New Enterprise Stone & Lime

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The Tyrone Forge quarry, owned by New Enterprise Stone & Lime, Inc., supplies blacktop, concrete, lime and crushed stone. For us, the quarry is a bit of mixed blessing. Since it’s only a little over a mile away from our houses as the crow flies, we get noise and light pollution from it – though nothing like the folks living right next to it in the villages of Nealmont, Ironville and Tyrone Forge.

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But it’s damned convenient having a source of 2RC gravel so close to the bottom of our lane. “Lane” perhaps fails to convey the reality of a mile-and-a-half-long, one-lane road up a northeast-facing, steep mountain ravine. Road maintenance has been a constant preoccupation for us in the 35 years we’ve lived here. There are always trees to be cleared, rocks to be pitched off, ditches to be dug out, cross-grates to be cleaned (picture half-culvert pipes topped with narrow versions of cattle guards), ruts to be raked out, and potholes to be filled. So they know us pretty well at the quarry. It’s a fairly friendly place, and the state Department of Economic and Community Development has listed New Enterprise as one of the 50 best companies of its size class to work for.

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Up through the 1970s, the quarry was a small, family-owned operation. But when it was bought up by New Enterprise, it began to expand almost overnight, gobbling up hundreds of acres of valuable farmland. Though limestone quarries don’t produce anywhere near the kind of pollution that other forms of mining do, they can still produce a lot of silt runoff, which can have a devastating effect on aquatic life. And the Tyrone Forge quarry sits right on the banks of the Little Juniata River, a high-quality trout stream. According to FlyFishingConnection.com,

Little Juniata River, located in the Southern region of Central Pennsylvania, is a river that’s making a comeback with help from the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission and environmental awareness. Throughout the 1960s, raw sewage and pollutants from local mills ran into the Little Juniata from towns above. Cleanup started in the early ’70s and today, the Little Juniata is a large river with large deep pools, moderate water, and prolific hatches supporting the thousands of fingerlings stocked by the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission each year. This river is one of the finest in the State of Pennsylvania, running through two counties (Blair and Huntington).

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In March, New Enterprise applied for a permit to expand further–

to deepen the quarry, add additional mining and support area, add an additional sediment pond, add a NPDES discharge point, and change the postmining land use on New Enterprise Stone & Lime Company’s property from forest and cropland to unmanaged natural habitat (251.4 acres) and permanent water impoundment (137.4 acres).

So if this is approved, they will become stewards of a small lake and over 250 acres of “natural” habitat.

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Meanwhile, the parent company continues its active involvement in the permanent destruction and fragmentation of habitat through highway construction. In 2000, New Enterprise was the successful bidder for the construction of a ten-mile stretch of the newly christened Interstate 99 just north of here. Thus, it became the official executioner of a once-beautiful section of Bald Eagle Mountain – the very same ridge we live on – tearing a gash out of its wooded flank that in some places reaches all the way to the ridge crest. The quarry roars through the night to supply the stone and concrete for former Congressman Elmer Greinert “Bud” Shuster’s “Highway to Nowhere.” By sheer coincidence, New Enterprise was always a heavy contributor to Shuster’s campaign chest. (It has continued that pattern with Bud’s son and dynastic successor, Bill Shuster. In the current election cycle, Son of Bud is the second-largest recipient of campaign donations from the building materials industry in the U.S. Congress.)

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Bud Shuster was no stranger to such amazing coincidences during his tenure in power. His highway-building zeal found its fullest expression in his chairmanship of the powerful Congressional Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, during which time he aided and abetted the most expensive road construction boondoggle in U.S. history, Boston’s Big Dig. If you live in Boston and have learned to appreciate the convenience and fine workmanship of this engineering marvel, you can thank his stalwart supporters at New Enterprise Stone & Lime – and you can thank us, the residents of Plummer’s Hollow, for helping to keep them in business. Have a nice day.

Band of gypsies

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Eu amava o amor, essa lepra.
I was in love with love, that leprosy.
–Eugénio de Andrade, Matéria Solar

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Thanks to your lightfoot genius
no Eighth Route Army
kept its lines more fluid,
traveled with less baggage,
so nibbled the advantage.
Even with your small bad heart
you made a dance of departures.

