Via Negativa

December 6, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Anecdotal

Up at 5:30 a.m. for a bit of moonbathing. I take my chair and thermos mug of coffee around to the southwest side of the house, in front of the portico. A couple minutes after I settle in, a cat-shaped, detachable shadow trots down the driveway; even from ten feet away, I can’t hear a sound. Of course, that may be because I have a knit cap pulled down over my just-washed hair, which is already beginning to form ice-dreads.

The moon is a day past full and stands low in the west, in the same direction as the interstate, and sings the same, monotonous, high-pitched tune. It’s the howl of a lonely Yeti — or, more likely for this neck of the woods, a Stone Coat. (The din of my 8-year-old computer is at least an octave lower, though, so don’t think I’m talking about myself here!)

The black cat trots back up the driveway, pausing for a moment to glance in my direction, then accelerating just a little. The other day I surprised her in the middle of the field, and she ran flat-out for the barn. She seems to sense that it’s bad luck to cross my path, being fonder of native songbirds than non-native, feral cats as I am. But in fact I’m both too lazy and too softhearted to grab the gun. I keep expecting a coyote, a great-horned owl or a fisher to do the job for me, but somehow year after year the cat manages to survive this gauntlet of eager housecat predators. Just lucky, I guess.

Found in the archives of a blog called an open chart:

i thought cinderella’s dancing was far more beautiful when she was barefoot–there was such grace to it, such childlike simplicity. when she put on her magical slippers, i thought something was lost.

Sometime last night while I was sleeping, spam comment #40,000 (since June!) stormed the Akismet-protected walls of Via Negativa and was thrown back down with the rest of the barbarian mob. I’m not sure why this blog has become such a magnet. Maybe it’s the sheer number of posts in the palisade, each with a spot to put a ladder up.

The opening line of an email addressed to my mother from an angry all-terrain vehicle (ATV) enthusiast, in response to a message of hers that was forwarded to an ATV riders’ list:

Education is the key to all things successful, and I see that you lack education in some of this arena.

The letter went downhill from there.

That was one of two things that gave me a belly laugh yesterday. The other was a story from the furnace repairman, Earl, who had come up to replace my wildly inaccurate analog thermostat with a state-of-the-art digital one. In the course of installing it, he mentioned that one can adjust it so that its actual temperature setting is hidden, allowing unsuspecting users to set it as high as they want without effect — a feature in high demand from local landlords who pay for their tenants’ heat, he said. “They want to turn it up to 80 degrees? Fine, it’ll read 80 degrees! And most of the time, they’ll be satisfied with that, even if it’s still just 70 in the apartment,” Earl said.

One problem tenant was an elderly woman who complained of being cold all the time. The whole building ran off one thermostat, and the landlord couldn’t turn it up high enough to satisfy her. So he called Earl. “We gave her her own thermostat. She watched us cut the hole in the wall and fish the wires through. What she didn’t know was that the wires didn’t connect to anything — they were just hanging loose in the wall. She turned that thermostat up to 85 degrees and that’s where it stayed. She said it felt good to finally get warm.”

Sometimes I tap my foot while I’m writing. Yesterday afternoon, one of the tenants in the crawl space under the house — probably either a porcupine or groundhog — started tapping back from about five feet away. I adjusted my speed and volume to match. It felt like we were making music together, you know? I’m just like those people who play saxophones to the humpbacked whales, only doubtless more irritating to the wild creature in question. After a while, the porcupine-or-groundhog’s tapping petered out, so I stopped too. I’ll let it think it won that round.

Just now, I started tapping as I wrote the preceding paragraph, and wouldn’t you know it — my unseen interlocutor answered with some taps of its own. I wonder how it’s making the noise? It has two tones: the aforementioned tap, and a lower-pitched knock. It’s not a gnawing sound, but I still picture large teeth connecting with the beams somehow. I refuse to believe that it’s actually tapping and knocking with one of its forefeet.

I notice that the new thermostat makes a click whenever it signals the furnace to run. It’s a loud tsk sound. The furnace comes on with a groan and a sigh.

December 5, 2006 by Dave Bonta

One shot

So there I am, searching for an image to serve as a header for the Festival of the Trees coordinating blog. (I had decided to switch to a theme with less annoying fonts.) It’s late morning, and I’ve been going through my photos for close to an hour. I’m getting frustrated, because I only have a small number of what I’d consider acceptable tree photos, and none of them look much good cropped to banner dimensions. I’m also feeling some frustration at the fact that I haven’t done anything that you might call creative so far today.

