Photos – Page 40 – Via Negativa

October 12, 2008 by Dave Bonta

In a yellow wood

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood”: that’s as far as I ever got with Frost’s best known — and most poorly understood — poem. Oh, sure, I finished reading the words, but my imagination never advanced beyond that initial image, which delighted me. To hell with the figurative meaning; the literal one was quite enough for me. I suppose I should be ashamed to admit that I often engage with poetry on such a superficial level, but you have to understand that we have several miles of old woods roads here on the mountain which seem much like the “roads” in “The Road Not Taken,” moss-covered, sometimes grassy, and ankle-deep in yellow (and orange and red) leaves this time of year, which whisper as you walk. And in any case, a yellow wood on a bright October day invites careless wandering. You can push regrets and fears of failure to the back of your mind for a while.

Archery season for white-tailed deer began last Saturday, so we do share the woods with a few hunters, who sit camouflaged in the trees, alert and focused on a single goal while we amble past, heedless as only an unhunted non-predator can be.

The yearly mulch is underway. I walk admiring the woods with a lazy gardener’s eye, willing myself to ignore multiple ecological wounds and see everything as if couldn’t be better arranged, as if each bush and tree were perfectly shaped and situated, as if every stone and clump of ferns stood in an aesthetically optimal relationship with its surroundings. It’s not a bad habit to get into, I think. The problem with the narrator of “The Road Not Taken” is that he’s too concerned about destinations. “Somewhere ages and ages hence,” he might think back on the choice he made, but what he’ll really miss, I’ll bet, is what he missed that day: the option to stay and revel in all that yellow.

October 8, 2008September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

The fog of fog

The black walnut tree keeps dropping its ordnance on the roof. When will the fog burn off?

I’m not talking about financial fog, the fog of war, the fog of charm, or the fog of epidemics. I’m not talking about Fat, Oil and Grease, Friend of Girl, or Fear Of Google. I’m not talking about Utility Fog, in which microscopic robots link arms to form apparently solid furniture that can shape-shift on command, much less electronic fog, a mysterious phenomenon allegedly responsible for the Bermuda Triangle.

It’s a little confusing, isn’t it, all these fogs! I’m not talking about Alzheimer’s, the mental condition attending chemotherapy or chronic pain, or impediments to reading comprehension. I could be talking about a Photoshop effect, but I’m not, and for once I’m not alluding to existential ignorance, either.

I mean actual, honest-to-Whomever fog: clouds that form on the ground instead of in the sky.

Of course, when you live on a mountain, your fog might well be someone else’s cloud, especially in the winter and early spring. But this time of year, you can rise above the clouds simply by walking uphill. Or you can stay inside and wonder vaguely, between bouts of election-season-induced fury, who the hell keeps knocking on the roof.

September 2, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Back to School

I enter town by an alley off the railroad adjoining the parking lot for G&R Excavating and Demolition — “The Professional Homewreckers,” they call themselves. “No Job to Big or Small.” Sic. Walking into town on a quiet Sunday morning to use my sister-in-law’s computer, my route takes me along the railroad tracks and under I-99, where the 35-year-old overpass is undergoing extensive reconstruction. Workers have wrapped the massive steel girders with chainlink fence and covered that with burlap. It reminds me of a pupating caterpillar, the difference being of course that when it emerges from its chrysalis it will still be a highway bridge. I glance back at the end of our mountain, and see that it’s topped by a wisp of cloud that belies its diminuitive elevation: the sun-struck forest exhaling into the crisp morning air.
Continue reading “Back to School”

August 21, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Black Moshannon

If you can’t see the slideshow, or if you’re on dial-up, go here.

Gnarled stumps of pine trees cut down a century earlier jut from the tannic waters of Black Moshannon Lake. Though like most lakes south of the glaciated portions of Pennsylvania it is a man-made reservoir, a smaller, boggier series of ponds preceded it, and descendents of the beavers that built the original dams remain. Last Saturday, my mother and I were admiring the banks of cardinal flowers in the streambed below the dam when a small birch tree beside the trail toppled over less than fifty feet away. We went over to look and discovered that a beaver had chewed it almost all the way through, presumably the night before, but for some reason had left it standing.