–Stanley Kunitz, “After the Last Dynasty”

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The gypsy musician tells the interviewer that his favorite album growing up was by Jimi Hendrix, Band of Gypsies. He had a cassette copy that he listened to thousands of times. He liked it because it was so different from the traditional music his father played. He didn’t speak a word of English then, and had no idea what the title meant.

*

I don’t have a car. Lately, in my dreams, I have been running across train stations in the oddest places, all lit up and waiting for the railroads to come back. Some people are already buying tickets at the window. Homeless people are already moving in.

*

There were lilacs in the above photo, but I cropped them out. If you can’t smell them, what good does it do to see their image? The white in the background is the side of my parents’ house. If it weren’t out-of-focus, you’d see clapboard: about six inches wide near the ground, tapering to less than five near the roof – a trompe l’oiel effect designed to make the house look taller than it is.

*

You are all homeless – says the one god – with me. The thin whisper of a voice is lost in traffic.

A brief inquiry into the manners and customs of fools

I have been thinking about the fools, those anti-heroes of proverb and byword. A whole fool is half a prophet, they say, and A fool is his own informer. Which half of the future does he see – the half without hope, or the half without informers?

The fool is prolific: he grows without rain, they say. He takes liberties. He puts on airs. The fool’s world is a paradise, but better hell with a wise man than the heaven of fools. Don’t they sound jealous, these anonymous pimps for wisdom?

The fool tries patience, proves the rule. You can tell an ass by his long ears, a fool by his long tongue. His laughter resembles the crackling of thorns under a pot, they say: a loud and useless fuel, soon spent. And they say there’s no fool like an old fool, so it seems the elderly must be held in high esteem in the fools’ country. A dead man is mourned for seven days, a fool for a lifetime. What a wise custom, to mourn people while they are alive, so they may appreciate the tributes! For seventy years we learn wisdom – and die fools.

The language of fools – Folly – must be among the hardest to master, because it so easily masquerades as ordinary speech. Answer not a fool according to his folly, says the Book of Proverbs, lest you become like him. But Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he become wise in his own conceit. No foolish consistency at work there!

Clearly, not all proverbs are creations of the wise, though it’s hard to tell which are which. For example: In the country of the fools, a proverb walks with a limp. So what? Balance is where you find it. And why shouldn’t a dog return to his vomit? It’s the only way to discover what really happened! Everyone agrees that God looks after fools, so why should we shun their company?

Proverbs are prickly things, full of acid and the taste of deja vu. Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child, but the rod of correction shall drive it from him, says the Book of Proverbs. What dangerous folly! But aren’t proverbs in general a little like fools? For a fool cannot be questioned or explained, as the Yiddish proverb has it.

If we can’t trust proverbs, what do we really know about these strange people, the fools? Like most tribes, their own name for themselves is doubtless much less derogatory – in fact, it probably means something like “the people.” But given the difficulty of finding reliable informants, this is sheer conjecture. That fools are fond of sweets is an invention of the wise.

One hears about holy fools, though not of late. Fools used to have their own pope, too, chosen by popular acclaim – and vox populi, vox dei, as they say. I don’t think the Pope of Fools did much beyond carrying around a shepherd’s crook with no sheep in sight and issuing bull. But when the festival was over, he went wisely home to his wife.

Some say the fools have a tortoise for a king; we know all about his contest with the too-clever hare. The Yoruba call him Ijapa, and quote his proverbs for laughs – the only safe way to wax proverbial, I suspect. One morsel for the mouth, one morsel for the pocket – the word of Ijapa. What the world calls corruption the corrupt call being prudent. If you’re going to question authority, be sure to ask permission first – the word of Ijapa. Aren’t the best revolutionaries always like the good soldier Schweik?

I think I have identified one authentic saying of fools in the Bible: It rains on the just and the unjust alike. Who but a fool would believe such seditious nonsense? As Ijapa arrived at his in-laws’ house he exposed his penis, saying, “Nobody knows who might like to have a look.”
__________

Sources: Yiddish Proverbs, edited and translated by Hanan J. Ayalti (Schocken, 1949); Holy Bible; A Treasury of African Folklore, by Harold Courlander (Marlowe, 1996).

Becoming animal

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chipmunk among Canada mayflower leaves

The other evening, my fifteen-month-old niece Elanor gave utterance to her first distinct, undeniable series of English words. They were animal sounds.

