One window, two window, red window, blue window…
Invasion of the swamp things
Red maples are one of the few tree species capable of becoming grotesque at an early age. In a way, their highly malleable forms reflect their superior adaptability: they are at home in wide variety of soil types and exposures, and though a first-succession species, can also take advantage of relatively small gaps in the canopy. They are, however, not long-lived trees, so unlike oaks, for example, they must start producing seeds at a young age. It makes sense, therefore, that they would evolve a mutable architecture geared toward short-term reproductive success at all costs.
The one thing red maples don’t tolerate very well is fire, being thin-barked and shallow-rooted. Oaks and hickories, by contrast, are good at isolating fire scars and preventing them from becoming an avenue for infection, and their roots go deep. A hundred years ago, small, low-intensity ground fires were a relatively common occurrence in the drier parts of the eastern forest, and as a result, red maples were rarely found outside of really wet areas. But with widespread fire suppression, the oaks and hickories lost their competitive advantage and the maples, being faster growers, were able to dominate natural and man-made forest openings such as blow-downs and clearcuts. It doesn’t hurt that the over-abundant white-tailed deer seem relatively unenthusiastic about red maple sprouts, and acid rain apparently doesn’t affect them much, either. So what was once a creature of the swamps has virtually taken over the state, and studies of forest composition show that it is now our single most common tree.
That’s scary news to anyone who cares about natural forest ecosystems. Maple seeds aren’t nearly as popular with wildlife as acorns and hickory nuts, possessing only a fraction of their nutritional value, and my insect-collecting brother Steve informs me that dead maple trees don’t support anything like the diverse invertebrate communities that populate dead oaks. It’s a good bet their decay doesn’t contribute much to the soil, either.
So if you’ve been around for more than a few decades, it’s not your imagination: the fall foliage really is getting more spectacular with every passing year. Whereas oaks are fairly temperamental, going straight from green to brown as often as not, and being fairly monochromatic by species when they do color up, you can count on red maples every year for an array of bright reds and oranges as variable as their architectural forms.
Knowing what I know, how can I still admire their colors and their grotesque shapes? But I do. Hell, it’s not their fault they’ve become so goddamn numerous. I love red maples the same way I love people, come to think of it.
Don’t forget to submit links to the Festival of the Trees by October 26 for the special Halloween-themed edition.
And yes, I have written about red maples and fire suppression at least once before, so Google informs me.
After
Remember this?
The fine craftsmanship of Mike Nicely, general contractor. These particular bookshelves will soon house my poetry collection, but first I have one day more of touch-up work, including a final coat of varnish on the floor. And I must admit a certain reluctance to move all my stuff back in — or even the bare minimum of stuff necessary to make it habitable: chair, table, footstool… The room will never again seem as starkly beautiful and as full of possibilities as it does right now. Or as echoey.
[audio:http://www.fileden.com/files/2007/1/5/600283/Reelin.MP3]Diagnostic
Certain ticks found on deer harbor the bacterium in their stomachs. Lyme disease is spread by these ticks when they bite the skin permitting the bacterium to infect the body. Lyme disease can cause abnormalities in the skin, joints, heart and nervous system.
—MedicineNet.com
I sat on the ground because
that’s what the boulder was doing.
It seemed only right.
I laid down on my back in the leaf duff
so I could join the giant oak tree
in tracking the sun.
But this was a woods with
a clear view beneath the canopy,
everything but the rocks & ferns reduced
to telltale pellets.
I should’ve kept my distance.
On the way home, three times
I felt something on the side of my face
& couldn’t dislodge it.
Hours later, at supper,
a tiny, red & black barnacle of an insect
dropped from my collar & began inching
across the table: a deer tick.
My thumb came down
& crushed it against the smooth white wood.
Clear views are dangerous here.
Only a sick forest can harbor
such distances.
__________
UPDATES
10/30/07: Lines subtracted from last stanza, and different lines added to third stanza.
10/18/07: Lines added to last stanza in response to reader comments.
Living large
I went for a walk this morning along the portion of the property line that runs straight down the Bald Eagle Valley side of the mountain. A scrim of cirrus softened the contrast between light and shadow without actually blocking the sun, and thinned out as the morning wore on.
Just off the crest, a 15-foot-tall, fire-scarred white pine snag glowed in a private sunbeam as if spotlit, and I stood admiring it for several minutes. The longer I looked, the more impressed I became, until finally I had to back away: this thing had power.
