Category: Plummer’s Hollow

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.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Timberdoodle

Cold, gray days make me think cold, gray thoughts. Years from now anyone will be able to tell just from reading this record of my internal weather what the earth and sky were doing outside my window at the time.

But the conditions are just right for the woodcock’s annual sky dance, as Aldo Leopold once termed it. Sunday evening after supper, around 6:30 p.m., I heard the distinctive peent peent call of a male woodcock in full courtship mode. He was about a week later than last year, but then, everything’s late this year. I called my parents, and they joined me out behind the barn to watch the show.

The American woodcock – also known as timberdoodle, bog sucker, night partridge, Labrador twister, or (in Quebec) la Becasse – is an exceedingly strange bird: basically a displaced shorebird that lives on earthworms and nests in old fields and young, brushy woods. Picture a fat bird about six inches long from top of head to tip of stubby tail, with a wingspan of maybe fifteen inches. Its eyes are set way back on its head, opposite its most distinctive feature – the four-inch-long bill. (I happen to have a taxidermist’s mount of a woodcock on my wall, whence the above picture.)

Phylogenetically speaking, Scolopax minor is a sandpiper; Arthur Cleveland Bent included it in his classic Life Histories of North American Shorebirds (Dover Publications, 1962 [1927]). Though Bent’s meticulous collation of accounts from the scientific literature have been superceded by the (still incomplete) Birds of North America series published by the American Ornithologists’ Union in cooperation with the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, his life histories remain far more readable. About the woodcock, he writes,

This mysterious hermit of the alders, this recluse of the boggy thickets, this wood nymph of crepuscular habits is a common bird and well distributed in our Eastern States, widely known, but not intimately known. Its quiet retiring habits do not lead to human intimacy. It may live in our midst unnoticed. Its needs are modest, its habitat is circumscribed, and it clings with tenacity to its favorite haunts even when encroached upon by civilization.

A bit of moisture was in the air Sunday evening, and between the low barometric pressure and the very low cloud ceiling – only a few hundred feet over our heads – sounds traveled far. It occurred to me that such acoustic conditions might be especially favorable for the woodcock’s spring display, though the published literature focuses mainly on the light-gathering potential of the open areas favored for singing grounds. One study in New Brunswick did find that sites with less white noise are favored, but here in Plummer’s Hollow, woodcock displays have increased over the years, even as noise from the nearby highway has also increased. Highway noise was especially loud on Sunday, but that didn’t stop our woodcock from peenting for all he was worth.

Perhaps in part because of his long bill, the woodcock is a skilled ventriloquist. If you hadn’t read the literature, you’d swear that he was flying rapidly back and forth as he delivered his peent call, which sounds almost like a very brief sample of a cicada’s song repeated over and over, or a high-pitched nighthawk. You can peer around at the darkening clouds all you want without seeing him, though, because at this stage in the performance he’s still on the ground, standing or strutting about. In the dry prose of the Birds of North America monograph by D.M. Keppie and R.M. Whiting, Jr., “Male rotates on ground causing directional change in intensity of Peent.”

Bent reproduces a much more colorful account from 1894, courtesy of William Brewster (who heard paap instead of peent). It’s not clear to me how anyone manages to observe this behavior without infrared goggles, but Brewster assures us that

At each utterance of the paap the neck was slightly lengthened, the head was thrown upward and backward…, the bill was opened wide and raised in a horizontal position, the wings were jerked out from the body. All these movements were abrupt and convulsive, indicating considerable muscular effort on the part of the bird… The opening and shutting of the bill strongly suggested that of a pair of tongs. During the emission of the paap the throat swelled and its plumage was ruffled… The mouth opened to such an extent that I could look directly down the bird’s throat, which appeared large enough to admit the end of one’s forefinger. The lateral distension of the mouth was quite striking.

It used to be thought that a silent female could usually be found somewhere in the vicinity whenever a male performed like this, but more recent studies have cast doubt on that theory. Some males display every night for weeks as they migrate north, seemingly for the sheer hell of it. Perhaps they’re simply psyching themselves up for the real thing? In any case, the precise purpose of the male woodcock’s springtime display remains unknown. The close association of nests and singing grounds suggests some role in courtship, but the bird’s social behavior offers few clues to what that might be. According to Keppie and Whiting, woodcocks have “no known dominance hierarchy nor minimum individual distances.” They are

Polygynous [and form] no pair bond; males give no parental care. Males in north continue display long after most females commence laying eggs; some males display at widely separate singing grounds. [There’s] no evidence of mate guarding or that male territory provides females with physical resources; [it remains] speculative that copulations occur mainly on singing ground. Some females visit at least 4 singing grounds before nesting and continue visits while incubating and with broods.

