Follow the sign of the leaf. Climb. Go.
All veins lead to the bright midrib,
between the twin nipples,
and over the great divide of the palm.
Orange dog
Jean has been blogging about pilgrimage — beautiful, moving posts. They are especially interesting to me because my family also went to Santiago de Compostela on a vacation back in 1978, traveling the old Pilgrim Road by car from Paris, with lengthy detours to take in sections of the other branches before they all converged south of the Pyrenees. We didn’t do it for religious reasons, but simply as a way to try and experience the world of the high Middle Ages. Aside from Dad, who planned the trip, most of the rest of the family grew quite tired of musty Romanesque churches, except me. I’ve always loved dark, quiet, cave-like places. Throw in stone carvings of monsters, yet, and I’m in heaven.
Heaven: where the wild things are.
I can’t say the experience changed me in any profound, spiritual way, though I know I wanted it to. It’s hard to get all spiritual when you’re crammed into the back seat of a Renault with both your brothers. I remember one stop in the mountains — one of those small sierras in northern Spain — where we all exploded from the car the moment Dad pulled over, everyone heading off in a different direction. My father came close to losing his temper, I think.
I was twelve years old, just hitting puberty. I had recently started my own vegetable garden, and missed it terribly. It was perfectly circular, and consisted of a single, three-foot-wide, double-dug bed in the shape of a spiral. At the center of the spiral stood a tepee of locust poles covered with Kentucky Wonder pole beans. My dream was to sit there, under the beans, and be content, but I don’t think that ever actually happened.
Our trip lasted six weeks, beginning in late April. Freshly plowed fields and gardens were everywhere. I remember the longing I felt — especially in the French Massif Central — and the promises I made to myself that I would come back someday and sink my spade into that soil and never leave.
I’ve been working on a think piece, but it’s hard to think in 80 percent humidity. So instead I fritter away at minor tasks, and the crickets outside my door chirp faster and faster as the afternoon wears on. I gulp a cold beer and get the hiccups. Chirp hic chirp hic chirp hic chirp…
The first two lines of the second stanza of Confession were a translation from the Shakespearean, “Hoist by [one’s] own petard.” I figured that, familiar though the phrase is, no one would actually know what a petard is. I didn’t. The dictionary said,
Etymology: Middle French, from peter to break wind, from pet expulsion of intestinal gas, from Latin peditum, from neuter of peditus, past participle of pedere to break wind; akin to Greek bdein to break wind
1 : a case containing an explosive to break down a door or gate or breach a wall
2 : a firework that explodes with a loud report
Or (3) an IED, I’m thinking.
In my cellarless house, one of the few cool places in which to store bottled homebrew is on the concrete floor of the bathroom, right beside the toilet. The beer doesn’t have far to travel.
Or rather, it goes out and comes back, much transformed.
What do you do when you reach the goal of the pilgrimage? Continue to the Cape of the End of the Earth: restless ocean, yellow flowers bobbing in the wind. Then south into northern Portugal, the best forests of the whole trip. I hear they’re burning now, every summer, thanks to global warming. And a couple years ago, Cabo Finisterre was awash in oil after a tanker crashed offshore. I wish I remembered more, so I could eulogize it better.
Yesterday afternoon around 5:30, a very tattered giant swallowtail (Papilio cresphontes) appeared on the butterfly bush in my front garden. This was a new record for the mountain. I signalled my mother on the intercom and she came down from the other house to watch it, too. Its yellow-and-black wings were in constant motion, backlit by the low sun and glorious despite their bedraggled state.
After about ten minutes, Mom said, “Listen! I think it’s making noises!”
“What kind of noises?”
“Tch-tch. Chrrrrrr!”
“Uh, no. That’s my camera, Mom.”
