COLD DAYS AT PEACE
This has been a chilly week with several frosty mornings. With the plastic tarpaulin over my trailer, the windows plugged with Styrofoam boards, and blankets draped over the ill-fitting door, inside the trailer I remain comfortable, even cozy. With windows and door-cracks sealed, it's dark inside and the trailer feels like a small cave.
At night I remain toasty inside a good sleeping bag and during days the heat of my computer and my own body keep the trailer's small space warm enough. I wear several layers of clothing and often work at the keyboard in fingerless gloves. My main problem is that sometimes the oxygen runs low and I must let in fresh air. Then heat escapes like a scared wren.
This entire last summer I never once turned on a fan (most days I wore clothing only for jogging and working in the garden), and I'm hoping to make it through this winter without once using the small electric space-heater kept for emergencies. Some years I've managed, others I've needed the heater, though never for more than a few minutes each day. This week last year we had a 14° morning and I was glad to have the heater then.
When I’m in a regular US home and either the air conditioner or heat pump drones on and on, it weighs upon me. I cannot but keep thinking of the vast environmental destruction being caused in the name of my physical comfort. Land lost to coal mining, the production of greenhouse gases, radioactive wastes... all to produce energy to have me feel cooler or warmer without needing to add or remove clothing.
When at night I turn off my energy-efficient computer and my little 40-watt, high-intensity reading lamp, not an electron of energy flows in my trailer. While I sleep, no ecological violence is committed on behalf of my comfort, and maybe that's one reason I sleep so soundly and awaken so glad.
*****
FIRE
On these cold mornings I am especially aware that each day for me begins with a touch of magic. I am thinking of the orange flash that erupts at the end of my match, then moves as a hesitant blaze into the tepee of dry branches and wood splinters I've heaped beneath the grill and skillet. Then for a few minutes a kind of dance between the fire and me takes place as I try to make the flame feel at home. If the air and wood are moist this can be hard but so far I've always managed to cook a meal.
There must be some kind of atavistic memory at work here, maybe a certain sequence in my genes resonating with the memories of morning fires accompanying untold generations of my evolving ancestors in their caves, their winter lodges of bark and fur, and on Africa's savannas.
Every campfire is a piece of the sun itself momentarily visiting me. Energy from the sun flowed through space and was captured on Earth by the bush or tree whose wood I am now burning. That sunlight energy was stored among the chemical bonds of the carbohydrates comprising the wood. Now as that wood burns, its chemical bonds break apart and the former sunlight energy is released.
If we are looking for an appropriate ceremonial communion with the agencies sustaining us as living beings, there can be no more appropriate act than to conscientiously ignite and nurture a fire just large enough to do its job, and then to be thankful for its service.
*****
SUNLIGHT IN THE LOBLOLLY FIELD
On chilly, sunny days such as we had earlier this week, I like to sit in the Loblolly Field. There, sunlight is the thing.
For example, down inside a dense, shoulder-high thicket of brown, frost-killed goldenrod there'll be a clump of scarlet blackberry leaves. I'll set next to them, being sure to position the red leaves between the sun and me. When my eye is about rabbit-nose high, looking up at the blackberry leaves glowing with the sun on the other side, I think that no one on Earth must be seeing anything as red as I am.
If I get into position fast enough, and I always do, during the first few seconds of looking at those red blackberry leaves I am showered with thousands of tawny goldenrod fruits knocked from the goldenrods' nodding heads as I sat down. As the goldenrods' fruits fall, sunlight ignites inside their fuzz parachutes.
Back-lighted, the stiff, slender goldenrod-stems show up as silhouettes, some vertical, others diagonal. On one side of each black stem there's etched a thin glaze of luminous ice. Atop the silhouetted stems sunlight charges each goldenrod's pyramidal fruiting head consisting of thousands of fuzz-parachuted fruits with radiant translucency. Sunlight also etches a narrow but intense fire-rim around each head. Then, beyond the fuzz-blaze there's the blue sky, translucent itself as only the blue sky gorged with sunlight can be.
