Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
See also my Woodrat photoblog and my Flickr account.
Submissions are closed for the current theme at qarrtsiluni, Come Outside; we’ll have a new theme to announce soon. In the meantime, exciting new content will continue to appear almost every day through the end of the month, so be sure to keep visiting the site. Wearing of protective helmet and gloves is optional. Congratulations to guest editor Fiona Robyn on an outstanding job!
How can you call it a storm when it’s so quiet, and when the world grows lighter, rather than darker, as the snow piles up? asks a newcomer to the northeast. It’s the wind, says a native, who has recently moved to a city so used to winter that the residents ride bicycles in the snow.
The wind spins around the trees like a pole dancer, leaving rings as wide as bicycle wheels.
Snow may evoke erasure and forgetfulness for us, but it doesn’t stop the squirrels from remembering where they buried each of their hundreds of acorns. In the depths of winter, scientists have discovered, gray squirrels not only mate, but they also eat like gourmands, savoring every bit of a nut after the often laborious struggle to disinter it from the frozen ground. Snow turns these arboreal acrobats into divers.
The aptly named tuliptree catches snow in its dried seed-cups until they spill over. The slightest breath of wind is enough to scatter the whole banquet.
Fifteen inches of snow is enough to almost bury the shortest mountain laurel bushes. Leaf clumps protrude from the snow in the shape of Iron Crosses, as if a small division of German soldiers had perished here.
The cirrus clouds grow thinner and thinner, until by late morning the sun shines brightly for the first time since the storm began two days before. Now the snow is a screen for shadow plays with a simple, incremental narrative arc.
Little sunlight penetrates the spruce grove, where the snow is still making its way to the ground.
I walk bow-legged on webs of rawhide, in hoops of ash wood. There’s just enough snow to make it worth the effort to break trails for snowshoeing. After only an hour, muscles I haven’t used since last winter begin to register their complaints. Unlike walking on water, no faith is required — only patience, and the willingness to sink.
To view all the photos I took yesterday, click here.
View larger size here.
“Broomsedge bluestem’s primary mode of reproduction is sexual” (see here). That’s one thing I like about plants: they’re not completely dependent on sex to make more of themselves. Which is good, because sex for plants usually involves the intercession of a third party — a moth, a hummingbird, an extinct ground sloth, you name it. Sounds chancy.
In any case, botany geek-talk is cool. “Sessile spikelet 3-4 mm long, twice to half again as long as the internode, the awn straight, 10-15 mm long; pedicellate spikelet wanting or rarely present as a minute scale, pedicel exceeding the sessile spikelet. Flowers: Either sessile and hermaphrodite, or stalked and staminate, sterile or not developed.”
Broomsedge bluestem (Andropogon virginicus L.), also known as whisky grass or yellow bluestem, is slowly spreading through our old fields. The photo above was taken at what we call the Far Field, which was never planted to non-native brome and orchard grass the way the First Field was. I love the stuff, especially at this time of year when its far-from-blue stems and leaves stand out against the snow. Its flame-colored foliage seems appropriate for a plant that flourishes after fires, and thus has evolved to provide a nice, dry tinder. Absent fires, it’s also an early colonizer of overgrazed pastures, old strip mines, and old fields like ours, especially on acidic soils. It’s slowly infiltrating the non-native grasses in First Field, relying on chemical warfare (allelopathogens), but has a harder time competing with the native goldenrod. At the Far Field, it’s restricted almost entirely to the mowed paths; the rest of the five-acre field is dominated by goldenrod…
which looks like this right now (speaking of blue stems). We may have as many as eight different species of goldenrod on the mountain.
This kind of old field habitat is becoming increasingly scarce, so we think it’s important to keep it open. Dad used to use a tractor and mower, but in recent years he’s switched to using hand pruners on the encroaching black locust sprouts. It’s good winter exercise, he says.
The goldenrod provides, among other things, a valuable nectar source for migrating monarch butterflies, which come south along the ridge in great numbers each fall. Plus, this is a northeast-facing hollow. For our own psychological health, especially in the cold, dark months of the year, we appreciate all the extra light a field provides.
To tell the truth, though, it’s very difficult to say whether the value to conservation of maintaining old field habitat is greater than the value of forest interior habitat, which is becoming just as scarce here in the crowded northeast. If we were to let our 45-acre First Field grow in, and/or plant native trees to accelerate the succession, we’d create a parcel of virtually uninterrupted forest close to a mile wide. Numerous studies document how the nesting success of forest interior-dependent songbirds, for example, improves dramatically with distance from the nearest forest edge. But are wood thrushes more important than monarch butterflies? Probably if you’d ask ten different ecologists, you’d get ten different answers. I hate that we even have to make these kinds of choices, playing God.
