Today was a day for visions… though not necessarily a day for understanding. The light had a special quality to it, that early spring haziness.
It was a day bookended by thunderstorms. The temperature climbed into the low 60s.
A fire hydrant at the edge of town stood guard over a feral underground.
Near the crest of the ridge, I saw a tree eating a large rock.
I don’t like that someone did this but I can’t help but admire the tree’s response.
I’ve noticed this tree before, but not after a hard rain. Its eye of lichen really blazed forth, and its green suit of moss was fabulous.
The rain also accentuated the distinction between the two halves of this oak, one dead, the other very much alive. This too seems fabulous, in the specific sense that it reminds me of something out of a fable.
Lichens brighten in the rain. They open all their pores.
A dry strip of bark appears virtually lifeless in contrast to rain-soaked portions, where moss, algae and lichen have been revived.
But no one beats wood frogs for revivals. From suspended animation to full-on orgy. It boggles the mind.
It’s always such a gift and an honor when my artist friends make adaptations of my work. Marc Neys surprised me with this yesterday: a complete and I think effective re-imagining of the original poem. You know, what any attentive reader does. But most readers aren’t crazy-brilliant Belgian artist-composers.
My interior monologue: I don’t get why people still need mythic archetypes. Are we really so shallow?
Five minutes later: Let’s be honest, you’re still just a Moomintroll who longs to be Snufkin.
And that felt like a pretty solid insight, you know?
The moral of the story: Be sure to expose your children to the Moomin books—they’re pretty great.
There’s much more I could say on all of this but I’m currently (evening of June 28) chasing the sunset up a steep hillside. Which is absolutely not a metaphor for anything.
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I understand the need for sacred theatre, i.e. ritual, around major life events—especially death, when the survivors are the most earnest in their need to behave as if a truer but less tangible reality exists in which total annihilation can be overcome or evaded somehow.
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hot tub
laid bare in the woods
a junkie’s pale face
My interior monologue is heavily laced with sarcasm. I suppose that’s a Gen X thing. (Yes, of course you do. That’s the kind of sophisticated analysis you’re known for.)
Perfectly healthy, I’m sure.
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“If everyone just thought like me, the world would be a better place” is a hallmark of both imperialism and fanaticism — in fact, they summon each other up, I think.
This is not idle philosophical speculation. Most left-wing revolutions turn repressive because fundamentally the revolutionaries are either too fanatical to accept that there will always be dissent, or too callous to care.
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The forest is full of mourning cloak butterflies with pristine-looking wings: the new generation has just turned into adults. They will likely be aestivating soon, but in the meantime they’re defending territories in the woods.
I watched two mourning cloaks battling for several minutes on the side of an oak this afternoon. Since tree sap is their main source of food, perhaps this tree is especially good tasting. They used front and middle feet to bat at each other; mouthparts didn’t seem to be involved, and wings only a little. Here’s a brief video of the very end of the fight:
Bushwhacking through a Pennsylvania state forest, it’s impossible to stay lost for long. My first sign that a road was near, this morning, was a hunting camp privy. As is so often the case.
At one scenic overlook, a memorial to someone who leapt to his death. I actually remember this. I was a Penn State undergrad at the time.
Someone had spray-painted “no fear” on the retaining wall-like structure:
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I remember my parents pointing out a “lovers’ leap” place on some family trip when I was a little kid, and how baffled I was. If romance made people jump to their deaths, it struck me as something best avoided.
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Some trails are notional—made through bushwhacking.
Some trails are roads.
Some trails are the spines of mountains.
And some Snufkins go for a wander primarily to get a new perspective on where they live.
