Bees on bull thistle

bumblebees on thistle

I took this picture two weeks ago, right before sunrise — click to see the full-size version, as usual. The following poem is a good example of the sort of exercise I engage in to stay in practice, on days when inspiration utterly fails to strike.

Night stops them cold
where they cling
to the green thorax
of the mother of bumblebees,
that bed of nails.
They hang
lifeless but not dead,
sleepless but very far from waking
to the vast meadows that blaze
above their heads.

Missing tree

gone beech 1Slap. Slap. Slap. Slap. Slap. Slap. Slap.

The first flip-flops of the fall semester are coming up the sidewalk across the lawn in front of Old Main.

Slap. Slap. Slap. Slap.

They stop short. There’s a brief rummaging sound, then the snapping open of a cellphone, followed by seven beeps.

Hey Brad, it’s me. I’m here on Old Main lawn, on that sidewalk above the Wall?

You’re where? Oh, sorry! But listen, you gotta come down here RIGHT NOW. I want you to tell me I’m not crazy!

beech with three-part trunkWell, you know that tree with like the smooth gray bark and the great big limbs that reached all the way to the ground? The one we used to party under, and you carved our initials on it way up high where no one would see it unless they climbed?

Yeah, O.K., a weeping beech — whatever. I called it the Umbrella Tree.

Listen, it’s NOT HERE.

I’m DEAD serious. I’m standing here looking at a great big patch of smooth DIRT. It’s like, no stump or anything!

They’ve got the area all roped off, with ribbons and stuff. Oh wait, I guess I can walk around…

beech with fungusNo, the one behind it is still there. But there’s a big orange fungus thing on the back of it, like, I don’t know… Like maybe that’s what happened to the other one, you know?

Yeah, I know it looked healthy last time we saw it, but that was like last MAY.

I don’t know, I’m just saying, maybe they HAD to cut it down.

No, I don’t see how our carving could’ve hurt it. People have been carving these trees like FOREVER. You remember that one on the other side of the sidewalk? “1970 – the year PSU burned”! It’s like a YEARBOOK or something.

Oh wait! Hold on! I was wrong! The tree’s STILL HERE!!!

gone beech 2No, I am NOT. I’m SERIOUS. You know that one big branch that bent down into the ground and came back up again? The one that we — uh, you know. They LEFT it, the part that comes back up! It must’ve put down its own roots! They just cut off a couple of its side branches or whatever. And there’s fresh barky stuff all around it.

WhatEVER. The point is, they’re keeping it! Like, they didn’t WANT to cut down the rest of the tree, but they HAD to.

beech with graffitiWell, maybe, but why would they? They go to all that trouble with those elm trees, when they could just cut THEM all down and put in some other kind of tree. Penn State LIKES trees!

Well, I don’t care if it IS just because of the alumni. Pretty soon we’ll be alumni too, ya know! Well, I will, anyway. You can go back to sleep now. I gotta get to class.

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For all you procrastinators: today is the deadline to send in tree-related links for the third Festival of the Trees, which will be hosted on September 1 at Burning Silo. Send them to Bev at burning-silo (at) magickcanoe (dot) com, with “Festival of the Trees” in the subject line.

Jumpseed

jumpseed

I can’t look at jumpseed without my body remembering how it felt to be five & walking home from school, that long mile & a half up the hollow, how my fingers found some obscure satisfaction in stripping the eponymous seeds off the stems, feeling them rattle against my palm, & idly pulling out clumps of translucent, shallow-rooted clearweed. They lined the road bank, two shades of green.

Freshly moved to Pennsylvania from our home in rural Maine, I had been skipped into the first grade & was just finding out that a profound overbite marked me as half-rodent. Clearweed, stingless nettle, so easily dislodged! Jumpseed, so willing to part with handfuls of your hard, green teeth! I took you for granted. I failed to learn even your common names for decades.
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Again, another reminder that the blogzine qarrtsiluni, which I help edit, is soliciting contributions for a new theme, education. The word limit this time is a whopping 3000, but of course briefer submissions are welcome, too. Send fiction, nonfiction, poetry and artwork to qarrtsiluni (at) gmail (dot) com.

