At qarrtsiluni, Beth and I are really excited by this year’s winner of our poetry chapbook contest: Watermark by Clayton T. Michaels, which we just launched on Monday in dual print and online versions. As part of the latter, we put together a audiobook podcast of the author reading his poems, for which he also composed and performed an original guitar theme, but I thought it would be fun in addition to record a conversation with Clayton and find out where all this great poetry is coming from. So I called him up last Saturday, and peppered him with questions about writing poetry and music, teaching, heavy metal, comic books, and more.

Links

• Clayton’s blog
• Watermark online
• Two essays by Richard Hugo from The Triggering Town: Essays and Lectures on Poetry and Writing
• “A Story About the Body” by Robert Hass (in Robert Pinsky’s “Poet’s choice” column)
• Stan Brakhage (Wikipedia)
• Brakhage’s Mothlight on YouTube
• Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey
• David Dodd Lee’s blog

Theme music: “Le grand sequoia,” by Innvivo (Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike licence)

locust borer on goldenrod

I’m ready to let summer go. But I’m not sure summer is quite ready to let go of us: the forecast calls for a high of 90 (32°C) tomorrow. By the weekend, they’re saying, it will grow cool again — just in time for Labor Day, our version of the holiday which the entire rest of the world celebrates on May 1 in a kind of merger with pagan rites of spring, but which we Americans use to mark the end of summer with one last vacation. Labor Day, like Memorial Day, must always fall on a Monday to give us a three-day weekend, and therefore qualifies as a kind of moveable feast. As for the feasting part, that’s pretty much an everyday thing this time of year, especially for those of us who refuse to buy fresh corn or tomatoes out of season. This is the time to gorge, to spoil ourselves with sliced tomatoes in every sandwich and fresh peaches a half-dozen times a day.

Here’s a recipe adapted from one of the Moosewood cookbooks which I made for lunch today. It uses fresh chopped tomatoes in a kind of unique way.

North African Cauliflower Soup

In a big ol’ soup kettle, saute a large chopped onion in a couple tablespoons of butter. Peel and dice two medium potatoes. Grind one tablespoon each of fennel and cumin seeds. Add potatoes, spices, and five or six cups water to the pot and bring to a boil.

Meanwhile, chop up two medium heads or one large head of cauliflower (I did the former. One head was pale yellow and the other was orange). Add that to the pot along with salt to taste, plenty of fresh-ground black pepper and an optional bullion cube (vegetable or chicken).

Reduce heat, cover and simmer for half an hour. Meanwhile, get a lemon out of the fridge and go out to the garden and pick some chives, if you have any. Dice one medium fresh tomato for each soup bowl, unless you’re using really small bowls, which I don’t advise for this soup (it’s a main dish, not an appetizer). When the vegetables in the pot are good and soft, puree the soup in a blender along with two or three tablespoons of lemon juice, return to the heat briefly if you’re a hot-soup fanatic, then ladle it over the tomatoes. It should be thick and creamy. Garnish with chopped chives or scallions.

Full, you went to bed on time;
a quarter empty & you never act your age.

Hasp with no padlock,
no wonder the night got away!

Old flat tire.
As if my poet’s O were set in gothic.

* * *

Note on the series

I’d been aware that a few of the poems I’ve written this spring and summer seem thematically connected, and was thinking that when I had accumulated a half dozen or so, I should put them into a new series called something like “mid-life crisis poems.” Not that I’m having a true crisis, but the unifying theme of these poems seemed to be a pervasive anxiety about aging and the body. Imagine my surprise when, after finishing the above poem this morning, I went through the archive and discovered I’d written 16 poems that fit the theme since May! It’s already almost the length of a chapbook.

So I guess my middle-agedness has been more on my mind than I realized. But as Charles Simic once told an interviewer (I’m paraphrasing from memory), one of the distinguishing features of the poetic mindset is a continual astonishment at the passage of time.

