Category: Nature/Ecology

Posted on by Dave Bonta

What grows

I remember as a child being especially fond of songs with accretionary verses. You know, like the “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” “Children Go Where I Send Thee,” or “Hole in the Bottom of the Sea.” A collection of Pennsylvania German songs in the book Pennsylvania Songs and Legends (edited by George Korson, Johns Hopkins Press, 1949), which I picked up at the same used book sale where I found Gerard’s Herball last month, includes some charming examples. Here’s one I especially liked.

I have, perhaps foolishly, mucked with the rather stilted translation a bit, despite my complete ignorance of the source language. According to the modern German-English dictionary I consulted, the verb wachs-en (wachst) means grow, sprout, come up, extend, increase, thrive. This verb is dropped in the middle verses (in favor of is), then reappears in the last two. Though in the latter case I have elected to go with “lies (with),” the choice of the original (and possibly prudish) translators, I think the shared meaning-element of growth and extension is a key to the whole song. Complimenting this verb, the noun Hecke also occupies a pivotal position, and seems to mean copse, thicket, hedge, underbrush, and also branch or twig by synecdoche, as with the English wood (a cognate of wild) coming to mean lumber. This simple song speaks volumes about the pre-modern European way of seeing the forest. I’ll give the German for the first and last verses and for each new noun as it crops up.

Was wachst in diesem Wald? (What Grows in This Wood?)

Sung by Emma Diehl at Freiburg, Snyder County, Pennsylvania, 1938. Recorded by Thomas R. Brendle and William S. Troxell.

Was wachst in diesem Wald?
En wunderscheener Bí¢m.
Bí¢m in di Hecke,
Zwishich Lí¢b un Schtecke.
Was wachst in diesem Wald?
Hecke schtandee,
Das wachst im grienen Waldee.

What grows in this wood?
A very beautiful tree.
Tree in the thicket,
Among sticks and leaves.
What grows in this wood? A dense thicket.
That’s what grows in the greenwood.

What grows on this tree?
A very beautiful limb (Nascht).
Limb on the tree, tree in the thicket,
Among sticks and leaves.
What grows in this wood? A dense thicket.
That’s what grows in the greenwood.

What grows on this limb?
A very beautiful branch (Heck).
Branch on the limb, limb on the tree . . .

What grows on this branch?
Very beautiful leaves (Lí¢b).
Leaves on the branch, branch on the limb . . .

What is in these leaves?
A very beautiful nest (Nescht).
Nest in the leaves, leaves on the branch . . .

What is in this nest?
A very beautiful egg (Oi).
Egg in the nest, nest in the leaves . . .

What is in this egg?
A very beautiful bird (Vojjel).
Bird in the egg, egg in the nest . . .

What is on this bird?
A very beautiful feather (Fedder).
Feather on the bird, bird in the egg . . .

What is in this feather?
A very beautiful bed (Bett).
Bed in the feather, feather on the bird . . .

What lies in this bed?
A very beautiful woman (Dí¢m).
Woman in the bed, bed in the feather . . .

Was wachst in diesem Dí¢m?
En wunderscheener Schatz.
Schatz im Dí¢m, Dí¢m im Bett,
Bett im Fedder, Fedder am Vojjel,
Vojjel im Oi, Oi im Nescht,
Nescht im Lí¢b, Lí¢b am Hecke,
Hecke am Nascht, Nascht am Bí¢m,
Bí¢m in di Hecke, zwischich Lí¢b un Schtecke.
Was wachst in diesem Wald?
Hecke schtandee,
Das wachst im grienen Waldee.

Who lies with this woman?
A very beautiful lover.
Lover in the woman, woman in the bed,
Bed in the feather, feather on the bird,
Bird in the egg, egg in the nest,
Nest in the leaves, leaves on the branch,
Branch on the limb, limb on the tree,
Tree in the thicket, among sticks and leaves.
What grows in the wood? A dense thicket.
That’s what grows in the greenwood.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Unkempt

The peculiar thing about these woods is their power to turn melodies into something else entirely. Yesterday afternoon, for instance: the sun hangs low in the treetops and gazing into it my mouth drops open, the tune I am whistling under my breath escapes and goes muttering off through the laurel. Two or three dried leaves turn over in their sleep. A dog barks in the distance.

No music can ever be stopped, because time can’t be stopped. Or so it seems to me at the moment. I am standing with the brow of the hill behind me, watching as the silhouettes of trees grow darker by the minute within their shining outlines. I have it within my power to freeze this moment forever in a poem, I say to myself. But it isn’t true.