I avoided the open talus slopes as much as I could, though the wooded portions of the upper slope are just as rocky. The thin soil is enough to keep most of the rocks from tipping underfoot, though. I renewed my acquaintance with several outlandishly crooked rock oaks.
Why go to all the trouble of picking my way down to the base of the mountain? Well, for one thing, this corner of my parents’ land contains the largest rock on the property. It’s about five feet tall and ten feet long, and forms a cluster with two smaller companions. They’re probably the remnants of a single boulder that calved off the ridge crest during the last glacial epoch, as a result of the intense freezing and thawing that also gave us the open talus slopes.
I sat with the boulder for a long time, trying to block out the roar from the other side of the property line. There’s a reason why I don’t come down here very often.
No matter where you are in America, a Wal-Mart truck goes by every twenty minutes. I’m convinced of it.
A hundred feet up-slope from the biggest rock on the property stands the biggest tree. It’s a red oak, well over 200 years old, I would guess, and close to five feet in diameter at breast height (sorry — I never remember to pack a tape measure). At one time, there was a small grove of giant oaks here in this corner — maybe eight of them in all — but the line wasn’t surveyed very well, and our neighbor to the south along the mountain laid claim to most of the grove and put it under the chainsaw about fifteen years ago. The one other giant on our side was split down the middle in an ice storm, though the standing half still lives.
It’s a bit of a mystery how such big old trees could’ve survived, given that they adjoin an old charcoal hearth and haul road dating back to 1815. I can only surmise that some early settler had fenced the area for pasture, sparing it from the collier’s axe, and left a scattering of oaks for shade. That would also explain their big, spreading crowns, which are atypical of forest trees. The grove might also have been much bigger before the construction of the highway in 1970; we didn’t move here until 1971, and didn’t acquire this portion of the property until the mid-80s.
The lower flank of the mountain is dotted with small seeps and springs, so even though it faces northwest and doesn’t get much sun, trees grow a lot bigger down here than up on the dry ridgetops. Running northeast of the corner, paralleling the highway, there’s a ten-acre stand of mature oaks and other hardwoods that would seem pretty damn big if they didn’t suffer by comparison with the last of the giants.
See the whole photoset from today’s walk: Down in the corner.
UPDATE: For the conclusion of the story, see the next post.
Refugee
Picture a hungry brood of talons making a sudden appearance beside you as you sleep in the cedar tree, beaks without mouths grasping, stabbing, and missing their meal by millimeters. Imagine your blind flight into the dark.
10 p.m. A thump against the window. I open the porch door on a panic of wings.
Higher education
The locksmith’s daughter had beautiful bones that cast long shadows on her skin. She wanted to be thin. Cell phones were dwindling; why not those who pressed the sleek clamshells against an ear, as if to listen to the ocean’s test signal? She fasted, draped in hipster black, and learned to love desire for itself. Her hips grew sharp as blades of grass, and she trembled in the least breeze.
The doctor’s son wanted to be tough; he made the team. But then he began hearing voices, and thought it was the coach. They said that this was Olympus and the gods were near — take off your clothes. He took his chew out of his cheek and threw it on the ground. “To hell with you!” he shouted, and walked off the field with the scorched outline of his former life trailing behind.
They crossed paths on the cemetery hill, and stood smiling wanly at each other.
“Eat something, you stupid goth bitch.”
“Grow a brain, you dumb jock.”
But that isn’t what they said. And a good thing, too, considering how soon they would be sharing a bottle, a needle, a pipe.
“I can’t get the coach out of my head.”
“I know exactly what you mean.”
She didn’t know, of course — she had no idea — but it was, as in mathematics, a serviceable assumption to begin on.
Old news
“Old news,” they say scornfully, as if the apparent oxymoron speaks for itself. But as far as I’m concerned, old news is the best kind. And no, I’m not talking about literature, which Ezra Pound famously defined as “news that stays news.” I mean honest-to-god, newspaper news. I only read one daily newspaper with any regularity, the Christian Science Monitor, and I read it two to four weeks late. Granted, that’s because I have to wait for both my parents to read it and pass it on, and they only pick up their mail once or twice a week. But I’ve come to appreciate the many subtle, often bittersweet flavors of a well-aged news story.
