Harvest
A clear, cold morning in early autumn. The sun lovingly singles out the whitewashed walls of the old spring house from among the dark cattails and rushes of a little marsh. It almost seems to levitate, this strange little building – the only one on the farm that doesn’t line up with the ridges.
Two song sparrows are busy gleaning seeds from the tear-thumb, a two-foot-deep confusion of orange-red, vine-like stems and leaves choking the marsh and the adjacent ditch. I say “vine-like” because tear-thumb has no tendrils; the abrasive surfaces of its stems and leaves, coated with tiny, backwards-pointing barbs, help it climb over adjacent vegetation, but often it simply keeps piling up in place, falling all over itself. Its nondescript flowers have turned into clusters of little pink seeds, and I imagine that the bright autumnal color of its foliage, as with so many other plants, is meant to advertise their availability to the birds.
I watch from my chair across the road in front of my house, feeling that something is going to happen – has already happened – might be happening right now, without my knowledge. Autumn always provokes that kind of restlessness in me, a longing to escape the endless round of days and go wandering.
Gray squirrels start scolding at the edge of the woods: harsh, nasal alarms spreading from tree to tree. Probably a feral housecat, from the sound of it. I look for her without success, the black cat with white feet who has miraculously managed to elude the owls, coyotes and fishers for so many years.
I have been jotting down some thoughts in my laptop, the old-fashioned kind with a spiral of thin wire and dry skin-like leaves made from dead tree flesh. I’ve just been writing about power, and how adeptly it can disguise itself as love. I am not sure I can always tell the difference, even in myself. I know that both are necessary and at times beautiful, but I also know that I much prefer the cat’s silent slink to any klaxon.
The squirrels wind down after about ten minutes. Then I hear something large coming down the trail, and I go out into the driveway to take a look. An archery hunter – my friend Tim – is carrying his equipment out of the woods at mid-morning on the opening day of deer season. He sets his compound bow and portable tree stand down at the corner of the driveway and heads back up into the woods, emerging a few minutes later dragging a large, eight-point buck. He stops into the house for a glass of water, and I take the chance to grab my camera and snap a few pictures. This is far from the largest set of antlers I’ve ever seen, but it’s one of the most perfect – well-proportioned and unchipped by combat.
Many hunters, including Tim, loosely refer to deer antlers as horns, and I’ve seen translations of Native American deer hunting songs that call them that as well. But true horns, as on goats or antelope, grow slowly and last a lifetime. It’s impressive to consider that these antlers sprouted just few months ago, and would have been shed by January, yet they’re anchored firmly enough to the skull to allow Tim to drag the entire carcass with a rope tied to their base.
So much of the animal’s energy supply goes into growing the antlers, and into the rut itself, that bucks are severely depleted of fat stores right at the start of winter when they need them most. The winter before last, following a less-than-average kill rate due to poor weather during the regular rifle season, unusually severe weather during February and March left deer carcasses scattered all through the woods. Enough of the fatter, fitter does survived to replenish the herd – indeed, the kill rate for antlerless deer on our square mile of land remained virtually unchanged in 2004. But the annual harvest of bucks declined precipitously here and throughout much of central and western Pennsylvania.
A small hole mars the pelt low in the chest. Tim tells me that despite getting a good shot near the heart, his quarry still had the strength to rocket up over the ridge and stumble halfway down the other side before collapsing. It took him a couple of hours to track it, field-dress it and drag it back up over the mountain. But as I help Tim heave it into the back of his pickup, I notice that the body’s still warm to the touch. The eyes have yet to glaze over, and due perhaps to the chill in the air, so far only one fly has found the rift in its belly, the opening to that dark, red cave.
This time the day before, I had been en route to a cranberry bog with my hiking buddy L. Detouring around the heart of small town where a recent fire had gutted two square blocks, we spotted a legless man standing – or perhaps sitting – in the middle of a brick sidewalk. He had no artificial limbs that we could see; no wheelchair was in evidence. Vestigial jeans held up by red suspenders covered his stump of a hip. He seemed to be waiting for something.
The ground-hugging cranberry plants were loaded with fruit, pinker and more diverse in size and shape than the cranberries you can buy in the supermarket. Three months of dry weather meant we could stand in sphagnum moss and barely get our feet wet. The air temperature was around forty degrees Fahrenheit, but when we reached our fingers into the mounds of sphagnum, it felt five or ten degrees warmer. We wondered if this was heat retained from the day before, or if it came from the decomposing peat below.