Pear economics

ThoreauMy mother cut up and froze the rest of the peaches from the box marked “Thoreau” and gave it to me to fill with pears. Alas, there’s nothing remotely Thoreauvian about our pear tree, though we haven’t had to prune it in years. It’s a dwarf, genetically identical to every other Bartlett pear tree in the world, and this year, as most years, it was loaded. We are always amazed that this one, 15-foot tree, which looks especially small standing out in the middle of the field, can pack so much fruit into such an economical space. We planted it back in the mid-70s along with five other fruit trees in that location, but we didn’t fully appreciate the necessity of fencing everything from the white-tailed deer then. The Bartlett was the only survivor.

The pears have to be picked unripe; otherwise they fall to the ground and feed the hornets or the deer. Nor do our hoofed friends limit themselves to windfalls. We’ve actually seen them stand up on their hind legs and hop to reach pears as high as seven feet off the ground. Did Thoreau ever have a problem with deer eating his wild apples? No, he did not. There is exactly one reference to deer in Walden. It’s in Chapter 12, “Winter Animals”:

One man still preserves the horns of the last deer that was killed in this vicinity, and another has told me the particulars of the hunt in which his uncle was engaged.

To Thoreau, living in the hey-day of market hunting, the white-tailed deer was a wilderness animal and a creature of legend. In The Maine Woods, he mentions them in the same breath as bear and moose as a denizen of “Ktadin,” the irony being that in fact central Maine is at the northern edge of the white-tailed deer’s natural range. These days, suburban homeowners in the Concord, Massachusetts area probably think of deer the way most Pennsylvania suburbanites do — as hoofed rats — and some probably even keep their kids indoors in the summer so they won’t contract Lyme disease. If Thoreau were alive today, I imagine he would compromise his vegetarian principles enough to join other ecologically minded folks in becoming an enthusiastic promoter of wild venison.

Another creature whose numbers have mushroomed since the eradication of top carnivores and the severe fragmentation of the eastern forest is the woodchuck. When I picked the pears, I left a dozen or so in the topmost branches, figuring the deer would get them when they eventually fell. Not so. Two days later, my mom told me, she, Dad, and my brother Steve watched a woodchuck climb the tree to eat the remaining pears! This is highly unusual behavior — Mom tells me she’s only ever seen it once before.* They’re nicknamed groundhogs for a reason.

When I heard this, I was doubly glad I hadn’t been greedy and picked every last pear. The value of that one wildlife observation — especially to a naturalist writer like my mother — far out-weighs whatever pleasure we would’ve gotten from those dozen, succulent, top-of-the-tree Bartletts.

That’s the sort of accounting Thoreau excelled at. At the time of his death, he was half done writing a book called Wild Fruits, a contrarian work dedicated to the notion that “the less you get, the happier and richer you are.” Thoreau’s take on economics strikes me as considerably saner than the dangerous fantasies of the Chicago School:

It is a grand fact that you cannot make the fairer fruits or parts of fruits matter of commerce, that is, you cannot buy the highest use and enjoyment of them. You cannot buy that pleasure which it yields to him who truly plucks it. You cannot buy a good appetite even. In short, you may buy a servant or a slave, but you cannot buy a friend.

To me, a good, firm, tart apple is the finest of fruits, and I agree with Thoreau that even wild apples can taste delicious if you come upon them unexpected out in the woods. Pears are a bit like mangoes: soft and sweet and sticky. I enjoy them, but I have a hard time eating more than two or three at a time. Back when I quit smoking, I ate a couple bushels of Stamen Winesap apples in the course of a month, consuming as many as 25 a day and opening my first-ever abdominal savings account in the process. I couldn’t have done that with pears.

But pears were my paternal grandfather’s favorite fruit, and now that Pop-pop’s gone, eating pears from our tree has become an act of remembrance for us. So I filled the Thoreau carton with all the ones I could reach from the ground, then took a second carton up the stepladder, balancing it rather precariously on the top rung.

Since we hadn’t thinned them earlier in the season, many were small, no more than a couple mouthfuls each when they ripen. And of course they will ripen all in a rush, and we’ll do our best to gorge on them, feeling ridiculously wealthy and fortunate — not to mention sticky. And then they’ll be gone, and the box marked “Thoreau” will be put to some other good use.
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*This is an update of what I wrote earlier, when I said I thought it was unprecedented.

Don’t forget to send tree-related links to Bev by August 29 for the Festival of the Trees.

Enigmatic

question mark on screenLately I seem to be confronted by enigmatic signs. This morning while I was eating breakfast, for example, I noticed that one of the two cartons we bought peaches in, which originally held Xerox office paper, had “Thoreau” written on the side in magic marker. Perhaps someone connected with the orchard had previously used it to move or store books. But an entire carton just for Thoreau? He didn’t write that many books; it must’ve held mostly books about Thoreau. I’ll take the peaches.

