Pennsylvania – Page 7

February 3, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Short Mountain

Hearing there were old trees there, last Saturday my hiking buddy and I went over to Short Mountain – a place I can see from the ridge above my house. It’s time for a closer look, I thought. Together we saw far more than we would’ve seen alone. I am indebted to L. especially for drawing my attention to the stump in the second photo and the pool in the last one.

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In the last week of January, white rocks half-hidden by the green of lichens.

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The side of the tree that faced the weather still raises iron fingers to the breeze.

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Where it ground against another rock during the last ice age, the ridgetop boulder still burns.

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In the exposed end of a limb ripped down by last January’s ice storm, a complete record of the tree’s efforts to hold on to it.

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At the base of a large white oak, a monstrous burl. Inside, maybe a twist of limbs; another, darker sky; the shadows of birds.

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Right where we join the trail, a black birch’s spreading bark splits the bright orange blaze in two. Which way should we go?

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Behind the leaf dam, slow lines of foam crossed by a single leaf. The mountain stream turns still, no sound of water.

January 31, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Brick and mortar

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I’ve been coming to Penn State’s Pattee Library since I was a kid. My dad worked as a reference librarian there, and I learned my way around the Library of Congress cataloguing system before I learned my times tables. I remember when they first started to computerize the catalogue, how novel that seemed. Dad was active in the American Library Association’s Machine-Assisted Reference Services (MARS) committee way back in the dark ages before the p.c. revolution. Now, so many library materials are available through electronic databases, slogans such as “the true university is a collection of books” seem mossy indeed.

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The library has almost doubled in size since I was a kid, with the addition of the new Paterno wing. Everything’s been changed: what’s shelved where, what the different sections are called, how you get from one part of the library to another. They even repainted the ceiling above the central stairwell in the oldest part of the library a few years back. It had been monochrome, but I kind of prefer the new look.

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As an aging alumnus, I most treasure those parts of campus that remind me of the way it was when I was a student. It’s been undergoing a building boom for the last ten years or more, but two of the main ingredients of the central campus landscape that haven’t changed are locally quarried limestone blocks and American elms. The limestone seems especially appropriate because it’s faithful to the underlying geology. Preserving the presence of the American elms seems noble in a kind of Sisyphean way, since Dutch elm disease is such a threat. As soon as a tree contracts it, down it comes and a new elm sapling is planted in its place.

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Since universities may now exist partly or even wholly online, the phrase “brick-and-mortar” has become the usual modifier to distinguish the traditional kind. Built of limestone blocks below and brick above, Old Botany is easily the coolest building on campus. It’s not very big, and no classes meet there, so a lot of people don’t give it a second glance. It reminds me for some reason of the kind of student I used to be, gazing out at the sky, my mind elsewhere.

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I was always dreaming about a shortcut to knowledge, like everyone else since Adam and Eve. These kids today – well, they have that shortcut. Some other dreamers actually set about designing it. It’s called the Internet. Or maybe Google. Or the Wikipedia. Heck, I don’t know – call it the Tower of Babel if you want! Now, hand me another brick…

January 30, 2006September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Walking on the crust

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Geez, Ben, has it really been nine years since you checked out? It was late January, I remember that. Three or four days after getting the news, I was still consumed by violent fantasies of revenge against that unrepentant son of a bitch who got you hooked. I needed someone to blame, I guess. I went out for a walk around the mountain, which was a bit of a struggle due to a deep snowpack with an icy crust that wasn’t quite strong enough to hold me up. So I lurched along, trying hard not to slip and falling through at unpredictable intervals. I made a bet with myself: “If I can take twenty steps on top of the crust without breaking through, I’ll stop fantasizing about violence and try to forgive.” And what do you know? Twenty steps later, I still hadn’t broken through! So I amended it: “If I can make it all the way down this hill on top of the ice…” Damn, how’d I get so light all of a sudden? It was spooky! Finally, I said, “If I can make it all the way back to the house” – and I almost did. I guess it had just been a matter of concentration all along. I could see the smoke from my chimney rising straight up, lighter than the air.