I always think of the wild black cherry (Prunus serotina) as a tree of affliction. Even its fruiting can be a burden to it on years like this, when branches bend low under the weight of the crop and black bears break them in their inexplicable eagerness to feast on the sour, stony fruits. Nor are they alone: as my mother wrote in a column last year,

In addition to cedar waxwings, I saw red-eyed vireos, blue jays, and scarlet tanagers harvesting wild black cherries, but the list of songbirds and other wildlife that feast on them is legion. Thoreau mentioned gray catbirds, brown thrashers, eastern kingbirds, blue jays, red-headed woodpeckers, eastern bluebirds and northern cardinals as the most common birds that eat wild black cherries, in addition to robins and cedar waxwings. Huge piles of bear scat studded with cherry pits on our trails testified to their popularity with bears. And the smaller animals, such as foxes, squirrels, and chipmunks, also ate the fruit.

It might sound a little melodramatic to refer to black cherry as a tree of affliction, but like many temperate-zone fruit trees it’s a member of the rose family and therefore susceptible to any number of pests. Both tent caterpillars in the spring and fall webworms this time of year seem especially attracted to it. Borers, scale insects, aphids, carpenter ants and pileated woodpeckers attack it with a vengeance. And though a hardwood, its new growth is flimsy and highly susceptible to storm damage. The trees in general have poor architecture and shallow root systems, making them equally vulnerable to splitting and uprooting, depending on the nature of the storm.

Some trees become horribly disfigured with the fungus known as black knot. I thought I remembered writing about this a few years ago and did a seach of the Via Negativa archives. I found a short post describing the aftermath of our last big ice storm back in January 2005, which disproportionately impacted the black cherries, as ice storms always do.

Now here’s another misshapen shadow: a cherry the ice storm didn’t touch. Most of its branches have been truncated by the fungal infection that foresters call black knot. I wonder if this thorough amputation of twigs and smaller branches isn’t what saved it, preventing the ice from reaching critical mass? In such extreme conditions, a handicap can turn into an advantageous trait. The chronically ill sometimes are the fittest, the ones who survive the longest, bear the most young. Pain is their legacy, and it is the most precious gift imaginable. Without it, imagine how brittle we’d be — how terribly unequal to the task of love.

(Hmm. Not sure I agree with that now.)

Black cherries grow in profusion on the south-facing slopes of our mountain, in part because their seedlings are among the few species not especially attractive to deer. Almost pure stands of black cherry can be found throughout northern and central Pennsylvania, in fact, and in many areas, lumbermen strive to perpetuate this unnatural dominance through clearcuts, which traditionally favored the fast-growing, shade-intolerant cherries.

Some foresters have gone so far as to try and convince their ecologist colleagues of the rightful existence of a black cherry-dominated “Allegheny hardwoods” forest type, unique to our region and therefore deserving of special preservation efforts such as even-aged forest management, A.K.A. clearcutting, followed nowadays by herbiciding of ferns and striped maples and extensive deer fencing, the deer having nothing else to eat in many areas. So preserving a black-cherry-dominated timber stand is a little like what the American major famously said about that village in Vietnam: you have to destroy it in order to save it. But the historical record is clear. In a more natural forested landscape, black cherries would make up probably no more than two percent of forest cover in our region, filling in the occasional gap left by the death of some other tree.

It’s no mystery why loggers are so fond of the tree: it’s a beautiful wood. At one time, it was sent to furniture manufacturers in the Carolinas, but now most of it is shipped to China, whence we re-import it as finished furniture at great cost in carbon emissions. One can only hope that the new crop of local Amish and Mennonite furniture-makers prosper enough to help put an end to this absurd practice.

Unnatural as the current dominance of this species may be in our woods, its fruiting habits do serve as a reminder of the kind of teeming and profusion that used to occur on a regular basis when the great eastern forest was still largely intact. When I see the ground in our cherry woods carpeted with fallen fruit, I’m reminded of descriptions of the American chestnut before it succumbed to the blight, and how the woods used to be ankle-deep in chestnuts every fall. Most of our native wildlife species evolved with such bonanzas, so perhaps we’re lucky that a few tree species still display such irrational exuberance (to steal Alan Greenspan’s memorable phrase), however much it may cost them in the end.

