Category: Trees

I like trees. I like them a lot.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Learning from the ivorybill


Drawing by Mark Bowers, from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service website
(link via The Daily Blatt)

1. Mr. Wile E.

A week ago, when I heard the news about the rediscovery of the ivory-billed woodpecker, I was – as I mentioned – afflicted with a sudden and unaccustomed surge of joy and hopefulness about the state of the planet. After a couple hours of reading on-line articles and corresponding with my two birder-brothers about it (my parents being on vacation and out of e-mail reach), it occurred to me to send a message to the listserve of the Pennsylvania Biodiversity Partnership in my capacity as co-chair of the Public Lands Committee of the Pennsylvania Chapter of Sierra Club. After a link to the Cornell Lab and a few other remarks, I concluded, “The message for Pennsylvania is clear: Recover It (old-growth forest) And They Will Return.”

Yes, that’s right. Even in the midst of my jubilation, I couldn’t resist putting my own spin on things. And in fact, it bore satisfactory results: it sparked a good discussion of old-growth on the listserve, and my reaction against my own opportunism led to a half-decent poem two days later.

But Coyote wasn’t fooled. I neglected to mention this at the time, in part because I figured y’all might suspect me of making it up. But it’s true. It was about nine o’clock that evening, and I had been listening to some of my favorite country blues cassettes (remember cassette tapes?) while drinking three or four celebratory bottles of homebrew. (It was, unfortunately, too cold to sit outside.) Then I got hungry, and remembered some leftovers up at the other house, in my parents’ refrigerator. The night was dark. Just as I got to the top of the hill, a coyote let loose from the middle of the field – less than a hundred yards away. The hair stood straight up on the back of my neck. He or she howled a couple of times, then barked like a dog: Har! Har! Har! Har! Har! I scuttled inside, grabbed the highest-powered flashlight I could find, and shone it back and forth across the field, hoping to pick up the eye shine, but the animal had already slipped away.

Now, to appreciate this incident, especially if you’re from out west, you have to understand a couple of things. First, that eastern coyotes don’t vocalize nearly as often as their western counterparts. Second: the eastern coyote is, depending on which biologists you believe, either a brand-new animal here in the east, or a once-eradicated species that reintroduced itself in the latter half of the 20th century. The latter theory postulates that European settlers, being unfamiliar with the North American coyote, simply mis-identified it as the “brush wolf” – which they then proceeded to wipe out as quickly as they could. The problem with that theory is that coyotes are virtually impossible to eradicate. Since they have always played second fiddle to wolves, it makes sense that they would evolve an extremely flexible population ecology: the more you persecute them, the faster they reproduce. Gray wolves, having evolved (at least since the demise of the dire wolf) as top dogs, have no such resilience.

But canids speciate as much by culture as by genetics, which is to say that species boundaries are readily crossed, and only mutual hostility and fear of being eaten prevent interbreeding – 99 percent of the time. A DNA analysis of eastern coyotes did strongly suggest that interbreeding with timber wolves – the smaller subspecies of wolves inhabiting eastern Canada – had occurred in the recent past. But who knows? Perhaps there were a number of regional subspecies in 1600. Some biologists argue that the Pennsylvania “brush wolf” was neither gray nor timber wolf, but the red wolf of the southern Appalachians.

Does Coyote care about all this? I think not. This new/old wild canid has figured out that frequent howling in the densely populated east is not advantageous. Nearly every hunter in this state owns a powerful spotlight, and coyotes may be shot anytime as a varmit. The easiest way to do this, I’m told, is by playing tapes of their howls. Meanwhile – and very anecdotally – I hear from folks in Vermont and West Virginia that an even larger coyote is beginning to appear. It’s probably only a matter of time before wild canids in the northeast switch from opportunistic predation to direct reliance on our hugely over-abundant white-tailed deer herd. I hope.

Of more direct relevance to the ivorybill rediscovery is the fact that the presence of coyotes in the state was officially denied for years – decades, in fact. Even as sightings grew more frequent and the evidence more and more overwhelming, spokespeople for our state wildlife agency continued to deny the obvious. The name of this agency might tell you why: it’s the Pennsylvania Game Commission. It derives almost all its funding from the sale of hunting licenses, and all license increases must be approved by the state legislature. Game Commission folks knew that the interval between official acknowledgement of the coyote’s presence and demands for its eradication would be about two or three nanoseconds, so they stalled as long as they could. When it finally became impossible to deny the obvious – some fifteen years ago now – they announced it as a wonderful new addition to the state’s already impressive roster of legally trapable and shootable critters. They made it sound like such a good thing, in fact, that to this day they are regularly accused by more credulous members of the hunting fraternity of having deliberately introduced the animal, as part of vast and sinister conspiracy between anti-hunters, the Audubon Society, and the United Nations. These are, of course, the same anti-hunters who want to slaughter all the deer in the state. As Dave Berry would say, I swear I’m not making this up.

In fact, I know this guy who knows a guy who drives truck, and one time about fifteen years ago, after a couple beers, he says to my buddy, “You won’t believe what I got in the back of my truck…”

2. How much old-growth is enough?

One of the first two responses to my e-mail to the Biodiversity Partnership listserve raised some interesting questions:

I have been told the ivory-billed woodpecker has been seen by outdoorsmen in the Arkansas area for years. No one of any “authority” believed the people who saw them. Now that some upper-shelf person saw one, it is now for real. Great, but the same can be said for other animals in the eastern US: cougars, badgers, wolves, lynx, Allegheny wood rat etc. come to mind. It is time we get our heads out of the sand and put a little effort into documenting other animals in our midst.

The author, Gene Odato – chief of the Rural and Community Forestry section of the Pennnsylvania Bureau of Forestry – responded to my spin with some of his own. If some of these supposedly endangered or regionally extinct species are, in fact, present, then what do we have to worry about? If anything, we have too much old-growth – and not enough young forests.

I would like to know more about the nature of that forest in the Cache and White River bottoms: year last cut, degree/type of management, etc. That would be very instructive to us all.

