Via Negativa

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.

November 24, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Scissor, Paper

It started with angels:
a chain gang, joined
at the wings.
Or children holding hands,
their blank faces
& androgynous bodies
ready for the magic
of markers. Seven
to eight, it seems,
was the Age of Paper.
In the lunchroom,
older boys passed on
the lore of cootie catchers
& diamond-shaped
footballs folded
from a notebook page.
Back in class,
we made snowflakes
& taped them to the high
classroom windows,
bait for the gods of snow
& early dismissal.
In December, we draped
the blackboard & doorway
with Christmas chains,
red linked with green
linked with red,
& come February, learned
the simplest cut of all:
the craft-paper heart.
This time, though green
might’ve seemed more apt,
only red would do.
The teacher showed us
how to turn them into cards
with the addition of
a recipient’s name
on the outside
& some simple message
hidden in the fold, making
a virtue of the necessary,
indelible crease.

November 22, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Wilderness

Here’s a new definition I just thought up this morning:

Wilderness is any place where human beings can know themselves to be endangered.*

__________

*The Wilderness Act of 1964, written by Pennsylvania native Howard Zahniser, defines wilderness as

an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.

“Untrammeled” is a great word — and, as advocates for more eastern Wilderness like to point out, it is not a synonym for “pristine.” Few parts of the North American continent have been unaffected by their 10+ millennia of human occupation. But I think it’s also critical to note, pace timber industry apologists, that the chief “management” tool of the Native Americans was fire: an essentially untamable force whose careful manipulation requires the very opposite of managerial hubris. I’m not sure whether periodic burning qualifies as trammeling — “enmesh[ing] in or as if in a fishing net; hinder[ing] the activity or free movement of,” as the Free Online Dictionary puts it — but I’m quite sure that fire suppression amounts to the worst kind of trammeling.

Wilderness has roots in our Biblical heritage, as I’ve mentioned here before. In the Gospels, Jesus is tested in the wilderness for forty days, following the time-worn practice of prophets and leaders in the Tanakh, where

Desert or wilderness (tohu) is portrayed as part of a separate order that in some sense (as the tohu-wa-bohu of Genesis 1:2) predates and gives rise to Creation; thus, it is a place of testing and renewal (for Jacob/Israel, David, Elijah, etc.) and an image almost of Emptiness in the Buddhist sense.

American Indians, too, valued wild areas for their power to heal and transform, usually through some harrowing encounter with ultimate otherness.

So from a humanistic as well as an ecological perspective, wilderness is much more than a mere park — in fact, in many ways it is the opposite of a park. Though Yellowstone National Park was the world’s first (1872) federally protected area devoted to nature conservation, its original conception was flawed in three significant ways. First, it was founded upon the white supremacist doctrine of Manifest Destiny. Not only were the Indians then resident in the park not consulted about its creation, but they were driven out as so much vermin. Second, the expulsion of humans was followed by the eradication of natural predators, in accordance with the Western European demonization of carnivores. Third, we now know that, big as it is, Yellowstone National Park is still too small to fully preserve the genetic diversity of the species it is intended to protect. Conservation biologists now recognize that effective conservation areas cannot simply be set apart from the rest of the world, like modern versions of Noah’s Ark. Boundary fences, too — despite what I wrote about “gated communities” the other day — are an impermissible form of trammeling.

Wilderness must be web-like, with protected nodes and linkages to allow the free interchange of genetic materials — hence, for example, the international effort known as the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative. For this to work, we have to stop thinking in dichotomous terms — humans versus nature, urban (or reservation) squalor versus pristine park. The human and non-human realms must be much more effectively interwoven, while preserving the sovereignty of each. In human-dominated areas, people must learn to become better hosts for nature and for “the widow, the orphan, and the resident alien,” as the Bible always puts it. In wilderness, the tables are turned and it is we who are poor and homeless.

Incidentally, if you want to keep abreast of news affecting wilderness and wildlife in the United States, be sure to bookmark Alan Gregory’s Conservation News.

November 21, 2006September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

B-ing

What begins with b? Today was the first clear day all month, but my mind was a blank. I stared at the screen for a while, then wrote the single word basket. An empty container made of dried grass.

Black walnut trees.

Black raspberry shadows — this year’s dead canes.

barn

Barn.

Bottles in my window, all of which once held medicine: Bromo-Seltzer, Phillip’s Milk of Magnesia, Chamberlain’s Cough Remedy, Hewlett Bros Triple Extract, A. Lancaster’s Indian Vegetable Jaundice Bitters, and Backache and Kidney Mixture Number 20.

