Category: Uncategorized

Saturday morning was foggy and drizzly – not the best kind of day for taking pictures, but I tucked my camera in a coat pocket just in case. The combination of moisture and low light made the fresh green of buds and young leaves appear especially vivid. And sometimes wildlife is more active on days like this. I hadn’t gone far when I heard the first ovenbird of the season: Teacher, teacher, teacher, he sang – or is said to sing. You hear something one way a certain number of times and pretty soon it’s hard to hear it any other way – a situation that teachers, preachers and politicians shamelessly exploit.

I found this interesting patteran in the middle of the trail. Gray foxes, like most members of the dog family, mark regularly used trails with urine and scat to communicate their presence, and probably other information as well. Gray fox turds are distinguished from red fox and coyote by their small size – a half-inch to two inches long. I don’t know what message this author had in mind – again, I was not the target audience – but I was impressed by what looked like a multi-media presentation, incorporating sticks as well as turds of varying size, shape and color ranging from almost white to dark gray.

I ran into a box turtle going the other way. He was about three-quarters grown, making him less than ten years old, I think. It’s very gratifying to know that the hollow still supports a breeding population of box turtles – we found a mating pair on the other ridge just last August – and that some of the young ones are surviving despite abundant predators. I sat down a few feet away and watched him watch me – a staring contest I made no effort to win.

I’ve often thought that if reincarnation were real, I’d like to come back as a box turtle. They always seem exceptionally gifted at minding their own business. Though between the growing pet trade and the ever-spreading, deadly asphalt tentacles of human settlement and commerce, retreating into one’s shell at the first sign of danger may not be such a wise strategy.

Farther down the same trail I encountered this red eft traveling in the same direction I was, albeit a bit more slowly. As with the Department of Transportation, bright orange signals warning. And unlike with the ovenbird’s song or the gray fox’s patteran, here the message is intended for a multi-species audience: I don’t hide because I don’t have to. If you eat me, you will die.

Red efts are the terrestrial, middle-aged form of red-spotted newts. After the first few months in their natal pond or stream, baby newts become eft up, as it were, and spend the next several years wandering around the woods and living off invertebrates in the forest litter before their final molt, at which point they sprout gills and go back into the water for good. Imagine if humans did that!

Near the end of the trail I was impressed by a clump of evergreen woodfern fiddleheads shoving aside the matted leaves: green fists raised high, as if in some impromptu street protest. That may sound fanciful, even melodramatic. But what could be more insurrectionary than spring? Happy May Day, y’all!

A trail without any other people on it can still seem awfully busy. In fact, come to think of it, if these trails had many other hikers they wouldn’t be nearly so interesting. Plants and wildlife sign would be trampled, and the critters would learn to stay away.

But even along the one-lane gravel road up the hollow, there’s plenty to see this time of year. Large patches of purple trillium – also known as wake robin or stinking Benjamin – line the stream for about half a mile. Their heads were all bent down in the rain. At first, I kind of regretted it – after all, we only get to see trillium for a few weeks out of the year – but then I started liking them that way. They looked as if they were napping – and perhaps they were, in a sense: conserving energy for the next warm day, when they’d have to send out their famous odor again to attract pollinators. It sounds like a good theory, at any rate. I felt compelled to apologize when the flash went off.

I stole the title of this post from Jerry Hassinger, President of the Pennsylvania Biological Survey, who told me that he sometimes gives talks on this theme at the local nature center in his area. I had been sounding off about people who insist on hiking rapidly through the woods, only pausing on mountaintops to admire scenic vistas – which I actually find kind of boring.

On the second day of our trip, at approximately 1:15 in the afternoon, a large black-and-white woodpecker with the characteristic color pattern of an Ivory-billed Woodpecker flew across the bayou at close range in front of [Bobby] Harrison and me. We cried out simultaneously, ‘Ivory-bill!’ and paddled frantically toward shore. As soon as we landed, we took off through the boot-sucking muck and mire of the swamp, climbing up and over fallen trees and through branches, with camcorder in hand and running. Although the bird landed on tree trunks briefly a couple of times, we weren’t able to catch up with it or take video.

Fifteen minutes later, I suggested that we sit down and write detailed field notes, before we’d had a chance to think much about what we had seen or to confer with each other.

As he finished his notes, Harrison sat down on a log, put his face in his hands, and began to sob. ‘I saw an ivory-bill,’ he said. I stood quietly a few feet away, too choked with emotion to speak.

– Tim Gallagher

The ivory bill — sometimes called the white-back, pearly bill, poule de bois and even Lord God bird — was known for the two-note rap of its bill as it ripped into tree bark in search of edible grubs and beetle larvae.
– Randolph E. Schmid, Associated Press

Its notes are clear, loud, and yet rather plaintive. They are heard at a considerable distance, perhaps half a mile, and resemble the false, high note of a clarionet.
– John James Audubon

If you’re not a birder or a conservationist, you may well be wondering what the fuss is all about. After all, it’s not a big story like the Michael Jackson trial. Not to mention the papal succession – that was huge! And you mean to tell me you think the rediscovery of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker is biggest story since the fall of the Berlin Wall? C’mon! It’s just a bird.

Even the usually savvy on-line environmental magazine Grist failed to grasp the full import of this story, omitting any mention of it in their daily digest of news links yesterday. When I wrote to complain, a friendly editor responded right away by pointing me to their blog, where the story had indeed earned a few, superficial lines – “Everyone thought it was extinct, but apparently one has been spotted (grainy video here). Cool!” – under the headline “Big news for the bird nerd crowd.”

