2 I can’t remember who sold us grass— rolls of Bermuda grass that a hired gardener spread upon the soil like new bandages after all the carabao grass had been ripped away.
Hiking with the Antichrist
descent path
of a regional jet
wild yarrow
Last night I watched it get dark from the bench at the top of the watershed—the head of the hollow where the old field meets the spruce grove. There’s a very misleading vista of forested ridges, which, because our own mountain is so low, manage to hide nearly all the valleys in between, creating the illusion of a Penn’s Woods with only a few scattered lights of cell towers and scattered farms. All of State College, a small city of around 40,000 in the summer, is hidden by the mid-valley ridge except for one water tower. It’s a good spot to watch the sky and imagine impossible things.
Learning what cumulonimbus clouds do at dusk on a June evening is of vital importance, just as it was earlier to watch the late afternoon light on mature-but-still-young oak leaves in the hollow among which a tanager and wood thrush were performing their greatest hits. I thought I’d spend the spring and summer hiking elsewhere, as I was doing last fall, but so far that hasn’t happened, between the garden needing regular attention and the high price of gas discouraging unnecessary trips.
What is truly necessary, then? Walking, yes, and sitting still from time to time. But when you’re lucky enough to have the run of a private forest two and half miles long, you don’t need to drive somewhere in order to walk. So many urban and suburban dwellers don’t have that privilege; I feel I should use it well and file these reports often.
*
Today, however, I decided to go hike my favorite stretch of Tussey Mountain — the part I see from the aforementioned bench looming off to the east, nearly 1000 feet higher.
dark forest edge—
sassafras extending
middle fingers
A popular spot to get high, judging by all the comfy-looking seats among the rocks. Good thing I’m not an influencer—I’d have to include myself in the photo, and the thing I like about this view is precisely the fact that I’m not in it.
Rock tripe. I love how they curl back as if ready to take flight.
Went off-trail among the ridgetop hemlocks for a while.
mossy rocks
as big as coffins
black-throated green
(That’s the warbler who allegedly sings Trees trees murmuring trees!)
It was worth going off-trail just to get up close and personal with all the contrasting shades of green. This is the true visual treat of late spring and early summer, more than anything blooming right now, even mountain laurel.
The main reason to go into wilder places is to be reminded that pretty much anywhere in the world will, given time, turn into a garden on its own. They’re out there, these aesthetically magnetic places. The fun is finding the small and unofficial ones. And in most cases keeping them to yourself.
What’s fun in the folded Appalachians — the Ridge and Valley section — is that all the places you know have echoes elsewhere, since habitat and forest use patterns tend to follow geology, which keeps running through the same, mostly edge-ways layers. Everything repeats—not necessarily in a Groundhog Day manner, but sometimes that, too. I can find analogues to our ridges at Plummer’s Hollow. In fact, I’m on one now. That’s what makes this so interesting to a stay-at-home nature freak like me: it’s the same but different. I can play detective as I walk, trying to guess the forest history.
There are an insane amount of black-throated green warblers along this stretch of ridge. I think it’s safe to say that if or probably when all the mature hemlocks succumb to the woolly adelgid, the black-throated greens won’t be nesting up here anymore. Then think of the countless acres of hemlocks as recently as 100 years ago, lost to the logging boom and never likely to come back, and all of the more boreal-type species that have declined or vanished as a result. Think about the trout streams that no longer held trout, and people puzzled that God’s bounty, as they saw it, might actually be contingent on good treatment of the earth and respect for wild and waste places just like it says in Leviticus.
Also, it’s interesting to watch forest succession in places with little history of recent human disturbance. My hiking buddy L. and I discovered this years ago at a very remote, nearly deer-free gorge full of dying old-growth hemlocks, the Tall Timbers Natural Area within Bald Eagle State Forest. It’s deeply sad that we’re losing some of these last fragments of eastern old growth to an introduced pest and a changing climate. But if you happen to have a lifetime’s knowledge of what forests in the Ridge and Valley tend to look like, you can still appreciate the specialness of a place where forest openings are filled not with ailanthus or mile-a-minute vine but mountain ash, sugar maple, or red oak.
Two military jets hurtle past a few hundred yards away, skimming the treetops. What an absolutely terrifying, inhuman howl.