I listen for a while to the footsteps of a deer that seems to be in no particular hurry. At one point I hear the high, keening sound of a cedar waxwing up in the treetops, followed a moment later by a chickadee. From this bend in the trail I can travel in imagination on through the stand of large old oaks, past the clump of sapling beeches, above the wild grape tangles where the whirring arrows of ruffed grouse stirred up from the laurel so often lodge.

It doesn’t seem necessary to keep walking, though. I have the strong impression all of a sudden that everything is in its place. I remember the title of an early book by Gary Snyder, Earth House Hold, which I like better than any other line or poem he’s ever come up with. A house held is a house kept clean – but what does cleanness mean, any more, in a world full of man-made chemicals with no analogue in nature?

Let’s talk about neatness, then, about straightening up. Each natural community, each portion of the land has its own ideas about keeping house: right here, for example, it says both fire and ice, trees and deer and steaming gutpiles. The top carnivores are missing, so we humans have to do the best we can without them.

The previous day’s high winds brought down numerous dead snags and rotten limbs. It amazes me how often a large tree can crash down without major injury to any of the trees around it. I remember years ago the reaction of one of our visitors – a very urbane intellectual from Lima, Peru – to the sight of a line of broken-down locust trees left by a recent ice storm: How are you going to fix them? he wanted to know. And some time before that, our elderly neighbor, who had grown up with an even-aged forest, told my father that the growing number of logs on the forest floor didn’t look right, especially if they happened to span the stream. The woods are so messy now, she complained, a few years after the gypsy moth caterpillars came through and sped things up a bit. Yes. And the stream would never again flow as quietly as it did through the monotonous pole-timber of her youth.

Out in Ohio, a dear friend of the family, a life-long nature lover, rails at the way her daughter insists on tidying up the woods behind her suburban home, picking up all the fallen branches, cleaning out the brush. The irony is that they have a big bird feeder and enjoy watching wildlife. The same daughter goes on periodic shopping sprees for clothes, then gives almost everything she buys to Goodwill or the Salvation Army because it would make her closets too messy if she tried to keep it all. Ah, charity.

To me, the messier the woods get, the more inviting they become. A young, even-aged forest has little to offer in terms of habitat, either for wildlife or for the imagination. Songs die somewhere down in the throat. On a late afternoon in early winter, with the clean outlines of aging trees against a sky blue to the horizon, I am reminded of water spilling over fallen logs or waves on a lake lapping against half-submerged hulks along a ragged shore. The impeded stream is the one that sings, Wendell Berry once pointed out.

Back up and along the edge of the spruce grove I go, admiring the three-inch-high forest of ground cedar that covers close to half an acre there. The eastern ridge and the mountains beyond glow orange-red in the setting sun. I find one of our hunter friends sitting against a tree, his rifle resting on his lap, at the edge of an area where my father cleared out the trees two years ago to preserve the view. Charlie’s younger son, who died in a automobile accident at the age of 17, used to still-hunt in this very spot.

I return his wave but am careful to keep silent. It strikes me that all the while I stood facing west he had been sitting here on the other side of the hill, facing east and seeing things he will probably never speak of to anyone. If and when Charlie gets a deer and has it butchered and stacked neatly in labeled packages in the freezer, every time he fries up a steak it will remind him of this afternoon and others like it: the quiet, the moving light, the thoughts that came and went of their own accord. Between the two of us, I think, we kept a pretty careful watch over things. If there were any motes of dust, I would have seen them.
__________

A contribution to the Ecotone wiki topic Housekeeping and Place.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Shadow cabinet

An enormous wish:
That nothing be too plentiful;
That grass diminish into lawns,
And the hunt become a ceremony of love.
This harmony is a prayer against too much.
Paul Zweig, “Prayer Against Too Much”

Thursday, November 18, 10:30 a.m. A mostly overcast morning, and tolerably warm. The slowly changing sky is full of indistinct faces: stray ears, the odd bulbous nose, chins, foreheads, eyes both bright and dull. The bluebirds sit quietly on the electric line above the old nest box. In forty acres of field, there are thirty-nine acres of silence and one cricket. Play it again, Sam.

But here comes a series of agitated cries to spoil the mood. Nobody does agitation as well as the pileated woodpecker. And it’s always damn near impossible to tell what, if anything, has gotten them so riled up. This one’s in the woods up beyond the old farm dump, flapping from tree to tree, yelling. When it comes across the field, I notice that its calls are timed to its deliberate wingbeats, AH…AH…AH…AH…AH as if it were cheering itself on.