Perhaps if it were “only” a story about a lost-and-found, mysterious and magnificent bird, this attitude would be understandable. But I’m not even a birder, and the news had me crying and dancing around the room (and that was before I started drinking).

This is a story about us. It’s a story about the possibility of redemption and the persistence of hope, “the thing with feathers,” as Emily Dickinson once observed.

Back in the 1930s and 40s, when the last known ivory-billed breeding territories were threatened with destruction, we knew full well what we were about. Once found in old-growth bottomland forests along the coast from eastern Texas to North Carolina and in the Mississippi floodplain as far north as southern Ohio and Illinois, it had dwindled to just a few known locations as a result of an orgy of logging that climaxed in the first decades of the 20th century. As the Cornell Lab’s website puts it,

Before European settlement, some 52 million acres of the southeast were a wilderness of bottomland hardwood forests–those that develop in the floodplains of slow-moving rivers and streams. These forested wetlands have their tree roots in wet soil and their trunks often in standing water. Nearly half of the southeast’s bottomland hardwood forests were found in the Mississippi River alluvial plain, the river’s age-old delta, spanning seven states. Today these forests have shrunk to less than one-fifth of their original 24 million-acre extent. It is in this vastly diminished forest that the Ivory-billed Woodpecker was rediscovered in Arkansas in 2004.

What remains of the once-grand bottomland hardwood forests of the Mississippi Delta, today clings to the rivers of Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana–a thin skeleton of their former abundance. No other wetland system in North America has suffered such a tremendous reduction in area as have the forests of the Mississippi delta, now considered one of the most imperiled ecosystems in the world.

As regular readers of this blog know, I’m a big fan of traditional blues music. To me, it’s no accident that some of the most haunting and evocative folk songs ever recorded were the work of African American sharecroppers, lumber camp and levee gang workers in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta. (My first reaction on hearing my brother Mark’s phone message, where he said something had been rediscovered “right across the river from Rosedale,” was to begin whistling Robert Johnson’s “Traveling Riverside Blues” – “Lord, I’m goin’ to Rosedale, take my rider by my side…”) When I traveled to the Delta two years ago, I was shocked by how thoroughly the land had been tamed – drained and leveled and monocropped with cotton, a forbiddingly bleak landscape. Thin ribbons of trees clung to the sides of streams and oxbow lakes. There was nothing remotely colorful about the poverty that was everywhere on view. Yet last night, as I celebrated this astonishing news, who did I want to listen to but R.L. Burnside, Bukka White and the incomparable Johnny Shines? Contrary to stereotype, one can find plenty of life-affirming messages in the blues. But they’re not immediately obvious; you have to really listen. This is worlds away from the bright and shiny superficiality of most American pop music.

The Nature Conservancy and its partners, too, have been avoiding the bright lights. For the better part of a year they’ve been laboring in secret to preserve as much land as possible before going public with the announcement. That’s because everyone in the conservation community remembers what happened the last time we had a chance like this: we blew it. Or rather, one very rich and greedy man blew it. The Ivory-billed Woodpecker’s last confirmed sighting had been in the 300-square-mile Singer Tract in Louisiana in 1944; everyone realized at the time that this was one of its very last strongholds. The National Audubon Society and the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology made a concerted effort to purchase the land, but its owner refused to sell. In 1948, knowing that he was quite possibly consigning a species to oblivion, Mr. Singer (he of the sewing machine) had the tract clearcut to make way for soybean fields.

Three years ago, after a fruitless effort to confirm rumors of the bird’s persistence along the Pearl River in Louisiana, John W. Fitzpatrick, the director of the Cornell Lab, expressed the frustration conservationists felt toward this tragedy far more eloquently than I can:

Despite scattered reports from Louisiana to Florida ever since, no definitive proof exists that Ivory-billed Woodpeckers persisted beyond the doomed birds studied by Tanner [in the Singer tract].

How could we do this? Today’s renewed interest in the Ivory-billed Woodpecker should kindle much more than dim hopes of a dramatic rediscovery. Whether or not the bird still exists (odds are strongly against it), the ivory-billed story demands our full attention as a vivid symbol of the most comprehensive conservation failure of 20th-century America. By 1900, millions of acres of virgin pine and hardwood still existed in the southeastern United States. Who could have predicted that in our individual, corporate, and public lusts for materials and revenue, we would lack the foresight or collective will to save even a single tract of this primary forest? Quite simply, we cut it all.

For years, I’ve lived with frustration about this inexcusable mistake. Now, I’ve even wept about it along the banks of a Louisiana bayou. With a hand resting on a four-foot-diameter water oak trunk, my mind flooded with black-and-white images of men standing at the base of trees nearly four times as wide. I’ll never see such a sight. Nor will my children. Nor will theirs. The 20th-century frenzy consumed trees that had been alive since before Columbus arrived. Will anyone ever be allowed to see such a forest again?

The Ivory-billed Woodpecker existed because forests were vast and the trees immense. By taking literally every stand of big trees, we drained the woodpecker’s lifeblood. Today in a few places, the forest regenerates and even faintly recalls the forest primeval. If the Ivory-billed Woodpecker did survive the bottleneck of our thoughtless, century-long massacre, then it could flourish again, for there are places like the Pearl River where conditions are steadily improving. But they still have a long way to go … and they are still at our mercy.

If the Ivory-billed Woodpecker is extinct, we should nevertheless vow to resurrect its ageless habitat of giants as a monument to that landscape’s greatest bird, and allow a generation of Americans far distant from our own to walk under those forests once again.