I had already gone down to my own house, worn out from a day of visiting, so what follows is based on my parents’ account. Elanor loves books – all books, even the ones without pictures – and as the adults talked, it seemed nothing out of the ordinary for her to sit on the couch with one of her favorite books on her lap, slowly turning the pages. It was a picture book for small children called Animal Sounds, which has foldout, cardboard pages, and for novelty’s sake, apparently, she was looking at it upside-down. Her grandpa was the first to notice that Elanor was imitating his pronunciations of the onomatopoeia in a low voice. “Ribbet! Ribbet!” she said as she looked at the upside-down frog. Then she turned the page to the lion cub. “GrrrrrrOWL!”

Dad signaled Mom and Steve to shut up and watch. It was no fluke. “Squawk! Squawk!” said the parrot. Another turn and unfolding of the complicated pages, and the baby elephant was clearly saying “Baroooo!”

*

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tent caterpillars on a wild sweet cherry

And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures of each kind, cattle and crawling things and wild beasts of each kind.” And so it was. And God made wild beasts of each kind and cattle of each kind and all crawling things on the ground of each kind, and God saw that it was good. And God said, “Let us make a human in our image, by our likeness, to hold sway over the fish of the sea and the fowl of the heavens and the cattle and the wild beasts and all the crawling things that crawl upon the earth.”

And God created the human in his image,
in the image of God he created him,
male and female he created them.

(Robert Alter, trans.)

This is the notorious passage in Genesis leading up to God’s first commands: be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and conquer it, hold sway (radah). About this last verb, Alter notes that it is “not the normal Hebrew word for ‘rule’ […] and in most of the contexts in which it occurs it seems to suggest an absolute or even fierce exercise of mastery.”

Could we ask for a more explicit expression of the kind of anthropocentrism that has fueled our current environmental malaise? And yet the passage is not without redeeming qualities. Notice, for example, that wild animals and creepy-crawlies are given equal standing with livestock. This is consistent with other parts of the Bible, such as the 104th Psalm and the last chapters of Job, which explicitly recognize the claims of untrammeled nature. One can also see some irony in the account of humanity’s separate creation. While all other earthly inhabitants were brought into being through the utterance of spells – or prayers, if you like – the human is fashioned by reference to an image, as idols are made. This is brought home by the parallel Creation myth that begins a few verses later, in which God literally fashions the man out of clay, and simultaneously gives birth to the world’s first bad pun (“‘adam, ‘human,’ from the soil, ‘adamah,” as Alter puts it).

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yellow mandarin

These thoughts were sparked by an entry in a new (to me) blog called everydayandeverynight.com, by Rabbi Shai Gluskin. According to Rabbi Gluskin’s post Shade Under Sun, the word tzelim, “image” or “idol,” derives from the word for shade or shadow, tzel.

We are idols made of flesh and bone, mere shadows of God. Certainly we shouldn’t be worshiped. Though not the real thing, we do share some of God’s qualities.

Taking refuge in the shade, safe from God’s blinding light we can look up and see the canopy illuminated. This illumination is akin to our inspiration.

We can, however, forget to look up. We may, like Adam, delude ourselves into thinking we can hide from God. The shadow then is no longer a protector from God’s blinding light, but a vice to run away [into].

I like the way Rabbi Gluskin grounds his interpretation in the arboreal imagery of spring. Elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, trees are explicitly recognized as a potential focus of idolatry, reflecting the historical competition of the Yahwist cult with the cult of the Asherim. In fact, in the second chapter of Genesis, the humans’ first openly idolatrous behavior is toward a tree.

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a Baltimore oriole harvesting insects from young black walnut leaves

Let’s step back a few verses, though. In the first Creation account, as I mentioned, non-human animals are not shaped, but merely spoken into being. Given the primacy accorded to mindful prayer in Jewish tradition, wouldn’t this actually threaten to raise their ontological status above that of humans? Perhaps the original compilers of the Bible thought so, too, because in the second story, we see the order of (male) human and animal creation reversed – and this time, God fashions all creatures from the soil, and subcontracts out to Adam the job of giving them names.

But were these creatures, too, fashioned after pre-existing prototypes – are they “made in the image of God”? If God works the way a sculptor does, shouldn’t we expect him to project some element of his own identity into his work, like any artist?