I thought about the bog people of northern Europe – I had recently re-read P. V. Glob’s famous book – and how perfectly the tannins can preserve hair, flesh, clothing, inner organs, sometimes even the eyes. Perhaps the peat, on its slow way to becoming coal, kept the bodies warm as well, consolation for the unnatural deaths that more than a few of them may have actually welcomed, with a shutter of joy intermingled with horror at the thought of going down to meet the goddess – or the horned god.
On our way home that afternoon, we stopped for coffee in the rural county seat. Traffic narrowed to one lane in front of the courthouse, and orange-shirted workmen stood up to their waists in a hole in the middle of the street.
At almost every moment, I think, it’s possible to witness something completely new, even if one never ventures far from home. The best hunters, like my friend Tim, are those who know where to sit: in his case, where the acorns lie thickest among the laurel. As for me, I’m sitting here watching the song sparrows use cattails for a kind of cursive scaffolding, something I’ve never focused on before. They grip the leaves near the top with their wiry claws and flutter their wings for balance as they ride them down, down, bending them over double and then some. The sunlight spreads into the marsh. The male song sparrow cuts short his eponymous song and dips his beak once more into the harvest.
Color
Imagine if, like most mammals, we saw the world in black and white. We might know autumn as the time when the leaves try to match the cloudless sky in clarity, just before they free themselves from their tenuous attachments.
Imagine – answers the cynic – if we didn’t see the world in black and white. Sharp contrasts are pleasing to the eye and the mind of a creature whose not-so-distant ancestors relied on depth perception to keep from falling, perhaps to their death.
Imagine how different, how much more modulated our sense of the world would be if the nostrils were our main doors of perception. While our eyes can perceive only a narrow spectrum of colors, the number of smells our noses can distinguish is said to be virtually infinite. Given the troubles we have with leaders whose outstanding characteristic is a fondness for dichotomy, I wonder what would happen if we restricted positions of power to those with highly sensitive olfactory organs?
Probably things wouldn’t turn out too differently. I can think of plenty of highly sensitive people – many poets, for example – who don’t know the first thing about compassion. It’s the heart that needs to learn more hues than red.
Postcards from home
I carried my second-hand camera to the far end of the field; it carried the field back home in its little wafer of memory. I’m sorry it’s a little blurry. I had slept poorly the night before, & now everything seemed slightly out-of-focus.
Leaves on a first-year catalpa sprout are almost big enough to serve as umbrellas in a pinch. Yesterday morning, though, as you can see, I used them as a welder’s visor to look at the sun. Expect major sunspot activity in the next few days.
A white ash split down the middle by last January’s ice storm bravely sent up a few clusters of sprouts, but this summer’s drought has not been kind. The Virginia creeper climbs it with claws of shadow.
As I started up the ridge, my tired kneecaps made little popping noises with every step. Then I saw how thickly the wild grapes hung, fat clusters weighing down a witch hazel bush at the bend of the trail. I found a ripe grape & popped it into my mouth. Thick skin, crunchy seeds, acid-sweet pulp – I eat it all. There’s something vaguely unsettling about a peeled grape.
For you, oh reader, I’ll ford a river of white stones, for you I’ll grow a garden of lichens – don’t laugh. Marvel of marvels, a garden of lichens once gave me my best line ever: fungal integument chemically identical to an insect’s exoskeleton.
Dry? Of course it’s dry. This river is parched.
When you read these words, do you hear your own voice, or imagine mine?
Comment
A rare visitor rounds the bend of the driveway below my house
The screech owls gave me another chance to listen more closely to their calling the night before last, so I was able to revise the poem I wrote in answer to Zweig’s “Listening to Bells” the other day. Take another look – I think it’s a little less “In lieu of,” a little more of a genuine listening now.
I also want to draw your attention – for the benefit especially of readers who might have been grumbling to themselves about the dearth of prose here lately – to some truly inspired writing by recent contributors to the comment strings. There’s a longish and delightfully chaotic kite-tail of comments helping to keep the Chant for the Summit of the World Body aloft. Two of my favorites in that string include one from Jean:
…[T]he world body doesn’t need a rest. None of these is about the world body doing anything, just about what people would like it to do, or think they would like it to do. In fact, the world doesn’t have a body, only a shadow, a reflection indicating the presence of body that actually isn’t there. It talks a lot about wanting to have one, but no one can agree about what kind of animal it should be, and Bush is determined it should not come alive, wants a robot or nothing.