It's misleading just to say that a back-lighted blackberry leaf is red, for the leaf is mainly an intricacy in which each vein and veinlet is delineated as with black ink, every fungal infection causing a splash of urgent yellow or brown, and every bug-munched place with a lacy fringe. Viewing a red blackberry leaf with sunlight pouring through it, there are cell structures to see, systematically spaced stomata, and textures and contrasts beyond words.
Moreover, if you enter the Loblolly Field not in the middle of a sunny afternoon, but rather right after dawn as the day’s first sunlight pours in, and there's heavy white frost encrusting the goldenrods' pyramidal fruiting heads and the bluestems' curling brown leaves, and you keep all this between you and the sun so that a frost-white world glistens as you move through it toward the sun, and sparrows and towhees rise from amid it all shaking white frost crystals into powdery snows, and here and there intensely green and blue and pink dew-sparkle-beacons flash on and off, and you stand there breathing out great clouds of steam, so vividly aware of your own wet breathing, cold air rushing in and out of warm, pink lungs, pink mouth and nose-holes and curling face-hair, and then there's the sky so blue, and you look and look...
*****
PEENTING THE LOCAL TIMBERDOODLE
In a recent Newsletter I mentioned the American Woodcock currently at home in our Loblolly Field. Cheryl up in Michigan writes telling me how a naturalist she knew coaxed woodcocks into flight. It's done with the "Timberdoodle dance." Timberdoodle is another name for the American Woodcock, at least up there. The bird also goes by the names of Pepperdoodle, Bog Sucker and Big Eye.
The dance consists of first pinching your nostrils shut with your fingers, then calling "peent." Cheryl further writes, "As you make the 'peent' sound you bend your knees, which lowers your body 1-2 feet. Then you straighten back up, rotate your body ¼ turn and repeat the 'call and dip,' allowing 10-20 seconds between each 'peent.'... After each 'peent' rotate ¼ turn before 'calling and dipping.'"
On Tuesday night, at about 5:30, just when the sky was visible but everything else lay deep in shadows, I went near where I'd seen the woodcock and "peented." I didn't bother with bending my knees, but I did pinch my nose and rotate my body between each call. After several series of calls it got so dark that I figured any nocturnal bird by then would be busy at work, and so I started my return walk to camp.
But then all in less than a second I heard heavy flapping attended by a sharp whistling sound, and I looked up just in time to see an absurdly chunky-looking little being with stubby, rounded wings and a long, needle-like beak zooming past exactly at the level of my nose. If I had enjoyed more sense of presence than to jump backwards, throw out my arms and yell "Jeeze!" I might have been able to reach out and grab me a Timberdoodle.
I had assumed that the idea behind peenting was to encourage the courtship display, which is complex and interesting, and which I've seen in Kentucky but not here. However, maybe you peent just to attract the bird. If that's the case, I'm not sure I'll be peenting much, at least not wearing a helmet.
*****
RED-SHOULDERED HAWKS SCREAMING
This week's mostly warm, sunny days have been busy ones for the Red-shouldered Hawks. Usually by midmorning the air had warmed nicely, a slight breeze had begun stirring, and a very great deal of hawk screeching had begun cascading from the sky.
Several mornings this week I planted apple trees, wearing nothing but a pair of shorts and sandals, and the sunlight, breezes and hawk calls overhead made a heady mixture as I worked. Often three or four birds flew tight circles near one another, sometimes almost touching in midair, all the while issuing their shrill calls. One call was a kind of "kee-yar," and another was a constantly repeated, sharp "eep, eep, eep."
The males swooped a lot. High in the sky a male would suddenly draw in his wings, dive headfirst, level out, then, as on a roller-coaster ride, shoot back skyward carried by his momentum, performing a U. I suppose that the tighter the U, the faster the dive, and the higher he climbed with his built-up momentum, the more impressed any watching female might be.
The funniest thing was when a male rested at his perch and a female deigned to visit. The male gave the clear impression of being surprised, even intimidated, by the visit. Especially the male's body language showed that he was of two minds. On the one hand he was desperately eager for the female's attention but, on the other, he was more than a little respectful of her larger, more powerful build and sharp beak and talons.