I glance up and find myself gazing out the window at a sudden snow squall. I relax and watch the swirling flakes for half a minute, then on an impulse, grab my camera and go out on the front porch. With the camera on wide angle and natural light settings, I shoot three pictures almost at random. Snowflakes are already beginning to hit the lens, so I scurry back inside. Reviewing the pictures on the LCD display, I delete two of them right away. But it occurs to me that the third — a shot into the sun, which was half-hidden by a scrim of snow cloud — might well yield a good banner image. I upload it to the computer and look at it in Photoshop, and sure enough, at about 50 percent magnification, there are plenty of likely banner-size images. I crop and save three in quick succession, and the first one I try at the Festival blog looks fine (I keep another in reserve at Flickr, just in case). It fits the season, which is nothing if not festive. Only after the photo is up and in use as the new header do I take the time to look at it more closely — the kind of looking that would have to precede image-making in almost any other medium than photography.

Sketch artists may draw a fairly negative moral from this story: look how totally inattentive one can be and still end up with a half-decent photo! Snapshot photography is obviously an invitation to semi-distracted, careless looking rather than genuine seeing.

All that may be true. But I am ridiculously pleased that I managed to get a good image largely “unencumbered by the thought process,” as they say on Car Talk.

Is it fair to say that I was inattentive, though? I don’t know. Thinking back on it, I’m pretty sure that I had the image I wanted to take already in my mind’s eye before I went out on the porch. Looking at the two images I got out of the one shot I saved, it’s evident that a couple things were working in my favor: the snowflakes were effectively backlit by the almost-shining sun, giving maximal contrast with the trees behind them; and the fact that it was the edge of the woods, as opposed to somewhere in the middle of it, meant that there were plenty of outstretched branches to suggest motion and energy.

I’m dwelling on this not to blow my own horn — I really don’t think of myself as anything but the rankest of amateur photographers — but because I’m fascinated by the creative process. In the close to two years that I’ve been doing this, I’ve found myself taking fewer and fewer shots of each subject. Quite often, the first picture snapped turns out to be the best, and I know it when I take it. But quite often, too, I’ve been looking at the subject for a good long time before I get the camera out. Take the recent deer skull pictures, for example: the skull sits right outside my door, in the lilac bush above my stone wall. I’ve been looking at it for months. The view from my porch? I take it in for at least a half-hour every morning.

I watched myself on Sunday, when I went for a walk around the mountain with the camera. As usual, I took a certain number of shots of things simply because they looked cool, and more or less knew when I took them that they wouldn’t be keepers. I got close with a couple, including a strikingly grotesque red maple tree that I’ve been photographing off and on for months without success. I think I may have the right angle now, but probably the light needs to be different. I spent a lot of time standing and looking at things, and found that simply by gazing with no particular expectations, a couple of times a viable shot would appear. One of the better photos featured a clump of turkey-tail fungi I’d never noticed before, and I took it with very little deliberation. But I’ve photographed other clumps of turkey-tail fungi, so quite possibly I already knew what angle to shoot from.

Has photography made me a better writer? I don’t know. More than anything, I suppose, it provides me with a creative outlet when I don’t feel up to writing, and the results often make good writing prompts, too. (This post doesn’t count, being more analytical than creative.) Has it changed the way I look at things? I doubt it. But I think it has reinforced some of the lessons I had already learned from three and a half decades of writing poems: to trust my impulses, and to work with whatever comes most readily to hand.

I’d be interested in hearing from other writers who have taken up photography. What, if anything, do you think you’ve learned from it?

December 4, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Exorcism

Our task, is it not an exorcism,
a response to the inscrutable challenge?
–Enrique Lihn

The world’s selves cure that short disease, myself.
–Randall Jarrell

__________

For the rest of my deer skull series (shot yesterday), see here. Mosaic created with fd’s Flickr Toys from my own photos: 1. black bear footprint, 2. mannequins, 3. Baltimore checkerspot, 4. orange and blue, 5. phoebe, 6. art for sale, 7. solitary vireo 2, 8. fawn face, 9. The Middlewesterner, 10. wheel bug with wasp, 11. mushroom beast, 12. cairn man, 13. locust borer, 14. turkey hen, 15. Carolina wren, 16. annual cicada on sidewalk crack, 17. spectacled owl on eggs, 18. wattled curassow, 19. Sri Lankan mask, 20. squirrel window, 21. field sparrow grooming 3, 22. snail 3, 23. wood turtle with its head drawn in, 24. convertible, 25. vulture 2

