a little disappointed by how many people seem to see the world exclusively through the lens of Hollywood and video games, but on the other hand there was no shortage of commenters who clearly knew something about birds, dinosaurs, or both. One definitely gets the impression of overlap between nature-nerdism and general geekery.

I’m grateful to the Redditors for linking to the photo (more than once, apparently) and providing such amusing commentary. But as a blogger, it’s not the kind of audience I’m looking for. Judging from the stats, a vanishingly small percentage of viewers took the time to look at any of the other photos in the set. None of them left comments there — if they had anything to say, in the usual social-media pattern they went back to where they found the link and commented there.

Still, it’s kind of nice to know that that many people can still be moved by the site of a wild creature. I’d like to think it stirs something primal in the human breast.

“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!

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.

Every angel is falling—not like a skydiver
rushing toward reunion
but like a fish leaping above the calm surface of a lake,
entering a new universe of knives & eyelids.
Imagine being born at the height of your powers.

One rainfall & your chalk outline
disappears from the curb.
One hurricane and half the population
of your migratory species
vanishes over the Atlantic.

I don’t believe in angels, but I believe in their falling,
their helplessness against evil.
Nobody is watching over us except
for the blessed satellites, most of which
are in stable orbits.

We point our dishes at the farthest stars,
searching for any crumb of meaning.
Who but the most downwardly mobile,
undocumented aliens
would turn unjaded ears toward the earth?

__________

The first line is of course a riff on the opening of Rilke’s second Duino Elegy, “Every angel is terrifying.”

Low afternoon sunlight bathes the end of a log — a tree brought low by the ice storm of ’05 and cut to clear the trail. Walking with others, I have time only for one quick snap in passing. What attracts my eye? The red, the green, the pattern of white lichen. Later, looking at it on the screen, I realize that in its slow smolder of decay it has gathered all the colors of the Christmas season (though our only white so far has shrunk to a small patch of snow on the north side of the spruce grove). And looking at the lichen, I think: teeth. Big back molars, packed tight in an impossibly capacious jaw.

I have too much to chew on this month. Beyond a certain point, the chewed becomes the chewer, setting the gut to permanent churn. At the merest slight we light up like Christmas, but for the wrong reasons. Combustion comes in many forms, and some give off more heat than light. Starved of oxygen, for example, is possible to smolder in such a way that one turns almost entirely to charcoal — no ash for de-icing or the caustic lye, nothing but the fabled anti-gift, a stocking stuffer from Krampus.

I’m not sure why I did this. I don’t actually celebrate the winter solstice in any way; I just like having a tree up this time of year. And since my parents have decided to bail on Christmas, that meant I could raid their stash of ornaments and lights.

First I had to transplant my Norfolk Island pine into a heavier pot so it wouldn’t tip over, then drag it away from the windows so I could get some lights and ornaments on it. The tree’s only five and a half feet tall with sparse boughs, so I could afford to be choosy about what I hung. I mostly stuck with birds and antique glass balls. You can’t go wrong with birds and balls. This is a well-hung tree. Of course, it also includes everyone’s favorite ornament, Santa in a bathtub, accompanied by a ceramic Mrs. Claus with arms out in a gesture of alarm. Two wooden elves are seeking escape, one on skis and the other in a small aircraft.

Probably I should’ve waited until St. Lucy’s Day on December 13, which had been the approximate date of the solstice before the adoption of the Gregorian calendar. Hence John Donne’s poem, “A Nocturnal Upon S. Lucy’s Day, Being the Shortest Day.”

‘Tis the year’s midnight, and it is the day’s,
Lucy’s, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks;
The sun is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;
The world’s whole sap is sunk;
The general balm th’ hydroptic earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the bed’s-feet, life is shrunk,
Dead and interr’d; yet all these seem to laugh,
Compared with me, who am their epitaph.

Study me then, you who shall lovers be
At the next world, that is, at the next spring;
For I am every dead thing,
In whom Love wrought new alchemy.
For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness;
He ruin’d me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death—things which are not.

And so forth.

Of course, in my solstice tree’s native Norfolk Island, it’s the summer solstice coming up on the 22nd. “The climate is subtropical and mild, with little seasonal differentiation,” according to the Wikipedia. “The temperature almost never falls below 10 °C (50 °F) or rises above 26 °C (79 °F).” Sounds dull. They do, however, have a Norfolk Island pine tree on their flag — it’s their biggest export. The name of their major settlement is Burnt Pine. They have 51 endemic plant species, including the world’s tallest tree-fern, but their native forests are reduced to a single, five-square-kilometer tract protected as a national park. Numerous endemic species of birds have gone extinct due to habitat destruction and the introduction of rats, cats, goats and pigs. Perhaps some of the fanciful bird ornaments on my tree can serve to evoke the spirits of this vanished avifauna: “the endemic Norfolk Island Kākā and Norfolk Ground Dove along with endemic subspecies of pigeon, starling, triller, thrush and boobook owl.”

The official motto of Norfolk Island is “Inasmuch.” I love that.

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.

The hunters wrapped their treestand in camouflaged cloth. When it came time to paint the roof, they chose blue. That way, they thought, it might blend into the sky, forgetting that the deer see in black-and-white. Or maybe they remembered, and painted it to please themselves. But now their sky has fallen in, a lid on a sagging box nailed to the twin trunks of a rock oak that pull it back and forth between them in the ridgetop winds, like a prized toy.

Stand close to the blaze of autumn leaves and be uneasy: for if the deer are blind to this degree of glory, think what we we are missing from their own universe of sound and scent. I don’t suppose it’s a trade-off, but what if it were? What if, as so many ancient peoples believed, you could step into another animal’s skin? Would you sacrifice color for the chance to hear and smell as acutely as deer, bear, wolf?

But it’s a lot harder to stop smelling and hearing than it is to shut the eyes. Imagine being wild in a tamed land, hedgerows and managed woodlots your only refuge, with no escape from the human stench and din. Which makes me wonder: if humans had never lost our other senses, would we be still be able to abide our trashing of the earth?

When the oaks finally shed their leaves in early November, the younger ones are usually the last to let go. They remind me of children too wound up to sleep. Leaves are something we have no direct analogy for: they are part-hand, part-mouth, part-eye. Trees in winter retreat into themselves like hibernators, denning in plain sight.

I live not among them, but a short distance away — which is just as well. They are dangerous, even in suspended animation. In fact, they creak and groan the loudest when they are empty and need nothing more, neither noon nor sunset, and all their gold lies browning at their feet.