I would also like to know more of the management details of the land the woodpecker inhabits. As for PA or any other state: How much old-growth is enough without damaging the lives of the people who depend on the wise use of the forest? The public land such as the national forest and in particular the state forest of PA already manage 30% to 50% of the forest as old-growth. How much more do we need without sacrificing the habitat needs of hundreds of wildlife and plant species that depend on early successional forest, poletimber-sized forest?

I asked my brother Mark to do some digging – something which, as a geographer, birder and conservationist, he didn’t have to be asked about twice. In fact, even before he headed over to Arkansas last Saturday, he fired off a preliminary e-mail in response to some of Gene’s concerns.

All I can say at this point is that Arkansas appears to be quite a bit more advanced than Pennsylvania – after all, its motto is “The Natural State” rather than the “Keystone State.” Arkansas parks are some of the most impressive I’ve seen. It takes some guts or gall to block a bridge across the Mississippi River from this county (Bolivar), the epicenter of cotton production in the US, across to Ark, but they did it years ago to avoid destroying the White River Refuge. Thanks to the White River National Wildlife Refuge, there is no unbroken road along the Mississippi River on the west side of the river through Arkansas. (Where this bird was rediscovered, however, is right off the Interstate, well north.)

I’m just not quite convinced that people up in the northeast can conceive of the size of some of the wildernesses down here, nor understand that the old-growth was logged as recently as the 1940s, and never really completely, at least in Arkansas and Louisiana (Mississippi is a different, sadder story, of course) – the Big Forest, like this side of the river, was mostly wilderness until the end of the 1800s, so analogous to the Big Thicket [in Texas]. There are still several million acres of flooded bottomland hardwood forest in the lower Mississippi River Valley, and probably the single highest biodiversity indices, as well as biomass production. The Mississippian civilizations arose here; Poverty Point mound civilization, living with and off the untold millions of waterfowl and fish and etc. and so forth.

The point is that the region has been all but forgotten by most conservationists – sort of like living in Brazil and forgetting the Pantanal or whatever. The Mississippi, White, Cache, Pearl and other rivers are still free-flowing and undammed. There are still virgin canebrakes (bamboo forests) on private land. I’m already getting a bit impatient at urbanites who pay attention to areas only when Audubon or the Conservancy make them into big destinations. I wrote about listening to local voices in my book on Honduras. Almost no one does that here.

3. Accomodating a “magnificent misanthrope”

The White River flows south, joining the Arkansas just above its junction with the Mississippi in the middle of a huge roadless area comprising some 125,000 acres, much of it still in private hands. The White River National Wildlife Refuge (NWR) stretches north along the river from there, joining with the Cache River and its attendant NWR just south and for many miles north of Interstate 40. It was to the latter location that Mark and family headed last Saturday after motoring up the fabled Highway 61, unable to simply cross the river at Rosedale due to the State of Arkansas’ atavistic dislike for Progress.

As his e-mail indicated, the verified ivorybill sightings reported in Science were all along the Cache River, within a very short distance of the interstate. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service folks at the Cache River NWR were very forthcoming and were able to answer all his questions, he said: he and his family were virtually the only visitors to arrive there all day. The wildlife refuge had designated special observation points beyond which it intends to restrict access – 5,000 of the refuge’s 60,000 acres have been closed. All the high officialdom were there, braced for an onslaught of crazed birders that never happened. It seems the word had gone out over birders’ listserves to stay home and leave the ivory-billed woodpecker in peace.

The only problem, Mark said, is that no one really knows what disturbs an ivory-billed woodpecker. Various theories are circulating about why the bird has proved so darned elusive for the last half-century. Perhaps, as my brother Steve suggested last week, it has learned and inculcated in its young an extreme wariness toward human beings – “a magnificent misanthrope,” he called it. Mark replied that this seemed plausible – at least based on his experience with some rare birds and mammals in Central America – but added that the White River area, which is now presumed to harbor a breeding population of ivorybills, is formidably remote and difficult of access. Ivory-billed woodpeckers don’t migrate, and the literature says that their breeding territories can be quite small for a bird of that size – no more than a couple square kilometers.

So presumably the male sighted up near I-40 is a dispersing juvenile looking for new territory. What makes this area attractive? It harbors the oldest known stand of bald cypresses in the United States, Mark said – trees over two thousand years old.

Mark went on to say that – contrary to the essay by John Fitzpatrick that I quoted here last week – the forests down there were never completely cut-over. According to the Cache River NWR managers, many patches of older forest remain, though none of them may be “virgin” – the oaks, pines and other valuable trees were, indeed, all taken at some point, but many stands of bald cypress and black gum were not. Thus, the ivorybill probably never ran out suitable nesting trees.

The limiting factor, then, back during the most severe bottleneck period following the end of the timber boom, would have been food. As a woodpecker, the ivorybill has a very high-protein diet (though it does eat lots of fruit, too). According to stomach-content analyses performed in the early 20th century, most of its protein was derived from one family of insects – longhorn beetles. The larvae of these beetles live in the wood of standing dead trees, including oaks and pines – the species that were high-graded out of the swamps some eighty years ago. There must have been some awfully lean years for an awfully small and secretive remnant population of ivory-billed woodpeckers.

Now these trees are recovering – and even better, they’re dying and being left to rot in place rather than being “salvaged,” as would probably happen if it were a Pennsylvania state park or forest. Mark noted that floods and beavers are part of the natural disturbance regime of Mississippi floodplain forests; high waters regularly kill pines and oaks without bothering the true swamp species – cypress and black gum. The NWR managers told him that they adopt a passive management approach to reforestation. The Cache River website lists “Protect and restore the bottomland hardwood resources of the basin” as one of the four, main Refuge Objectives. Management Tools include public hunting and “Water management for waterfowl, wading and shore birds.” In Dahomey NWR on the Mississippi side, Mark said, this includes the occasional dynamiting of beaver dams.

This area of Arkansas – the Big Woods – is wild. It’s home to a healthy population of black bear, and panthers are moving in. The human population is low and dropping at about ten percent a decade, Mark said. The Fish and Wildlife Service people told him that the local reaction to news of the ivorybill’s rediscovery seemed mostly positive, and this isn’t surprising – wildlife watching, hunting and fishing already make a substantial contribution to the local economy. It’s a myth that public opinion changes more slowly in rural areas than in supposedly more progressive urban and suburban areas, Mark said.

