February 2008 – Page 2

February 18, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Ode to a newspaper article

Below the fold you continue
in two columns, the body of your text
committed now to carry through
after the titillating lede. What’s next

beyond the jump, that brief
moment of vertigo around
your midsection? Briefs
for neither side. You sound

a note of caution at partisan-
ship, strive for balance, blend
levity with gravity. It takes an artisan
to reach such a well-rounded end.
__________

Written for the Read Write Poem prompt, an ode on the body. Links to other responses can be found here.

UPDATE: Just now, catching up on the Christian Science Monitor, I came across a grim reminder that odes and journalism both remain very serious business in some parts of the world:

Saw Wai is a Burmese poet known for his love songs. His eight-line Valentine’s Day ode, about a brokenhearted man in love with a fashion model, was a particularly tender one. But there was one problem.

If read vertically, the first word of each line formed the phrase: “Power Crazy Senior General Than Shwe.”

The senior general himself, head of Burma’s (Myanmar’s) military junta, could not have been amused. The head of the censorship board was urgently called to the capital; the weekly “Love Journal” has been shut down and copies of the offending edition were yanked from newsstands.

Saw Wai is now in jail, where apparently he will spend Feb. 14 in isolation, behind bars.

February 16, 2008March 6, 2014 by Dave Bonta

Thursday, mid-morning. Crunching my way up across the field, the thick crust on eight inches of snow forces me to take my time, however much I might think that the real show is in the ridgetop woods, where a heavy coating of hoarfrost is rapidly disappearing from the trees. The sun is strong, and since I don’t own a pair of prescription sunglasses, I have to walk with one eye shut and the other squinting against the glare. Not that this stops me from snapping pictures, of course: dead weeds and grass are always especially photogenic with snow to provide a ready contrast and a smooth white screen for shadows.

I notice it’s my right eye that’s the more sensitive of the two; it’s less painful to squint through my left. Consequently, everything has a reddish or magenta hue, which is especially noticeable because the light is so strong. My right eye sees a more greenish or cyan world. I’ve always thought of my eyes as warm (left) vs. cold (right), and perhaps because I’m right-handed, I do favor the latter. I think you can see this in my photographs, where I so often skew the color balance toward cyan. To me, they just look better that way. But with my cold eye shut and the LCD screen on the back of my camera almost unreadable in the glare, I’m snapping pictures on faith. This turns out not to be a very good idea: none of them come anywhere near the pictures in my mind. Maybe Yeats was on to something with that sententious epitaph of his.

Friday, mid-morning. It’s overcast and warmer, near freezing. On my way up the path to my parents’ house, I come across another walker in the snow — some kind of caddisfly, I think. After a few minutes of walking on top of the snow, it slips under the crust. Perhaps it’s a little warmer under there, or the insect senses that the icy covering offers protection from feathered predators. I watch the dark blob moving under the crust and can still picture the folded wings, the Charlie Chaplin legs, and the inquisitive antennae feeling all over like the hands of someone playing blind man’s bluff, groping for anything warm.

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February 15, 2008September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Screech owl love

An extended version of this morning’s “Porch.”

At dawn, amid the creaking of trees in the wind, I hear the wavering cry of a screech owl down in the pines. Half a minute later, the male answers: a lower-pitched call from up in the woods. They duet for a couple of minutes, trill-calls intermixed with their trademark descending whinnies.

The temperature is just around freezing, and the air smells of rain. I catch a glimpse of movement off to the left — can they really be that close? — and then there they are, two small, winged silhouettes fluttering through the trees. They connect in mid-air for barely a second, then land in adjacent treetops opposite the porch. They sit ruffling their feathers for about a minute, silent now. Then one at a time they fly off toward the powerline, their wings soundless as always. A gray squirrel begins to scold — softly, as if still half-asleep, or else trying to duet with the nearest tree, creaking in the dawn wind.

I sit clutching my empty coffee mug, thinking that perhaps a one-second mating is the perfect observation for a 140-character Twitter tweet — and realizing at the same time that a bare-bones account just won’t satisfy.

There’s a lot to the courtship of eastern screech owls that I didn’t witness, judging from the description on the Owl Pages (a good site, aside from the incredibly annoying pop-up link-ads).

