Category: Photos

See also my Woodrat photoblog and my Flickr account.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The spell of the quotidian

Looking uphill

and looking downhill.

“Gosh, what a pretty little town!” I hear myself saying.

Fifteen seconds later, the most obnoxiously loud speedbike I’ve ever heard goes roaring through the gap and my thoughts turn murderous.

*

When the light is low-angled and golden, I can look back through woods where I’ve just walked and their magic and mystery remain completely unabated. But all it takes to break the spell is for the sun to go in.

What if I have it backwards, though? What if the real illusion isn’t when we intuit that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy, but when we instead let everydayness infect everything? The illusion of familiarity: that we’ve seen it all, and there’s little left to discover. The spell of the quotidian.

One thing I retain a five-year-old’s sense of wonder about, though: mysterious animal burrows in the woods. “Who lives there?” the child always wants to know—and will likely be equally entranced whether you reply elves or weasels. You’d just better be able to spin a good story about them!

*

Church bells to mark the start of the work day. Even God has to clock in.

Some time this afternoon, I think, wild lettuce will begin blooming on the ridgetop, where spongy moth caterpillars have killed so many oaks. In a week or two its seeds will ride the wind—traveling for miles and surviving in the soil for decades, until the next disturbance.

The future looks good for wild lettuce and its weedy ilk. There will be an accelerating number and variety of forest canopy-opening events: more insect outbreaks, freak storms, wildfire, blights… Damn, this spell of the quotidian is no joking matter!

But that’s not the only plant doing well this summer. The lowbush blueberries are having their best year in decades, and so is this native wildflower,

which has been saddled with an odd common name, cow-wheat.

Cow-wheat is a native annual hemiparasite (partially parasitic), using specialized root structures to invade the roots of its host and steal nutrients, while also performing photosynthesis. Its hosts may be several species of pine (Pinus) and poplar (Populus), as well as sugar maple (Acer saccharum), red oak (Quercus rubra), and even lowbush blueberry (Vaccinium angustifolium).

So a good year for blueberries is a good year for cow-wheat, it seems.

Another native wildflower just coming into its own: poke.

The plants are so enormous, you’d be forgiven for thinking them bushes. They’re clearly good enough for some birds to nest in:

The aforelinked Wikipedia entry says

The common name “poke” is derived from puccoon, pocan, or poughkone (from an Algonquin Indian name for this plant). Berries were once used to make ink, hence the sometimes-used common name of inkberry.

Plants that are deadly poisonous but still edible if prepared properly do fascinate me, but in my view you have to be pretty damn hungry to eat poke shoots in the spring. Mom inflicted them on us a couple times when we were kids, and it’s one of very, very few foods I could barely eat. (Truly. When the parents took us to France, we ate escargot with gusto.)

***

Flipping rocks on the highest point on the property, I disturbed a tiny ringneck snake—the first live one I’ve seen in years. Not necessarily because they’re rare, but because they’re secretive and nocturnal. We stared at each other in shock for a long moment. Then I went for the cameraphone and the snake whipped around and shot into a burrow.

Well, that’s one burrow I know the occupant of! As with Monday’s gray fox sighting, it always feels like a great privilege to get these kinds of glimpses into the lives of Plummer’s Hollow’s shyer residents.

Wherever there are northern ringneck snakes there are salamanders—the bulk of their diet. Wherever there are salamanders, in the Appalachians, there are still functioning native forest ecosystems. And wherever there are forests, there’s wonder. (But you knew I’d say that.)

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Hot Planet Summer

Realizing that one of the things I really like about Facebook and Instagram is the mundanity of much of the content. As far outside the mainstream as I am in how I occupy my time and what I like to read and think about, it’s useful to be reminded of normal things that people do, such as attend sporting events, cook on backyard grills, dance to music that nobody loves but almost everyone can tolerate, go on family vacations, etc. Especially at this point in my life, when I know that everyone else is just winging it, too, and that some of the most organized-seeming people are also the most terrified. (And considering the state of the world, if you’re not terrified, I don’t know what to tell you.)

Normality seems precious, now. Many actively debate its existence. I want to commit as much as of it as possible to memory. What we were like. How beautiful the planet still was.

***

mosquito wading
through my arm hair
her caress

stump water
a jake-braking truck’s
thunderous stutter

roadside diner
a vulture walks the last
few feet

stick insect
the wings you can’t grow
would be so green

mossy log
an old lightning strike’s
glossy char

***

How many times can an axis mundi be destroyed before the concept of the sacred becomes completely nonsensical? In the book of death all will be unwritten, but in the name of Life. Those who pray for the end of time and champion the destruction of the planet claim to speak for the unborn. For whom do you claim to speak?

