Reflections, miscellany,
marginalia.
April 28th, 2013
I went out to perform the rites of
Spring: carrying a short shovel and a hand clipper, equipped with
good boots and gloves, I walked out in a mild rising breeze to look
at the cistern above the pond. Some rain is due tomorrow after four
perfect sunny spring days.
Every winter the cistern clogs with
silt and the clamps on the supply pipe joints come apart. It is
necessary to cut through brambles to reach the source, where from a
northern spring the clean water comes through the low stone wall
marking the edge of the property and meanders through a neglected
meadow, soggy most of the summer, full of odd trees and mock-orange
brambles. On this preliminary expedition I forgot my screwdriver for
the clamps, but it was moot, as the pipe coming out of the cistern
refused to flow when I cleared enough silt to feel it. So tomorrow
I'll bring a snake as well, unless the rain is heavy.
I walked back to the house by a
different route, examining the various curiosities in the meadow.
There are two or three black-ant cities: raised mounds the size of
footstools surrounding a dead pine tree in each case, the land in an
eight-foot circle drier and greener, grassy islands in the soggy
meadow full of every kind of marsh-loving plant. Looking closely, I
see the black ants walking around in leisurely fashion, some carrying
grains of earth, some not. They don't project the usual frenetic ant
energy more typical of summer. I realize that these mounds are just
middling-size towns in the black ant worldwide civilization; not New
York or Sao Paulo, they more resemble Binghamton, Johnson City,
Endicott.
Approaching the border of
civilization, I notice, as I have often before, the scattered ancient
apple trees still hanging on stubbornly after these many decades of
neglect and overgrowth. My grandfather only tended the three trees
in the groomed areas near the house, but three fields on the north
side had been orchards once; the easternmost has been entirely filled
with maples, and even the fallen trunks of the old apples have rotted
away; but in the other two fields they hang on like grim death,
flowering and producing a few small sour apples in the upper
branches, wherever sunlight comes to them through the limbs of the
invading barbarians – the ash, the red pine, spruce, and of course
maple. I admire their gnarled and flinty endurance, and among my
obligations to the land will be aiding and abetting them against
their enemies.
Stewardship of the land is much on my
mind. Traditionally it has meant nothing more than arranging matters
to suit us. An old friend of mine, nine years older than myself,
loves squirrels amd chipmunks on his suburban lot, and they come to
him to be hand-fed. He told me he found them hiding and refusing to
descend their trees one day recently, and in the backyard he found
the reason: a black snake had emerged to sun himself, like all of us
in the spring. He killed the snake; I asked him why he wouldn't want
the snake around to control mice, and of course he said that the
snake would wipe out his chipmunks. An example in miniature of the
constant destruction of the balance that we practice. This is not my
idea of stewardship. But I didn't say that to him, as it would
achieve nothing.
As I walked out with the shovel my
father called down to me to check the island for goose eggs. We have
a pond with a tiny island on it, and every year a pair of Canada
geese stakes it out for their nest, forgetting (if it is the same
pair) that last year, like every year, my father destroyed their eggs
as soon as he could. He and my mother are sure that just a few years
of multiplying geese will bury us in goose shit. Currently he still
mows more than four acres of meadow that my grandfather had laid out
as lawn and tiny golf course; fortunately my grandfather was not so
rich or golf-obsessed that he had the land treated professionally
with all the chemicals legal for use in the fifties and sixties. In
vain I have argued that the geese improve the meadow to some degree,
as do all grazing herds when they are not forced to stay and strip
the land bare.
I may have made some progress
regarding squirrels, though. My parents have had a fixed hatred for
greys, because they “steal” birdseed bought for the songbirds
that my grandmother loved so much, and they feared the reds, thinking
that they will get into the attic, chew on wires and burn the house
down. My dad would go out and shoot them with a pellet gun on a
regular basis. But I pointed out (avoiding the appearance of any
emotional appeal for the animals) that his shooting had little or no
effect on their population density, which is limited by habitat and
food supply; when he thins them here, more gladly move in from the
surrounding woodlands. And now he doesn't bother them; but perhaps
that is just because he can't shoot quite as well as he used to.
There is a certain accidental forbearance that seems to seep into
their lifelong policies, perhaps due as much to forgetfulness and
debility as to any spiritual growth.
As for me I am a great admirer of
squirrels as well; especially the reds, whose ability to race among
the bare branches of the locusts in the late fall surpasses in
athleticism anything I've seen from any other mammal. I once saw one
miss a tiny branch and fall at least thirty feet; it ran back up the
tree immediately. So I intend to treat the squirrels as honored
guests, though I'll try to escort them out gently should they enter
the house.
Which leads directly to another
anecdote I'm recorded in passing elsewhere. Last year at some time
my wife entered an upstairs bedroom in my parent's house to find a
bat circling the room. She came and got me, and I went into the room
with a towel to throw over it, as we had no butterfly net; but my
first approach was to open the window all the way,and wave my arms
gently to create better odds that it would find the way out into the
night. But the word had spread in the house that there was a bat,
and my mother reverted to her childhood, in a sort of a panic, and
began yelling, kill it, kill it! Get the tennis racquet! Kill it!
I said there would be no tennis racquet, and in a few minutes the bat
found the window and left. But I remembered so clearly at least one
incident of this same kind from my own childhood, when we got a
racquet and eventually killed the panicked animal, all of us in a
laughing panic ourselves, participating in the primitive patterns of
our own evolution, which mandate killing as the default response to
any odd situation involving animals. In my adult years I have a
different attitude toward this, that is very much at odds with most
of humanity. I especially dislike the killing of snakes, poisonous
or not.
