Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
Where I grew up, and still live for part of the year. It’s located near Tyrone, Pennsylvania in the valley and ridge province of the Appalachians. Plummer’s Hollow Run drains into the Little Juniata, part of the Chesapeake Bay watershed.
If you’re a regular reader of The Morning Porch on Twitter or elsewhere, you know I’ve been following the progress of a northern flicker nest in the dead elm tree on the other side of the yard. I first noticed the presence of a pair of flickers around the house back on April 30:
Two days before my friend from England arrives, my inner voice sounds like a tour guide: Those are flickers. Hear how they croon their name?
— Dave Bonta (@morningporch) April 30, 2012
Yes, it’s been damp. But so far only the north-facing roof of my house has moss on it. This is useful to know in case I ever get lost.
For weeks, thunderstorms in the late afternoon or early evening have been an almost daily occurence. This has meant not only lots of rainbows but some interesting lighting conditions as well. As I type this at 7:58 p.m., the sky is suffused with an amber glow even as rain continues to fall. I feel almost as if I’m trapped inside a glass of the ale I had before supper.
Due to all the rain, the big vernal pool at the top of the watershed is lasting much longer than usual this year — good news for the wood frog tadpoles, which have now become frogs with tails and are graduating at a steady rate. Every morning, my mom reports, there are fewer of them than there had been the day before, which presumably means they’re leaving the water under cover of darkness. It’s a relief to know that after so many springs when the pool dried up too soon, our aging population of wood frogs will finally get some new blood.
The young frogs will spread out, travelling up to several hundred meters in all directions, and make new homes in the leaf litter, preying on various arthropods, including millipedes. I wonder whether any of them will make it as far as the house.
Naturalist, blogger and photographer Jennifer Scott Schlick visited Plummer’s Hollow earlier this week, and has just posted a short but stunning set of macro photos of some of our wildflowers. She was especially charmed by the rue anemone and fringed polygala (AKA gaywings), neither of which she’d encountered in her area of upstate New York (Jamestown and environs, just north of the northwest corner of Pennsylvania). It was also the first time she’s seen pink and yellow color variants of red trillium — one of the flowers included in our photo-poem collaboration last year. I’ve embedded her Flickr slideshow below, but if you can’t see it, here’s the link.
I had a hunch that Jennifer’s slideshow-talk “Confessions of a Reluctant Birder” would make a good presentation for our local Audubon chapter’s annual spring banquet, and I was right. Turns out she’s a highly entertaining, down-to-earth speaker. She does this sort of thing more or less for a living, along with banding birds, introducing high school kids to nature, mobilizing hundreds of volunteers to remove invasive plants from a 600-acre wetland, and yes, writing the occasional grant to support the Jamestown Audubon Center & Sanctuary, for which she serves as program director.
It was fun following Jennifer through our woods and introducing her to some of my favorite fellow inhabitants. Seeing the hollow through the eyes of a visitor is always a treat, but never more so than when the visitor has advanced training in looking at the natural world. And if you’re wondering whether Jennifer has blogged about the visit yet herself, the answer is of course.
This almost belongs in the Manual series, but for the fact that I didn’t write it. The text, and the object to which it refers, came from the pen and knitting needles of Rachel Rawlins, and you can see both at twisted rib. While there, you can click on the conversari tag and browse her half of our on-going, inter-blog conversation in words and images, originating in more quotidian exchanges via email, IM, etc.: one of those sprawling conversations that just keeps sprouting new, sometimes grotesque branches and digressions, grows ever more firmly rooted, and seems as if it might go on forever.
I shot the footage of the garter snake ball yesterday morning, while rushing back and forth between the houses to bake bread. (A mention made it into the Morning Porch, whence, curiously, Luisa also derived the image of a heart.) I felt I had to make the film fairly abstract, since I already made a videopoem with more straight-forward footage of a garter snake mating ball two years ago. On that occasion, I also uploaded an 8-minute video of the orgy. This time, I grabbed my regular camera and managed to get one half-decent still photo:
It was a thing of beauty, albeit hair-raising as always. Incidentally, I’ve probably said this before, but our robust garter snake population in Plummer’s Hollow is, I think, a direct consequence of our decision to stop mowing the lawns. If you like reptiles and amphibians and want to encourage them around your own home, the best thing you can do is transition to a less-managed landscape. Call it Daoist gardening if you like.
Garter snakes usually form mating balls immediately after emergence from hibernation in spring, but sometimes they mate in the fall, too. The great American poet Stanley Kunitz wrote about encountering one such coupling — “that wild braid” — in his iconic poem “The Snakes of September.”
Yesterday’s post prompted some additional recollections from my mother. Sometime during their last fight to save the hollow from being clearcut back in the late 80s, my parents were meeting with the lumberman/owner of the neighboring property in a lawyer’s office in Tyrone (the town adjoining our mountain). Of all the loggers we’ve ever met, this guy was the hardest to come to an agreement with because he viewed his role as divinely ordained: God had put the trees there for Man to use. Forest trees are a crop that needs to be harvested — a not-uncommon view at industry-funded schools of forestry, by the way. He once told me and Dad on a walk through the woods: “These trees are overmature. They want to be cut!” (See my poem about the incident.)