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Residual

Thirty years after the sudden death of someone I didn’t know terribly well, what remains? Not his name. Not quite his face, but something of his posture and physique. A strong impression of good-natured and thoughtful conviviality, based on possibly no more than half a dozen conversations, always on the periphery of punk shows. The shock and sadness of his death from a brain tumor. Someone who, on rare occasions when he pops into my head, still makes me smile, and shapes my memory of that whole period in my life. Good times. A good dude.

Wish I remembered his name.

***

fledgling cuckoo
flopping across the road

adoptive parents
nowhere to be found

poor little rain-crow
didn’t mean to be a parasite

*

opening my umbrella
I spook a bear

in the depths of the hollow
widely spaced raindrops

water still gurgling
under the rocks

and the crashing of something big
in black velvet

upslope through woodferns
and storm-downed timber

*

a distant cuckoo singing
who are you you you

I know a lullaby
when I hear one

***

pine (k)not

***

One interesting residue of my long-ago year in the Kansai region is that humid rainy days in the summer still remind me a bit of Japan, not necessarily in a fully conscious way (which is why I call it a residue). Similarly, a snowy, cold winter day might have an extra charge of excitement and possibility to it from my early childhood years in Maine.

***

A fast-moving longhorn beetle. I’m beginning to understand why professional insect photographers like to pop their subjects in the freezer for a few minutes to slow them down. This beetle seemed very keen on getting back under cover as quickly as possible.

*

Just as I’m thinking of turning back to the house, a medium-sized animal clambers down out of an oak tree and stands for a few seconds looking back at me. It’s been years since I’ve seen a gray fox. First time I’ve ever seen one in a tree, which seems odd, considering their reputation as the most cat-like of canines—and how much damn time I spend looking up at trees.

The clouds redden with sunset. Can’t resist a shot, clichés be damned.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Five haiku


watch on Vimeo

harvestman
eight ways to go
from one leaf

coiling
and recoiling
garter snake

box turtle
dignified despite the mushroom
on his chin

*

far pasture
the slow rearrangement
of cows

watering hole
the sky’s reflection in each
deep hoof print

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The smell of smoke

river in November light between bare woods and mountain

I used to love watching Londoners watch the moonrise. At such times, a metropolis can feel like a village; strangers may actually find themselves having spontaneous conversations in one of the most uptight places on earth. The famous views become even more instagrammable: Let no one drink alone with the moon ever again! And the dogs running off-lead in the park, rolling ecstatically in the grass wherever a vixen had sprayed her scent.

open moon—
someone’s fingertip making
a wine glass sing

***

lyrics for an imaginary pop song

eyes on
her wing bones
hot tattoo summer

the voyeur finds
his gaze thwarted
by skin turned screen

close your eyes
and see more
with augmented reality

pay no attention
to the smell of smoke
behind the curtain

***

Ridgetop cellar hole for a collier’s hut. Two hundred years ago, this mountain was a smoking ruin.

An oak that started growing about that time.

Another oak that started growing about that time. Not too long ago, it seemed sturdy enough to get married under. Sic transit gloria mundi.

The charcoal fed the forge in the gap; the forgeman might’ve seen the mountain before it was entirely denuded. It was he and his family who settled it when clearcutting made it affordable. I suspect it had been a place of wet meadows and rhododendron thickets where forge workers liked to go on picnics, gather ginseng and sassafras, go hunting, etc.—a backyard wilderness even as devastated as it was.

***

A click beetle lands in my lap and seems unable to escape, given its strategy of trying to, I guess, freak predators out by snapping its body several inches in the air—and landing right back in the same spot. I take pity on it after six or seven clicks and give it a flick.

Whippoorwill, crickets, an occasional katydid. The moon isn’t due up for… a while. As for me, I’m going down to the house and up to bed.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Illustrative

wren wiping his bill
on the ridgeline of the roof

his mate already brooding
on a second clutch

the first clouds always
look innocent enough

until they open
their rainy mouths

catbird singing out
instructions for assembly

a deer sneezing
from her day bed in the weeds

this is how one gauges
one’s aptitude for silence

in Figure 1 we can see
how the trend lines wander

game trails converging
at the edge of a cliff

at the bottom of which
waves pound or traffic roars

and over there it’s me
with a stick

hunting my lost appetite
on the z axis

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Bodily

Ghost pipes emerging from the ground always remind me of hattifatteners. And as saprophytes, they are a bit transgressive. I have to say I’m almost surprised they don’t make their way down to the river under cover of darkness and set off for the open sea. As with so many truly original artists, Tove Jansson’s creations come to feel like something that ought to exist. She’s close to the common creative source of everything, one could almost say, skating up to the edge of some very thin ice.