Better than nothing, as the drug test subject said when he learned he’d been given the placebo.

November 20, 2006 by Dave Bonta

On Stilts

She was the only child, she says — she never
got to play. Mother put her to work as soon
as she could walk, a brand-new list of chores
every morning. Pennsylvania Germans
were very judgmental, she says,
her eyes made enormous by thick glasses.
Whenever anything bad happened, it could only be
punishment for some slip: the Lord is good.

Now, with both parents dead, she thought
she was unlikely ever to go back.
But after the surgery, she had to lie prone
for two weeks while her eyes refilled with fluid.
Short trips to the bathroom were O.K.,
as long as she didn’t look at anything
but the floor. If she tilted her head back just once,
the ophthalmologist warned, her eyes might collapse
into their sockets. She felt like a slug,
complete with retractable eyestalks.

Her husband bought her a laptop
& placed it on a chair at the foot of the bed
where she could comfortably reach the keys,
& she bookmarked pictures of the sky.
They helped her fall asleep — a few, difficult hours
wrested from the interminable wakefulness.
She dreamt of crossing darkened fields
& forests on tall stilts, the lamp-lit kitchens
of her childhood teetering below.

November 19, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Gated community?

“Your road is much smoother than I expected!”

So said a recent visitor from the Granite State about her first encounter with the Plummer’s Hollow Boulevard (take that, you Pennsylvania wusses!). Lorianne also pointed out that, in light of our sturdy, locked gate at the bottom of the mile-and-a-half-long road, “You live in a gated community!”

“How can two houses containing three people be a community?” I said indignantly. “We’re an extended family!”

“That’s only if you exclude the animals,” she said. “What about all the birds and deer and chipmunks?”

It’s true, we do have the property posted for hunting by written permission only. That’s gating of a sort, I guess. On the other hand, we welcome casual hikers up the hollow road, and even provide a self-guided nature tour pamphlet in a literature box at the bottom. But we also have a sign a mile and a quarter up asking them to respect our privacy and go no farther. Our hospitality has its limits.

We certainly exclude unauthorized vehicles. I spent a couple hours Saturday morning with my brother and some hunter friends fiercely posting and re-blazing one section of our boundary with a new neighbor, who had begun to demonstrate an alarming tendency to disrespect the line and ride an off-road vehicle onto our land. Over the years, we have fought many such incursions, with a new incident once every two or three years. We’re usually nice the first time we encounter someone on an off-road vehicle, and increasingly hostile thereafter if they don’t quickly take the hint and stay off, eventually resorting to foul language and the use of firearms. Living in the country presents the committed pacifist with almost as many dilemmas as living in the city — though probably neither sort of place is as bad as certain housing subdivisions with their incessant leaf blowers and anti-clothesline ordinances. Actual gated communities seem to illustrate better than anything else the truth of Sartre’s dictum that “hell is other people.”

Though I think she was half-joking, Lorianne was right to suggest that our sense of community must extend beyond human beings, and encompass the entire local ecosystem. So the list of unwelcome visitors to the gated community of Plummer’s Hollow includes loggers, miners, industrial wind plant developers, and land speculators of all kinds. “Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place,” says the Bible (Isaiah 5:8). Nature’s hospitality, too, has its limits, and a day of reckoning is fast approaching.

Lorianne was amused to discover gates within gates. At the heart of our property we have erected a three-acre deer exclosure — a place where large herbivores are excluded by an eight foot-tall fence and three gates. We hope that the Turtle Woods Wildflower Sanctuary, as we call it, will provide an ecological baseline to help us measure the success of our controlled hunting program on the mountain.

Ironically, perhaps, the point of most of this exclusiveness is to provide a space for the unimpeded recovery of wildness. We are extremely wary of imposing too many of our own demands and desires on the land, believing that wilderness is not simply an area where human presence is minimized, but where larger-than-human forces are given the respect they deserve. We encourage deer hunting because we are pragmatic enough to recognize that the artificial removal of the natural predators of deer over a century ago has led to severe ecological disruptions. We look forward to the eventual return of cougars and wolves to the forests of the East, but in the meantime, human hunters will have to try and fill the gap as best they can.

So I think it’s fair to say that by placing strict limits on what we can do with the land, we count ourselves among the excluded. Buying land and erecting real or figurative fences around it carries the risk that one will come to view it as, in some ultimate sense, one’s own — a mere piece of property to dispose of however one wishes. And there’s probably no firmer barrier to understanding than that.

