Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
See also my Woodrat photoblog and my Flickr account.
The hunters wrapped their treestand in camouflaged cloth. When it came time to paint the roof, they chose blue. That way, they thought, it might blend into the sky, forgetting that the deer see in black-and-white. Or maybe they remembered, and painted it to please themselves. But now their sky has fallen in, a lid on a sagging box nailed to the twin trunks of a rock oak that pull it back and forth between them in the ridgetop winds, like a prized toy.
Continue reading “In plain sight”
If nothing else, the fact that the vast majority of roads are no longer intended primarily for walkers ought to temper our enthusiasm for road as a metaphor for life. In the American imagination, a road trip unwinds in a time apart from ordinary life where clarity is intermittent and undependable, but where life-changing visions are possible. A road movie is all about visions.
This weekend I saw two sort-of road movies by the same director, David Lynch: The Straight Story, which was wonderful, and Lost Highway, which was not. I guess what I most liked about the former was its gentle subversion of the genre, as its cowboy-hat-wearing protagonist travels back roads at the speed of a riding mower, yet remains a figure of immense dignity and charm. Stories unfold more naturally at a walker’s pace, I think, and the movie is full of great stories and characters. By contrast, the break-neck Lost Highway seems to revel in its own incoherence, and the characters are two-dimensional and unlikeable.
Of course, coherence isn’t everything, especially when attempting to depict dreams and hallucinations. With its obsessive sex and violence, perhaps Lost Highway offers a truer glimpse into the American psyche, but The Straight Story isn’t exactly lacking in grit, either: its characters are haunted by aging and infirmity, mental illness and the loss of children, PTSD, broken families, even roadkill — a topic all too seldom considered alongside our romance with the road.
The contrast between the two movies is especially stark in the ways in which they acknowledge, or fail to acknowledge, the world beyond their own, fragmented stories. If authenticity derives ultimately from a sense of rootedness, Alvin Straight’s odyssey has it in spades. Whereas in Lost Highway the natural environment is never anything more than background, The Straight Story intercuts regular, slow aerial pans to convey the vastness of the land. Lightning shows up for dramatic effect in almost every other night-time scene in Lost Highway, but never seems entirely real. But in Straight Story, the two thunderstorms are events, and the title character stops everything and sits down to watch them as intently as if they were movies, burning visions of blinding roots into the memory.
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.
It’s been unusually wet here in recent weeks, so for International Rock-Flipping Day this year I thought I’d try my luck up on the ridgetop. In the past, my style has been to flip lots of rocks and hope that I’d find something interesting sooner or later, but this year I decided instead just to find one or two especially charismatic or well-situated rocks and be content with whatever I found underneath.
After 45 minutes or so I found a rock that really appealed to me. It was up off the ground by about six inches, capping a skirt of moss-clad soil on the side of a venerable old rock oak (Quercus prinus). Continue reading “In the hall of the mountain cricket”