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You know, it’s funny – I’ve never actually sat on your bench. Well, it’s all wrong, the way they installed it facing away from the street. Probably when the plan for downtown benches was first put forth, someone in the Borough Council objected that they might become an inducement for the Wrong Element to loiter and scare people, so they compromised by putting in benches that no one would actually want to sit on for more than a few minutes – shoppers resting their weary arms, someone taking an important call. But your family did well in putting your name on the closest bench to the record store. You know, they have a new bus stop across the street, now. Big new library, too. And dude, right across from your bench, someone just opened a Jamaican restaurant! I heard it’s good.

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The kids still sneak down into “Little New York” to drink. They think they’re gangbangers now – it’s pretty funny. You should see them walking along with their pants down around their knees, all rebelling in step. I’m sure it’s no easier than it ever was to grow up blue-collar in State College, PA. But these days, as every place gets more and more like every other place, probably the only towns that aren’t full of fake-ass shit are the ones that are just about dead. And State College is booming.

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There’ve been a hell of a lot of changes in town and on campus in the last nine years, but one thing hasn’t changed: no matter where you go, in the borough or the surrounding townships, someone is always tearing something down or putting something up.

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“Happy Valley” may have started as a tourism promotion campaign, but then people started to believe it. Penn State even runs its own retirement community now on a hill above the bypass. Who wouldn’t want to grow old on the frontiers of utopia? Somewhere in State College, there’s always a light left burning in broad daylight to reassure us that progress is on the way.

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Proof that at least some people in State College can laugh at themselves: the State College Centennial Pigs. I guess you’d remember this. The official story is that the sculpture was based on an historic photo of a sow nursing two piglets right in the middle of College Avenue, but with the Penn State campus right across the street, the symbolism is pretty hard to miss.

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The shoppes and restaurants downtown come and go, seemingly unaffected by all the new box stores on the outskirts. I’ve never seen so many upscale clothing stores and hair salons in one place. You can actually buy pre-ripped jeans now – imagine that! Instant authenticity! And there are more pizza places, coffee shops and tanning salons than ever. The owner of one tanning place just got busted for making secret videos of his patrons. Sick bastard.

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There are not one, but two Wal-Mart Supercenters now, one for each end of town. A group of about forty local activists staged a protest outside of one of them last month, holding signs and handing out literature. The funny thing is, according to the article in the paper, nobody really gave them a hard time, and some people were downright friendly. Does anyone actually enjoy shopping in a place like that? Go into Wal-Mart and all you hear is stressed-out parents yelling at their kids. I think being greeted at the door by people who are paid to act cheerful sets the tone – the whole place stinks of humiliation.

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Bouyed up the university, State College is still bubble-land surrounded by Bubba-land, metastasizing suburbs with no urban core, its bounty untroubled by the occasional small mutiny.

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Anyway, I don’t want to bore you. I saw your bench sitting there empty next to the record store and thought I’d just say Hey.
__________

Please note that the last photo is not a double exposure, simply a shot of reflections in a store window to the inside of which a poster of John Coltrane had been taped.

December 23, 2005 by Dave Bonta

Cut your own

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News flash: Rudolf’s nose isn’t exactly red…

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We’ve been coming here ever since I was five years old. I remember the excitement, all three of us boys crammed into the backseat of the old Scout.

Dad always made us walk at least a half a mile, for some reason. “That’s where all the good trees are, kids!”

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Of course, the snow was much deeper when I was your age. And the trees were greener, too.

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“What’s the fence for, Mommy? Can’t they just fly away?”

“That’s to protect them from all their fans, honey. Just like those barricades they put up to protect the president on TV!”

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“I think he likes me!”

“Of course he likes you, honey. You’re giving him treats.”

(Sound of chewing.)

“Daddy, can I have a reindeer for Christmas?”

October 17, 2005 by Dave Bonta

Thousand Steps

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There’s a place a few miles southwest of here called the Thousand Steps. It’s an old ganister quarry on the side of Jacks Mountain just north of the water gap known as Jack’s Narrows, named for an early settler who achieved great fame as a serial killer of his Indian neighbors. A narrow-gauge railroad on a steep, switch-backing grade hauled the quarried rock down into the Narrows, thence to the refractory in nearby Mount Union. Workers built the dry stone steps in the 1930s in order to make a faster commute.

