Knots

barn knots 1

Near where I found the dead man’s fingers, a murder of crows — as they say — harassed the treetops, shrill with complaint and denunciation, rage rattling in dozens of crow throats. I couldn’t see what they were mobbing, even after I climbed the slope to the base of the tree that seemed to be at the center of the swirling and diving shapes. It was around ten o’clock on a chilly morning. The sky was gray, and the birch and witch hazel leaves glowed yellow under the dark canopy where darker wings clipped against oak leaves, precipitating a rain of acorns. I never heard the wings of their foe, whose changing position I could only infer when all the crows suddenly rose at once and moved downridge, but by that very silence knew it could only have been an owl.

barn knots 2

High winds a week ago felled a few trees seemingly at random. Not far from where the crows had been, I discovered a good-sized red oak tree that had snapped near the base and lay head-down against the mountainside, its entire green city of leaves upended. I hiked up to the stump and peered in at a chaos of red-brown wood. I saw no sign of rot, no carpenter ant galleries, nothing to explain why an 80-year-old tree would snap like that, in the prime of life. As I stood there — without my camera, forced to take a long, close look — a chipmunk popped up right in front of me and ran straight down into the center of the rent. I held my breath — what if the tree suddenly settled a few inches? But the chipmunk came back out, saw me, and froze. I took a few slow steps backwards. These leaves would turn brown in a few weeks, I knew, but it would be a year or more before they fell. Having fallen itself, the tree would hold tight to the very sails that caused it to capsize.

barn knots 3

We drive by an Amish schoolhouse every time we go to buy vegetables and dry goods at our favorite Amish farmstand and store in the neighboring valley. In fact, the very first time we went out there, following a map that one of the proprietors had made for us when we stopped by her booth at the farmer’s market, we were surprised to find that the Amish kids already seemed to know us. The school had just let out, and kids of all ages were running along the road. “Hi, Mrs. Bonta!” one of them shouted to my mother as we drove past, waving.

barn knots 4

Two autumns ago, the township supervisors in their wisdom decided to park a heavy truck right on top of a large culvert pipe under the gravel road that leads into the farmstand, to try and keep it from washing out in the flood from Hurricane Ivan. The usually dry creekbed turned into a torrent and, as the bemused Amish neighbors watched, in the middle of the night the back of the truck slowly sank from sight.

We happened by a few days later, on the very morning the township decided to try and raise the truck, which stood almost on end in the creek where the poorly constructed culvert-bridge had been. Close to a hundred local residents, Amish and non-Amish alike, gathered around. Some brought lawn chairs and video cameras. Suddenly I saw kids pouring out of the schoolhouse a quarter mile away. Their teacher had obviously given up trying to keep them focused on their lessons; here was education of a different sort. I watched as they romped and played in the pasture next to the creek, little different from any other kids their age. At one point, one of the smallest boys picked up a large rock and held it over his head, unsteadily. Then he heaved it a girl. It looked as if it landed on her foot, or pretty close to it. I saw her turn and yell. He wandered off, the brim of his straw hat tipped down at a thoughtful angle.

barn knots 5

Early last week, when I accompanied my mother on a vegetable run, the kids were all out on recess behind the schoolhouse. They were playing softball, boys and girls together. Just as we drove by, I saw a lanky kid of ten or eleven swing at the ball, then start for first base with one hand on his hat, bare feet flying.
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My apologies to dial-up users for the size of the photos in this post, which may be my last post until Sunday or Monday.

All five photos were taken on the northwest side of our barn. The barn has been painted twice since it was built a hundred years ago: first red, then, sometime in the fifties or sixties, white to match the houses. I was thinking of the quote in yesterday’s post: “In good weather, funerals are often held in barns.”

Spring wildflowers: where are they now?

rue anemone leaves“Spring ephemerals” is the catch-all term for the woodland perennial wildflowers whose brief blooming period occurs just before the full leaf-out of the forest canopy. Some, like Canada mayflower and wake-robin, are what my mother calls true ephemerals, melting back into the leaf litter after setting seed sometime in the middle of the summer. Others, including the violets, hepatica, foamflower and rue anemone — shown here — persist as nondescript leaves among the silverrod and white wood aster, before the drifts of falling leaves bury them. (For a photo of rue anemone in bloom, see here.)