For the 51st edition of the Festival of the Trees at Orchards Forever, focusing on edible trees (deadline for submissions: August 29).

I was just beginning to make out the words when the alarm jolted me awake. Later, when I mentioned to my mother, the naturalist, that I’d dreamed about a talking turtle, she said, “I think you need to get out more.”

That evening, I did get out in a matter of speaking when my poem about the loggerhead turtle appeared in Poets for Living Waters. This caught me by surprise, since I’d submitted it a couple months earlier and never heard back, but I gather that the curators, Heidi Lynn Staples and Amy King, have been deluged with submissions. The latest issue of Poets & Writers has an article on the project, “Poets Act on Oil Spill.”

“People talk about poets as a tribe,” Staples says, “and I think [creating the site] was as if we were calling out, saying, ‘This is happening! What can we do? Let’s gather!’ — as if the screen were the fire we’re now all gathered around.” [...]

King and Staples modeled their group after Poets Against War, a popular Web site established in January 2003 that solicits and anthologizes poems protesting war, though Staples and King wanted Poets for Living Waters to be “for” something, rather than “against.” Yet “people are sending in a lot of work reflecting anger and grief about what’s happened,” Staples says. Even so, the two poets believe such emotion is simply part of the process of mobilizing the community. “It’s something we need to do,” King says. “This is why we have ceremonies, this is why we have funerals. If you don’t have that moment when you’re articulating horror and grief and anger, how can you begin to respond?”

Regular readers of this blog will recognize both the poem and the statement on poetics. Publications that consider previously blogged work are unfortunately so rare that I hardly bother sending things out these days, which is a shame: the pressure to spruce up “Loggerhead” for publication elsewhere did improve the poem, I think. Whether it also made me more likely to dream about talking turtles, I’m not sure.

Foxconn, a Taipei-based manufacturer of high-tech goods like Apple iPads and iPhones, installed safety nets around the building earlier this year after more than ten employees jumped to their deaths. But some of the nets have been removed in conjunction with rallies the company hosted today to boost employee morale. Because nothing makes you love your job more than being forced to attend a public spectacle to show the world you don’t want to die. [...] Foxconn, whose name has been mentioned with regards to rumors of a seven-inch iPad by Christmas, also announced plans to hire 400,000 additional workers this year.
Chinese iPad and iPhone Manufacturer Rallies On, Despite Worker Suicides (New York Magazine)

Photos and text by Teju Cole

(Sunday, August 22, 2010. West Broadway and Murray Street. There are several speakers.)

Where are the Islamists right now, standing here arm in arm with us, saying that this is wrong? Where are they?

I don’t think it is wrong.

To build a victory tower on the deaths of our citizens?

OK, it’s not a victory tower.

Oh it’s not? What do you think it is mate?

It’s a community center. I’m sorry.

Do you know… are you familiar with the Islamic religion? They’re killing people all over the world.

So are we.

Where are we doing that mate?

Uh?

Where are we doing that?

Where are we killing people?

Yeah, where are we doing that?

Everywhere.

You’ve got to move along guys.

No, we’re allowed to have a conversation. We’re on a public street having a conversation.

Can you step under the awning?

OK, fine, we can do that… Listen, I can understand your point of view, when you say that America has not done everything right over the years. I agree with you. But I also say to you: look at what’s taking place in the Islamic world. They’re looking to conquer our nation and make us a nation that is…

That’s your perspective…

Right. We’re free to exchange that point of view.

Can I add something? I see the point that he’s making, because there is a lot of conflict in the world. Nobody is going to deny there are Muslim terrorists.

Right.

OK? That’s conceded. But what I want to ask you is: do you think these folks have a legal right, if they want to build a mosque over there? If that building is available?