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The steps climb a steep ravine where hemlock, Table Mountain pine, birches and maples have grown up in the more than fifty years since the quarry ceased operation. The old switchbacks make for convenient landings on which to pause and catch one’s breath. Since the acquisition of the Steps as part of a state gameland some ten years ago, they’ve become very popular with local people in search of spectacular views of mountains and forests and the winding Juniata, most poetic of all eastern rivers.

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Another attraction of the site is the fortress-like building that used to house the dinkey locomotives, made of the same stone as the talus slopes that surround it. An immense red oak tree stands directly below it; it’s easy to imagine the quarrymen resting briefly in its shade after trotting up the side of the mountain.

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Sunday was chilly – a good day to make the climb. Although the air was very clear, the sky was not. A pale mortar connected heavy blocks of cloud, sometimes gapping just enough to permit a brief view of the sun.

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Whenever that happened, cameras came out of pockets to record the instant transformations in the landscape. The few trees that had already turned color blazed like torches against the dark pines.

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The wind blew in strong gusts out of the northwest. Turkey vultures rose in tight circles above the Steps, catching whatever slight heat must still have been rising, despite the chill in the air, from all those open patches of bare rock. By the time we returned to the car, our legs felt like rubber from the long descent.

September 20, 2005September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Making adjustments

Yesterday morning I visited State College, home of Penn State’s University Park campus. The leading headline visible in the newspaper kiosks all up and down the main street declared, City Not Ready For Residents. Classes started more than two weeks ago, but I imagine there are quite a few freshmen who still aren’t quite ready for State College, either. Quite apart from the strangeness of a new place – which some will find bewilderingly large, and others ridiculously small and lacking – is the virtually unchallenged practice of trying to make wildly disparate individuals conform to uniform requirements and lesson plans.

A couple hours earlier, I had been moved almost to tears by my parents’ description of a movie I had never seen. It was a foreign film, which meant that they probably got more out of it than if it had been in English, paradoxically enough. With subtitles, one doesn’t have to worry about missing any of the dialogue due to the characters speaking too rapidly or indistinctly. My father has mentioned that on the rare occasions when he gets to watch a movie at some motel with cable TV, he always turns on the closed captioning for that very reason. And of course when one replays a foreign movie in one’s head, all the characters speak in English, without even a trace of an accent. The words at the bottom of the screen, so essential to our comprehension, completely erase themselves in memory. Such captions might constitute a good example – so rare in our society – of a completely ergonomic tool.

Our friend L. recently told us about a small auditorium on campus where foreign and art films are sometimes shown. It’s fan-shaped, like most auditoriums, she said, but the weird thing is that every row has the very same number of seats. So people sitting right in front of the screen end up being crowded much too close together, and folks in the back rows find themselves sitting much too far apart – especially if they might have had any hanky-panky in mind. Think of all those pairs of frustrated hands trying to connect with each other in the dark, arms stretching awkwardly and maybe even a little painfully into the chasms between the seats.

I stopped into the CVS pharmacy to buy shampoo; it was my lucky day. A huge sign in the window announced a Semi-Annual BEAUTY SALE. If beauty could be bought and sold, I thought, just imagine how valuable ugliness would become! Then I thought: Prove that this isn’t already the case. “As soon as everyone in the world knows that the beautiful are beautiful,” says the Daodejing, “there is already ugliness.” It’s the ugliness that’s lucrative, ugliness that drives this bizarre, anti-ergonomic economy. I’ve seen aerial photos of the oil fields of Venezuela and the Niger Delta; they aren’t pretty.

The shampoo was on sale; it cost all of eighty-eight cents. Sure, it’s full of chemicals that have never been tested for their long-term effects on human beings, let alone on water quality, but I don’t have much money, and haircuts aren’t cheap. The shampoo should last close to six months if I’m careful and keep my hair short.

