Photos – Page 35 – Via Negativa

December 9, 2009 by Dave Bonta

Beast

This morning was foggy and rainy. The five inches of snow that had fallen overnight turned to slush and began to melt. For those few deer hunters who were out in this weather, the hunting was excellent. They spoke of climbing into their trees before daybreak and listening to coyotes sing.

The head of a four- or five-year-old whitetail buck is significantly larger than the head of a younger deer. The hairs around eyes and muzzle are longer, and one can even find whiskers on its lower jaw — where a chin would be if deer had chins.

The antlers are thicker and have a wider spread, with longer tines. I was struck anew by the strangeness and wonder of the cervid family: This animal sprouts a pair of trees from its head every year, uses them to battle with other males, then sheds them in the middle of the winter and starts growing new ones in the spring!

What about the meat? I asked. Oh, we grind it all up, they told us. Bucks have a strong taste to them during the rut. Prized as they may be for trophies, it’s the does that are really the best eating.

By mid-afternoon the sky had cleared. The snow was so wet, it practically splashed when I stepped in it.

The melting and settling gave the landscape an almost shrink-wrapped appearance, accentuated by the long shadows of a low sun less than two weeks from the Solstice.

With tonight’s return to sub-freezing temperatures, I am hopeful that winter has come to stay for a while. I can hear it howling up on the ridge.

November 21, 2009 by Dave Bonta

Sunroom

I can remember how it felt but I can’t remember the feeling itself.

I was living at the time between quotation marks, a perilous existence. People who lived in their cars looked down on me.

I remember running my hands over and over her bare scalp — the scandal of it.

The woods aren’t even there anymore. Someone’s sunroom occupies that very spot.

November 17, 2009 by Dave Bonta

Wild apple

That first sacrament’s
cratered snow was already
turning brown
while they marvelled
at its tartness, the luster
& tight fit of its skin,
its curved descent to orifice.
Then oh the aftertaste —
like wood, like clay.

Click photo for a larger version.

November 13, 2009 by Dave Bonta

Moss garden

I discovered this wild garden some ten years ago at the edge of one of the talus slopes just over the crest of Sapsucker Ridge. I had been bushwhacking along the northwest side, smashed my way through the last laurel tangle expecting to hit open rocks, and found this instead. I was immediately reminded of the Moss Temple (Kokedera), a World Heritage Site in Kyoto, Japan that I was fortunate enough to visit back in 1986. Despite constant traffic noise — in this case, from the four-lane highway at the base of the ridge — a moss garden is a summons to silent contemplation. Something about that densely packed green crowd maintaining such utter silence can’t help but have a profound effect on the imagination.

As I discovered on that first visit, there’s only one easy way out or in. On subsequent visits, I’ve always approached it thinking I must’ve been mistaken, maybe it’s not that great after all, because the view from above isn’t too promising. You have to pick your way to the bottom of the slope, and even then, I suppose, it might not be everyone’s idea of a scenic spot, especially since the view of the valley and the Allegheny Front beyond is better from an area of open rocks 75 feet away. But the variety of moss and lichen species in such a small space seems extraordinary. One of these years I’ll have to try and photograph them all so I can key them out.

There’s a feeling of deep time, almost timelessness, in the slow-growing moss and lichens. They grow on their own calendars, flourishing at times of the year when nothing else is green. At the end of the last glacial epoch 8000 years ago, this ridgetop, like every other in central Pennsylvania, would’ve been a cracked and broken scree slope — a biological desert. We’re well south of the furthest extension of the ice sheet, but miniature local glaciers still did plenty of damage. Eight millennia later, patches of open talus still remained when these ridges were clearcut for charcoal in the early 19th century, and the subsequent fires and erosion enlarged them again. In the two centuries since, the forest has resumed its glacially slow conquest of the rocks.

I can never go there without doing some damage, no matter how gingerly I step, so I try to limit my visits to just once a year. The moss grows directly on the rocks, which shift unpredictably under my weight, tearing their thick green pelt. If I step on the unmossed rocks, the foliose lichens crumble under my boots. How can something so tough be so fragile? Once, I discovered a neat line of deer hoof prints through the moss — a rarity, since the deer usually avoid the leg-breaking talus.