December 2, 2006 by Dave Bonta

The Collector

May, 1905. The run-down end
of a village in Hungary, where
the peasants are marrying
& giving in marriage, the same
as ever. A slight young man
with a silk bow fastened to his neck
is taking a strange-looking machine
from its case & assembling it
on a stool. The hurdy-gurdy player
watches as he inserts a cylinder
& attaches a brass horn.
What kind of music does it make,
he asks. All kinds & none,
says Bartók, his voice
crackling with wonder. It’s an ear
with a perfect memory.
He points to the stylus.
They finally invented a pen
that knows how to speak!

August. In Paris to compete
for the Prix Rubenstein, Bartók visits
the Moulin Rouge — so many butterflies
of the night with painted faces,
he writes in a letter to his mother —
& a cabaret called Le néant.
Here instead of tables
there are wooden coffins,
the walls are black & decorated
with human skeletons or parts
of skeletons, & the waiters
are dressed as if for a funeral.
The lighting is such that our lips
take on the color of blackberries,
our cheeks a waxen yellow,
nails violet — in other words,
we look like cadavers —
& for entertainment, one
of our party lets himself
be wrapped in a winding sheet
& changed into a skeleton
before our eyes.

1915. The Great War
restricts travel to a few counties
in the interior. Bartók writes,
I often leave the road & cut
through the woods, where I find
a great many insects.
That’s my other collection now —
it too will keep me occupied
long after my return.
The peasants here are poor
but very hospitable. I am bound
always by gratitude, never
quite free. But on Sundays
we go to collect songs
in the neighboring villages,
taking the long way around
& hiking through the mountains
whenever we can. I’ve started
taking photographs, too,
a difficult thing.

January 1943. New York.
At what will turn out to be
his last public performance,
Bartók is soloing with his wife Ditta
in the Concerto for Two Pianos
and Orchestra: the New York
Philharmonic, conducted by Fritz
Reiner. Suddenly Bartók veers
off-score, leaving his wife
& the others to grope along
after him as best they can
on this new path through
the same, steep terrain.
Afterwards, Reiner is furious.
How could you risk everything
on a whim? They are riding
in a New York taxi cab.
After a long silence, Bartók turns
to his wife beside him & says,
The tympanist! It was
the tympanist who started it.
He hit a wrong note — & suddenly
there was a new idea
that I had to try out right then
& follow wherever it led.
I couldn’t help it. That moment
will never come again.

December 1, 2006September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Carnival!

It’s blog carnival time! Hie thee over to Arboreality for Festival of the Trees 6 — Taking Root and Bearing Fruit, an exceptionally generous and well-organized link-fest. Take work off early if you have to.

I thought I’d get into the spirit of things with the above shot of an oak apple gall, made by — get this — an oak apple gall wasp. Last May, the parent wasp hijacked an oak leaf (still attached) and made it grow a brood chamber for her larvae, which eventually burst out, Alien-like, through the little holes at the front. Either that, or the holes were made by some predator going in. In any case, I was disappointed to see that my favorite invertebrate carnival, Circus of the Spineless, has been postponed for another week.

However, in scanning the list of just-published blog carnivals at BlogCarnival.com, I was very pleased to discover a scholarly section of the blogosphere I had no idea about represented at the Biblical Studies Carnival. If you’re as turned on as I am by topics such as “When did Yahweh and El merge?”, “Were the Galatians already circumcised?” (a seven-part series!) and “Going Potty in Ancient Times,” then please join me in checking out this carnival. If you’re after lighter fare, though, perhaps the Carnival of Satire will be more to your liking.

If you’re a bird-lover, you probably already know about I and the Bird, but if you don’t, the latest edition (#37) offers an excellent introduction to one of the original inspirations for the Festival of the Trees.

By the way, if you’d like to help spread the word about the Festival of the Trees with a colorful badge in your sidebar, just like the one I have —

or with a more minimalistic “antipixel” button —

we have the code available for copying and pasting at the coordinating blog’s new Promote page.

