Photos – Page 54 – Via Negativa

May 31, 2007September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Painting the river

The river this morning is a dark & glistening thing. It reminds me of the tar I spread onto a flat roof two days ago: so glossy, smoothing only by a little the pocked & pimpled surface underneath. I spread the tar with an old broom for a brush, sweeping back & forth to work it into the cracks. It was abstract expressionism at its best.

The two spans of the interstate highway cross the river without getting their feet wet. The riverbank beneath them is a desert, littered with empty beer bottles & cans of spraypaint, & filled with the muffled echoes of tires banging over the seams in the roadbed & the fluttering of pigeons in the strutwork.

A fresh batch of graffiti on the concrete piers touts anarchy, marijuana, & hallucinogenic mushrooms. It’s an attractive thought, to get stoned & stare into the water until the rumble of traffic turns into another river, & those distant abstractions the government & capitalism seem ready to give way & crumble into the current.

But the only graffiti artist with any skill appears to be working on his or her self-branding, so to speak: the tag Selph appears in half a dozen places, each in a different style. I picture a sylph-like creature, a pale goth who flits from one stoned friend to another, wrapping herself in the glossy wings of the night.
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This week’s Poetry Thursday prompt was “rivers” (see the other responses here). Since I had to go into town this morning anyway, I took my camera along. I’m not sure I ended up with a true poem, but what the hell — it was a good prompt.

May 27, 2007September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Blues and yellows

Yesterday morning I found myself listening, quite by accident, to some old piano blues. The cassette was mislabled; I’d been looking for something else, but what I found was exactly what I needed to hear. Not because I had the blues, you understand. But because those particular songs — “Mother Earth” by Memphis Slim, “You Can’t Have It All” by Sunnyland Slim, and “Cry To Me” by Professor Longhair — make me glad to be alive.

Then I went out with my camera, checking to see if the mallard’s clutch had hatched in the night. This is a duck that, in defiance of all logic, has nested in a dry field on a dry mountaintop, about 100 years above the head of the stream — probably the same one I saw checking the place out on April 24 in the company of her mate.

I went straight from the blues to the yellows: yellow irises in the shed lawn (top photo) and a flock — or is it a charm? — of goldfinches up in the field.

The mallard hen was sitting perfectly motionless, as usual, trusting in her excellent camouflage, which renders her nearly invisible even from three feet away. No yellow ducklings were in evidence. Actually, with all the nest-raiding predators about, I’ll be very surprised if the nest survives the full incubation period. But if it does, it should be interesting to see what the mother does with her new family: will they walk the full mile and a half down to the river, as one of our hunter friends saw a wood duck family doing last year? Or will they try and stick it out in our stream, which, while free of snapping turtles, would seem to offer no protection from raccoons, foxes and coyotes?

When I got back to the house, the sun was just filtering down to the wild mustard patch in front of the old springhouse. So many yellows — so much sweetness and light! The only blue I found, apart from the sky, was in a few, last, faded speedwell blossoms in my garden, and in the pinhole-sized spots at the base of a caterpillar’s spines.

But mostly what I saw was green.

May 24, 2007September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Melody

This week’s challenge at Poetry Thursday was to write a dialogue poem. For some reason I’ve been thinking about an incident from 11 years ago, the rape and brutal murder of an 11-year-old girl by a 15-year-old boy she’d been going on hikes with, including up our hollow. (See my mother’s book Applachian Summer for the whole story.) Unpleasant to think about, let alone to try and write about, but I think violence against girls and women is real and pervasive, and we shouldn’t let it pass in silence simply because of its connection with so much that remains unspeakable.

Gram was starting a batch of cookies
when I went out
I’m just going up the street I told her
I didn’t say anything about our secret places

you told you told
your innocent act didn’t fool me
we could’ve gone exploring forever
if you hadn’t told

I wish I’d waited
we had all summer
& I love to lick the batter off the spoon
though she always says raw eggs aren’t safe

the loathing on your face when I showed you
what you did to me
put it aWAY you said
AWAY AWAY

I hear them calling & the name
reminds me of something
maybe that fish that died of loneliness when I was five
I used to press my ear against the tank

sugar & spice for my frogs & snails
we had a deal
I showed you old farm dumps a hole in the fence
one rusty shovel to turn an acre of need

how strange this sudden softness
into which I’ve slipped
fog so thick I can’t make out the trees
Gram’s cookies must be getting cold

I might’ve stopped short of the shovel
if you hadn’t gone crying to Jesus
ignoring me who had given you
all I had

Melody I hear them call
Melody Melody
as if the birds weren’t already singing
as if it weren’t enough

May 23, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Under surveillance

Another cool, dry morning. Ee-oh-lay, the wood thrushes intone. Ee-oh-lay. Witchedy witchedy witchedy! answers the always upbeat common yellowthroat. Somewhere out of sight over the valley (well, with the trees leafed out, almost everything is out of sight now) a helicopter begins circling. That deep whup whup whup, growing nearer then farther, drowning out the more distant birds, provokes a kind of nervous reaction, and the next thing I know I’m over in the herb garden pulling weeds.