This was my first real visit to State College in several months. A new parking garage had just opened, right across the street from the old parking garage and two short blocks from the third major parking garage, which is a stone’s throw from a new, multi-level parking deck. If gas becomes too expensive for most of the students to drive cars, I wonder how many of them will suddenly rediscover how convenient it is to walk or ride a bike? If the predictions of peak oil theory are correct, these public monuments to private fantasies of independence will soon stand as empty as the shells of dead snails. At least the skateboarders, banned from the sidewalks, will have plenty of places to ride.

The new library downtown is almost finished. It sits rather comfortably on the new, expanded corner lot that has been created for it, and I was struck by the fact that it now no longer faces down toward the Penn State campus and its main artery, the elm-lined pair of sidewalks that lead straight to the university’s own, recently expanded library. Now it stands side-by-side with the three-year-old borough building, facing into the center of town as if to symbolize State College’s would-be independence from the behemoth university whose appendage it really still remains.

The main doors to the public library will take foot traffic in right about where an alley used to connect to the street. A large parking lot occupies most of the space where the Goodwill, Army-Navy store and bicycle repair shop used to be. Yesterday, workers were putting the final touches on the outside of the building, reaching up with paint rollers or leaning and twisting in with caulking guns. The landscaping appeared to be complete; the brand-new shrubs probably arrived already pruned. Twenty-foot trees had been planted in the new, faux-brick sidewalk.

My main reason for coming into town had actually been to visit the university library, which is also a fully public facility, complete with open stacks and no borrowing limits. Five years on and I’m still adjusting to the strangeness of its new wing and the novel arrangement of space and collections throughout the complex. They just redesigned the electronic catalogue in an effort to make it user-friendlier, and from what I could see, they succeeded. (“User-friendlier,” incidentally, is what MS Word’s Spelling and Grammar tool advises in favor of “more user-friendly,” which is what I had originally typed.) But finding my books in the oldest stack area wasn’t as easy as it used to be, because the locations are described in a more general fashion now, and one is expected to study a map on each level in order to figure out where to go.

I still take the stairs rather than the elevator in the section of the library that’s been the most thoroughly remodeled and, as they say in the plastic surgery business, enhanced. I was amused to see that the lounge areas around the stairs were plastered with signs: Cell-Phone Use Area. I suspect that every area designated for smoking when I was a student back in the mid-80s is now a Bantustan for cell-phone users, shielding the rest of us from the hazards of second-hand talk.

Halfway down one staircase, two large, galvanized steel pipes bisecting the landing a foot below the ceiling made me stop and eye all four walls with sudden astonishment. It’s strange how a glimpse of normally hidden infrastructure can sometimes make one feel as if the corner of a shroud or curtain had just been lifted.

I suppose that last image might mean more to someone from a strictly Muslim country. Here, instead of the chador, women wear dark glasses – men, too. I was struck by just how many people in town and on campus seem to feel a need to shield their eyes. It occurred to me, though, that perhaps part of the popularity of sunglasses owes to the freedom they give their wearers to stare uninhibitedly at each other’s bodies – that a mask of cool indifference quite possibly disguises a face of need.

One woman wearing mirrored lenses pushed a stroller, and I glanced down at its two-year-old occupant. Babies and toddlers are somehow exempt from anti-ogling rules; I guess it’s presumed they’re too young to have a fully developed sense of privacy or personal space. He sat up straight up in the carriage, looking all around at the things no one else could see. No city will ever be ready for residents like him.

May 24, 2005September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Martin’s Gap

We’re in Martin’s Gap, on the edge of the Rocky Ridge Natural Area in Central Pennsylvania’s Rothrock State Forest. We got lost for a while on the drive in, and now, wandering along the stream in search of the trail, we encounter showy orchids in full bloom. In the dim light of a rainy late afternoon, you almost expect flowers like these to begin speaking. It’s not as if they lack for tongues. I sprawl on my belly, trying to shoot their portrait in the gloom with my little snapshot camera. A pickup truck stops on the nearby gravel road: “Is everything all right?” “We’re fine, thank you!” That bland baldness that most speakers of the English language mistake for truth.

A few minutes later a barred owl calls from the ridge: Hu HU huhu, hu HU huHU-awl. He flies in to query us more closely; I’m not sure how to answer. Barred owls, like their close cousins the spotted owls, are quite unafraid of human beings and often seem curious about these strange, flightless birds trespassing in their woods. The traditional birders’ onomatopoeia has them asking, “Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you all?”

