Someone asked, “What is my self?”
Jôshû said, “The oak tree in the front yard. Look at it.”
A monk asked, “I come from far away. Master, what is your teaching?
Jôshû said, “I do not tell it to the people.”
The monk asked, “Why do you not tell it to the people?”
Jôshû said, “This is my teaching.”
The monk said, “If you do not tell it to the people, why should they come across the seas to visit you?”
Jôshû said, “You may be a sea, but I am not.”
The monk said, “Well, then, what is there within the sea?”
Jôshû said, “I hooked one fish.”
The official Sai asked, “Can even a great master go to hell?”
Jôshû said, “I lead the way.”
Sai said, “But why should an excellent master, of all people, go to hell?”
Jôshû said, “If I don’t go, how can I meet you there?
—Yoel Hoffman, tr., Radical Zen: The Sayings of Jôshû (Autumn Press, 1978)
A newly discovered yellow jacket nest under my porch must be destroyed. The decision has been made before anyone has even laid eyes on it; removing the lattice-work to take a look would be hazardous. Dozens of hornets come zipping out at the slightest vibration — a heavy tread above their heads, for example — so we figure it must be big. It seems to be right over the door to the furnace, so there’s no question it has to go, and the sooner the better, before it grows enormous. I resolve to do it tonight, after dark.
The prospect of killing an entire colony isn’t something I relish, though I’ve done it before. A feeling of dread settles in the pit of my stomach. I go for an evening walk around the trails.
In the woods on the crest of Laurel Ridge I spy what looks like the top of a human skull resting on the moss: an enormous, bone-yellow bolete. I stand looking down at it for a while, and it’s almost an out-of-body experience.
A scolding blue jay finally snaps me out of it. It’s not clear if it’s scolding me or some other large predator, so I stand for a while longer, listening and alert.
A couple hundred feet away on another trail, a few clumps of the aptly named black trumpet mushroom are silhouetted against the moss, poised as if to herald the coming night. I consider harvesting them — they’re delicious — but decide instead to leave them alone and return the next morning with a camera.
It’s nearly dark when I get back. I fetch a large coffee can from the basement of my parents’ house and put a splash of gasoline on the bottom, then find a sturdy piece of cardboard and a box of kitchen matches. I carry it all down to the yard in front of the porch, set up a dim lantern, and gingerly remove the lattice. I can see immediately that my tried-and-true method of placing a can over the nest and quickly sliding in a cardboard lid, severing the nest’s overhead attachment, won’t work this time. The nest isn’t going to fit in the can — it’s already almost as big as my head. What’s more, it appears to be securely attached to the beam behind it.
Plan B is simpler and more brutal. Dad mentioned he had a can of wasp and ant spray, so I go fetch that, instead: d-trans Allethrin. Rainbow brand.
Fortunately, it’s a cool night — the temperature is already in the low 50s — so resistance should be minimal. I direct a long blast of the insecticide into the opening of the nest from about two feet away, then stand back. An eerie, high-pitched boiling sound ensues. Imagine all the inhabitants of a paper city shrieking in unison. I stand in the dark listening for three or four minutes until it dies away.
The next morning, only a single hornet circles the nest, which I examine in daylight for the first time. It’s beautiful, if you can ignore the small corpses clogging the entrance. It would make a fine lampshade, I think.
Tired of dodging the persistent longhorn beetle, I finally let it land so it could verify that I was not a tree. Recovering from a week of crippling lower back pain, I was celebrating my personal Independence Day a day late, but the forest still had claims on me. I remembered the Sunday before, how my back had gone out just as I was sitting down, and the flies had landed on me just the same. We are little more than large and awkward guests in a world of insects, I sometimes think. If only we all had exoskeletons instead of these troublesome, tree-like spines!
