Fall, as I have previously mentioned, is my favorite season. Spring is bathed in beautiful pastels, summer is a fine time for swimming in a creek, and winter offers superb excuse for curling up inside with a few of those books one intended to read four months ago. But fall – that season of glorious arborous fireworks, celebrating successful end to another trip around the sun, is, as has been said, da bomb.
Category: Outdoors
Matter of perspective
As I sit watching the water flow downhill, the news is reporting Standing Rock Sioux Americans confronting police in an effort to block a 1,170-mile, $4 billion pipeline being built across land the tribes-people consider sacred, and across a river that is a water source for several million people.
President Obama said the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers – responsible for at least one of the pipeline’s required permits – is looking at a way to reroute the pipeline, but he has to know the company will fight that, citing the cost of the pipe it already has rushed to lay as it tries to outrun any potentially successful efforts to change the already expensive project..
Changing seasons
The end is near, the calendar says, though physical evidence offers some argument. Summer inexorably withdraws southward, following the Canada geese to their winter abode, but the lawn still needs periodic cutting.
We returned from a two-week road trip to the sound of a cricket holding forth from among the stones. It was an unexpected sound for mid-October. Temperatures the past few days have been in the 80s that should be at least 20 degrees lower, breaking records for highs set in 1908. Marsh Creek is shallower than it should be this time of year. Rain near the end of September raised the creek some, but a friend reports a boulder that is usually submerged all winter is about 18 inches exposed.
Sea Change
The sky brightens as though on a timer announcing 6 a.m. The sun isn’t really up, yet, but its warming rays are bending over the horizon, illuminating the knotty pine boards of the bedroom loft’s western wall.
The rain has finally tired, leaving only the sound of incessant wave action rubbing away at the shore with the soft-sounding, powerful strokes of a woodworker rubbing the surface of a boat’s wooden molding. The smoothness of the sound belies the power peeling layer after layer of ancient minerals and stirring them into the sea.
Somewhere to my south, a hurricane threatens to submerge Miami, Florida.
Life supporting is a good thing
Several years ago, I wrote a story about an applesauce processor. My guide took me through the entire process, beginning with the orchard – – so far, science hasn’t come up with a way to make apples without the trees. Huge bins of apples were hauled to the processing plant, where the apples were washed, sorted, cored, chopped and mashed into mush, er, sauce, and poured into jars.
My guide was especially proud of the part of the process that killed off stuff that wasn’t apple. He was proud that, in his words, his sauce “would not support life.”
Funny thing, until then, I thought the purpose of the applesauce was to support life – mine, if I was the buyer.
So long, old friend
We met Grady at a doctor’s office in February 2007. He was homeless, effusively friendly, and eager to see us. We invited him home. It doesn’t seem that long ago.
The day we met, the doctor took the stitches out from having surgically removed the collar that had grown into his neck. It was most of a year before he’d not make a puddle on the floor when someone new came to the door.
Marking the Middle of Autumn
Through the trees a couple of honks announced a gaggle of Canada geese approaching from the north. In less than a minute, maybe 20 individuals in a signature V floated just over the stand of oak trees, wings beating in almost perfect unison. They likely would land in a field of corn stubble, at least near a stream, if not in the pond across from the Mount St. Mary’s University campus a few miles down the road.
For the past few days, Blue Jays here been gathering, like caravaners of old, preparing to head south, rather than west, for the winter. Apparently, though, the new caravaners are mostly young birds. Older couples – blue jays, by the way, are monogamous – tend to stay around here for the winter. That’s OK. The jays love the peanuts we toss out to the squirrels, and we love watching as they drop down to the back deck, grab a nut, and make off to feast in peace.
A walk in the woods
Rain, glorious rain … almost the words and tune of a song I cannot quite name or sing, but last night! The music all was outside. Giant kettle drums, flashing strobes – I loved it. This morning, the rain gauge registered an inch and-a-half. We needed it, and more.
A few evenings ago, I slowly poked along the road next to the near-dry stream bed, collecting the webs of funnel spiders with my camera – intriguing creations designed to direct an unsuspecting dinner guest down the inviting hole to the waiting host. I found a lone yellow puff of a caterpillar, likely preparing to weave a home for the winter.
A fine kind of sorcery
I was about to leave the house one afternoon this week, when I decided to mention to the Resident Nurse:
“I don’t feel right,” I said, “and I’ve been out of bed long enough I should have woke up by now.”
“My heart is sending Morse code like back in the days of black-and-white TV – a couple of quick beats, skip a few, another one, skip a couple more …”
The only home we have
We The People have a long history of preserving public land for the enjoyment and education of all of us, and for, we have been lately learning, the health of this whirling blob of mud we call home. Yet, we are destroying indigenous families and forests to make room to grow quinoa in South America, and palm oil in Asia.
Here at home, the Republican platform calls for the federal government to get out of the business of owning public lands. There is profit in those forests and canyons – oil, natural gas, coal and lumber are waiting to be harvested by industries that have little concern for the health of our grandkids. (I wonder whether those folks might be interested in giving up the thousands of military reservations we non-military peeps are not allowed to visit. I would love to visit that cave dug into the rock a few miles from my home.)