Whatever its function, the aerial part of the woodcock’s display is the most spectacular for human observers. After a minute or two the peenting abruptly stops and the timberdoodle launches himself into the air. Once aloft, he beats his wings in such a manner as to emit a high-pitched whistling or twittering sound, “produced by air passing between three attentuated outer primaries” (Keppie and Whiting). (In the photo above, these three are clumped together so that they appear as a single, thin feather at the very end of the wing.) Thus whistling like a dove on steroids, our hero ascends steeply in wide spirals. It’s usually possible to see his small and faintly ridiculous form silhouetted against the darkening sky as he careens around, though a couple times this past Sunday we watched him disappear into the clouds at the apex of his aerial dance.

That’s when he begins to sing for real, repeating a rapid-fire series of four to six melodious twittering notes, which, like the earlier peents, seem to come from all directions as he zigzags, banks and dives. The interweaving of these notes with the fluting of his wings produces an eerie effect. In less than half a minute he drops back down to the ground, so quickly he’s almost impossible to spot. It must be a tricky thing to put on a show like this without becoming owl bait; I would imagine that the flying maneuvers and the ventriloquism represent adaptations to avoid predators, but who knows? Keppie and Whiting do say that having eyes on the back of his head “may help male detect predators while recurringly Peenting at same localized site.”

We listened and watched while the woodcock went through four iterations of his song and dance routine. Each time the period devoted to peenting grew briefer; it was hard not to come away with the impression of mounting excitement as the bird got more and more into his act. The first couple of times we were able to pick out his silhouette, but during his third spiral dance my dad couldn’t see him, and by the fourth time, none of us could make him out. But he kept it up until the last little bit of daylight had drained from the sky. It wasn’t until I went back to the house that I remembered, for the first time that day, that it was the equinox.

The next morning I heard him again from my front porch, starting around 5:20. I walked up behind the house with my coffee and listened for a while, but I never did manage to spot him. He stopped after twenty minutes, just as the first song sparrows began calling. Last night at dusk we went out again, but he had shifted operations to the far side of the field – near the presumed nesting habitat at the edge of the woods – and we never did catch a glimpse. My mother persisted after Dad and I returned to our respective houses, and she told me this morning that she had been able to sneak right into the center of his singing ground. Although she never got a good look, during the silent pause at the end of one flight she caught a movement out of the corner of her eye, a darting shadow only a few feet away. She figured that must’ve been him coming in for a landing, because he didn’t resume peenting until she retreated a few dozen yards.

I say “presumed nesting habitat” because woodcocks are truly secretive birds. They nest in shallow depressions directly on the ground, often near the base of a tree, and their dead-leaf coloration makes them almost impossible to spot. One year we did find a telltale series of holes the diameter of a pencil in the mud right inside the woods near the old farm dump, and took that as pretty good evidence of a resident woodcock in the vicinity. Old fields like ours are not as common in Pennsylvania as they used to be; most have either gone back to woods or have been converted into malls and subdivisions. Not surprisingly, woodcocks are becoming increasingly scarce here, though I gather that the species as a whole is not in trouble. It can be found as far west as the 100th meridian, as far north as southern Canada, and as far south as the Gulf Coast, where it over-winters.

One way or another, it’s hard to imagine that too many people, other than hard-core birders, are outside at six-thirty on cold evenings in early spring to witness the courtship rites of woodcocks. Aldo Leopold, in a Sand County Almanac ( Oxford University Press, 1949), lamented the widespread ignorance of this spectacle on the part of his neighbors in Wisconsin:

The drama of the sky dance is enacted nightly on hundreds of farms, the owners of which sigh for entertainment, but harbor the illusion that it is to be sought in theaters. They live on the land, but not by the land.

Of course, home entertainment options have multiplied a hundred-fold since Leopold’s day. Even kids can rarely be found outdoors anymore, except for closely supervised activities such as Little League or soccer practice. Few people know and fewer care about (for example) skunk cabbages, whose sturdy spathes can actually generate enough heat to melt snow, and probably not too many folks bother to track down that frantic quacking sound off in the woods that we’ll be hearing in another week or two. Again, though, they don’t know what they’re missing: few sights can compare with a shallow pond in the forest that’s seething with horny wood frogs.

