Plummer’s Hollow – Page 56

July 14, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Mushrooms

The mid-summer woods are dark and damp and full of mystery. Visibility is at a minimum. Things crash off through the brush without ever giving one so much as a glimpse. Strange calls issue from the throats of recently fledged birds.

Mushroom. It sounds like a good place to get polenta, or the last stop in an obedience school for sled dogs. Then too, it conjures up the effects of certain fungi on humans: ventilating the rooms of the mind with extra windows, say, or dissolving the liver.

Small patches of sunlight slide across the forest floor and disappear, re-appearing a few feet or many yards away. The photographer of mushrooms can either stalk these patches of available light and see what they illuminate, or find a potential subject and wait for the sun. Or, of course, one can forgo the sunlight altogether, use a tripod, and shoot in the gloom.

Me, I lie in ambush. I figure I’ll know my quarry when it comes.

July 10, 2006 by Dave Bonta

What I saw when I was drinking

Yesterday afternoon, I drank up the last of my homebrew. Plummer’s Hollow will be dry until I get around to making some more. So it was a bittersweet occasion. Hell, it was a bittersweet beer.

But don’t be alarmed — I wasn’t drinking alone. I never do.

For one thing, there were the flies. Not the kind that bite, but the kind that just want to land on you and walk around a bit, pausing every few steps to rub your grime off their forefeet.

A good, strong stout should help you appreciate, you know, the little things: The songs of the birds. The weave of your jeans. The way you don’t feel anything one way or the other when you kill a fly, and you begin to wonder if that makes you a potential sociopath.

I got many glimpses of the chipmunk that lives in my herb garden as it hurried back and forth to its burrow, climbing tall weed stalks to get at their seeds and riding them down to the ground. I thought about my grandmother, who used to hand-feed chipmunks when she and Grandpa lived here for several summers back in the 1970s. In all likelihood, she fed this very chipmunk’s great x 30 grandmother. I can’t help feeling that creates a special bond between us. Not special enough to make we want to try hand-feeding it, but pretty special.

Through the slats on the porch railing, I had a good view of a crowd of garlic, though I wasn’t close enough to eavesdrop. People tell me I should decapitate them so their bulbs will grow bigger, but I can rarely bring myself to do so. They have such character! I love watching them uncurl, finally pointing their bills straight up like bitterns. And when their heads split open and the children within grow beaks of their own, I scatter them far and wide. Slowly but surely, I’m turning the lawn into a garlic patch.

From time to time, my eyes strayed back to the book on my lap: Jim Harrison’s The Shape of the Journey: New and Collected Poems. I was reading the section of poems called After Ikkyu and liking it pretty well. Harrison is a good drinking companion.

But mostly, I looked at the beer. As I mentioned, it’s homebrew, so I wouldn’t have to carbonate and bottle it. Three years ago, in fact, I left a couple batches in the carboy and just siphoned off a pitcher whenever I got thirsty. I don’t particularly need the mouth-feel of carbonation; I do it for the foam. What do wine drinkers look at? I’ve never understood that. Beer is beautiful.

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UPDATE: With the last photo, I meant to reference Dsida Jeno’s “Poem of Darkness,” which I recently became acquainted with thanks to frizzyLogic. True, Jeno himself mentions coffee. But what better than stout for a “dark and bitter drink” into which, “one dank brown evening,” to “melt and sink”?

July 9, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Old farm photos

The Children’s Picnic

Seven girls sit on the lawn around a picnic blanket. The year is 1919 or 1920, so of course they are all wearing dresses. They range in age from three to about fifteen. One girl wears a bow in her hair; she is six years old, and her name is Margaret. We don’t know the names of any of the others, because 81 years later, Margaret can no longer remember who they were. The teenager might have been her cousin Phyllis, she thinks.

The photographer takes three pictures of the children’s picnic, which will make it possible to pinpoint its location — on the lawn above the kitchen — even after eight decades have elapsed and almost everything has changed. In the background of one photo, a martin house and a large bell stand loom above the unfamiliar foliage. In the first two photos, the girls look stiff and serious — all except for Margaret, who grins impishly, at home here on her Great Uncle George’s farm. Then they go back to their picnic, raising spoons to their lips. The pet collie, whose name is Snap, appears as a blur of movement off to the left. Margaret’s eyes follow the dog; you can almost hear her calling for him to come. But he isn’t interested in joining this strange feast, which seems to include nothing but a small pile of oak leaves in the center of the blanket.