Well, I’ll tell ya, this is… I’m gonna answer your question. I’m gonna answer your question. I’ve been asked this question by many people, and my answer to that question is: if this faith, Moslem faith, did not hijack our planes and fly them into our buildings, killing out citizens, if they did not shoot… if a Moslem did not shoot… in the name of Allah, did not shoot up Fort Hood and kill fifteen of our soldiers, if they didn’t bomb embassies around the world, hotels around the world, innocent people…

Right…

If they didn’t, ah… the list can go on… if they didn’t try and set the bomb off in Times Square, killing innocent people, in the name of Allah, then I would say, build your freakin’ mosque.

No, no, no, no. I’m not asking if you think they should be allowed to build it. I’m asking if you think… if they have a legal right. Do you think they have the legal right? You understand the question I’m asking?

Oh no, I absolutely do. And in America…

They have the legal right. Exactly.

No, no. See I didn’t say that. In America, if you do not prove to be a threat to our society and our citizens and my children, then I have no worries with you. The Buddhists aren’t…

I’m not… I’m not asking if you have worries with them…

My friend, you can’t apply the Constitution to murdering thugs. You can’t do it. At some point…

There are plenty of murdering thugs in this country that are not brown, black, or…

I know you’re… I understand that…

I know you’re understanding me here. You keep talking about how you feel about it, what you think the threat is. I’m asking if legally…

You want me to say legally they do. You want me to say that.

I don’t want you to say anything. I want to see what your understanding is.

Yeah, but what I’m explaining is… well, I’ve said it three times now. I would say if they weren’t bombing and killing our citizens, then I would say yes. But they do not have the legal right due to the fact that they are a threat to our citizens.

You know what I mean by legal right? The laws of this city and of this country permit them to build it.

I know. And they’re using our Constitution, they’re using our laws, to… freakin’… make us under their thumb. And I’m not buying it. I’m not going to do it. If they were law-abiding.

So we’re not going to have the laws anymore?

So the only thing you can do is try to change the law.

Here’s the deal: if I was to go out and murder, maybe blow up this building over here…

Yeah?

Should I be protected under the Constitution?

Well, yeah. That’s why we’re a nation of laws.

The same thing applies to a faith that have shown themselves time and time again to…

Actually, no it doesn’t, because the Constitution doesn’t respect…

Look, listen. We’re gonna have to agree to disagree. Because I will never…

You know those fellows…

I grew up as a Christian in a Muslim country. These people are so evil and so hateful…

I know they are, my friend.

And they kill everybody.

I know that.

What country did you grow up in?

Egypt. I’m from Egypt. I grew up with Muslims.

You’re Coptic.

Yeah, I’m Coptic.

OK.

I grew up with all my friends as Muslims. They are very nice people. But Islam is a so fucked up religion, you won’t believe it. If you read Qur’an… I read Arabic, this is my native tongue. If you read the… have you read Qur’an?

Yes.

Oh, it’s… it’s… did you read…

But you know what? I’ve also read the Bible.

Yes. What about the Bible?

There’s a lot about the Bible that’s very troubling?

Yes. Like what? Do you see people killing? Do you see Christians killing?

Do I see Christians killing?

All over the world, man.

Here? Here? Do you see them blow themselves up? Do you see them blow themselves up?

Wait, are we arguing about techniques, or are we arguing about whether Christians have ever gone out and killed?

What? Arguing about techniques?

Here’s the bottom line: we’re not going to be able to see eye to eye. I appreciate your taking time out of your busy day…

I appreciate your reasonable tone also.

I do too.

I just want you to understand that, for me, this is like a legal issue. I’m not a Muslim. I’m an atheist.

OK.

OK? But I’m an American. And I think that if we have our laws, we have to all agree to respect those laws. If you don’t agree with a part of those laws, there’s a legal way of contesting those laws. If you really feel this is, like, they are murderous and dangerous, there’s, like, a legal step… You can sue, you can ask your congressman to get the law changed.