This is how the recovery happened: I had laid down Saturday afternoon and unexpectedly fell into a deep sleep, though I had gotten plenty of sleep the night before. I dreamed I was inching across one of the high barn beams despite my bad back, a burning cigarette dangling from my lips. My father came into the barn, spotted me in the rafters, and said, “So that’s what you meant by a spiritual retreat!” When I woke up, the pain was already beginning to recede.
Fourth of July:
fireflies flash, fireworks boom,
the moon turns to fuzz.
All day, the firefly clings unmoving to the double-paned storm door as it swings open and shut. Fast-moving thunderstorms dump rain on the upturned faces of evening primroses; water gurgles in every ditch and draw. On the other side of the world, a young woman whose name means voice or call is shot dead in the middle of the street. Millions watch the cellphone video: rivers of blood spilling from her mouth and nostrils, her wide-open gaze fixed on infinity. Then night descends, the shortest of the northern year, full of cries and fires. I log off around 10:00 and step outside to listen to what seems at first like a restless multitude: the rushing wind and water. Fireflies blown sideways in mid-blink seem to be attempting some form of Morse code.
Seven hours later, as dawn breaks on the solstice, we find a juvenile screech owl perched on a small snag beside a trail, possibly just fledged and not quite ready to fly. Its mother shrieks and clacks her bill at us. I take two flash pictures and move quickly away, anxious not to attract the attention of crows.
Farough (or Forugh) Farrokhzad was, by all accounts, one of the greatest Iranian poets of the 20th century. Here’s an English translation of one of her poems that seems appropriate to the moment. It’s from Sin: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad, translated by Sholeh Wolpe.
The Wind Will Take Us
by Forough Farrokhzad
Inside my little night, alas,
the wind has a rendezvous with the leaves;
inside my little night, there is fear
and dread of desolation.
Listen.
Hear the darkness blow like wind?
I watch this prosperity through alien eyes.
I am addicted to my despair.
Listen.
Hear the darkness blow?
This minute, inside this night,
something’s coming to pass. The moon
is troubled and red; clouds
are a procession of mourners waiting
to release tears upon this rooftop,
this rooftop about to crumble, to give way.
A moment,
then, nothing.
Beyond this window, the night quivers,
and the earth once again halts its spin.
From beyond this window, the eyes
of the unknown are on you and me.
May you be green, head to toe—
put your hands like a fevered memory in mine…
these hands that love you.
And cede your lips
like a life-warmed feeling
to the caress of my lovesick lips.
The wind will one day blow us away.
The wind will blow us away.
In less than a minute after entering the woods, I acquire an aura of insects. I step carefully through knee-high wood nettles with my hands in the air, peer at the screen in the back of my camera as if it were an escape hatch, and focus on the one still fly.
Now that they are silent and surrounded by new forest, we want the lime kilns to bear more than a passing resemblance to Mayan temples — to have been shrines to something other than greed and toil. We want their gaping to reflect openness rather than consumption, and their standing apart to signify fidelity to a transcendent vision, one that was always intended to culminate in a hillside of yellow moccasin flowers, tulip trees dripping with nectar, and an abandoned mine harboring endangered bats.
A thunderstorm shakes me out of sleep in the small hours. I lie awake listening to non-human screams — cat? Raccoon? In the morning, I peer up into the crevasse between the portico and the house, as if the bat’s sleeping face held any clues. The peonies are bent double with their latest haul of rain.
The sawfly stood in the middle of the trail blocking our way, slowly moving its antennae like the arms of a martial artist, its wings too tattered to fly. “They don’t sting,” Steve said. I scooped it up and it we passed it from hand to hand before depositing it on a trailside tulip poplar.
A gang of us — three families — had gathered for a Memorial Day hike in Bell’s Gap, on the trail to Pancake Flats at the top of central Pennsylvania’s Allegheny Front. The trail is unsigned, as are nearly all the trails in our 1.4 million-acre state game lands system, the Pennsylvania equivalent of National Wildlife Refuges. So despite the fact that we’ve lived here for nearly 40 years, and the trail is less than ten miles away, I’d never hiked it before, not having been sure where the good trails are in State Game Land 158. It took a newcomer to the area — poet Todd Davis — to scout out this and other trails in the game lands above his house in his restless hunt for poems and for deer. Deer hunting is confined to the autumn months, but poem hunting is year-round, an open season.