*****
PACKRATS AND SPATULAS
Our Eastern Woodrats, Neotoma florida, are very different from Norway Rats, the typical "alley rat." Eastern Woodrats possess large ears and large eyes, while Norway Rats have squinty little eyes and small ears. Woodrats possess bushy tails while Norway Rats have naked ones. Woodrats are called packrats out West, and I think they should be called packrats here, too.
Packrats tend to wander around in the night gathering things. Long ago I learned not to leave anything small lying around, else one of my Eastern Woodrats would pack it off. But during the course of a year sometimes I simply forget to hang my kitchen utensils on their hooks on my outside-kitchen's roof beams, and sometimes I simply forget to chuck my chopsticks and knife into the jar where woodrats can't get them.
Consequently, now nearly all my kitchen utensils are missing. I am now down to a pair of mismatched chopsticks, a bone-handled hunting knife too heavy for them to carry off, and a butter knife. All my spoons, forks, kitchen knives and my two spatulas have been stolen one at a time.
Monday when my last spatula disappeared I tried to track it down. Without a spatula I can't properly flip my daily cornbread. I used to flip cornbread by tossing it into midair from the skillet, with a certain wrist motion it took years to perfect, but then the handle came off my skillet. Now I need a spatula.
Beneath the wooden platform on which I sit during breakfast I found a collection of about a hundred stolen dried peppers and various mismatched chopsticks. A woodrat was there looking at me with that big-eared, wide-eyed, goofy look woodrats have, but I didn't bother her.
Beneath my trailer I found a foot-high pile of shiny items, mostly aluminum foil from trash my handful of visitors have left here over the years. Rummaging in the pile I found a butter knife, but not a trace of my two lost spatulas or my favorite "anodized stainless steal forever-sharp" knife.
A small trail was clearly visible leading from below my trailer into the wild clutter of shattered limbs left by the collapse of the big Pecan tree during Hurricane Lili. I plunged into that jungle and followed the trail to the other side, to a collapsed shack once lived in by a tenet farmer, now little more than a few rotten timbers and some very rusty sheets of roofing tin. There the trail went beneath the tin sheets and the Pecan's trunk lay exactly atop that. In short, my spatulas were lost. If I should move things too much, the Pecan's trunk might shift onto me.
I rather like my woodrats, and I accept my lost utensils as just chastisement for my general forgetfulness. My woodrats knock about beneath the trailer each night and explore my kitchen as soon as night falls. They are good company, but I do miss my spatulas and "forever-sharp" knife.
*****
ANDROMEDA GALAXY OVERHEAD AT DUSK
About an hour after dusk nowadays one of the most majestic views in the night sky is available right overhead. It's the Andromeda Galaxy, also known as M 31.
This is one of those things that you'd never give a second glance if you didn't understand what you were seeing. For, what's to be seen is nothing more than a very small, faint smudge in the sky. In fact, right now moonlight makes it a bit hard to see, but if you wait for a few nights before looking, until the moon is below the horizon at dusk, I think it'll be clearly visible for you.
The understanding needed to appreciate the Andromeda Galaxy is that all the stars in our night sky belong to our own galaxy. About 1,900,000,000,000 stars -- or "solar masses" as they are called today -- populate our galaxy. Usually galaxies are portrayed as vast, whirlpool-like swirls of stars. Such galaxies have "arms" composed of untold numbers of stars spiraling outward from an intensely bright center. Not all galaxies are spiral shaped, but our own galaxy is considered to be a spiraling one, and efforts are being made to map the various arms.
Now here's the wonderful thing about the Andromeda Galaxy: When we see it, we're seeing something outside our own galaxy. It's a whole other galaxy. It's like being a fish in an aquarium, with all the stars we see in our sky being objects inside our own aquarium. The Andromeda Galaxy is a completely different aquarium across the room containing nearly as many "solar masses" as our own galaxy.
A light-year is the distance that light travels in a year, which is about 6,000,000,000,000 miles. The diameter of our own galaxy is about 100,000 light-years. No star visible in our sky with the unaided eye is farther away than 100,000 light-years. Well, the Andromeda Galaxy, the "nearest large neighbor galaxy" to our own, is 2,900,000 light-years away.