Black Moshannon is a pretty special place, home to rare orchids, carnivorous bog plants, and many other strange and wonderful things. Botanists consider the 1,500-acre Black Moshannon Bog Natural Area to be “the largest reconstituted bog/wetland complex in Pensylvania.” The park is surrounded by a much larger state forest on the Allegheny Plateau a few miles west of the Allegheny Front. I won’t give the exact elevation, because I know my western readers will laugh, but let’s just say that it’s high enough to be significantly cooler than most of the surrounding area. So the small swimming beach is always a major draw.

In fact, our main reason for going there on a beautiful, cool summer day was to introduce my three-year-old niece Elanor to the joys of a swimming hole. She’s always been drawn to water, but her fascination has included a healthy admixture of fear. With some coaxing from her father, though, and with the example of all the other kids to follow, she was soon splashing and yelling with the best of them.

My own interaction with the water was solely photographic. Like Elanor, I’m drawn to water and never get tired of looking at it: the plants that grow in and around it, the trees and branches that fall into it, the frogs that sit quietly beside it, leaping in at the last possible moment. By the end of the afternoon, we were each relaxed and besotted from our long immersions.

August 19, 2008September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Old frog, new tricks

ticket booth

This is another postcard that will not appear on the fantastic new site postal poetry. That’s because I’ve joined Dana Guthrie Martin as co-editor, and we won’t be posting our own work. But we’re actively soliciting submissions from anyone and everyone else, and we’ve created a section where artists and poets can connect for collaborative contributions, as well. Come have a look!

August 18, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Zendo

A Japanese-style zendo on a Pennsylvania hillside. I suddenly remember I too used to dream this dream, years ago. How strange to encounter it in someone else’s woods, though. It’s as if I never woke up.

After half an hour of zazen, I find the continued presence of the wooden floor with its wavy grain somehow comic: everytime I open my eyes, there it is again! Solid yet wandering.

Kettle drum.

Wooden clappers.

Bell.

Rooster.

Cicada.

Airplane.

The growl of a stomach.

A caught breath.

A sigh.

Walking meditation: the world’s most difficult dance. So many possible steps, and none of them wrong. We go single file through the woods. If the trees aren’t laughing at us, they should be.

At the Dharma talk about honoring the body, I watch a black lab running in his sleep.

We are enjoined not to speak throughout the service. The next morning, I feel a cold in my throat.

August 13, 2008September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Geotrupid

I was walking up the path under the black walnut trees in my parents’ yard this afternoon when I spotted a minor commotion at ankle level: a bald-faced hornet and a large, metallic-green beetle seemed to be arguing over something, though the hornet flew away when I bent down for a closer look. The beetle was right in the middle of the path, about a foot away from a file of fairly fresh cat shit, so I figured it was some sort of dung or scarab beetle. Anxious for a good photo, and mindful of my brother Steve’s interest in documenting all the beetles on the mountain, I set down the bag of vegetables I was carrying and scooped up the beetle.

In contrast to yesterday’s frog, the beetle fought hard to escape, wedging its head and forelegs into a crack between my fingers and pushing with immense force. I barely managed to hold it in. I ducked inside just long enough to grab the camera, and set the beetle down on the concrete walk, where I’m sorry to say it rolled onto its back and I shot a few photos of it in that compromising position before helping it right itself. The feather-like protrusions on the ends of its antennae — evidently called antennomeres — glowed orange in the late afternoon sun as it turned and began marching purposefully toward the tall grass. I stuck out a hand and herded it back into the sunlight, whereupon it stubbonly began heading back in the same direction. The second time I stopped it, it emitted a loud chirping sound — if I’d ever wondered what a pissed-off dung beetle sounded like, this was my answer. Then it lifted its elytra, unfolded the sails of its underwings, and took off, buzzing at least as loudly as a June beetle.

I emailed Steve for an I.D., and he responded quickly.

I don’t suppose you thought to collect it?! That’s a pretty rare beetle, Geotrupes balyi (species 90% certain, genus certain). It used to be considered a scarab, subfamilae geotrupinae, but now it’s in a separate family, Geotrupidae, the “earth-boring dung beetles.” The geotrupids look a lot like tumblebugs and other scarabaeid dung beetles; they roll balls of dung, etc. However, they generally live underground and are seldom collected in the USA. They are much more common in Europe; Fabre has a segment on dung beetles which are geotrupids. The well-known “spring dor beetle” of Europe (also just called a “dor,” a good scrabble word) is a bluish geotrupid quite common in much of the European continent. I’ve never collected or seen a geotrupid on the mountain before, so this is a new species and family for bioplum [our family’s biological inventory of the property].