All over the planet, we are rapidly approaching a point of no return, and not just where climate change is concerned. The loss of biodiversity and the radical simplification of ecosytems are epiphenomena of equal importance to our long-term survival. A world of simplied ecosystems is one with far fewer feedback loops, fewer checks and balances, and therefore greater extremes. Extremes of heat and cold. More catastrophic floods and droughts. Plagues and outbreaks of all kinds. More frequent and hotter fires, many of them fueled by invasive species — as broomsedge bluestem has become in fire-prone Australia. Forests giving way to savannas, and savannas to desert.
But there will be a lot more light. Our descendents will learn to love this shining, depauperate world. They will see God’s stark handiwork at every turn.
When I came up the house yesterday morning, my mother was in full rant mode. I encouraged her to blog about it at our new Plummer’s Hollow site.
Many schools were cancelled including Tyrone. I couldn’t believe it. In Maine, at 40 below, I removed the heater from the car engine, bundled baby Mark in layers of clothes, and took Steve to first grade and Dave to nursery school in our Volkswagen bus that never warmed up above zero during our half hour ride. No one ever talked of calling school because of the cold.
And here, one year when Bruce was off to a conference in January and the boys had to get to school on their own, I walked them the two miles down to town at zero degrees, we stopped at a restauarant and they had hot chocolate to warm up, and then they walked on to school while I walked home. I remember the hoarfrost clinging to the trees beside the river and forming on my hair. In those days, Tyrone didn’t cancel school because of the cold. No wonder kids stay indoors like their parents, mesmerized by technology and getting fatter day by day. The outdoors has become something to fear.
I feel much the same way. Pennsylvanians have always been weather-wimps, and they seem to be getting worse. Plus, weather forecasts weren’t as hysterical back in the seventies and eighties, when we regularly got alot more snow and cold than we get now. Sometime in the past ten years, I became aware of the fact that the threat of virtually any measurable snowfall, or temperatures falling below 10F, is an occasion for a “winter weather advisory,” a “winter storm warning,” or a “winter storm watch” (possibly a misuse of the National Weather Service terminology). The wind-chill factor was just beginning to take hold when I was a kid; now, it’s almost constantly on the lips of broadcasters eager to keep people inside and glued to their TVs or radios.
However, I must admit I’m not as cold-hardy as either of my parents. Both sleep with one of the windows open in their bedrooms, even at two below F with a howling wind. “Well, I have a really warm comforter,” Mom told me. “And when it’s really cold like this, I tie a sweater around my head.” Ohhhh…kay.
This seems like a good juncture to remind everyone that qarrtsiluni will be soliciting for contributions to the current theme, “Come Outside”, only through the 15th. Our guest editor, Fiona Robyn, has been doing a fantastic job acquiring, editing and assembling posts to go up at the rate of five a week; by Friday we will have welcomed our tenth new contributor since the middle of January. I hope some more of our past contributors will feel inspired to send stuff in, as well. And of course, we welcome just plain readers, too! If you like what you see there, please help spread the word.
I’ve been getting outside as I can, both to snap pictures and to do a little bit of sledding. I do wish it would warm up enough to snow some more; the snow cover we have is so thin that strong sunlight is enough to melt it off on south-facing slopes, even with temperatures in the single digits.
My apologies to subscribers for the duplicate posting. I’ll blame it on my half-frozen typing fingers.
Just like its mythological namesake, this January had two faces. It started out warm, on the heels of a virtually snow-free December. Throughout the northeast, lakes and ponds remained unfrozen, temperatures soared into the high 50s on a few days, and we thought that winter would never come. But then, just past the middle of the month, the mercury fell. Those of us who care about forest health cheered — at last, a good cold snap to knock back some of the more virulent insect pests! And we started getting snow: a half-inch one day, two inches a couple days later, and with just one day above freezing, much of it is still on the ground.
The cold air is great for walking in — the dryness is easier on the lungs. “It’s just like hiking in Arizona!” my mother exults.
In the woods, the rhododendron leaves curl up, turning one, uniform face toward the frigid air.