Here's how to find the Andromeda Galaxy. At this latitude around 8PM, face northward and look high into the sky. One of the most conspicuous constellations there looks like a crooked, somewhat squashed M. This is the constellation Cassiopeia. Notice at the top, left of the M's left hump there's a smaller star. That star more or less points to the Andromeda Galaxy. Hold your arm skyward and make a fist. The Andromeda Galaxy's blur lies about a fist's distance from Cassiopeia, in the direction pointed to by that smaller star. Binoculars show the galaxy as a blur.
*****
GIANT GARLIC
Here and there in the forest large patches of garlic appear. Usually the ruins of an old house stand nearby, often just a brick chimney rising among tall trees. Sometimes there's not even that, just a relic population of garlic hanging on where once a garden was tended. Naturally, having such a supply of garlic, I eat prodigious amounts of it, and must smell accordingly.
Such a garlic patch grows all around my trailer -- hundreds of plants, nowadays with green leaves over a foot tall. There's one place where the garlic plants are at least twice as large and dark green as the others, and that's at the edge of my living space where periodically throughout my days I go pee.
The deal is that in the human body when amino acids (the building blocks of proteins, of which our muscles are made) are broken down -- and our bodies are continually replacing old tissue -- urea is produced as a waste product. The nitrogen in my urea then undergoes an amazing series of changes brought about by soil microbes to become a fertilizer for my garlic plants.
Therefore, whenever I pee I stand there visualizing a nitrogen cycle beginning with nitrogen atoms in the foods I eat incorporating themselves into my body, my body constructing with those atoms all kinds of wondrous tissue and organs, then during the process of continual rejuvenation my body finally getting rid of the nitrogen as waste urea, which would poison me if it were not properly cleansed from my system. My garlic plants receive my abandoned nitrogen as if it were manna from heaven.
From experience I know that this summer when my garlic plants' green blades will have died and shriveled away I'll go dig up enormous white garlic bulbs at my peeing place. The bulbs will have no odor of urine at all in them, of course, for my discarded urea will have been transformed by magical processes into pure garlic essence.
And how good will be that garlic in a salad or soup, or eaten raw on my tomato sandwiches. And all the time as the garlic aroma wafts about me I'll be thinking what a wonder it is that at that moment many nitrogen atoms will be making a return trip to my body, that again they will find themselves inside my muscle tissue and the DNA and RNA of my genes, and, eventually, sure as anything, at least some of those nitrogen atoms will be peed again in the vicinity of some needful garlic.
*****
GRACKLES
A couple of times each day a flock of 300 to 400 of those foot-long, black, long-tailed, sleek-looking birds called Grackles, Quiscalus quiscula, announces itself with a sound which, when heard from a distance, is reminiscent of a rain coming through the woods. The flock draws closer, squeak and chuck calls of individual birds emerge from the general din, and finally the diffuse bird-cloud filters noisily through treetops around me.
It's as if the birds can't decide as a flock which tree to light in. Maybe a hundred will land in one tree but the rest will pass a few hundred yards beyond to another tree, and some birds won't land at all, just keep going, and when the ones in the first tree see this they take wing again, but by then the ones who didn't land now are landing... Well, it goes on like this, and in the end the entire flock more or less keeps together as it drifts through the forest.
On Thursday as I worked in the garden part of such a loud, rambling, undisciplined flock landed in a large Water Oak nearby. I wondered whether they were eating that tree's small, orange-fleshed acorns. All the birds I could see were only squawking and looking around at their neighbors so I decided that they were not.
However, soon part of the flock rose up and flew to join their companions across the hill. As they passed directly above me I heard expressive sounds I would not have thought any bird capable of making, sounds maybe you'd expect from a troupe of half-drunk, completely uneducated and uninhibited elf-thieves chortling over something dumb they'd done.
Something plopped onto the ground beside me as they passed overhead. It was half of a Water Oak acorn, so some of them had indeed been foraging. In fact, in our area acorns are this bird's second-most important food source, after corn scavenged from fields.