I’m not a Christian but sometimes I think, you know, they might be on to something with the myth of Antichrist. Like, I don’t believe in Christ, but the Antichrist? That’s us. That’s our deathly hand around nature’s throat.
(No, I’m not listening to metal as i hike. That would seem blasphemous even to me!)
A large ground beetle goes into the ground, as is, one supposes, its wont.
I like to watch invertebrates simply because they make up an overwhelming majority of the critters I see on a day-to-day basis. Also they are cool as hell, obviously, and often terrifying if you make the mistake of looking at them through a hand lens. Even so I barely know a fraction of their names. Some of the more obscure ones may still be officially unknown to science, because taxonomy is hard and thankless work.
Damn, it’s chilly up here! Glad I decided to try out this longsleeved merino shirt.
I hate to sound like a fanboy, but I got this shirt for all the obvious practical benefits that people talk about only to discover the real reason for its popularity is that it’s such an unbelievably soft but smooth texture, almost like a second skin. When the wind blows, it feels amazing.
Maybe all athleisure wear is like this, and I’ve been missing out all this time? Too bad my nipples aren’t erogenous zones like a normal person’s. But it does mean less potential for embarrassment in the unlikely event I run into anyone else today.
It’s not silky but silk-adjacent, without the alien feeling of actual silk. It feels like something a mammal made.
Mostly I’m just happy for an excuse to deploy that hilarious, oxymoronic marketing term “athleisure wear.”
*
Garter snake sunning in the middle of the trail. You’ll just have to imagine it, curled into a single stripey loop—it looks much too comfortable to disturb.
I wonder when the last time was that someone went through? Certainly the clump of pale corydalis I found growing in the middle of the trail hadn’t been trampled. The Mid-State Trail may be part of the Great Eastern Trail network, but let me tell you, this ain’t the Appalachian Trail. I saw no one else all day. As usual.
*
We need to stop using the word “picturesque” for things that, upon examination through the back of a camera, turn out to have in fact no good pictures in them. That still trips me up, thinking that just because something looks cool that it’ll make a cool image. That’s like assuming that just because a person is good-looking, they’ll make a good model.
*
Because I’ve also hiked this trail at times when the leaves are down, stopping to take lots of pictures, I know there are way more cool old oaks, birches and hemlocks than i can see now. It definitely heightens the experience just to know they’re there. I mean landscapes are just like people in their uniqueness, aren’t they? No one expects to learn all there is to know about a person in just one visit. The world needs fewer travelers and more lovers.
Just tripped and nearly fell less than a hundred feet from the spot where I tripped and fell last fall. That’s some spooky shit.
I’M ALMOST OUT OF BATTERY. TELL ME GOOGLE HOW TO APPEASE THE UNQUIET GHOST OF A CLUMSY HIKER.
*
Cool, twisted old trees on my right, grouse exploding from dense cover on the left. That’s this hundred feet. It’s constantly changing, and I wish I could be present for the full wonder of it but wonder is exhausting so thankfully rare. I’m having a ridge experience, which is kind of the aesthetic equivalent of being in a perpetual low-level state of arousal due to one’s choice of shirt.
Found a boulder field to eat lunch on, sunning myself on the rocks like that snake, hunched over my sandwich. Boulder fields are cool and all, but these ridges would have fins like sharks had it not been for the icy breath of the glaciers fifty miles away for thousands of years.
Couldn’t find my second sandwich for a few seconds and I almost had a full-blown panic. I am not cut out for the wilderness.
I love the fast wolf spiders that prowl these rocks. I dream of seeing an Allegheny woodrat in the wild some day, but they’re so rare now, I might’ve missed my chance.
ridgetop wind
a black-and-white warbler
hisses back
“Light rain ending in 37 minutes.” If it weren’t for the excitement of failing batteries, technology would suck every last ounce of adventure out of a hike.
A view to the southwest of Plummer’s Hollow nearly hidden by curtains of rain.
Ah, the smell of cow manure, even this far above the valley! That’s how you know you’re in central Pennsylvania.
I hate whoever did this, no doubt choosing to camp under this ridgetop hemlock for its ambience, then carelessly building a campfire on its exposed roots.
Miraculously, it clings to life. Trees are tough up here.
I like trail registries if only for the surrealism of encountering a post office box in the middle of the woods.