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gaywings, or fringed polygala

Of course, it would be absurd to accuse God Himself of idolatry. But he does seem to be actively encouraging Adam’s own tendencies in that direction, fashioning the animals one by one not only “to see what he would call it,” but also to see if any of them would appeal to him as a “sustainer.” When none seem to fit the bill, the female human is created while the male sleeps, almost like a sexual fantasy given flesh. The stage is set for idolatry, loss of innocence, fear and exile. Alter says,

The Hebrew ‘ezer kenegdo (King James Version “help meet”) is notoriously difficult to translate. The second term means “alongside him,” “a counterpart to him.” “Help” is too weak because it suggests a merely auxiliary function, whereas ‘ezer elsewhere connotes active intervention on behalf of someone, especially in military contexts, as often in Psalms.

But the Psalms are directed toward God, are they not? Did the authors of this myth mean to suggest that in his yearning for a flesh-and-bone sustainer, Adam was already drawing away from God? His first recorded utterance is no psalm, but an impassioned poem to the woman – a naming-poem, a spell.

The language used for Eve’s creation, says Alter, is architectural rather than sculptural: the verb means “to build” rather than “to shape,” and “the Hebrew for ‘rib,’ tsela’, is also used elsewhere to designate an architectural element.” (This imagery helps set the stage for the Tower of Babel story, perhaps. Or at least suggests that we should see the Tower as anthropomorphic, if not theomorphic.) The idolatrous impulse here is quickly realized with the entrance of the first non-human animal a few verses later. No sooner have we been told that the man and woman “become one flesh” and that “the two of them were naked … and they were not ashamed,” then the serpent appears to set them against each other. And the main descriptor used for the serpent, ‘arum, “cunning,” is a play on ‘arumim, “naked.”

Thus, guided by the active intervention of one of the animals Adam named, Eve “saw that the tree was good for eating and that it was lust to the eyes and the tree was lovely to look at, and she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave to her man, and he ate.” The word translated as “lust” will appear often in the exhortations of the prophets, for whom lust and idolatry seem to have been closely linked.

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blue-gray gnatcatcher on scarlet oak sapling

Eve’s first act is to look for her own ‘ezer kenegdo, it seems. Forget for a moment the millennia of moralistic and sexist interpretations based on the premise that the rightful place for righteous humans is back in some otherworldly version of that paradise. Forget the quintessentially priestly assumption that ignorance – unthinking obedience – is bliss. What the Genesis Creation stories really suggest is that rebellion is somehow intrinsic to created beings. A thing is no sooner named, fashioned, or dreamed up – a child is no sooner birthed – than it acquires its own personality, as every artist or parent knows. Self becomes Other, and Other then returns to open the eyes of the Self. The pivotal importance of the serpent in the Genesis story (the devil is nowhere in sight) almost bridges the gap between this and other tribal Creation myths, where animal tricksters also play central roles. By the time we get to Abraham and Sarah – let alone Jacob, Job and the Prophets – we find human beings capable of telling God a thing or two.

What could we possibly know that an omniscient God does not? Humility: the dawning recognition that we are not, in fact, the center of the universe. A sense of wonder. Without some measure of selflessness, is true empathy possible? The infant, godlike in her egotism, can hardly begin to imagine herself as another being; her squawks and chirps and cries are solely her own. Only with the growth of other-consciousness can she become capable of the imagination necessary for anthropomorphizing empathy. If – as eco-philosopher Paul Shepard asserted – it is the animals that made us human, could we not also say without any impiety that it is humans who taught a violent and amoral god how to be Good?

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Photo from last year’s trip to the reptile zoo. See here and here.

__________

UPDATE: Steve tells me that Elanor had actually been saying “Woof, woof!” now and then for a month or so, and that the evening before her “reading” of the animal sounds book, she had added a second element to her vocabulary: “Tickle, tickle!” Make of that what you will.

&

Dave,

I’d like to use your poem Grace in the upcoming issue of _____. It’s a beautiful piece, but I would much prefer to spell out the word “and” throughout rather than using the “&.” How do you feel about this? We’re going to run it in either case, and we will, of course, respect your decision.
[…]

C.

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C.,

[…]
Ampersands: I love ’em! I know that poems with ampersands are looked down on by the mainstream poetry establishment these days, and some readers may find them off-putting. But I like “&” because it is an ideograph, one of the few permitted in our otherwise alphabetic language, and so connects us more viscerally to the world of signs and tracks and omens.