But now, miracle of miracles, we have a second chance. As my 41-year-old brother Steve wrote to me yesterday, “This is the story I’ve been waiting to read since I was six years old.” Pica of the aptly named blog Feathers of Hope put it this way:

The world’s a mess. All the work I see being done around me every day to study, preserve, explain the natural world seems like a drop in the ocean, given the devastation we are wreaking on the planet. Yet today, all of it — ALL of it — is given new hope.

So I think I’m far from the only one to whom that “high note of a clarionet” sounds as if it could be a blast from Gabriel’s trumpet: the dead have risen! Fate knocks not once, it seems, but twice: a two-note rap. You can hear it too. Just step outside.

A semi-coherent phone message from my brother Mark this morning. Mark, a birder and conservationist-geographer, lives in Mississippi, in the Yazoo Delta. “I don’t know if you heard [incomprehensible] discovered just across the river from Rosedale. They’ve known about it for a year but they were keeping it quiet.” I figured that Mark hadn’t had his coffee yet. Whatever it was, it could wait.

This is what it was. (Background here. Much more here.)

Words fail me. I’m weeping.

This is a companion to yesterday’s post.

He was a funny one, he was a funny one, he was a funny one, Poe.
Oh, he was a funny one, he was a funny one, he was a funny one, Poe.
Oh…

If he’s going to rave about his Annabel Lee, you might as well keep time, you see. Your Poe, your poet, what a funny thing his face does, the place in his face where the words come out, the hurt, the heart, the hole, the holes in his head, how godawful funny he is! Larry, Curly & Poe. It makes you weep with the effort to keep from bursting.

You have a bird to whistle & you have a bird to sing. Look at them, look at them, girlfriend – aren’t they sweet? They preen themselves, they touch bills – how touching. Only apes & monkeys groom each other, silly monkeys dancing on leashes, monkey, monkey, funny monkey. Under the bam, under the boo, you want to be a monkey too! But not in a zoo.

Look how serious, how deep & serious, oh how delicious, he loves you, he loves you not. The idea of it! The idea! You wish you knew where this echo came from, it makes you feel like his Echo: as if! As if!

Eyes of a deer, a dear, under all that hair. Your mouth is doing what his mouth does – or is it the other way around? There’s nothing so intimate as being in on a joke, you know. When this is all over you’ll laugh, but not just yet. You must both go in, go in, go under, you must surrender, you must become who you are or were: your morbid Poe, his Annabel Lee.

You are the flower with scattered petals. You are the blossom unfertilized by a bee. The struck match who lost her phosphorous head – a lass, poor me! The blank fired by the starter’s gun, the nothing that it is still required to be, don’t hate me because I am beautiful, beautyful, bootyful Annabel Lee.

How did your face get this hairy? Whence & whither & wherefore these caterpillars crawling on your forehead? What does this droning, moaning hole have to do with me? The more you cry, the less you understand why. You’ve been higher than this before, but never so far inside of a joke.

What are these foolish things? They remind you of yourself. Your lips still mimic his, but it sounds like nonsense, the random syllables of birds settling in to roost.

We whisper. We chirp. We lie down side by side & smile. You can almost forget he’s a man when he’s like this. You’ll never find out about us now, my love, my really me! What a wonderful joke to play on my self, whose ways are neither so many nor so mysterious.

Mystery does not begin and end with the Big Questions – Why are we here, How can evil exist in a benign universe, How can nirvana include samsara. Mystery is much more particular than that. The core of every being or event is inexpressable; all poets and artists know this. The world eludes our grasp in a manner that is both simple and profound.

How does a snake move without appendages? It seems as unlikely as speech without articulation. It can barely see, yet somehow it manages to find the right branch to take it where it wants to go. At key junctures, you watch it pause and lift its head, opening the mouth a little. The head and first six inches of its five-foot body nod and sway. Clearly it is weighing options, it is thinking – but how? What kind of thoughts? Its keenest senses are attuned to heat and motion. A snake would almost certainly not form mental pictures as we know them. Imagine yourself listening through every bone in your body. You think of Polynesian mariners, able to feel the presence of islands hundreds of miles distant by feeling the subtle shifts in ocean currents.

Like all predators, a snake is a creature that has evolved along with its prey – in the case of a black snake, small mammals such as mice and voles. They are fast-moving, fast-burning, fast breeder reactors. We like to say that mammals are warm-blooded and reptiles cold-blooded, as if the former is an advance over the latter. But nature is fundamentally non-hierarchical. Each strategy has unique advantages and trade-offs. The reptile’s core temperature is usually as high as a mammal’s; it is simply more closely tied to the temperature of its immediate environment. The drawback is that a reptile enjoys less liberty to go wherever and whenever it pleases. The advantage is that it can endure extremes of temperature that would kill a mammal. Also, without the energetic demands of an endotherm, reptiles tend to be on average much longer lived. And they know things no mammal can know, in a way it can never know them.

Members of many species of snakes and turtles live long enough to form intense bonds with their home ground. If transplanted and unable to find their way home, they starve to death. However knowledge is acquired, it must be organized mainly in the form of three-dimensional maps. So-called instinct can code for extraordinarily complex behaviors, but it still can’t tell the snake much about this tree, that branch. In its relatively brief and presumably intense period of juvenile development, it acquires intimate knowledge of territory: here there is shelter, here good hunting. The map consists of temperature patterns, networks of vibrations, felt with the same immediacy needed to maintain a constant body temperature. To borrow an image from Star Trek, the snake forms a mind-meld with its environment.