When the temperature drops below 35F, rhododendron leaves begin to cup and curl at the edges. At 25F, the leaves have curled so tight that half the leaf surface has disappeared and the leaves droop. When temperatures hit the teens, leaves shrivel even tighter, turn brownish-green and dangle like stiff string beans. This response to temperature changes is a rhododendron’s method of preventing loss of moisture through the leaves.
The upper side of a rhododendron leaf is leathery. The bottom side is dappled with tiny air valves that control the flow of air in and out of a leaf. Cold air contains less moisture than warm air. So when low temperatures and high winds arrive, the leaf valves close. By looking out a window on a winter day, one can determine roughly how cold it is by the degree the rhododendron leaves have curled and drooped. When temperatures rise, the leaves open again.
The species in question here is Rhododendron maximum, which grows throughout the eastern U.S. in the colder, damper parts of the forest, often along streams under hemlock cover, or on north-facing slopes. This is because its leaves are sensitive to sun-scald, unlike its cousin mountain laurel (Kalmia latifolia), which, though also evergreen, does not curl its leaves in the cold.
The Cherokee used to use rhododendron leaves in weather magic. They would “throw clumps of leaves into a fire and dance around it to bring cold weather,” according to this compendium. They also made rhododendron-leaf decoctions for external and internal use against headaches, heart trouble, and other aches and pains, and carved the wood into pipes and spoons. I imagine some still do.
The day before yesterday, I found coyote tracks in the woods above my house, about a hundred feet from my front porch. There was a skim of snow in the tracks, so I knew when the tracks had been made: around midnight, just before the snow stopped. I was inside reading blogs at the time.
That evening, when I was having supper with my parents, the subject of Second Life came up. I mentioned reading that Sweden was establishing the first official embassy in the cyber world. Dad had been reading about Second Life in the business press, and we began talking about virtual real estate, and how you can get people to buy anything if you can just figure out a way to stake a claim.
Mom was baffled. “What? WHAT? That doesn’t make sense!” It really bothered her that people would devote so much time and energy to creating a simulated world when the real world is so little known and appreciated. We agreed that it might be more interesting if the game’s creators had attempted to set up some kind of rudimentary ecosystem, with real ecological costs to any major disruption or development – a kind of Biosphere 3. Right now, apparently, the “place” has few non-human inhabitants, and ecosystem creation is left up to the owner-gods of autonomous parcels of Second Life real estate, such as Svarga, or the new Terminous.
But apparently ecosystem creation was part of the original plan. The CEO of the parent company, Linden Lab, said in a recent interview that
We were very interested in simulating things like physics and weather as a starting point, with the goal of creating enormous complexity that would be very beautiful. We used to imagine that SL, or parts of it, could become vast forests, full of little evolving plants made of code, and you could wander in that forest and find things that no one else had ever seen. What a thought! Builds like Svarga are going exactly in that direction now. I can’t wait to be able to walk in those forests.
I’m of two minds about Second Life. It does seem to have some real-world utility as a space for people to share their artworks, perform original music, or grill their congressional representatives. I’ve always been interested in communal creation (and community creation). But at this point, Second Life sounds more like a shopping mall than a true town square. Its owners could pull the plug at any time, and they are under no obligation to tolerate dissent. And let’s remember: building those artificial forests does have real-world ecological costs in terms of the energy needed to build and power computers and computer networks. The wood-based economy of the high Middle Ages destroyed Europe’s forests in order to build (among other things) cathedrals, those timeless evocations of forest space in glass and stone.
Of course, what’s really caught the media’s attention is the amount of commercial activity that goes on now in Second Life. Real U.S. dollars (converted into an artificial currency) are being spent there… which means that SL’s ecological footprint is growing. Corporations are eagerly buying up advertizing space, and some long-time participants are beginning to complain that there’s less and less to distinguish it from the real world they’re trying to escape.
But let’s not be too hard on the Second Life enthusiasts. It seems to me that people who long to fully inhabit a virtual world are little different from those who regard heaven, or some spiritual plane, as their true home, and their earthly bodies as temporary houses for an immortal soul. (It’s not for nothing that we call our online visual counterparts “avatars”!) I’ve read exactly one cyberpunk novel — William Gibson’s Neuromancer — and was repelled by its vision of an all-encompassing cyberspace. But who among us doesn’t live in a fantasy world to some extent? Why else do we enjoy novels?
The anthropological and paleontological evidence strongly suggests that humans are, at root, gatherer-hunters who evolved in seasonally nomadic, small-band societies. As a result, our sense of home ground is fluid and highly adaptable. Like migratory birds, we have a strong homing instinct precisely because we are prone to wandering. And we are not just wayfarers but way-makers, always trying to convert routes into destinations and the Way into something that can be spoken about. Part of us longs to travel; the other part longs to nest. While some mark territory, others are content just to explore.