My feet are tired but in a good way—that warm feeling they get after a good long hike. What did I learn today? Merino is amazing, and always bring the solar battery charger. Hiking with as much technology as possible is the way to go, really. I simply need to find a good dictation app so I don’t have to keep stopping to write down my thoughts. Then a 360° camera so I can record my hikes for a virtual reality experience. Then I’d be able to relive them someday when my knees are shot and the hemlocks are all gone.
A Palimpsest
"Never again will a single story be told as if it is the only one."
~ John Berger
1
It's possible to see the underlying
geography once you find a corner
that frays against touch—
Under the PLU of Red
Delicious apples, under their waxed
skins in crates at the PX market—
On streetcorners
where shoe-shine boys snapped
their cotton rags sharp as any chamois—
Though I admit it was lost on me then
why my father wanted to point out,
when he went for a haircut,
the Koken barber chairs
with reclining backs and porcelain
armrests, shipped all the way
from St. Louis, MO in the 1900s
(the year of manufacture engraved
on the iron trestle); or how it happened
that his best friend Don Alfredo
lived among us, cutting and lighting cigars
as he worked in the cave of his basement
office at Sky View Restaurant
and Mezzanine. Look, we are not
the dregs of empire. We know a roast
beef sandwich or a hamburger
is not as good as lengua or a whole
pig skewered over a fire.
We know a pearl or piece of ore grifted
from these hills, despite their shine
suddenly withheld from us.
Slug Life
six haiku written while sitting at one spot in the woods
invasive slug
the wood pewee bending
his one note
*
cool morning
the sun catches a spider
patching holes
*
a wasp on foot
the nervous trembling
of her wings
*
ancient seabed
a sudden roar
from the quarry
*
higher pitched
than my memory
first cicada
*
which tree
will be today’s gnomon
great grey slug
*
And here’s the nearly six-minute encounter that fueled all that, for those who have the patience (or a really good prescription):
* * *
I just found these coral fungi less than 50 feet from my front porch. Why don’t I ever go back here? I muttered as I crouched down to take a shot.
Then I stood up and saw all the poison ivy. That’d be the reason.
In Summer
The air's blowtorch to the face A glove around the body By midday you want to peel off clothing your skin The mind fogs in its own sauna Too torpid to move toward the hollow of a cooler temperature A door in the wall A shade tree A wilderness springs up even in stasis Pillows collect uneven silences From their banks you look up at the moon's cool wrist You touch a washcloth to your nape If you had a diaphoretic A mint leaf A balm
Tell me we’re fucked without telling me we’re fucked
In American poetry as in our ordinary discourse, a kind of positivism reigns supreme, using language to expose, explore, and extract meaning. We bring this mentality to haiku in English and are thwarted, because in Japanese culture, language is considered to be such an inadequate vessel for conveying true thoughts/feelings that what isn’t said becomes at least as important as what is. (This is the point at which my own attempt to master Japanese faltered, as a young man in love with a certain style of discursive conversation. What’s the point of learning a language if you can never use it for robust arguments about ideas? I said to myself then.)
Haiku with its wealth of off-the-shelf natural imagery (kigo) represents an attempt to enlarge the overall cultural vocabulary for human feelings, which are considered much more recondite than most WYSIWYG Americans tend to admit. Suggestion and concision in haiku, tanka, etc., more than just arbitrary restrictions intended to spur inventiveness, represent openings for interpretive possibilities that require sensitivity and creativity to parse. So for American poets the challenge becomes “tell me X without telling me X”—a currently popular online meme formula. But rather than jokey photos, we work with two images or observations, a main one and a subsidiary one, joined by a semantic break in an almost kintsugi kind of way, mindful of the gap itself. According to the aesthetic values of Edo-period Japan, which still hold sway in traditional arts and crafts, in kintsugi “such ‘ugliness’ was considered inspirational and Zen-like, as it connoted beauty in broken things.” This wabi/sabi aesthetic finds parallels in a number of countercultural currents in the West, from Medieval monasticism and the whole Christian embrace of poverty and brokenness to the disruptive force of Eliot’s The Wasteland, and provides I believe the most reliable bridge between two otherwise quite different understandings of the limits and purpose of language..
There have been five upheavals over the past 450 million years when the environment on our planet has changed so dramatically that the majority of Earth’s plant and animal species became extinct. After each mass extinction, evolution has slowly filled in the gaps with new species.