4. Disturbing conclusions

Lessons for conservation elsewhere may be more elusive than either Gene or I were originally willing to acknowledge. The fact is, every bioregion is unique; ecologists have learned the hard way that forest succession in the east, where most canopy replacement occurs as a result of single-tree or small stand mortality, is more the exception than the rule. The so-called edaphic climax model first developed in the northeast United States still seems to be a pretty good fit for our region. But in areas of complex physical geography like the Appalachians, natural disturbance regimes may change radically over very short distances – nothing like the broad, virtually flat and geologically uniform floodplain of the Mississippi. And while we do have a few possible old-growth obligate species, present or extirpated – northern flying squirrel, pine martin, sugar maple longhorn beetle – the list is much longer for species that simply do best in mature forests, or in forests with many old-growth characteristics. Features such as standing dead timber, downed woody debris, multiple age classes – including many 150-year-plus specimens – and a healthy humus layer provide optimal habitat for many of Penn’s Woods’ most treasured species, including: winter wren, Acadian flycatcher, black-throated green warbler, blackburnian warbler, magnolia warbler, Swainson’s thrush, brown creeper, blue-headed vireo, cerulean warbler, yellow-bellied flycatcher, brook trout, goshawk, barred owl, fisher and lynx; many slow-dispersing spring ephemeral wildflowers, such as painted trillium and dwarf ginseng; most lungless salamanders, which can take over a hundred years to re-colonize a clearcut; and unknown numbers of native ferns, mosses, liverworts, lichens, fungi and invertebrates.

Actually, this situation is not atypical of forest ecosystems anywhere in the world. At least among charismatic megafauna, the number of species completely intolerant to human disturbance is very small, but the number that depend on the continuation of something very like what they evolved in is – as one would expect – very large. Many advocates for the timber industry like to point to studies that show edge and early-succession species declining, but in some cases these are species native to the Midwest whose ranges have expanded only in recent times as the land was cleared. In other cases they are species that might have been naturally rare, dependent on natural clearings resulting from the occasional stand-clearing ice storm or tornado.

Concerns about balancing the needs of humans with those of other animals are very appropriate. By why should one species monopolize 90 percent of natural resources and dominate virtually every bioregion? There’s something awfully depressing about the idea that every species and natural community on the planet persists only because human beings have decided they can tolerate its presence. This is a far, far cry from the view of Creation expressed by the Voice out of the whirlwind in the Book of Job. To pretend that we can and should manage all of nature is sheer hubris. And a narrow, species-by-species approach to conservation not only misses the larger picture, it ignores the magnitude of what we have lost in terms of sheer plant and animal biomass. The forests of pre-Columbian North America – lightly managed by human beings for millennia, mostly through fire – teemed with wildlife. Seventeenth-century explorers and settlers were nearly unanimous in their astonishment at the great numbers and diversity of fish, foul and game, even though to some it seemed forbidding, a “waste and howling wilderness.” Somewhere along the line, the Biblical vision of wilderness as a place of testing and transformation had been replaced by a fear and hatred of the untamed that haunts us to this day.

Everyone likes nice, park-like woods with great big trees and very little messy understory. Pure stands of old-growth hemlock or spruce can certainly inspire reverence, but they don’t come close to satisfying the ecological definition of old-growth, which includes trees of all ages and conditions – and much more besides. Conservationists err in putting too much emphasis on protecting stands of big trees and not enough on the need to recover old-growth forested landscapes – the natural condition for at least ninety percent of Pennsylvania and most other eastern states.

How much old-growth does wildlife need? All it can get. We need to relearn humility and begin to heed that Voice out of the whirlwind. We need to welcome natural disturbances and recognize them as blessings in disguise rather than “natural disasters” ripe for “salvage.” Many more insect outbreaks and some wildfires on public land could be allowed to run their course. Public and private land managers could do a much better job at grouping and connecting stands of “legacy trees” within timbered areas. Herpetologists tell us that uncut buffers around wetlands of all kinds should be measured in the hundreds of yards rather than in the tens or hundreds of feet, as is currently the practice (if we’re lucky). Most forested headwater areas should never be cut to protect hydrology and downstream organisms, such as our increasingly beleaguered native mussels. And all this presumes success in controlling the biggest on-going scourges of Pennsylvania forests: white-tailed deer overbrowsing, air pollution (including acid rain), and fragmentation from roads and sprawl. I don’t think any of these problems are anywhere near as severe in the Big Woods of Arkansas. But unless and until we address them, biodiversity here will continue to decline.

One way or another, it’s almost a given that Coyote – patron of unforeseen consequences – will have the last laugh.
__________

UPDATE: Mark just e-mailed me with a couple corrections (which I have made), and added the following thought:

The geography of the lower Mississippi valley alluvial swamps (bottomland hardwood forests) is similar in character to the varzea of Amazonia, though of course with the leveeing of the Mississippi River and side rivers, flooding is not nearly as extreme as it once was. However, the geomorphology is very similar, and includes huge oxbow lakes – the largest in the Americas north of Amazonia are in the Delta.

My point is that humans have lived and farmed Amazonia, and seasonally the varzea forest, for millennia, using swidden rotation (slash and burn) which involves small clearcuts. This does not mean the Amazonia (or the Peten in Guatemala, for that matter) are “second-growth”; it means that human populations are low enough that human disturbance regimes are simply another form of forest modification. Indeed, swidden, the world’s oldest form of agriculture (or horticulture), is successful in that it mimics natural treefall dynamics, widely believed to be the disturbance regime that is most important in helping create the awesomely high biodiversity of the Amazon.

When human populations swell and elite/capitalist greed enter into the equation, forests are wiped out. It is all in the temporal and spatial scale at which the destruction is taking place, however: this can quite rapid, or over decades or even centuries. Essentially, does the local human population absolutely depend on a healthy ecosystem, or not? Economics and governance are at the heart of it.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Knot

I wrote this yesterday afternoon.

Above and below the Road to the Far Field, the wreckage of a woods. Big sugar maples, black cherries, red maples, shagbark hickories – all ripped down by the ice. But the view! On this clear, cold day, Sinking Valley is a glaze of white between ridges that mix brown and blue: the brown of tree trunks, the blue of their shadows against the snow.