Yesterday around lunchtime, a question mark butterfly landed on the screen of my front door and stayed there just long enough for me to snap three pictures from inside. Nothing too odd about that, except that the very same thing had happened two days before, around the same time of day. What might it mean?

Yesterday afternoon, a dry high blew in. By late in the day, that end-of-summer mood I tried to evoke with quotes from favorite poems yesterday morning had given way to elation and a distinctly autumnal sky. black locust log After supper, I grabbed my camera and headed up over the ridge to the west, escaping the long shadows that already reached as far as the houses. The wind blew steadily, making the shadows dance as I poked along through an open forest of very old, gnarled chestnut oaks and black birches. The thin soil and open rocks of the Tuscarora Quartzite formation support little else, especially since the loggers of a hundred years ago took most of the white pines, almost all of the hemlock, and all chestnut oaks straight enough to serve as mine timbers.

I soon came to the first of a string of small talus slopes — open rockslides of a few acres in size that start just below the ridge crest. Such rockslides are a familiar feature to anyone who’s ever hiked along a ridge in the western half of the Folded Appalachians. Logging and associated burning in the 19th century may have set back their colonization by lichens, moss and trees by a few centuries, but essentially these rock slides all date back to the last ice age, which ended 8,000 years ago. Though we’re well south of the southern-most extension of the Wisconsin ice sheet, periglacial conditions reworked local landscapes throughout the central and southern Appalachians, creating talus slopes, bogs, and a host of other unique habitats.

At the edge of the rockslide, I paused to admire some paper birches growing in a clump, as they so often do, re-sprouting from the same roots. I stood at the center of the clump, my feet sinking into a deep, spongy mound of rotted wood. The individual trunks might last little more than half a century, but I’ll bet this birch has been here in some form for a very long time.

vulture 1I was just starting out onto the rocks, looking for pictures, when I saw something large and black out of the corner of my eye. A turkey vulture had landed on the other side of the rocks, about eighty feet away. The head was still half gray, which I guess — in contrast to human beings — would make it an immature. I froze and started snapping pictures, expecting it to take off at any moment. But it didn’t.

I eased myself down into a comfortable sitting position on the warm rocks. The vulture didn’t seem at all concerned about my presence. Its head swiveled slowly about, and from time to time it reached down to groom its breast feathers, but otherwise it seemed content to sit and face the sun, which was about half an hour from setting.

vulture 2So that’s how I found myself watching the sunset with a turkey vulture. I shot its picture several dozen more times, of course, hoping that a few shots would turn out relatively unfuzzy (I wasn’t packing a tripod). At a certain point I realized it probably intended to roost nearby, though I didn’t see any other vultures around — they generally roost together, I had thought.

Since the air was now so clear, the light didn’t change much as the sun neared the horizon. The steady wind filtered out most valley noise except train whistles. As I watched the bird, I began to regret what I wrote a week ago about the ugliness of vultures. The wind lifted the feathers of its breast and nape, and the sun tinged them with gold. vulture 4I saw its head from all angles as it looked about, and it came to seem as appropriate as punctuation at the end of a line of fine, dark calligraphy.

I’m sure that more scientific-minded readers will fault me for anthropomorphism in implying that the vulture was there to watch the sunset. But no sooner had the sun dropped below the horizon than the vulture hopped off its rock, waddled into the woods and flapped up into the branches of a black birch tree. I took that as my signal to get up, too, and get off the rocks before darkness fell.

eastern clouds after sunset

Milk of paradise

monarch caterpillar 4

The last blossoms have faded and fallen at the milkweed patch, so things aren’t quite as frantic there now as they were a month ago. But it’s a still a pretty happening place. Whereas in July the patch was like a saloon, serving everyone who came, now it’s more like a walled garden, unapproachable to all but the few species that are adapted to feed on milkweed — and the things that feed on them. When I stopped by on Sunday, every other plant seemed to host a monarch caterpillar.

monarch caterpillar 3

Judging by their size, they must be about ready to pupate. I did see one monarch butterfly with very tattered wings going around laying eggs on the leaves, but I wonder whether her offspring will have enough time to complete metamorphosis before frost.

dead monarch caterpillar

I also found a dead monarch caterpillar — a grim reminder of the fact that, while the monarch’s ingestion of milkweed’s potent alkaloids makes it poisonous to birds, that doesn’t mean it’s safe from all predators.