***

One of the things I really like about growing old is learning to feel in my body how time unfolds. This might not be as clear to people who move around a lot, but for example I can see mounds of moss in the woods and remember when they were logs—and before that, when they were trees. I am old enough that if I were a tree, I’d probably already be good for a bit of saw timber.

***

I always tell myself the same thing when I set out: it’s not about the miles, you don’t have to go far. But I almost always do.

I would never have called myself an athlete when I was younger, and I don’t now. There’s a culture of competitiveness and self-improvement around athleticism that is deeply alien to me. But I remember in high school gym class whenever we played soccer, since we’re Americans and had no idea how to play positions, everyone just ran up and down the field with the ball until one by one they dropped out, panting, and it was just Bonta, this weirdo brainiac with no friends, running idly back and forth with the ball and wondering what the hell was wrong with everyone else.

Then as now, the only thing I did differently was walk a bit every day. By the time I was in high school and stopped taking the bus home (which only got us halfway there), I guess I was walking four miles a day with a fair amount of up and down in it—pretty much the same as now. I didn’t run by choice but seemed able to run more or less indefinitely when needed. Some of that is surely down to genetics. But it’s striking how small a daily time commitment is required to reach this condition. “Year-round training!” I hear the athletes chorus. In your world, sure. If I looked at it that way I’d stop doing it tomorrow.

I just like being outside, walking the land. There’s deep sense of satisfaction I get after a walk of sufficient strenuousness and aesthetic pleasure, and I’m not interested in trying to disentangle the two. You can’t really talk about walking without talking about places and how and why we love them. A good part of the “how” is by walking. Some cultures have local pilgrimage traditions—a bit like that, maybe.

***

One of the things I dislike about getting older is the way flies will just brazenly walk around on top of my bald head as if they own the place. Be patient, will you?! Someday all this will be yours.

***

Watching small jets land at a regional airport 40 miles away a half hour past sunset may seem like a pretty minor thrill, but something about that bright, blinking dot descending in total silence gets me every time.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Glory Be

bindweed seeds get high
in a gray squirrel’s gut

Convolvus winding
into a green sky

the ghetto of goldfinches
and spiderling balloonists

boundless
squirrel like a primate ancestor

what gets traded away
for a gift of visions

which buried treasure maps
slip from memory

allowing scatter-
hoarded acorns to sprout

in your gray squirrel mind-
turned-world

a whole forest grown
from the unconscious

how the morning will glory
in those oaks

***

Please note that I have no idea whether squirrels in fact get off, intentionally or otherwise, on seeds in the Convolvus family. It was just a fun prompt for a poem.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The red and the black

Picking red raspberries up on the Allegheny Front. Quite a switch from the more common black raspberries that Mom and I have been concentrating our berry-picking efforts on for the past week and a half, which signal ripeness by color change. With red raspberries, you have to kind of gently pinch them and see if they’re ready to let go. The dead ripe ones drop at the lightest touch. And they’re even sneakier than the black raspberries, bending canes down as they ripen so the best berries are often well hidden from above. They seem to be expressing an evolutionary preference for dispersal by small, ground-dwelling critters such as toads and turtles. Which makes sense, given their preference for wetter sites.

There’s a common yellowthroat up here with a distinctly different accent from the ones back home—ten miles away. Ours go witchedy-witchedy-witchedy, while this one goes liquidity-liquidity-liquidity. Truly a message for our time.

***

Many people don’t know this, but round about midsummer, some of the younger sassafras trees dance together at sunset.

What they do after that has not been recorded and is best not inquired into.

***

Already half-full, the sneaky cup. Already russulas up, with bites taken out of them. Already the first black gum leaves are beginning to turn.

Already half-full, the moon passes through a heart that turns into a tree, then disappears behind a giant grey mouse, re-emerging just below its tail. As Dave Barry used to say, I swear I’m not making this up. Except of course I am. They’re just clouds. The moon has nothing and everything to do with us.

The first true katydids! So early.