Charles in the Garden

Two-year-old Charles stands in a large patch of turnips, or perhaps rutabagas. Behind him, the barn is brand-new, painted a shade of darkness that must be red. Above the corncrib, rows of fruit trees where we have only ever known a field stretch all the way up to Sapsucker Ridge, which is dimly visible in the distance. In dreams, I sometimes visit another version of the hollow that lies right over a ridge we’d somehow overlooked, where the orchard was never bulldozed out in the 1950s and the old farmhouse was spared its extreme makeover into a faux plantation home. Everything is twice as big and twice as far — the way things looked when I was small.

Margaret’s little brother still has uncut, blonde curls and wears a long-sleeved white dress. He stands with his feet planted firmly in the garden path and grins at something off to the photographer’s left. With one arm raised he points high above his head, as if leading the ranks of turnips on to glory.

Light and Shadows

In the middle of the road below and to the right of my front porch, Jacob Plummer stands in his Sunday best with one hand on his hips and the other resting on the rear wheel of an open carriage. His wife Mollie sits up in the carriage holding the reins. They’re hauling what look like steel gates, or perhaps the springs for a child’s crib. The horse has his head up, clearly intent on getting back to the barn. At the top of the photo, a limb from the balm-of-Gilead polar tree that used to stand at the corner of the wall until its death in the early 1970s blocks much of the background. The bottom third of the photo is a double exposure. On the near side of the road, the sky starts over with much less balm-of-Gilead in it — a sky which, judging from the sharpness of the shadows cast by man and horse and carriage, must be a clear blue and not this barren field of white that we see.

Harrowing

The hired man and his son have paused in their harrowing of the freshly plowed field. It’s spring; the trees at the edge of the field still look skeletal, and there are splashes of white that could be shadbush. The newly emancipated stones have dried in the sun, making them clearly visible against the darker soil. The man is bearded under a floppy felt hat, and wears a long-sleeved white shirt and dark pants held up by suspenders. In the first photo, the camera is tilted, making him appear to stand at an angle to the ground, like the gromon on a sundial. In the second photo, they’ve turned away from the photographer and gone back to work, the boy astride the left horse holding a switch, the man behind with one foot on the harrow and his hands on his hips as the iron teeth sink once more into the mountain’s thin red clay.

The Siblings

Richard is twelve, and doesn’t know what to do with his hands. In one photo, we see him in profile against a tree with his hands held stiffly behind his back. In another photo, he stands in the road halfway up the hill toward the barn with his hands thrust into the bib pockets of his overalls, frowning at the camera. In a third photo, taken at the same spot, his little sister has joined him. His hands have now disappeared behind the front of his overalls, elbows a little less awkward at his sides as he stares at the ground to his right. A straw hat nearly hides his new haircut. Margaret appears to imitate his posture, resting her weight on one leg and thrusting a hand into the pleats of her dress. The dog is nowhere to be seen. Stifling the vivacity that will carry her through nearly ninety years of life, she looks as grownup as she can, and gives her best impression of utter boredom.

July 7, 2006 by Dave Bonta

The web and other fables

Last Sunday morning I walked down the mountain to meet the woman we buy eggs from on her way back home from 8:00 a.m. mass. As I crossed the tracks, I heard her tires on the metal decking of the county bridge. She rounded the bend and stopped; a helmet with legs stood in the road between us. We hurried over and crouched on either side of it with our cameras, admiring the bright red eyes and orange markings and its apparent fearlessness as it continued on over the gravel and into the high weeds. However it had managed to survive to adulthood in the tiny strip of woods between the tracks and the river, it knew better than to look for sanctuary in the dark night of its shell.

Does place matter? Are online spaces truly analogous to real-world places? Do the connections we forge through blogging reinforce or compete with our connections to real-world communities and natural places? I emailed a bunch of blogger friends to get their opinions, and as you might expect, everyone had a different take on it. “What I like about place-specific writers (though I am definitely not among them),” wrote Siona, “is how I come away appreciating the nuances of my own particular corner of the planet that much more as a result.” Lorianne noted that for her main interest — nature writing — the blogosphere was a gold mine.

Whereas published nature writing might clue me into a handful of interesting (usually spectacular) wild places, place blogs allow me to check in on a greater number of places, most of them quite ordinary: places where folks actually live. Instead of seeing ‘nature’ or ‘place’ as being something that happens somewhere else away from people–Abbey’s deserted desert, Thoreau’s tranquil pond–I learn from blog-reading that ‘nature’ and ‘place’ transpire in the real world, in places where people are reading books & doing laundry & getting drunk & falling in love.