wheel bug with wasp

Wheel bugs still stalked the patch. I found one busy feeding on a wasp. A second wheel bug sat on a leaf a foot below it, and I wondered briefly whether they might be male and female, but I didn’t have the time to stick around and see if any interaction would take place. They seemed perilously close to the nearest monarch caterpillars. I thought of Coleridge:

And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!

milkweed bugs 3

. . . For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

The milkweed bugs are as gregarious as the wheel bugs are solitary. I found several milkweed pods that looked from a distance almost like ripening tomatoes, so covered were they by the bright orange-red bugs. A closer look revealed that most of the insects were busy feeding, their long beaks piercing the skin of the pod to get at the ripening seeds beneath. Milkweed bugs go through five larval instars, each of which appears progressively more like the adult form, and most stages seemed to be represented at each of their feeding pods.

milkweed tiger moth

I also discovered a couple caterpillars of the milkweed tiger moth — yet another milkweed obligate, as its name suggests. They too had bright warning colors, notwithstanding which they seemed to prefer feeding on the undersides of leaves. With all the wheel bugs around, that seemed like a good idea.

Argiope aurantia

In the middle of the patch, an Argiope spider sat motionless on her web with its characteristic zigzag line stretching away from her like some sort of ornamental garden path. This feature has earned Argiope aurantia one of its common names — writing spider. But not surprisingly, such an eye-catching and frequently encountered spider has more than one common name: around here, people tend to call them banjo spiders, for some reason.

By far the most widespread name, however, is garden spider. For me, as for her, a garden can found almost anywhere, if you’re willing to take the time to really look.
__________

See my growing milkweed patch photo set for more photos. See also Burning Silo blog for frequent updates on Bev’s captive monarch caterpillar rearing project, including such fascinating posts as today’s feature on a prominent predator — stink bugs.

Spined micrathena

micrathena dorsal view
Click on the photos to view the larger versions

Micrathena gracilis: not, perhaps, the specific name that most of us who have tried to walk through an August woods sticky with her webs would have chosen. But is she not slender and graceful, this spider, apart from the spiked club of her abdomen?

micrathena ventral view

The ventral side of her abdomen appears to bear the spiral template for the web, whose silk emerges from its central point. Every morning at dawn she spins her web anew, spanning some path or opening in the forest where the light pools. If a human or other animal should blunder into her web, she’ll have a new one completed in a couple of hours. If it lasts until sunset, she devours the silk, leaving only the three foundation threads. The forest of the night throbs with the call-and-response of katydids — a noise like the surf, or a bank of industrial looms — while hundreds of spiders quietly erase their work.

spined micrathena

She too can stridulate, though I’ve never heard it: a low-pitched buzz or hiss, they say, designed to frighten off predators.

The male is a fraction of her size, and has only two, flattish spines where she has ten. His spinning is limited to a single, non-sticky strand that he lays across her web: a path bisecting the net that spans the path. He hides under a nearby leaf, waiting for the right moment to place himself at her service but not at her disposal.

They each have two copulatory organs, and each pair must make contact, necessitating some complicated gymnastics. To ensure success of this risky business, he dances vigorously at the end of his thread, making the entire web vibrate as he bobs and waggles his skinny rear end. I would have to suppose the female finds this spectacle deeply entrancing. During copulation, if all goes well, the male flips over onto the female’s abdomen, and she can return to hunting flies with her new appendage sprawled on his back among the graceful peaks.
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See here (PDF) for a complete description of the courtship and mating practices of M. gracilis.

Wheel bug

wheel bug 2

Yesterday afternoon, I stopped by the milkweed patch on the way back from a walk to the Far Field. A few monarchs still sailed back and forth, no doubt looking for places to lay their eggs, and a tiger swallowtail and great-spangled fritillary patronized the few remaining blossoms. The clusters of gray-green pods poking out from under the big, flat milkweed leaves almost suggested a miniature banana plantation.