This suggests further that snakes do not dream. A current theory among evolutionary biologists holds that dreaming evolved as a way to organize and learn from experience. One can see its utility for short-lived creatures with a well-developed visual cortex. We know from the human sphere how well non-dreamers are able to prey on dreamers – usually by inhabiting the dream itself, or taking on something of its character. But such creativity, one suspects, is denied to the snake. What, then, does it have? It has time.

The snake is slow and capable of prolonged periods of apparent trance from which it can “awake” to sudden movement with no apparent transition whatsoever. We like to disparage the oldest parts of our brains as the reptile mind, as if it were some primitive thing. But in natural history, as in anthropology, it is the idea of the primitive that is primitive. The reptile mind responds to stimuli in a manner that is both simple and profound; one can no longer really speak of self and other, self and environment. I am this-climbing, this-eating, this-feeling.

The snake goes a couple feet along the wrong branch and stops. The darkness under the eaves isn’t getting closer this way. Stop and sway for five minutes, ten. Send tremors all through the limb. There, that other one… but the gap is a little too wide to bridge. The part of the brain/spinal cord that’s near the tail says here, and then begins to move so the head can take its place. The snake doubles back on itself like two trains running in opposite directions. By the time the tail gets to where the head had been, the head has reached the intersection and started down the other branch.

You expect the branch to bend down, but the snake knows better. Without the slightest hesitation it descends the increasingly slender branch to the very twig-end and straight out over the eighteen inches of empty space to the drainpipe. With the drainpipe as a support, the head enters the hole under the eaves even as the back half of the snake is still in the tree. It wastes no time, ever. From start to finish the whole climb takes only forty minutes, but to you it seems both brief and endless, a loop of tape you will replay more than once. Snake in a tree, you whisper. It has the unmistakable flavor of a dream.
__________

I hope it almost goes without saying that much of this essay consists of speculation with no basis in science.

Someone in an e-mail list raises an interesting question: What do you call belly-button lint?

“We always called it flint,” someone else offers. “I was never sure why.”

Indeed. Where did that “f” come from?

*

When I was a wee lad of ten or twelve, my dad managed to convince me that belly-button lint was produced by a special lint gland located right under the skin above the navel. “What’s it for?” I asked. “I don’t know. What do you have tonsils for? What’s the purpose of the tailbone?” he asked rhetorically.

This was my introduction to a radically new conception of the human body as a work-in-progress. Among the many profound and beautiful insights generated by the theory of evolution by natural selection is the importance of imperfection to life. Vestigial organs serve to remind us of our origins, while mutations make it possible for a population to adapt to sudden changes that might otherwise spell its doom. In this light, there’s really no such thing as a perfect fit of organism to matrix. The distinction itself is more than a little artificial, given co-evolution and ecological feedback loops. Exquisitely specialized organisms may almost satisfy human definitions of static perfection, but they are far less likely to persist over time – not that that’s necessarily the best measure of success.

As I would learn in a few years when we studied evolution in my ninth-grade biology class, this notion of perfection versus imperfection lies very close to the core of concerns religious people have with the theory. What may strike me as beautiful because it demonstrates the unimaginable complexity of the dance of life seems to frighten or alienate people with a more hierarchical worldview.

My biology teacher encouraged class discussions; the year I took it, we even held a formal debate to which the whole school was invited. I was on the Evolution team. It was a reasonably amicable affair; I genuinely liked several of the members of the Creationism team, which included the girl who would’ve been the valedictorian of our class had she not accepted early placement at Penn State beginning her senior year.

The guy who became valedictorian instead, my friend Jim, was the leader of our team. He wanted to begin our presentation with a short speech about non-literal hermeneutic approaches to the Bible, but the teacher nixed it. Instead, we were encouraged to zero in on all the inconsistencies between the two, rival accounts at the beginning of Genesis. It was like shooting fish in a barrel. Our own fish grew legs and headed for high ground.

I’ve never enjoyed debating, and only agreed to participate to support Jim. I agreed with him that we should’ve taken a more conciliatory approach. But it was, without a doubt, a learning experience. I found out just how cheap a cheap shot can make you feel, for example, when during one exchange I demanded to know how light could exist before the creation of the sun. My opponent gestured toward the ceiling and said, “Electricity!” and the audience jeered. I felt sorry and exultant at the same time. Score!

Does losing make you wrong? In an evolutionary sense, what does it mean to lose? Are the distinctions between species real, or do they simply cater to the limitations of the human intellect? Wasn’t it possible that the Creationists had some valid insights, at least in their guiding intuition about the rightness of the universe, the emptiness of the notion of random chance, and the biases of a reductionist scientific view? But weren’t they just as guilty of a reductionism of their own?

In fact, doesn’t turning a conversation into a debate pretty much guarantee that only the most reductionist arguments will be heard? “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind,” said Gandhi. This seems true of competition in general: as soon as contestants forget that it’s only a game, imagination and critical thinking both go out the window.

*

I don’t know how old I was when it finally occurred to me that my old man had been pulling my leg about the navel lint gland. It’s a good example of the educational importance of imagination-testing lies. Just as a certain number of mutations are needed to preserve a population’s genetic health, fictions are essential to the survival of a culture.

So in that spirit, I’d like to hear readers’ suggestions about what we should call belly button lint. And if it doesn’t come from a gland, where the heck does it come from? What are its properties? How many different kinds of belly button lint are out there, and what are their various habitat requirements? Can we construct a taxonomy, a family tree? Does lint ontogeny recapitulate lint phylogeny – or did all lint come into the world together, by divine fiat?