Below the old corral, I remind myself to quit walking so fast. Stop and look around, Dave! I take three steps back in the direction I just came, and a ruffed grouse family flushes from the weeds. The half-grown youngsters burst into flight, careening off to all points of the compass. The mother stays behind to do her broken-wing act, weaving drunkenly through the dry leaves and calling piteously. “Oh, stop your grousing!” I say, and she does.

Places are no less real for being imaginary, Beth wrote.

I think imaginary places have great power, and when we (on purpose or unwittingly) are presented with a real life substitute, the fantasy is diminished or even destroyed. I don’t much like seeing movies of books, for that reason, because I rather like the people and places who are created by my imagination when I read. In the case of REAL people (bloggers), the temptation to actually meet is too great, so it has been a tradeoff I’ve been glad to make. But I am sorry for some of the diminishment of the power of that virtual place and its inhabitants.

Marja-Leena offered a visual artist’s perspective, saying that for her, familiar blogs quickly become very place-like. It occurs to me that the element of evolution in a blog — the fact that it is constantly growing — adds to its feeling of spaciousness.

The black raspberries are ripening. The decline in our local deer herd has meant that, for the first time in over a decade, there are enough canes around the houses to yield a cup or two a day. I feel sorry for people who have to keep their lawns mowed, or feel that they do; it’s a nice feeling to be able to go outside and gorge on something one didn’t even have to plant. It’s odd, though: picking berries into a pot always seems like work, but eating them as I go, a handful at a time, is pure pleasure. I feel like a bear circling my house, glancing into all the windows.

Early in the discussion, I had mentioned that I didn’t think that immersion in online activity was such a great issue; the invention of writing systems had precipitated the original leap into abstraction, and that leap is still unsurpassed by anything that’s happened since. The blogger known as whiskey asked,

I want to know why it’s (potentially) unhealthy to live in an abstract state – as a writer, or as any kind of an artist? After all, it seems a bit of a prerequisite to live there, in the spaces between imagination and reality, memory and creativity, but is there really ever a conscious choice in the matter, or are we just drawn that way?

I think that creative individuals have a more heightened sense of reality – not in an abstract sense – but in the capacity to shift perception, to see otherwise, to move a little deeper in and out of what surrounds them than someone who stays on the surface of things.

To me, this is an infinitely healthier state, more flexible, less subject to rigidity and thus breakage. The benefits seem to far outweigh the risks – although it’s true that the risks take quite a few of us out. Is that pathological or is it evolutionary?

Several other bloggers answered, and a consensus seemed to emerge that, as Beth put it,

Abstract thinking […] can be informed by the concrete, day-to-day world, and our gift (I’d dare suggest) is to describe or translate the day-to-day world with added meaning because of that ability to think abstractly. So I think the two are best if in some sort of conscious balance, not that one is healthier than the other.

I get up from my writing and go out. It’s a beautiful morning, the nicest in a couple of weeks: clear and cool, like autumn in July. I climb the hill past the lilac bush — the path I take a dozen times a day. Just as I step onto the veranda of my parents’ house, a sunbeam passes through the front porch and all the way through the living room to light up a potted geranium that sits in the middle of a round table next to the door. This is its second blossoming, pink streaked with white, as obvious as a five-dollar whore. But the sun’s spotlight, filtered by several layers of glass, lends the flowers a brief, otherworldly radiance, and half a minute later, when it fades and goes out, I find I have forgotten whatever it was I came up for. Newly inspired, I go back down and return to my writing.

The email discussion began to ramify, making it difficult for me to keep track of who said what. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Dale weighed in about the importance of the quality of one’s attention, and questioned the relevance of “the natural” to our ability to stay focused on the present. Siona’s response resonated with me.

To me, physical embodiedness is a necessary part of attention. It’s all fine and good to examine the quality of attention from a spiritual or psychological point of view, but I somehow think that, unless the body is included, something is missing. And much as I’d like to think I can capture the same meditative quality in my squared-off office quarters, I know that unless the pores of my skin are soaking up the richness of a landscape, that unless the bronchii in my lungs are breathing in the respiration of plants, that unless my body is settled in the earth, where it belongs, there’s no way I can presume to be as present as truly possible. We are all connected to the planet, and the deepest present awareness, I think, demands this connection to “the natural.”