This was a species we only knew from books and blogs, so neither of us could place it right away. When it finally flew off after fifteen minutes of nectaring, Mom dug out her butterfly guides and identified it almost immediately; there’s nothing else like it. I found the following on eNature:
Known as the “Orange Dog” by citrus growers, the Giant Swallowtail is sometimes considered a citrus pest and is subjected to massive spraying. It is capable of flying long distances and often strays into northern and midwestern districts.
“Orange,” my foot! It’s as yellow as orange juice. But a brave traveller, nonetheless.
Chilling to consider the beautiful things that are murdered for our breakfast.
Signs and wonders
These are the proverbial dog days of August, and if you’ve ever wondered why they’re called that, the answer is simple: it’s when a dog shows up and lies on your porch.
If you haven’t noticed a dog on your porch this year, it’s probably either because: a) you’ve been naughty rather than nice, or b) you haven’t lost a tooth lately. Don’t be surprised if you end up with a stocking full of cats instead.
*
It was so humid the other day that not only did the salt not come out of the shaker, it actually clumped up in the Morton Salt box. The salt may, as advertised, pour when it rains, but when we get a really humid spell, forget it. Actual beads of moisture formed on the outside of the salt box — I swear to dog.
*
This morning around 9:00, I found a crayfish walking across the lawn. This seemed as if it might be a serious portent; I’ve never seen a crayfish venture out of the water before. I raced back for my camera, but by the time I returned, it had disappeared into the tall grass. When I spotted it, it was about ten feet from a drainage ditch and marching purposefully toward a shallow well some fifteen feet farther up the hill, so all I can think is that the on-going drought has made the former spot uninhabitable, and it decided to try its luck at the well instead. It’s tempting, though, to think that the humidity might have been the real culprit: the crayfish was in an exploring mood, and simply didn’t notice that it had left the water.
*
If you want to do a biological inventory of your house, rip out some of the walls and then pound on the beams with a hammer. Snakes really dislike this, we’ve found. Also, the fine plaster dust that settles over everything makes it possible to see where the mice go on their nocturnal visits. I’m looking at a line of tiny, delicate tracks right across the top of my keyboard.
*
Old dogs and small children seem capable of communicating on a very deep level. The trouble is, I don’t think they really have much to say to one another.
But what do I know?
Domestic regression
“The urge to destroy is also a creative urge,” said Bakunin. Taking a crowbar to the walls of a living room where I’ve spent over half my life feels less like destruction than some kind of past life regression therapy. Each layer of wallpaper represents a different occupant, probably, and I can track changing aesthetic tastes over the course of a century. I can also now hazard a guess about when the windows were put in, based on how many layers their moulding overlaps. And under the repeated prying of the crow, the blank page of the plaster crumbles to reveal the regular ruling of a schoolboy’s notebook.
The lath is attached to thin spacer boards tacked to the original plank shell, which itself retains a layer of thick, 19th-century wallpaper. I can see daylight through the cracks between board and batten. The contracter was imagining two-by-fours, I guess — a regular internal skeleton — and plenty of space between the bones for insulation. But this house was built like an insect, with an exoskelton to hold it all together. It’s nice to imagine that the oak and chestnut planks were milled from trees cut right here on the mountain, but in all likelihood they came from farther to the west or north, beyond the reach of the charcoal cutters for the iron furnaces and forges of the upper Juniata. With a forge right at the bottom of the mountain remaining active until 1850, the hollow probably would’ve had nothing but pole timber in 1865 when the house was built. They called this “Brush Mountain” for a reason.
How the wind must’ve howled through the cracks those first winters after the Civil War! Did they heat with charcoal, I wonder? As a retired forgeman, the first occupant would’ve been most familiar with it. But possibly by then real coal was cheaper, shipped on the new railroad down the Allegheny Front from the newly opened mines to the west.
And now for the ceiling…
UPDATE: Whitewash! We found whitewash on the original ceiling beams! Just like a barn.
Holey
The tiger swallowtail nectaring in the bull thistles has a small hole in its left wing, like a missing pane in a stained glass window that tempts bored children with a glimpse of the sky.