Either way, home is a circle of stones with a fire in the middle. If you sit facing the fire too long, your back gets cold and you turn as two-sided as Janus.
So get up and dance!
Yesterday was the coldest morning so far this year; all the public schools were on a two-hour delay, and the streets were nearly deserted. I sat at a table in the bookstore window, waiting for one of the music stores to open so I could buy a new harmonica. Long strings of colorful paper cranes hung between me and the street — not quite a thousand of them, but nonetheless intended, I think, as a concrete expression of hope for peace.
I had just picked up a a bilingual selection of poems by the great 17th-century Mexican poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, translated by Alan S. Trueblood: A Sor Juana Anthology. As I’d remembered from his translation of Antonio Machado, Trueblood is a competent but not very imaginative translator, which is fine for my purposes: I’d prefer to have to struggle through the Spanish, referring to the English only for help with vocabulary.
I opened the book to this sonnet, an indictment of shallow faith:
Verde embeleso de la vida humana,
loca esperanza, frenesí dorado,
sueño de los despiertos intricado,
como de sueños, de tesoros vana;alma del mundo, senectud lozana,
decrépito verdor imaginado;
el hoy de los dichosos esperado
y de los desdichados el mañana:sigan tu sombra en busca de tu día
los que, con verdes vidrios por anteojos,
todo lo ven pintado a su deseo;que yo, más cuerda en la fortuna mía,
tengo en entrambas manos ambos ojos
y solamente lo que toco veo.
After I bought the harmonica, I had a little bit of time to kill before lunch, so I went for a brisk walk. The temperature had risen to perhaps 10 degrees (F), but the sidewalks were still pretty empty. I walked around the west end of town, trying to remember all the front porches on which I had partied at one time or another. I counted twelve. I didn’t feel in the least bit nostalgic, though: that was fun while it lasted, but after a while I felt I had heard just about every conversation it was possible to have while drunk.
I slowed down to admire a line of large sycamore trees. On one of them, some artist had mounted a pair of green eyes — verdes vidrios, indeed! I resolved to attempt a translation, however inadequate, of Sister Juana’s poem.
Green enchantment of every human life,
mad hope, delerious gold fever,
convoluted sleep of the sleepless
where dream and treasure are equally elusive;
soul of this world, leafy senescence,
decrepit fantasy of green
that the happy call today
and the unhappy, tomorrow:
let those who wear green glasses
and see everything just as their desire paints it
chase your shadow in search of a new morning.
For my part, I’ll give fate the greater latitude,
keep eyes in both my hands
and look no farther than I can touch.
While we sat inside eating supper,
the snow came down & filled in all the tracks.
Vole & sparrow tracks on the back steps,
squirrel & feral cat on the lawn,
the wingprints of a hawk. Even
my own tracks from an hour before:
the snow’s feet grew to fit them all.
After supper, I switched on the spotlight
under the gable, went out into the storm
& stood looking up.
Here in between these seeming absolutes —
black above, white below — the mix
is anything but gray.
Black pepper from the islands.
Salt from the encircling sea.
It’s beginning to look and feel like January at last. We’re getting snow in small increments, here — ideal for preserving the tracks of small birds and mammals. The above tracks were probably made by a slate-colored junco, AKA snowbird. Juncos forage extensively on the ground, looking for seeds and insects, and in breeding season they nest on or very near the ground as well. The Wikipedia claims that juncos will sometimes eat their own droppings, then eat the droppings that result from that, and so on — an ouroborus-like exercise in self-consumption. It’s the rare being that can eliminate elimination altogether, like the mites that live in your eyelashes. Demodex mites lack an excretory orifice of any kind. They spend most of their lives head-down inside hair follicles, like shy woodland creatures living in hollow trees. Sometimes they emerge at night and walk around on your skin while you’re asleep.
Click on photo for larger view
Much as I like looking for tracks, what I’m really attracted to is untracked snow, which offers a vision of the world free of mark or blemish. Maybe that’s what motivates the coprophagous slate-colored junco, too: an aesthetic preference for a clean slate. Or at least a clean plate.
__________
Thanks to Ambivablog for originally bringing demodex mites to my attention.
BIOLOGICAL MATURITY: In stand management, the age at which trees or stands have peaked in growth rate and are determined to be merchantable.