Other people jumped in to differ with or expand upon points already made. It occurred to me that, instead of using email, we should all be blogging and linking to each other. Only interconnected, hyperlinked text, with multiple nodes and no center, can begin to fairly represent a real-world conversation.

I went out for a walk one evening right at dusk during a break in the rains, and chose a foot path that winds through the hundred-year-old oak woods on what we call Laurel Ridge. The wood thrushes as usual were singing their heartbreaking songs. I started noticing mushrooms beside the trail, though it was hard to tell how many in the dim light. A deerfly found me and began blundering around in my hair. The humid air had a rank and fungal scent.

By the next morning, a cold front had blown in and the rains seemed to be over for a while. I took the path again, and was astounded. Yellow-brown toadstools were everywhere, pushing up the leaves, opening their cracked umbrellas. Here and there I saw amanitas and coral mushrooms, and clusters of Indian pipes — ghost flowers, as someone aptly nicknamed them — offered counterpoint to the lurid fungal display. I sat down on a patch of moss. It’s one thing to realize intellectually that a dense network of fungal mycelia extends for miles beneath one’s feet, and that without it, most of these trees could barely gather water or nutrients, but it’s another thing to see direct evidence of it.

Arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi are mutualistic symbionts living in the roots of 80% of land plant species, and developing extensive, belowground extraradical hyphae fundamental for the uptake of soil nutrients and their transfer to host plants. Since AM fungi have a wide host range, they are able to colonize and interconnect contiguous plants by means of hyphae extending from one root system to another. Such hyphae may fuse due to the widespread occurrence of anastomoses, whose formation depends on a highly regulated mechanism of self recognition. […] The root systems of plants belonging to different species, genera and families may be connected by means of anastomosis formation between extraradical mycorrhizal networks, which can create indefinitely large numbers of belowground fungal linkages within plant communities.
–Manuela Giovannetti, Luciano Avio, Paola Fortuna, Elisa Pellegrino, Cristiana Sbrana and Patrizia Strani, At the Root of the Wood Wide Web: Self Recognition and Nonself Incompatibility in Mycorrhizal Networks

Like an Internet user clicking on “page source” for the very first time, I sat uneasily among the fruiting bodies of the wood-wide web.
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For a much more thorough and academic look at the relationships between blogging and place, see Tim Lindgren’s paper, “Blogging Places: Locating Pedagogy in the Whereness of Weblogs.”

June 29, 2006September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

News

My eighth entry in the self-portrait marathon

Meanwhile, there are entire towns where nothing terrible is happening for an hour or two, where parents are caring for children with remarkable tenderness, where nurses are tending patients, mail carriers are delivering packages, and at least one man who owns a small business is taking off work early to coach a girl’s soccer team. Terrible things will continue to happen in those places, which the best efforts of such people will not be sufficient to prevent, but their bursts of gratuitous kindness are the mustard seeds from which healing bushes sometimes grow. They constitute the alternate reality that I want to live in, even if it means limiting my exposure to other kinds of news.
—Barbara Brown Taylor, “What’s new?” The Christian Century, May 30, 2006

As I sat on my porch this morning drinking my coffee around 6:30, I watched a lightning bug fly past with its lamp extinguished and decided it was time to do another self-portrait.

I don’t know what kind of play the self-portrait marathon is getting in the larger blogosphere, but I doubt it’s attracting the kind of breathless attention devoted to the latest Supreme Court decision, or whatever fresh horror is emerging from Iraq or the Occupied Territories. And perhaps that’s as it should be. But if you haven’t stopped by lately to check out the gallery, you should. You can view it as a Flickr slideshow, too.

While it’s easy to be cynical and dismiss the self-portrait marathon as nothing more than an outlet for bloggers’ unflagging tendency toward self-absorption, I think that misses the real story. Over 75 bloggers, from amateur shutterbugs like me to professional portrait painters, have committed to taking a prolonged, in-depth look at one subject — a subject that Agatha Christie once described as “perhaps the greatest mystery of all: ourselves.” And as the galleries attest, many of the results have been quite striking.

The blogosphere has been billed as an alternative to the mainstream media, but in many ways, it’s just as superficial. The emphasis remains on speed rather than accuracy, sensationalism rather than nuance, and two-sided conflicts rather than the full complexity of life as most of us experience it in our daily lives. Even for us non-political bloggers, there’s a great temptation to simply post our latest snapshots, with a few accompanying sentences of breathless prose, and move on to something else. To try to see anything more fully, to observe it attentively and then take the time to describe or depict it with as much care and effort as we can muster seems almost counter-cultural. But if the bloggers I tend to read have anything in common, it might be precisely this, that they are dedicated to documenting what Barbara Brown Taylor refers to as “alternate reality.”