UPDATE (3:00 p.m.): I’ve just finished reading all the posts in the Festival. I learned about a form of meditation in which people try and imitate trees; trees wrapped entirely in straw for the winter; fungi that kill animals and share the spoils with their tree partners; the amazing xylothek; a tree so toxic that the smoke from its burning wood can kill people who inhale it; and medlars that must be bletted. If you want the links, you know where to go.

November 30, 2006 by Dave Bonta

In deer season

Fog until 9 a.m.
Sitting in their trees,
the hunters hear
every drip.

A silent crow flies past,
something dangling from its beak.

Water beads
on the coiled tendrils
of wild grapes.

Unmistakable, the sound of hooves
on wet leaves — until it stops.

The fog thins.
A pair of does stand frozen,
raising & lowering the white
alarms of their tails.

November 29, 2006September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Twelve reactions to a wood duck box

1. If there were enough hollow trees, we wouldn’t need to build bird boxes. There aren’t enough hollow trees because the forest is too young and/or too intensively managed. One biologist I know, who used to work for the state, told me that the more conscientious foresters were always asking him, “How many den trees should we leave per acre?” But he refused to give them an estimate. “As many trees as you can leave, wildlife will use them.”

2. Whoever made this box seems to have had a barn in mind: red paint, corrugated steel roof. “No room at the inn…”

3. One always sees wood duck boxes near the water’s edge. Seems logical enough, except that wood ducks often nest up to a mile from the water. When they are less than 24 hours old, the ducklings climb out of the nest, using the long, sharp claws peculiar to their species, fall to the ground and follow their mother on foot to the nearest swamp, pond or stream, never to return to their nest.

4. Two years ago, one of our hunter friends saw a female wood duck going into a hole in a chestnut oak right on top of the ridge, about three quarters of a mile from the nearest body of water. This past spring, a different hunter was amazed one morning to encounter a wood duck leading her ducklings right down the middle of the Plummer’s Hollow Road. If she had nested in the same tree as the year before, the ducklings’ journey would’ve been over a mile long. I suppose that would be like taking a toddler on a ten-mile hike — on an empty stomach.

5. “The mother calls them to her, but does not help them in any way. The ducklings may jump from heights of up to 89 m (290 ft) without injury,” says the Cornell Lab of Ornithology page. There’s a heart-warming children’s book in all this, just waiting to be written.

6. Nest predators such as crows, raccoons and skunks tend to follow forest edges, including riverbanks. Raccoons are major predators on wood duck boxes such as the one in the photo above, which is not protected with metal flashing or placement on a pole over deep water, as some conservationists recommend. I wonder if their vulnerability to edge-dwelling predators is part of the reason some wood ducks nest so far from water? Or are they forced to nest farther away simply because they can’t find anything closer?

7. Songbirds often have to deal with nest parasites of different species, such as cowbirds and cuckoos. According to the Cornell page, wood ducks can parasitize each other: “If nest boxes are placed too close together, many females lay eggs in the nests of other females. These “dump” nests can have up to 40 eggs.” Barnyard behavior, in other words. One wonders as well about the possibility of unnaturally ideal nest boxes producing local populations too large to be healthy, as has happened with humans ever since the growth of permanent settlements. “Disease and parasites are not usually important causes of death, although diseases such as duck malaria and duck viral enteritis are known to affect Wood Ducks,” says this page from a Canadian site.

6. Wood ducks are “easy to care for and breed and have been commonly bred on game farms and in zoos for decades,” according to the Game Bird And Conservationist’s Gazette.

7. Want to start your own wood duck colony? Unfinished lumber is best, says the Gazette.

A square plywood structure or hollowed log can be used, but our experience is that optimal success is achieved with an inside diameter of 9-12 inches. There should be an entrance hole of about 4 inches in diameter at the top. It is usually best to use rough-cut lumber for constructing the box so that the hen can more easily climb up and out of the hole. But whether smooth or rough is used, it is always a good idea to install a ladder on the front inside wall of the box to make it easy for the female to climb out. The front inside wall leading up to the hole should either be scored with a saw every one half inch all the way up, or cross-kleets nailed up this inside wall to climb on. Also a ramp that is scored or thin pieces of lath or other wood cross nailed on it for traction is important for helping pinioned birds get into the box, and this ramp should be placed from the entrance hole at about a 45 degree angle down to the water surface or ground for pinioned birds to climb up to the hole on. Several inches of nest material like wood shavings, grass, etc. should be put on the bottom for them to nest in.

