Plummer’s Hollow – Page 32

March 7, 2011 by Dave Bonta

Greensleeves

Yesterday morning’s small rain turned into fat snowflakes by mid-afternoon. I went out for a walk with camera and umbrella. Because of the soaking rain that had preceded the snow, the lichens and mosses on the tree trunks were still a vivid green, contrasting nicely with the snow. For an hour and a half, I kept shooting variations of the same photo.

The snow was exceptionally sticky, making for the most picturesque snowfall of the season. Something like six inches fell here. By this morning, even though the wind had scoured the treetops, snow still clung to all the lower branches, getting thicker the closer it got to the ground. If someone from a country without snow had seen this, they might have imagined the ground was mounting an insurrection against the sky, which was as achingly blue as it ever gets in January.

But this is March: the sun is much higher in the sky, and getting warmer as the day goes on, so it’s all turning to mush. A classic onion snow, I’d say, even if the wild onions have barely broken ground. The trees, at least, are sporting that scallion green.

Click on the photos to see larger versions on Flickr.

February 5, 2011May 30, 2016 by Dave Bonta

The Aftermath (videopoem)

Watch at Vimeo / Watch on YouTube

(text)
So you tore yourself away
from news of revolution
to stand under an umbrella in the woods
as the trees made rain?

Yes. The news means nothing
if I close my eyes & ears.

But what did you see?
Not the trees & ice around you—no.
But a pressed-down people
righting themselves with a shower
of broken shards, bowed limbs rising,
rising.

Those were incommensurable events.
There was nothing the trees could’ve done
to resist their liberation.

And what did you do
while the forest was shedding
its only copy of itself?

I tried to freeze it
with a pair of cameras,
one for motion,
one for the moment’s immortal soul.

Why didn’t you drop everything
& join in?

* * *

Adapting my ice-storm videos to a pre-existing poem, In the Ice Forest, proved impossible, so instead I tried the ekphrastic approach and wrote a poem in response to the footage — and the experience. For me, it usually happens this way. That link goes to a post at the Moving Poems forum, where I talk a little bit about the making of my first documentary-style videopoem, as well.

The topic of the poem was influenced by discussions at the new online community Writing Our Way Home, which celebrates “writing that precisely captures a fully-engaged moment.” Unfortunately, perhaps, the felt obligation to record things for later sharing or for record keeping distances oneself, prevents one from becoming fully engaged. If someday you see me abandon photography and videography altogether and just stick to writing, that will be the reason.

February 2, 2011 by Dave Bonta

Brush Mountain under ice

This is one of 14 new photos of this morning’s spectacular de-icing — go watch the slideshow. Once it starts, be sure to click the little four-arrows icon on the bottom right to expand to full screen. If you’re on dial-up (or using an iPad) you’re probably better off to browse the set.

The photos are in the order I took them; you can see more and more ice falling as the set progresses. I carried an umbrella, but still had to pause constantly to wipe moisture off the lens, and kept switching between still and video cameras, all the time with my mouth hanging open because it was all so goddamned beautiful.

The storm luckily caused very little damage here; in fact, such pruning as did take place was probably, on balance, good for the forest, downed woody debris being so crucial for biodiversity. If your forest or woodlot experienced similar “damage” in this storm, please, if you possibly can, let the snags stand and the fallen trees and branches lie. The wildlife will thank you for it. If you do harvest a few downed trees, for firewood or whatever, try to do it in as randomized a fashion as possible without building any new roads or compacting the soil any more than absolutely necessary. Don’t believe any logger or forester who tells you that unharvested dead trees are “going to waste.” On the contrary, their presence helps accelerate old-growth conditions.

UPDATE (1/3): It doesn’t look as if a videopoem will be in the works, but I did record new audio for my old poem “In the Ice Forest,” q.v.

February 2, 2011 by Dave Bonta

Weather report

On the weather maps, the monster storm was a sinuous creature poised to swallow half the east. We girded our loins (whatever that entails) and prepared for a power outage, but little more than an inch of pellet ice fell. But the storm hadn’t gone away; it was merely waiting until after dark to strike. Now there’s the eerie sound of water trying to flow in an ice-filled gutter and the scattered taps of rain or sleet striking the windows. The power goes out, comes on, goes out, and I sit in the darkness wondering where I put my flashlight.

I find the big Coleman battery lantern and discover it no longer works. I have a kerosene lantern but it’s too much trouble and bad smell; it’s almost bedtime anyway. The lights come back on. Better go get an armload of wood from the barn while I’m still dressed — there’s a very good chance I’ll wake to an ice-cold house.

When I turn on the outside light, the spicebush beside the front door is beautiful in its gleaming coat of frozen rain. The branches are just beginning to bow. I wonder what the woods will look like in the morning. The rain is loud and echoey as it strikes the crusted surface of the snowpack: a sound as far removed from the gentle hush of a summer shower as Metallica is from Andrés Segovia.

As I crunch up the driveway, it occurs to me that a day without power wouldn’t be so bad — it would force me to get out and take some pictures, shoot video, maybe even use my new audio recorder to capture the sound of crashing limbs. I think back to the last big ice storm, in January of 2005, and remember that it was my blogging about it at Via Negativa that prompted my cousin Matt to send me his old digital camera, my first, so that the next time I’d be able to take pictures.