Solomon's plume in berry 1

Those that fruit in the autumn, though, tend to put on a colorful display to make sure that their berries will be found and eaten. For Jack-in-the-pulpit, the large clump of red berries is enough of an advertisement all by itself; its leaves have usually turned brown and fallen by this point. Many others, though, rely on yellow leaves as well as bright orange or red fruit, including wild sarsaparilla, ginseng, and Solomon’s plume (above).

Solomon's seal in berry

This time of year, no one would think to confuse Solomon’s plume, which used to be called false Solomon’s seal, with Solomon’s seal — one of several fall-fruiting plants with blue berries. Another is Indian cucumber root, whose blue-black fruits are set off by a small patch of red at the center of the top whorl of leaves, which don’t seem to be in any hurry to turn yellow.

Indian cucumber root in berry

Though not a spring wildflower per se, wild yam’s attractive, heart-shaped leaves with strongly creased, parallel veins often attract attention in wildflower time. Though the basal leaves are typically opposite in groups of four, later leaves alternate along the vine, which can exceed fifteen feet in length. Wild yam bears inconspicuous male and female flowers in the summer, and by early autumn, its once-showy leaves are yellowing and dropping off. The unique seedpods can make a good addition to dried flower arrangements, but being brown, they can be hard to spot this time of year. I had to make a special search to locate these; the spider had chosen a good place to lie in ambush.

wild yam fruits with spider

Come January, however, wild yam seedpods will be quite visible against the snow, as we wander through the woods barely able to remember the seven-month-long display of warmth and color.

Festival of the Trees 4 – Hoarded Trees!

pinesaps (unpollinated)

Check out the 4th Edition of the Festival of the Trees at Hoarded Ordinaries. Lorianne has included some great tree pictures, including fog- and lichen-draped pines and a wonderfully grotesque, be-burled spruce. And, as always, be sure to follow the links for another enjoyable ramble in the woods.

If you’re wondering what the above photo is doing in a post about trees, pinesaps are epiparasitic on trees.* They’re closely related to the better-known Indian pipes, but tend to be much more colorful, and bloom a couple months later here in Central Pennsylvania. After pollination, they tip their flower-cups toward the sky.

pinesaps (pollinated)

*(Update – the above post was written in extreme haste) Pinesaps derive their nutrients through the fungal symbionts of trees, which act as a nutrient bridge beween tree and flower. Botanists are divided on whether pinesaps are essentially parasitic, or whether they might give something back.

Another chance

another chance 1

A twig falls from a tree and lands on my hat — I feel a gentle tap, much too light for an acorn. I take the hat off and watch as the twig arches and inches forward: an inchworm, the larva of a geometer moth.

another chance 2

It crosses the machine-stitched message on the front of the cap — another chance — and the lower wing of the ivory-billed woodpecker. I bought the cap last November on a visit to Brinkley, Arkansas (see here and here) and have worn it regularly ever since. The colors have faded quite a bit. The dot of yellow thread in the woodpecker’s eye has become virtually invisible, and its black-and-white suit looks ready for a trip to the cleaners. Unfortunately, it’s hard to wash a ball cap without shrinking it or warping the brim.

another chance 3

I am among those who continue to believe in the ivorybill’s rediscovery, because I believe in Occam’s Razor, that rule of logic which asserts that the simplest explanation that accounts for every case is most likely to be correct. The many small pieces of evidence and testimony, though hardly unassailable by themselves, do add up, inch by inch. Skepticism and cynicism risk nothing, but they also offer few rewards beyond the sense of membership in an elite club of fellow Brights.

another chance 4

Geometer means “earth-measurer.” The inchworm — also known as a spanworm or looper — takes the earth’s measure with its body, one prostration at a time. This isn’t a progress, but a pilgrimage, with no goal other than to be a caterpillar: it very likely has no notion that any transformation lies ahead. It reaches the far side of my hat and stretches out into space. I flick it onto the ground and watch to make sure that its course takes it away from the tractor tires. The next morning, there’s news of another ivorybill discovery, this time in the Florida panhandle.