The giant chestnut oak at the bend of the trail casts a peculiar shadow, though. Its stumpy limbs bristle with last year’s sprouts, and fresh tracks in the snow show that again this winter the ridgetop porcupine has returned for more pollarding of her favorite tree. There are thousands of chestnut oaks on the mountain, but for some reason it’s the very oldest ones that seem to draw the porcupines. The sweetness of age, perhaps? Or is it simply that, being old, they are less efficient at producing tannins in response to overbrowsing? An absence of bitterness in itself can seem plenty sweet, I know.

Now here’s another misshapen shadow: a cherry the ice storm didn’t touch. Most of its branches have been truncated by the fungal infection that foresters call black knot. I wonder if this thorough amputation of twigs and smaller branches isn’t what saved it, preventing the ice from reaching critical mass? In such extreme conditions, a handicap can turn into an advantageous trait. The chronically ill sometimes are the fittest, the ones who survive the longest, bear the most young. Pain is their legacy, and it is the most precious gift imaginable. Without it, imagine how brittle we’d be – how terribly unequal to the task of love.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Nineveh

I made baked fish for supper last night – thick thawed steaks of mahi-mahi, the gift of an acquaintance who had caught them herself in a fishing trip off North Carolina. I soaked them in lemon juice and smothered them under a thick blanket of whole wheat bread crumbs that had been sauteed in olive oil with cumin, coriander and plenty of basil and garlic. It was delicious, but too plentiful; I ate too much. Exhausted as I was when I finally went to bed, I woke after several hours, feeling the fish in my stomach and listening to the downpour on the roof.

This is our first major winter storm here in central Pennsylvania. All night and into the morning – continuing even as I type at 8:30 – hard rain has been falling and freezing, falling and dripping and freezing. As the small hours crawled by, I could hear the muffled cracks and crashes of trees giving way under the weight of ice. Twice when I got up, the digital clock at the foot of the stairs was flashing, but miraculously, the electricity stayed on. The second time, I stayed up to read for a little while. The book I grabbed was Carolyn Forché’s The Angel of History, where I found the following line:

Nuit blanche, your nights awake and the white window winter-locked.

I poked my head outside at one point around 4:30 and noticed a light in the far window of the main house. My father, too, was awake. Sometimes I think of insomnia as the family curse. Every family needs a good curse, don’t you agree?

At quarter after six, following a brief hour of sleep, I rise for the final time, anxious to brew my coffee and take a shower before the power goes. I’m out on the porch by 6:35, cradling my mug and listening to the fuselage. If you’ve never been through a major ice storm, let me tell you, it sounds like war. The difference with this one is the sheer volume of water in the stream, whose roaring drowns out most smaller breaks. What I hear are the sharp rendings of limbs, the explosive cracks of trunks snapped halfway up, and the thunderous crashes of full-sized trees giving way at the roots.

There are hundreds of acres of woods in all directions, and a high percentage of canopy-height trees are weedy, first-succession species such as black locust, black cherry and scarlet oak, many of them near the end of their natural life span of 80-120 years. The only thing preventing me from accepting this damage with complete equanimity is the knowledge that many parts of the forest may never successfully regenerate, beset as it is by a triple threat of white-tailed deer, invasive trees and shrubs, and acid precipitation. Usually one thinks of the effects of acid rain in terms of damage to the soil and water, but during ice storms, the trees and shrubs are encased in acidic armor that may last for days at a time. I can’t believe this doesn’t do a lot of damage, especially to evergreens like hemlocks and mountain laurel.

One thing I don’t have to worry about, however, is direct damage to the houses. Those farmers knew what they were doing when they planted their houses in the middle of large clearings, out of reach of any but a few ornamental trees. Usually I resent this distance between my house and the woods, but this morning I’m grateful for it.

The day dawns on an eerie and beautiful landscape. Ice storms of this severity have occurred with increasing frequency over the past thirty years – now they come as often as once every three to four years – but this is the first I can remember when the ground was completely bare of snow. The effect therefore is of pure, unmitigated crystal, white from a distance only in the way that cut glass appears white. If I had a camera and put a picture up here for you to look at, you’d probably imagine that every surface would answer a curious tap with a resonant ding. But such beauty weighs heavily on the real world. Even just reading about it, you might picture sleek, transparent body suits for every branch. But all the twigs droop with closely spaced, finger-long icicles, racks and racks of little knives – and that’s where the extra, fatal bit of load comes from. The 20-foot-tall red cedar tree in my herb garden is bent completely over, its head to the ground. In desperation, I get the broom from the kitchen and give it a few nudges to see if I can shake any of the ice loose. All I manage to do is roust out a couple of terrified sparrows.

I take my umbrella and go for a walk around the field – the woods are too dangerous. Now I can watch as well as listen to the limbs and trees crash down, at the rate of several a minute. When the big ones go over, they send up a brief splash of ice fragments. They also trim limbs and branches from their neighbors, which may not be entirely unwelcome. Any time I see a branch or limb breaking loose, I wonder if it isn’t just the radical amputation the parent tree needs to take the weight off the main trunk. It’s all in the architecture, of course. Trees that are built for the long haul, such as tulip poplars and white oaks, are masters at dropping the odd limb and quickly healing over the wound before infections can enter. You’d think hemlocks and white pines, with the tremendous weight of ice on their needles, would – like my red cedar – be the first to go. But as I survey the line of hundred year-old white pines along the driveway, I can see how easily each ice-laden limb rests its weight on the limb below. Hemlocks and spruce are even better at this, folding up like umbrellas under a heavy layer of snow or ice. Hence their tendency to eventually dominate northern forests, given a few centuries of winter storms to weed out the competition.

I approach as close as I dare to the woods on the northeast side of the field, above Margaret’s old house. Five large, downed trees – black cherries and locusts – stretch out into the field. Beyond, it looks as if at least a quarter of the trees have been felled or badly dismembered by the ice.

