Looking uphill
and looking downhill.
“Gosh, what a pretty little town!” I hear myself saying.
Fifteen seconds later, the most obnoxiously loud speedbike I’ve ever heard goes roaring through the gap and my thoughts turn murderous.
*
When the light is low-angled and golden, I can look back through woods where I’ve just walked and their magic and mystery remain completely unabated. But all it takes to break the spell is for the sun to go in.
What if I have it backwards, though? What if the real illusion isn’t when we intuit that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy, but when we instead let everydayness infect everything? The illusion of familiarity: that we’ve seen it all, and there’s little left to discover. The spell of the quotidian.
One thing I retain a five-year-old’s sense of wonder about, though: mysterious animal burrows in the woods. “Who lives there?” the child always wants to know—and will likely be equally entranced whether you reply elves or weasels. You’d just better be able to spin a good story about them!
*
Church bells to mark the start of the work day. Even God has to clock in.
Some time this afternoon, I think, wild lettuce will begin blooming on the ridgetop, where spongy moth caterpillars have killed so many oaks. In a week or two its seeds will ride the wind—traveling for miles and surviving in the soil for decades, until the next disturbance.
The future looks good for wild lettuce and its weedy ilk. There will be an accelerating number and variety of forest canopy-opening events: more insect outbreaks, freak storms, wildfire, blights… Damn, this spell of the quotidian is no joking matter!
But that’s not the only plant doing well this summer. The lowbush blueberries are having their best year in decades, and so is this native wildflower,
which has been saddled with an odd common name, cow-wheat.
Cow-wheat is a native annual hemiparasite (partially parasitic), using specialized root structures to invade the roots of its host and steal nutrients, while also performing photosynthesis. Its hosts may be several species of pine (Pinus) and poplar (Populus), as well as sugar maple (Acer saccharum), red oak (Quercus rubra), and even lowbush blueberry (Vaccinium angustifolium).
So a good year for blueberries is a good year for cow-wheat, it seems.
Another native wildflower just coming into its own: poke.
The plants are so enormous, you’d be forgiven for thinking them bushes. They’re clearly good enough for some birds to nest in:
The aforelinked Wikipedia entry says
The common name “poke” is derived from puccoon, pocan, or poughkone (from an Algonquin Indian name for this plant). Berries were once used to make ink, hence the sometimes-used common name of inkberry.
Plants that are deadly poisonous but still edible if prepared properly do fascinate me, but in my view you have to be pretty damn hungry to eat poke shoots in the spring. Mom inflicted them on us a couple times when we were kids, and it’s one of very, very few foods I could barely eat. (Truly. When the parents took us to France, we ate escargot with gusto.)
***
Flipping rocks on the highest point on the property, I disturbed a tiny ringneck snake—the first live one I’ve seen in years. Not necessarily because they’re rare, but because they’re secretive and nocturnal. We stared at each other in shock for a long moment. Then I went for the cameraphone and the snake whipped around and shot into a burrow.
Well, that’s one burrow I know the occupant of! As with Monday’s gray fox sighting, it always feels like a great privilege to get these kinds of glimpses into the lives of Plummer’s Hollow’s shyer residents.
Wherever there are northern ringneck snakes there are salamanders—the bulk of their diet. Wherever there are salamanders, in the Appalachians, there are still functioning native forest ecosystems. And wherever there are forests, there’s wonder. (But you knew I’d say that.)