Breeding season for Eastern Screech Owls is generally around mid April, but may range from mid March to mid May. [Ha!] They have an elaborate courtship ritual. Males approach females, calling from different branches until they are close. The male then bobs and swivels his head, bobs his entire body, and even slowly winks one eye at the female. If she ignores him, bobbing and swivelling motions intensify. If she accepts him, she moves close and they touch bills and preen each other. Pairs mate for life but will accept a new mate if the previous mate disappears. Gray and red colour phases will mate together.

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology gives a slightly more nuanced account of their mating practices:

Eastern Screech-Owl pairs usually are monogamous and remain together for life. Some males, however, will mate with two different females. The second female may evict the first female, lay her own eggs in the nest, and incubate both clutches.

As with most birds, the male lacks any penis whatsoever. Male and female openings are outwardly identical, and the consummation of all that mutual preening tends to be as brief, and seemingly about as passionate, as a peck on the cheek. Homosexual pair bonding has been observed among barn owls, and there’s no reason to doubt that it occurs among screech owls, too: nature loves infinite variety, even if some humans don’t. (See here for sad proof of the latter.)

Happy belated Valentine’s Day, y’all. Thanks for reading.

February 14, 2008 by Dave Bonta

“Childhood in nature” stories wanted

Prompted by my previous post, Sally White has started an impromptu blog carnival-like roundup of posts on Childhood in Nature. “Please share your stories online and send me links,” she says.

For many, childhood experience may not have been in a literal woods, but whatever the environment that inspired imagination and discovery, we invite you to share it. Place is important to all of us. Where were you, and how did it shape your life?

Visit the post for links to other recollections, and leave your own link in the comments. This might be a good time to revisit your blog archives…

February 13, 2008 by Dave Bonta

The hawthorn place

Do children still have secret places? When I was a kid, growing up here on the mountain with my two brothers as my only playmates, I had a lot of time to myself, and came to like my own company pretty well as a consequence. Being an inveterate day-dreamer, the mountain I wandered probably bore little resemblance to what the others saw. I especially enjoyed finding secret places, which often featured clearings in the woods. During the long hours of confinement in school, I remember sketching the imaginary rooflines of lonely mountain huts, suggested to me by my reading of medieval Irish and classical Chinese poems and stories. I was — it must be said — a pretty weird kid.

The best places were those I only ever saw once, and was never able to find again, so that they remained secret even from me. I won’t say any more about those. But most of the others I revisited fairly often, and I ended up sharing some of them with my younger brother, too. These refindable places had the drawback of never remaining static: I remember how devastated I was when my favorite large tree on the mountain died, and a few years later fell over. I hardly ever go back to that ravine now.

One place that’s remained more or less the same is the one pictured here. In my mother’s nature writing, she often mentions the Far Field thicket, a place right on our property line at the south end of a small meadow — the Far Field — a mile down-ridge from the houses. The thickety part is dominated by fox grape and the strange thorny trees called Hercules’ club or devil’s walkingstick, which flower in profusion in midsummer and sport heavy masses of purple berries in the fall — a wildlife bonanza. She always enters this area from above, I think, and enjoys the way the thicket acts like a blind at the same time that it attracts birds, especially in the winter.

I always preferred the area downhill from the thicket, ever since I discovered a secret entrance through the woods on the other side. I was in my mid-teens, I guess. One summer day I followed an animal trail over a dry watercourse and through dense green jungles of grape vines and emerged into a clearing right next to a gnarled hawthorn tree. It was an old charcoal hearth from the early 19th century, one of many on the mountain, immediately recognizable because of its size — roughly 40 feet in diameter — and the fact that it was perfectly level. An old galvanized steel bucket with a couple bullet holes in it lay on its side in the middle of the clearing, and I turned it over to make a seat and sat there for a long time.

Another hawthorn grew immediately below the old hearth, and as I continued to follow the animal trail through a small, wet meadow, and then backtracked toward the thicket, I found more — maybe ten in all. The area had been clear-cut repeatedly over the last 200 years, but I wasn’t thinking about that at the time. To me, it was a wild orchard.

I had always mourned the loss of the Plummer’s Hollow orchard, which the old timers told us about when we moved in: forty acres of apples, pears and peaches. The previous owners had bulldozed out all but a handful of the trees back in the 1950s, we were told — ten years before my birth. When I was a kid, an ancient Yellow Delicious apple tree grew below the back porch among Concord grape trellises, and a Stamen Winesap below that. But both trees died in the late 80s, around the time a burgeoning deer population was decimating the grapes. So I suppose it was inevitable that one of my favorite places on the mountain should be an ersatz orchard whose trees were well armed against the deer.