It’s getting hot out there
TThree Black Vultures showed up in the backyard Tuesday and headed for our stream. They were not looking for food; they craved water. They hover over us every day; that was the first time any of them landed so near our house.
Drinking water is in short supply in many wild places. We are in a time of year when water levels often are low, but Marsh Creek, in places where it normally only is low, is nearly dry. I was shooting pictures of a pair of Great Blue Herons looking for enough water to support a fresh frog for lunch when a Mallard drake swam by, about three feet over the surface of what used to be the creek. There was more water in the humid air than in the stream bed.
On a nearby fence rail, a dozen starlings sat with mouths open, panting. Other critters presumably have found shadier places to await sundown.
They may not speak our language
I’ve lived many places and left bits of me in several of them. One of my favorite memories is swimming with the loons on hot summer midnights in Maine.
Common Loons have existed unchanged since the first ones flew over the planet and under its water. According to the fossil record, they existed as a distinct species more than 30 million years ago, and with that kind of seniority, they think they own wherever they land.
If we love it, why destroy it
I once worked with a man whose wife’s idea of “roughing it” was a Holiday Inn without a swimming pool. He liked to hunt and fish. She, obviously, did not. The result was infrequent family trips to the forest, a problem for which 59 Pennsylvania legislators have a solution.
Close your eyes and imagine Caledonia State Park with a Sleepy-Time Motel & Conference Center, swimming pool and a paved parking lot adjacent to Thaddeus Stevens’ forge, and meeting rooms named for the trees and critters chased away by construction. Camping areas are replaced by a theme park, including a water flume or two wending their way past Stevens’ furnace. A shuttle service carries folks to a wide spot on the Appalachian Trail, where they enjoy box lunches provided by conference center tour guides.
A matter of perspective
A stream splashes down several steps into a pool that is home to at least one growing bullfrog. For the past hour, Old Sol has worked mightily to climb over the oaks and maples that line the ridge.
A Mourning Dove serenades a mate, while in yon garden, tomatoes prepare to be fried green, and the zucchini vines show no sign of my bulk having crashed among them, now two weeks hence. Clearly, I came out the worst in that encounter.
Sometimes, as I sit out under the trees watching a variety of critters go about their daily business, I think about whether we might be in a huge spacarium, like a terrarium only containing multiple planets. We could be, in that imagined universe, like Charlton Heston in the original “Planet of the Apes.”
Busted left wing
Wednesday, there were four eggs in the bluebird nest. Thursday, I didn’t check. Friday evening, the eggs were gone. Nary a sign. No chicks, no shells. Nothing but ne(s)t.
I turned around on the slide up which I had walked to view the nest mounted to the roof of the children’s play structure. I guess I slid, because that’s what one does on a slide, lost my balance and crashed into the garden, on the way becoming tangled in the plastic netting effective at keeping out rabbits and neighbor’s cats but not so much a 260-pound lummox trying to walk on slippery slides.
Miracle of life
Monday, there was one, new, baby Robin. We didn’t get to see the first poke into the world of breath-on-your-own, but it still wore a part of its shell like a hat.
Tuesday, there was another.
She laid them one each on consecutive days.
Fifteen days later, the first little one appeared.
An extraordinary queendom
A friend used to say the trees caused the wind to blow, like when you wave one of those Japanese hand fans. “Whenever you feel the wind, you look and see the trees are moving,” he said in an offering of proof. He wasn’t all that far-fetched.
A beautiful time for a drive or a walk
Beside a road off Pa. Route 34, somewhere north of Gettysburg, Don Yost and John Deere team up to pull a chisel plow through a field of corn stubble.
Last year was no-till for the field, and the crop was corn. No-till means the ground is left unturned, the roots of the previous crop keep the hillside from flowing to the bottom in heavy rains, and new seed poked into the earth with a tool made for the task.
We’re the smartest, except for the others
![Long Pine Run in Michaux SF [Click to enlarge]](https://theedgeofthewood.comm/images/gallery/Michaux_SF-1202.jpg)
The stream roars softly over a barrier of rocks near where I sit taking inventory as Grady the Golden pads about the area on his own cataloging mission.
Nearby, a long-needle pine catches my eye, not for the needles – they are common enough – but for the pine cones protruding from the trunk, That is not something I’ve previously noticed. Later, down at the Michaux State Forest office, Forestry Technician Mike Rothrock tells me it is common for young Pitch Pine to have cones growing from the trunk, as well as the more common configuration, growing from the ends of branches.
Fishing season opened this week
Fishing season started this week. It was too darn cold to brave the squadrons of fisher-folk who’d be gathered in all the most productive places, though I did buy my license.
When I was a lad, we were one of two families living year-round on the lake. Some summer folks from town had their weekend-only cottages in clusters; between the clusters were large trees that passing storms had pushed into the water, and lily pad farms where the broad leaves and deep grasses hid lunker Chain Pickerel.