Paths of infection

trail

In a few more years, the path in this picture will be two centuries old. That’s fifty years older than any of the buildings in the hollow. They’re the healed remains of the roads the colliers built when they first clearcut the mountain, with results that must have been catastrophic for the hollow: floods, fire, massive loss of topsoil. But now, chances are if you come to visit in any other season than winter, our moss-covered trails are one of the things you’ll most remember about the place. They’re beautiful. In spring and summer, before the leaves fall and turn every step into a loud whisper, it’s possible to stalk through the forest as quietly as a burglar.

I always confuse the path with the destination. Don’t you? I start out intending to go somewhere, but then something catches my eye and I slow down for a closer look. Then I notice more. An hour hour later, I’ve only made it half a mile from the house.

laurel leaf

Nothing draws the attention quite like someone or something with a disfiguring disease. Whatever is decimating the mountain laurel here begins with colorful eyespots: brown rimmed with red and yellow, like targets in reverse. With certain kinds of sickness, yes — the leading edge of infection is marked by unnatural brightness. That fever glow.

rash

I found a black gum tree with a bad case of warts. Each wart is a hermit’s cell for an Eriophyid mite, a microscopic, two-legged relative of spiders. It goes through a mere two larval instars, and manages to have sex while maintaining its immaculate separation from others of its kind:

Mites do not mate with each other; sacs that the male leaves lying around on the leaf surface fertilize the female as she walks around.

Freedom from sexual contact can be liberating. Some species of Eriophyid mites alternate all-male generations with all-female generations. Very little is known about them beyond these basic facts. Some 90 percent of Eriophyidae have yet to be named and classified by taxonomists, so I suppose chances are good that this is one of them.

For the tree, the galls aren’t the sickness, they’re the treatment. The tree would say, with some justification, that each mite is walled in to keep it from spreading. But the mite, like thousands of other gall-making arthropods, is in fact practicing a kind of ju-jitsu, using the tree’s defenses against itself. The feeding chambers are not only ideal for solitary contemplation, if such be the bipedal mite’s inclination, but keep out most predators, as well.

After they attain adulthood, the Eriophyidae abandon their chambers. This is the time when accidental sex may occur. Many of them also take to the wind and float for miles, like the Daoist sages of legend. Some of them, no doubt, end up in my lungs.

bear tree

This black gum bears the scars of somewhat larger animals — bears and humans. When I painted a trail blaze on it seven years ago, I can’t remember seeing the other marks there, but judging from the depth of scar tissue, bears have been carving up this tree for some time. Though they much prefer electric and telephone poles to communicate their “Kilroy was here”-type messages to other bears, any conspicuous tree, living or dead, will do. For hikers, this is a useful reminder that they aren’t the only ones using the trails. For bears, it is perhaps a gratifying reminder of the fact that our paint marks are no match for their claw marks. Bears often destroy human-made things left in the woods — it’s as if they regard us as some kind of enemy.

For the tree, unless and until the trunk is completely girdled, none of this is a real impediment to continued growth and prosperity. Black gum trees are masters at walling off wounds with thick scar tissue. They almost all rot out at an early age, making them impossible to date by ring counts. But the outer shell of a mature black gum is hard as iron.

charred

White pines fight disease with tars, which can sometimes keep them standing after death for as long or longer than they stood as living trees. A century after the forest fire, a short-lived path that the flames took up the trunk of a pine tree is still marked with charcoal and a livid blaze.

News from the ‘Hood

faith-based initiative

Yesterday was a lovely day in my virtual neighborhood. A new edition of the Festival of the Trees went up at Earth, Wind and Water, honoring the 150th anniversary of the publication of the theory of evolution by natural selection. Tai Haku wrote a full paragraph for almost every link, placing the trees in ecological or cultural contexts. My favorite entries included a post on the bizarre and beautiful Common Screwpine; a great overview of mangrove forests by artist Carel Brest Van Kempen, who is putting together a traveling group show of mangrove art to raise money for their conservation; and a page on the Ginkgo trees that survived the atom bomb blast at Hiroshima, which I somehow missed on my visit to the city 20 years ago.

The first of the month also means posting a new nature column over at my mom’s site, this one illustrated as we often do with some of my old photos: Sunday, Sweet Sunday. It should give you a good sense of what Plummer’s Hollow is like this time of year — and why we are grateful to live in a conservative Christian area despite being what you might call secular humanists (and believers in “evil-lution,” needless to say). Sundays really are much, much quieter.