This is where the problem comes in. When the government that currently is in power — I’m no fan of George Bush or Republicans, I’m an independent thinker, I like to consider myself that — when the government refuses to represent the will of the people, and they turn a blind eye to you, what else is left but to go out into the street and say: this is what we want? And you know what? Liberal groups, or pro… anti-war, and so and so forth, have used this means for years and years and years. And now, the problem is that they are starting to see folks like myself get angry. We’re angry. We’ve had it up to here, and I’m coming out… I have four young children at home. You think I want to be here today? I worked last night. I gotta go to work tonight.

I understand what you’re saying.

I don’t want to be here. But you know what? I gotta be here.

Yeah.

And I’m doing this to protect my home. To protect my family.

But do you…

Cause these folks are a threat to me civil…

But, but, do you…

My life. And to my children’s life. And it’s not…

But do you understand that to people looking from outside, it’s like you sort of go in there and almost everybody in there is white…

But you know what? That’s why… it’s good that you had an opportunity to speak to me. Because you can see that I am not… I have… I married a woman from Ecuador.

Right.

I don’t have what you think. There’s a stereotype…

I’m not talking about what I think. I’m talking about perceptions.

That they’re white guys. White. It’s wrong. I have… I work in East New York. I hold little black babies in my hands that are freakin’ tortured in there. My heart goes out to them.

What do you do?

I’m a fireman.

You’re a fireman.

Yes. So, the deal is this: I cry with them. OK? So, what I want you to know is: don’t paint with a broad brush.

I’m not painting with a broad brush…

Well, I’m just saying, tell your friends not to paint with a broad brush. My father-in-law don’t speak a lick of English. OK? I communicate with him the best I can and, I will tell you this: I have black friends. If someone walks my walk and talks my talk and is a good man… I had a guy sitting on the front stoop of his… in East New York. He was working on a motorcycle, with his three kids, three little kids. I says: there’s a father that believes what I believe in. I walked over to him and I started talking to him. And we had a great conversation.

Is that also… is that also true of Muslim fathers in this city?

No. Moslem fathers I have a big problem with, and you know I have a big problem. I believe they’re out to kill me. OK? So you know that. So…

Do you feel…

Give me a Buddhist, give me anyone…

But do you…

Nobody does what they do.

But do you feel that, for example, that the religion itself should be outlawed in this country?

Absolutely.

Um, hold it now. Um… yes.

Absolutely.

So we should have laws that say you can’t be a Muslim?

Yes. It’s an absolute threat. When a religion poses an absolute threat to your civilization, I say yes, they can no longer practice in your land. They refuse to conform to anything of our society, anything of American culture and values. Our Constitution means nothing to them. Sharia law means something to them.

I have friends who are Muslim. My best friend is Muslim. He’s as much an American as I am. Do you realize? You criticized him a second ago for not painting a broad brush…

What’s your name brother? Where are you from?

Joachim. Actually my girlfriend lives here.

Where are you from?

I was born in Haiti.

Haiti. OK, OK.

Do you realize, you just criticized us, or whoever, for painting a broad brush of this group…

Right, right…

Which is hard not to, considering I just saw a guy with a Confederate flag, a shirt on, continually singing “Born in the USA.” The kind of connotation. You might not feel that way…

That’s what’s projected…

I… I can understand…

It’s projected. There’s no reason for it. To blast a song that says “Born in the USA.” It just sends the wrong message. But you just criticized us for painting a broad brush, but you yourself just paint a broad brush of billions of people.

What I’m… what I’m gonna to do for ya is I’m gonna tell ya why I’m painting with a broad brush.

But you shouldn’t, right? Cause you told us we shouldn’t.

Nah, nah. Listen to me. You can tell me why… you just told me why you might paint with a broad brush there. I’m going to tell you why I paint with a broad brush. The reason I paint with a broad brush is because I explained to…

My name’s Teju. What’s your name, brother?

Jim McCann.

Joachim.

Joachim, nice to meet you.

Josh.