Just in from the edge of the field to the northeast, in the fifty-year-old woods that I still think of as an old orchard fifteen years after the last surviving apple tree died out, a mixed flock of white-throated sparrows and juncos crowd the Japanese barberry bushes. They fly down into the Japanese stiltgrass for seeds, return to the bushes, singing. Given the choice between two rival onomatapoeic interpretations of the white-thoateds’ song, today I’d say it’s definitely Poor Sam Peabody they’re singing about. Sweet Canada is too far out of sight and out of mind – this week, anyway.

People talk about old fields and orchards “reverting” to woods, but it’s not true. Yes, some first-succession trees came in here, but this is very unlikely to resemble what had preceded the land’s conversion to field – a one-off woods that had been, in turn, nothing like the original forest before it was clearcut for charcoal in 1815. So what had been most recently an artificial savanna dominated by clones of a tree native to the Caucasus has simply seen the geographical center of its nightmare botany drift eastward.

Nevertheless, in the weak sunlight I find myself pausing to admire the nice, straight trunks of these young black cherries, black locusts, black birches and red maples. Here in the forested east, if nature were left to its own devices such uniformity in age class would occur only on about two percent of the total area, following rare, catastrophic disturbances. The species that depend upon such disturbances and the range of short-lived habitats that succeed them would be rare and highly prized. I squint, imagining myself looking at this woods with the eyes of a delighted discoverer. I can see how easy it might be for forestry students to become mesmerized by the endlessly varying distribution patterns of more-or-less uniform columns above a light and open understory. It’s like an endless Parthenon.

This is, I realize suddenly, one of those rare days when my mind isn’t wandering. I find myself stopping often to peer at things like the curled-up bark on a dead birch or a forest of lichen on an ancient stump – things so common I don’t bother to write them down. I know from experience that, regardless of whether the specific details ever surface in my writing, the more such looking I allow myself to do, the better – deeper – my poetry will eventually become. Yet so often it seems preferable to stay in the narcotic shadows of my imagination than to engage closely with the landscape I’m walking through.

The factory whistle blows the noon hour. It’s back after a three-year silence during which the Tyrone paper mill, which had specialized in high-quality recycled stock, was shut down by its parent company, stood idle for close to a year, then was bought and slowly brought back to life by a consortium of former workers and local investors. For some reason, they only restored the whistle to operation three days ago. It blows at 7:00 and 8:00 a.m., 12:00 and 1:00 p.m., and again at 4:00 p.m. It’s a fairly sonorous, long, baritone blast. My mother resents the intrusion, but I grew up with the sound, so I’m delighted to be hearing it again. I can’t decide, but it sounds as if it might be just a little lower in pitch now.

The whistle finds me in the chestnut oak-black gum-heath understory woods near the crest of Laurel Ridge. The light continues to vary in intensity – not quickly, as on one of those high-pressure days with fast moving cloud shadows, but slowly and meditatively. No doubt this has a lot to do with my own mood. I have the feeling that I could be anywhere, depending on where and how tightly I focus. This clump of trees and bushes seem straight out of a northern forest – smell that air? That dried-out root ball could be driftwood on a beach after the season has ended and the summer people have all gone home.

I’m reminded suddenly of a great title I thought up the other day – a title for what, I’m not yet sure: Shadow Cabinet. I liked the implied merger of the personal and the political, and had pictured a kind of cross between an 18th-century cabinet of curiosities and a vanity chest topped by a black mirror. But now I’m seeing analogues everywhere I look.

Ten minutes later I scare up some turkeys who had been foraging just over the crest of the ridge. There’s a thick screen of mountain laurel and lowbush blueberries between us; my first sign of their presence is two, three, four immense dark shapes bursting into view with a great flapping of wings. I hear the sound of a large crowd running through the dried leaves and walk quickly in that direction, hoping for a better view. As I push my way through the laurel, pandemonium breaks out.

Let me tell you, there are few sights in nature as dramatic as a herd of wild turkeys on a mountaintop suddenly turning into a flock. It scarcely seems possible that anything so heavy can fly, and fly well, let alone that a creature so ungainly, even prehistoric in appearance can suddenly attain such grace.

The panicked wingbeats from some twenty-five turkeys taking off at once includes plenty of clicking sounds as the wings clip first against bushes and saplings, then against small branches in the canopy. They soar out over the valley two and three abreast, curving to the southwest on a trajectory that should intersect with the mountain again a mile or two downridge. One of our hunter friends’ families lives in a house right down on the other side of Elk Run Road from here, and if any of them are home and looking up at the mountain right now, I imagine they will be feeling a mix of awe and frustration at this sight. Throughout fall turkey season, none of the hunters saw a single bird. The season ended just last Saturday, so of course that was the signal for the turkeys to emerge from wherever they’d been hiding. Wild turkeys are reputed to possess a great deal of cunning – in stark contrast to their domesticated cousins, who are so lacking in sense as to lay eggs standing up, and who can’t be left outside in a downpour lest they tilt their heads back to watch the rain until they drown.