Dramatic and beautiful as this all may seem, I’m keenly hoping for a rapid rise in temperature. I don’t believe in petitionary prayer, but do try to picture, as hard as I can, ice falling off the trees: big frozen swordfish-size chunks dropping from the limbs, schools of ice-minnows slipping from the crowns. I visualize Marianne Moore’s “Octopus of Ice” dissolving into harmless calamari. But really, these things that are wreaking havoc now are more like giant squid with their sinister, cigar-shaped heads anchored upside-down to the boles of trees and their tentacles poised, terrible and still. To them, perhaps, the forest is a sideshow, and they are waiting for some properly monstrous prey – as if the fish I ate for supper had grown into a whale in my belly and I was soon to deliver it on the never-never shoreline of Nineveh, that great city. The rain shows no sign of letting up.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Above the brim

Do you remember the Frost poem, “Birches”? I was that

boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father’s trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.

I learned to do that in my late teens, not with the white birches Frost had in mind, but with black birch and red maple saplings, neither of which were in short supply on this mountain. But I confess, it was the poem that put the idea in my head. Frost’s language was just accurate enough to provide all the direction I needed.

I used to climb trees a lot back then, but I don’t think it ever would have occurred to me on my own to purposely shimmy up a thirty-foot-tall tree that couldn’t quite support my weight. A few feet from the top it would start to tip. That’s when I’d turn and, facing outward, reach above my head, put the thin trunk in a stranglehold and leap. If the tree was the springy sort and I hadn’t miscalculated, it would bend gracefully and give me a good, swift ride back to earth. But sometimes it would snap and I’d land in a heap with half the tree on my head. I guess it helped that I was thick-skulled and only weighed 150 pounds. Just enough to be a living hell on birches, and not a dead one.

Do you remember the first time you realized, as viscerally as you can know anything, that words are, in the end, unsuited for carrying any burden but their own flowering, their individual crops of fruit or mast? Christmas of 1986 was a strange time. First came a visit from my long-distance girlfriend, then a visit from my brother’s. Both women were beautiful and had unique, vaguely angelic names to match. Break-ups were imminent in both cases, but that didn’t stop these two young women during their one day of overlap from taking each other’s measure in a not-so-subtly competitive way that all of us would later remember as hilarious.

Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.

I was nearing the end of my 21st year on the planet, and life seemed, by and large, a sweetly tragic affair that required much too much effort to make go. Some Caesar or another was always decreeing that all the world should be taxed. You go for a walk in the woods and you have two basic choices, it seemed to me then: out and back, or a big circuit. I remember the desperate energy with which I scrambled up one poor sapling after another, launched myself into space and returned more rapidly than I might have wished to the brown, unfrozen ground, until one day shortly after Christmas when the snow finally came and covered everything.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

What grows

I remember as a child being especially fond of songs with accretionary verses. You know, like the “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” “Children Go Where I Send Thee,” or “Hole in the Bottom of the Sea.” A collection of Pennsylvania German songs in the book Pennsylvania Songs and Legends (edited by George Korson, Johns Hopkins Press, 1949), which I picked up at the same used book sale where I found Gerard’s Herball last month, includes some charming examples. Here’s one I especially liked.

I have, perhaps foolishly, mucked with the rather stilted translation a bit, despite my complete ignorance of the source language. According to the modern German-English dictionary I consulted, the verb wachs-en (wachst) means grow, sprout, come up, extend, increase, thrive. This verb is dropped in the middle verses (in favor of is), then reappears in the last two. Though in the latter case I have elected to go with “lies (with),” the choice of the original (and possibly prudish) translators, I think the shared meaning-element of growth and extension is a key to the whole song. Complimenting this verb, the noun Hecke also occupies a pivotal position, and seems to mean copse, thicket, hedge, underbrush, and also branch or twig by synecdoche, as with the English wood (a cognate of wild) coming to mean lumber. This simple song speaks volumes about the pre-modern European way of seeing the forest. I’ll give the German for the first and last verses and for each new noun as it crops up.

Was wachst in diesem Wald? (What Grows in This Wood?)

Sung by Emma Diehl at Freiburg, Snyder County, Pennsylvania, 1938. Recorded by Thomas R. Brendle and William S. Troxell.

Was wachst in diesem Wald?
En wunderscheener Bí¢m.
Bí¢m in di Hecke,
Zwishich Lí¢b un Schtecke.
Was wachst in diesem Wald?
Hecke schtandee,
Das wachst im grienen Waldee.

What grows in this wood?
A very beautiful tree.
Tree in the thicket,
Among sticks and leaves.
What grows in this wood? A dense thicket.
That’s what grows in the greenwood.

What grows on this tree?
A very beautiful limb (Nascht).
Limb on the tree, tree in the thicket,
Among sticks and leaves.
What grows in this wood? A dense thicket.
That’s what grows in the greenwood.

What grows on this limb?
A very beautiful branch (Heck).
Branch on the limb, limb on the tree . . .

What grows on this branch?
Very beautiful leaves (Lí¢b).
Leaves on the branch, branch on the limb . . .

What is in these leaves?
A very beautiful nest (Nescht).
Nest in the leaves, leaves on the branch . . .

What is in this nest?
A very beautiful egg (Oi).
Egg in the nest, nest in the leaves . . .

What is in this egg?
A very beautiful bird (Vojjel).
Bird in the egg, egg in the nest . . .

What is on this bird?
A very beautiful feather (Fedder).
Feather on the bird, bird in the egg . . .

What is in this feather?
A very beautiful bed (Bett).
Bed in the feather, feather on the bird . . .

What lies in this bed?
A very beautiful woman (Dí¢m).
Woman in the bed, bed in the feather . . .

Was wachst in diesem Dí¢m?
En wunderscheener Schatz.
Schatz im Dí¢m, Dí¢m im Bett,
Bett im Fedder, Fedder am Vojjel,
Vojjel im Oi, Oi im Nescht,
Nescht im Lí¢b, Lí¢b am Hecke,
Hecke am Nascht, Nascht am Bí¢m,
Bí¢m in di Hecke, zwischich Lí¢b un Schtecke.
Was wachst in diesem Wald?
Hecke schtandee,
Das wachst im grienen Waldee.