Which is not to say that hawthorn sprouts don’t still have a pretty rough time of it. Two springs ago I planted 50 hawthorn seedlings around the yard and adjacent meadow, hoping that at least a handful would escape detection by the deer, but I haven’t seen any sign of them since.

It would be easy to rationalize my irrational love of hawthorns. I could cite the attraction of their flowers to insects, their leaves to the larvae of many moths and butterflies, and of course their fruit to a huge number of birds and mammals, humans included. I could talk about hawthorn jelly — which I’ve never actually made — and hawthorn salad from the fresh, new leaves, which I’ve never remembered to sample. I could talk about the European folklore, which generally casts the tree as a symbol of hope, and includes the belief that Jesus’ crown of thorns came from a species of hawthorn. “In Serbian folklore, a stake made of hawthorn wood was used to impale the corpses of suspected vampires,” says the Wikipedia article on the genus Crataegus, while “in Celtic lore, the hawthorn plant was used commonly for rune inscriptions along with Yew and Apple. It was once said to heal the broken heart.”

The hawthorn place has grown a bit more open over the decades, thanks to the deer keeping wild grape sprouts and blackberry brambles in check, but otherwise it hasn’t changed all that radically. The biggest change is in spring, when the hawthorns bloom: what used to be a small patch of mayflowers has grown almost to an acre in size, completely covering the charcoal hearth and its environs with a forest of green umbrellas. The rusty old bucket is still hiding in the weeds, and it still makes a serviceable seat.

mayapples with hawthorn blossoms
Hawthorn blossoms on mayapples (photo taken in 2005 with my old 1-megapixel camera)
__________

Written for the special Festival of the Trees edition on fruit trees and orchards, set for March 1 at Orchards Forever.

February 12, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Yucca

Aboveground, I am all blade,
shedding filaments to keep
my edges keen. I can go months
& months without water.
My connections to this sand-
stone ridge run deep.

But I don’t know why when I blossom,
nothing happens. My nights
have never turned incandescent
at the touch of fabled wings.
My panicle is a pale flag
that no one ever salutes.

This couldn’t be exile, could it?
There’s desert enough here
for those who wait.
All through the dry season,
my flower stalk’s bony shadow
creeps over the smooth white drifts.
__________

Written in response to Read Write Poem’s Lenten prompt. Links to the other responses are here.

February 11, 2008March 6, 2014 by Dave Bonta

Power

The Hidden Messages issue of qarrtsiluni is continuing to unfold. As usual, the second month of the issue is busier than the first, with a new post going up every day, so be sure to check back often. There’s a lot of really powerful stuff going up.

I wasn’t looking for messages, hidden or otherwise, when I went for a walk with my camera yesterday morning. I did get some pictures which I hope will be good enough for a post I’m planning to write for the next Festival of the Trees’ special edition on fruit trees and orchards.

When I was still a mile from the house, a snow squall blew in, and I got some pictures of that, as well. It was exhilarating to walk along the crest of the ridge with 40-mile-an-hour winds whipping the trees back and forth and at times reducing visibility to about ten feet. (During those times, of course, I kept my camera under my coat.) Unfortunately, not everyone was out on foot: I learned this morning that the whiteouts caused accidents and pile-ups on highways all around Pennsylvania.

I got back just in time for lunch, looking more or less like the Abominable Snowman. At 3:00 o’clock, we headed down the mountain to my niece Elanor’s third birthday party, and moments later the power went out — a neighbor from the valley called to let us know just as we reached the bottom of the hollow. This time I forgot to bring my camera, so I don’t have a photographic record of Elanor’s high-energy antics as she whirled and tore around the apartment.

We returned to the mountain two hours later to fire up our small gasoline generator, cook supper, and keep the pipes in my parents’ house from freezing as the temperature dipped to zero (-18° C). Sometimes when the weatherpeople say “cold front,” they really mean it! Fortunately the wood stove in my living room and the earth-sheltered design of my laundry room are enough to keep my own house warm. But the generator requires refueling every hour and a half, and it’s a two-person job, so Dad and I had to stay more or less awake until the power finally came back on at 2:30 in the morning. Oddly enough, when we laid bets hours earlier about when the power would return, 2:30 was my mother’s exact guess. I’m not sure what hidden messages she’d been privy to.