Such (according to farm kid folklore, at any rate) is the nature of the fowl that many of us will be counting our blessings over one week from today. Personally, I feel blessed enough already. And if these wild birds are as smart as the hunters say they are, no doubt they have been celebrating an early Thanksgiving of their own.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The butternut chronicle: Nov. 19, 1998 & an afterword

Clear sky, thirty-six degrees. I’m out on the porch as always. At 10:05 a lone blue jay flies in, lands in the upper brances of the butternut tree. With its large beak it begins probing the crevasses and lesions in the bark, just like a nuthatch or chickadee. They all do the same thing, I think – me too. But the tree can hardly pick at its own wounds.

***

With that, my note taking came to an end. It’s too bad I did not then realize what the true focus of my journaling had been – I probably would have been inspired to keep it up for much longer. I had been thinking that the focus was me, my observations, the record of an inveterate porch sitter. And no doubt there was something to that. Just the other day, I was struck by a reference to the back deck in a poem by Robert Haas. He’s a native Californian, so it seemed perfectly natural – not just a suburban thing, as decks are elsewhere, and not a symbol of Americans’ chronic inability to be content with where we are and accept the vagaries of the local climate.

The front porch in small town and rural Pennsylvania performs many functions that a back deck cannot. Even with cable TV, video games and the Internet, a lot of people still sit out on their porches in the evening – which begins at 4:00, with the end of the second trick. As I mentioned here once before, the front porch is an extension of the threshold, blurring the boundary between home and street. It affords a safe vantagepoint for watching the world go by, as the world is wont to do. Friends and strangers don’t need to feel shy about dropping in – no invitations are necessary. If all the seats are taken, you can sit on the stoop. The back deck, by contrast, is a wholly private space.

I knew of course that the butternut was dying a slow death, and I knew that I would miss it when the last green branch withered, girdled by the canker. But I figured it would stand for many years after that, remain a wildlife condominium in death even more than in life. I never expected it to just topple over one day in August, at around 8:30 on a calm, clear, humid morning. We cut it all up for firewood except for the bottom eight feet, which were full of carpenter ants – the proximate cause of the grand old tree’s demise.

In its absence, I don’t know that I could really gather enough material for a daily front porch chronicle. I have of course recorded a number of observations in these virtual pages, and someday there might be enough to gather into a small chapbook. But the gap between the porch and the edge of the woods is too large – about 75 feet – for close observation of whatever goes on there, and I don’t like using binoculars. The only other tree that’s close to the porch is a Japanese cherry that I will probably cut down this winter to put it out of my misery: it’s terribly afflicted with a disease of its own, black knot. This spring I need to knuckle down and plant some stuff – a bigger job than it might seem, because virtually everything we plant must be fenced against the deer.

I don’t much like fences. But I can’t help thinking that a project like that might give me plenty more to write about.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The butternut chronicle: Nov. 18, 1998

This entry is part 14 of 14 in the series The Butternut Chronicle

For those who just tuned in, I’m transcribing and reworking the notes from an old journal consisting almost entirely of thoughts germinated and observations made while sitting on my front porch. It ran from November 1 through November 19, 1998.

I woke early, grabbed a shower & took my coffee up into the field to watch the Leonids. Between 5:20 and 6:00 I counted thirty-three streaks of light. I found myself slowly revolving in place with my head back, sometimes stomping my feet to keep warm: an Indian kind of dance, perhaps, accompanied by a vague though prayerful longing. All the while, a pair of great-horned owls were calling back and forth between the ridges and Venus shone bright as a searchlight. Even as the stain of light from the east spread across the sky, even as the earth’s atmosphere grew visible, meteors continued to flash in its inverted pan. Thirty-three: one for each year of my life. These are all the stars I wished upon, I said to myself, knowing full well they were nothing but grains of dust.

Out on the porch at 8:12. It has turned into a glorious morning. I crane around to admire the rosemary blooming on the other side of the window glass: two pale blue, almost orchid-shaped flowers at the end of the longest branch, which bends like a lazy N or half an infinity symbol.

1:15 p.m. Forty-five degrees now and still cloudless, but the stench of cow manure freshly spread on some field down in Sinking Valley makes it tough to sit outside. I count myself fortunate, though, that the pulp mill in Tyrone went out of operation back in 1970, and that none of those massive hog farms one reads about elsewhere have been built here yet.