“The hen.” “Pinioned birds.”

8. I wonder why captive ducks would need nesting material? In the wild, the female lines her nest with down plucked from her own breast.

9. Providing nesting boxes may not be the same thing as raising captive birds in a game farm, for their beauty or for canned “hunts.” But it does presuppose at least a yearly commitment to return, clean out and repair the boxes. I’m not sure we can ever rest easy about the long-term survival of a species so dependent on human goodwill for its nesting habitat. The best approach would be to let the forests mature, let nature take its course.

10. The wood duck’s closely related congener, the Mandarin duck, is very similar in ecological niche and behavior, including nesting habits. The wild populations have not been as fortunate as their North American cousins, however, and again, bad forestry is the culprit, according to this site:

In 1911, the Tung Ling forest, a Mandarin stronghold, was opened up for settlement and thereafter forests were cleared. By 1928 few sufficient breeding areas remained. The current Asian population may be under 20,000 birds. One factor that has helped the Mandarin to survive is their bad taste. These ducks are not hunted for food.

The wood duck, by contrast, has been heavily impacted by over-hunting in the past.

“Mandarin Ducks are frequently featured in Oriental art and are regarded as a symbol of conjugal affection and fidelity,” notes the Wikipedia. “In reality, though, the ducks find new partners each year.”

11. A webpage from Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources, which erroneously states that wood ducks may nest “within about a quarter mile of suitable brood rearing habitat,” adds this fascinating tidbit: “Occasionally, wood duck females will nest in chimneys.”

12. Though migratory, wood ducks “have a phenomenal ability to return to the same breeding area year after year,” says the Oakland Zoo. Their strongest commitment, in other words, is not to each other — as East Asian lore about the Mandarin would have us believe — but to place.
__________

Today is the deadline for the Festival of the Trees #6. Please send tree- or forest-related links to jadeblackwater at brainripples dot com for inclusion in the December 1st festival at Arboreality.

November 28, 2006February 18, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Building a better reader-trap

I’ve just introduced two new features that should improve navigability and access to the Via Negativa archives: an Advanced Search function (see sidebar, under “Search Via Negativa”) and a Table of Contents (see top of page). I can’t take credit for either of these innovations: both employ free, open-source software plugins, and as usual I needed my cousin Matt’s assistance to get them up and running.

Advanced Search allows boolean operations, searching by category, searching of comments, and other nifty features (see the plugin page). Let me know if you have any problems with it.

The Table of Contents page is exactly what it sounds like: a complete, clickable list of blog post titles arranged in reverse chronological order. It uses software developer and photographer Justin Blanton’s Smart Archives plugin. I did this as much for my own convenience as for anyone else’s — I can barely remember what I wrote last week, let alone last year. I’m beginning to think more seriously about pulling some material together for a book, and this new navigation tool should help me find it. But I hope it will also encourage visitors to settle in and browse. I want Via Negativa to become a total time-sink experience for everyone who stops by.

To make room for the TOC link at the top of the page, I’ve moved the blogroll link into the sidebar, under “Other Places.” The credits are linked in the footer as well as at the bottom of the sidebar (as Acknowledgements). I’ll probably make more changes in the days or weeks ahead (I really like Blanton’s idea of a website tour, for example). The challenge, as always, is to engage new visitors while also serving long-time readers. Please let me know if you have any ideas or suggestions. And thanks for reading.

November 27, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Quehanna Wild Area

We didn’t just drive two hours to look at ice on a mud puddle, did we?

No. It was more like an hour and a half in each direction.

And why not? Someday, ice might be as rare a sight here as in Macondo, the fictional town in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Fifty years from now, we’ll struggle to describe it to the young ‘uns, who by that time will have attention spans less than four seconds long. “It was kind of like cold glass,” we’ll begin, and stop when we see their eyes glazing over.

An old wound has exposed a patch of heartwood in a tulip poplar. I run my fingers over the rippled surface, like an illiterate person trying to make sense of the headlines. But this is ten-year-old news, at least. It’s useful to be reminded once in a while just how large a percentage of every healthy tree is technically dead.

How long could any of us stand without a sturdy superstructure of memories and habits? We shouldn’t call it heartwood, I suppose. The heart gets blamed for everything, the poor sap.