Here’s a brief video that should give some sense of the elemental power of the storm.

Blog subscribers should either click through to the post to view the video, or go here.

February 9, 2008August 1, 2015 by Chris Bolgiano

My Best Friend is Building a Hummer of a House

by Chris Bolgiano
Tuesday, January 08, 2008
Licenced through the Blue Ridge Press free syndication service and posted here with the active cooperation of the tragically blogless author.

Our best friends Philly and Jake retired last year and built their dream house a short walk over the ridge from where my husband and I live amid a hundred acres of Appalachian Mountain forest. We all met in college and bonded on the first Earth Day. Since then, my husband and I have gone “Back to the Land,” homesteading in the lushest temperate woodlands in the world, while Philly and Jake worked their way across continents. For 35 years, we’ve looked forward to retiring together.

Now, their dream has become my nightmare. It began with their plans for a 4,000-square-foot house — twice the size considered comfortable for a family of four just a few decades ago. Suddenly I felt frightened for the state of the world, and saw the situation in double negatives: If my nature-loving friend Philly wouldn’t choose not to build a mansion, who would?

“It’s a personal decision, how much space you need,” Philly said, not in answer to my question, which I’ve never asked, but after I emailed her a link to a website that calculates the environmental footprint of such “personal” decisions. Every decision an American consumer makes is environmentally charged, because we use more of everything and pollute more than anyone else in the world. Philly knows this, and she knows that I know that she knows.

As Philly’s blueprints materialized, I recognized the green-eyed face of jealousy, namely my own, reflected in the wall-sized windows of her cathedral-ceilinged great room.

Philly’s house is much bigger and far more elegant than my rustic, passive-solar cabin — House Beautiful magazine versus Field and Stream. Trading jealousy for guilt, I joined Philly on shopping forays and shared her new-house happiness by buying toxic remodeling products likely made by exploited Chinese workers.

Meanwhile, Jake was directing bulldozers to open the view by pushing down two acres of big oaks and pines. No one limited the tread of tires, no one tagged any trees for protection, no one saved the mossy-carpeted forest topsoil for reuse.

In a footprint eight times larger than the standard quarter-acre suburban yard, nothing above microscopic level was left alive, and even the soil microbes must have been pretty hard pressed. Then dozens of dump trucks delivered soil mined elsewhere. Jake just bought a riding mower.

The real test of friendship came when I first walked down the southern slope of Jake’s new yard. Fallen trees sprawled across the property boundary and their wilting canopies sagged into our creek, where they would, in a sudden storm, divert the flow and erode the stream banks. I knew this to be a violation of a local erosion ordinance.

Talking to my husband later, tears sprang to my eyes. “If it was anybody else, we would turn them in just like we did those other two neighbors when they threatened the creeks.” One case involved a careless logger and the other a careless house-grader, and both times the creeks ran the color of bad coffee.

“Yes, that’s true,” my husband acknowledged. “But these are our best friends. We’re not going to… turn them in? His voice took a Valley Girl swing upward.

No. Ethical questions about who is responsible for protecting the environment faded in the harsh light of being a snitch. Who am I to criticize, anyway? We sent our share of sediment to the beleaguered Chesapeake Bay when we built our quarter-acre pond. Our ecological footprint here casts a shadow even at high noon on a clear day.

Scales of space and time determine what is sustainable. Extrapolated to each of the world’s six billion plus human beings, the scale of even my (minimally) more modest materialism would crash the earth’s ecosystems sooner rather than later, according to climatologists.

Well, I’m hoping for another twenty good years of living next door to Philly and Jake before the world collapses or I take the ultimate “Back to the Land” trip. Now that they’ve moved in, we get together regularly for dinner and a movie. We laugh at all the same jokes, just as we did in our youth. Our dear old friends have become poster people for the American environmental disconnect, but like siblings committed to family peace, we skirt the topics of our personal contributions to consumption, climate change, energy wars, and pollution.

For me, friendship trumps ideology. And if environmentalism is a religion — if the Creation is sacred — then I want to be a “hate the sin but love the sinner” kind of believer, not a “if thine eye offend thee pluck it out” kind. All I can do is ride herd on my own damage to the earth.

February 8, 2008February 19, 2013 by Dave Bonta

More morning

Sometimes the strict length limit of my Morning Porch entries — 140 characters — just isn’t enough to say all I want to, and today was one of those times.