*****
TURNIP APHIDS
This week I’ve been studying aphids and I find them pretty interesting creatures. First of all, there are many kinds of aphids, and each species has its own special life cycle. The one on my turnips is the Turnip Aphid, Lipaphis erysimi. A typical aphid life cycle goes approximately like this:
A wingless female hatches from an egg and begins sucking juice from its host plant. Without assistance from a male, this female -- instead of laying eggs -- gives birth to a number of wingless females like herself. Wingless virgin females then produce generation after generation of wingless virgin females. About when summer comes along, certain of them begin producing offspring that develop wings, and this new generation of winged aphids then flies to a new plant, which may be a completely different species from the host plant of their mothers.
On this second host plant, new generations of mostly wingless females are born. As colder weather arrives in late fall, suddenly another generation of winged aphids is produced, but this time about half are males. Sexual reproduction takes place the usual way and the females return to the kind of host plant we started with in the spring, and lay eggs on it. These eggs overwinter and next spring the cycle begins again.
The life cycle of my Turnip Aphids differs from the above scenario. Since Turnip Aphids live mostly where winters are not severe, the overwintering egg stage usually is skipped. As my January turnip leaf shows, the females just keep producing females all year round, and both eggs and males are usually very hard or impossible to find.
Turnip Aphids do often switch host-plant types, though the new host species must be a member of the Mustard Family, which includes radishes, kale, collards, and weeds such as Bitter Cress and Shepherd's Purse. In places where Canola, or rape seed, is grown, Turnip Aphids have become serious pests.
The ability of aphids to reproduce is mind-boggling. Wingless adult females can produce 50 to 100 offspring. A newly born aphid becomes a reproducing adult within about a week and then can produce up to 5 offspring per day for up to 30 days! The French naturalist Reaumur during the late eighteenth century calculated that if all the descendants of a single aphid survived during the summer and were arranged into a French military formation, four abreast, their line would extend for 27,950 miles, which exceeds the circumference of the Earth at the Equator!
*****
FORAGING GRAY SQUIRRELS
Most mornings in dawn's twilight, before the sun's rays begin shooting in from the east, several Eastern Gray Squirrels, Sciurus carolinensis, work among the slender branches at the top of oak trees in the woods. Sometimes there's five or more. Acorns cluster at the outer branches so when a squirrel goes there the branches yield. A squirrel's acorn-nabbing foray usually begins with a brief pause on the stable part of a branch, then there's a hurried rush to a branch-tip acorn, and then a rush back onto the stiffer part of the branch. Sometimes a squirrel misjudges a branch's strength and momentarily finds himself dangling, or worse.
If you ever see such a group of foraging squirrels, notice how each individual runs along a branch for a second or two, then freezes, then runs some more, then freezes. When several squirrels in a tree all move in this stop-motion manner, it's a funny thing to see. My guess is that they pause because that helps them spot approaching hawks and owls. Seeing how all squirrels stick to such a disciplined program of stops and goes, we have a hint as to how serious the predator threat is for them.
By the time morning's sunlight hits the treetops, the squirrels are gone. I suppose that's because the bright light makes them more vulnerable to predators. They don't always return to their dens for the rest of the day, though, for often in the middle of the day I hear the "Aaarghhhh!" call typically made by aggravated female squirrels while they're being chased by several males. These chases can go on for hours.
*****
HERMIT THRUSH
Each morning as I prepare my campfire breakfast, a Hermit Thrush comes visiting. He seldom gets closer than about six feet but he definitely likes to watch me from not far away. More than once he's landed on a water bucket and cocked his head sideways so that one eye looked directly into my own eyes. Saturday morning he briefly landed on the table less than a yard away.
Hermit Thrushes belong to the same bird family as the American Robin, so they are about a robin's size and shape (a little smaller), hop on the ground like a robin, and share with robins that curious ability to appear to hold their bodies in one place while, in a flash, their two legs scratch the ground below, stirring up insects and earthworms. Unlike robins, Hermit Thrushes are fairly drab-looking birds, mostly rusty-gray on their backs, and with a few modest speckles on their pale breasts.