Farther down, Rexroth’s Daughter – one of the pair of inspired misfits who call themselves Dharma Bums – added this:
Thanks for poetically revealing the myth perpetuated by google. The world body is like an urban legend. Repeated enough it becomes evidence of its own existence. The google bomb of self: A desperate need to believe in the reality of our own skins writ large.
Google bomb – the willful multiplication of incoming links with uniform wording or naming, in order to increase the attraction of a place or position by its sleight-of-hand substitution for the results of otherwise unrelated searches, using a god-like logarithm of our own invention – has to be one of the most accurate analogies for the formation of self I’ve ever seen. As the Wikipedia article points out,
Google bombs often end their life by being too popular or well known, thereby attaining a mention in well regarded web journals and knocking the bomb off the top spot. It is sometimes commented that Google bombing need not be countered because of this self-disassembly.
In a different, more animist vein, Beth left a vivid comment after the aforementioned “Listening” post:
…I dreamt of an owl last night, a big one – like a great horned – seen in the dream first through trees, and then flying over the roof of the moving car and then ahead of it, down the road and off into the trees again.
It was blue.
Thanks to everyone who comments and to all who visit here, whether with words or with the gift of silent presence. It’s never quite the quiet of a tomb, though I must admit, sometimes I feel that I ever stop chipping away at my epitaph, I’ll have to go lie down under it and mind my manners. And then it’s nothing but cut flowers – no gardening allowed! So gather ye rosebuds and all that. Or rose hips, really, by now…
A pasture rose, New York aster, and the light above my writing table visible through the dining room door
UPDATE: Bloggers are invited to enter their favorite comments from among those left at their blogs for the 90 Great Comments Contest, hosted by Glittering Muse (and inspired in part by this very post, for which I’m honored).
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Raising the tank
It’s been over thirty years since the thousand-gallon oil tank was buried in the lawn, and we figured it was only a matter of time before it rusted through. This would be an environmental catastrophe, since it sits right above the stream, near the head of the hollow. We were planning to replace the old guest house furnace with a new, more efficient model anyway, so it seemed like a good time to put in an above-ground, fiberglass-lined tank, as well.
Thus, Saturday morning found us – my dad, my brother Steve and I – helping to free an aging, submersible craft from a shallow sea of soil. I say “helping,” because in fact the diesel-powered farm tractor did most of the work. The backhoe arm had no trouble moving earth that had been broken up by the original excavation in 1973, but as soon as it tried to bite into virgin ground, it ran a cropper of the bedrock, which is little over 18 inches down in some spots. Dad sat at the controls while Steve and I leaned on our shovels, or climbed up behind him for a better view. From the front porch, looking straight down as dirt and boulders tumbled onto a growing pile, I really did begin to feel as if I were watching a kind of semi liquid, like the stuff that spills out of a field-dressed deer. But when the hole got below four feet in depth, we saw water for real: even in this drought, the bottom of the tank sat a foot below the water table.
Of course, the air itself was saturated with moisture. The thermometer was climbing past 90 and we were sweating buckets just standing still. But Dad was afraid of undermining the guest house front porch, which he and I had spent considerable time and effort shoring up a few summers back, so Steve and I did have to jump down into the hole at one point and do a bit of digging around that side. Standing on top of the emerging tank, Steve discovered a metal ring or handle poking up. Without that discovery, we might’ve spent all day trying to get a chain under and around the tank.
Using the tractor’s front loader, Dad was able to lift and carry the tank up to the barnyard. I had already gone up to the main house to begin preparing that evening’s supper – we eat almost nothing but cold dishes in this kind of weather, so I have to work well ahead. But Steve buzzed me on the intercom so I wouldn’t miss it, and I ran back down and joined Karylee and Elanor on the porch. As the tank lurched free of the earth, it swung dangerously close to the nearest porch column, and we all moved down to the far end.
Once in the barnyard, we lowered the tank onto concrete blocks, stacked so it would sit an angle. I pulled over the steel drip pan from underneath the bulldozer, and Dad and Steve proceeded to cut a small hole in the bottom with a sawzall in order to drain out the last of the oil. When it was finished draining, Dad gave the end of the tank a kick and discovered that it had amazing acoustic properties: a booming bass that went on and on almost as long as a Japanese temple bell. After supper, on my way back down to the guest house, I grabbed a sledgehammer from the barn and tried it out, striking the end as hard as I could. From a foot away, I could hear all kinds of overtones. Dad joined me in the barnyard after dumping the kitchen scraps in the compost pit. “Bet they can hear that all the way from Tyrone,” he said. I tried an accelerating rhythm: BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOMBOOMBOOM, like the world’s largest ruffed grouse. My dad’s never been to a rock concert. “You can feel the sound right in your chest,” he marveled.