All afternoon the butternut gets a thorough grooming from nuthatches, chickadees, even a downy woodpecker – sometimes all in the tree at once. Between 2:45 and 3:30 there’s a steady procession of squirrels back and forth between the woods and the walnut tree on the slope behind the house. For whatever reason they have abandoned their usual caution about crossing open ground today. At 3:20 I watch one squirrel pause for a drink in the stream. It crouches to sip in a very feline manner, takes its time. Then it climbs the butternut as high as the Thinker’s usual post and takes time out for a thorough scratch.

By 3:30 the sky has gone white. It’s very still. Much to my surprise, the smell of manure has already completely dissipated – guess I complained too soon. The downy is working over the smallest dead branches – there are quite a few – and I’m enjoying the range of tones he manages to extract along with whatever grubs or insects he’s after.

Around the same time, a small flock of chickadees demonstrates their species’ versatility. Some ride weed stalks and cattail heads halfway to the ground, dangling head-down like a dried plant’s dream of heaven in a huge winged seed. Others fly up to the tops of the walnuts and black cherries at the woods’ edge to raid old webworm nests, while still others hop around in the butternut, poking and peering under every loose piece of bark. They could just stay at the birdfeeders all day, but what would be the fun in that?

At 4:30 the Thinker crosses the road about fifteen feet off the ground and follows his usual arboreal highway down the splay of butternut limbs to his favorite spot. All’s not right with the world, but there’s no reason why it couldn’t be.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The butternut chronicle: Nov. 16, 1998

For those who just tuned in, I’m transcribing and reworking the notes from an old journal consisting entirely of thoughts and observations made while sitting on my front porch. It ran from November 1 through November 19, 1998.

I’ll also submit this as a late entry for the Ecotone wiki topic Cats and Place.

If I were a good ecological citizen, I’d be reaching for the .22 right now. And I might yet. But I have such a hard time pulling the trigger any more.

A cold wind has kept me off the porch for much of the day. I’m beginning to think I might have picked the wrong time of year to start this record. It was still 34 with a stiff breeze when I came out at 2:00, and I don’t last for more than ten minutes. But the wind did allow me to sneak out without disturbing the black and white cat hunting in the overgrown front yard below me. Out of habit, I grabbed the rifle from its usual spot behind the door, setting it down on the wicker sofa beside me.

Though completely feral, this cat’s relative lack of wariness by daylight distinguishes it from, say, a red fox – another non-native that occupies a similar ecological niche. Actually, given that we have both red and gray foxes on the mountain, with coyotes moving in, the few wild-living housecats may only survive because they are able to switch to a more diurnal pattern than they might otherwise prefer. Thus are new niches pioneered.

Not that this ecosystem needs another prolifically fertile mid-sized predator. In the absence of top carnivores, and with the highly fragmented landscape offering lots of access to formerly inaccessible deep-forest spots, omnivores such as raccoons, skunks and opossums are devastating populations of songbirds through nest predation. Seen in this context, feral housecats are just one minor piece of the puzzle. It’s the unnatural proliferation and consumption patterns of human beings that are at the root of all this, of course.

This cat is, I suspect, a regular resident of an old barn down in the valley, less than a mile to the east. I have tracked it up over Laurel Ridge in winters past. An all-black cat sometimes shows up as well. They both seem to specialize in rodents – mainly chipmunks and meadow voles – but I’m sure neither would hesitate to raid a song sparrow or ovenbird nest in season, if they happened across it.

After a few minutes of fruitless stalking of the semi-subterranean voles, the cat goes out to the driveway and pads down to the big log that lies at a right angle to the road. Using the log as cover it sneaks back toward the stream. At the base of the butternut it surprises a chipmunk, attempts to pounce. But the chipmunk easily dodges and disappears in the dense weeds.

The last couple days it’s been warm enough for the birds to bathe in the stream below the butternut tree, but not today. I wonder whether the cat’s interest in this spot stems from familiarity with its frequent use by birds? Quite possibly so. I picture the cat crouched low among the sedges, waiting for its chance as an unsuspecting junco whips up an instant fountain with its wings . . . As much time as I spend out here, I still miss so much of what goes on!

The cat climbs the bank and works its way over to the corner of the house. Some new movement in the weeds prompts it to freeze once again – more voles, no doubt. Finally it heads up the slope and out of sight. I suspect it may be headed for an old woodchuck hole that gives access to the crawlspace underneath the kitchen, which is fine with me. Plenty of white-footed mice there. I’m getting as tired of setting traps as I am of taking potshots at feral housecats.

