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.
This morning I helped our neighbors, Troy and Paula Scott, haul some cow and roadkilled deer carcasses to two locations on the mountain for a golden eagle camera trap, part of an ongoing project headed up by ornithologists Todd Katzner and Trish Miller to track the movement patterns of eastern golden eagles. Paula is the point-person for the project here in Plummer’s Hollow since she has the most expertise with trail cams, as my mom detailed in a recent column. There are various other locations around the state, but I believe ours may be the only one to include cow as well as deer carcasses. Continue reading “Raw”
By now I’m sure you’ve heard about the mini riots that broke out at big-box stores all across the U.S. yesterday as desperate bargain-hunters, squeezed by a shrinking economy, fought over Christmas gifts. I’d like to think these incidents, played up by a conflict-addicted media, don’t represent the behavior or attitudes of Americans in general. In fact, for the small percentage of folks who still get up off the couch to go hunting for wild game, the opening day of regular-rifle deer season is a much bigger deal. And here in Pennsylvania, that falls on the Monday after Thanksgiving. Continue reading “Black Friday vs. hunting season”
It’s a tradition in our family to go out for a walk after the mid-day meal on Thanksgiving and Christmas, sometimes all together, but more commonly by ourselves or in smaller groups. This might seem strange to those for whom constant family togetherness is mandatory on such occasions, but, well, some of the holiday traditions of other folks seem strange to us, too: lolling around watching other people play sports, for example, or lining up outside stores on Black Friday morning. To each his own. Continue reading “Thanksgiving walk”
A sudden south wind buffets the house, roars in the ridgetop trees for a few minutes & dies. I go out to take a leak. The moon hasn’t risen yet & it’s dark. Nightcrawlers rustle under the lilac, dragging fragments of leaves into the ground.
Wood smoke: must be from the Amish in Sinking Valley. I inhale greedily. On the other side of the mountain, the deep labored thrum of a locomotive is followed a long minute later by the whistle—an almost orgasmic release.
At this time of night, it would be perfectly reasonable to confuse a hawk with a handsaw. In the crawlspace under my floor, some small mammal scratches the cold-air return duct with restless, dreaming claws.
It’s rained for the better part of a month, and the woods are wild with fungi. We’ve been been eating like kings: maitake, chicken mushrooms and giant puffballs. But some of the inedible mushrooms are eye-catching, too, and so plentiful they can even cover a trail blaze, threatening to replace our way-making with their own. Continue reading “Along autumn trails”
As a follow-up to yesterday’s post, I decided to shoot some pictures of the black walnut tree in question. It had rained off and on, but the sun came out while I was shooting, making everything glow and glisten. In processing, I tried switching to black-and-white and found I preferred that for almost all the photos, with the possible exception of the one above. Here’s a slideshow of the set, which requires Flash, meaning that if you’re on an iPhone or iPad, you won’t be able to watch it. However, this is best viewed on a large monitor — once it starts playing, click the four-arrows icon at bottom right to expand it to full-screen. (If you’re on dial-up, it’s probably easiest to browse the set, and if you’re reading this via email or in a feed reader, you’ll probably have to click through to view the slideshow.)
The photo with my hand in it shows what I believe is the scar from our long-ago Frisbee attack. Usually black walnuts that sustain damage to a terminal bud end up forking, but this one did not. A single bud became the new main stem.
Black walnut wood is prized by furniture makers, and the supply is relatively scarce because the trees grow slowly once they start to get big. As these photos and yesterday’s post suggest, however, they grow quite rapidly in their first few decades. My feeling is once they start bearing nuts, that takes so much out of them that they don’t have much energy left to channel into wood. Consider they remain leafless for roughly seven and half months of the year at our latitude, not leafing out until early June, and the very woody nuts are always plentiful — I don’t think pollination ever fails.
The yard of my parents’ house is dominated by black walnuts, which might not seem like a good thing given their legendary inhospitabilty toward certain other plants, which can’t tolerate the chemical juglone exuded by black walnut leaves, husks and roots. However, for birdwatchers like my mom, they’re ideal because they leaf out so late and lose their leaves so early. When migrating warblers move through the yard, she has no trouble spotting them.