another chance 5

Our observations, acoustic encounters, audio recordings, measurements of cavities, and analysis of feeding sign provide evidence that Ivory-billed Woodpeckers may live along the Choctawhatchee River in the Florida panhandle. In a 1-year period from 21 May 2005 to 19 May 2006, members of our search team saw birds that we identified as Ivory-billed Woodpeckers 14 times. We heard sounds matching Ivory-billed Woodpecker kent calls and double knocks, and our listening stations recorded numerous putative kent calls and double knocks, including both sounds at the same recorder on the same day. At the location of our sightings and sound detections, we documented trees with very large cavities with dimensions exceeding the published range for Pileated Woodpecker cavities and exceeding sizes of cavities measured in a nearby area where Ivory-billed Woodpeckers are known not to occur. Also at this same location, and sometimes on the very trees with large cavities, we observed bark scaling unlike that seen in other southern bottomland forests. Any one of our lines of evidence could be dismissed as coincidental or a mistake, but together, these observations, collected by experienced ornithologists, suggest that Ivory-billed Woodpeckers may be present in the Florida panhandle. The persistence of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers will be established definitively only by a clear photograph or video image, a fresh feather, or perhaps genetic analysis of material from a nest or roost cavity, but the evidence presented here warrants an expanded search and protection of this bottomland forest habitat.

It seems we may still have another chance to get it right.
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For more on the Florida panhandle ivorybills, see the evidence presented by the authors of the new report at their respective websites: Geoffrey Hill and Daniel Mennill.

Foggy morning ramble

grape tendrilThe fog didn’t burn off this morning until after 11:00, prolonging the dim, early morning light for hours. At times, the sun would break through for a few minutes, only to disappear again when more fog billowed up from the valley. I went for a slow ramble on an empty stomach, which probably sounds like a lot less fun than it was. Walking through the woods, I kept to the moss as much as possible, thrice surprising deer at close range where they had bedded down among the laurel and huckleberries. They leapt to their feet and went crashing off into the fog.

Nyssa leaf webAt first light, I’d listened to the wicka-wicka-wicka calls of migrant wood thrushes, interwoven with the back-and-forth hooting of great-horned owls a half-mile away. The resident thrushes stopped singing at the end of the first week of August, and presumably headed south shortly thereafter. Since then, our mountain has provided temporary shelter for who knows how many hundreds or thousands more wood thrushes from points farther north. They fly all night, touch down around dawn and forage all morning, fueling up for the next stage of their epic journey. Now, around nine o’clock, I spot one flitting about in a black gum sapling beside the trail, presumably searching for the high-calorie berries signaled by the already-turned, bright orange leaves.

peeling globeOut in the field, the cloying odor of goldenrod mingles with the pungent stench of cow manure wafting up from some freshly sprayed field in Sinking Valley. The resulting mixture actually isn’t bad. I once heard a radio interview with an inventor of perfumes, who explained that a successful scent had to have something really putrid in the mix in order to achieve a proper balance. “A bit of skunk can give just the right note of excitement,” she said.

A monarch butterfly appears out of the fog, already flying at 55 degrees Fahrenheit. It flaps and glides low over the goldenrod, landing every fifty feet or so. I set off in pursuit of it, which isn’t too big a challenge: its slow, meandering course is a good fit with my own pace. But it’s going to take us a while to get to Mexico.

foggy monarch

Off color

xylophoneCompany policy dictated the wearing of bright colors for all male employees. One senior manager wore a sky-blue suit with a scarlet tie; another wore orange slacks and a green sport coat. Maracas were issued to everyone in management, with instructions on how to use them and when. I’m not sure what I was doing there. Probably I had been hired through a temp agency and kept on indefinitely, despite my failure to observe the rules about fun. But now they were trying to make me part of the team.

Along with one other guy, I was taken downstairs to the plush offices of the Chief Financial Officer, who always wore mirrored sunglasses, he said, to protect his eyes from the glare of the suits — including his own, which was a vibrant purple. He spoke in a low, conspiratorial whisper. “What they want us to do now,” he said, “is watch some silly training video. But I don’t think you two really need any more training. I got some other ideas — come on, have a seat.”

I sank into the plush leather armchair and directed my gaze toward the screen while the CFO fiddled with the projector. “I know, I know. We can build the most sophisticated weapons delivery systems known to man, but can any of us operate a simple projector? No, we cannot,” he said with a self-deprecating chuckle. C’mon — how dumb do you think we are? I remember thinking just before the first of the lurid images appeared on the screen.

The CFO maintained the avuncular tone throughout, supplying the only soundtrack to the silent movies of rape and incest and torture. “Good stuff, eh guys?” I found myself nodding in agreement — I wanted the job. When the lights came back on, I forced myself to smile. Our new friend handed us each a pair of sunglasses identical to his own. “Welcome to the firm,” he said.