Thrushes and thrashers should not be confused. Brown Thrashers, found here year round, are of a similar color and also bear speckled breasts, but they are in the same family as Mockingbirds and Catbirds, so they are larger birds, with much longer beaks and tails. Several thrush species visit our area, but only the Hermit Thrush is a winter resident. During migration, unless you hear their songs, it can be hard to distinguish the various thrush species. The main visual fieldmark of the Hermit Thrush is its reddish tail and rump -- the rump being that part of the back right above the tail.
Of course I do not overlook the point that I am a genuine hermit each morning being visited by a genuine Hermit Thrush. Nor do I ignore Walt Whitman's lines:
*****
JANUARY'S FOREST GREEN
Though nowadays the forest is mostly brown and gray, there's ample greenness to please the eye. Right now I'm taking a five-minute walk in the woods, and here are the main green things I notice:
Trees:
WATER OAKS: still bearing ±1/3 of their leaves
LOBLOLLY PINES: scattered, common
SOUTHERN MAGNOLIA: scattered, a bit less common
AMERICAN HOLLY: occasional, largely extirpated
EASTERN REDCEDARS: remnants from when this land was cleared
Evergreen vines:
GREENBRIARS: several species
JAPANESE HONEYSUCKLE: introduced weedy vine
YELLOW JESSAMINE: soon to flower
CROSSVINE: semi-evergreen
Evergreen ferns:
CHRISTMAS FERNS: Abundant on the forest floor
SOUTHERN SHIELD FERNS: Some winters get frostbitten
EBONY SPLEENWORTS: Common small ferns
Other:
CANE: Abundant in the forest understory
MISTLETOE: Common, especially on Black Oaks
SPROUTING SPRING FLORA (many emerging spring herbs and grasses)
The greenness being talked about here is a dark, bronzy, tattered and diffuse one. It’s very different from spring's rambunctious, sunlight-charged yellow-greenness. Our current greenness is a placid, almost somberly mature color, a dark, residual hue full of the sense of biding its time during this season of waiting.
The two main species providing our January forest-greenness are the Water Oak, and Cane. Water Oak, our most common forest tree, slowly loses leaves throughout the winter. When spring's new leaves begin emerging, some of last year's green leaves will still be present. Cane, a native bamboo averaging 8-12 feet high but sometimes much taller, in places forms "brakes" so dense you can hardly shoulder your way through them.
*****
FART-BLOW
When a deer is frightened it reflexively alerts other deer by issuing a kind of loud blow-sound and by stamping the ground. Similarly it is a natural function of a good hermit to fart whenever the need be. At dusk once this week I was standing as silently and quietly as I could next to a field of blackberry brambles, hoping to spot a rare species of sparrow that sometimes sings at dusk. Without thinking much about it, I let a fart rip. Unbeknownst to me, a deer had walked up right behind me, probably not seeing me because of the darkness and because I was so still. My detonation occasioned the deer's sharp blow and this in turn scared me out of my wits. There must have been a moment when both deer and I were airborne with our wheels spinning.
*****
STORM JOG
Saturday morning at dawn I awakened sweating in my sleeping bag, for during the night the air had turned unseasonably warm and humid. I jogged wearing only shorts and shoes, and before long I was good and sweaty, feeling as if I were a detached awareness with my body on auto-pilot running below me. That's a good feeling, when the body is working well and the fresh air rushes into the lungs feeling like high-octane fuel, and the trail below invites you on and on.
Suddenly there came a roar into the trees and at a distance heavy rain could be heard coming through the forest. In a second the gloomy warm air all around was sliced through by a fist of cold air feeling exactly as if it were a blast off of ice. Double-speeding back to the trailer, the wind roared and the trees bent, and my lungs and heart revved to a fast-paced cadence.
Beautiful it was to run in the wind, to be hard and fast in a grand theater of gentle rage.
*****
WIND ROAR ICE MOON
The cold front that moved through here late this week was an amazing thing to behold. On Tuesday the thermometer in my Waxmyrtle read 72°F at noon. Then the wind rose into a roar and by Friday morning it was 15°.
Wednesday night at midnight, embedded in the wind's howling, a persistent sound of an animal gnawing on plastic awakened me. I imagined the Opossum having finally succeeded in knocking my large thermal mug off its high perch, now eating away the mug's plastic cap to get at the hunk of cornbread stored there from the previous day. I abandoned my toasty sleeping bag and went to save the mug and cornbread.