Let’s remember: a gate is not just a barrier, but a portal, as well. John Muir wrote that “the clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness.” Any space between two trees can become a gateway of sorts for anyone whose mind is fully open to what the land itself is trying to express.

November 17, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Bear lines

The rain lets up.
A pileated woodpecker
hammers on my house.

Autumn for the trees
is a second springtime
for the rocks.

Four parallel lines
on the maple log
where the bear thought better of it.

This fall, once again,
I’m shocked to see how much the leaves
had managed to hide.
__________

Yesterday, when the rain eased up in the early afternoon, I took my camera for a walk down the hollow. For folks with high-speed internet access, here’s a ten-photo slideshow of the results. Dial-up users can browse the photos here.

November 16, 2006 by Dave Bonta

November rain

Rain makes the November woods less gray: tree trunks green up as the moss swells and lichens open their pores. The contrast between dark bareness and bright accretion is repeated in the stones of my garden, which remind me of barnacled sea creatures. In back of the house, beyond my kitchen window, the leafless black raspberry canes glisten, a tangle of arches in every shade of purple.

At least it’s a warm rain. I go out to take a leak in the driveway, and find myself gazing at the wild rosehips in front of the wall — such an enticing red! A squirrel crouches on a branch to husk a walnut, fur twitching under the too-short porch of its tail.

Flooded out of its hole beside the old stone well, a garter snake, too, looks unusually brightly colored. At my approach, it shrinks and expands simultaneously, curling into an S shape and flattening its body: yellow stripes on dark brown like a multi-lane highway viewed from the air. All empty threat, of course, but still I keep my distance. Up at the bird feeder, the tufted titmice look like punk rockers with their crests matted into liberty spikes.

It’s raining, it’s pouring, we used to chant when we were five — but nobody’s snoring here yet. In this kind of rain, you’d think the damn gutters would clean themselves, wouldn’t you? I brew a rare second cup of coffee.

The wind is from the east, and the barometric pressure is low enough to be detectable as a sort of nameless elation. I keep going out onto the porch to watch the shreds of cloud scudding in over the treetops, gray against the white cloud ceiling.

Loud at first, the rain
grows quieter by the hour
on a hillside deep
in fallen leaves.

November 15, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Wild geese

My daughter — the one I never had — I’ve given her up for dead. Words in a dream. Whose? Pale gray skin rising out of sleep, this sky. One size fits all. Wild geese so low over the trees, you can hear their wingbeats.

Last night, my long-dead grandmother, impossibly wrinkled. We were standing in different lines; I don’t think she saw me. –Do you have anything to declare? –No, nothing. It’s true, she rarely did.

This morning, the smell of skunk goes well with coffee. The trees are bare now except for the beeches & some of the oaks, the big ones. Standing under them, I can’t snap a photo without freezing a leaf in mid-fall.

How can we live without the unknown before us? Certainty is a nightmare. At least when I dream, I know I’m dreaming! But the bench looks better empty, I decide, & wander off.

November 14, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Abusing the Ladder

“Do not misuse or abuse a ladder.”
safety instructions on the side of a 28-foot extension ladder

The ladder makes a perilous bridge, but it’s better than nothing. The ditch by the pasture only runs when there’s a flood, & then it’s a torrent. So I ran for the ladder, laid boards down & drove the goats across it in single file. It only bowed a little.

Another time we hung it in the well all summer — a handy rack for the hams, to keep them cool. Whenever we needed one, I’d climb down the ladder with a rope around my waist, groping around between my legs for the sweating bag of meat. Somehow, pigs belong under the earth. It’s where they’re trying to go all their lives, pushing their snouts into the soil like soft bulldozers.

When we were making bricks & needed a mold, once again — you guessed it — we used the ladder. Mud, straw and sun, a simple recipe. True, we got fined for building without a permit, & we had to take the tower down. But it sure made people talk!

Now for the barn dance, they’re giving the ladder pride of place in the hayloft, in front of the amps. Some kid with a drumstick is banging on the rungs, eking out a tune from all the variations of abuse.

Outside, the fiddler draws his bow against the barbed wire fence, like the louder little brother of the wind: an eerie sound, as unapproachable as the horizon. It makes me want to climb on out of here.
__________

Thanks to Blue Abstractions for the oddmusic gallery.

For a righteous rant on warning signs and safety labels, see here.