In addition, “and” is one of my favorite words, because of the way it can bring disparate things together and lead the mind off in new directions, so I don’t mind calling attention to it.

That said, however, I’m very curious about your reasons for wanting to spell out all the “and”s in this poem. I’m not completely inflexible on this point.
[…]

Dave

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Dave,

[…]
As for ampersands, I guess I’m just one of those people that are put off by them in formal text. I find that they interrupt my concentration–and that I end up paying attention to the &, rather than focusing on the word it represents.

That said, your argument for using them was very nicely stated. And in the end, I’ll be fine with whatever decision you make.
[…]

C.

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What do you think? Is anyone else out there put off by ampersands in poems, or other text?

I find them curvy and sensuous – little women, almost. “&” could be a pictograph of a woman holding a child – not an inappropriate image, considering the fecundity of the word it represents, often replaced by a mere pause, a catch in the breath represented by a spermatozoal comma. To me, ampersands make a printed poem a bit more tactile, subconsciously recalling the link with calligraphy – and with my childhood, when I taught myself poetry and calligraphy together. I don’t remember when and I why I picked up the habit of using the ampersand for every “and” in my poems except at the beginnings of sentences, but it has become deeply engrained.

And being suspicious of any and all habits, I’m grateful to C. for making me question it. Does it really make sense to risk distracting the reader with this anachronism?

Some time ago, the redoubtable Languagehat gave his imprimatur to a page from Adobe that traces the history of the ampersand. I had known it came from a ligature for the Latin et (“and”). But I hadn’t realized that it still serves as a sort of touchstone for modern type designers, the one character where they can really let their imaginations roam.

There are many interesting variations of the ampersand, such as those created by the talented Ludovico degli Arrighi, the Renaissance writing master (fig. 8 ), and Robert Granjon, the gifted 16th century French type designer (fig. 9). The new Poetica typeface family, which was designed by Robert Slimbach of Adobe and based on Cancelleresca, the commercial writing hand used during the Italian Renaissance, offers a rich collection of 58 different ampersand characters (fig. 12).

Ampersand usage varies from language to language. In English and French text, the ampersand may be substituted for the words and and et, and both versions may be used in the same text. The German rule is to use the ampersand within formal or corporate titles made up of two separate names; according to present German composition rules, the ampersand may not be used in running text. In any language, the ampersand’s calligraphic qualities make it a compelling design element that can add visual appeal and personality to any page.

Some version of the ampersand appears in most languages that use a Roman script, so it gives any text that employs it a sort of window into the wider, polylingual universe. It is also an important element in many computer languages. Character entity references in HTML all begin with an ampersand, which further reinforces – in my mind at least – the connection between ampersands and the dream of a common language.

__________

Ampersand image of “Humanist minuscule, 1453 A.D.” borrowed from the above-linked Adobe page.

Stalking the horned fungus beast

Last Thursday, after I re-found the blister beetles for my brother Steve, we walked back through the flowering oak woods. It was a sunny day, and the woods were filled with butterflies.

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Juvenal’s duskywing (Erynnis juvenalis) – not to be confused with the very similar Horace’s duskywing, which emerges later on in the summer – almost disappears when it lands on the forest floor. It’s strongly associated with dry, upland oak habitat, emerging from the chrysalis just as the oaks are bursting their buds. We were probably seeing males patrolling for females; each seemed to circle a fairly small area.

After mating, the female duskywing will lay her eggs singly on scattered oak leaves. The caterpillar will munch away on its oak leaf in splendid isolation – unlike, say, tent caterpillars – and will roll the leaf around itself like a sleeping bag whenever it rests. To each his own method of camping out, I guess. The adults feed on nectar from a number of species, including blueberry, which is the main ground cover here. They are said to sleep “with wings folded rooflike over the back, in the manner of a moth.”

A brilliant green six-spotted tiger beetle lands on the trail in front of me, and I go into the photographer’s crouch (see the photo in Friday’s post). This is quite possibly the most-photographed beetle species in the world, Steve says. He adds that when he was a kid, he used to have to go to the Scotia Barrens near State College to find any tiger beetles, but thirty years later, Cicindela sexguttata has become a common resident here on the mountain. I wonder if that might not be due to an increase in available prey. As a forest matures, it becomes structurally more diverse, with more forest openings and fallen woody debris, and insect numbers and diversity increase correspondingly.