Who lies with this woman?
A very beautiful lover.
Lover in the woman, woman in the bed,
Bed in the feather, feather on the bird,
Bird in the egg, egg in the nest,
Nest in the leaves, leaves on the branch,
Branch on the limb, limb on the tree,
Tree in the thicket, among sticks and leaves.
What grows in the wood? A dense thicket.
That’s what grows in the greenwood.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The butternut chronicle: Nov. 19, 1998 & an afterword

Clear sky, thirty-six degrees. I’m out on the porch as always. At 10:05 a lone blue jay flies in, lands in the upper brances of the butternut tree. With its large beak it begins probing the crevasses and lesions in the bark, just like a nuthatch or chickadee. They all do the same thing, I think – me too. But the tree can hardly pick at its own wounds.

***

With that, my note taking came to an end. It’s too bad I did not then realize what the true focus of my journaling had been – I probably would have been inspired to keep it up for much longer. I had been thinking that the focus was me, my observations, the record of an inveterate porch sitter. And no doubt there was something to that. Just the other day, I was struck by a reference to the back deck in a poem by Robert Haas. He’s a native Californian, so it seemed perfectly natural – not just a suburban thing, as decks are elsewhere, and not a symbol of Americans’ chronic inability to be content with where we are and accept the vagaries of the local climate.

The front porch in small town and rural Pennsylvania performs many functions that a back deck cannot. Even with cable TV, video games and the Internet, a lot of people still sit out on their porches in the evening – which begins at 4:00, with the end of the second trick. As I mentioned here once before, the front porch is an extension of the threshold, blurring the boundary between home and street. It affords a safe vantagepoint for watching the world go by, as the world is wont to do. Friends and strangers don’t need to feel shy about dropping in – no invitations are necessary. If all the seats are taken, you can sit on the stoop. The back deck, by contrast, is a wholly private space.

I knew of course that the butternut was dying a slow death, and I knew that I would miss it when the last green branch withered, girdled by the canker. But I figured it would stand for many years after that, remain a wildlife condominium in death even more than in life. I never expected it to just topple over one day in August, at around 8:30 on a calm, clear, humid morning. We cut it all up for firewood except for the bottom eight feet, which were full of carpenter ants – the proximate cause of the grand old tree’s demise.

In its absence, I don’t know that I could really gather enough material for a daily front porch chronicle. I have of course recorded a number of observations in these virtual pages, and someday there might be enough to gather into a small chapbook. But the gap between the porch and the edge of the woods is too large – about 75 feet – for close observation of whatever goes on there, and I don’t like using binoculars. The only other tree that’s close to the porch is a Japanese cherry that I will probably cut down this winter to put it out of my misery: it’s terribly afflicted with a disease of its own, black knot. This spring I need to knuckle down and plant some stuff – a bigger job than it might seem, because virtually everything we plant must be fenced against the deer.

I don’t much like fences. But I can’t help thinking that a project like that might give me plenty more to write about.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Notes from a school for solitude

Solitude . . . bears us away
Into its icy comforting, our pain and our happiness.
– Charles Wright, “Half February”

I have been cold. All day yesterday & the day before my hands stayed warm to the touch – or so I would imagine – but inside, behind the knuckles & at the base of the thumbs, a spreading numbness. My enormous kneecaps have begun to ache, poor things, even under long johns. When I climb the stairs they make audible clicking noises. They feel as if they might come unattached, somehow.

Equinox. Who’s there? In last night’s dream, a random remark prompted the poetry teacher to assign the making of masks – right now, drop everything! Some were carved & painted, some forged, some molded in clay or – like mine – built up with flour paste and strips of yesterday’s news. They were glorious.

I find myself longing for another cigarette – it was just this time of year I stopped smoking back in 2000. The cloudless mid-September sky seeps in through every pore. I sit in the woods & listen to the oak trees tapping everywhere with their acorn mallets.

The best tones come from things that are the most hollow: logs, of course, but also certain flat rocks with ant or termite galleries underneath them. Sometimes an acorn strikes another acorn on a lower branch & one hears a rapid tick-tock as both hit the ground.

I watch a mourning cloak butterfly glide from one patch of sunlight to another, dark brown/magenta fringed in white lace. This one will over-winter, I know, will find a suitable piece of bark to crawl behind & let itself freeze solid, the glycerol in its blood keeping ice crystals from growing in the narrow cave of its heart. I’ll see it again on the first warm day in March, wings duller, flight path more erratic.

A chipmunk clucks from six feet away, standing erect like the world’s smallest grizzly. It stares right through me until I begin to question my own presence. A doe and its almost-grown fawn drift in and out of sight among the laurel, chewing loudly. Archery season begins in little over a week.

I decide to stay put until the oaks can incorporate me into their on-going composition. My body’s own distracted percussionist slows to match the chipmunk’s insistent metronome. My scalp begins to tingle, anticipating its Chicken Little moment. With what tact, I wonder, will an acorn strike – a sound I hope to hear inside & out? Or maybe it will merely test for a reflex, a one-two tap on these knees I hug to my chest . . .

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Stories and understories

Another clear, cold morning. The leaves of the red maples across the driveway are beginning to turn, and up in the woods the black gum understory glows yellow and orange, a foretaste of glory soon to come. The water in the stream has finally returned to normal after last Friday’s thirty-year flood, revealing newly carved, raw banks, sand and gravel bars, and even some new waterfalls.

This morning I am afflicted with a kind of restlessness I rarely feel at other times of year, a sort of map hunger. It is not specifically a travel bug, though certainly hopping in a car – if I had one – and following back roads all day would be one way to assuage it. Exploring more intimate landscapes – if I had a significant other – would be another way. Instead, I shall attempt to distract myself with the usual mixture of busyness and woolgathering.

It has always struck me as a bit sad that the coloring of the understory doesn’t play a bigger part in most peoples’ autumnal narratives. In another couple of weeks, those who can spare the time will drive north, perhaps to Pine Creek Gorge (a.k.a. the Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania), to goggle at maples and birches in their fall plumage. But in my view, the obvious colors of those young forests can’t hold a candle to the range and subtlety of black gum, found widely as a sub-canopy tree here in the oak forests of central Pennsylvania. Whether or not the oaks themselves will color up properly is always impossible to predict; when they do, the deep, earth-toned reds and oranges provide a pleasing contrast with the incandescent sugar maple and dependably yellow tulip trees and elms. But by then the black gums will have shed their leaves, opening up the understory just in time for the witch hazel to show off their pale yellow blossoms against the year-round green of mountain laurel.