Nice to meet you. But as I said earlier, you didn’t agree but 95% of the world’s conflicts… if you go around the world I think you could see that Moslems are involved in many of the conflicts throughout the world…

Just like Christians were about two hundred years ago, but we can move on…

Well, was it right?

No.

Good. I don’t agree it was right either.

And probably now too, and we can give examples of…

Well, what do you say?

I’ll listen to you first. I should listen, and then I’ll talk.

Anyway, when a group of people poses… proves to be a threat to your society and your civilization, then that’s when I say they shouldn’t belong here, and that’s the bottom line.

What’s the threat to the society. What do you think…

Basically, that all laws and the Constitution mean nothing. That they’re going to… that the objective is to introduce Sharia law across the land…

What is Sharia law?

Sharia law is cutting somebody’s hand, cutting somebody’s leg…

Well, it’s a strict… it’s a strict interpretation of the Koran, I believe…

OK.

That calls for, right, women being stoned to death, um, women being…

Marrying four women…

What’s your name, brother?

Hani.

Hani. Hani. Teju. How’re you doing?

That somehow this is an opportunity for people in this country to start stoning women…

Oh yes.

Because somehow they’re gonna trump the Constitution.

It’s Jim, right?

Yes.

OK. But, Jim, aren’t you worried that if you start saying something like mosques should not be allowed in the US or Islam should be banned, don’t you think that will have a sort of more violent response?

Well, I’ll tell ya, I’m not worried about it. I think that the writing’s on the wall. I think that’s what it’s going to come down to eventually.

Do you… do you feel the president is a… is a Muslim?

Who, the president? Oh yeah.

You think he is?

Oh yeah.

Why do you think that?

I think that because he… the church he attended before he became a Moslem… when he, before he became president, right? Is a, what was it, a black, uh… the church that he belonged to, he didn’t attend regularly, but he did attend for political reasons. But what happened was that when he became president, he hasn’t attended church since.

OK.

He’s gone to every Moslem country in the area, pro… uh… professing to extend an arm to the Moslem community.

But a lot of people in this country are not particularly religious. The president doesn’t have to be a Christian, does he?

Um…

I mean he doesn’t have to be a very, very active Christian.

No. But when he professes to be, and then he doesn’t attend a church for a year and change since he became president?

Everybody professes to be, right?

Well, not everybody. You said you’re an atheist.

No, no, no. Everybody who runs for office and wins.

I think Obama should have been honest with people and said, I’m not a Christian…

He wouldn’t have won.

Well, I think he would have gotten elected. If he said, I’m a Christian but I don’t go to church. It wouldn’t have affected him.

Oh, in America it would have affected him. But, but, that doesn’t mean he’s a Muslim though.

Well, I…

You just have a gut feeling?

Well, I think he’s pandering to the Moslem faith. Maybe he’s not a Moslem. Do I care? Do I believe in what he’s doing in our nation right now, as the president?

So that’s your real issue. So separate that from saying he’s a Muslim. Because he’s not. In other words, if you want to persuade people of your point of view, you have to try to stick to the facts. The fact is there’s no reason for thinking he’s a Muslim. Now we can say: he’s tried to make peace with the Muslim nations, sure…

I still think potentially he could be. Many in the country don’t know what he is. They don’t know what he is. They don’t know if he’s Christian, they don’t know if he’s Moslem. It’s all…

He’s a Christian. He said so himself.

Yeah, but there’s no way to really to really tell. You identify a person by their actions.

How do you know Dick Cheney is a Christian?

You identify, you can tell what a person is, by their actions. Would you agree with that? You can tell what a person is by their actions.

Yes. Yes?

I’ve never seen Obama pray five times a day.

He hasn’t gone to a mosque, he hasn’t…

Yes, yes, but you don’t know if he’s a Christian either, because he doesn’t attend church.

He drinks alcohol, he eats pork.

Anyway, it really don’t matter to me. But anyway, we’ll never see eye to eye. We’ll never see eye to eye. But it’s OK. I believe that this is a threat to my family, to my country, and I’m going to stand up for it, and that’s basically the bottom line.