Tiger beetles are famous for their ferocity, but there’s more to them than that. After six-spotted tiger beetles mate, the male rides around on the female’s back for a while to make sure nobody else gets a chance at her. Or at least, that’s how the scientists explain it. I suppose it might just be a prolonged afterglow.

We pass a fallen scarlet oak log, and Steve gets his knife out. “Oak logs like this are a gold mine – you never know what you’re going to find,” he says happily as he begins ripping off pieces of bark. Grubs and spiders go scurrying.

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Daylight crashes rudely in on a scarab beetle larva, which squirms and burrows deeper into the rot as I snap its picture. It somehow manages to be both beautiful and repulsive at the same time.

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A brilliant green halictid bee pauses in front of a slug. Perhaps we’ve just interrupted something important; we’ll never know. “Halictid” means “salt-loving,” Steve informs me. “There are a huge number of species, including those little sweat bees that like to sting after they’re finished drinking your sweat. But most of them are harmless, like this one.”

We spot two tiny snails, barely a millimeter across. Snails were one of the earliest animals to colonize land, and they’ve been doing quite well in the 350 million years since. By some estimates, one acre of moist temperate woods might harbor 1.5 million snails; a montane forest in Panama was estimated to hold 7.5 million snails. I guess if you know what you’re doing, you’d never have to go hungry. But one can only eat so much escargot.

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Our most spectacular find was an orange-red larva of an elaterid, or click beetle. Some click beetle larvae – smaller than this one – are known as wireworms, and arouse fear and loathing in many gardeners. But adult click beetles are every kid’s favorite insect, especially the huge eyed elators with false eye spots on the back of the thorax. Click beetles are so called because of their unique, two-step defensive strategy. First, they roll over on their backs and play possum, without the grin. If that doesn’t work and the predator – or a finger – actually makes contact, they flex the head and thorax backward, then suddenly straighten out with an audible click that fires their bodies several inches into the air.

“Not too much is known about beetle larvae in general – they’ve hardly been studied at all,” Steve notes. Most of what we think we know is based on what we can most easily see, so even for relatively charismatic insect species like tiger beetles and click beetles, we have few notions about their behavior during the 90-some percent of their lives spent in the juvenile form.

The limitations of our current method of investigation – rapid roof removal – for learning anything about insect behavior are obvious. In one crevasse, we surprise a pair of cave crickets, side by side but not mating. They sweep their amazingly long and sensitive antennae back and forth like a blind person feeling for the curb. I can’t resist quoting from a Japanese website:

Many of cave crickets have the round back, it has the form of having been the thickset, and there is no wing. Hind legs and an antenna are very long and detect existence of a surrounding situation and a foreign enemy in darkness by shaking and moving this antenna from back to a front. In the color of the body, it is brown, an eye degenerates, and, as for gray or the thing which was adapted for the cave, the body is soft. It lives by preference under the damp places in a cave etc., and a stone and the fallen tree.

Cave crickets are omnivorous, and can go for a long time without food. To stave off starvation, they will eat their own legs, one by one.

“Oak logs are the best,” Steve says as we make our way down to the stream. “You won’t find anywhere near the same level of biodiversity under the bark of a pine log, for example.” I feel another piece of the ecological puzzle snapping into place. I knew that oaks were keystone species in the Appalachian forest, but I had always thought in terms of acorns and den trees – the scale I’m familiar with. From what Steve is saying, it sounds as if, prior to the death of an oak, its contribution to the food web has barely begun. And doubtless a wood so prized by invertebrates must furnish more than its fair share of nutrients for soil microorganisms, as well.

We pass a beech log, and Steve pulls back a strip of bark to show me a smooth, unpopulated surface. But then he spots an old bracket fungus, A.K.A. artist’s conk. “This is where you find stuff on a beech log,” he says. He pulls it off and shows me the underside, which is pocked with small craters.

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“These are the exit holes of Bolitotherus cornutus, whose name translates as ‘horned fungus beast’! Here, let’s find one so you can get a picture of it.” He starts digging into the rotten conk with his fingers. “A-ha!”

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That’s an insect?”

“Yup. I’ll put it on my hand so you can get a better look.”