I was pleased to see that the juvenile assassin bug I’d photographed a couple of times for my milkweed patch photo set was now an adult, and readily identifiable. It turned out to be one of the most bizarre and distinctive of the 160 species of assassin bugs found in North America: the wheel bug, Arilus cristatus. It’s a very large, eye-catching insect with a shiny dark patch at the end of its wings and a semicircular crest — the eponymous wheel — crowning its thorax like the blade of a circular saw, or a misplaced mohawk. I spotted it in the top leaves of a milkweed plant not three feet from where I first photographed it as a juvenile on July 17, and just as before, it reacted to me and my camera with the wary poise of a street fighter, sidestepping away in a manner that clearly said don’t fuck with me.

wheel bug 1

And I wouldn’t want to: web sources describe its bite as much more painful than the sting of any hornet. In fact, assassin bugs used to be used as instruments of torture in Central Asia (and might be still, under dictators like Karimov and Turkmenbashi). Their mouthparts are essentially weaponized straws, first injecting a poison that paralyzes their insect prey and turns their insides to soup, then sucking them dry.

The function of the “wheel” is completely unknown. That’s not too surprising, really, because like many common insects, wheel bugs have rarely been studied. The best thing on the web appears to be an article at the Hilton Pond nature center website, which includes general background on bugs (i.e. hemiptera) for the entomologically challenged, as well as some excellent close-up photos — much better than mine. See also Bugguide, the insect wiki, for more photos of wheel bugs in larval and adult forms.

gypsy moth cocoons

If you like trees as I do, you should be grateful for the presence of wheel bugs. They’re one of the few predatory insects capable of feasting on hairy caterpillars such as fall webworms; tent caterpillars, which were in outbreak mode in many parts of the northeastern U.S. this spring; and gypsy moth caterpillars, which about a month ago defoliated hundreds of acres at higher elevations around Central Pennsylvania. With all the gypsy moth egg cases and empty cocoons on our ridgetop oaks right now, I fear we may be headed for a defoliation here next year.

mantis 1

Predators are different. The quality of attention that they bring to bear on their surroundings can seem both charismatic and a little intimidating, as anyone who as ever gazed into the eyes of a hawk or a captive leopard can attest. Praying mantises, with their large, space-alien eyes and their unique ability to swivel their heads, strike us as highly intelligent, but it’s not the kind of intelligence that, in humans, would lend itself to multi-tasking or associative thinking. I doubt that the mind of a predator can easily accommodate the kind of broadly focused awareness most useful to omnivorous habitat generalists such as crows, raccoons, bears, or humans.

By “mind,” of course, I mean the whole of the nervous system and its responses, whether learned or instinctual. For such a finely tuned instrument as an assassin bug, the brain itself may be somewhat superfluous. In a series of famous experiments on a related species from the American tropics — Rhodnius prolixus, the carrier of Chagas’ disease — the British entomologist Sir Vincent Wigglesworth surgically removed the brains of a number of captive assassin bugs and found that they not only survived, but far exceeded their normal lifespan.

wheel bug 3

Though some human males do identify strongly with the single-minded hunting prowess of natural predators, they should remember how most male praying mantises meet their end: as food for their mates. Apparently female wheel bugs, too, are in the habit of eating their partners as soon as they have completed their single-minded task. Cannibalism is common among wheel bugs; they are not given to displays of sociability. Neither the wheel nor a second set of tiny eyes on top of the head are present in the larval form, when mating is not a concern, so perhaps they evolved to help the male fend off attacks from the female prior to mating. If anyone has a better theory, I’d love to hear it.

Foxfire

We temporarily interrupt our series of self-portraits to bring you another report on the strange goings-on in the fungal kingdom.

As I walked up the hollow the night before last, a thin rind of moon behind the ridge gave little light. The air was thick and still, though the first katydids of the season hinted of cooler nights to come. My feet know the road well enough that I can walk it even on a pitch-black night with little fear of stepping off the track and going over the edge into the ravine. But this time of year, the road is discernible as a strip of greater darkness through a woods dotted with glowworms, a few late fireflies, and the blurry nebulae of foxfire.

Halfway up, I paused to catch my breath next to a veritable galaxy. I reached blindly toward the glowing spots and ran my fingers over dime-sized polypore fungi on the end of a log. I couldn’t resist breaking off a couple and sticking them in my shirt pocket — they had a definite aura of currency. Once home, I turned a lamp on and quickly off again to verify that light leaked only from the porous orange undersides of their pale caps.

The literature on bioluminescent fungi rarely points out that all light is the by-product of a decay of sorts, electrons of energized atoms falling back to their normal orbits. In the case of foxfire, though, the link is more literal: light results from the oxidation of an unknown compound referred to as a luciferin, and has been described as photosynthesis in reverse, serving an unknown purpose. I can’t help thinking of Lucifer, burning as he falls.