As for the walnuts, they are a bit of an acquired taste and a lot of work to remove from the shells, requiring a sledgehammer and extensive use of a nutpick. The hulls — source of the ink my friend Alison is so fond of — are easy enough to remove, but you have to wear gloves. If you don’t, as we didn’t when we were kids, you tend to provoke comments like, “Hey Bonta! Did you’ns run out toilet paper?” Kids can be cruel. These days, we find it much easier just to buy a jar of pre-shelled black walnuts for a couple dollars from the local Amish whenever we need some, so the squirrels up here feed very well.
Gray squirrels are scatter hoarders, and it’s their burying of the walnuts all around the yards and meadow that’s responsible for most of the new trees — those few that get past the deer (or boys with Frisbees). In the book North American Tree Squirrels, mammalogist Michael J. Steele recounts some of the strategies gray squirrels use to keep other squirrels from discovering their walnuts, including digging a couple fake burial sites in a row before finally burying the walnut for real if other squirrels are watching. I also once watched a squirrel excavate a walnut that had been buried about a foot down, clean it all off, then dig another hole a yard away and re-bury it. I suspect it thought another squirrel had watched the initial bury.
The most amazing fact about this behavior to me is that the squirrels rely on memory alone to recover hundreds of nuts, even when they’re buried under an additional foot or more of snow and ice. Steele has calculated that a squirrel digging a black walnut out of the frozen ground on a bitter cold January day, then chiseling through the rock-hard shell, expends more energy than it gets back from eating the nut. Hence, I suppose, the frequent raids on the birdfeeder to make up the deficit.
Don’t forget to submit tree-related links to the Festival of the Trees monthly blog carnival (deadline: September 30). The next edition will be at europeantrees — and we are still looking for a host of the following (Nov. 1st) edition.
There’s a black walnut tree beside the driveway that my brothers and I tried to kill one spring evening when we were teenagers and it was just a seedling. Now it drops fat green planetary objects from 50 or even 70 feet up, another one landing on the old cracked tarmac every so often with a heavy thunk, like a worn-out clock that has forgotten how to toll. But the tree’s in the prime of youth; it is I, the one-time would-be assassin, who has turned decrepit. I have a fan in a little cage that I turn on my face in the heat of the summer, and for most of the other three seasons, my bony knees remain cold no matter how many layers I wrap them in. The falling walnuts remind me not of harvest-time and blessings as they should, but of all the projects I’ve abandoned, including love, reproduction, a career, the whole matter of being a useful citizen.
It should be noted that we have plenty of squirrels, so sometimes the walnuts don’t fall on their own; they are pushed. Maybe the squirrels are simply clumsy, and drop the nuts by accident. But I’ve watched them do it, and I have to say I think they relish the sound of a walnut connecting with its unmissable target the earth, like bored kids with a frisbee aiming for the terminal bud of a tree seedling at the edge of the yard, and shouting with triumph when a lucky throw shaves it bald.
Walking through a dark forest without a flashlight is an exercise in trust: trusting your feet to find the trail, trusting chance not to place a new fallen tree at shin level, trusting that a storm won’t blow in — for there’s no hurrying this slow shuffle. Over the chanting crowd of katydids in the trees, I hear the thin, whispery alarm calls of flying squirrels. I stop and peer at an almost vertical row of glowing spots a few feet off the trail: foxfire.
The damp air is an olfactory smorgasbord of molds and fermentation. As my eyes adjust, I begin to discern different flavors of darkness, too: here the rich black shadows of trees, there the cafe-au-lait openings of trail or blow-down. I feel less helpless now, more in control. But no sooner do my feet and eyes grow accustomed to their new normal state than the restless mind is off again, and I have to keep calling it back: Heel! Stay!
Is it loneliness that prompts it to wander like that? If I were sharing this darkness with others right now — say, outside a federal penitentiary in Georgia, cupping a candle flame — would I be better able to maintain focus? If instead of myself I were, in fact, concentrating all my thoughts on some victim of the criminal injustice system on his last, too-short walk into permanent darkness, wouldn’t my own hopes and dreams fade into the background, as faint as foxfire?