The whole time I tracked the cat with my eyes, I was remembering a story that the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi once told on himself. He was trespassing in a fenced game preserve when a strange-looking magpie startled him, brushing his face with its wings on its way to a nearby branch. He raised his crossbow to take aim at it, but just as he did so,

He noticed a cicada, which had just found a beautiful patch of shade and had forgotten what could happen to it. A mantis hiding behind the leaves grabbed at it, forgetting at the sight of gain that it had a body of its own. The strange magpie in its turn was taking advantage of that, at the sight of profit forgetful of its truest prompting.

‘Hmm!’ said Chuang Chou uneasily. ‘It is inherent in things that they are tied to each other, that one kind calls up another.’

As he threw down his crossbow and ran out of the grove, the gamekeeper came running behind shouting curses at him.

(A. C. Graham translation, Chuang-Tzu: The Inner Chapters, Hackett, 2001)

To be a part of the food chain does involve one in a sort of infinite regression. But what Zhuangzi is critiquing here, I believe, is the way the focused awareness of the hunter can be so easily spoiled by thoughts of gain. The instant one thinks “I have forgotten myself!” all is lost. As soon as Zhuangzi loses his mental equilibrium, the game warden is after him. There are so many ways to participate in the lives of others – and the majority of them seem to involve some sort of ego-projection. I wonder if my squeamishness about killing doesn’t derive primarily from my own fear of death.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Laundry

There’s getting to be a serious backlog of thoughts and observations around here. Is there such a thing as mental retentiveness?

*

Last Tuesday, in Penn State’s main library, I’m browsing the new books shelf in the Arts and Humanities section when a peculiar sense of deja vu washes over me. I have been coming here for over 30 years, and the library has gone through quite a few changes during that time. But suddenly I am remembering how I used to think as a kid whenever I browsed the spines of abstruse academic books: Professors know all this cool stuff! I will never be that knowledgeable. I’ll never even be able to grasp simple things like how income tax works.

It makes me sort of sad, now, to realize that in fact very few professors know much of anything outside the boundaries of their disciplines. It further occurs to me that one of the rare exceptions to this rule may be my own brother Steve – not yet a professor, but a PhD and master of many foreign languages and diverse areas of expertise, from entomology to physics to economics to British and American horror fiction. And even for people like him, I have a very good idea of the pivotal role that intellectual confidence and the fluent use of big words play in shaping other people’s perceptions of unlimited expertise.

It’s not at all a comforting thought, the realization that, fundamentally, humanity knows nothing. I’d much rather be that naive little kid again. (And in fact, I never have figured out the federal tax structure. But neither has anyone else, I don’t believe.)

*

All last week I was looking at faces and seeing the skull beneath the skin. In one or two cases, I had to look away to avoid imagining earthworms tumbling out of eye sockets. Where the hell did this come from? I am rapidly losing interest in the kind of speculative writing (and reading) that has formed much of the content of this weblog. I didn’t start out to be a “blogger of place,” but now I think I could happily abandon everything else and just focus on the daily news: I mean the real news, the minutiae of otherwise unchronicled events that don’t directly involve human beings thinking up new reasons to slaughter each other.

*

The most original idea I had last week (well, original to me, anyway) was this: Via Negativa ought to have its own blog, a place to put housekeeping notes, maintain searchable categories of archives, report on new incoming links, post complementary and critical e-mails, and blogroll all sites that link to V.N. I could include occasional reflections on how well or poorly different writing experiments at V.N. seem to turn out, and even post ideas for alternate posts that never made the cut.

I know there’s such a thing as metablogging, which means simply blogging about blogging in general. (My favorite metablog is Mandarin Design.) What I have in mind is something even more reflexive: a hyperblog, perhaps?

I’m not sure I can handle the upkeep for another blog, though I did play around a bit with title ideas – Penumbra, Caveat, Via Parasita – and mottoes: Made in the shade. Vanity of vanities. My blog has fleas.

*

Yard signs, garden signifies, I decide a week after the election.

*

Late Thursday morning, I went for a brief ramble around the field, entranced by the shape and color of the goldenrod seed heads. The weak sunlight gives an air of mystery to the puffy, gray-white heads of tall goldenrod (Solidago canadensis), making them appear to glow from within. The 40-acre field is dominated by goldenrod, but tall goldenrod is just one of four or five different species, and one of only two to go to seed in such an impressive manner. It’s Veterans Day, and I can’t help seeing platoons of soldiers standing stiffly at attention.