For many of the forest’s most charismatic inhabitants, of course, “the story is the understory,” as the title of a local conference for forest landowners put it a few years ago. Though foresters shudder at the thought of a future forest dominated by commercially useless species like black gum, the fact is that their many lateral branches, abundant fruit and (eventually) generous hollows provide numerous benefits to many species of songbirds and mammals. The dominance of black gum is of course unnatural – like virtually every aspect of present forest composition. Or, to put it differently, it represents a natural response to highly unnatural conditions, especially the regeneration of an even-age forest following the virtually complete clearcutting of the state a hundred years ago, and the absence of top predators and other keystone species and processes (especially wildfire and the passenger pigeon). Severe overbrowsing by white-tailed deer has created unnaturally open, park-like woods throughout much of Pennsylvania; ridgetop oak-heath forests are among the few communities where some sort of understory and even limited regeneration of canopy species has continued, thanks largely to the protection that mountain laurel thickets afford to tree seedlings.

I have dwelt on these themes here only once before that I can remember. That’s one of the most prominent ways in which Via Negativa does not fairly represent my day-to-day thinking, which is haunted by specters of environmental degradation on a daily if not hourly basis. An amusing – and, I thought, highly flattering – comment yesterday prompted the realization that, yes, this blog functions as a refuge of sorts for my most handicapped, maladapted and ill-begotten musings. An asylum, you might say. In response to yesterday’s brain fart about calla lilies, Leslee wrote, “You are completely insane, ya know. And the weird thing is, after reading your blog I sometimes start to think in a similarly warped way. But just for a few minutes. I don’t know if this is good or bad. Probably both.”

But I’m not like this in real life, honest! Or am I?

*

I wrote up our September 11 “Poets for Peace” reading for a local, alternative newspaper yesterday at the urging a friend, who is helping them get through a difficult transition period between editors. It would have been a little awkward, I felt, for the moderator to try and write a piece of objective journalism, so I cast it instead as an editorial. I had planned to try and quote a few lines from almost everyone who read, but that didn’t work out. The first few paragraphs described the rationale and modus operandi, which will be familiar to readers of my original blog post about it. I went on to quote from a couple of the readers whose work I thought would most resonate with a general audience. But for y’all, let me just quote from the conclusion:

Two different readers opened with poems by Jalal al-Din Rumi, the great 13th century Afghani-Persian poet and mystic. But possibly the most haunting of the afternoon’s poems were those of Lee Peterson, the “Emerging Poet-in-Residence” at Penn State’s Altoona College, from her just-published Rooms and Fields: Dramatic Monologues from the War in Bosnia (Kent State University Press, 2004). Reading in a quiet voice, barely above a whisper, Peterson channeled voices like that of Sabiha, in “The National Library”:

I had decided to study history at university
the day the library started burning.
I was loaded down with books on my way to my parents’ home.

People darted. They jerked like fish
caught on a huge, dry stone. . . .

As this, the lead poem in Peterson’s book, reminds us, written words are among the first casualties of war. Even in the United States, it is becoming increasingly easy to imagine a future in which certain forms of expression are banned; under the so-called Patriot Act, libraries and librarians have already witnessed government-sanctioned assaults on our constitutional rights. I don’t think any of us who organized the “Poets for Peace” reading expected that it would be controversial, and we sent out press releases in good faith. Thus, for me, one of the biggest surprises of the afternoon – aside from the high quality of the readings – was the complete lack of coverage by the local press. That evening, I perused the September 11 edition of the Centre Daily Times. It contained a special feature on “What the Flag Means to Me.”

I worry that the meaning of September 11 will be increasingly confined to themes of patriotic martyrdom and wounded pride. In the future, will American schoolchildren remember the World Trade Center attacks the way Serbian schoolchildren remember the disastrous Battle of Kosovo in the 14th century? As poets, I feel we have a special responsibility to honor all points off view and give voice to all perspectives in order to forestall the tyranny of a single, acceptable interpretation. Lee Peterson’s “Kosovo Polje: The Field of Blackbirds,” imagines what such a reduction has meant for this archetypal battlefield, the ground zero of Serbian epic poetry:

. . . even the worms found new homes.

Now only crows play in the weeds
or watch from the swinging heads of pines
while men root the dust

for the one thing they claim
will take them back and back and back.

*

And let me finish up here by saying what I didn’t have space for in the editorial: Serbian epic poetry, for all its focus on violence and nationalism, is great stuff! Check out the translation of The Battle of Kosovo by John Matthias and Vladeta Vuckovic (Ohio University Press, 1987). The complete text, which includes a preface by Charles Simic, is available on-line.

Simic describes what a performance of the oral epic was like:

One day in school, in what must have been my fifth or sixth grade, they announced that a guslar would perform for us. This was unexpected. Most city people in those days had never heard a gusle being played, and as for us kids, brought up as we were on American popular music, the prospect meant next to nothing. In any case, at the appointed time we were herded into the gym where an old peasant, sitting stiffly in a chair and holding a one-stringed instrument, awaited us. When we had quieted down, he started to play the gusle.

I still remember my astonishment at what I heard. I suppose I expected the old instrument to sound beautiful, the singing to be inspiring as our history books told us was the case. Gusle, however, can hardly be heard in a large room. The sound of that one string is faint, rasping, screechy, tentative. The chanting that goes with it is toneless, monotonous, and unrelieved by vocal flourishes of any kind. The singer simply doesn’t show off. There’s nothing to do but pay close attention to the words which the guslar enunciates with great emphasis and clarity. We heard The Death of the Mother of the Jugovici that day and a couple of others. After a while, the poem and the archaic, other-worldly-sounding instrument began to get to me and everybody else. Our anonymous ancestor poet knew what he was doing. This stubborn drone combined with the sublime lyricism of the poem touched the rawest spot in our psyche. The old wounds were reopened.

The early modernist Serbian poet and critic, Stanislav Vinaver, says that the sound of gusle is the sound of defeat. That, of course, is what the poems in the Kosovo Cycle are all about. Serbs are possibly unique among peoples in that in their national epic poetry they celebrate defeat. Other people sing of the triumphs of their conquering heroes while the Serbs sing of the tragic sense of life. In the eyes of the universe, the poems tell us, the most cherished tribal ambitions are nothing. Even the idea of statehood is tragic. Poor Turks, the poet is suggesting, look what’s in store for them.