But the mug stood in its place and the cornbread was safe. The gnawing issued from inside the woodpile where probably an Eastern Woodrat was chiseling at something. After figuring all this out I turned around, and above the trailer's roof in the frigid darkness I beheld a transfixing sight.
The gibbous Moon hung above the eastern horizon like a finely etched chunk of white ice. Five long, flat clouds lay below it, evenly spaced like stair steps leading from Earth to Moon. The Pecan tree with its swaying Spanish Moss rose black-silhouetted to the left.
In recent years it's seemed to me that the blackness experienced when I close my eyes at night isn't as pure as the blackness remembered from childhood, and the same can be said of silence, and of the odors and tastes of things. The blackest blackness I can manage now is somehow a bit pale, and I never experience real silence, there always being a sort of ringing in my ears.
But Wednesday night the silence was palpable and pure, and the leafless Pecan tree's silhouette against the moonlight-flooded sky was black as my childhood's blackest hole. The Moon dazzled not only with eye-hurting glare but also with a savage, cutting clarity. It erupted with glare, while the stair-step clouds wore luminescent edges.
The wind roared, the sky cut, the Earth lay stunned, and I stood there thinking this: That maybe the reason the senses dull as one grows older is that only children possess the resilience to survive glimpsing how exquisitely alone and vulnerable life on Earth really is.
*****
COLDNESS BRINGS A MOOD
Several friends emailed me expressing concern about the cold weather, for they knew me well enough to guess that I'd try to make it through the freeze without using my space heater (which I did!). But, this cold snap was no problem at all. It brought a kind of mood worth savoring.
During late afternoon before the night of the big freeze the sky spread over with a mysteriously heavy blueness that was so opaque and shadowy that when I looked into it, it seemed as if I heard a deep-bellied Ommmmmmmmmm. Deep in the night, alert to the coldness and quietness outside, I in my sleeping-bag cocoon imagined myself as an embryo in an egg suspended in distant empty space. Friday morning during my jog, chunks of ice coagulated in my beard, and I ran laughing, feeling the ice with my stuck-out tongue.
Later, sunlight slanting in from the east during breakfast was dazzlingly bright and clear, and how amazing it was that in such coldness the titmice should sing their spring song and my friend the Hermit Thrush should come looking at me just as he does on any warm day. The campfire blazed with orange flames and the smoke that drifted upward, having the last three mornings blown hard into my face as the wind streamed from the north, was nothing but friendly now.
Sometimes a taste of bitterness is required to remind us of the wonder of sweetness. This cold snap was bitter, and what comes now is pure sweetness.
*****
STINKHORN
On Monday the season's first Stinkhorn, Mutinus elegans, a weird but fairly common sort of mushroom, appeared among the leaf-mulch in one of our organic gardens. It's called a stinkhorn because it stinks, and if you see what it looks like you’ll understand why country folks sometimes call it Dog-pecker Mushroom, or some such honest name. Some books call it "Devil's Dipstick" but I think that that's just a made-up name to get around the fact that it looks so unsettlingly like a dog's penis.
Stinkhorns secrete disreputable-smelling, greenish goo. Flies and other insects attracted by the stench walk over the goo's surface. In doing so the fungus's spores stick to the feet, and then when the insect flies away it carries those spores to new locations, thus serving as the mushroom's dispersal mechanism. This strategy must be effective because stinkhorns are found worldwide.
A curious part of the stinkhorn life cycle is that the part aboveground "hatches" from a distinctly egglike structure forming in the ground. The first such "egg" I shoveled up in the garden I thought was surely a turtle egg. It had a somewhat leathery "shell" and a more or less gelatinous interior, just like you might expect of a turtle egg. However, stinkhorn eggs are strictly fungal, and you can eat them, too -- just slice and fry. I've read that you can eat the aboveground part as well, but it's mostly hollow and it stinks, so I can't imagine it being appetizing.
Stinkhorns teach that just because you can do something, that doesn't mean that you necessarily should do it.