All the leaves on all the goldenrods turned black and shriveled with the first frost, which makes it much easier to see the ground around their stalks. Since the field hasn’t been tilled in at least 33 years, a thick carpet of moss has grown up in many areas. I can pick out three distinct species of moss without hardly trying; I am sure there are many more than that. British soldiers’ and reindeer lichens can be found in the drier areas. Ebony spleenwort ferns, still green, show up quite easily now, sprouting here and there among the moss. I am surprised to find a cutleaf grape fern (Botrychium dissectum), though. This is a species we didn’t used to see that much of, but now, every year we find more of it. It’s difficult to decide whether that’s because it is truly on the increase, or simply because, until we first identified it some five or six years ago, we didn’t know what we were seeing. It’s not an especially rare species. Maybe it’s been here all along.

True to its name, this cutleaf grape fern’s triply pinnate leaf has turned a deep wine red. In pausing to admire it, I knock against the six-inch-tall sporangiophore with the toe of my boot, and it releases a little brown puff of sporangia. Holy smoke! I tap it some more, like a lazy Johnny Fernseed. Billyuns and billyuns, I think. Meanwhile, the clouds overhead have thinned, and now the sun begins shining strongly enough to cast shadows. The tall goldenrod seems to shrink a bit. Now it’s just another hayfield gone to seed.

*

Yesterday was cloudless and very, very quiet from mid-morning on, when our weekend visitors departed. I felt rather disoriented all weekend because of the disruption of my early morning rituals: these were people who get up as early as I do. I still sat outside both mornings with my coffee, but my cherished communion with the darkness was destroyed. About all I could do was enjoy the way the two bright pin-pricks of Venus and Jupiter were enough to give the entire rest of the sky a depth and purity it otherwise would have lacked.

Hospitality is as close to a sacred duty as any I know. One can’t very well ask one’s guests to please sit in the dark for twenty minutes just so one’s own, hidebound rituals won’t be altered for a day or two. Nor were these the kind of people I could’ve invited to join me out there. With the temperature around 25 degrees on Saturday morning, my uncle made it clear he thought I was crazy – just like the black guys in his north Jersey neighborhood who stand around outside shooting the bull in all kinds of weather. (To his credit, he didn’t imply that they were all drug dealers, merely that they were incomprehensibly Other.)

I throw in a load of laundry right after they leave, and hang it outside. My usual hiking buddy has other commitments today, so I decide reluctantly to spend the rest of the morning on a long-overdue redesign of the blog. This eats up half the afternoon, as well. When I go out to take the clothes down around 3:00, I hear what sounds at first like a large waterfall or distant applause coming from the other side of Sapsucker Ridge, toward the west. High-pitched overtones like rusty door hinges reveal its true origin: a mammoth flock of red-winged blackbirds. After a few minutes, the flock takes wing, which is impressive both aurally and visually. A moment of silence gives way to the sound of wings, like a thousand decks of cards being shuffled at once. Just as the flock comes into view over the ridge, it performs a complex roll-and-split maneuver, a kind of mitosis. Within this enormous cloud of birds, some individuals begin flying in unison toward the southeast, over the field, while an equal number begin flying equally in unison toward the northeast, along the ridge. How is this decided?

The southeast-bound section of the flock heads out over Laurel Ridge toward Sinking Valley, then swings around northwestward and rejoins the other half of the flock in less than a minute. They all settle in the trees just beyond the corner of the field and resume the rusty waterfall impersonation. But after only a few seconds another hush, another card-shuffle of wings. This time, with the low sun full on them and the blue sky above, the effect is spectacular. I stand open-mouthed as the flock spirals, rising like a cobra from a snakecharmer’s basket, splits in the middle, rejoins, undulates like a flag in the breeze. As they wheel about, thousands of red wing patches simultaneously catch the sun.

Then I realize that One of These Things is Not Like the Other, as we used to sing back in grade school. A small hawk, probably a Coopers, is making tight circles in the middle of the flock. Suddenly I can see what this whole aerial ballet is all about. I’m reminded of the way certain Java applets respond to the slightest motion of the cursor as the flock swirls and curls around its would-be predator. After about a minute the hawk gives up, turns and glides off down the ridge, heading south for the winter. The blackbirds fly west, and in a few seconds things are absolutely quiet once again.

*

A little while later I’m sitting out on the porch, enjoying the stillness and the play of random thoughts swirling around in my head. One that I write down concerns the phrase “too much information.” I guess what strikes me is the way that the very concept of “information” – still basically alien to me, despite having been all my life the son of a librarian – includes connotations of too-muchness. Information can be catalogued, it can be communicated, but can it ever really be absorbed in the way that (say) knowledge or understanding can? Information evokes sleek and sexless modernity, pure quantity without affect.