Few things are more wonderful than sitting in the darkness listening to the sound of rushing water. I’d been awake since 3:00, and after tossing and turning for a while, gave up on sleep, turned the light on, and grabbed a novel off the end table. Soon it was 5:30, and time for my morning ablutions. By 6:00 I was out on the porch with my coffee. My tired eyes slowly adjusted to the dark.

I’m not sure I’ve ever described the setting in detail. The porch is about 75 feet from the edge of the woods, which is on the far side of the driveway. Actually, my small front yard sits in a right-angled bend of the driveway, which also divides it from the spring house “lawn” off to the right (southwest) as one sits facing out. The front yard is man-made, consisting mainly of rock fill — probably rocks sledded off the field back in the mid-19th century — with only a thin layer of dirt on top. Back when we used to keep it mowed, the grass would turn yellow every July.

Except in high flood conditions, the water from the spring house and the drainage ditch coming down from the field all flows right underneath the yard, paralleling the porch, at a depth of four to five feet, presumably following what had been its original course before the fill was added. Another drainage ditch comes down along the edge of the woods opposite the spring house and goes into a large pipe under the bend of the driveway. It then winds around below a high bank on the eastern side of the yard and meets up with the water from the underground tributary about twenty feet from the porch: in front and to the left from where I sit. This is effectively the head of Plummer’s Hollow Run, since it’s the highest place with running water at the surface year ’round. The large, spreading butternut tree that used to stand at the edge of the yard grew on the bank right above this spring. I still mourn its demise.

Following the hard rains two days ago, there’s running water on all three sides of the porch, each with its own, distinctive tone cluster. The water from the springhouse makes a bass gurgle as it goes underground. The water in the drainage ditch at the edge of the woods trickles at a more baritone pitch, dropping into the pipe. The rushing sound comes mainly from my left — a lusty tenor and soprano section. I wish I had the equipment to make an adequate recording.

So I’m sitting there enjoying the non-lexical vocables of water after all those silent words going through my head. For once it’s the only sound — there’s no highway noise — until I hear the faint scrabbling of claws on bark. It’s the right time for a porcupine to be returning to its den under the house, so I assume that’s what it is, even though I can’t see any silhouette of one in the nearby trees. When the scrabbling turns into footfalls on leaves, it sounds too loud for anything smaller than a deer, but soon enough a round shadow detaches itself from the dark background of the lilac bush and comes waddling across the lawn. I can just make out the white-tipped mantle of quills. It squeezes under the porch, and I feel the vibrations in my chair as it bumps through the hole into the crawlspace under the house. A few more bumps and it’s still. It occurs to me suddenly that s/he, too, has probably been awake for the last few hours. And while I was reading a novel, the porcupine was up in a tree, chewing on the thin bark of branches, each of us consuming the forest in our own way.

February 7, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Bringing the violence home

Naivasha was somewhere I went a long time ago and looked on the dreamy sight of a lake alive with pink flamingos. Now people there are killing each other, wielding machetes and burning houses. Of course it isn’t more tragic if it’s somewhere you’ve been, or if it’s happening somewhere beautiful. But it certainly brings the shock and tragedy of violence home to you.
—tasting rhubarb

What if that 4:00 a.m. knock on your door doesn’t come from some plainclothes agent of a sinister government, as we’ve always been told to expect, but from the folks down the street, whose kids are in the scout troop with your kids? And what if there isn’t even a knock? They burst into your bedroom and stand wavering, as if trying to decide whether the sight of you naked and violated is worth all the mess and bother. They’ve armed themselves with simple but effective weapons that might have been disguised, up until now, as spading forks, or hedge clippers, or aluminum bats for a pick-up game of softball down at the park. Oh, and their leader cradles a 12-gauge shotgun, or some other efficient guarantor of a polite society. You must leave — now, he announces with a melodramatic solemnity which in other circumstances you might find laughable. The Martinezes started an argument about it, and they’re dead. That would account for the blood and the heavy breathing, the flushed excitement on their faces. Honey, get the kids in the minivan. Tell them we’re going to see Abuela. And for once, the kids listen. At daybreak, creeping through the subdivision with your headlights off so as not to attract attention from the roving bands of local teenagers, you catch an odd movement from behind a backyard grill: sudden wings, a flash of pink. Then another, and another: one by one, the flamingos are abandoning their calm green lake. A silent V slices through the dawn sky.

Month: February 2008