Twenty-eight great-
spangled fritillaries
on one small clump
of butterfly weed

lifting & settling
to pivot on the un-
steady dust-devils
of their tongues,

their wings rocking
halfway open for
balance, orange
against orange.

Ezra Pound famously described literature as “news that stays news.” Fine. But what do we mean by news? Isn’t there something inescapably sensationalistic about the practice of selecting and highlighting certain phenomena, pushing the rest into the background? Well, perhaps so. But barring enlightenment, how else are we to see?

It occurs to me that this definition, “news that stays news,” captures pre-modern and non-Western attitudes toward elevated language, as well. Consider, for example, the song cycles that once accompanied all-night circle dances of the O’odham, or the spontaneously generated, loosely linked verses of one of the old-time blues poets like Son House or Bukka White. From one perspective, such lyrics employ traditional folk material, and therefore must be the opposite of news. But if words are treated as living, ephemeral beings rather than marks on the page, and therefore must be re-created for every performance, how can their inspired production not constitute news?

So in that sense, I think the ephemeral and fairly spontaneous nature of the blog medium should help nudge us away from our usual Western attitude toward art as something static and eternal, the realization of some bullshit Platonic Ideal. I think the non-Western view is closer to reality. All art is inherently messy and imperfect, a moment temporarily rescued from the ceaseless flux. Whether its subject is the world without or the world within, a good work of art is nothing more or less than inspired journalism.

When I wrote an email to some family members yesterday, I mentioned two things I thought were newsworthy: the twenty-eight fritillaries, and the discovery of a nesting solitary vireo (A.K.A. blue-headed vireo) less than a hundred feet away from the nest I found last year. I can’t claim credit for this discovery, though. Two biology students from Penn State Altoona, who are working on a research project up in our woods, told me about it when they stopped to admire the fritillary-covered butterfly weed on their way back down the mountain. They were abashed they’d never noticed the nest before, and so was I when I went to look. It’s about eight feet off the ground above one of our most frequently traveled trails, right in front of one of the gates to our three-acre deer exclosure. How in the world could we all have missed it?

The vireo let me walk right under the nest and snap pictures from two feet away, her head swiveling to follow my movements. Since the nest is wedged into a small fork on a witch hazel branch — the favorite tool of water dowsers here in the Appalachians — I wonder whether the eventual fledglings will be gifted with the ability to locate hidden springs? Will the healing properties of witch hazel make the nest’s occupants somehow less vulnerable?

At the beginning of this post, I quoted Barbara Brown Taylor on “healing bushes” (a phrase which, taken out of context, might seem to have a certain political resonance!). Her focus was on the Bible’s Good News, but this quite literal healing tree with its avian occupants — not an “alternate reality,” but the real world as we all too seldom remember to see it — is gospel enough for me.

June 27, 2006September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

For the birds

Squish, squish, squish went my boots as I waded through the tall grass on Greenbriar Trail. But much as I looked forward to changing into dry pants and shoes, strangely enough, I was content. Starting at 6:05 in the morning, we had managed to tally many of the deep-woods species for which the Bald Eagle Important Bird Area was designated, including Acadian flycatchers; worm-eating, black-throated green and cerulean warblers; and a plethora of wood thrushes, ovenbirds and scarlet tanagers. We had run into a box turtle on Laurel Ridge Trail, and enjoyed views of the adjacent ridges rising above a thick blanket of fog. Though it was extremely humid and the vegetation was still sopping wet from the previous evening’s downpour, at least the air was cool and it hadn’t rained on us.

True, the real birders — my mom and my brother Steve — were unhappy at all the no-shows, but that’s in the nature of point counts, I guess. The idea isn’t to count every bird every time, but to capture most of the breeding species every year, in a consistent enough fashion to be able to track population trends over the course of decades. And it’s not everybody who’s fortunate enough to be able to go out their front door and find themselves in the middle of an IBA. In our case, though we don’t have a hawk watch on the property, we’re situated on a ridge with one of the highest recorded counts of golden eagles in eastern North America, which I think helped persuade the scientists on the Ornithological Technical Committee of the Pennsylvania Biological Survey that Bald Eagle Ridge was worthy of designation as an IBA — one of over 80 in the state. Its abundance of interior forest habitat was the other key consideration. As conservationists here never tire of pointing out, Pennsylvania is home to 17 percent of the world’s scarlet tanagers and nine percent of the wood thrushes. Long-term data, such as those generated by point counts, will help scientists monitor the health of these species.