The sound of a very small shower approaches. I take my hat off to relish the tap of its millipede feet on my close-cropped scalp, but it’s already past. An odd reaction, perhaps — a sign that, deep down, I might still crave another’s touch.
Somehow I find the brushy intersection where the Short Way Trail leads down off the ridge, and soon I am seeing a light among the trees. Look, nobody’s home! Blinking dots of light in the window where an ethernet unit sends and receives from a world-wide web.
And how is it, I wonder as I enter the house, that I managed to walk all that way without blundering into a single spider web? The equinox may not be until Friday, but autumn is already here. Or as the book of Jeremiah puts it: The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.
Master Po: Close your eyes. What do you hear?
Young Caine: I hear the water, I hear the birds.
Po: Do you hear your own heartbeat?
Caine: No.
Po: Do you hear the grasshopper which is at your feet?
Caine: Old man, how is it that you hear these things?
Po: Young man, how is it that you do not?
“Kung Fu” (TV series), pilot episode, 1972
A grasshopper doesn’t move when I pass her on the concrete walk through the front garden to my door. This seems unusual, and I crouch down for a closer look. I think the bright red hind legs might make it red-legged grasshopper, Melanoplus femurrubrum, but it’s probably something in that genus, at any rate. I notice the end of the abdomen is swelling and contracting, and keeps pressing against the concrete like a finger probing for a weak spot. She takes a few steps forward, presses the concrete some more, then steps off the walk into the garden and immediately finds a patch of bare dirt that behaves as expected, yielding to pressure. The swelling and contracting of the abdomen, combined with steady pressure from the big hind legs, slowly forces it into the soil to the depth of about a centimeter. The grasshopper now remains immobile for the next several minutes except for a slight throbbing of the abdomen, which I presume denotes the deposition of eggs.
The more this grasshopper absorbs my attention, the more I notice of her surroundings, too: the small black ant walking in tight circles beside her, a larger red ant that crosses the walk in a more purposeful manner, the black field cricket — half the length of the grasshopper but just as fat, and twice as charismatic — who comes down the walk toward me and crosses into the moss garden. I hear a hummingbird buzzing into the spicebush above my head, then dropping down almost to my ear and hovering for a second before rising into the lilac and briefly perching. Even as I watch, others are watching me.
When the grasshopper pulls out, she climbs back up onto the sidewalk, which has evidently lost none of its attractiveness. She crosses it slowly, again “fingering” it with the end of her abdomen every inch of the way. How can any creature be so unaware as to mistake hard concrete for soil, just because it’s a similar color? Finally she stumbles off the other side of the walk and onto another suitable patch of dirt where the moss hasn’t grown in yet. Since our last rain was just two days ago, again she has no trouble penetrating the soil surface with her throbbing organ. I stand up slowly from my crouch, but clearly she is too intent on egg-laying to notice me and the threat to her existence I represent.
A nascent online community devoted to “practicing the art of attention,” This Life Lived, challenges members this week to consider the nature of attention itself:
What does “attention” mean to you? How do you define attention for yourself? What do you look like when you are paying attention, and what are you doing? What do you feel when you are at full attention: Do you feel calm and still, or do you feel wired and energized?
Try to construct a clear and personal definition of attention this week. If you struggle to get started, you could say to yourself or write in your journal, “To me, attention means that I am ______________ .” Then describe that definition in detail. Take time with your personal definition. Notice yourself throughout the coming week, and try to catch yourself in the act of paying attention. Notice what that act or moment does for you, and how it affects your day.
To me, attention means that I am going out of myself, not unlike the egg-laying grasshopper — and in the process, making myself vulnerable. Somehow, I think, the vulnerability is key to the whole experience. Although I am fortunate to live on a mountain with (at present) no man-eating carnivores or poisonous snakes, crouching down in the woods or fields at various times of the year can definitely be hazardous, exposing one to Lyme disease-carrying deer ticks. I don’t spend a whole lot of time obsessing about that, but the point is that the vulnerability of a rapt observer is real and not theoretical. Women and girls of course experience another whole dimension of vulnerability in many seemingly remote areas. In any case, my point is that we are the products of millions of years of evolution in which we were usually prey animals as well as hunters and foragers, and I think the kinds of attention we experience today have been shaped by all three of those roles (among others). I’d go so far as to suggest that the way the attention rather quickly widens out when we focus on one thing is an adaptive behavior. We may be focusing on what’s right in front of us — some hard-to-spot wild root crop, say — but if a twig snaps the wrong way, we’ll hear it.