For example, at breakfast this morning I read a carefully researched piece from September 21 about the role of racism in criminal sentencing and whether or not racism is in decline in America, which, though written in response to the “Jena 6” march and demonstrations, had an additional resonance for me because of the ugly racist incident at Columbia University that I had just seen a mention of online. Then at lunch I read all about the Burmese monks, how they were taking to the streets in protest for the third day in a row. It was the kind of cautiously optimistic international coverage at which the Monitor has always excelled, and my knowledge of what would happen next gave the story a depth and pathos which I’m sure I never would’ve felt had I read it on the day it was published.
Imagine if you could go back in time, knowing how things will turn out, but remaining powerless to change them: that’s what reading old news is like. One gets to smile indulgently at the hot issues of the day — and then turn the page. Because, let’s face it, a lot of old news is pretty out-dated, superseded by more recent developments, and that’s one of the main benefits of reading the newspaper two to four weeks late: it saves a lot of time. Time better spent reading, well, literature.
I suppose it’s not a healthy approach, and I’m quite sure it isn’t a very responsible one. How can I be a good and productive citizen if I don’t follow the news more closely, especially as the presidential election season closes in on its final year? Can I really in good conscience sign all those online petitions and send all those emails to our public servants without a strong grasp of the issues at hand? I don’t know, but I’ll tell you this: I sleep pretty well. Instead of pointless agitation and dread, I am plagued only by sadness and resignation, which rarely interfere with a good night’s sleep.
Metaphorest
Nature is a temple in which living pillars
Sometimes give voice to confused words;
Man passes there through forests of symbols
Which look at him with understanding eyes.
–Baudelaire, “Correspondences” (Willaim Aggeler translation)
A forest is the metaphor for this site. Like a forest, rhetoric provides tremendous resources for many purposes. However, one can easily become lost in a large, complex habitat (whether it be one of wood or of wit). The organization of this central page and the hyperlinks within individual pages should provide a map, a discernible trail, to lay hold of the utility and beauty of this language discipline.
—Silva Rhetoricae: The Forest of Rhetoric
Midway on our life’s journey, I found myself
In dark woods, the right road lost.
–Dante, The Inferno (Robert Pinksy translation)
In this I would imitate travelers who, finding themselves lost in a forest, ought not to wander this way and that, or what is worse, remain in one place, but ought always to walk as straight a line as they can in one direction and not change course for feeble reasons, even if at the outset it was perhaps only chance that made them choose it; for by this means, if they are not going where they wish, they will finally arrive at least somewhere where they will be better off than in the middle of a forest.
–Descartes, Discourse on Method (Donald A. Cress translation)
I sank down on the bench, stupefied, stunned by this profusion of beings without origin: everywhere blossomings, hatchings out, my ears buzzed with existence, my very flesh throbbed and opened, abandoned itself to the universal burgeoning. It was repugnant. But why, I thought, why so many existences, since they all look alike? What good are so many duplicates of trees?
–Sartre, Nausea (Lloyd Alexander translation)
The mind is the source of all confusion, and the body is the forest of all impure actions.
—The Sutra on the Eight Great Realizations of Great Beings
__________
Once again: Don’t forget to send in links for the Halloween edition of the Festival of the Trees by October 26.
And speaking of deadlines, next Monday — October 15 — is the deadline for submissions to the current qarrtsiluni theme, Making Sense (theme description – general guidelines).
Disaster area
It starts innocently enough: just a small rift, a discontinuity in the otherwise seamless joinery of our days. The pulse quickens. We feel a bit more… alive. Yes.
We were always told such frightening things about courting disaster. But what do the old people know? Surely they are just jealous of our youth and energy — they want to deny us the heady pleasures they themselves are too worn down to handle.
And the pleasures now are nothing if not heady. Bark turns to bite; bony dinosaur hide splits open and lifts into feathers. Welcome to evolution, baby!
But each new opening only retains its brightness for a little while before it, too, turns dull. The body is continually subverting the mind’s best efforts to fly free, and returning us to our cages of solid matter.
Nothing matters: that is our chant as we look for new chasms to outgrow, new eyeholes to peer out of, new mouths with which to whisper in disaster’s ear: save us.
And so we become like snakes, slipping our skins, going belly to belly with our parent rock. Our tongues taste the wind in stereo. We tap into the simple on-or-off reptile brain.
With our fellow heads we talk, we dance, we howl. Disaster possesses us in turn. We paint our headstones.
All photos taken at or near Wolf Rocks, a popular teen hang-out spot in the Gallitzin State Forest of Pennsylvania.