Finally, we announced the next bimonthly theme at qarrtsiluni: Transformation, with guest editors Jessamyn Smyth and Allan Peterson.

We are looking for work exploring transformative instances of all kinds with an emphasis particularly on the change itself — the dynamics inside the chrysalis rather than a static image of the butterfly emerged; the moment of Daphne becoming a laurel.

And within an hour the most highly motivated poets (yes, they exist!) began sending in submissions, much to my wonder. It should be another interesting issue.

Fly in a Broken Window

fly-in-a-broken-window

Via Magnetic Poetry Online Kits (hat tip: sister AE). Also influenced by Tiel Aisha Ansari. Yes, I know I’m not an artist!

I was honored to have inspired the prompt at Read Write Poem this week with my “Blue Jeans” magnetic poem. You can find links to the other responses here.

While Shuffle Words compositions are constrained by the small number of total words, the problem with Magnetic Poetry Online’s Poet Edition (which sounds redundant, doesn’t it?) is the limited number of good verbs. Whoever put their word collection together seems to have been under the impression that poetry is chiefly concerned with nouns and adjectives.

Notes from the dead time

Early afternoon: the dead time, I always think of it. A cicada is using the plank walls of my house as a resonator in lieu of a tree. It’s LOUD. But as soon as I go out with a camera and try to film him in action, he stops, like some sort of hyper-self-conscious poet.

*

Over the past few days, I’ve heard a couple different people mention “seven-year locusts.” More biblical influence, I suspect — things always come in sevens in the Bible. What the hell is seventeen? A number of no mythological significance whatsoever.

But maybe for us residents of the eastern United States, it should be. Isn’t making new myths an essential part of becoming native to a place? To me, the old stories about Persephone or Orpheus or Korach pale by comparison with the saga of the 17-year cicadas.

*

It’s not all cicadas here, though. On the powerline right-of-way, the lowbush blueberry bushes are blue with berries (is there any way to say that without sounding horribly redundant?) and the black raspberry canes around the houses are beginning to bear fruit — those that haven’t been grazed too heavily by deer.

One morning last week, I came out onto the powerline to find someone else there before me. “Hey, it’s a bear, eating up all my blueberries!” I shouted. Dad was using his walking stick to lower himself gingerly into a crouch, and was shoveling handfuls of berries into his mouth. So that’s what he uses that stick for! But who can blame him? Wild blueberries are definitely worth a painful descent.

Ten minutes later, climbing the ridge beyond the powerline, I saw a bear for real — one of the four yearlings wandering the mountain alone now that their mother has chased them off and (presumably) gone into estrus. It came ’round the bend in the trail and stopped. I had been standing there waiting for a singing black-throated blue warbler to get close enough to photograph. The bear and I blinked at each other for a few seconds. Then it headed off into the laurel at a gallop, before I could fully redirect my attention from the bird.

The very next moment, the warbler dropped down into a laurel bush right next to me, sang once, and flew off before I could turn my attention back to him. So, no photo of either one. My glacially slow reactions do make for memorable glimpses of things, though.

*

Last night I saw something I wished I’d been able to film in some way. Around ten till ten I took a walk up the mowed path through the field to the top of a bowl-shaped feature we call the amphitheatre, thinking I’d watch the fireflies. And it was quite a show: blinking, floating lights throughout the field and yard and into the treetops, all the way up the side of the wooded ridge. But what made it even more spectacular was the distant thunderstorm, visible but completely inaudible above the eastern horizon. Cloud-to-cloud lightning kept lighting up different fissures in the clouds (is there any way to say that without sounding redundant?) while the rest of the sky remained dark — and the equally silent fireflies flashed below.

*

Now I’m sitting out on the porch, fighting the dead time with strong tea and reading Richard Shelton’s Selected Poems for the hundredth time. A doe is grazing on the black currant bushes in the stream below the yard, and I notice with a mixture of disgust and pity that her back is black with deerflies. Her short tail swivels and her hide twitches constantly in a fruitless effort to shake them off. Watching her skin vibrate while the rest of her goes unhurriedly about her business puts me in mind of a belly-dancer, bedeviled by the crawling stares of her audience.