Who or what are they searching for, I wonder? One night two months ago, at around 10:00 p.m., a helicopter circled the farm with a searchlight for close to fiteen minutes. My brother was just starting down the hollow toward his car, which was parked at the bottom. He said he had to duck behind a tree to avoid the helicopter’s searchlight. When he got home, he called up the local police station to ask who was missing. Nobody, they said. Did they have any idea why a helicopter would be searching Plummer’s Hollow? No, they didn’t.

I say “weeds,” but most of what I pull is grass. It’s kind of an anti-lawn. If you let the grass go, it can crowd out the dandelions and gill-over-the-ground if you’re not careful. Just as I was finishing, about twenty minutes later, I noticed the helicopter sound fading into the distance. Or maybe it was the other way around: my compulsion to pull weeds faded with the ‘copter sound. At any rate, moments after I went inside, a male ruby-throated hummingbird zoomed in to the coral bells next to the walk.

I wouldn’t have thought anything further about it, except that the same thing happened this afternoon, too: I pulled a few weeds, went inside, and a few seconds later a hummingbird zoomed in to check out my work. I think I’m being watched.

May 20, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Several luminous things

As above, so below. The day that ended with less than one degree of apparent distance between the two brightest objects in the night sky began for me with the finding of several luminous things. It was a cool and cloudless morning, and in the woods, the spent flowers of the oaks rained down every time the wind blew, making an almost imperceptible patter.

Newly opened leaves already supplied food and shelter to a variety of insects. The first rays of sun caught one small caterpillar, the larva of a dull brown duskywing, still out gobbling on a bright green oak leaf. Perhaps it was concerned that its own green was still too dark to offer an effective camouflage. Its bedroll waited a couple of leaves away.

A rose-breasted grosbeak let loose with its usual string of brilliant notes from a black birch tree at the edge of the woods. “Rose” doesn’t begin to describe the patch of color on its breast: an almost unnatural hue, like a punk chick’s hairdo. I tried and failed to get a good photo, but after it flew, I discovered a new lady’s-slipper orchid almost directly underneath its perch.

Most of the trees are fully leafed out now, but a few canopy gaps always remain. Small patches of sun moved slowly across the forest floor, growing or shrinking as they moved. And since it was a cool morning, the flies moved with them. For half a minute, the roof of Jack’s pulpit sported a bug-eyed gargoyle.

I watched a small blowfly apparently pollinating a Solomon’s-seal, crawling up into one of the bell-shaped blossoms, then backing out and flying away before I could take its picture. Again, though, I was quickly compensated, this time with a perfectly motionless deerfly on a wild yam leaf.

A clump of cinnamon fern fiddleheads huddled in the middle of a crowd of mayapples. They were facing inward not out of antipathy toward their toxic neighbors, but in anticipation of the imminent rise of their leader, the brown, fertile frond whose resemblance to a cinnamon stick gives this fern its common name.

Hidden under their parasols, the mayapple blossoms remained thoroughly mysterious. They depend on insect pollination to produce fertile seeds, yet they offer no nectar in compensation. How do they do it? The eventual fruits, ripening in mid-June, are the only part of the plant that isn’t poisonous. In fact, they’re said to be very good. I’ve never had one, because the animals always get them first, but maybe this year I’ll be lucky. Would I deprive a chipmunk of its treat? I would.

May 19, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Conjunction

If you live in the eastern U.S. or Canada, go outside right now and look to the west.

Purty, ain’t it?

I don’t usually indulge in breathless, guess-what-just-happened blog posts, but this was too good to miss. I’m sure it’s all over Twitter.

UPDATE: And you want to know why I don’t? I just mispelled “conjunction.” In the title of the post. (See the permalink URL if you don’t believe me.)

May 16, 2007 by Dave Bonta

By the wayside

Our desination last Sunday was a roadside cliff in northeastern Pennsylvania that my friend L. remembered from one trip some seven years before. To hear her describe it, it was a veritable hanging garden of moss and ferns and wildflowers, and she had jotted enthusiastic notes to that effect in the margins of her atlas. We looked for over an hour, and never re-found it.