So on this particular day, Dad had to go to work after the meeting, leaving Mom to walk up the hollow. She mentioned this by way of making small talk after the meeting — what a nice day it was for a walk. The lumberman was aghast. “You’re going to walk? Aren’t you afraid of trees falling on you?”
It was a very telling remark, and we couldn’t help wondering how many other loggers suffered from such extreme arborophobia.
Fear of trees isn’t restricted to those against whom the trees might legitimately harbor grudges, however. Not long after we moved in back in 1971, a farm woman in the valley — another neighbor — asked Mom if she wasn’t afraid to be surrounded by trees. “I’d be terrified to live up there. What would you do if there was a forest fire?” Some years later, a writer-friend of Mom’s from State College expressed the same fear, adding by way of explanation that she was claustrophobic.
Well, I can see that. Besides, anyone who watches television with any regularity would be familiar with the raging, canopy-height forest fires that occur annually in many parts of the west. Here in the east, in most forest types including ours, fire really isn’t much of an issue. What forest fires do occur tend to be low-key affairs that scorch a few acres and kill a few fire-intolerant trees (read: trees that are not oaks) before they burn themselves out. It’s only in recently logged-over areas where the dried-out ground is deep in discarded limbs and branches that true conflagrations can occur.
Fear of forests in general is of course pretty widespread — just think about how many horror movies are set in cabins in the woods. It’s not altogether irrational to be afraid of wild places if you don’t know what you’re doing, or if there are aggressive poisonous snakes or grizzly bears about. Our black bears and timber rattlers are pretty hard to piss off, but to the extent that such things keep fools and lumbermen at bay, we could stand to have a lot more of them.
This morning, I found myself daydreaming about some of the famously strange trees of the world that I have yet to see: baobabs in East Africa, the Tule cypress, the fig trees whose roots are trained into living bridges in Cherrapunji, India, the dragon’s blood trees of Socotra Island… Then I remembered that I have actually seen some pretty great arboreal sights in my time: a cloud forest in Honduras, 2000-year-old bristlecone pines, Japanese maples at the moss garden temple in Kyoto, giant redwoods and sequoias, and an old-growth baldcypress-tupelo swamp forest in Arkansas came to mind.
And then I started thinking about some of our visitors here over the years to whom our own homely trees must’ve seemed a little exotic. In my last year of college, for example (1987 if you want to know), I was friendly with some grad students from northern China, and they invited themselves out in mid-October to see the fall foliage. It was a little early for our oaks, but they oo’d and ah’d over the flaming maples. The thing that struck them most of all, though, was the fact that all these trees grew on their own without having been planted, and that we also didn’t have to water them — they just couldn’t get over that.
Another time, my parents hosted a friend from Peru, a sociologist and poet who’d gotten a teaching gig in Kansas for the year and came out east to visit us. It was early spring, and he was agog at all the damage that an ice storm had wrought among the brittle black locust trees all along the upper edge of the field. After listening to my dad talk about disturbance regimes and forest succession for a while, he stopped and said, “But Bruce — how are you going to FIX them?”
Actually, the amount of standing dead trees and fallen woody debris in our woods might strike many native Pennsylvanians as a bit strange, too. Most forests, private and public, have been managed more intensively than ours; the market for hardwood being what it is, relatively few oak forests around here are allowed to age much beyond 80 years. In fact, our former neighbor Margaret, who grew up in the 1920s and 30s when the hollow was still recovering from being cut-over in the late 19th and early 20th century, told us before she died in 1991 that she thought the hollow had become very messy. She couldn’t remember ever seeing so many logs on the ground.
And since the majority of Americans now have grown up in the suburbs, they are probably used to seeing pretty well-groomed stands of trees. One exceedingly urban colleague of my dad’s at Penn State years ago simply refused to believe him when he told her that we had to carry a chainsaw in the back of the car, because trees regularly fell across our mile-and-half-long access road. This didn’t happen in any of the local parks, as far as she knew. “There must be something wrong with your trees!” she insisted.
It’s all in what you’re used to looking at, I guess. One thing about forests almost anywhere in the world: they’re very good at confounding one’s expectations. And the older they get, the stranger and more perverse they become.
Update: See the follow-up post, “Arborophobia,” for some more reactions to our woods.
“The obvious,” Charles Simic once wrote, “is difficult/To prove.” (“The White Room,” from The Book of Gods and Devils.) This is my new favorite quote.
Continue reading “Proof”
A brief update on the golden eagle camera-traps I wrote about two weeks ago: we haven’t been fortunate enough to lure in any eagles so far, but Paula has recovered some interesting wildlife shots. Oddly, she says, all the good stuff has been at the site behind the spruces at the top of First Field; the big cow carcass out at the Far Field hasn’t drawn in much of anything. I wonder if this might not be because the former site is near water (those tiny, ephemeral ponds I wrote about yesterday).
The critters in the gallery are a bobcat, a fisher, and a pair of red-tailed hawks. (Click on the thumbnails to see the full-sized images.)
It as if winter has gone on strike, leaving nothing but a few scabs.
All five of the small depressions on top of the mountain are full; what we usually call vernal ponds have become distinctly hibernal. It may seem like an odd place for water to collect, but a mountaintop is the one place where water doesn’t really know which way to go, so some of it just stays put.
Maybe that’s generally the case with things on top of mountains — they stay because they can’t decide on the best route down. Not that I would know, of course.