*

It’s turned into a nicer day today than the weather folks had predicted. I guess I’ll be able to hang my laundry out in the ol’ solar clothes dryer. It may make a little more work, but that’s a small price to pay for fresher smelling clothes – and no brutal lint trap to clean and re-set. Save the lint!

In early April woods, what you notice above all is the moss: how much of it there is, how green, how gold. Every morning when I sit down to write, it might as well be that elusive first day of spring, high clear notes like those Stravinsky heard, scratching, gnawing, wriggling. A bassoon played at the very top of its register. What if, after all, I don’t have anything new to say? Worse: what if I do?

*

I’m sitting in my usual spot, in my usual chair. When the pileated woodpecker calls, it sounds like the answer to something I had just been thinking.

A second pileated appears to have the very same reaction.

Half an hour later, I encounter another echo in the closing stanza of a poem by Christopher Reid:

Book shut, light out –
then in the gap
before real sleep
you feel the hill
looming closer,
then closer still,
a dreamlike imposture
that brings the trees’
lulling furor
right up to your ear,
and the monologue
of a distant dog
who more or less agrees
with what you have always thought.

– “Caretakeing,” Mermaids Explained

*

The eastern phoebe always answers his own question. No one but a phoebe could say whether it’s always the very same question & answer, but they do seem to have a high degree of consistency. Fortunately, the air is alive with variable rests. And from time to time the phoebe stutters, as if something just swallowed still beats its wings in his throat.

*

A bright but windy afternoon. Seven wood frogs float in the tiny pond, silent, motionless except for the reflections of fast-moving clouds in their great round eyes.

*

Two days ago I woke to howling wind & two inches of wet snow plastered to the sides of trees, bushes, my front porch, everything. I went for a walk. Facing into the wind, the woods were brown. In the other direction: white as January. Some places on the ridgetops, the ground was almost bare. Turning & turning, in the space of a mile I must’ve walked three, half of it backwards.

*

Beyond the crocuses, the old outhouse sinks deeper into the pit that was dug for it on the day of its birth.

*

Coltsfoot blooms at the edge of the gravel road, many-spoked wheels without rims. Only after the flowers die back will the eponymous leaves emerge, rampant hooves spreading larger than life for the want of a horseshoe nail.

*

In what sense is spring a return, in what sense is it new? The answer seems obvious, but it isn’t. Alone in an eight-by-eight foot room in his apartment in Clarens, Switzerland in 1911, Stravinsky saw the Chosen One dancing herself to death. Remembering his piano, the other tenants in his building would later say, Monsieur Stravinsky played nothing but the wrong notes.

*

“They were the wrong notes for them,” said the composer, “but the right notes for me.”

*

The last scrap of snow in the hollow has finally melted, leaving a dark, shiny patch on the leaves that will dry by evening. Among the gray & brown & red-tinged hills we go on living absent-mindedly in our high, white houses.

In Japanese, futon has three syllables: fu + to + n. It refers to a combination of two items: a thin mat – the shikibuton – and a thick quilt, or kakebuton. No foldable wooden frame is involved or implied. The only connection between the Japanese futon and American futons is that the former are also foldable. During the day, futon are stored in a closet and the sleeping room becomes a living/dining room.

You can learn a lot about a people by studying where and how they sleep. Although the futon is commonly stored out of sight, there’s nothing shameful or even especially private about it. By contrast, until fairly recently Japanese tended to regard Western-style beds as inescapably sexual in their purpose. When I was in Japan twenty years ago, we foreigners used to snigger at the proliferation of “love hotels” (labu hoteru). But they seemed to be patronized more by married couples wanting to sleep in a bed for a night than by unmarried or illicit couples. The neighbors would gossip if the husband came home too early, but if the wife slipped out to meet him in a labu hoteru, none were the wiser.

Not that a futon isn’t big enough for two – barely. But being spread directly on a tatami (rice mat) floor, it doesn’t provide any special cushioning effect for bodies engaged in vigorous exercise. Plus, the shikibuton is hard to clean, and any unsightly stains would be visible to the neighbors during its regular, back-yard airing. This involves draping the futon over a clothesline and beating the bejeezus out of it with a special stick or a plastic baseball bat. I can’t remember how often we did this – maybe only once a month during the winter – but I do recall it as a somehow deeply satisfying activity on a sunny, breezy day. The stated purpose of beating the futon was to get the lumps out, but it always felt as if it had an apotropaic aspect as well: Begone, foul phantoms of the night! And afterwards that nice, clean, outdoorsy smell permeated one’s bedding. I don’t know what people who live in dense urban areas do.

It always seemed to me that all futon were the same size – I don’t recall seeing child-sized futon, though they must exist. The way sheets were folded around and between top quilt and bottom mat gave the whole arrangement a distinctly marsupial, even womb-like ambiance. The traditional Japanese household is (or was) a female realm. The inner room where the family ate and slept is described with the same word, oku, that’s used to refer to another man’s wife, okusan. Not unlike harim in Arabic, oku in this context is a protected place where female primacy is unchallenged.

Japanese men used to come in for considerable censure if they returned home too soon after work; perhaps they still do. The explanation I always heard for this was that it would look as if they weren’t dedicated to their job if they didn’t go out drinking with their colleagues every day after work, and no doubt that perception did exist. But I think it also made them look like henpecked wimps. Japan was – and probably still is – a very macho society, where uxoriousness was regarded with contempt. The supposed business meetings after work had little to do with business and much to do with male fantasies of power and control – or relinquishing control.