Three years ago, a large branch fell across the upper portion of the garden, and now it shelters a foot-wide band of fallen leaves and leaf-rot. This, of course, is how the forest spreads. Should I put my finger on the clock-hand and keep this area in a state of arrested development — as the monks at Kokedera have been doing for the last 700 years with their obsessive raking and removal of all organic debris? Should I start picking out the branches and pulling the occasional blueberry, striped maple, and black birch sprouts? Should I, in short, become a gardener, and rob this spot of its wildness? Or should I let nature follow its course, content in the knowledge that plenty of other potential “found gardens” exist, slowly shifting in and out of peak aesthetic condition, all over the mountain?

View the complete slide show or photo set.

November 10, 2009 by Dave Bonta

High graded

It’s funny how the logging of a slope can so alter one’s sense of space as to make an area one had previously thought of as steep seem almost flat. I am just fifty feet from our property line here, on the site of a trail I’ve followed many, many times along Sapsucker Ridge, but I feel lost — literally, as in “Where the hell is this?” The old trail is blocked by piles of slash — forester-speak for the discarded tops of felled trees — as is the new haul road. Saplings lie prostrate; it was evidently too much trouble to drive the skidder around them.

The diameter-limit cutting, also referred to as high grading, does leave at least some cover for the many understory plants and creatures that need it, but it ignores the need for trees with a mix of genetics to supply seeds for regeneration. Often the smaller trees left when a logger takes everything over ten inches in diameter at breast height aren’t any younger than the big trees, they just aren’t as healthy. Planning for the future is obviously not part of the picture here. These are logging practices straight out of the 19th century.

The porcupine tree has just lost its nearest neighbors for — I’m guessing — the second time in its life; forest trees don’t get that wide a crown if they’ve spent their whole life in a crowd. Maybe I’ll start calling it the Job tree, instead — “I alone am left to tell thee.” Like Job, it’s been sorely afflicted, but the constant pruning of its twigs by porcupines living in its hollow heart has yet to kill it, and who knows — all this new light may help it survive another century. These ridgetop chestnut oaks are damn tough trees.

The chainsaws leave marks as regular as the grooves of a harrow on a fresh-tilled field. To a forester, for whom every logging operation is a timber harvest, this must be a beautiful sight. And if the deer don’t become too ravenous at any point in the next four to five years (a big if), each of these chestnut oak stumps may acquire a ring of saplings. Quercus prinus excels at stump-sprouting.

So like the old man thrown into a cart for dead bodies in Monty Python’s Holy Grail, despite appearances this tree is not dead yet! Though forestry convention has us age trees by the oldest above-ground trunk, the root system here could be several centuries old.

The physical and ecological effects of logging extend hundreds of feet into the adjacent forest. But of course neighboring landowners like us would have a very difficult time getting a judge to issue an injunction on that basis — we know this from bitter experience. The ridgetop was the only place level enough to put a logging road, but it was also the property line, so the ephemeral ponds at the top of the Plummer’s Hollow watershed, less than 50 feet on our side of the line, will be affected by runoff as well as increased levels of light and wind and exposure to invasive plants, among many other effects.

This had been the sole remaining section of woods surrounding ours not to have been logged in the last 40 years; a couple of neighboring properties have been logged twice in that period. Plummer’s Hollow has become an island of older forest habitat, simply because we have done our best to leave it alone. But we realize that’s a luxury some people can’t afford, and we can only speculate what kind of pressures must drive someone to have their cherished hunting ground lumbered right when the hardwood market is at its lowest point in decades.

They say a depressed economy is good for the environment, but here in Pennsylvania, with virtually unregulated hydraulic fracturing for natural gas in the Marcellus shale formation about to kick into high gear, I don’t think that will turn out to be true. Bad as this little logging job looks, our forest got off lucky.

For more on high grading, see also my earlier post on the subject from 2006.

Don’t forget to post something about trees this month and send me the link so you can be included in the next edition of the Festival of the Trees. See my call for submissions on the coordinating blog for details.

November 9, 2009 by Dave Bonta

Qarrtsiluni: better than your average snake oil

Some people still swear by witch hazel extract as a balm for cuts and bruises, acne and mosquito bites. But to me, the shrub’s greatest healing power lies in the visual relief and color its flowers provide — among the few splashes of color still remaining in the gray and brown woods of late autumn.