January 3, 2011 by Dave Bonta

Biotic hacks

An otherwise leafless tulip-tree sapling in the yard still holds five or six leaves, curled and sewn into moth cocoons: a simple yet elegant biotic hack. (Update) This is most likely the work of the promethea silkmoth, Callosamia promethea.

Many of the dried goldenrod stalks display a more destructive repurposing, the work of a midge known as Rhopalomyla solidaginis which lays its eggs in the terminal bud and restricts all further growth to that point, where its fat larva feeds and may be joined by midges of other species in search of shelter.

A inflorescence may still emerge from the cluster, but much of the time there’s only the hack’s faux flower, a beautiful fuck you to the Canada goldenrod.

Less destructive is the goldenrod ball gall, winter home of a fly larva, Eurosta solidaginis. The adult which emerges in the spring is said to be a poor flyer, and only lives a couple of weeks — long enough to mate and inject its eggs into a young goldenrod stem. It is the larva that then produces the chemical instructions to grow a globular home in the plant’s core.

December 24, 2010March 6, 2014 by Dave Bonta

Merry Christmas from Plummer’s Hollow

Watch on Vimeo.

Wishing everyone who visits here peace and joy this holiday season and in the New Year.

Thanks to Stellar Art Wars for releasing their song, “Best Christmas Yet,” under a Creative Commons Attribution license on Jamendo.

December 21, 2010 by Dave Bonta

Solstice meditation

I’ve always felt a little sorry for the sun because it cannot cast a shadow.

What does it have to remind itself of its own eventual death?

What would the henge builders say about a god who never eats and a people who no longer believe in sacrifice?

What would the ancestors make of our craze for the living dead?

December 14, 2010 by Dave Bonta

A Year for Forests

I see from the photo that it was snowing when I snapped this. I was intent on the flayed tree, this black locust savaged by a horny buck who must’ve bent it halfway to the ground to reach so far up its trunk. It’s O.K. with me; the tree isn’t one we necessarily want to survive. It’s one of the advance scouts for the forest’s never-ending attempt to take back the ground it lost 150 years ago to field and orchard.

Black locusts are good at that: rhizomatic, nitrogen-fixing, fast growing… the perfect native colonizer. As fast as we prune them out of the old meadow, they reappear, new sprouts capable of growing five feet in a year. The tree in the photo looks like a three-year-old to me. Armed for combat of a sort with its short thorns (nothing like those on a wild honey locust), a black locust sapling seems like good match for a deer’s antlers, which must be flayed themselves and then polished and honed: trees that live a single season and never sprout a leaf.

In the black cherry woods near the Far Field, time and rot have stripped all the bark from a tree brought down by ice five winters ago. Now its bare trunk burns with new life, albeit not the kind typically featured in parables about self-transformation. I look around for saplings in the openings the storm made, and spot a few, but almost none of them are hickories or oaks.

I have seen this forest devastated again and again: by gypsy moth caterpillars 30 years ago and by ever-more-frequent ice storms, the result no doubt of the changing global climate. Will stands like this ever revert to closed-canopy forest, or will they continue to thin until half the mountain is covered by savanna and dominated by fast-growing colonist species such as black locusts, black cherries, striped and red maples, and the alien tree-of-heaven?

It’s easy to get depressed and forget that whatever happens, however stark a desert we make, it will still be beautiful. On a cloudy late afternoon in the monotone winter woods, this allegedly dead tree was by far the most colorful thing.

2011 is the International Year of Forests. For the New Year’s edition of the Festival of the Trees, which will be hosted at the British blog Nature’s Whispers, we’re asking bloggers to share tree-related plans or resolutions, or simply to reflect on their relationship with forests. As for me, I hope to see our family’s 640 acres of mountaintop land given long-term protection through a conservation easement by next year’s end. Uncertain as the future of the forest may be, we need to give it at least a fighting chance.

December 6, 2010September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Last call for summer

The other morning I noticed an odd thing. In the clump of dried brown tansy stalks beside the porch, one clump of yellowish green leaves remained.

A closer look revealed a single blossom. Ordinarily, tansy blossoms are confined to the flat-topped head. They bloom in mid-July. Their leaves are so astringent, they repel almost all insects — which is why I grow them: they make a great mothball substitute. Also, I’ve used them in brewing, in lieu of hops.

But what made this one sprig’s clock go off so late? July is always when I start to notice harbingers of autumn: curly dock leaves turning purple, the first orange appearing on the black gum trees. Five months on, it seems that there are still a few forgotten corners of the natural world where the news of summer’s surrender has yet to penetrate. I am reminded a little of my partying days, how I always used to get my second wind at 4:00 in the morning when everyone else was nodding off. “Hey! C’mon! There’s still plenty of beer!”

November 26, 2010September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Thanksgiving porch

2007 (November 22)
Something approaches at a slow shuffle, gray in the gray light: porcupine. He threads the thistle patch, squeezes under the porch.

2008 (November 27)
That drum so low it sounds as if it’s in your head? A ruffed grouse, beating the air with its wings like one hand clapping. Or so they say.

2009 (November 26)
As if giving thanks, the thin, wavering call of a white-throated sparrow. The dawn sky half-cloud, half-clear. A distant owl.

2010 (November 25)
Steady rain, and the temperature just two degrees above freezing. In the herb bed, the pale blue wheel of a blossom on the invasive myrtle.