Oh sure, we found the road she’d marked in the atlas, but it wasn’t the one she remembered. The cliff was neither as steep nor as wet nor as rich; she didn’t even recognize it. The road she’d been on then had been paved, she was sure of it, but this was potholed gravel.

We consoled ourselves with a visit to the nearby Rickett’s Glen State Park. Black-throated green and black-and-white warblers called from the tops of old-growth hemlocks, but my attempts to pish them down within camera range brought me nothing but chickadees and a redstart.

On our way down the glen, we saw waterfalls and blossoming hobblebush; on the way back up, we saw crowds of painted trillium. They were right beside the trail, and it was hard to see how we’d missed them on the way down.

Driving back on PA Route 118 toward Hughesville, we pulled off the road to examine an incredibly verdant north-facing cliff, thick with moss and ferns (see photo at the beginning of the post). It was obviously very unstable, though, because a couple tons of it had recently calved, and blocked most of the berm. Directly across the highway, the rock cut was dry and grassy, and someone had erected a roadside memorial: white cross with a blue bow at its center, ringed with artifical roses and rocks the same color as the cliff. Joe Young, 34, 2003. Banks of greater celandine were in flower a few feet away, an old-world poppy more striking for its foliage than for its yellow, cross-shaped blooms.

May 11, 2007September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Mood indigo

The middle of a warm afternoon in May. The new leaves have reached about half of their full size, and the steep end of the mountain is so green you want to shout for the sheer wonder of it. Below on the railroad tracks an east-bound freight has been stopped on a tip from someone down the line who saw a figure sitting in an open boxcar. A dark-skinned man in handcuffs is being placed in the back seat of a police van. Cars line up on both sides of the crossing as the police sort slowly through three gym bags full of personal belongings, right there on the brick sidewalk beside the station. Where is he from? What language does he speak?

A line from an obituary: He was truly an honest man and enjoyed tinkering with clocks.

He was. I knew him. A good man who shouldered a great deal of sorrow in his life, including the deaths of both his adult children.

You ain’t been blue, no, no, no.
You ain’t been blue till you’ve had that mood indigo.

We came home from shopping to find an indigo bunting — the first one we’ve seen this year — sitting on the metal table next to the door, motionless except for a slight trembling and the blinking of its eyes.

May 7, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Wildflower walking

The air was cool on Saturday morning, and this tiger swallowtail let us approach quite close as it basked in the strong sunlight. With the pale forest litter as a backdrop, it was difficult to spot, even from three feet away. Only with all intermediate shades between dark and light removed (with the “threshold” effect in Photoshop) does the pattern of its wings emerge clearly, just like the children’s game where someone says “hot” or “cold” to lead someone else to a hidden prize. Having only two options can really clarify.

The purple trillium comes in two colors, purple and light yellow. The latter seems to be controlled by a recessive gene, like blue versus brown eyes in humans. Given the trillium’s three leaves, three sepals, three petals, and three stigmas, though, it seems a little surprising that there isn’t a third color option. Then again, most trillium species only have one.

Cut down a trillium for any reason — even if only for the cut flower — and it can take years to recover, if ever. Like many perennial native wildflowers of the Appalachians, trilliums spread with glacial speed, depending almost exclusively on ants to carry their seeds back to their colonies and toss them out in their middens after eating the protein-rich bribe (the eliasome). And ants don’t tend to walk great distances, at least not in human terms. “This type of seed dispersal is termed myrmecochory from the Greek ‘ant’ (myrmex) and ‘dispersal’ (kore),” says the Wikipedia.

A freshly opened flower of yellow mandarin is the same monochome green as its leaves. Young as it is, though, it’s already bound by a few strands of spider web. The flowers must move quickly before the forest canopy fills out and robs them of sunlight; those whose lives are linked to theirs, like the ants and the spiders, must move even more quickly. But I suppose it is because they have so little time each year in which to flourish that these wildflowers’ long-term progress is so slow.

So musing, we sauntered slowly up the hollow.
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UPDATE: Gina Marie posted about the walk here.

May 5, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Leaf-out

Witch hazel was once the dowser’s favorite source of forked sticks. But nowadays the few dowsers still practicing their ancient and ridiculous craft are just as likely to improvise with wire from a coathanger — good news for the witch hazels, I suppose. But just look at this tree: doesn’t it look like a great place to hang a coat?

For six months the trees have stood bare and exposed, and I’ve had nothing but convivial feelings toward them. But now suddenly they are turning alien and inhuman. Where before I might’ve seen a face, now there’s nothing but a mask waiting to be carved. I’m seeing handles instead of hands, chair legs instead of limbs, and instead of company, a forest of empty chairs.