Traveler’s joy
More notes from last week’s trip to West Virginia.
Below the pulloff for the roadside view, the vine called traveler’s joy sprawls over the rocks.
A wood lily rocks gently in the wind, doors thrown open to all six points of the compass.
Yellow birch: the straight & narrow path is never dull.
Ground beetles take the place of dinosaurs in a forest within the forest where flowering plants are still a distant rumor.
Rank & deadly, false hellebore raises a green panicle above leaves already half-dead, turning color for no one.
On the summit where we found snow in late October, fireweed blooms against the spruce.
Two ways at once
Last week my friend L. & I spent some time in West Virginia’s Monongahela National Forest – our third visit in less than a year.
We take our umbrellas walking, slower & slower.
I hear springs gurgling under the rocks. Small, dark pools appear among the rhododendrons. In one, a red maple leaf floats, already orange with autumn; the surface of another is covered with hemlock needles – tiny green rafts going nowhere.
We overtake a snail traveling in the same direction, gliding along under its spiral backpack.
Rain rarely reaches us unmediated by trees. The sun can come out long before rain has finished dripping from the leaves. As slowly as I walk, my glasses still fog up every time I stop.
The already wet trail grows wetter. One rock hisses under my boot.
We stop for lunch – instant ramen – and a spot of tea. I set my tin cup in the creek to cool, keeping watch to make sure the rhododendrons don’t drop a blossom in it.
With thunder rumbling in the distance, we dangle bare feet in the water. I watch a pair of crayfish battling a few feet away. The loser scuttles over & gives my ankle several exploratory taps.
I watch water flowing around a large rock, its translucent body a net of shadows as it folds back against itself. After ten minutes or so, I think I might understand something fundamental about water, its impetus to condense, to fall, to plumb the depths. But then I glance just a few feet to the left & am completely flummoxed by a large drift of foam. I had forgotten about tannins. The water is never just one thing, I think.
The storm breaks. Tree trunks become rivers flowing in two directions at once, outside & in.
On the way back, I stop to eye a large hemlock with limbs like reverse mouths for the sun. The tree reveals itself as a condensation of need, or needs. (Who knows if all aspirations can be reduced to a single breath?) Things turn inside out before my astonished gaze. With each footstep, I realize, we are helping to hold down an insurgent earth.
What I am calling need might be a kind of thirst or hunger, but it seems risky to try & grasp it through analogy with human desires, which are so wrapped up in surfaces. The non-human world seems much more rooted & constrained by custom. And what these others lose in flexibility they gain in the directness of their access to what we call the divine. For them, there is no gap whatsoever between spirit & matter.
A torrent of thoughts under my umbrella: Every element of Creation seeks redemption from its uncreatedness, its just-so-ness; death & decomposition represent only a temporary setback. Life is continual recomposition.
The life force, for lack of a better term, consists not merely of need but the energetic field surrounding it, which helps forge connections between beings. To feel those connections deeply is intoxicating – or, more accurately, leads to something like a contact high.
Spirituality is almost beside the point, considering that the body is already a temple and the digestive system is the most perfect altar imaginable. From the belly’s faithful service we can learn the art of letting go, a kind of sympathetic magic aimed at getting other things to let go of us. However hungry it may be, the panther knows better than to try & sever the jugular of a mountain stream.
Done scribbling, I glance up from my pocket notebook. An open space under the hemlocks is illuminated by a single, fist-sized clump of rhododendron blossoms. “What are you writing?” L. asks. “Oh, silly stuff,” I answer truthfully.
A half-mile farther, another open grove shimmers with the endlessly supple song of a winter wren. A second thunderstorm rumbles in the distance. The sky grows dark.
An hour later, we’re back at camp. I’ve carried my folding camp chair over to a house of boulders, where I sit admiring the arrangement of space & the spill of light where it opens to the sky. The boulders are green with moss, & each is capped with a dozen or more large, leathery ears of rock tripe. The resident hermit thrush draws near, playing his crystal flute. For several long moments I feel confirmed in whatever it is I’ve been trying all afternoon to intuit. Then a fly buzzes through without even slowing down – zoom. It is the most thorough & devastating refutation I can imagine.
And if you think the world is recalcitrant now, I say to myself, wait until you’re in your 80s.
I go looking for my hiking partner & find her sitting under another rock shelter, spying on the forest road below. I return to camp & start on supper. Later, she tells me that when a pickup truck finally did drive by, she couldn’t look.