Once under the influence of alcohol, a Japanese man can get away with virtually anything, including telling off his boss. The after-work drinkers thus participate in a ritual inversion of the strict rules and hierarchies that govern their workaday world. Attention-getting performances, discouraged under normal circumstances, are actually rewarded in a bar or nightclub – hence the invention of karaoke. If women are present, they tend to be the unmarried, hyper-feminine entertainers employed by the fancier nightclubs to light men’s cigarettes, pour their drinks, and listen. When I was in Japan, I knew a fellow American exchange student who worked as a nightclub entertainer despite a very limited understanding of the language. “They all say pretty much the same things, and besides, all they expect you to do is look sympathetic and say So de gozaimasu ka? [‘Is that right?’] once in a while,” she told me. I didn’t get the impression that extra-curricular activities, e.g. in a labu hoteru, were a part of her job description.

In 1985, Western-style feminist ideas hadn’t made much of an inroad yet. Few women worked beyond marriage. But they ruled the roost at home, as I’ve mentioned, exercising complete control over finances. Once the first child was born, couples stopped using intimate pronouns for each other in favor of papa and mama. This is less traumatic a transition in Japanese than it would be in English, however. Whereas for us, pronouns connote some measure of permanence and essentiality, Japanese pronouns function more as positional markers. There are multiple ways of saying “you” and “I” depending on the relative status of the speakers.

Japanese pronouns also degrade and fall out of use far more quickly than ours do. A hundred years ago, for example, ware was a commonly used first-person pronoun among social equals; now, one would only refer to oneself as ware when addressing a dog or an enemy. By contrast, over the last five hundred years English has seen just one set of pronouns – thou, thee, thy, thine – fall into disuse, and by an opposite process: what had once been a more familiar form of address gradually came to seem more and more formal, presumably because the translators of the King James Bible used it for conversations between human and deity. As science elbowed in and God came to seem increasingly remote from the day-to-day workings of a clockwork universe, the old familiar second-person pronouns acquired an air of archaic sacrality. In a somewhat analogous manner, once-cozy Japanese vernacular practices such as sleeping in a futon and nestling around a kerosene heater for warmth may come to seem stiff and old-fashioned, fit for preservation mainly as reminders of quasi-mystical Japaneseness.

I came across the results of a non-scientific poll online that suggest that up to 60 percent of Japanese under the age of thirty may sleep in a bed rather than in a futon. This is surprising because students and other young people, being poorer and more peripatetic, would be less likely to use beds than would those with stable households. In addition,

a quite large difference between the genders can be observed, with women preferring Western beds more strongly than men: Among women, as many as 67 percent responded [sic] to sleep in Western style beds, while only 51 percent of men did so. In case of male company workers, the Japanese futon is with 52 percent even more popular than the Western style bed (48%).

The Japanese futon may not be as well suited for nocturnal exercise as a Western bed, but it does have the family values-promoting advantage of being quiet. Despite Japan’s prosperity, it remains a crowded country, and I gather it’s still not uncommon for families to sleep together in the same room – as families do throughout much of the world. Only a bed requires its own room. Even many families wealthy enough to afford houses or apartments with separate bedrooms may still keep several futon for the use of guests. My first homestay family in 1985 gave me a futon and the use of the one Japanese-style room, which they no longer needed because they each had separate bedrooms, and in any case were never home much. The wife worked, and the two teenage boys were always off taking lessons of one sort or another.

I’m sure there’s a strong argument to be made for the health benefits of futon versus too-soft beds. In fact, I remember more than one older Japanese telling me they scorned the comforts of the shikibuton to sleep directly on the floor. Much better for the back, they assured me. Then again, a certain degree of pain and self-deprivation has always been regarded as salubrious in Japan. That’s why the samurai were so taken with Rinzai Zen: only a fierce Zen monk could dish out the beatings they needed. I imagine that a wooden stick brought down hard across thinly clothed shoulders makes the same kind of sound, meets the same soft-but-not-too-soft resistance as a futon hanging from the line.

In fact, isn’t that what beating the futon is really all about? Anything so closely associated with our innermost selves as the bedding we sleep in cannot fail to become almost a shadow-self. In dreams our bodies gain all sorts of intoxicating powers and terrifying vulnerabilities, and even in half-awake fantasies we may give ourselves greater license than in true daydreams. As countless nursery rhymes remind us, beds are like boats, or magic carpets. The greatest mysteries of life – birth, death and sex – transpire in or on them.

Making the bed or folding up the futon is the first and most vital step in our daily accommodation to the exigencies of a diminished world where machines and abstractions rule. That accommodation no longer seems as automatic as it once might have been, however. Many of my friends tell me they also spend a great deal of their waking time in bed, reading, writing, blogging, watching movies. It’s no wonder the hyper-modern Japanese increasingly crave beds and privacy, as they, like us, seek more permanent refuges from an ever-more-disembodied world.

I’m late. The last of the red drained from the sky while I was in the shower; now the ridge behind me glows red as I sit facing east with my feet propped up.

Suddenly there’s a distant boom, very low-frequency, comparable in pitch to the drumming of a ruffed grouse. Maybe it’s more of a rumble than a boom – I feel it as much as I hear it. What the hell was that?

A minute later, another boom. The kind that rattles glass in windows, shakes plates from plate rails.

A third boom. I can feel it in my molars, almost. I decide they must be blasting at the limestone quarry two miles away, although usually it’s a higher-pitched sound, and the direction of origin isn’t nearly so difficult to pinpoint. A fire siren starts up and dies.