Just because trails lack signs and blazes doesn’t mean they’re unmaintained. In the preceding brief video (which subscribers must click through to watch, I think) my mother demonstrates her famous high-speed log-footbridge crossing technique.
Once across the creek, the trail — an old woods road — begins a gradual ascent of the southern side of the gap. We skirted the edge of a tiny pond just big enough for one pickerel frog and some lily pads. Canada mayflowers bloomed in profusion, which along with some other signs, such as abundant three-year-old rhododendron sprouts, confirmed what Todd had been telling us: that the local deer herd had yet to recover from the winter of 2006. The other common wildflower along the trail also had a name invoking our neighbor to the north: Canada violets. And near the top of the mountain, the birders in the bunch were thrilled to spot a Canada warbler — though they were even more thrilled when they heard and saw a Kentucky warbler on the way back down.
Meadow rue (above) was just coming into bloom — a flower that, despite its common name, tolerates the deepening shade of a late spring woods as well as anything can. This is actually eastern waterleaf (see comments). I found the unopened buds at least as intriguing as the blooms: a mass of feathery bracts reminiscent of some headdress from the highlands of New Guinea. Foamflowers and bishop’s cap were nearing the end of their run, while the last of the painted trillium had shriveled a few days before, by the looks of it.
We passed stands of very mature second-growth oaks and tulip poplars, intermingled with hemlocks which still seemed free of woolly adelgid damage. It was a very impressive forest, especially for state game lands, which are often subjected to short-rotation timbering to help pay the agency’s bills. Comparisons with Plummer’s Hollow were inevitable, but a little unfair perhaps, since the exposure, elevation, and geology all differ greatly. Plummer’s Hollow Run follows the same, vertical sandstone formation for its entire length, while Bell’s Gap cuts through a layer cake of shales, sandstones, limestones, and conglomerates. This complex geology helps explain why, in the Appalachians, you never have to go very far from home to see something completely different from what you’re used to.
And that in turn might help explain why Pennsylvania has the most stay-at-home population of any state in the union. Certainly in my case, being able to travel a few miles and see starflowers in the path is way more exciting than the prospect of ever visiting the Hollywood Walk of Fame. I realize most people aren’t quite as attuned to such variations in the natural world, but Pennsylvania’s cultural diversity is also due, at least in part, to its complex physical geography: Slavic coal miners a few miles away from Mennonite farmers and Italian quarrymen.
Fortified with chocolate chip cookies, we made it all the way to the blueberry scrubland at the top of the mountain — Pancake Flats, so called I suppose because of the usual scattering of huge, flat boulders and outcrops of Pottsville conglomerate that cap the Front.
It was, as I said, Memorial Day. Some mark the holiday with parades and shows of piety, but I had no stomach to watch an enormous flag being carried through the streets of a town whose council had recently voted to despoil its own section of the Allegheny Front with a massive industrial wind plant right in the watershed for its reservoir. My own loyalty is to the land rather than the symbol, to crazy quilts rather than to the orderly subdivisions of a flag.
On the way back down, we passed another pair of hikers heading up — the first Todd had ever seen on this trail besides himself and those he brought with him. We exchanged smiles and greetings. “I walk up here every couple of weeks,” one of the men said.
To anyone with an interest in plants, returning the way one came is rarely boring; you can’t step into the same trail twice. I found a flowering wood sorrel we’d somehow missed on the way up. And on an outcrop of limestone halfway down, Mom and I spotted a gang of eldritch, arrowy leaves spilling over the step-like rocks: walking fern, Asplenium rhizophyllum. It seemed to be in even less of a hurry than we were.
Long johns in the morning, shorts in the afternoon. It’s trout season, pale bellies peeking from the creel.