Listen:

Yes, and from Jerusalem, O from that holy place,
A great gray bird, a taloned falcon flew!
And in his beak he held a gentle swallow.
But wait! it’s not a falcon, this gray bird,
It is a saint, Holy Saint Eliyah:
And he bears with him no gentle swallow
But a letter from the Blessed Mother.
He brings it to the Tsar at Kosovo
And places it upon his trembling knees.
And thus the letter itself speaks to the Tsar:
“Lazar! Lazar! Tsar of noble family,
Which kingdom is it that you long for most?
Will you choose a heavenly crown today?
Or will you choose an earthly crown?
If you choose the earth then saddle horses,
Tighten girths- have your knights put on
Their swords and make a dawn attack against
The Turks: your enemy will be destroyed.
But if you choose the skies then build a church-
O, not of stone but out of silk and velvet-
Gather up your forces take the bread and wine,
For all shall perish, perish utterly,
And you, O Tsar, shall perish with them.”

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Heart’s Content

My second maxim was to follow resolutely even doubtful opinions when sure opinions were not available, just as the traveller, lost in some forest, had better walk straight forward, though in a chance direction; for thus he will arrive, if not precisely where he desires to be, at least at a better place than the middle of a forest.

Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method

The buzzy songs of half a dozen species of wood warblers accompany my surfacing from the shallow waters of an uneasy night’s sleep. What in the world could possess an otherwise fairly sane human being to spend ten dollars a night for the privilege of sleeping on the ground? It’s 5:30 on an overcast Sunday morning in the Heart’s Content campground of Pennsylvania’s Allegheny National Forest, “Land of Many Uses.”

I fire up my backpacker’s stove, boil water and, with the help of a cloth filter, turn myself into a percolator machine: drip, drip, drip at about the same speed the coffee will exit my body an hour later. The trees still drip from yesterday afternoon’s soaking rain.

The mostly full campground is quiet. I can’t get over being amazed at how many people, some of them not even active outdoor recreationists, will go to such trouble to get out in the woods on a rainy weekend. I admit that this is a pretty nice spot, as campgrounds go. Though bordered on three sides by a 45-year-old red pine plantation, the campsites themselves are tucked into a maturing deciduous forest, each with just enough vegetation around it to lend an impression of privacy and intimacy. I think about how most of the time that people spend in public lands is devoted to doing fairly simple things: eating, sleeping, tending campfires, walking or driving around, looking at stuff.

By contrast, the official management philosophy of national forests stresses Multiple Use, with a strong bias toward economically productive activities. In the Allegheny, this includes primarily logging (especially of black cherry, a fast growing, first-succession species prized by the furniture industry) and oil and natural gas drilling. The Forest Service also favors high-impact, industrial recreation, especially on all-terrain vehicles (ATVs) and snowmobiles. Yet statewide surveys show that most outdoors-oriented people can’t stand the noise and (in the case of ATVs) the destruction caused by these machines, which represent exactly the sorts of things that the average forest “user” goes to the woods to try and escape. Surveys also show most people are against commercial timbering on public lands, even though its cessation is currently outside the bounds of acceptable political discourse.

I wonder, as I drink my coffee, whether it would be possible to start a movement to counter Multiple Use that would advocate “no use, just appreciation”? I guess the way to sell people on an alternative philosophy like that would be to emphasize the extent to which wild places should be above and beyond all considerations of utility and profit. Then I remember the unofficial slogan of the Rainbow Tribe, which a few years ago held its annual gathering just about a mile from this spot: “Welcome home,” they say. Imagine if that were written at the bottom of every National Forest sign, in lieu of “Land of Many Uses”!

But the forest is a very different kind of place for humans to come home to. When we try and impose our own aesthetic values, the results can be frightening. Leaving the campground for an early morning walk, I cut through the pine plantation and am able to walk in a perfectly straight line between rows of virtually identical trunks to reach the parking lot on the other side of the road. There is almost no ground cover, only a scattering of star flowers and a couple small patches of hayscented fern. From one patch a fawn leaps to its feet and clatters awkwardly away, visible for many hundreds of feet in this unnaturally uniform, Cartesian space.

I’m surprised to see a total of eight vehicles in the parking lot, which also serves a trailhead for the Hickory Creek Wilderness Area, the only area so designated in this national forest (except for a few, tiny islands in the Allegheny River). It’s a fairly unexceptional stretch of forest; the fact that so many people are backpacking through it on a rainy weekend testifies to the magic of the word “wilderness,” with its implicit promise of ultimate escape.

For me, however, the allure was the 120-acre old-growth remnant at Heart’s Content – and the more than 4,000 acres of old growth contained in the Tionesta Scenic and Research Natural Areas, where we planned to spend the rest of the day. We had botanized happily in Heart’s Content for several hours the previous afternoon; now I simply wanted to discover whether it’s possible to get lost in such a small tract of old growth. It is!

When I return to camp an hour later, refreshed by the rich sights, smells and sounds of a natural forest, I’ll be surprised to find I’ve been sapped of enthusiasm for theorizing about forest values – or much else. In fact, I’ll be uncharacteristically taciturn for much of the rest of the day. I realize I may be a little more impressionable than most people, but once disoriented, I find it difficult to re-orient, even after many hours of hiking and successful pathfinding in the Tionesta. A day later, back on my own front porch, things will still seem a little “off” to me; I’ll be struck by the oddness of the straight line of the driveway against the edge of the woods, for example.

I’ll still be puzzling over how, when I left the loop trail in Heart’s Content determined to “walk straight forward . . . in a chance direction,” I could’ve ended up back on the same section of trail I left – still inescapably “in the middle of a forest.”

But unlike Descartes, I am perfectly happy to be here. “Trees, trees, murmuring trees!” sings the black-throated green warbler. The long and endlessly supple call of the winter wren is a rare treat, and I could listen to the piping of the hermit thrush all day. So whence this nameless clutching in my chest, whence this hollow thudding, this clatter of hoofs?