In the forest, one cannot help hearing voices, I think. But a hundred feet down the road, we run into another group of wildflower enthusiasts. “Did you hear that barred owl?” “No! Where was he?” They seem like very nice people, but I’m reminded once again of why I shy away from large group hikes. A little while later, I find this crowd of open-mouthed puffballs on the end of a log.

Wild yam and maidenhair fern: two ways to spiral. When the dervishes whirl, they say, they’re searching for something they know they’ve never lost. Or for someone, all in green, variously known as Adonis, Elijah, Khidr or St. George. The tighter the whorl, the more earth his velvet coat takes in. For a double helix, add one dragon.

Narcissism is fine for the moon-faced narcissus. For orchids, we need another word: orchidism. You want mythic content? Surely the evolutionary tango of pollinator and blossom will suffice. If you’ve ever steeled your heart against jealousy and self-love and sought salvation in complete otherness, that was orchidian behavior – highly evolved.

The sky slowly clears. We climb out of the shadow at the crest of the ridge, which is capped with strange sandstone outcroppings: megaliths, stone heads carved solely by the weather. I’m reminded that more light doesn’t necessarily mean less mystery – especially if it comes from the sun, which has always struck me as being full of darkness. Try staring at the sun for more than a second and you’ll see what I mean. You’ll carry its smudgy thumbprints around on your retina for the rest of the day.

While my hiking partner relaxes on a flat rock to listen to the forest, I go clambering in search of still more images. Here’s a burl on a rotten rock oak, half-debarked: a coroner’s view of the brain. If you aren’t following a map, you find maps everywhere.

Below one of the largest outcroppings, I hear low murmurs and creep cautiously around, not especially enthusiastic about catching people in some intimate or illegal act. But there’s nobody there, just this young Hercules’ club, otherwise known as devil’s walking stick – a common native colonizer of forest gaps. In lieu of branches, it sports enormous compound leaves and has the odd habit of producing so much fruit in the fall as to bend and even break its brittle stalk, otherwise fiercely defended with collars of thorns. There’s a lesson in there somewhere, I’m sure. Its masses of berries rapidly ferment, making them all the more attractive to the songbirds it counts on to spread its seeds far and wide, shitting them out in drunken, erratic patterns – spirals, wheels.
__________

For previous portraits of Pennsylvania natural areas, see The Hook and Tow Hill.

May 16, 2005 by Dave Bonta

Weeds

Suddenly, beginning yesterday morning, my inbox is overflowing with German spam. Auslaender bevorzugt! Tuerkei in die EU! Deutsche werden kuenftig beim Arzt abgezockt! Graeberschaendung auf bundesdeutsche Anordnung! Vorbildliche Aktion! Volk wird nur zum zahlen gebraucht! Du wirst ausspioniert ….! And so on. The two that I open by accident contain no HTML, just Internet addresses. Clearly, the senders are “pharming,” trying to lure the curious or unwary into visiting a website where the seeds of malicious software lie waiting for new victims, new agents of dispersal. But why me? I don’t know a word of German. Whence this sudden invasion?

A few hours later I’m on a botanical field trip where one of the other participants is German and speaks authoritatively (albeit with a heavy accent) about plants and disturbance regimes, here and in Europe. We’re examining one of the few, tiny, remaining fragments of xeric limestone prairie in Pennsylvania. Why do European plants so easily out-compete ours? I ask. The German guy explains it’s because many of the northern European weeds have had a thousand years of intense cultivation to learn how to be aggressively weedy.

In North America, by contrast, the only really widespread form of anthropogenic landscape alteration was fire. Regular burning favors oak forests or savannas, depending on geology, exposure, moisture level, and other factors. This perpetuated openings that were originally natural, dating from a much warmer climatic period ending around 4,500 years ago in which wildfires were much commoner than they are today. Given fire, deep-rooted warm-season grasses can successfully out-compete cool-season grasses – mostly European imports. Large Pleistocene herbivores such as ground sloths and mastadons also played a role in originally creating these openings; in more recent times, the American bison helped spread prairie seeds between far-flung openings. Our trip leader describes an experiment with samples of different kinds of animal fur in order to find which would best transport the seeds of side-oats gramma grass, a prairie indicator species. Some pelts, such as deer and elk, shed the seeds immediately; the densely matted buffalo pelts picked up and retained side-oats gramma seeds like nothing else.