This entry is part 26 of 31 in the series April Diary
Dear April i can’t tell you what a thrill it’s been for me to listen from the morning porch to hermit thrush song, that most ethereal sound: imagine a woodwind made of crystal and inhabited by the ghost of a bell and you might get the idea
(i will never fully forgive TS Eliot for mischaracterizing hermit thrush song in “The Wasteland” which i see someone has written a paper on though as a non-academic it’s off limits to me. the quote is
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop But there is no water
TS Eliot, “The Wasteland,” lines 356-358
which he justifies with a quote from the great ornithologist Frank Chapman in a note:
357. This is Turdus aonalaschkae pallasii, the hermit-thrush which I have heard in Quebec County. Chapman says (Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America) “it is most at home in secluded woodland and thickety retreats… Its notes are not remarkable for variety or volume, but in purity and sweetness of tone and exquisite modulation they are unequalled.” Its “water-dripping song” is justly celebrated.
but nobody but Eliot himself seems to have called it that)
they’ve never nested up here as far as we know despite occasionally attempting to set up territories as this one seems to be doing. the last time it happened, in 2020 up around the vernal ponds, i watched wood thrushes chasing him, and Mark and I thought maybe the limiting factor for us isn’t that we’re too low in elevation (1600 feet) for hermit thrushes but that we’re not high enough to exclude wood thrushes which out-compete their cousins
anyway Mark first heard this one on the 16th so he’s a persistent bugger. if our theory is correct, we may eventually get them nesting up here if wood thrush numbers continue to decline. so i should be careful what i wish for because i love wood thrushes too
putting Ripple Effect back on the shelf this morning i noticed i had another collection by Elaine Equi, 2013’s Sentences and Rain and i have absolutely no idea where it came from. must’ve picked it up secondhand somewhere
well so much for reducing the height of my current reads pile. but that’s a high-quality problem indeed. Ripple Effect was from 2007 and i was just thinking i should get one of her more recent books
i really dig the title poem:
Equi is certainly in that age-old tradition of the wise jester
well i just lost a fuck-ton of writing here because the WordPress iPhone app froze. i guess if i want to keep composing on my phone i’d better compose in Notes and paste it into the app when it’s done (i have been doing that to some extent already but not today obviously)
i stopped the car in Sinking Valley today on my way back from the Amish garden center to take a photo of our not-so-impressive mountain and captured what appears to be a UFO
putting up a deer fence, you do need to think like a deer. where they can push in, where they might be tempted to leap. if i were ever to move out west where they have mule deer instead of whitetails i’d have to start learning that stuff all over again. this is the kind of local knowledge one gathers over time. to the extent that old people can be said to be wise it’s because of stuff like this (not generally because of their politics, lord knows)
working in the garden after supper i can hear our neighbors out in theirs, a quarter mile away. well mainly the shrieks of their twin grandchildren, who are four years old and love living in the woods
there’s something really special about not only living where you grew up, but seeing and hearing other kids grow up there too. to use an old-fashioned phrase, it gladdens the heart
so i got the fence all moved and patched together and well as they say, a thing of beauty is a joy forever
also today i shot a brief video of a black rat snake pretending to be a rattlesnake which took me back to the first time i saw that, also on the powerline right-of-way, at the age of 12 or so and i thought it was a rattler ran all the way back to the house and either Mom or my older brother Steve went back with me and it was just a black snake being a jerk:
It’s not that you’re chasing a white moth through the forest; it’s just that she happens to be flying ahead of you, right? It’s just that things come to you when you’re walking. And you to them.
An ephemeral forest pool, fed by spring rains. Here at the top of the watershed the rain doesn’t quite know where to go, so it sits for a while. Ripples on the surface show how any point can be the center of an expanding universe. I love watching them intersect and cancel each other out.
Driving home along the river, I have to turn on the windshield wipers every mile or two because of all the mayflies, the off-white inkblots of their anonymous deaths. Imagine living one’s life in a state of arrested development, and only on your last day undergoing not one, but two radical transformations, one after the other: growing wings, breathing air, and mating just once, having gained reproductive parts in exchange for the loss of a mouth.
spring again
scheduling my first
Covid shot
Process notes
Placing two things in close proximity: that’s a poem. The shadbush and hepatica footage here came from a single walk down the hollow and back. But if only I’d had a dash cam on that drive home…
Will this be the final post in the Pandemic Year series? Probably not, but it feels as if it could be.
Pedants may think that COVID should still be written in all caps but that doesn’t seem to be how common usage has gone. In time, even the initial capital letter will come to seem too much, and it’ll end up like scuba or ok, just another word.