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“It’s a type of tenebrionid, or darkling beetle,” Steve explains. Most tenebrionids are desert dwellers, but this species has adapted to life inside rotten shelf fungi. It isn’t so much camouflaged as thoroughly imbued with its environment, which is caked between the ridges of blunt, tuber-shaped projections on its back. A much better picture of a clean female fungus beast can be seen here. The accompanying photo of a male shows the horns for which it was named. It looks like nothing so much as a miniature Triceratops.

According an abstract of a paper I found online, B. cornutus has well-developed wings, but has never been observed to actually use them, preferring, apparently, to walk. In a mark-and-recapture study, a few individuals were found at distances greater than those predicted from observations of its regular style of locomotion. Perhaps they did short sprints when no one was watching.

Epithalamium, with images from the Brothers Grimm

The French woman who received the world’s first partial face transplant has complete feeling in the new tissue five months after the operation, she told a Sunday newspaper.

Isabelle Dinoire, 38, also told the newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche that the hardest part of her recovery appears to be getting to know herself again. When asked if she has accepted her new face, she responded: “It’s too difficult to explain.”
AP

1. Prince Charming
A bad week. She swallowed
pills, eight
little erasers

& while she lay on
the floor with her mind
elsewhere, the golden Lab

brought his famished
tongue across her face.
Unclipped toe-

nails click
on the cold linoleum
as the dog goes

to his bed, comes back
for another lick, & finally begins
to nibble.

He starts with the lips,
like any faithful lover.
That faint half-smile.

2. Mirror, mirror
The only mirror she kept
in her apartment
lies face-down when not in use.

Every day she checks
a small flag of skin that
the doctors implanted

right above her navel: white
or gray would signal
surrender. Every day

when she pulls up
her blouse, she feels
something turn over inside,

some phantom embryo
forming without nose
or chin, the mouth

a permanent wound
no lips can ever hope
to zipper shut.

3. Cinderella story
The organ
donor’s face comes
slowly back to life.

Too young
to have had laugh lines
or crows’ feet,

it was smooth
& as firm at first
as a glass slipper.

Now, after
the delicate diplomacy
of scalpel and suture,

the awkward wedding over,
it slowly fills
once again with feeling,

softens
in the heat
of an unfamiliar dance.
__________

An epithalamium is a wedding poem. For a brief history of the form, see here.

Incidentally, submissions are still open for the current qarrtsiluni theme, “an opening in the body.”

May Day

What a pleasure to see International Worker’s Day return to the U.S., the country that gave it birth! Arise ye workers from your slumbers, I said to myself this morning as I watched the bread yeast bubbling up in the bowl. Bread and roses, I muttered an hour later as I introduced the glutinous “sponge” to the mix of oil, salt, ten-grain cereal and blackstrap molasses. Rise up!

International Workers’ Day (a name used interchangeably with May Day) is the commemoration of the Haymarket Riot of 1886 in Chicago, Illinois, and a celebration of the social and economic achievements of the international labor movement. The 1 May date is used because in 1884 the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, inspired by labor’s 1872 success in Canada, demanded an eight-hour workday in the United States to come in effect as of May 1, 1886. This resulted in a general strike and the riot in Chicago of 1886, but eventually also in the official sanction of the eight-hour workday. The May Day Riots of 1894 and May Day Riots of 1919 occurred subsequently. […]
The Red Scare periods ended May Day as a mass holiday in the United States, a phenomenon which can be seen as somewhat ironic given that May Day originated in Chicago. Meanwhile, in countries other than the United States and United Kingdom, resident working classes fought hard to make May Day an official governmentally-sanctioned holiday, efforts which eventually largely succeeded. For this reason, May Day in most of the world today is marked by huge street rallies of workers led by their trade unions and various large socialist and communist parties — a phenomenon not generally seen in the U.S. (which has a history of strong anti-communism) or the UK. [Refer to the Wikipedia article for links.]

So today’s nationwide, one-day strike by Hispanic immigrant workers – condemned equally by George W. Bush and liberal icon Ted Kennedy – is an historic event, and augurs well for the future of organized labor. Already, over the past decade and a half, American workers have seen a bit of life return to the moribund labor movement as Mexican immigrants, in particular, have begun to organize. Immigrants are becoming as important to the U.S. economy as they were in the late 19th century, and are bringing similarly radical values – such as the idea that food, clothing and shelter are rights, not privileges, and the conviction that authorities are never to be completely trusted. This seems only appropriate, since the dominance of corporations and the gap between rich and poor are returning to levels not seen since the age of the robber barons.