I really appreciate your taking the time.

Thanks fellas. Thanks, Josh.

Thanks, Jim. Take care of those kids, all right?

Have a good day.

OK. See ya.

Thanks.

A bunch of other friends in a private listserv are having an intense discussion replete with highly personal confessions. Because I have nothing to confess, I eat half a jar of pickled jalapeño slices, which makes me sweat profusely and blow my nose five times, like summer and winter in the same jar. Afterwards, I feel wonderfully purged.

I pass the compost pile on a moonlit walk — that too-sweet smell of fermentation. A mid-sized animal goes crashing off into the weeds. We are not doing compost right; I know that. But there are just too many rewards for doing it wrong.

turtlehead at The Hook

The last time I visited The Hook, the hobblebush and painted trilliums were in bloom. It was mid-May. My hiking buddy L. and I parked on the south edge of the 5,119-acre watershed and scrambled down a steep ravine as the shadows lengthened, and we began to worry about the long drive home. Greenish-yellow pollen coated our boots.

That was in 2005. How did we let five years go by without returning to this spot less than two hours from home? But better late than never, as they say. Many of our favorite spots in northern Pennsylvania have probably been marred if not ruined by deep gas drilling in the Marcellus shale formation, and we’ll never get another chance to see them as they were, while many of the old-growth stands around the state that we visited in the early aughts have been decimated by the alien invasive hemlock woolly adelgid and/or beech bark disease.

Joe-Pye weed

The Hook, though, is still in pretty good shape. In fact, it looks healthier than most forests in the state, due to the low deer-browse pressure. We saw hemlock boughs that dragged the ground and abundant oak and other hardwood seedlings in the drier areas. This time we entered from the north side, following the well-blazed Mule Shanty Trail along a seep that turned into a trickle that fed into the pure, dark waters of Panther Run — a much more gradual descent. The light-drenched woods gradually grew darker as conifers began to appear and the hills closed in, and oddly, I noticed that the mosquitoes actually decreased in number as the afternoon wore on. It remained humid, though — so humid that moisture condensed on many of the rocks on the trail. L. washed her face in the creek at one point and her face was still damp, she said, half an hour later.

rhododendron leaf

Again the shadows were long, but this time they signaled relief from the heat. The trail wound between boulders and talus slopes, and for much of the way followed the rocky bed of a century-old narrow-gauge railroad built during the lumbering boom. These were no rolling stones — they’d gathered their share of moss and lichen — but some of them still shifted uneasily and made hollow clinking sounds as we walked over them.

And as before, we found abundant silence. Three times we flushed ruffed grouse, which rocketed out of the rhododendron with the usual heart-stopping burst of wings. There were scattered calls of ravens, and a black-and-white warbler sang beside the trail at one point, but for long stretches all we heard was the trickle of the stream.

chanterelles

On the long drive up, L. had been looking rather obsessively for a particular kind of packaged ice-cream in a cone with nuts on top, and not quite finding what she wanted. So when a few chanterelles appeared in the trail I thought maybe her luck in finding delectable cone-shaped food items had turned, but search as we might, we couldn’t find any more. At home, I told her, the woods are virtually devoid of mushrooms because of the drought.

We walked as far as a wooden foot bridge that had marked the end of our hike from the opposite direction five years before. I actually didn’t recognize it until we reached the middle and looked at the graffiti scratched into the railing with pen knives: somehow those human markings triggered my memory and I recognized the configuration of hills and creek as well.

tinder polypores on yellow birch

Neither mule nor shanty was in evidence along Mule Shanty Trail, but we did find a log covered with the hoof-shaped tinder polypores, one of the most storied of all fungi. We took a shorter route back to the state forest road following the evocatively named Molasses Gap Trail, along which we discovered the remains of a loose stone foundation which couldn’t have supported much more than a shanty, for mule or otherwise. Molasses Gap Run disappeared under the rocks, where its trickle remained audible in the silence. “Lonesome water,” I said.