The point count protocol developed by Audubon Pennsylvania involves counting every bird seen or heard in three minutes at each permanently designated point on a route. Counters must go out two times each breeding season, defined as the months of May and June, between 6:00 and 10:00 in the morning. The points must be 500 feet apart, and we have sixteen of them in our route, starting at the spruce grove at the top of the field, and taking in both ridges and the deep hollow in between before ending up on my parents’ front porch — Point 16. On Saturday, I was the official timekeeper and note taker; Mom and Steve identified the birds, mostly by ear.

Point 14 is in the field near the edge of the woods, along a mowed trail we call Butterfly Loop. As we stood there counting, a pair of fawns came bounding down the trail toward us. I whipped out my camera and snapped a couple of pictures before they turned and raced off. Then, as we squished on toward the next point, they came running back. This time, the bolder of the two got within six feet of me before deciding that I might be dangerous. We almost had ~~the venison equivalent of veal for supper~~ a lovefest.

Steve spotted a sharp-shinned hawk harrying a red-tailed hawk in the sky over Laurel Ridge as we neared Point 15. Then, on the way back down toward the house, he asked if we’d seen any Baltimore checkerspots. “Not yet,” I said. But then we spotted one.

You may remember my post about the caterpillars, which feed mainly* on turtlehead, a plant that isn’t nearly as common as it used to be, thanks to ~~the hooved rats~~ our friends the deer. We found two Baltimore checkerspot caterpillars this spring, and on Saturday morning, we saw two adults, one after the other — both in the vicinity of our largest patch of turtlehead.

Most of the yard birds remained stubbornly silent during the three minutes we listened on the front porch, so the count ended on a bit of a gloomy note. But there’s no denying the pleasure that can come from changing into a dry pair of socks. I draped my wet socks over the railing on my own front porch, and later that afternoon, I noticed they had become a Mecca for great spangled fritillaries.

When I poked my head out around 5:00, I even caught a pair of butterflies mating on my socks, though I wasn’t able to get a picture of it. I guess there are all kinds of good reasons to get one’s feet wet.
__________

*Edited from “exclusively,” which turns out not be true, according to the latest science. Thanks to commenter “striped twistie” for the correction (see message string).

June 14, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Small change

I wait, cup in hand, for the shiny coins of inspiration — that small change. I sit on the bench at the edge of the spruce grove, watching the sun rise red above the layers of cloud and mountain. Bumblebees are flying overhead, a steady stream of them, heading for the spruce trees and their inconspicuous male flowers. The evening before, when Eva and I were stringing up the tarp we used for a tent, the whole grove had been abuzz, even as the wood thrushes were tuning up. But with nightfall came the more miscellaneous sounds, the kind that invite breathless speculation: the snap of a twig, a high-pitched chittering, an explosive snort.

On Monday, my mother discovered that she’d lost her little pocket notebook: two months of journal notes, which she hadn’t yet typed up. Yesterday, she and Eva retraced their steps from Sunday’s walk, but to no avail. As the day wore on, Mom became increasingly despondent. But this morning, when we get back to the house from our camping adventure, she’s in high spirits. Last night, she says, Mark — Eva’s dad — had called, and while she listened to him talk, she suddenly remembered ironing some clothes on Sunday, right before she missed the notebook. As soon as she hung up the phone, she went down to the basement, and sure enough, there was the notebook on the shelf above the ironing board. The impending arrival of visitors on Sunday afternoon had been enough of a distraction to make her misplace the notebook, so it makes sense that she would need another disruption of routine — Mark’s call — to return to the mental state she’d been in when it went missing.

You may have noticed the small midden of pocket notebooks surrounding my computer monitor in yesterday’s self-portrait. For me, however, these notebooks serve as much more temporary repositories of information and fragments of thoughts; the computer screen is my primary tablet now. This is a big change from my pre-blogging days, when I still used scrap paper for at least the first several drafts of a poem or essay. All that tree flesh — one drawer of my file cabinet is so full, I can barely get it open. I should haul its contents into the recycling center, but its physical presence is somehow comforting. It’s a kind of ballast, I think.