The sixth mass extinction is happening now, but this time the extinctions are not being caused by natural disasters; they are the work of humans. A team of researchers from Aarhus University and the University of Gothenburg has calculated that the extinctions are moving too rapidly for evolution to keep up.
If mammals diversify at their normal rates, it will still take them 5-7 million years to restore biodiversity to its level before modern humans evolved, and 3-5 million years just to reach current biodiversity levels, according to the analysis, which was published recently in the prestigious scientific journal, PNAS.
Mammals cannot evolve fast enough to escape current extinction crisis
The brokenness of the world is far more urgent than it was in Basho’s day. If we don’t mind the gaps, they will soon swallow us and all our art and culture, because a world without beasts, a world where the immense creative power and resilience of nature are hidden for millions of years, is a world without poetry.
dancing flames—
a ruby-throated hummingbird
here and gone
(via Woodrat Photohaiku)
There’s one wood thrush here with a markedly less pleasant song than the others. It’s sort of flat and minor key, and while still musically more interesting than most songbirds, simply does not meet the high standard set for wood thrushes. This thrush’s performances feel perfunctory, even dialed in. Two and a half stars.
I wonder whether I’d be more concerned about my legacy as a poet if I had planted fewer trees?
Hypocenter
Zero, as in ground. Zoic traces, all but vanished by the last worst-ever catastrophe. Zones take the place of neighborhoods, nations: all the north- south-east-west we once knew, all the mapped and gridded sheets. Zills clicked in the fingers of Spanish dancers. Zabagliones thickened with egg yolks, sugar, and sweet wine. Zebras (15), bushbucks (12), elands (11), gazelles (11), giraffes (15), impalas (18), waterbucks (12), and topis (10) brought to Calauit island in 1977 on the MV Salvador. Zaftig now in her eighties, does the former dictator's wife even remember what she was thinking when she clapped her diamond-encrusted hands and ordered her own personal safari? Zizz zizz say the bees in the lavender— Zealotries are not their business: only preparation for the days coming faster than anyone could anticipate. Zestless, saltless, lightless. Zibelines and other soft, lustrous fabrics along with qiviut, alpaca, angora, merino and silk, by this time mere entries in the encyclopedia of former lives and bodies before they faded with the world.
Descent
What happens when we stop thinking of evolution as a ladder leading to us, which it most definitely is not, and start thinking about it instead as the story of our ancestors? What Darwin called the Descent of Man. Because that’s what we are: descendants. The paramecium is my brother! Or my ten-thousandth cousin a million times removed.
Paramecium or Paramoecium is a genus of unicellular ciliated protozoa. They are characterised by the presence of thousands of cilia covering their body. They are found in freshwater, marine and brackish water. They are also found attached to the surface. Reproduction is primarily through asexual means (binary fission). They are slipper-shaped and also exhibit conjugation. They are easy to cultivate and widely used to study biological processes.
https://byjus.com/neet/paramecium/
I strongly advise clicking through and reading the entire bit about paramecium reproduction, for a strong sense of just how simple things have gotten for some of us. Here’s what follows the section on asexual reproduction:
Sexual reproduction in Paramecium is by various methods.
In conjugation, two complementary paramecia (syngen) come together and there is a transfer of genetic material. An individual has to multiply asexually 50 times before reproducing by conjugation.
In the process of conjugation, the conjugation bridge is formed and united paramecia are known as conjugants. Macronuclei of both the cells disappear. The micronucleus of each conjugant forms 4 haploid nuclei by meiosis. Three of the nuclei degenerate. The haploid nuclei of each conjugant then fuse together to form diploid micronuclei and cross-fertilization takes place. The conjugants separate to form exconjugants. They are identical, but different from the earlier cells. Each exconjugate undergoes further division and forms 4 daughter Paramecia. Micronuclei form a new macronucleus.
Paramecium also shows autogamy i.e. self-fertilization. A new macronucleus is produced, which increases their vitality and rejuvenates them.
Cytogamy is less frequent. In cytogamy, two paramecia come in contact but there is no nuclear exchange. Paramecium rejuvenates and a new macronucleus is formed.
A Paramecia undergoes ageing and dies after 100-200 cycles of fission if they do not undergo conjugation. The macronucleus is responsible for clonal ageing. It is due to the DNA damage.