The invaluable BugGuide.net includes some photos of this species, and I can see why Steve considers it the most likely candidate. The contributor, a fellow named Jim McClarin who is obviously at least as big a beetle fanatic as Steve, says, “I found this fellow in/on a mushy, slimy, rotting mushroom near a small pond or seasonal pool in mixed woods” in Rockingham County, New Hampshire. He offers “Mushroom geotrupid” for a common name.

So is this beetle coprophagous (dung eating) or mycetophagous (mushroom eating)? The authoritative Generic Guide to New World Scarab Beetles (which defines “scarab” broadly) says that Geotrupidae may be either.

Life histories of the geotrupids are diverse, and food habits vary from saprophagous to coprophagous and mycetophagous, and some adults apparently do not feed. Adults of most species are secretive, living most of their life in burrows. Although adults do not tend larvae, adults provision food for larvae in brood burrows. There is overlapping of generations in some species. For example, in the genus Bolboceras, eggs, larvae, pupae, and adults have been observed together in a single branching burrow. Adults dig vertical burrows (15-200 cm in depth) and provision larval cells with dead leaves, cow dung, horse dung, or humus. Burrows of some species extend to a depth of 3.0 meters. In restricted habitats, some species are semi-colonial. Geotrupids are not of economic importance, although their burrowing has occasionally caused damage in lawns. Adults of many geotrupids are nocturnal and are frequently attracted to lights at night. Some species are attracted to fermenting malt and molasses baits. Most adults and larvae stridulate. The biology and behavior of many species, especially the Bolboceratinae, are poorly known.

I can vouch for the stridulation. And it sounds like if I want to attract more of them, I need to get my ass in gear and ferment some malt. After all, who needs dung or rotting mushrooms when there’s beer?

August 12, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Visitor

I was just sitting down at the computer this morning when I noticed something moving behind the front door. “White-footed mouse,” I thought. But it seemed a little small for a mouse.

It was a frog. My first instinct was to prop the screen door open and herd it outside. But its belly was caked with dust bunnies — it must’ve spend the night under a bookcase — and the dust included a number of long hairs. I soon realized that all four of its webbed feet were tangled in hair, and it was having trouble moving.

I picked it up and tried to pull all the gunk off of it, but it proved to be a delicate operation, so I carried it up to my parents’ house. Dad is very good at this sort of painstaking task.

It took him about five minutes to carefully snip the hairs free with a nail clipper and wash the frog off in a pan of water. I called Mom down to identify the frog, and after poring over the books we decided it was probably a half-grown green frog (though we’re open to other suggestions, too). We only have a small stream, but apparently green frogs are fine with that. They’re habitat generalists. They like to hang out under logs near streams, apparently, so it could be that this frog found the crack under my door inviting.

The Wikipedia article on the green frog calls it “primarily nocturnal,” but adds that it “is not as wary as many other species of frog. Fleet of foot and difficult to spot, this frog is often noted only indirectly as it flees into the water.” If our identification is correct, it’s a new species record for the mountain. Who knows how long its kind has been hiding out here? Unless the juveniles really disperse widely, I’d say we have a breeding population.

After Dad got it thoroughly cleaned off, I carried it down below my house and released it beside the stream. It was by this point quite habituated to human hands, however, and didn’t want to leave; I had to poke it with a finger to get it to hop off into the weeds.

Cute as it was, I hope it doesn’t try to return to the house. There are way too many milk snakes and black snakes in the walls to make this a hospitable environment for frogs — to say nothing of the groundhogs, porcupines, raccoons, skunks, and feral cats that have been known to inhabit the crawlspace under the floor. It’s lucky for the frog that it didn’t tangle with anything larger than a dust bunny.

August 11, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Skywatching

August, & the empty catbird nest catches small walnuts that will never hatch. An early autumn chill settles into my kneecaps. Last night, a cricket made entirely of electrons haunted a cross-continental audio connection between computers. It sped up & slowed down according to no change in temperature that anyone could discern. Thus, perhaps, the Great Motherboard amuses herself. Today at sunset the sky was full of chimney swifts, & I watched them for a while because it’s the height of the Pleiades, & this was likely the only skywatching I would do. Swifts are well named. The clouds turned orange above them while they weaved & wheeled. For whose chimney were they the wayward smoke? And in the morning, sometimes the sun finds a hole in the wall of trees opposite my porch & blinds me for half a minute before inching upward. Then wherever I look I see its negative: dark suns swimming in a cloudless blue.