I knew L. was familiar with the poem because it was she who had first given me a copy of it ten or fifteen years ago. Roy Addison Helton was a Pennsylvania poet who spent some time farther south in the Appalachians, collecting and adapting folk material such as the legend of lonesome water, which held that anyone who takes a drink from such a hidden stream can never leave the mountains.

Dug where I heard it
Drippling below me:
Should a knowed better,
Should a been wise;
Leant down and drank it,
Clutching and gripping
The overhung cliv
With the ferns in my eyes.

Tweren’t no tame water
I knowed in a minute;
Must a been laying there
Projecting round
Since winter went home;
Must a laid like a cushion,
Where the feet of the blossoms
Was tucked in the ground.

Tasted of heart leaf,
And that smells the sweetest,
Paw paw and spice bush
And wild briar Rose;
Must a been counting
The heels of the spruce pines
And neighboring round
Where angelica grows.

I’d drunk lonesome water,
I knowed in a minute
Never larnt nothing
From then till today;
Nothing worth larning,
Nothing worth knowing.
I’m bound to the hills
And I can’t get away.

This makes me just a little uneasy, because at least two times that I can remember when I was a kid, I did this myself — dug down through the rocks and drank “lonesome water.” I don’t know if that’s why I’m still hanging around central Pennsylvania or not — a place can get its hooks into you in any number of ways — but I definitely feel I haven’t learned anything of any particular value over the years. If anything, I’ve grown dumber.

shadows of shining clubmoss

Certainly it’s neither smart nor especially pleasant to stick around and witness the decline and degradation of so many of the places I love. But at least a few of them remain relatively intact.

But wouldn’t this movie have been a lot cooler if you were using your idea-implanting superpowers for good rather than for evil, and targeting, say, Dow Chemical on behalf of the victims of Bhopal? Shouldn’t you really have contacted the Yes Men? After all, they share your fondness for abandoned warehouses and scenes with lots of floating and flailing about. They are masters at assuming new identities and making lies seem more attractive than the debilitating truth.

They dream big, too. They had hundreds of oil and gas executives lighting candles ostensibly made from human flesh, and convinced a conference hall full of New Orleans building contractors that doing the right thing was more important than maximizing profits. They embarassed the U.S. Chamber of Commerce into reversing its position on global warming. They led an effort at mass inception in Manhattan that involved printing and distributing an edition of the New York Times from six months in the future, which got over 100,000 people contemplating a world without war and hunger, and how really doable and ordinary that could be.

But you professional dreamers — what do you do? In your matroyshka-doll world of a dream within a dream within a dream, where was the green space among all those brutal modernist highrises? I didn’t spot a single park, not even a tree. You grew old together in the company of phantasms, living only for each other, as self-centered and cut off from the real world as the plutocrats whose yes-men you later became. And then to die without dying — what a fix!

Such an interesting word, fix. It’s what a junkie craves. When the fix is on in a movie about the mob, you know things are about to go horribly awry. A fix is a fundamental alteration, but not necessarily for the better — just ask a dog that’s been fixed. The Yes Men might be out to mend the world themselves, but when they interview a gaggle of free-market economists to see if they’ll say anything revealing on camera, they choose this more ambiguous word: How would you fix the world? And then, more mischievously: How would you like the world to appear on the blue screen behind your head? Which is tantamount to saying: Show us your dreams.

The Yes Men Fix the World was, to my mind, everything that Inception was not: droll, witty, thought-provoking and inspiring. Inception, a movie about the possibility of planting ideas in another person’s imagination, was really rather dull. There wasn’t any laughter in it. Where in the one movie, mud and grunge and empty suits are a source of comic relief, in the other they are mere fixtures, signifiers of seriousness for the director’s fundamentally unserious and impoverished imagination.

If you haven’t seen Inception yet, save your money. If you haven’t seen The Yes Men Fix the World, it’s available for free online. Go watch. And then, if you like, join up. This is one effort at collective imagination that doesn’t need to stop when the theater lights go up.