When I sit out on the porch drinking my coffee in the morning, much of the time I am not paying attention. But at a certain point I’ll remember that I need some interesting observation to write about for The Morning Porch, and at that point I turn into a kind of hunter-gatherer. I don’t have a clear search-image in mind, but I’m alert for anything that will make good writing fodder. Often I begin by listening, mentally naming everything I hear, which at this time of year may not be much: goldfinch chittering, the steady trill of tree crickets, the whine of an annual cicada, a passing jet, the faint sounds of traffic from the gap. Just listening like this makes me more aware of what I’m seeing, too, and it’s a good way to begin because listening is inherently more absorptive than looking, which preserves a distance between observer and observed. Sometimes then I’ll stand up and start taking a mental inventory of the plants in my front yard.
It’s funny: as I’ve probably mentioned here before, when I was a kid I was very resistant to the idea of learning names for wild things, because it seemed to me that once we associate something with a fixed name, we make it much more difficult to see that thing in a different light. Now that I’m a writer, though, I’ve bowed to necessity and put a high priority on learning the common names. It’s true, you can have some sort of relationship with something for years without knowing what it’s called. Perhaps someone more enlightened than me can experience something akin to the Zen ideal of direct seeing — good luck with that. In my experience, knowing a name is the first step toward making something’s acquaintance in a real way.
As many thousands of times as I walked up the road as a kid, coming home from school, I never knew the names of the plants whose hard, comma-shaped seeds could so easily be stripped from the stalk, or the ones with fleshy, translucent stems that snapped so easily. They were my companions in dawdling; I de-seeded and uprooted them unmercifully as an occupation for my distracted fingers. Was I really paying attention to those unnamed plants? Not really. It was only about ten years ago, on a hike sponsored by our local Audubon chapter, that I finally learned what people call them: jumpseed (Polygonum virginianum) and clearweed (Pilea pumila), a stingless nettle. These names were so right, and so delightful, I was immediately ashamed of my long-standing callousness, and I haven’t been able to see either plant since without an inward smile of recognition.
If you’re a poet, you’re probably familiar with some version of that relaxed-yet-focused, semi-trance state in which the best lines and ideas come to the surface. I’m sure other artists get into that zone as well. For me, its strongest analogy is to hypnagogia (thanks for the word, Natalie!): it is a mild kind of threshold consciousness characterized by increased receptivity and suggestibility. As with actual hypnagogia, it’s a state that often yields real insights. But it’s not so different, either, from that state of attention I found myself in this morning, watching the grasshopper probe the ground with her ovipositor, or earlier, on the porch, listening to goldfinches and watching them glean seeds from the wild thistle. I was open, I was vulnerable, I was letting things in.
Mom ready to release a golden eagle trapped on our mountain and fitted with a radio telemetry unit (photo by Todd Katzner)Dave Bonta: Can you remember your first reaction to the property? What impressed you the most?
Marcia Bonta: I was overwhelmed by the ride up through the dark hollow, followed by the sunlit opening at the top in early July. Then, while your dad talked to the realtor, the rest of us were out in the backyard filling our stomachs with black raspberries. I had never seen so many wild berries. That’s when I urged your dad to buy the place.
DB: How did Central Pennsylvania differ from other places you’ve lived? And how have your impressions of it changed over the years?
MB: I had loved our home in rural Maine, but I wasn’t fond of the black flies in May and June and the mosquitoes the rest of the summer that made the woods uninhabitable until the first frost. But I did enjoy snowshoeing in the winter and the frozen lake that allowed me to explore the shores on my snowshoes. I also liked the independent-minded people. I was devastated when we left because I had had five years of living in the country and didn’t want to live in a town or city again, as we had during our first years of marriage in Washington, D.C. and suburban Virginia. I knew, though, from our years at Bucknell University, as college students, and also the time we had spent at my grandparents’ home in Pottstown and at my great Aunt Mary’s home in Mahanoy City, that Pennsylvania had beautiful, wooded hills and mountains and that we would be able to find a rural home here.