That was my last dream this morning before I woke. Don’t ever let anyone tell you we dream in black and white — a silly notion — though sometimes maybe I wish I could. Outside it was overcast and threatening rain.

springhouse in the rain

The other day around 3:00 in the afternoon, the sun broke through in the middle of a downpour. In the little marsh across the road, the roof of the springhouse shone brightly through the curtain of rain. It was beautiful. Fog began to form almost immediately, the rain turning back into clouds as soon as it hit the ground. When it slackened off, I rushed up into the field to watch the last of the mist rising off the goldenrod.

path to the clouds

By the following morning, off-and-on showers had given way to a steady rain. My brother brought his year-and-a-half-old daughter up for a visit and they horsed around for a while in my parents’ library. She has been drawn to books ever since she could sit upright — even large books without words. She loves sitting and turning the pages of her daddy’s scholarly tomes, or visiting the public library with her mother. If her grandpa doesn’t sit down and read one of her favorite children’s books to her as soon as they arrive, she gets very out-of-sorts. And I have to say, whenever she comes to visit, the books up on the shelves suddenly seem considerably less solemn and reserved, as if they know it won’t be too many more years before a new reader takes them down, one by one, and translates their black-and-white pages into joyful sound.

playing in the library

(As usual, click on the photos to see the full-size versions, which may take a little while to load at slower modem speeds.)

Planting sang

Sing a song of sang, that human root:
wrinkled homunculus growing slow as thought.
Even the seeds take twenty months to sprout,
stones that finish growing in the ground
as if traveling through the interminable gut
of some great beast that vanished in the Pleistocene.
Sing a song of burying in haste,
the berries’ flesh a tempting prize for mold.
So if picked on a morning in early September,
nestled into a plastic vial & sent by overnight mail,
you must plant them as soon as they arrive —
don’t put it off till after supper.

Choose each resting-place with care,
moving slowly through the woods & stopping often.
Pretend you’re burying a grandparent, piece by piece.
Make a hole with your index finger
no deeper than the second knuckle,
drop the blood-colored berry in & cover it up.
Pray for uninterrupted sleep, & an end to sleep.
Let your stomach rumble, soft & low.
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Quite by chance, I just found out that my local public radio station aired a related story this morning. Refer to the other links on that page for more on sang culture in Pennsylvania.

Behind the pretty pictures

dewy butterfly

A butterfly outlined in dew: what could be more beautiful, right? Ah, but ignorance is bliss. A cabbage white on a common mullein stalk: what could be more emblematic of the simplified ecosystems bequeathed to us by five centuries of global trade and environmental exploitation? My blog buddy Pablo, of Roundrock Journal, goes so far as to remove every mullein he finds on his land, fighting what I fear is a hopeless battle against invasive species. Most of the time, I can’t bring myself to be quite so zealous. Are we not an invasive species as well? Where forest ecosystems are concerned, I am reduced to near-despair by the seeming impossibility of doing anything about the scourge of invasive earthworms, which are slowly but surely destroying forest humus and threatening everything that depends on it, from native wildflowers to trees, fungi, snails, salamanders and songbirds. And let’s not even talk about aquatic ecosystems.

Most of the time, when I write about nature here, I try to stay positive. I want to help people appreciate the natural world, not infect them with my cynicism and despair. But I do experience almost daily the truth of Aldo Leopold’s observation: “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.”

sun through fog (b&w )

It goes without saying that, even at its most degraded and impoverished, the world is still beautiful — often achingly so. To some, the loss of complexity and diversity may even seem like a blessing. But whatever the aesthetic pleasures afforded by simplicity or the efficiencies associated with organizational unity, complex systems are much stronger and more resilient than linear ones. More than that, our minds and bodies are themselves complex systems thoroughly enmeshed in the larger networks of relationships in which, and through which, they have evolved. Nature offers a model for mobility and flexibility that we can’t get any other way. Its health — its wholeness — is essential to our own. Touch one strand and the whole web trembles.

dewdrops in web

Farewell to dial-up

snail 1

This weekend, we bid a fond farewell to dial-up Internet. With the invaluable assistance of my cousin-in-law Jeff, we’ve swapped 28 kilobytes for 3 megabytes per second.