These days I don’t save anything but the final draft, and maybe that’s a mistake. It seems a little like our jerry-rigged tent last night: all roof. Imagine a ship that’s nothing but a sail, or an airplane that’s little more than wing. It might get you where you wanted to go, but with little room for comfort.

Mosquitoes sang me to sleep — a private concert in my ear. When I wake at 5:30, they’re still singing the same tune. We had hoped for coyotes or at least a whippoorwill, though getting to hear wood thrushes from just a few feet away did repay me for my aching hips and shoulders, I guess. But it’s the thin, dogmatic theme of the mosquito that keeps replaying in my head as I sit looking sideways at the sun, an array of copper-colored spots forming on my retina. One always hears about pennies from heaven, as if Providence never trades in anything larger. But perhaps the point is to fine-tune our sense of gratitude, I think, as I drain the last of my coffee and Eva joins me, sleepy-eyed, on the bench.

June 12, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Swarm

On Friday evening, my dad spotted something odd next to the veranda and gave me a buzz on the intercom. In the gathering dusk, it was a little difficult to tell exactly what it was, at first. A walnut branch was wearing an upside-down hat about twice the size of a Baltimore oriole’s nest: a swarm of honeybees! It rearranged itself as the branch bobbed in the wind, like no fruit you’ve ever seen. It hummed.

It hung there all day Saturday while the scouts searched for a suitable home. Consensus decision-making is never swift.

Now I thought of a thick tongue, and remembering the old saw —

A swarm of bees in June
is worth a silver spoon

— I thought of a rich person born with a swarming appetite for sweets.

Mid-afternoon on Sunday, as I was starting lasagna sauce for supper, I heard a shout from the veranda. The swarm had made up its mind. “It looked like a loaf of bread just crumbling to pieces,” said Eva, who witnessed the breakup — “the weirdest thing I ever saw.” In less than a second, the quiet hum had turned into a roar. We all rushed out to watch as the bees rose above the treetops and streamed away toward the east. I ran after them, but they traveled in a loose cloud that was hard to see against the blue sky, and I lost them when they entered the woods.

The only other time I’ve seen a swarm on the move, it was much more compact, and traveled only about fifteen feet off the ground — a hair-raising apparition. This one flew at least twice as high. It had probably split off from one of the honeybee colonies in the walls of a derelict house a quarter mile away; that might explain its initial attraction to my parents’ house. But its ultimate destination was probably some hollow tree, of which we have plenty on the mountain.

We used to keep bees back in the late 70s and early 80s, before the bears became too numerous, and twice I watched as my dad captured feral swarms and put them into waiting hive boxes. The first time he got all suited up and carried the smoker along, but the second time, he used nothing but a pair of pruners and a burlap sack, as I recall. Putting a hive of bees into a clean, white box full of frames seems a little like trying to lure a god into a shrine — or typing poems into a humming computer. Go forth and pollinate, says the maker to himself.
__________

Speaking of swarms, be sure to check out today’s post at The Middlewesterner, where Tom describes his visit to Plummer’s Hollow, our road trip to Montreal, and the blogger swarm that followed.

June 8, 2006March 16, 2016 by Dave Bonta

Bear

A heavy tread on the gravel drive, as if from a very large dog or a small pony trotting past my front door. It’s late Tuesday morning. I’ve been feeling depressed about the end of a too-short vacation, and am still very tired. But I force myself up out of my chair in front of the computer and over to the window in time to see a medium-sized black bear pausing where the trail enters the woods. I step out onto the porch for a better look. The bear sees me and gallops up the trail, quickly disappearing behind the thick curtain of leaves.

It’s good to be home, I think, as a male ruby-throated hummingbird ricochets back and forth above my herb garden, displaying for some nearby female. What wildlife did we see in the city? Pigeons, starlings, English sparrows, gray squirrels. This dullness in my head is nothing a good night’s sleep can’t dispel.

An hour later, when my ten-year-old niece Eva comes down from the other house, I tell her about my sighting. “Nuh-UH! You’re lying! I don’t believe it!” I show her the blurry photo I managed to snap as the bear’s butt disappeared up the trail. “That’s no fair! I hate you!” she exclaims. I’ll admit, it doesn’t seem right that good wildlife sightings should come to those who sit in front of their computers, while others go for long walks and see nothing.

Eva wants to go looking for the bear immediately, but I tell her it could be anywhere by now — and besides, I badly need a nap. Later in the afternoon, she bugs me about camping out that night, but I manage to persuade her that a walk at dusk will suffice. So around 8:15 we head up into the woods of Laurel Ridge, following the trail the bear took.