The next issue of qarrtsiluni, the literary magazine I help curate, will be all about health, broadly defined. I’ve been remiss in not linking to the call for submissions, which we published on November 1. The editors this time are Susan Elbe and Kelly Madigan Erlandson, and the deadline for submissions is November 30. Susan and Kelly have chosen a theme that should resonate far beyond the current health care debate in the United States:

We are interested in creative interpretations of health, which will of course include the health (or lack thereof) of the human body, but also of the mind and spirit, the environment, or the culture. How systems stay in balance, how one attains wellness, how we relate or respond to our own state of health and the health of others, and the extent of an individual’s physical, emotional, mental, and social ability to cope with his/her environment would all be fair game. Unusual health-related practices also intrigue us (serpents? psychic surgery?) as well as tales of spontaneous recovery. How much control do we have over our own health? Explore superstitions, regale us with symptoms, or simply make a well-written toast to our health — we’ll consider it. Keep in mind too that the etymological roots of health include “whole” and “hale,” but also “holy.”

Read the complete description if you’re interested in submitting.

If the above is news to you, then you might’ve also missed the fact that we’re doing daily podcasts at qarrtsiluni now (subscribe in iTunes here, or listen via the audio players on the site). For many of the image posts this issue, Beth and I have been indulging ourselves a little and engaging in extended discussions, prompted by the images but often going off on tangents related to other aspects of the current theme, “words of power.” I think some of them have turned out pretty well. It’s fun.

There was an interesting, brief interview with Pamela Johnson Parker, the winner of qarrtsiluni’s 2009 chapbook contest, today at Read Write Poem. Her answer to the last question, “Can Poetry Save the World?” was intriguing, I thought:

I can’t speak for the world, but it’s saved me. I had an illness this summer that affected my speech, coordination and memory. My neuropsychologist was amazed that I could immediately recall poems, whole stanzas of them. I made one of the quickest full recoveries he’s ever witnessed. I give credit to Shakespeare, Bishop, Keats, Frost, Browning, Cummings — and also to Mrs. P., the 7th-grade teacher who made me memorize poems as a penalty for talking in class.

So there you have it: poetry can heal. I prescribe one dose of qarrtsiluni a day.

November 8, 2009 by Dave Bonta

Incandescent

I will miss the incandescent light bulb, its hairless, faceless, chinless head as if from a gelded angel. I will miss that single, glowing synapse. That one bright idea appearing above our heads in the comics, quintessence of the thought balloon. I wouldn’t mind if light bulb jokes died along with it, but I’m sure they’ll persist in some form as long as the obtuseness of other people seems worth a laugh.

There’s no denying the compact fluorescent bulb’s comparative sobriety, though — it’s as blandly utilitarian as a radiator coil or a wastebasket. I’m sure there are those who will miss the radiator coil if electric cars take over, and wastebaskets probably already have their aficionados, but neither comes close to the incandescent light bulb’s fungal charisma. Flea market booths that today specialize in antique glass insulators will someday do a brisk business in burnt-out bulbs. Little girls will stop for a closer look: Daddy, what sort of doll did this come from?

And Daddy will say, its body was hidden from us, we didn’t think about it much. Its limbs were long seams of a greasy midnight that used to be trees, and had been buried halfway to forever in the hearts of mountains. And when we moved the mountains to disinter them, streams and rivers died, the lungs of miners turned black, deadly mercury spread across the earth. This was the dangerous kind of doll. We were happy not to have it around the house.

November 6, 2009 by Dave Bonta

All this time

leaving trunk

I was three and a half when my mom went off to the hospital to give birth to my younger brother. Dad was left in charge. Five days later, my maternal grandmother arrived to help out, and was astonished to discover that I was wearing five pairs of underpants, one overtop the other. Every morning my dad had reminded me to put on clean underwear, and I had.

This story is sometimes still re-told at large family gatherings to general merriment. Yes, kids can be literal. This afternoon when I walked into my parents’ house, Mom said to her four-year-old granddaughter, “Here comes trouble!” “What do you mean?” Elanor said. “That’s not trouble! It’s just Uncle Dave.” Thanks. I think.