As with the wolf and panther, the wild bison still has a sort of ghostly presence in the Pennsylvania landscape, recalled by numerous toponymns: Buffalo Valley, Buffalo Creek, Buffalo Run. Run they did, but never fast enough. You can, however, still see them around – there’s a farmer who raises buffalo right on the other side of this hill, one of the local participants informs us. That really gets us talking!

We discuss spotted knapweed, a plant I only know from the railroad right-of way. Most of the invasive species in our hollow first appeared down along the tracks, hoboing in from god knows where. Spotted knapweed is that tall, rank stuff with the purple thistle-like flowers, but no spines. Turns out it doesn’t need them. It’s what they call allelopathic, poisoning the soil for other plants, and it’s potent enough to repel would-be grazers as well. Humans foolish enough to pull it out bare-handed may be susceptible to a nasty rash, but just as often it doesn’t leave a physical sign, going instead straight for the nervous system. You get recurring headaches, our trip leader says, and for a week or two, nothing will taste quite right.

Following local leads, we discover a previously unknown prairie remnant on the side of a hill above a plowed field; the owner mows it every few years because it’s a popular sledding hill in the winter. A number of indicator plants are intermixed with non-natives; the bright, orange-yellow patches of hoary pucoon are the most extensive we’ve seen all day. They intermingle with red columbine for a wonderful, natural garden effect.

One of the botanists shows us how to identify the planted pine trees: gather their long needles together in a sheaf and press them against the palm. If they bend readily, it’s red pine. If they threaten to go right through the hand, it’s Austrian pine. These are definitely Austrian, stout swords. We laugh nervously about possible ethnic parallels. Our erstwhile German participant has already bustled off to scout out other rare plants, convinced there was nothing more to be seen with us. Earlier, he had asked me to show him the location of another prairie remnant on the map. I explained how it was right across from the entrance to a very charming cave. “I have no interest in caves,” he said. It was impossible to tell from his intonation whether or not he meant that remark to sound friendly.

The strange thing about yesterday’s outing was that I had been to the first site we visited nine years before, but had absolutely no recollection of it. I figured something would eventually ring a bell, but nothing ever did.

Last night, I didn’t dream about either German botanists or Vorbildliche Aktion, as far as I can remember. In the last dream before I get up, a train I’m riding returns to the station so I can search for my boots. I had taken them off and left them somewhere without noticing how much harder and rougher the ground had become to my stockinged feet. In this dream – maybe in all dreams? – the surfaces of the world are as smooth as a lover’s thigh. But no true beloved could ever be half so innocuous.

The train travels backwards for one whole stop, disrupting service up and down the line. “We do this all the time,” the conductor says. “We’ve learned to accommodate the special needs of our passengers, who are uncommonly forgetful.” Everyone disembarks, and the other passengers wander off in search of coffee or newspapers. My companion helps me retrace my steps: over a metal bridge, through cobblestone alleys, into a slick-floored casino. Perhaps the boots were stolen right off my feet? I search through the Recent Acquisitions rack in a second-hand clothing store, and although I do find several pairs of army boots that look virtually identical to mine, none respond to my plaintive whisper. One large pair gleams, freshly spit-shined. They almost sneer. Their former owner couldn’t have made it through Day One of Basic Training.

In the very last place I look, there they are: old and comfortable, caked with limey mud, perhaps carrying a few seeds of side-oats gramma. Now I remember! But I had to swim upstream to the source, the very start of the dream. I take off the loaner pair of women’s boots – they’d been just a little tight – and step into my own with a sigh of pleasure. Read into this what you will. Me, I woke up. I lay in bed rehearsing the apologetic speech I would have to deliver to my fellow passengers. “From now on, I’ll always take the train,” I thought, “even if it never takes me where I want to go.”