This time around, though, we’ll need to organize whole communities, not just workplaces, and we’ll have to organize by ecoregion, not just by industry. The labor and environmental movements will have to work together. You may wonder why someone working for his parents ‘way out in the country should be so concerned about all this. But here in the Appalachians, we can’t afford not to care. Ridgetop forests are dying hundreds of miles to the east of the massive coal-burning power plants of the Ohio Valley – to say nothing of the terrible and irreversible destruction visited upon those mountains and mountain people unlucky enough to have coal under them. The mine wars of the 1920s and 30s in Kentucky and West Virginia were as brutal as any struggles in the long, bloody history of the American labor movement. The United Mine Workers won – but for what? So they could help perpetuate an inherently exploitative industry? So their descendents would be deprived of clean air, potable water, soil, wildlife, the very horizon – and would ultimately lose their jobs to mechanization anyway? They should’ve heeded the message of those idealistic young female textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, who – according to James Oppenheimer, who wrote their song – “battle[d] too for men.” I would go so far as to say that an overwhelming focus on bread, to the exclusion of roses, has been the downfall of the American labor movement.

As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient song of Bread;
Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew–
Yes, bread we fight for–but we fight for Roses, too.
[Search itunes for recorded versions by Joan Baez, Judy Collins and Ani DiFranco]

I thought of taking the day off to show solidarity with international workers, but I already dodged work yesterday to finish reading a novel I’d gotten sucked into (fiction being my personal – and very occasional – opiate). So I still have to plant fifty pine trees. Plus, we’re all out of bread.

Hot off the presses

Two bloggers I read have new books out. Rachel Barenblat of Velveteen Rabbi has published a 24-page chapbook of her chaplain poems, chaplainbook, under the new Laupe House imprint. And Fred First of Fragments from Floyd has published Slow Road Home: A Blue Ridge Book of Days with his Goose Creek Press imprint. Congratulations to both authors! I take inspiration not only from their well-crafted words, but also from their example. Self-published, cooperatively published and print-on-demand books seem like a natural extension of the blogging ethos.

*

Speaking of natural extensions, I’ve just adapted Smorgasblog to fit my sidebar – scroll down past the Archives. The sidebar template had no problem with the HTML; it was a simple copy-and-paste job, sparing me the trouble of actually learning the language the blog template is written in (PHP), at least for now.

Links added since my last Smorgasblog update include: Numenius of Feathers of Hope on Vandana Shiva; Dick Jones on friendships between bloggers; Rachel Barenblatt on coming to terms with Jewish concepts of “purity” and “impurity”; Jarrett Walker on Jane Jacobs; a Nigerian commenter at the cassandra pages on Wole Soyinka; Patry Francis on equanimity; and Rexroth’s Daughter on being crabby. Check it out!

The way things are

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It’s right there in front of you, that Shangri-La, that eternal spring.

I mean, how else would it keep finding its way into your camera? You click the shutter thinking that you’re taking a picture of one thing, and hours later when you look at the results, you see something more, like those double-exposed pictures that the Victorians tried to pass off as photographs of ghosts.

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“I have a similar train of thought at peak of each season,” says the sylph, “a desire to stop the world for a geologic minute, a general sadness that it will pass.” Me too.

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But the passage itself is so beautiful: that way-making, that semi-conscious inscription of memories in nerve-map and neural net, in slowly fraying muscle, in thinning bone. Heraclitus’ river, the one you can’t step into twice? Why not say that it is reborn each moment, like any stream or spring? The Indians of La Florida – the flowering land – didn’t lie when they told Ponce de Leon about a fountain of eternal youth. They couldn’t know that he would put a self-centered spin on it.

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six-spotted tiger beetle

In my camera’s Shangri-La, green tigers stalk the numerous descendents of those wasps who long ago fell to earth and lost their wings. Birth alternates with death and joy with suffering, as in any divine comedy; only those for whom all distinction between individual and tribal existence is meaningless can escape death. And these immortals – too small to be glimpsed except through the finest optics – are running the show.

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Welcome to planet Earth.