Paramecium is a real chip off the old block! And it shows us that aging is a choice made by evolution, just as sex is. Not all microorganisms do age. Most of we consider to be universal truths don’t even apply to all species on this planet, let alone to whatever other planets might have produced.
This is the logical flaw in Christian Bök’s Xenotext project, genius as it is: assuming that any “intelligent aliens” who discover the code would even have the frames of reference to allow them to interpret it. I mean, it’s also anthrocentric nonsense to believe that anyone from another planet would even care that much about us, other than perhaps to eradicate us as an obvious menace to all other lifeforms on earth, but that’s become sort of a new, post-religious article of faith for many who “believe in science.” (Pro tip: believing in science is unscientific.)
Wanting to have fixed, would-be truths in which to believe strikes me as so juvenile. Properly educated religious people learn not to linger at that stage, but who advocates for intellectual flexibility among the post-religious aside from a few morally bankrupt corporatist pundits? Well, Teju Cole comes to mind. Rebecca Solnit. And a bunch of more academic or abstruse thinkers who will never go viral for anything.
I wish I had more precise descriptors than “insects” for the winged creatures going back and forth in front of the porch this morning—all Diptera, I’m sure, but the lack of a general term for anything larger than a gnat but smaller than a cranefly is frustrating. And of course it’s telling: this is how much English speakers in aggregate pay attention to the natural world. Apart from entomologists and trout fishermen, who cares about a bunch of wee beasties (Scots English FTW) looking less like Victorian children’s book fairies than refugees from a painting by Hieronymus Bosch.
cool forest
a sunlit glade buzzing
with house flies
Having a ridge experience means, for example, getting to the top and forgetting to pause because no scenic vista is half as interesting as cool old trees growing among the rocks. What’s my destination today? I’ll know it when I see it.
Just stopping to type that, I’ve upset a hairy woodpecker. I look up and yep, there’s a tree with nest holes beside the trail.
I don’t want to get a better camera in part because not being able to capture quite everything is still a pretty good goad to write.
summer evening
a certain slant
of Dickinson
LOL.
stiltgrass
a black ichneumon wasp
thinner than death
(Ichneumons are the ones whose eggs hatch out inside living caterpillars—the inspiration for the Alien movie universe. There are tens of thousands of species, each specializing in one species of caterpillar.)
The evil impulse is such a great teacher, as long as you ignore its instructions. I refuse to elaborate.
Trying to take more artsy photos on my walk today, instead of just spontaneously reacting to what I heard and saw, dissatisfaction led to frustration led to boredom. Eventually I stopped taking pictures altogether, and began gathering yarrow tops for beer.
Manille
“The manila envelope is ubiquitous in modern record keeping
... it also embodies a history of global trade, war, and colonialism."
~ from Off the Record, Guggenheim Exhibit,
April 2 - September 27, 2021
Why do eye and ear seem to hearken more kindly to words
finished in a different tongue? Seductive ends: vanille instead of
vanilla; Manille instead of Manila— this name given to paper
recycled from rope, its fibers culled from banana plants. Deep
turmeric yellow, bales of hemp harvested from abacá crops
in that colonial outpost in the far east. So much use for the ships
and banners of war, for new sources of commerce! And envelopes
in which to slip bills of lading, terms of consignment or lease;
contracts that renewed even after flags were pulled out and folded.
Flaps seal shut with two metal teeth biting down, or a cardboard
button fixed with a narrow length of cotton twine. Once, we walked
through the walled city and its tourist-washed cobblestones,
certain that every merchant in every shop had reams of these
in drawers and filing cabinets. From the ramparts, a view of the bay
and the setting sun, coronet still desired by every kingdom.
In a restaurant named after the enlightened ones, we stopped
for ice cream with essence of sampaguita flowers.
A spoonful turned our mouths into high-
vaulted cathedrals, where incense smoke
wafted, ghost-like, in the triforium.
Explain This
Humid moisture underlines the air in summer, and wood expands. In cooler weather, gaps shrink back into the grain. It doesn't matter that the carpenter took accurate measure of lengths and widths before curing the planks then laying them side by side, or clamping mitre joints. It's not defiance that buckles and undoes the seams—something still lives that is of tree, though no longer green. Barometer of falling light or scorch, of love withheld and given back, responding like any other body to its environment.