Photos – Page 52 – Via Negativa

April 23, 2007 by Dave Bonta

The day after Earth Day

2:00 a.m. The first-quarter moon is down, and the sky — viewed without my glasses — is a smudge of dim, dinner plate-sized lights. I pee onto the driveway, careful not to splash my bare feet.

8:00 a.m. After a mostly sleepless night, I think at first I’m imagining things. I cup my hands to my ears, trying to hear over the roar of traffic from the interstate. Could that really be a hermit thrush? I walk quickly up into the woods and sit down on a log to listen.

How to describe it? The song of the hermit thrush is an elfin thing, full of crystal bells and moonlight and the kind of unanswerable questions most of us stopped asking after the first grade. The thrush must’ve flown all night, steering by the stars.

It’s a shame he wasn’t here yesterday morning, when it was so quiet. Now it’s Monday, and the people who know what Jesus thinks are eating Egg McMuffins while they drive, delivery trucks are making deliveries, and the schoolbuses are returning riderless to their barns.

10:30. The woods smell of heat. With the sun high over the leafless trees and the dying mountain laurel, there’s nothing to shield the ground from the shadows of hawks.

1:00 p.m. A red-bellied woodpecker trills and trills from the top of the tall locusts in the yard. I doze off with the window open, picturing the farm as seen from above: a green and brown bowl. A woodpecker’s paradise.

4:30. Camera in hand, I stand by the springhouse watching garter snakes circle the daffodils as if searching for something. Tongues flicker briefly as they pass each other. I can hear the whisper of their bodies, interlocking scales sliding over the dead leaves.

See also my mother’s post, Earth Day.

April 16, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Academy of Natural Sciences

In a museum full of dead things, the butterfly garden gets prominent billing: “Alive and Enchanting,” says the banner above the admissions desk.

But the skeletons still fascinate. Pointing and squealing, schoolchildren thunder through the hall of the “Mesozoic Monsters,” as the museum calls them. For millions of Americans under the age of seven or eight, dinosaurs and their relatives occupy the same niche in the imagination that will later be filled by pop stars and Hollywood celebrities.

In a slightly quieter part of the museum, a 3,000-year-old mummy lies half-naked in a replica of a tomb. Here disassembly rather than assembly was required. Small knots of schoolchildren pause before the exhibit long enough to express their bafflement at finding a dead man on display on a floor otherwise devoted to taxidermy mounts.

But one floor down, the cocoons are left unwrapped until they hatch. Here in this newest addition to the museum’s permanent exhibitions, nature is no less of a spectacle than in the more traditional exhibits, but now the visitors are permitted behind the glass.

And while we are still discouraged from touching the exhibits, we are given instructions in how to behave should the exhibits happen to touch us: “Just stand still and wait for them to fly off. And watch where you step.”

We were all eyes.

April 13, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Flies of the Lord

Meet Bombylius major, the greater bee fly (thanks, Bev!). Not only does it look superficially like a bee, but its larvae are parasitic on the larvae of certain solitary bees. The adults turn vegetarian, and imitate bees in feeding on nectar. The flowers, one supposes, are equally tickled to be pollinated by fly or by bee. But insect predators presumably prefer their flies not to look like bees, hence the mimicry.

Ordinarily these are fast-darting insects, but 45-degree temperatures on Wednesday morning made this one sluggish. Somewhere it must be finding nectar, though — perhaps in the maples? And just a day or two of warm weather will bring the shadbush out.

I remember the last warm day we had, over a week ago now: by late afternoon, the woods were buzzing, mostly with calliphoridae. That’s one of the great novelties of early spring, that one can actually feel warm and brotherly toward blow flies. A rare religious impulse even had me effusing from scripture —

Their land brought forth frogs in abundance, in the chambers of their kings.
He spake, and there came divers sorts of flies…

–which, taken out of context, actually sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?

The blow flies’ metallic black or blue bodies made a pleasing contrast with the light-brown forest litter as they blundered about in search of something darker and smellier. The most successful in this search will likely have the easiest time eluding predation, given how they stand out against leaves or grass, and thus — one supposes — evolution favors dung- or carrion-colored blow flies the same way it favors bee mimics. There are a lot of hungry birds this time of year.

If there is a God, my friends, this is how she works, in never-ending Creation. The methods may seem random or cruel to our limited way of seeing, but “it is finished in beauty,” as the Navajo Night Chant puts it. In beauty, in harmony, in balance: all three have been offered as translations of the Navajo hozho, which expresses, I gather, the central moral and aesthetic value of a people whose own Creation story begins with the Air-Spirit People, whom we call insects.