Dead trees of some species, such as oaks and hemlocks, disintegrate from the outside in. Bitter tars or tannins help preserve them from the agents of decay. For others — locusts, poplars, birches — the outer shell is the last thing to go.

Civilizations are like that too, aren’t they? I can imagine America’s thin plastic skin persisting for centuries after its Nutrasweet core has succumbed to rot. Meanwhile, the descendents of the Aztecs have managed to preserve the core of their intellectual tradition more or less intact for five hundred years after the Conquest, that apocalypse in which their ancestors had so heavily invested. To the Nahuat way of thinking, it is our waking life that is a shadow. Even the sun must travel to the underworld to get more light.

An almost-pure stand of white birches, I discover, is less impressive than a single white birch on a mountainside of black birches, reaching into the rhododendron like a blind man’s cane. I’ve never been to this particular spot before, but I’ve been to enough places like it to have a sense of what’s been lost and may never return, short of another ice age: the deep, spongy moss under a north-facing slope of towering hemlocks. The wind hissing through its teeth. Siskins and crossbills.

I suppose some of you might go to the woods for a dose of something called “nature,” which is alleged to have restorative properties. Not me. I go to hunt for ghosts.

Which is to say, for lights and mysteries. What left its white track on this soon-to-wither leaflet? Does the thick end of the path indicate metamorphosis, or sudden death?

Was all that summer green just a trick of the light?

I could ramble on, but we ought to get out of the woods now. The deer hunters are moving in for Monday’s rifle season opener, cleaning out their cabins and staking out their favorite spots, on which we have probably been trespassing all afternoon. I guess some hikers are after a wilderness experience — whatever that means — but whenever I visit a new place, I like to speculate about who might’ve been there before me and how they might have seen it. Up that ravine, someone’s cousin might’ve shot an albino buck, and got maimed in a car accident three weeks later as a result. Along this very section of trail, some toddler out with her grandparents may have encountered ice for the very first time. You never know.
__________

As always, be sure to click on the photos to get the blow-ups.

November 25, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Felling the balm of Gilead

After strong winds brought a dead limb down onto the electric lines leading into my parents’ house, my dad decided that the last of the big balm of Gilead poplars would have to go.

The balm of Gilead, Populus balsamifera, is a strange tree, growing quickly to large proportions, as befits a colonist of floodplains. Limbs shoot out haphazardly at all angles, giving this far-northern cousin of the cottonwood a rather ungainly appearance. But what was a boreal, wet-soil species doing on our dry, Pennsylvania mountaintop? At the end of the 19th century, balm of Gileads were prized for their reputed medicinal properties, and must’ve been sold through nurseries. Though completely unrelated to the Old World trees of the same name, their buds exude a sticky substance with many of the same properties as the resin of their namesake.

Populus Candicans is called Balm of Gilead in America. The buds are used, and called Balm of Gilead Buds, as are those of P. Nigra and P. balsamifera, the product of the last being imported into Europe under the name of Tacomahaca. They are covered with a fragrant, resinous matter, which may be separated in boiling water, the odour being like incense, and the taste bitter and rather unpleasant. They are stimulant, tonic, diuretic, and antiscorbutic. A tincture of them is useful for complaints of the chest, stomach, and kidneys, and for rheumatism and scurvy. With lard or oil they are useful as an external application in bruises, swellings, and some cutaneous diseases. In ointments they are a little inferior to paraffin as a preventive of rancidity.

The bark of P. balsamifera is tonic and cathartic.

Some contemporary herbalists apparently still use balm of Gilead buds. I think my mom experimented with them back in the 70s or early 80s, when she went through a period of enthusiasm for herbs and wild foods, but found them too much trouble.

When my parents bought the place in 1971, there were five of the big poplars growing around the houses. The biggest one stood at the corner of the stone wall in front of the guest house, where I live now, and where my grandparents spent the summers back in the 70s. In a series of photos of the farm from 1919, the Guest House Tree, as we called it, was already fairly good-sized. By the early 70s, its top-most limbs were beginning to die. About fifteen feet off the ground, its massive trunk divided into three, and one of the sections hung dangerously over the house. Poplar wood rots quickly, and Dad and Grandpa knew that they couldn’t waste much time deliberating about it. We were poor; hiring a professional tree removal service wasn’t an option, so they had to do it themselves, with only a small farm tractor to pull the cable.