There are so many holes in my knowledge. The harvestman hiding in the bergamot is missing a pair of legs on its right side — does that mean it must keep two of its eyes closed if it wants to avoid walking in circles?
A bergamot leaf with a large hole plays temporary host to both a treehopper and a tumbling flower beetle, who completely ignore each other: the former has as little use for tumbling as the latter has for hopping.
A green, spotted leaf beetle scales the tip of a leaf and stands motionless for more than a minute as if suddenly self-aware, gazing at all the green leaves spotted with meal-sized holes.
Discovery channels
It was truly a Discovery Channel moment. Well, except for the fact that I was in the middle of taking a leak. After some twenty minutes of fruitless stalking, I had given up on getting a good picture of the sharp-shinned hawks screaming at me from various hidden vantage-points around the spruce grove at the top of the field. This is the third year in a row that they’ve raised a family there, and while extremely secretive as long as the young are in the nest, as soon as they fledge, the parents become quite vocal, even aggressive. Just about every morning for the past week, my mother had reported getting close views of them, but by the time I got up there in mid-afternoon, there was no sign of them. “They probably come back each night to the spruce grove, and hang out there in the morning before going off somewhere else to hunt,” she suggested.
Thus it was that around 9:30 on a beautiful, cool, Sunday morning I found myself in the narrow strip of field between the back of the spruce grove and the edge of the oak-cherry woods, engaged in contemplation of the wonders of nature. My bladder was only about half-empty I realized two things: a sharpie had landed in the black locust sapling right above me, and a large stick had just snapped at the edge of the woods about 50 feet away. It had to be either a human or a bear. I zipped up hastily, and a moment later caught a glimpse of a large, black form moving between the trees.
To tell the truth, I’ve never been quite sure that the kind of nature shows featured on the Discovery Channel or in National Geographic specials are entirely a good thing. I mean, if the goal is simply to entertain and to inspire, they’re great. But I worry that such shows raise false expectations about the sort of experiences people are likely to have when they go outside, where, let’s face it, your chances of seeing charismatic megafauna doing exciting things are pretty remote on a day-to-day basis — not least because most larger animals spend the majority of their time doing essentially nothing. Worse yet, the average person’s failure to see nature-show-worthy spectacles in his or her own neck of the woods might lead him or her to conclude, subconsciously at least, that preserving local wildlife habitat isn’t as important as, for example, Saving the Rainforest. How else to explain public silence in the face of runaway exurban envelopment, despite polls that consistently show widespread public support for Protecting the Environment?*
Those of us who have come to crave regular contact with wild nature have done so despite, or perhaps even because of, nature’s consistent failure to provide highly entertaining spectacles. There are lots of cheap thrills, if discovering a new wildflower or a fresh pile of coyote scat is your idea of a thrill. But really, wouldn’t you rather go geo-caching, or roar around on a mountain bike or an ATV? As one of my more urban visitors said one time when I tried to get him to go for a walk after several days of sitting around talking and listening to music, “I’ve seen trees before!”
Nevertheless, sometimes nature does — heeding the call of Oscar Wilde — imitate art, and this was one of those times. I snapped two quick photos of the sharpie before it flew over my head and landed on a taller locust tree a stone’s throw behind me. Then the bear reappeared at the edge of a milkweed patch an equal distance in the other direction. Jesus! Where to look?
Another thing about those nature shows: they’re culled from thousands of hours of film, taken by very talented photographers using very expensive equipment. My thrilling encounter with the black bear was fairly long by real-world standards — maybe a minute — and yielded one pretty good view, but the only picture I got was, as you can see, pretty darn lousy.
It was a medium-sided bear, possibly the same one my mom saw looking in her kitchen window last week. Mother black bears chase off their year-and-a-half-old cubs around midsummer, and these “teenaged” bears, like the one I was watching, haven’t yet developed the wariness of the adults. They’re still learning the ropes. As a result, this is always the busiest time of year for so-called nuisance bear incidents. You’ve just finished moving into your dream house in Ferne Hollow or Oak Pointe, and the next thing you know there’s a goddamn black bear going through your recycling bin like it owns the place. There goes the neighborhood!