April 12, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Trees in the concrete

On the About page for the Festival of Trees, we note that “We are interested in trees in the concrete rather than in the abstract.” Xris of Flatbush Gardener thought it would be fun to take that literally and have “Trees in the Concrete” as a theme for the next edition of the blog carnival. In his own words:

Yes, I am also interested in trees in the concrete […]. Urban trees and forestry. Street trees, park trees, weed trees. So, for the next Festival of the Trees, I’m especially looking for submissions on this theme. This is not a restrictive theme, so anything which fits the FotT submission guidelines is welcome. If you have a doubt, send it. You can submit entries via the Festival of the Trees Submission Form on BlogCarnival. You can also send an email to festival (dot) trees (at) gmail (dot) com with “Festival of the Trees” in the subject line.

The publication date will be May 1st, 2007. The deadline for submissions is April 29. It’s my first time hosting a Blog Carnival, so be gentle.

April 7, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Wintery thoughts in a time of resurrection

Bigger news than this Easter weekend snow and cold snap, for us, is a rare visitor at the bird feeder two days in a row: a swamp sparrow. Or so my mother determined — I’m no birder. She came back from a walk yesterday morning glowing with enthusiasm at all the birds in the hollow that were seemingly unfazed by two days of snow: migrant hermit thrushes, yellow-bellied sapsuckers, blue-headed vireos, and more. I had walked briskly down the hollow and back an hour earlier and saw nothing but the blowing ghosts of winter and the sharp contrasts between green barberry leaves or yellow spicebush blossoms and the new backdrop of white.

A purely aesthetic vision necessarily excludes as much as it admits, always seeking to impose some sort of frame. That may account for some of my blindness. Then, too, as a man, I am probably more inclined toward tunnel vision in the service of specific search images (in my case, certain kinds of photos). I’ve always agreed with Louis Leakey, who felt women make better naturalists than men because they tend to be more patient observers. That’s one reason why he recruited women — Dian Fossey, Jane Goodall, and Birute Galdikas — to do the long-term primate studies he thought were needed. He also felt women would have more compassion and empathy for their subjects, and unlike a lot of scientists at the time (and to this day), thought that that was a good thing.

It seems to me that the critical balance we need to strike is not so much between art and science, but beween dispassion and compassion. It is not enough simply to dissect a frog, or to capture its picturesque image on a lily pad, in order to understand what makes it work. We need to see the whole pond, and the ecological matrix of which it is a part. We need to understand why frogs are suddenly going extinct all over the planet. And we need to understand that when they go, a part of us goes with them — and that no purported salvation that is limited to the human realm can in fact save us.

Happy Easter.

April 4, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Bulleted list

Things seen today:

fog and rain
a map to the mythical land of Generica
18th-century engravings of human fetuses just before birth, looking very peaceful and wise inside their mothers’ cross-sectioned bodies
a dozen flickers hopping around on the lawn like robins while a hen turkey wandered across the field behind them and the sun broke though the clouds
mist rising from the springhouse roof
daffodils in bloom around the old dog statue, which is beginning to acquire the faintest tinge of green
a slow fly.

The photos, however, were both taken on Monday.

April 3, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Woodchuck

I am watching a woodchuck through the kitchen window as it forages in the black raspberry patch out back. Its fat body fits easily between the canes, as if they had no thorns at all — the pale dead, and the reddish purple arches of the year-old canes, their heads buried in the dirt. The slope is stubbled with nubbins of grass, violets, dandelion, dame’s-rocket. The woodchuck’s jowls wobble as it gobbles the tender greens.

I am watching its progress in the small screen on the back of my camera, which I hold a foot from my face. First I see the animal as if in a stained-glass window, its body and the ground around it framed and fragmented by the raspberry stems: ground hog. Then I zoom in on face and fur, shining in the strong sunlight: so much color where until now I’d only noticed brown and gray! How much wood, even freshly split, could you say the same about?

But now I’m getting a reflection from the inside. I pull a yellow bottle from the windowsill and it spots the movement, freezes. Dark eyes bore into the camera. Then a waterfall of fur is spilling downslope. A moment later I feel a bump, bump, bump against what I am used to thinking of as a floor. I crouch down and press one palm against the wood.
__________

Previously on Via Negativa: Marmota monax.
See also my mother’s essay, Mad Marmots.

April 2, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Snakes in the water

“Hello Sirs, I’m very sorry for my post,” said the ghost in the machine-generated blog comment as a prelude to its list of commercial links. Or maybe, indeed, these were the words of a truly repentant soul typing spam for pennies somewhere in the global South, where a penny might actually still suffice to buy someone’s thoughts.

At any rate, that was the last thing I read this morning before abandoning my blog for the fog, which was rapidly burning off. The field was dotted with the first spider webs of spring.

“What exactly do you call that thing?” I asked my dad just now. “A junction box, I guess,” he said. It’s where the telephone cable divides in eight, like the legs of a spider. I went back down to the other house, and he signalled me a moment later: “Phone call!”