For years now, Jeff and my father have been scheming about ways to get high-speed access to Plummer’s Hollow. They didn’t think that the phone company, Verizon, would be laying fiber optic cables anytime soon. But last month, a telephone line repairman out on a service call informed us that they had indeed installed a local fiber optic network this past winter. It seemed a little odd that Verizon would go to all that trouble and expense and then neglect to inform eligible customers, but once contacted, they shipped the new DSL modem willingly enough. It only remained to wait for Heidi and Jeff’s next visit — fortunately already scheduled for Labor Day weekend — since we figured we wouldn’t be able to reconfigure on our own the wireless system that Jeff had set up for us between the two houses.

We were right. On Saturday morning, Jeff muttered and puttered around for a couple hours while the sorry remnants of Hurricane Ernesto kept us all indoors. Dad and I were on hand with what you might charitably call color commentary: advice, perhaps, but only of the fatuous kind offered up by the guys in the press box who couldn’t throw a pass to save their lives. It took Jeff a little while to figure out what he had done before and undo it, but suddenly there it was: the new version of Firefox downloading from the web in seconds rather than taking half an hour. “Gee, look at that, Paw!” To say we were stunned would be an understatement. After lunch, a couple more hours sufficed for Jeff to install a new wireless network.

snail 3

On Sunday, while Jeff and Heidi’s six-year-old daughter Morgan went off to explore in the woods with my mother, the laptops came out in the living room. That’s the funny thing about computers: since they tend to be less absorbing than books, somehow their use doesn’t preclude social interaction quite the way reading a book does. On the other hand, when my parents sit together in the evening reading newspapers and magazines, they also frequently share aloud from what they’re reading, so maybe there isn’t a huge difference.

Suddenly, Morgan was back, in a state of high excitement: “There’s a snail! We found a snail! You HAVE to get pictures!”

And so I did. This was a distinctly unsluggish woodland mollusc — a snail on speed. They had picked it up somewhere down along the road, and it emerged from its shell almost immediately and began exploring my mother’s hand. While I snapped pictures, it glided rapidly from finger to finger like a circus performer, switching to other hands as they were offered.

snail 4

Ironically, living out here in the boondocks far from cable TV, we now have a faster connection than many folks in town. Jeff explained that since we’re tapping into a node less than a mile from our houses in a rural farm valley with, presumably, fewer than a dozen other Internet users, we don’t have to compete for space on the cable. In his suburban neighborhood in New Jersey, by contrast, hundreds of people might be downloading files off the Internet at any one time.

Needless to say, this has left us all feeling a little breathless and barely able to believe our good fortune. But high-speed access probably isn’t going to change our lives. Like the snail, I’ll still remain fairly slow moving and low-energy by most people’s standards. I’ll still retreat into my shell from time to time. But I’ll relish being able to explore things like Flickr slideshows and Internet radio, and I’m already appreciating the ability to dispose of mundane tasks, such as reading and answering email, more quickly.

Best of all is the fact that I no longer have to keep my computer on all the time to avoid breaking the wireless connection between the houses, as was the case when it ran through the modem in my Dad’s computer. Now, I can turn the computer off before going to bed each night and wake up in a quiet house. More than anything else, it is that new access to silence that feels luxurious.

snail 6

Click here to see all six snail pictures. If you have favorite sites on the Internet that you think I’d enjoy, I’d love to hear about them. My tastes in music run to blues, jazz, roots/world music, and modern classical.

Bracing for Ernesto

wood turtle with its head drawn in

We are bracing for Tropical Depression Ernesto and the possible six inches of rain that have been forecast starting tomorrow night. So my brother and I have been busy cleaning drains in the road. I didn’t have a whole lot of writing time today, and what time I did have I spent trying to write a rare piece of literary criticism. It was awful, depressing. I feel unclean.

While I was working on the essay, about two hours ago, I glanced down at my office chair’s left armrest and saw blood. My elbow was bleeding, but from what, I couldn’t tell. I went into the bathroom and washed it off, then got out the Band-Aids. But when I started to put one on, peering at my elbow in the mirror, the bleeding had stopped and I couldn’t even find the wound. Elbows are a strange business.

A little later, a female ruby-throated hummingbird came and hovered just outside the window next to my writing table, watching me for close to fifteen seconds, which is almost an eternity for a hummingbird. A half hour later, I deleted the essay. It was well past time for a tactical retreat.