This bear, however, seemed more interested in smelling the milkweed blossoms, which have a very sweet, almost cloying odor. It turned its head this way and that, as if breathing deep from a cornucopia of scent. Either that, or it had caught a whiff of Human, and was struggling to separate it from the powerful background soup.
I turned around to look at the sharpie, and realized it was sitting in full view for the first time all morning. I turned back toward the bear. It must’ve caught sight of the motion, because a moment later it was gone, crashing through the bottom corner of the spruce grove. In an agony of indecision, I snapped ten quick photos of the sharpie, then headed off after the bear, which I could still hear crashing around in the woods. I walked back along Laurel Ridge Trail hoping to cross paths with it again, but no luck.
An hour later, I had uploaded my photos to the computer and had just begun to go through them and realize how truly bad they were when my mom came back from her own walk down the hollow. She carried a large, orange and yellow moth on the end of twig, figuring I might want to photograph it. This turned out to be a royal walnut moth, the adult form of the famed hickory horned devil.
O.K., I take it all back: nature really is like the Discovery Channel — at least at the micro-level. Get a camera with a macro lens and you, too, can take eye-popping photos of wildlife in your own backyard: just ask Bev, or Cindy, or Rebecca. My mom was envious of my sightings up at the spruce grove, but her own find was the more interesting one, I thought. The royal walnut moth, like the hummingbird clearwing sphinx moth that came in to the bergamot in my front garden the previous afternoon, is not only easier to observe but also a great deal stranger than anything the furred or feathered tribes have to offer. And best of all, it’s not likely to flee if you stop to take a leak.
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*Logically, an environment can never be destroyed. That’s the beauty of abstractions: they make horrors seem manageable by removing all traces of the real world: no land, no air, no water, no endangered species or ecosystems; no messy places or individual creatures. This is why I call myself a conservationist and not an environmentalist.
Fred Waring and other Pennsylvanians
The first four photos in this post were taken with the kind permission of the curator of the Fred Waring collection at Penn State, Fred Waring’s America, which I visited on a sudden whim yesterday morning. Fred Waring and His Pennsylvanians “taught America how to sing,” they say; I can’t begin to imagine what that means. All I know is that this golfing buddy of Bing Crosby and Bob Hope, this once-renowned purveyor of bland, inoffensive, beautifully choreographed arrangements of big band music grew up in Tyrone, Pennsylvania, the only genuine celebrity my home town has ever produced. I went to grade school in the former high school that had been built on the site of Waring’s childhood home.
But it seems Fred Waring had his wild and crazy side, too. He devoured the comics, and his archives include hundreds of original graphic artworks drawn for or about him by the cartoonists he befriended. He was apparently also fond of wearing “distinctive and original, sometimes ‘wild-looking’, jackets,” as one display put it.
I grew up listening to the five-string banjo. My older brother started learning the melodic clawhammer style when he was ten, after a few lessons from my banjo-playing uncle, who was part of the New York City folk revival in the 60s and 70s. I love the sound of this most African and most stigmatized of American instruments.
The music Waring got his start with wasn’t Appalachian string band music, however, but the kind of post-minstrel proto-jazz then popular among the hipper white folks. It makes perfect sense that Waring would go on to become the Pat Boone of the swing era. Someone had to do it, and who better than a genial, slightly funky, nice-looking white boy from smack in the middle of a state which was synonymous, then as now, with middle America?
It must be said that Pennsylvanians come in all stripes, however. Later in the day I attended a function at Shaver’s Creek Environmental Center — also part of Penn State — and took the opportunity to visit the birds at the raptor center.