But it is through just such unheralded events as these that spring advances. Robins can stick around right on through the winter at this latitude, singing whenever they feel like it, and warm days in February can fool non-native snowdrops and crocuses into blooming. How could anyone attribute the power of augury to such conventionally pretty things? Spring in the Appalachians is a blend of the radiant and the supremely strange. Nothing quite spells its arrival for me like the mad sky dance of the timberdoodle.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Round

“When are you going to show us what your goddamned head looks like?” I said, and he doffed his black knit cap. Underneath it was just as I suspected: freshly shaved that morning. An odd thing to do in the middle of the winter, he admitted. But the bumps and ridges of his skull didn’t stand out as they would have on a white person; this was no bleak winter landscape. When we went out, he pulled a second cap over the first.

I thought of the phrenologists of a hundred years ago, their lying science one of the pillars of racism and eugenics. So sure were they of the superior cranial capacity of Europeans, Stephen Jay Gould tells us, they unconsciously packed the little measuring pebbles more tightly into any skull known to have belonged to someone with darker skin. The trouble is, there never was any demonstrable link between cranial capacity and intelligence. The largest skull ever measured belonged to a severely retarded man.

Last night the almost-full moon glowing through a thin cloud cover enticed me into taking a long walk down along Laurel Ridge and back up the hollow. It was very quiet, apart from the crunch of my boots in the thawed-and-refrozen snow. I couldn’t take my eyes off the yellow moon, more perfect perhaps for the veil that hid its mountains and craters. No wonder bald monastics revere the moon as a symbol of attainment – especially those whose skin is as pale as the skull beneath it. But an African monk might get the last laugh, I’m thinking, whenever the earth’s shadow blocks the sun and reveals the moon’s true face. I remember how it looked last October, that sepulchral orange.

There was no perceptible immigration of clouds from the west. It was a snow sky, thickening hour by hour like a Béchamel sauce on the lowest possible heat. When I went out again at 9:30 to empty the garbage, the moon had grown as blurry as a flashlight in the fog. By first light this morning, over an inch of fine snow had already fallen.

It’s bread day. I find myself paying attention to what my hands do as I knead, taking a generous pinch of the white flour I use to keep the dough from sticking to the board and swirling it always in a counter-clockwise direction with my right hand, then rolling the brown ball back with my left, pushing in with the heels of both hands, folding it over, giving it a half turn to the right, push, fold, turn. In less than ten repetitions the last trace of white has vanished and it’s beginning to stick again. I slide the scraper across the board and give the dough a few more kneads, but now it won’t let go of my fingers; it coats my skin.

More dusting, more kneading, until the dough reaches just the right level of resilience. Then back in the bowl it goes to rise, doubling and tripling in size within the course of an hour. Wooden spoon, wooden board, steel scraper, ceramic bowl, worn dishtowel: the bread draws charisma from plain and earthy tools.

By tonight, judging from the weather forecasts, a thick new layer of snow will erase the ground’s imperfections, burying odors, muffling all sounds. For those who live far from the woods, this storm will be just another dreary nuisance – the proverbial wet blanket. For true enchantment you need somewhere for the eye to rest: dark trunks. A scandal of limbs. In a world of pure white, they say, the Inuit hunter hallucinates moving shadows, slinking, stalking, swallowing the light.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Knot

I wrote this yesterday afternoon.

Above and below the Road to the Far Field, the wreckage of a woods. Big sugar maples, black cherries, red maples, shagbark hickories – all ripped down by the ice. But the view! On this clear, cold day, Sinking Valley is a glaze of white between ridges that mix brown and blue: the brown of tree trunks, the blue of their shadows against the snow.

The giant chestnut oak at the bend of the trail casts a peculiar shadow, though. Its stumpy limbs bristle with last year’s sprouts, and fresh tracks in the snow show that again this winter the ridgetop porcupine has returned for more pollarding of her favorite tree. There are thousands of chestnut oaks on the mountain, but for some reason it’s the very oldest ones that seem to draw the porcupines. The sweetness of age, perhaps? Or is it simply that, being old, they are less efficient at producing tannins in response to overbrowsing? An absence of bitterness in itself can seem plenty sweet, I know.