FOREST INVENTORY: A survey of a forest area to determine such data as area condition, timber volume and species, for specific purposes such as planning, purchases, evaluation, management or harvesting.
LAND RECLAMATION: Bringing the land, damaged from natural or human causes, back into use for growing trees or agricultural crops.
OLD-GROWTH: Trees that have been growing for such a long time that net growth or value is often declining.
OVERMATURE: The stage at which trees exhibit a decline in growth rate, vigor, and soundness as a result of old age.
REGENERATION CUT: A timber harvest designed to promote natural establishment of trees.
SALVAGE CUT: The harvesting of dead or damaged trees or of trees in danger of being killed by insects, disease, flooding, or other factors in order to capture their economic value before they decay.
STOCKING: The number and density of trees in a forest stand. Stands are often classified as understocked, well-stocked or overstocked.
STUMPAGE: Value of timber as it stands uncut in the woods.
Standing timber itself.
TIMBER STAND IMPROVEMENT (TSI) – Improving the quality of a forest stand by removing or deadening undesirable species to achieve desired stocking and species composition. TSI practices include applying herbicides, burning, girdling, or cutting.
WORKING FOREST: Land used primarily for forestry purposes, but also available for recreation, usually where both managed land and land not presently being managed is present.
WOLF TREE: A tree with large branches and a spreading crown occupying more space in the forest than its economic value justifies. Wolf trees may have wildlife or esthetic value.
__________
Be sure to click on the photos for identification and additional information.
Festival of the Trees #7 appeared a few hours early last night — I presume the host had a party to go to, unlike me — and was one of the last things I looked at before going to bed at around 11:45. The rain was loud on the roof. Just as I was drifting off to sleep, I heard a distant rumble. Thunder, I thought. But in January? It was followed by a second rumble a few seconds later. The surprise of it woke me enough to look at the clock and realize that it wasn’t thunder I was hearing, but human beings marking an arbitrarily designated moment of time by discharging guns and explosives. My first thought of the supposed New Year — “Thunder!” — had been a delusion.
I woke eight hours later, grateful for the rare gift of a full night’s sleep. When I stepped out on my porch, coffee mug in hand, I was greeted by thick fog and the honking of Canada geese. They flew right overhead, so low that I could easily hear the wing beats, though the cloud hid them from view. My first birds of the New Year had been invisible.
I was reminded of New Year’s Day 2000, which began here with a thick snow fog — and with the turn of the millennium still a year away, contrary to the widespread popular delusion. Looking back, it makes me a little sad to realize that the tenacity of that delusion prevented us from enjoying a really memorable, planet-wide millennium-ending celebration on December 31, 2000.
Ten minutes later, a single crow flew in and landed at the top of a tall black locust tree at the edge of the woods. Unlike the “maybe crow” in the poem I just linked to, though, there was no doubt about this one’s identity. At least, not on my part — for all I know, the bird itself was in the middle of an identity crisis. Corvids are certainly smart enough to be capable of self-awareness, and thus also self-doubt, I suppose. Anytime you see a crow by itself, you have to wonder what it’s up to. It sat there silently for less than a minute, then flew off to the southeast. My first omen-like observation of the New Year had been — as always — highly ambiguous.
My first mammal sighting was of a gray squirrel — no surprise there! — perched on the head of the dog statue in my front yard, chewing open the hard shell of a black walnut. This silly game, taking note of first things, had led me to focus on a scene that was no less charming for being commonplace.
After a while, I got up and fetched camera and tripod for a few pictures of the fog. This galvanized me to lace up my shoes and go for a walk — one of my very few, inflexible New Year’s customs. I didn’t realize until later, when I uploaded my photos to the computer, how much trouble the camera had focusing in the fog. My first photos of the New Year were out-of-focus!
I was getting pretty hungry by this time, so I only took a short walk. I noticed that a couple of the power poles appeared to have fresh bear markings on them, though most likely they’ve been there for a couple of months and I only noticed them today because last night’s rain made them stand out. The bears are probably all in hibernation right now, though as warm as the weather’s been, I wouldn’t bet too much on that. We’ve seen bears out wandering around in Januarys past, whether from insomnia or an improperly triggered internal clock, who can say? Something like a rumble of thunder might wake them up.
*
Another New Year, 8:30 a.m.
Like a bear making claw marks
on a telephone pole,
I decide to take roll.
Low-flying geese,
solitary crow,
squirrel on the head of a concrete dog,
the fog.
Here, I answer.
Here.