Another boom. I’m not wearing my watch, but they seem to be spaced about a minute apart. I think of our friends in the small village next to the quarry, how stressful it must be to have this blasting going on while they’re getting ready to go off to work. I recall a brief lecture on strip mining and quarrying by one of the Pennsylvania Chapter of the Sierra Club’s most knowledgeable activists, at a meeting just last month. “Blasting is an art, not a science,” she said. “Or you could say that each new hole requires a brand-new science.”

Boom. Again a fire siren wails once and falls silent. Is this what it felt like to be in Sarajevo on August 25, 1992? Such a calm morning! And then… Coming out of nowhere, like the hotel bombing in Lebanon last month that killed the former president. Prompting a sudden sick feeling in the pit of the stomach for all those who came of age during the civil war.

Boom. If this were still the Cold War, I’d be wondering, Is this it? Instead I’m thinking Al Qaeda, payback for Abu Ghraib…

Pick your disaster. News of the recent earthquake off Sumatra prompts recollections of the one major earthquake I experienced, in Taiwan, 1986 – also a middle-of-the-night thing. A violent shaking of something one had always been taught to regard as inert and unchanging. The exhilaration I felt, against all reason – chalk it up to a neurotic/religious temperament, perhaps. I’m an awe junky, I admit it. The earth is alive! I remember exulting – silently, so as not to alarm my seven roommates, all of whom immediately scrambled out of their bunks and poured into the hall, talking excitedly in Fujianese. Other people told me they had run out into the street, watched buildings and lampposts sway. One even saw ball lightning. I was so jealous.

Boom. The sound comes less from the air than out of the ground. Perhaps they are blasting deeper than usual, or have started on a new stratum. The limestone beds are lower Ordovician, and lie at perhaps a 15-degree angle. My house sits in upper Ordovician, on nearly vertical strata of the fossil-free Juniata formation. A mass extinction of unknown origin 443.5 million years ago is used to mark the end of the Ordovician period. Thus, it’s no exaggeration to say that cataclysmic disaster is written right into the stone here. But more to the point, the sharp plunging of these strata means that if vibrations from the quarry followed bedding lines alone, they would travel deep into the earth, a mile or more beneath my front porch. That may account for my impression that the sound is emanating from the ground, from all directions. In addition, fracture traces associated with a nearby, inactive fault craze the rocks on either side of the water gap, and it’s hard to believe these lineaments don’t also act as conduits for sound.

I first learned about this back in the 70s, when a geologist from Penn State approached my parents about burying an instrument called a tiltmeter at the top of our field, a mile and a half from the fault. A second tiltmeter was buried a comparable distance in the opposite direction. Up until then, like most people I had associated faults with seismically active regions at the edges of continental plates, such as the Pacific rim. But the first generation of Landsat photos had revealed a maze of intracontinental faults and lineaments, as well.

A tiltmeter is like a seismograph, they explained, but way more sensitive. The idea was to measure differential movements along the fault in response to the same, uniform stimuli – most notably, the tides. It really fired my ten-year-old imagination to learn that land as well as water responds to the moon’s gravitational tug with daily and monthly fluctuations: earth tides, they called them. Even when it isn’t shimmying in some temblor or quarry blast, the ground is far less firm than we like to think.

Another source of movement preceptible to the tiltmeter was the shrinking or expanding of soil in response to changes in temperature. My brothers and I were easily persuaded to help out by taking daily readings of high and low temperatures with a special thermometer they lent us. And they let us watch and ply them with questions on the momentous day when contractors dragged a huge drilling rig up our narrow, winding driveway and clear to the top of the field.

The tiltmeter was planted deep, never to be removed. There’s still a noticeable depression there, if you know where to look. For a long time I walked softly whenever I passed the spot, mindful that my footsteps were being recorded (or at least registered – I think the radio transmitter failed in less than a year). They told us not to worry, though – anything like that would be automatically discounted, off the chart. For something sensitive enough to “hear” the moon, even the footsteps of an ant would be deafening, they said.

Boom. What would it be like if an earthquake struck here, in the east? It’s not impossible. Earthquakes in seismically inactive regions are rare, but they can be devastating. Here’s a website with a list of the major earthquakes that have struck the midwestern and eastern United States and eastern Canada in historical times. Most notably, in late 1811 and early 1812, “New Madrid, Missouri, experienced the three largest earthquakes known to have occurred in North America (magnitudes estimated between 7.2 and 8.3) and 203 damaging aftershocks. Soil liquefaction occurred.” The price for greater stability is more violent cataclysm, when it comes. Deep stucture is no guarantee of permanence.

The website’s map does locate Pennsylvania within a zone of minor risk of damage from earthquakes. But as an article by science writer Robert Roy Britt on Space.com makes clear, it’s extremely difficult to know whether a given fault is truly inactive, if the periodicity of significant seismic activity is measured in thousands of years.

Britt’s article focuses on a plateau area of upstate New York, but many of the lessons would apply here, as well. The scientist featured in the article, Robert Jacobi, has developed methods to detect slight activity along faults based on subtle clues that would be invisible to both satellites and tiltmeters, such as “a long row of dead, dying or stressed plants; maybe a hint of out-of-place autumn color skipping along the top of a forest canopy. … A leaning tree … can indicate that a fault is slipping quietly over time, possibly building stress that might give way in a sudden snap.”

Our local lineament can be traced simply by noting the course of the Little Juniata River from Tyrone southeast to Mount Union. This is not uncommon.