When we first moved to Plummer’s Hollow, it was a quiet place filled with birds and animals. Over the years, the songbird population has dwindled and the trees, shrubs and wildflowers have suffered and continue to suffer from invasive plants and diseases that I couldn’t have imagined. I also did not imagine that the Tyrone bypass that was finished up after we moved here would become an interstate highway, that all around us our neighbors would have their forests cut unsustainably, that the increasing deer herd would eat much of the understory, and that the family-owned limestone quarry at the base of our mountain would be sold to a large corporation.
On the other hand, I could not have imagined the advent of three new mammal species on our property — black bears, coyotes, and fishers — all of which have added to my pleasure in walking our trails.
DB: Did living here influence your decision to become a writer? I seem to recall that your first publications were actually about our back-to-the-land stuff, and the nature writing came a little later — is that right?
MB: I started keeping a nature journal when we lived in D.C. at the urging of your dad. Whenever we visited a natural area, I recorded it. At the same time, I was reading nature books, especially those by Edwin Way Teale and Hal Borland. Then, when we moved to Maine, I continued reading and studying nature books and keeping a nature journal.
When we moved to Pennsylvania, I was so enthralled by what I was seeing here, I wanted to write about it and began with a nature column in the local newspaper that also included country-living material, patterned after Gladys Taber’s country books on her life in Connecticut. I also realized that no real nature books had been written about Pennsylvania and that there were no articles about Pennsylvania in the many nature magazines we subscribed to. That was the niche I hoped to fill. But we were also homesteading at the time — raising a couple pigs, bees, chickens, Muscovy ducks, and vegetables. Getting nature articles in magazines was impossible without experience and contacts, but a number of magazines, including Organic Gardening, were interested in publishing my homesteading experiences. When I wrote my first book — Escape to the Mountain — about our first five years here, I did include some material on our pets and gardening and had intended to write a second one about the rest of our homesteading experience. I couldn’t get that one sold.
I realized that “how-to” books were easier to sell and I was also interested in promoting Pennsylvania’s natural places, so with your Dad as photographer and driver, we went all over the state both for articles for state magazines and for a book. After writing two books about such places and numerous magazine articles, I finally had enough of a reputation to do what I really wanted to do, hence, my four Appalachian Seasons books.
DB: You helped stop the final lumbering in Plummer’s Hollow, as you described in Appalachian Autumn. What lessons do you take from that whole experience — about human nature, about our legal system, and so forth?
MB: Your Dad and I have always been naïve about humanity, so we tended to believe at first what folks told us about their motivations and what they were doing. We soon learned differently. Where land ownership is concerned, we were told that owners could do whatever they wanted to their land and if it impacted us, our only recourse was to sue them in courts after the damage had occurred. In other words, you need money and power to challenge the system and we didn’t have either. We also realized that most people who owned land on our mountain looked at it strictly as a cash cow and/or as somewhere to hunt deer. They believed that by continually cutting, they would produce young growth to increase the deer herd. And when they needed money, they called in a lumberman. They expected that the forest would regenerate as it always had and didn’t want to hear about the impact of deer and poor logging practices. They didn’t seem to know much about any of the other creatures or plants on their land. In other words, their approach, and, indeed, the approach of most people still toward the natural world is utilitarian, which is why humans continue to take rather than give to nature, thinking that it will always produce. I know many people think that those of us who care so much for the natural world don’t care about people. On the contrary, we realize that once we despoil every inch of the earth, as many seem intent on doing, humans will be the ones to suffer, more than they already are in such places as the horn of Africa.
DB: How has your perception of the natural world changed over the years as a result of living here? Or, to put it differently: How has living here informed your understanding of nature and biodiversity?
MB: By watching the changes from season to season and year to year, I have learned a great deal about nature and biodiversity. When we first moved to the country, back in Maine, and then here, I was happy just to be close to the natural world, but I only knew the identification of a few wildflowers, birds, trees, and shrubs. With the help of books and articles, this history and English student managed to teach herself something about the plants and creatures she was observing. Mostly, I learned to be a hands-off person where nature is concerned — a watcher, not a doer.