These slippers have evolved to fit — or rather, not to fit — a very specific “foot”: a large queen bumblebee, such as Bombus vagans or Bombus borealis. As one paper puts it:
Despite the flower’s bright color, conspicuous “nectar guides,” and sweet smell, the pink lady’s slipper produces no nectar. Once a bumble bee has entered a flower through the labellum slit, the infolded margins ensure that the sole exit point lies upward, at the labellum base. To exit, the bee first brushes against the stigma and then an anther.
The lady’s slipper orchid abuses the trust not only of trapped bees, but sometimes of its fungal symbionts, as well:
The tiny seed of orchids contains little or no food reserves for the embryo, unlike most seeds. In order for the seed to germinate and develop, it must become associated with certain fungi found in most soils. The fungus nourishes the developing seedling until finally, after two or three years, the plant has leaves large enough to sustain itself by photosynthesis. At this point, the seemingly ungrateful orchid will sometimes cast off its fungal partner.
Pink lady’s slippers (Cypripedium acaule) flourish in small openings in heath-understory oak-pine woodlands and other open forests with acidic soils. Like the oaks, pines and blueberries with which they associate, they flourish after ground fires, reaching their peak of blooming some ten to fifteen years after a fire. However, they are not uncommon in our maturing second-growth woods, either; the thinning of the canopy following the initial wave of gypsy moth caterpillar defoliation in 1980 and 81 probably helped them out a bit. And our habit of maintaining a network of old woods roads, which date back to the early 19th century, seems to provide favorable habitats, as well. We have to step carefully this time of year.
The flowers pictured here, though, grow right inside the woods above my house, in what has become the thickest stand of lady’s slippers on the mountain: close to forty plants, producing at least fifteen blooms each year. They can be hard to spot among the lowbush blueberries, which are also flowering now. According to the paper from Ecology magazine that I quoted above, the blueberries and huckleberries may represent other species stepped on by the lady’s slipper orchid on its route to reproductive success:
In this study, Cypripedium plants near ericaceous shrubs, particularly blueberry, appeared to be far more successful than Cypripedium plants in other areas. […] As bumble bees visit the nectar-producing blueberry flowers, they may be tempted to explore the large pink lady’s slipper flower. When bumble bees are abundant among blueberry bushes, these exploratory visits may be frequent, leading to a high pollination success rate.
Botanists struggle for objectivity when discussing orchids, some species of which actually mimic female insects, inducing the males to try and mate with them. Terms like “deceitful” or “deceptive” seem to have given way now to the less moralizing “nonrewarding.” Except that, of course, for a human observer, the contemplation of these flowers is very rewarding indeed. Perhaps this is what Charles Mingus had in mind with the title of one of his greatest compositions. The shoes of the fisherman’s wife are some jive-ass slippers.
The last cattails lose their upholstery
in shadblow time
Men in camouflage work their turkey calls
in shadblow time
I found a flattened snake curled like an ampersand
in shadblow time
I read about the army interrogator who put a bullet through her head
in shadblow time
The world first learned about Abu Ghraib
in shadblow time Oh sweet Canada Canada Canada sings the white-throated sparrow
in shadblow time
The shocking red of the first tanager
in shadblow time
The talk shows were full of rage
in shadblow time
***
Shadblow, also known as shadbush, Juneberry, sarvis, and serviceberry, is a small tree in the Amelanchier genus native to the woodlands of eastern North America. It can be hard to identify due to hybridization between species: primarily A. arborea, A. humilis, and A. canadensis. It is one of the first native trees to flower in the spring, producing delicious fruit in early summer that tastes like a cross between blueberries and cherries. In Plummer’s Hollow, as in much of the folded Appalachians, it seems fondest of the most acid, rockiest soils, growing as a spottily abundant member of the chestnut oak – red oak – pitch pine – mountain laurel forest type.
Tomorrow is the last day to submit links for the next Festival of the Trees, which will feature posts on flowering trees.
