Photos – Page 33 – Via Negativa

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.

December 27, 2010 by Dave Bonta

Heartwood

It might be useful, this heart-shaped hole: flying squirrels could use it to get out of the weather. In warmer months, spiders could spin webs in it. Caterpillars could pupate in it.

A true desert is difficult to maintain. Some scrap of life or impertinent piece of flotsam always shows up to mar the perfect bleakness. Your only option is to keep narrowing your field of vision, until at last you are all alone with your demons.

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 23, 2010 by Dave Bonta

Tussey Mountain breakdown

Most climb Tussey Mountain for the views afforded by the numerous rocky openings along the ridge crest. To me, though, the broken rock itself is more interesting than the deceitfully smooth contours of distant ridges — to say nothing of the valleys and their bucolic-looking monocultures, which are probably less biodiverse than these boulder fields. Continue reading “Tussey Mountain breakdown”

November 3, 2010 by Dave Bonta

Reliving the fall

Just like that, it’s over. After all the breathless anticipation and hype, all the bluejay jeers and scolding squirrels, it’s hard to believe how quickly the moment passes and the ground is littered with the fallen. I speak, of course, of the autumn foliage, which in many parts of the northern hemisphere reaches its peak of color sometime in October. In no other month do so many people focus on trees, and if you want to relive it, there’s no better way than to peruse the links in the latest edition of the Festival of the Trees — which was hosted this time not by a northern blog at all, but by one based in Bangalore, India: Trees, Plants and more. Week by week, Arati chronicles her harvest of tree-related entries from around the world. Continue reading “Reliving the fall”

November 1, 2010 by Dave Bonta

The shining season

With most of the leaves down, the woods are filled once again with light. Continue reading “The shining season”

October 27, 2010 by Dave Bonta

Corncrib

The old metal corncrib beside the barn is almost 100 years old, and it shows. In this photo from 1919, it’s the small structure to the left of the barn toward which the toddler appears to be pointing. It’s never been anything but an ugly, functional building, even when it wasn’t yellow with rust. Now the metal roof is bowed in, and is probably beyond saving. We don’t use the building for much of anything these days — I’m not sure how much it was ever used to store corn, since this place was primarily an orchard — and there are plans afoot to tear it down next year and haul the metal off to the scrap yard to be recycled.

And yet inside, the light patterns can be quite beautiful. When I poked my head in today around noon, my camera card was already nearly full with photos of autumn foliage, but I would’ve deleted any of them if I’d needed the room for pictures like this. At first I concentrated on the patterns of light shining in and falling across an old table. Continue reading “Corncrib”

October 19, 2010 by Dave Bonta

Haunted tree

“We live on a continent of ghosts,” paleoecologist Paul Martin once wrote, “their prehistoric presence hinted at by sweet-tasting pods of mesquite, honey locust, and monkey ear.” The honey locust pods with their sweet pulp and indigestible seeds seem designed to tempt a very large mammal with indiscriminate eating habits — a ground sloth, a mastodon, a mammoth. Today’s critters might eat the pulp, but they don’t touch the seeds. Were it not for humans planting honey locust cultivars, the tree might still be restricted to wet areas, its seeds dispersed only by flood waters.

There’s something especially haunting about the locust’s formidable thorns, hard enough to make a serviceable substitute for nails, and growing several meters up the trunk. Nothing alive today presents much of a threat to the tree, but imagine bearing a yearly bonanza of tempting sweets on brittle wood and not having some way to keep a herd of hungry mastodons from trampling you or a ground sloth from ripping down your limbs.

The Appalachians are a haunted landscape in many ways, as I’ve written before. Their ecological communities are still reeling from the loss of such key species as the Eastern cougar, the American chestnut and the passenger pigeon in the 19th and 20th centuries. The forest itself is ghostly, a nearly transparent outline of its former self. And as species such as the honey locust and the Kentucky coffee tree attest, even the Pleistocene wasn’t so long ago. The Indians whose arrowheads may be found in abundance in the field a stone’s throw away from this tree in Sinking Valley, Pennsylvania, may not have hunted for mastodons, but their ancestors surely did.

13,000 years isn’t a very long time — not even for people. Artists were painting the European megafauna as early as 16,500 years ago in Altamira Cave, in what is now France. Today, their distant descendents spray-paint the rocks outside a small limestone cave at the foot of the aforementioned field, across the road from the honey locust tree.

Humans, too, evolved with megafauna, and I believe some of our behavior patterns still reflect this association. We tend to reproduce, for example, as if we expected a saber-toothed tiger to eat half our offspring. And in our nightmares we are stalked by monstrous things which often have no real counterpart in the world as we know it — or should I say, as we have made it, we and our ancient hunting partners, the dogs. Together we have tamed the earth, and orphaned ourselves in the process. Which is, perhaps, the scariest thought of all.

Written for the November 1 edition of the Festival of the Trees (deadline: October 29).