Now here’s another misshapen shadow: a cherry the ice storm didn’t touch. Most of its branches have been truncated by the fungal infection that foresters call black knot. I wonder if this thorough amputation of twigs and smaller branches isn’t what saved it, preventing the ice from reaching critical mass? In such extreme conditions, a handicap can turn into an advantageous trait. The chronically ill sometimes are the fittest, the ones who survive the longest, bear the most young. Pain is their legacy, and it is the most precious gift imaginable. Without it, imagine how brittle we’d be – how terribly unequal to the task of love.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Therapy

Suddenly, it’s January – a couple of inches of dry, drifting snow when I get up at 5:00 a.m., 10 degrees with a brisk wind. I have to take off my glasses to pull on the handmade neckwarmer I got for Christmas. It’s a snug fit, and as I pull it slowly over my face, I think of the amusing spectacle this must present. I recall the title of a science fiction story I read once: “I Have No Mouth, But I Must Scream.” Then it’s time to pull on boots, bundle into a heavy coat, grab gloves and knit cap – all so I can sit out on the dark porch for ten minutes and drink my coffee. Maybe I need therapy, I think. But then it occurs to me: maybe this is the therapy I need? If life were therapy, and therapy were life, why then…

I have no mouth but
I must scream,
says the wind.

My tongue knows its
own taste: the half-
frozen stream.

You draw me & I’ll
draw you, I tell
my childhood self.

We lean like ladders
against the clouds.
With one listening foot I feel
for the next rung down.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Nineveh

I made baked fish for supper last night – thick thawed steaks of mahi-mahi, the gift of an acquaintance who had caught them herself in a fishing trip off North Carolina. I soaked them in lemon juice and smothered them under a thick blanket of whole wheat bread crumbs that had been sauteed in olive oil with cumin, coriander and plenty of basil and garlic. It was delicious, but too plentiful; I ate too much. Exhausted as I was when I finally went to bed, I woke after several hours, feeling the fish in my stomach and listening to the downpour on the roof.

This is our first major winter storm here in central Pennsylvania. All night and into the morning – continuing even as I type at 8:30 – hard rain has been falling and freezing, falling and dripping and freezing. As the small hours crawled by, I could hear the muffled cracks and crashes of trees giving way under the weight of ice. Twice when I got up, the digital clock at the foot of the stairs was flashing, but miraculously, the electricity stayed on. The second time, I stayed up to read for a little while. The book I grabbed was Carolyn Forché’s The Angel of History, where I found the following line:

Nuit blanche, your nights awake and the white window winter-locked.

I poked my head outside at one point around 4:30 and noticed a light in the far window of the main house. My father, too, was awake. Sometimes I think of insomnia as the family curse. Every family needs a good curse, don’t you agree?

At quarter after six, following a brief hour of sleep, I rise for the final time, anxious to brew my coffee and take a shower before the power goes. I’m out on the porch by 6:35, cradling my mug and listening to the fuselage. If you’ve never been through a major ice storm, let me tell you, it sounds like war. The difference with this one is the sheer volume of water in the stream, whose roaring drowns out most smaller breaks. What I hear are the sharp rendings of limbs, the explosive cracks of trunks snapped halfway up, and the thunderous crashes of full-sized trees giving way at the roots.

There are hundreds of acres of woods in all directions, and a high percentage of canopy-height trees are weedy, first-succession species such as black locust, black cherry and scarlet oak, many of them near the end of their natural life span of 80-120 years. The only thing preventing me from accepting this damage with complete equanimity is the knowledge that many parts of the forest may never successfully regenerate, beset as it is by a triple threat of white-tailed deer, invasive trees and shrubs, and acid precipitation. Usually one thinks of the effects of acid rain in terms of damage to the soil and water, but during ice storms, the trees and shrubs are encased in acidic armor that may last for days at a time. I can’t believe this doesn’t do a lot of damage, especially to evergreens like hemlocks and mountain laurel.

One thing I don’t have to worry about, however, is direct damage to the houses. Those farmers knew what they were doing when they planted their houses in the middle of large clearings, out of reach of any but a few ornamental trees. Usually I resent this distance between my house and the woods, but this morning I’m grateful for it.

The day dawns on an eerie and beautiful landscape. Ice storms of this severity have occurred with increasing frequency over the past thirty years – now they come as often as once every three to four years – but this is the first I can remember when the ground was completely bare of snow. The effect therefore is of pure, unmitigated crystal, white from a distance only in the way that cut glass appears white. If I had a camera and put a picture up here for you to look at, you’d probably imagine that every surface would answer a curious tap with a resonant ding. But such beauty weighs heavily on the real world. Even just reading about it, you might picture sleek, transparent body suits for every branch. But all the twigs droop with closely spaced, finger-long icicles, racks and racks of little knives – and that’s where the extra, fatal bit of load comes from. The 20-foot-tall red cedar tree in my herb garden is bent completely over, its head to the ground. In desperation, I get the broom from the kitchen and give it a few nudges to see if I can shake any of the ice loose. All I manage to do is roust out a couple of terrified sparrows.