I left the fungi on the coffee table when I went to bed, thinking I should go out another night and gather more to scatter around the house, the better to avoid collisions with the furniture on nocturnal trips to the toilet. But by four in the morning, they had curled up tighter than clenched fists around their spots of light, and I woke once again in the darkness.

De onzas de plata, la luna
de madrugada llenó mi alma.
Cerré mi puerta, en el dí­a,
por verlas. No valí­an nada!

(With silver coins, the moon
of the small hours stuffed my soul.
During the day, I locked the door
to have a look at them. Worthless!)

–Juan Ramón Jiménez (tr. by Ralph and Rita Garcí­a Nelson)

Eye in the sky

Photobucket - Video and Image Hosting

UPDATE (July 29): According to a new article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the derailment in northern Pennsylvania was caused by speeding down a steep grade — the sort of thing that could have been prevented through better policing. 

The main east-west railroad line in the eastern United States, connecting Philadelphia to Pittsburgh and Chicago, runs past the bottom of our mountain. Our only access to the outside world is down a mile-and-a-half-long road to a public railroad crossing that serves nobody but us and our visitors, railroad employees, and occasional train photographers. On the other side of the tracks, a hundred yards of township road lead to a one-lane county bridge across the river to the highway beyond. Fisherman, teenagers swimming in the river, drug dealers, and people involved in, shall we say, other kinds of activities frowned upon by polite society, all use the township road and the small patch of woods between the tracks and the river.

The day before yesterday, my brother Steve had just gone out the gate and locked it behind him when a train came along. While he waited at the crossing, he decided to go check out a stand of vetch about fifty feet down along the tracks to see if there were any good beetles on it. Just as the first train was clearing the crossing, another train came thundering through in the other direction. He was still congratulating himself on his decision to make good use of his time when a railroad policeman pulled up.

“What’cha doin’, buddy?”

“Uh, I’m an insect collector. I just thought I’d check out these weeds while I waited for the crossing to clear. How did you know I was here?”

“We saw you in the satellite pictures. We’re on high alert, and we’re under orders to investigate anything that looks the least bit suspicious. Homeland Security and all.”

Steve explained who he was, and that we lived here.

“So that was you we saw walking into town along the tracks last Thursday?”

“No, that was my brother Dave.”

Steve asked if they bothered to interfere in any of the various shady activities that go on the other side of the tracks. No, but they were very aware of them. The railroad dick chuckled about watching people get naked in little clearings in the woods, never dreaming that someone might be watching from above.

When Steve reported this conversation to us later that evening, I think we each had the same, conflicted reaction. On the one hand, it’s a shame that the authorities feel we have to invest so much time and money protecting ourselves from terrorist threats at the same time that they turn a blind eye to so many social and environmental ills that a little bit of money could go a long way toward easing. And while Norfolk Southern was keeping an eagle eye on its main line, just last week a branch line in northern Pennsylvania saw a derailment that resulted in the spill of 47,000 gallons of sodium hydroxide into one of the state’s best trout streams, killing every living thing for twenty miles downstream. “The cause of the derailment remains under investigation,” says Norfolk Southern. This is the kind of thing that can and does happen around railroads, terrorists or not.

Further, in the view, I think, of all Plummer’s Hollow residents, the increasing militarization and privatization of domestic so-called security bodes ill for the long-term survival of the republic. “Homeland Security” already sounded like a cover for creeping fascism to us, so you can imagine how thrilled we were to have direct confirmation of our fear that we were in fact being watched — and not even by people on the public payroll.

On the other hand, as conservationists, we abhor the runaway expansion of the highway system with all its attendant costs in pollution, habitat fragmentation and economically unsustainable patterns of human settlement. It takes 100 times less diesel to ship freight by rail than by truck. If the government ever decided to shift taxpayer subsidies away from the trucking and petroleum industries and back to railroads, I think we’d all cheer, despite the cost to us in terms of added inconvenience and danger.

As I mentioned, we live only a mile and a half from the tracks. We have a pretty good idea of the kind of nasty stuff that goes by our crossing on virtually a daily basis. A major mishap or terrorist strike could easily render Plummer’s Hollow — not to mention all of Tyrone and vicinity, home to more than 5,000 people — uninhabitable. And in the event of such a disaster, given that our only access is across the tracks, how would we evacuate?

So you can understand why, the next time I have to walk into town, if the sky is clear, I’ll be looking up and giving a big, friendly wave. Nobody here but us chickens.