August 8, 2008September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

El Arbol del Tule

My brother Mark, a professor of geography at Delta State University in Mississippi, recently returned from a two-week trip to the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, where he was surveying cycad populations with some Mexican colleagues. While there, he took the opportunity to visit the world-famous Arbol del Tule (pronounced too-lay), in the small town of Santa Maria del Tule. I prevailed upon him to share some of his photos of the Tule tree with Via Negativa readers. Please click on the images to see larger versions.

The tree is an ahuehuete (ah-way-way-tay), known in English as Montezuma cypress or Mexican cypress — Taxodium mucronatum. Genetic tests have shown that it is a single genetic individual, not the fused trunks of several trees as some had thought. Tule is a kind of reed; the town was built on the site of a former marsh. According to the Gymnosperm database,

“Ahuehuete” is a Nahuatl phrase that means “old man of the water,” a fit name for a tree that is always associated with swamps, streams or springs (Bautista 2005). The tree is sometimes also called Ciprés de los Panatanos (Cypress of the Marshes).

The ahuehuete is most often found growing directly in the current of streams and rivers in Mexico. It’s a close relative of baldcypress (Taxodium distichum), the most visible difference being the virtual absence of cypress knees. Like the baldcypress, the Mexican cypress is deciduous, dropping its needles in the dry season.

Santa Maria del Tule is a small valley town a few miles east of Oaxaca City. It is easily accessible by local bus. The Arbol del Tule (l) dwarfs the church; a somewhat smaller ahuehuete (r) grows to the right of the church.

The town square is dominated by formal gardens, which include some topiary. One gets the impression from these photos of a rage for order — a natural reaction, perhaps, to the otherwise overwhelming wild presence of the great tree. However, this species has been a literal building-block of civilization in Mexico for a very long time. The Aztecs and other Mexica peoples built cities on shallow lakes by first planting palisades of ahuehuetes, then filling the areas they enclosed with rocks and soil. Tenochtitlan itself was built in this manner, which means that one of the largest cities in the world — Mexico City — had arboreal grandparents, whose bones might still lie buried somewhere beneath it.

Arbol del Tule
Common name: Ahuehuete or Sabino
Family: Taxodiaceae
Genus: Taxodium
Age: More than 2000 years
Girth (circumference): 58 meters
Height: 42 meters
Diameter: 14.05 meters
Volume: 816,829 cubic meters
Weight: 636.107 tons
Source: SEDAF
Town council 1996-98 [those who erected this plaque]

The age and even the exact size of the Tule tree are difficult to determine. The plaque at its base is unlikely to have the last word.

This is the smaller tree on the other side of the church, which would be considered remarkable anywhere else. As the aforelinked Gymnosperm database page puts it,

The Tule tree itself grows in a neighborhood that also holds six or seven other very large trees — one tends not to notice them, though, because most are behind walls and not publicly accessible, and because despite their large size (over 300 cm in diameter) they pale into insignificance beside the Tule tree itself.

Regular readers know of my interest in public poetry. I was happy to see Mark’s photo of an official Tule tree poem, especially since the poem, by Juan de Dios Peza, takes a decidedly via negativistic approach. Here’s the text, along with my quick-and-dirty translation.

El Ahuehuete de Santa Maria del Tule

¡Con qué pompa a la vista
te presentas titan de estas
risueñas soledades!
Si sacuden tu copa las
tormentas sollozan en
las ramas las edades.
¿Qué te puedo decir?
Inspiras tanto que a mí
me basta recoger tu
nombre y darte mi mutismo
como canto ¡Junto a un
arbol así nada es
el nombre!

Juan de Dios Peza
5 June 1994

The Ahuehuete of Santa Maria del Tule

How grand and stately
the sight of you, colossus
of these inviting solitudes!
When storms rock
your crown, all the ages
moan in your branches.
What could I possibly say to you?
You inspire me so much,
I’d rather withdraw your name
and give you instead my silence
in the form of a song: Next to
a tree like this, a name
means nothing!

Juan de Dios Peza
5 June 1994

Mark isn’t a terribly religious guy, but he said he found it strange that people would go into the church to worship with such a tree looming right outside. Here he is, as photographed by one of his colleagues, offering a prayer to the Arbol del Tule.

Be sure to check out the latest Festival of the Trees at Fox Haven Journal. The September 1 edition of the blog carnival will be hosted by the Spain-based blog Exploring the World of Trees; email links to Dan (treespecies AT gmail DOT com) by August 29.