A fawn appears and shoves its muzzle between her hind legs. The two of them amble across the driveway, climb the bank and disappear into the woods.

Poem for Display Above the Urinals in a Men’s Restroom

This entry is part 11 of 14 in the series Public Poems

 

Eyes front, soldier.
The general looks hard for signs
of deviation.

Don’t show too much interest
even in this poem,
which is probably gay.

There were trees here once
where you stand relieving yourself
against a hollow trunk.

They would not have known
what to do
with so much saltpeter.
__________

Note: Saltpeter, or potassium nitrate — a critical component of gunpowder — readily precipitates out of urine.

A non-plague of non-locusts

egg-laying cicada

The locusts are, it must be said, a bit of a plague on the locusts. The males call “Pha-roah! Pha-roah!” in a slow southern drawl while the females plunge their scimitar-shaped ovipositors into the thorny twigs, sometimes so deep that they break. All along the top edge of the field, the black locusts are acquiring a pruned and chastened look, as if they were the victims of some very localized storm.

cicada damage

Of course, 17-year “locusts” are really cicadas (see Brood XIV). According to some sources, when early European settlers first encountered periodical cicadas in eastern North America, the only parallel they could think of for such an extreme insect outbreak was the plague of locusts in the Bible, so “locusts” they became — despite the fact that, as members of the order Homoptera, they could scarcely be more distantly related to true locusts, which are grasshoppers, Orthoptera. According to the Locust entry in the Wikipedia, however, the conflation goes much further back, to “the Vulgar Latin locusta, which was originally used to refer to various types of crustaceans and insects.” The English essayist Thomas Browne was bemoaning the confusion between locusts and old-world cicadas as early as the 17th century. And obviously the popular description of the call of Magicicada septendecim as “Pharoah” shows the unabated influence of Exodus 10:4-15.

However, it would be a great exaggeration to say of these “locusts” that “they covered the face of the whole earth, so that the land was darkened; and they did eat every herb of the land, and all the fruit of the trees which the hail had left: and there remained not any green thing in the trees, or in the herbs of the field, through all the land.” Here’s what the folks at Cicada Mania say:

Question: Will the cicadas kill my trees, shrubs and flowers?
Answer: Possibly. Cicadas don’t kill flowers and shouldn’t damage shrubs, but they can do damage to young, wimpy trees like ornamentals. If you have wimpy little trees, you can net them to keep the cicadas off. Tree species that aren’t native to North America won’t fare as well as native species. Trees that lose a lot of branches typically revive after a year or two, but they will be ugly in the mean time. Cicadas actually are a benefit to trees, as they destroy the weaker branches. Please don’t use pesticides — you’ll destroy the good bugs as well as the “nuisance” bugs, and ultimately do your garden and the environment a huge disfavor.

Of course, as larvae, cicadas do subsist on tree sap, but given that cicadas and deciduous trees have evolved together, I doubt that they do much to weaken the trees. Though the science is inconclusive, it’s likely that their extensive tunneling benefits the trees by aerating the soil, and possibly by creating macropores for new roots and fungal mycelia. An AP article quotes a Dr. Frank Hale from the University of Tennessee:

The holes from which they emerge aerate the soil around the tree roots, Hale said. The millions of decaying cicada bodies supply nitrogen and other nutrients, which rain washes down the holes to the tree roots.

However, a Penn State Ag School publication for orchardists assumes the worst, and considering the unique stresses on heavily pruned and sprayed trees in monocultural plantations, it may well be on-target with its recommendation to prevent egg-laying at all costs. It also emphasizes netting if feasible, and mentions the harmful effects of pesticides on beneficial insects.

cicada in scrub oak

Do the various Magicicada species vary in their arboreal preferences? I’ve mentioned black locusts as a favorite for swarming and egg-laying activity (see my video at the Plummer’s Hollow blog), but I suspect that’s largely because of their location in the field-forest ecotone. The cicadas here do show an affinity for forest edges and openings, regardless of where they originally emerged. I don’t know if the fact that locust trees are nitrogen-fixing legumes makes them any more attractive as adoptive mothers to cicada larvae. We have noticed relatively few cicadas in the black walnuts that surround the main house, which might seem logical given the toxicity of walnut roots to many other plants, but it seems that if we had the rarer third species, Magicicada septendecula, that might not be the case:

Within the same brood, the three species are always perfectly synchronized, but they are separated microspatially by having different habitats within the same woodland. Magicicada septendecula prefers ovipositing in hickories and walnuts, and emerges in higher proportions under those trees than under comparable oaks. Both M. septendecim [the “Pharoah” species] and M. septendecula occur together in upland woods, but septendecim exhibits much less host specificity than septendecula. The latter species is much rarer than septendecim; it can usually be heard chorusing in local patches within a woods occupied by septendecim. Magicicada cassini is a species of floodplain woods, and characteristically can be seen to replace septendecim and septendecula as one moves down a wooded slope leading to a stream. Over much of the eastern United States, however, the original forest has been extensively disturbed. Periodical cicadas survive and reproduce surprisingly well in cutover, scrubby second growth. Tree species characteristic of floodplains, like American elm, are often a component of upland second growth, and, especially in such situations, cassini, septendecim, and septendecula become intermixed though they remain reproductively isolated. The present lack of microspatial separation in many situations, then, is an artifact of human disturbance.
—Henry S. Dybas and Monte Lloyd, “The Habitats of 17-Year Periodical Cicadas (Homoptera: Cicadidae: Magicicada Spp.),” Ecological Monographs, Vol. 44, No. 3 (Summer, 1974)

That might explain why the M. cassini cicadas are so much louder and more numerous around Canoe Creek State Park, much of which is floodplain or early-succession second growth. At our annual Audubon Society picnic last week, they were nearly deafening. In fact, a friend just told me that the dog-day cicadas are usually very numerous there, too — and regardless of the species, they make excellent fish bait, he said. Hardly the stuff of plagues.
__________

Today is the deadline to submit links to the next Festival of the Trees. Details are here.

Tinkering

If you’ve visited the site in the last two days, you might have noticed an “Index of Verbosity” at the bottom of the left sidebar listing the total numbers of posts, words, and comments for Via Negativa, together with some text explaining that the comments date back only to April 1, 2006. This afternoon I decided that the sidebar looked entirely too cluttered, so I moved most of that information into the footer instead. The numbers will be automatically updated everytime I post with the help of a software plugin called GeneralStats. And this evening I figured out the proper lines of PHP to use so I could put the Akismet spam-comment counter down there, too — a fun but frightening figure that grows by about 1500 a day. It didn’t seem fair to carry a free ad for Akismet and none for the many other fine plugins deployed here, though I did like that pale blue button as a visual element anchoring the sidebar. I’ll have to keep my eye out for a suitable replacement.

There’s a special joy that comes from making very minor changes to one’s blog, especially when it involves the successful deployment of complex tools and procedures that one barely understands. If you’re a blogger, I suspect you know what I’m talking about. Blogging is, above all, a superior form of procrastination. But what do you do when you want to procrastinate on blogging? Simple: you tinker with the blog.

Ode to a Compass

This entry is part 23 of 31 in the series Odes to Tools

 

I can still recall
my first encounter
with a compass in
the second grade.
It was shiny & dangerous,
a headless ballerina
with one wooden leg.
How odd, I thought,
that we should entrust
the drawing of circles
to something so asymmetrical.
And what to do
about that pinhole
at the center of the paper?
It seemed flawed
& unnecessary, like a seed
for a stone. I wanted
a way to make
a circle from without,
like shaping a pot
on a wheel. I had seen
hawks spiral
around an updraft
with nothing more
than a slight adjustment
to the wingtips.
Shouldn’t we
who are descended
from the trees
be able to free-hand
perfect circles,
simply by letting
the mind go blank
as a target?
The compass is a crutch.
Restore its missing leg
so it can return to
its first life as
a gnomon:
stationary,
circled by the sun.

Ode to a Hive Tool

This entry is part 22 of 31 in the series Odes to Tools

 

You need a key for entering where there is no door.
You are much too full of your mammal self
to fit through the always-open entryway
& in any case would have no idea
how to execute a waggle dance,
which looks like sun-drugged madness to you,
looming over the brood box with your angry halo.

You need the hive tool — a burglar’s jimmy —
to prize the honey-heavy frames
from the super, where they hang
for all the world like file folders,
an archive of everything that blooms.

You bring your smoker, of course,
stuffed with straw you pilfered
from some poor scarecrow.
With tear gas & face shield you come,
gloved & booted,
walking gingerly as a boy with his first erection,
praying for the insurgency to die down.