“Arms are instruments of ill-omen.
Using arms is like cutting wood on behalf of the Master Carpenter.
When one cuts wood on behalf of the Master Carpenter one can rarely
avoid cutting oneself.”
One might think that humans would have
a special affinity to a species as impressive and successful as the
Canada goose. They thrive in the absence of most their predators, of
course, and also due to the clearing of forests that we love to
replace with manicured golf courses and lawns, and pretty water
features. But we dislike their noise, their aggressiveness, their
manure, regardless of the organic benefits thereof. They are
inconvenient; they compete with us to a small degree, and so, as
stewards of the land, we discourage them. They also compete for
airspace, menacing our great flying dragons. If we were to continue
expanding the great world-machine that has allowed our current
so-called civilization, the geese will have to go, along with most
other natural creatures. But to imagine this landscape without their
legions cruising north and south each year, without their distant
clamor, strikes horror in me. On my sixtieth-birthday extravaganza,
cabin-camping at Ricketts State Park, we began hearing skeins of
north-going geese overhead, and I began counting them; I counted
groups I could see and those I could just hear. I think I stopped
counting in a half hour at about 25, and my best estimate was that
each skein had perhaps 150 birds.
Luckily for everybody, we almost
certainly won't be able to do that – to eliminate geese and every
other natural creature. We will reach limits and be forced to cut
back, either rationally and humanely, or (more likely) in a
disorganized, bloody mess of decline and loss. We might resemble my
weakening parents, who must soon relinquish their iron grip on the
land to my very different approach, and are already softening to some
small degree.
April 29th, 2013
I went out this morning in a very
light rain and trudged up to the cistern with a bucket, a screwdriver
and a plumber's snake, to complete the rite and bring water to the
pond. It was unusually arduous; three joints all needed careful
readjustment, as the person fixing it last year (probably me) did not
properly center the clamps; the cistern had a lot of muck to dip out
with the bucket, and the snake encountered considerable packed silt
deep in the pipe, and even when when I got the water flowing, it was
temporarily stemmed by one of the improvised repairs at one joint,
which mandated much squelching back and forth in my excellent boots
to locate and lance the clot. But water is now entering the pond as
per ancient custom. The unattractive little windmill is turning,
bubbling air into the center of the pond. The two giant grass-eating
carp are drifting about majestically among the floating wrack of
vegetation; the geese are complaining overhead after I put bird
netting all over their proposed nesting site, so that perhaps they
will use their generative energy elsewhere and my Dad will not have
to trudge down and smash their eggs this year; and I heard some
spring peepers close up, in the shallows, with their piercing call.
And I have seen the yellow-bellied salamanders drifting among the
water weed.
May 3rd, 2013
Since I filled the bird feeders two
days ago, the bird life has picked up immensely. Pairs of goldfinch,
house finch, cardinal, and blue jay compete for space on the pegs, as
well as individual nuthatch, redwing blackbird, and chickadee. They
sit in the apple tree, jockeying and waiting to dive-bomb whoever is
currently filling his beak. Once a raven, grim and huge, came and
sat in the topmost branch of the apple, and everybody scrammed or
froze, especially the chipmunk in the grass. Finally he became bored
and pushed off, and the party resumed. Unrelated sighting: a
pileated woodpecker on the huge eroded old willow, still alive at the
top, which I hope houses many creatures.
It is currently spring turkey season,
and we have talked twice with Todd Peters, walking through in full
camo, even to his gun and boots; he is an experienced woodsman and
has the wide useful knowledge of the born and bred northern
Pennsylvania countryman. He has not got a turkey yet apparently; I
told him that I had seen one fly from a treetop at the pond as I
stood below not far away; it calmly sailed down the wooded ravine
toward Rinne Creek. I also (today) saw a foot-long bass and a turtle
in the pond, so all is well. Dad and I
installed four trees in large pots on the terrace: two Italian plums,
one Stella cherry, and one combo apple with red delicious, Gala and
yellow delicious on different limbs; next spring after the last frost
we'll plant them on the southern lawns if they live. I
insisted on paying for them; it is my symbolic assertion of
investment and commitment to the land going forward. Perhaps not
coincidentally, today we saw our first deer and rabbit of the season.
According to Tsunetomo Yamamoto,
negligence is an extreme thing. One my first morning of this trip,
after a rainy night, I went out in cool sunlight, well armored, and
ripped, cut, tore and uprooted a massive blackberry colony
surrounding and choking a still-living juniper bush. The diameter of
the colony was about twenty feet. The roots pulled easily out of the
black, soft earth along with earthworms, centipedes and beetles. I
trimmed and pruned the juniper of twenty years of neglect; it took us
another two days to finish hauling off all the debris. We took two
dozen of the biggest, nastiest blackberry roots and replanted them in
a prime spot across the way, and later did the same for a number of
long-forgotten raspberry plants, replanting them along the crumbling
fences of the barnyard. The list of repairs, cleanups and minor
projects has been satisfyingly long, right down to this evening when
I convinced the folks not to keep plastic dinner trays on top of the
refrigerator, whence they inevitably fall to the kitchen floor and
break, if they don't hit one's arm or head. We threw away the half
of the trays which were cracked and badly chipped. We checked smoke
detectors and fire extinguishers; we relocated one extinguisher from
where it was totally hidden behind a phalanx of coffee-table books to
a spot near the fireplace, which has an ancient heat exchanger and
fan which is much used every winter. And so the endless List goes
ever on.
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