The birds on display are permanent residents, too badly injured to survive in the wild — less shadows of their former selves than living ghosts, some of them. They may never again rise on thermals over farm fields or ride the wind currents along a Pennsylvania ridge, but they and their handlers regularly tour the state, visiting classrooms, county fairs, and the like. I’ve seen them in action, and I think it’s fair to say that these birds, however diminished, are celebrities everywhere they go.
I can’t help wondering whether some such diminishment might not be a prerequisite for achieving celebrity status, in fact. We crave an encounter with wildness, with what we dimly sense to be a more authentic reality than our own, but without the danger and disorientation full contact might entail.
Shaver’s Creek also includes several miles of trails, a boardwalk over a wetland, and a beautiful little herb garden with a lily pond. Yesterday, the water lilies were in full bloom, and when I bent down to snap a photo of one of them, I realized that a green frog (Rana clamitans melonota) was sitting in meditation right next to it, like a Buddha that had just decamped from his lotus. I circled the pond, snapping photos. He never moved.
Fox tales
Walking down the hollow road this morning, I find a white breast feather from a large bird — a hawk? An owl? — lodged between a stem and leaf of foxtail millet. There’s a story here: some small mammal squirming in the talons, raking a feather loose.
Foxtail millet, fox grape, foxfire: pale imitations of their namesakes, lures for the unwary. The wild seen as deviance and degeneration from an original garden. Perhaps. It makes a good argument.
For more than a week, an ambush bug has maintained the same position near the top of a black cohosh inflorescence while the white bloom has migrated up the stalk. I nudge the insect with the tip of my pen to see if it’s alive, and it moves slowly to the other side of the stalk. Fairy candles, some call these midsummer blooms.
So many woodland flowers are white this time of year. Across the road, enchanter’s nightshade is in bloom, delicate white flowers that will turn into sticky little fruits — minimal burrs — and ride away in the silky fur of small animals: skunks, raccoons, foxes.
Garden
The garden is a map that redraws itself daily.
Two paths meet in a head of grass.
Route of wind & route of the ichneumon,
her witching sticks tap-tap-tapping
for the green blood of her quarry.
A bumblebee circumnavigates
the purple abdomen of a coneflower
like the hour hand on a lover’s clock
which always moves too quickly,
albeit sometimes in reverse.
The sun priests of the Aztecs
thought of the heart as a flower
& the dagger as a hummingbird’s beak.
A bad metaphor can be fatal.
The poppies’ sea-green pods
swell like thought-balloons in the comics,
each one empty except for an asterisk.
Where lilies are concerned, I like
the word better than the flower,
the idea better than the word,
the lilies of the forest better than the lilies of the field.
The children were tired of lawns & streets
and being watched.
They found a blank spot in the garden’s map
& never came home.
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Updated to add text at 5:35 p.m.
Death of an oak tree
The storm came in quickly over the ridge, bringing rain and lightning and strong gusts of wind.
Nine miles above, the sun shone. Below that, darkness and chaos: hurricane-force winds, temperatures a hundred degrees below zero. We are fortunate that most of the drama in a thunderstorm is over our heads; what we see is mostly the violence of catharsis.*
A couple days later, I found a big old red oak, a property-line tree, reduced to a tall, jagged stump. Even from a distance, I could tell this wasn’t the storm’s fault. Wind-thrown red oaks tend to go over roots and all — and it’s a good thing, too. Over the course of millennia, such regular uprooting is one of the few ways a forest soil gets turned, and many native species of plants and animals have come to depend upon the complex, pit-and-mound microtopography that results. Bole snap, as it’s called, is more typical of other species, such as the chestnut oaks that dominate these ridgetops. This, too, serves its purpose: standing dead oak snags are havens and cornucopias for wildlife.
A glance inside the stump confirmed my suspicion: carpenter ants were the true culprits here. Odd, isn’t it, that we refer to such masters of demolition as carpenters? Then again, their homes are no more destructive of forests than our own. And we are no less heedless of coming storms…
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*See “Fly Me to the Clouds,” by Paul VanDevelder, in the July-August issue of Audubon magazine.