DB: Over the years we’ve monitored for acid rain, watched waves of invasive species come in, fought industrial wind turbines and strip malls elsewhere on the ridge, and may be witnessing more frequent, destructive storms as a result of climate change. Are you ever tempted to just give up, sell the place, and move the hell out of Pennsylvania? What keeps you sane?
MB: If we were much younger, I would be tempted to leave. But then, what would we do with this place? We’d have to sell it to get enough money to live somewhere else. I couldn’t betray this property like that because if we didn’t cut the forest before selling it, as almost everyone does who sells forested property, the next owner probably would. And since we have determined to grow an old-growth forest here and are well on our way in some areas, we couldn’t possibly sell it to someone else. Our son, Steve, recently revisited our old property in Maine and found that the forest on it hadn’t been touched, much to our delight. I don’t think the same thing would happen here.
Going out every day in our diminished world keeps me sane most of the time. Also, the knowledge that I am getting old and may be lucky enough to be off the planet before climate change destroys the place. According to the latest science, Pennsylvania will not be as hard-hit as some areas. Of course, that depends on whether we can keep our ample water supply safe in this state when the drier states run out.
DB: We’ve been conducting guided tours for Penn State environmental studies and landscape architecture classes for a number of years now. How did that get started, and what have you learned from doing it?
MB: Dr. Ian Marshall, an English professor from Penn State Altoona, who teaches nature writing as literature, contacted me about speaking to his class. That was back in the early nineties. They were reading Appalachian Spring, I believe. Then, he asked to bring a group up for a field trip. After that, he and Dr. Carolyn Mahan, a biology professor at Penn State Altoona, designed a brand new environmental studies program for the college and wanted more in-depth field trips here. Very soon, you joined me in doing that. Dr. Marshall told professor friends at University Park about our field trips and once a reporter from WPSU also came on a field trip and did a program about it. I think that’s the way the word spread about our all-day field trips in which you talk about forest issues and I about wildflowers, birds, etc. I also am asked to read from my books and answer questions from the class about my writing.
I’ve enjoyed conducting these field trips because I started writing to teach people about the natural world, in hopes that they would be interested in defending it and in studying about it themselves. Some of these students, at least, are interested in doing that. Writing is a lonely experience, and sometimes it’s difficult to know if you’ve reached anyone. Seeing and talking to these students gives me hope for the future.
DB: What advice would you give to young people, or anyone, thinking of moving to the country? Should they fix up an old place as we did, or build new to take advantage of green building techniques? How should they try and balance their needs with the needs of wildlife?
MB: If there is already a building on the property, fixing it up is more environmentally sound than tearing it down and building new. But if they fix it up, they should still take advantage of energy-saving practices, especially those for heating and cooling.
As far as nature is concerned, they should develop as little as possible and let nature have its way. Nature likes messiness. It does not like, nor can it utilize, vast expanses of lawn. I am appalled at how many folks move to the country and spend their time on a riding mower cutting grass. Why don’t they stay in a town or city? If they are afraid of nature or want to neaten it up, they should not live in the country. We need more wildness in this country, not less. If everyone who has a large lawn would dig it up and plant native wildflowers, trees, and shrubs, they would create badly-needed habitat for all kinds of creatures. In addition, taking care of such a place would be more challenging, interesting, and body-building than sitting on a mower.
DB: How do you envision Plummer’s Hollow 40 years from now, or 100?
MB: I hope the forest continues to mature, the wildflowers and shrubs increase in number and diversity, and the mammal species thrive. I fear that climate change, diseases, and other impacts will negatively affect Plummer’s Hollow. I would love to be proved wrong about this. In fact, I hope I am wrong and that humanity will change its acquisitive ways before it is too late.
DB: Any concluding thoughts?
MB: Without your father, my life would have been very different. He encouraged my writing, he became my photographer even though it was not an interest of his, and he agreed to live at and manage our place even while holding down a full-time job and long commute every day. He gave me the kind of home I had dreamed about. What a wonderful gift that has been and continues to be.
Visit Marcia Bonta on the web, and read her monthly nature column for Pennsylvania Game News, at marciabonta.wordpress.com.