Two weeks ago, I caught a whiff of body odor from my underarms. As long as I change shirts regularly, I never get B.O. I decided it must be time to do laundry. The next morning, when I went to pull out the T-shirt from inside the usual layers of turtleneck, sweatshirt, and quilted flannel shirt (I keep a cool house), I discovered not one but two T-shirts, the newer one underneath the old. It gave me a funny kind of deja vu.

I’ve written before about the dreams I used to have in which I’d walk over the ridge and discover another hollow, parallel to this one, often with very similar buildings and inhabitants, “where the orchard was never bulldozed out in the 1950s and the old farmhouse was spared its extreme makeover into a faux plantation home. Everything is twice as big and twice as far.” Last night I had a version of this dream, but the previously unknown, Land-of-Faerie Plummer’s Hollow I found myself staring down into this time was a hellscape of strip-mine terraces and settling ponds: Lost Mountain.

Or rather, it was Lost Mountain crossed with a very local instance of mountaintop removal northeast along this same ridge, where an area known as Skytop was carved out to make room for a controversial highway cut a few years back, and a smaller geographic analogue to Plummer’s Hollow was almost completely buried in what turned out to be toxic pyritic fill. I shudder every time we drive over it on our way to Penn State. It’s like we’re driving over our own grave.

When I was a teenager, I used to day-dream about finding a small clearing in the woods where tree branches touched overhead, water dripped in a hidden spring, and you couldn’t hear a sound that wasn’t natural. Sometimes it had a small hut in the middle of it, but most of the time it didn’t. When I went to Japan in my sophomore year of college, I think I was still searching for that clearing — it had acquired Zen and Shinto overtones. I visited hundreds of rural shrines and temples that year, and would often take a bus or train to the end of the line and wander around in the hills. I was a bit of a romantic, it’s fair to say. Then I’d come back into the city and get back-slappingly drunk with friendly strangers. Somewhere along the line I stopped looking for that magic clearing and just stuck with the drinking.

Last week, for no particular reason, that old day-dream sprung to mind again. Maybe I’d still been inhabiting it all this time without realizing it. I took a walk up to the ridgetop, and instead of a second hollow, found myself looking into a sunlit clearing that stretched along the far side of our property line for half a mile where a small-scale logging operation has been underway since August. I’d been avoiding it for weeks. As my mother said resignedly the other day, at least we have a better view of the migrating hawks and eagles now. I stared across the valley at the Allegheny Front and saw another recently logged patch, marked with the raw Z of a steep haul road.

Today was crystal-clear, so I went back with my camera to take some pictures for documentary purposes. Every disturbed patch of forest recovers differently, based on chance factors as well as features intrinsic to the site, so I like to observe what I can. This was a diameter-limit cut, with everything under ten inches in diameter still standing except for the collateral damage of saplings run over by the skidder, so aesthetically it wasn’t as harsh as it could have been. But the freshly cut stumps were still hard to look at, especially those from trees I remembered well. I snapped more pictures of stumps than anything else. I studied the patterns left by the chainsaw’s teeth, the way they made a crosshatch with the concentric layers of what had once been xylem, the bark that would never be stretched over another new layer of life.

One pair of stumps from a double-trunked oak had small hollows at their center — a surprise to the loggers, I imagine. They must’ve found solid wood not too much farther up the tree, though, because I didn’t see any discarded logs lying about. I brought my face down close to avoid the glare on the top surface of the stumps, peered into the closest hollow and saw another face staring back. Hello sky. Hello water.

October 21, 2009 by Dave Bonta

Belated storm report

Snow on October 15! At first it was fun. Rolling balls for the snowman, I had to keep stopping to pull out black walnut leaf ribs — enough to make three dozen Eves, at least. Sure, give him a blaze-orange cap. Maybe he’ll come to life and wreak some minor havoc.

Read the rest of the report at the Plummer’s Hollow blog. (That’s my niece Elanor in the photo.)

October 20, 2009 by Dave Bonta

Under the highway

A split in the pavement where vehicles enter the overpass: from underneath, next to the tracks, it sounds like a heartbeat. Thump-thump. Soil in which nothing has sprouted in 35 years. The once-a-day Amtrak gathering speed, faces hidden behind tinted glass, & the blinking tail light disappearing around the bend. Thump-thump.