Quite apart from what is usually meant by economic considerations, how you attain something, I’m thinking, determines its real value. How you get somewhere shapes your ability to perceive, to absorb and assimilate. The cliche that says that life is a journey is too vague, it seems to me, because life is really more like a pilgrimage, even for people who are not especially religious. “Journey” implies a mere change in position of an essentially static subject, whereas “pilgrimage” recognizes and celebrates the reality that the perceiver changes along with the perceived, that road and traveler make and unmake each other in an intricate pas de deux. Trying to describe such motions using calculus would involve an unpredictable number of returns to the starting point to change the terms of the original equation. I remember my high school calculus teacher Mr. Bloom, and how he used to sometimes “solve” an impossibly difficult equation in just this manner. I wonder now if his habit of talking out loud to God as he went along was always as facetious as I had assumed at the time.

While I’ve been sitting here taking notes on myself, the sun has slid off my pant legs, across the yard and up into the woods. Yes, this is all a distraction from what’s really important. Yes, it’s time to go for a walk.

Up on Laurel Ridge Trail I stop to admire the messed-up bark of a chestnut oak tree that must have some kind of disease or genetic mutation. Deeply furrowed like all chestnut oaks, this one’s bark forms collars or rings every six inches or so. The result is a highly complex micro-topography. So often in nature, it’s the disease, the predator, the apparently tragic error that produces the most spectacular effects.

*

If I didn’t write it down, I write in my pocket notebook, would any of it matter? In other words, is meaning something I discover through writing – or something I merely invent? And is this discovery/invention mainly an unveiling, or does it more closely resemble embroidery, even weaving? If the latter, how do we describe the results? With a dip in the dye vat, a veil for a bride can become a widow’s weed . . .

Enough of this. I have to go up and take the bread out of the oven now. I’m making Swedish rye this morning, with orange juice, mashed potatoes and anise seed. Temperamental stuff – I don’t think it rose nearly as well as it did the last time I made it. I could stick with the tried-and-true whole wheat-multigrain recipe, but what would be the fun in that? Fresh rye bread with garlic butter and a bowl of cabbage soup: the search for meaning seems trivial by comparison.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The butternut chronicle: Nov. 14, 1998

This entry is part 13 of 14 in the series The Butternut Chronicle

For those who just tuned in, I’m transcribing and reworking the notes from an old journal consisting entirely of thoughts and observations made while sitting on my front porch. There’s no entry for Nov. 15, and only a couple of observations from the day before – also a Sunday in 1998.

The warm spell continues. It’s fifty-one degrees at 8:00 a.m. A disgustingly late hour for me to be getting up, but I spent a late night with some visiting friends, who are still sleeping.

All five of the nearby resident gray squirrels are in the butternut tree, racing back and forth through its vase-shaped splay of limbs. The sun shines brightly but diffusely through a thin screen of cirrus; the trees don’t cast shadows. There’s a peculiar feel to the air this morning, like Indian Summer gone stale, I write.

Then again, maybe I just need to change my socks.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The origin of the chickadee

Once there was a woman who had a daughter she treated badly. The mother would be boiling corn soup and she would make the girl stir and stir. She would look in the pot and see it there and go hungry. But when she asked for some, the mother always said, “Not yet.” There never seemed to be a time when the corn soup was ready. The poor girl wished she could be a bird and fly away. Her wish was granted, and They turned her into a chickadee. That’s why the chickadee always comes around when people have anything going on. It hopes they will give it corn soup. It follows you through the woods, too, when you go to cut logs or brush, think maybe you’re going to build a fire and make soup.

Seneca Indian story collected by Merle H. Deardorff at the former Cornplanter Grant, NW Pennsylvania (destroyed by the Kinzua reservoir in 1965)

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Butternut chronicle: Nov. 13, 1998

This entry is part 12 of 14 in the series The Butternut Chronicle

For those who just tuned in, I’m transcribing and reworking the notes from an old journal consisting entirely of thoughts and observations made while sitting on my front porch. The butternut tree that then dominated the view has since fallen over, and I have yet to reconcile myself to its loss – or to the imminent loss of its species, currently being wiped out throughout its range by a disease of unknown origin and poorly understood epidemiology.

3:20 p.m. Fifty-four degrees. A male white-breasted nuthatch inches along the edge of the porch roof, probing under the lip of shingles with his workmanlike bill.

There are four things you need to know about white-breasted nuthatches (Sitta carolinensis): 1) they are basically solitary; 2) their strongest allegiance as a non-migratory, highly territorial species is to place; 3) nuthatch space is defined and delimited by the presence of trees, with which they have a unique and intimate relationship; and 4) they spend must of their waking hours upside-down, finding thereby all the small gleanings overlooked by everyone else.