You have to understand — I rarely ever get any phone calls. But speak of the devil, and it rings. A lady from the newspaper was calling to verify that I was the author of a letter sent in under my name two weeks before. “Could you tell me the subject of your letter please?”

I could barely remember. “Uh, wind plants?” I ventured. “That’s right!” she said, sounding as pleased as a game show host.

On my way back down the hill, I noticed a knot of garter snakes in the old well. Clearly not a mating ball, I thought, but it didn’t seem as if they’d need to bunch up for warmth today, either — it was 65 degrees and sunny by this time. Maybe they were just feeling sociable.

At my approach, they all started going off in different directions, and a few dropped into the water and began swimming in circles. It’s always such a surprise to see a snake swim. You wouldn’t think them capable of any bouyancy at all.

“If I lived here, I’d set up an easel and just paint,” said a visitor on Saturday. But I don’t just live here — I grew up here, and that can make it hard to see things as an artist should, always at a bit of a remove. Ever since that remark, though, I’ve been looking at things with canvas in mind. Would this be worth the time, the trouble? Would it look good on a gallery wall?

It’s funny how a few casual words can lodge in the memory and bring about a subtle shift in outlook. We tend to think of communication as a kind of transaction, I think, with messages analogous to currency, inert, possessing only whatever arbitrary values we assign them. A convenient view, designed to keep the myth of the sovereign individual high and dry.

March 30, 2007 by Dave Bonta

On fire

Walking into town this morning along the railroad tracks, I noticed this structure under the highway overpass. While it might look like a homeless encampment, I suspect it’s the work of local teenagers. This is right below the end of our mountain, where some kids had a clandestine campout last fall and almost set the woods on fire. Fortunately, one of our hunter friends found them in time and helped put out the blaze, before politely suggesting that they party elsewhere. I think this is “elsewhere.”

Of course, it isn’t just kids who like to get messed up in the name of fellowship. I don’t know if the Independent Order of Odd Fellows is still active in Tyrone, but they built a damn fine building. It looked pretty as a postcard this morning.

I considered wandering around and shooting a bunch more photos of Tyrone, but really, between this photo and the last, you can get a pretty good idea of what the town’s all about. (I have a few other photos here.)

On the way back, the late-morning sun backlit a hillside of blossoming red maples. This is always one of the first trees to blossom in spring, along with the pussy willows. The end of Plummer’s Hollow was rather badly logged back in 1979 and 1985, and these maples are one of the main beneficiaries.

Red maple used to be restricted to moist woods and swamps, but over the last fifty years it has proliferated in all kinds of forests in Pennsylvania, for reasons that aren’t fully understood. The relatively recent practice of wildfire suppression is often blamed for the decline of oaks, though, and fire sensitivity would certainly explain why red maple used to be confined to wet areas. And while red maples are beautiful trees, they don’t have anywhere near the wildlife value of oaks.

Maple blossoms aren’t the only fire-colored thing right now. ‘Tis the season for doppelbock, according to the Beer Activist. At 8.3% alcohol, one bottle of these is just about all you need. Suddenly, a campfire in the woods seems like a pretty good idea.

March 26, 2007September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

The cloud of unmaking

Inside the cloud there were trees, there were woods and fields, there was an entire mountain where the last few patches of snow had shrunk in the wash, so that the ground was now almost entirely bare.

Inside the cloud, ants and woodpeckers went about their business of excavating chambers in the heartwood. Things seemed at first as they should be. But the ground, too, grew hollow from the ministrations of earthworms, the descendents of hardy pioneers, slowly unmaking the land and everything that sprouted from it. The dark red stems of Japanese barberry glistened against the yellow fur of last year’s Japanese stiltgrass.

Inside the cloud, rain didn’t have far to fall. But it brought nitric and sulphuric acid from power plants a hundred miles to the west. Evergreen leaves of mountain laurel turned beautiful shades of brown and red and copper before falling. Trees slowly weakened as the acid dissolved the minerals and nutrients needed for their growth, and left a soil saturated with aluminum. This effect was especially pronounced inside the cloud, which was more acidic than rainfall alone would have been.

Inside the cloud, trees made vulnerable by acid deposition succumbed to a thousand different enemies: diseases new and old, native or exotic pests. A warm winter allowed insects to flourish; a cold winter killed weakened trees outright. Weedier tree species such as black cherry and red maple took over from the oaks and hickories, but were much more likely to snap in the increasingly frequent ice storms. The forest slowly took on a patchy appearance, turned to savanna. The fallen trunks and branches bubbled with white fungi.

Inside the cloud, colors that had lain dormant all winter began to glow. Spring would come one way or another. Even if someday all flowering plants should die out, something would still brighten and appear to blossom. Something would still license the simulacrum of hope.

Don’t forget to submit tree-related links to roger (dot) butterfield (at) gmail (dot) com by March 30 for inclusion in the upcoming Festival of the Trees at his blog Words and Pictures.