“Faults chew up the ground, and so the ground is more susceptible to erosion – so many streams follow faults and fractures,” Jacobi said.

Variations in plant species or health can also be indicators: Stressed vegetation blooms later in the spring and turns color earlier in the fall.

“Some of these lineaments are there because faults conduct water and soil gas,” Jacobi said. “They conduct fluids and gases that will make trees and grass respond differently.”

Even within a forest canopy, scientists can pick out differences by flying over a region at various times of the year. In drier areas, where there is little vegetation, what greenery there is typically follows fault lines, where water reaches the surface.

From airplanes, readings of magnetic fields emanating from rock below helped Jacobi’s team calculate that some of the faults extended several miles (kilometers) below the surface. Matching their results with known faults in the far north of the study area helped show the method was reliable.

I’m fascinated by the notion that something virtually instantaneous on a geological time scale – seasonal changes in the growth of grass and trees – can be used to detect glacially slow movements along structures untold millions of years in age.

The booming stopped after about ten minutes. Three hours later, it’s a calm morning. I decided to ignore the red sunrise and hang out laundry anyway, choosing to believe an online forecast for sun and temperatures in the 60s. But in the back of my mind on days like this there’s always a little voice whispering, Don’t trust it. Anything can happen. We’re all living on groundless hopes, on borrowed time. The world can break.

“Konkerlee,” they sang – if singing is the term for something so unmelodic, so off-key. “Konkerlee.” But all together. With feeling.

Do you have any idea what I’m talking about? No, I suspect you don’t – unless you grew up in a family of naturalists as I did. I try not to take that for granted, remembering how mystified I feel when people my own age and younger bond over choruses of their favorite television theme songs and advertising jingles from the 1970s and 80s. So often, growing up, I found myself unable to relate to my classmates in the local public schools – we might as well have been speaking mutually unintelligble languages. Without television, I participated only vicariously in the major cultural watersheds of our time, such as the airing of Roots, or the sudden awareness of issues like homosexuality or possible human cloning.

I had more in common with some of my fundamentalist Christian classmates than anyone else. They too had parents who didn’t believe in TV, distrusted the government, raised much of their own food, and did weird things like read books out loud, have regular family meetings, and eat meals together at set times. They too wore clothes from the Dollar General Store and shoes from Super Shoes, and didn’t have a clue about sex, drugs or rock ‘n roll. But beyond that, our respective value systems had very few areas of overlap. (“What? You believe in evolution? Don’t you know you can go to hell for that?”)

These days, the Internet keeps me feeling marginally more connected to mass-marketed culture and politics, though I still haven’t seen things that pundits on the radio regularly tell us that everyone has seen, such as the appearance of the Beatles on American Bandstand (?), or footage of the jets crashing into the twin towers on 9/11. Even as a kid, I felt like an anthropologist in my own country, and that feeling has only intensified with age.

In a dream the other night I was walking along an abandoned county road – you know, cracked patches of asphalt where tough customers like chicory, teasel and spotted knapweed gather around, drinking from 40-oz. bottles & talking trash. I topped a rise and found myself in the middle of our field circa 1975. There was my older brother, age 11 or 12, pushing the lawnmower without a great deal of enthusiasm. There were those three, huge balm-of-Gilead trees that my dad had had to cut down a few years later because they were dead or near death & leaning dangerously over the house. The seckle pear tree was back in the Pear Tree Curve of the driveway, still five years away from its collision with the driver’s side of our old truck in my brother’s first driving lesson. Our red VW bus sat in the garage. The forsythia was in full bloom, along with that row of tulips that would later be wiped out by rabbits. Puppies romped on the veranda.

I walked up to my brother and explained that I’d just come from the year 2005, through some kind of time warp. (We always use to talk about time warps when we were kids.) To my surprise, he bolted, leaving the lawnmower running. Good lord, I said to myself – he thinks I want to kick his ass! Maybe the sibling rivalry had been stronger than I remembered. I stared around at all the acres of mowed lawn and lawn yet-to-be-mowed. Why in the world did we keep it up year after year, this pointless struggle to prevent nature from running wild? It’s not as if we had any neighbors to cluck their tongues.

I realized I wouldn’t be able to handle the shock of meeting my parents when they were younger than I am now, so I woke up. Outside it was one of those cold and foggy mornings just like the ones on which the red-wing blackbirds always used to come back, sometime between late February and late March. They were one of the first and therefore most eagerly anticipated entries in the old Spring Arrivals List that my mom taped to the refrigerator every year. They would show up right after daybreak and perch in the yard trees for an hour or two, making their rusty-barn-door-hinge racket. They almost never actually bred on the mountain, so this was one of the few times in the course of the year when we could count on seeing them. But for some reason they haven’t been paying us an early-spring visit nearly as often as they used to when I was a kid – maybe one year out of three.

White-throated sparrows were singing their wistful song about Poor Sam Peabody or Oh Sweet Canada, whichever you prefer (I hear both). As I sat there drinking my coffee and feeling nostalgic, damn me if a red-wing blackbird’s konkerlee call didn’t ring out. A whole flock had landed in the walnut trees above the other house – the one I grew up in – and was joined a few minutes later by another flock of about the same size. There must have been a couple hundred, all told. With that many of them calling at the same time, most of what you hear, as I said in yesterday’s post, are the overtones. It’s a little like Tuvanese throat singing, if you know what I mean. I walked over to the edge of the porch and stood there listening for the longest time, peering into the fog.
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N.B.: The above image of a redwing blackbird was highly modified from a web source.