Category: Photos

See also my Woodrat photoblog and my Flickr account.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Qarrtsiluni: better than your average snake oil

witch hazel 2

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.

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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.

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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.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Incandescent

cellar light

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.

Posted on 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.

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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.

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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.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Belated storm report

October snowman

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.)

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Under the highway

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.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Split

eye of the bread

In a poorly lit temple museum in Japan, there’s a thousand-year-old sculpture in unpainted wood of a monk caught at the moment of enlightenment, his face splitting open like a cicada’s shell to reveal the monk beneath. This reminded me of that. In the first ten minutes after it goes into the oven, the dough experiences a burst of expansion before the heat kills it — or, if you like, transforms it into its next, immobile state. Many bakers, disliking irregularity, cut slashes into the dough so it will split where they want, and sometimes I do this too, but most of the time I prefer to be surprised by what opens and what stays closed.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Listening for the saw-whet

hemlock throne

I want to see a tree, a tree, I’ll go mad if I don’t see a tree, the chief of baggage tells the writer-in-residence at Heathrow.

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Something singing right at dusk; I go out to listen. I’d hoped it might have been a saw-whet owl, but it turns out to be a distant ambulance. Needless to say, hardly anyone whets saw blades anymore.

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It’s staggering to realize that the great eastern forest was completely cut over without the use of chainsaws or skidders. All those axes! All those railroad lines snaking through the mountains! And the men cursing the trees in Italian, in Polish, in Czeck, in Hungarian, in English, in German, in Serbo-Croatian… Trees that were too massive for the sawmill were blown apart with dynamite and left to rot.

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Learning to read the forest involves mastering a language of absence. The tree standing on a colonnade of roots preserves the shape of the stump on which it sprouted. On rocky ridgetops, a ring of boulders might mark the spot where an American chestnut once stood. Pits and mounds throughout the forest signal the violent overthrow of giants.

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The words beautiful elephant come into my head. I open the anthology in my hand to a poem called “The Death of an Elephant.”

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Mushrooms as colorful as unclaimed luggage. The elder tree turns a thousand dark eyes toward the earth.

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Don’t forget to submit tree-related links to the Festival of the Trees. This time, the theme is secrets.