It was a learning experience. Dad says he didn’t notch one of the cuts quite right, felling one of the trunks too close to the spring house and shaving off the eaves. The cut into the rearmost of the three trunks was notched correctly, but the ground was too soft and wet and the tractor began to dig in. When Dad backed it up a little to try and get a running start, the tree started going back toward the house. So we raced to the barn and carried down several armloads of split wood, which Dad packed into the mud under and in front of the tractor tires for a distance of about ten feet. That gave him just enough traction to pull the tree over in the right direction. “That was a little tense,” he remembers.

In the decades since, we’ve taken out three more balm of Gileads that used to stand in a line on the southwest side of the main house, and a tall black locust on the northeast side. The last and youngest of the balm of Gileads stood upslope from the former line of three by about twenty feet, and was probably the offspring of one of them. Though ninety feet tall and close to three feet in diameter at breast height, it may not have been more than fifty years old. It probably had another couple decades of life in it, at least, but its proximity to the house and to electric lines made us unwilling to take the risk.

There was really only one direction the tree could fall without crushing a lot of other yard trees, not to mention the lines and house: down toward the edge of the woods. And it was not at all clear that tree was inclined to go in that direction. Fortunately, though, we’re no longer dependent on an old farm tractor for these kinds of jobs.

So there we were on Black Friday, Dad, my brother Steve and me. It was a beautiful, clear morning with no wind. I had just spent the last three hours working on a thoughtful and sensitive poem, but now it was time to go kill a large tree. Dad had bought a new, 125-foot-long steel cable, and while he and Steve bent and bolted the two ends into sturdy loops, I took the chainsaw to some fallen trees that blocked the bulldozer’s passage along the edge of woods.

A nuthatch worked its way down the furrowed trunk of the doomed tree, and chickadees flitted through its branches. Steve climbed the ladder to wrap a logging chain around the trunk while Dad maneuvered the dozer into position. The cable was just barely long enough. I had been appointed to do the cutting, not necessarily because I am the most adept with a chainsaw, but because Dad is the only one of us who knows how to operate the bulldozer, and Steve has a wife and kid to worry about.

I’ve cut down very few living trees in my life — certainly nothing approaching the balm of Gilead in size. When I made the first, diagonal cut for the notch, the tree began to bleed profusely. I’m not kidding: much to Steve’s and my surprise, several quarts of sap came streaming out of the wound. Then, as I worked on the bottom cut of the notch, I noticed that the top cut was already gapping open by maybe an inch and a half. Holy shit, I said to myself, this tree does not want to fall downhill. As soon as I finished the notch, I signaled to Dad, and he pulled the cable taut.

The wood was very soft, but — fortunately, perhaps — the chain on the larger of our two chainsaws hadn’t been sharpened in a while, so it cut nice and slowly. I didn’t want to overshoot by mistake. Given the width of the tree where I was cutting at a little below waist height, I had to work on the back cut from both sides. When only a two- to three-inch hinge remained at the center of the tree, I put down the chainsaw and picked up my camera. Only then did I give the signal for Dad to drive forward.

The tree came down more quickly than I expected. It flattened a couple of saplings on the way down, but otherwise fell pretty much where we had wanted. Steve and I cut the bottom fifteen feet of the trunk into three, enormously heavy logs, partly to free the cable, and partly to clear the end of the “lawn.” We pushed the logs down the slope, which was fun — one of them took out most of a multiflora rose bush — but the rest of the tree’s carcass will remain where it fell, a bonanza for invertebrates and everything that feeds on them. It may also act as a shelter of sorts for shrubs and tree seedlings — deer often seem less likely to browse amid the tangled limbs of fallen trees.

I’d feel bad about cutting down any tree, let alone one as large and unique as a mature balm of Gilead. It’s very strange to look up at my parents’ house and not see that tree looming behind it — kind of like the New York skyline after 9/11. On the other hand, I was happy that everything had gone well, and I was alive to write about it.

“So now that you’ve conquered a tree, doesn’t that make you feel like a man?” Steve asked jokingly. “Yes, it does,” I said. And it did — at least until the adrenalin buzz wore off.

In the silence after
the poplar crashed to earth,
a nuthatch calling.
__________

The entire series of photos from yesterday’s tree-felling is here. Don’t forget to send tree-related links to jadeblackwater [at] brainripples [dot] com by November 29 for the next Festival of the Trees.