Our trails are mostly old woods roads, almost 200 years old and deep in moss, so it’s not hard to walk quietly. A doe bounds up out of the ferns, and we head off-trail to search for her fawn, with no luck. We continue bushwhacking for another couple hundred feet through the woods, Eva in the lead since she’s shorter and prefers an unobstructed view. Then we rejoin the trail and circle the three-acre deer exclosure, continuing on the trail that parallels the field just inside the wood’s edge.

At the top of the field next to the spruce grove, another couple of deer bound off, and again we search around where they had been standing, but still no fawns. We do a little more bushwhacking through the edge of the black cherry woods that was so devastated by the ice storm the winter before last, and I’m pleased that Eva seems to have no trouble finding the easiest way between the felled trunks and blackberry vines. Then we cut over past the vernal pond — now nothing but a slight depression filled with flattened leaves and dried mud — and head down along Sapsucker Ridge. It’s about ten after nine, and I’m anxious to get Eva back before her grandparents go to bed.

The woods are open here — mostly oak — and off to our left we have a good view of the sunset above the Allegheny Front and the lights of Logan Valley below. The wood thrushes are mostly silent now, but a scarlet tanager sings a few, final bars of his hoarse song as we pass under his perch.

Eva stops short about seventy-five feet from the powerline right-of-way. “There’s a bear!” she whispers. Now it’s my turn to be skeptical. But I crouch down until my head is level with hers and I can see out under the leaves at the edge of the woods, thanks to the browse line made by our too-numerous friends the deer. Sure enough, a dark space among the ferns has the exact shape of a bear. It looks much bigger now than it did in the light of late morning. It’s standing still, facing the sunset, and my inclination is to stay still and see what it does, but Eva is already creeping forward on her hands and knees, so I have little choice but to follow suit.

We close about half the distance between us before the bear seems to shake itself out of its reverie, and moves forward, out of sight. We stand up and walk out onto the powerline, certain that the bear has moved off, but discover instead that it’s only gone as far as the nearest power pole at the edge of the ridge, less than twenty feet away. It now seems quite large — a male, I imagine, making the rounds of the power pole message boards in search of females, which are just now coming into heat. As far as we know, we still have two female bears wandering this end of the mountain, and both should be chasing off their year-and-a-half-old cubs this month, preparatory to their biannual mating.

“Lift me up! Lift me up!” Eva commands, and I quickly comply, locking my hands together into an unstable seat. She blocks most of my view, but what the hell — I’ve seen plenty of bears before. Eva is beside herself with delight. “Hello, bear! I love you!” she cries, waving wildly. It stares at this strange apparition for a few seconds before turning tail and crashing off into the woods.

We follow the bear’s fresh trail back to the other ridgetop power pole and find dozens of fresh gouges in the wood and a pile of large splinters around its base. “The bear stands on his hind legs and goes scraaaatch, then turns around and rubs his shoulders against it,” Eva informs me, repeating what her Nanna has told her. We’re descending the ridgeside, following deer or bear trails through the thick hayscented fern, the half moon bright above the trees to the south. Examining the power pole at the base of the ridge, we find that it, too, has been freshly tagged with ursine graffiti.

“Where are the stars?” Eva asks as we follow the mowed path across the field. Besides the moon, so far only one star and a planet are visible. I explain about the darkness, how it comes in increments, and how much of it we need in order to see.

May 20, 2006September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Under gray skies

Under gray skies, on the snowball viburnum, I found a strange creature with branches on its back.

This, it turned out, was the larva of the Baltimore checkerspot butterfly (Euphydryas phaeton). Its host plant is turtlehead (Chelone glabra), which used to be very scarce here on the mountain until we got the white-tailed deer numbers down to a more reasonable level. Just last year, we were excited to find a big patch of turtlehead in a wet part of the field about a hundred feet away from where I snapped this picture.

The Baltimore checkerspot lays her eggs in clusters on the undersides of turtlehead leaves in mid-summer. The young caterpillars spin a communal web, like tent caterpillars or fall webworms, and over-winter as half-grown caterpillars just under the surface of the soil. The coloration of the adult preserves the orange and black from the juvenile, but white replaces the blue. These beautiful insects – the official state insect of Maryland – are yet another argument for longer hunting seasons and/or the recovery of top predators in the East – wolves and cougars.