I take my umbrella and go for a walk around the field – the woods are too dangerous. Now I can watch as well as listen to the limbs and trees crash down, at the rate of several a minute. When the big ones go over, they send up a brief splash of ice fragments. They also trim limbs and branches from their neighbors, which may not be entirely unwelcome. Any time I see a branch or limb breaking loose, I wonder if it isn’t just the radical amputation the parent tree needs to take the weight off the main trunk. It’s all in the architecture, of course. Trees that are built for the long haul, such as tulip poplars and white oaks, are masters at dropping the odd limb and quickly healing over the wound before infections can enter. You’d think hemlocks and white pines, with the tremendous weight of ice on their needles, would – like my red cedar – be the first to go. But as I survey the line of hundred year-old white pines along the driveway, I can see how easily each ice-laden limb rests its weight on the limb below. Hemlocks and spruce are even better at this, folding up like umbrellas under a heavy layer of snow or ice. Hence their tendency to eventually dominate northern forests, given a few centuries of winter storms to weed out the competition.

I approach as close as I dare to the woods on the northeast side of the field, above Margaret’s old house. Five large, downed trees – black cherries and locusts – stretch out into the field. Beyond, it looks as if at least a quarter of the trees have been felled or badly dismembered by the ice.

Dramatic and beautiful as this all may seem, I’m keenly hoping for a rapid rise in temperature. I don’t believe in petitionary prayer, but do try to picture, as hard as I can, ice falling off the trees: big frozen swordfish-size chunks dropping from the limbs, schools of ice-minnows slipping from the crowns. I visualize Marianne Moore’s “Octopus of Ice” dissolving into harmless calamari. But really, these things that are wreaking havoc now are more like giant squid with their sinister, cigar-shaped heads anchored upside-down to the boles of trees and their tentacles poised, terrible and still. To them, perhaps, the forest is a sideshow, and they are waiting for some properly monstrous prey – as if the fish I ate for supper had grown into a whale in my belly and I was soon to deliver it on the never-never shoreline of Nineveh, that great city. The rain shows no sign of letting up.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Eyes in the wood

Sunday, late morning, and I’m moving slowly along the side of the ridge through the laurel. The sun is a fuzzy yellow spot behind a thin screen of cloud. At the edge of a small group of pitch pines, a screech owl takes off from the lowermost branch of a small beech less than ten feet away. Had I been more alert I might’ve seen it before it flew. Instead I get nothing but a momentary impression of squat head, gray plumage, absolutely silent wings. Was this the same bird whose trills and quavers I drank in with my morning coffee at 6:00 a.m.?

A little farther along, I find a log with a line of tracks in its thin coating of snow: gray fox. A crow caws from the other side of the hollow where the owl flew.

Crows are never out of earshot of other crows, it seems, because within five minutes fifteen to twenty more have flown in, by the sound of it. The snow, too, has suddenly grown more serious. I hunker down, pull up my hood. The snowflakes falling through the laurel make a soft, rustling hush – not that the crows are listening. As visibility diminishes, their mobbing rises in pitch. I picture the stolid owl looking out from a thicket of grape vines, the crows whetting their fury against its stony gaze. As the squall eases, the cawing too diminishes. In a short while the sun is weakly shining once again on a mostly quiet hollow.

I descend the slope to the stream and scramble up to the road on the other side. Most of what I do, on this walk as on every walk on the woods, is look at trees. I look at trees the way other people look at people. Today, for example, my attention is drawn to a tall white ash below the road with a large patch of smooth bark about 20 feet up. As I stare at the patch, I find myself looking at a big-headed, white bird with long tail feathers and wings bent back, fighting against both gravity and its prison of wood like a tree’s dream of a soul.

A quarter mile farther, I pause beside the huge black birch tree on the road bank across from Margaret’s derelict house and notice something truly strange: an array of rusty nails of varying sizes poking out of the bark from about chest height to head height, mostly facing down-driveway. What’s strange is that I have passed this tree countless times in the last thirty-three years without ever noticing these nails. I count twenty-five of them, the remnants, I decide, of some ancient sign that probably read “No Trespassing,” or “No Hunting Beyond This Point.”

In the woods across from my front porch, a nuthatch is calling vociferously from the dead half of a lightning-struck oak. Around on the still-living side, I notice a limb scar: bark gathered like a noose around a brown, pinched face. The face of something like a weasel, displaying a ferocity all out of proportion to its size.

How could I have forgotten – so close
to where I sit morning & evening
with a mug of something dark & bitter,
marking how the darkness thins
or thickens among the trees –
these eyes of wood?

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.