This morning, a Baltimore oriole has begun persecuting his reflection in the window opposite my writing table. He’s not quite as aggressive as last year’s cardinal, preferring to sing rather than attempting a full-scale assault. From a perch two feet away he flutters up against the glass, singing loudly. It must confuse him the way his rival opens his beak at the same time he does, since his is the only song. He’s looking right in my direction as he does so. If I didn’t know better, I might think I was the intended target of his sharply worded messages.

May 14, 2005September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

The Hook

We’re in The Hook Natural Area in the Bald Eagle State Forest of Central Pennsylvania, 5,000 acres of silence and pollen. The 100-year-old forest is beginning to close in: open above, darker and denser below. Young hemlocks rising beneath the canopy of birch and oak resume their millennial project of bringing soil to the rock-strewn hillsides, needle by needle.

Black and yellow birch limbs torn down by January’s ice storm have one final flowering on the ground. Catkins long as fishing worms release clouds of yellow smoke as we clear the branches from the trail. I wonder if the parent trees can feel this reflex flowering of their dismembered parts, the way a human amputee is said to be bothered from time to time by the unscratchable itching of a ghostly foot? Pollen, like rain, falls equally on the just and the unjust. By the end of our two-mile walk, my boots have turned a gangrenous shade of green.

I kneel and crouch and lie on my belly, trying for an acceptable shot of an obvious subject. But the charms of painted trilliums aren’t as obvious as they first seem; these flowers are far more recondite than their large and showy cousins the wake-robins, for example. Given a better camera, would I see half as much? Each clump of trilliums tempts me with new possibilities, unique arrangements – redemption! But the picture taken in haste, with little thought, turns out the best.

For sheen, there’s shining club moss, rhododendren. Almost every other surface – living or dead, organic or inorganic – harbors some patina, colorful assemblages of moss, algae, fungi, lichen, monera. I think of all the orders of angels: so many different ways to feed on light and nourish shadows. The first-succession black birches and oaks will take years to rot, slowly releasing their sweetness back into the soil, long after this barely recognizable hemlock stump will have dissolved into the slightest pimple on the forest floor.

Hobblebush blooms at the bottom of a ravine, acres of ankle-breaking talus guarding it from its nemesis, the white-tailed deer. In the late afternoon sun, the blossoms glow as white as any warning meant to make a deer turn tail. A nearby waterfall already plays on night’s changes, oblivious to the drought that elsewhere cracks the moss. Why “hobblebush,” I wonder, for such a limber tree? Its shadow stretches skinny wet fingers over and under the stone.

May 9, 2005February 18, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Tow Hill

Yesterday I walked around the Tow Hill portion of State Game Land 176 in Centre County, PA with my friend L., who lives nearby. This is a geologically, botanically and historically unique area – a former iron mining town now reverted to woods and barrens. The Tow Hill portion is crossed by a large powerline and dotted with small ponds, some occupying former mine pits, others made by beavers. It was a spectacular day to be out in the woods.

The buds open on the oak trees: yellow-green flowers, yellow-green leaves the size of squirrels’ ears & equally full of buzzy warbler voices. Warblers sound like what they eat, hard on the outside, liquid on the inside, segmented, brief – sing it! – cerulean, black-throated green, black-throated blue.

Just as the leaves open, the caterpillars pitch their tents. Power lines whistle a thin & hungry tune from bare metal trees.

Moth and rust don’t corrupt, they beautify. Some hunter thought this slab of old metal was worth leaning against a tree beside the trail for others to see. It’s trying to become a window, perhaps, one corrosive raindrop at a time.

A window? No, more like the obverse of a periscope. The sun sits on the surface of the murky pond like a glass-bottomed boat.

Strange fruit: a dry, rusted-through bucket hangs in a tree. If this were the American Southwest, we’d know what to make of the bullet holes: it’s been killed, we’d say, so its dead owner won’t come looking for it. Who knows when you might need to carry a little more sky?

Skunk cabbages space themselves as if they’d been planted by some self-effacing green thumb. The drama of their blooming long over, they spread their sails for home in the rust-colored mud.