Blizzard

Wind lacks clarity. It turns the snowy yard into a sort of desert: un-skiable, pine-needle-covered grass shows at one end, but raspberry bushes and currants lie buried at the other. There’s no way to tell what has happened, how many inches have fallen, the evidence all up in the air continuously turning.

It is so cold I cannot gather snow. Can’t shape it into a small world, packed between my gloves, then destroy it like an angry god; can’t roll it into three large worlds, stack them, and call it a man.

I wonder what my dog thinks. She brings winter in on long toe-hairs, accretions of ice and dirt from the road, like the nuclei of tiny comets that drop off and melt on the hardwood. Does she think this is the way things will be now—this constant rattle at the windows, the cold—or recognize it for what it is: a temporary lean away from the sun?

Still Mixed Up

Falling rain instead of falling leaves, a trail that smells of skunk. I follow the wet-mop coat of my dog down the warm path, past the Tickseed sunflowers. If I didn’t know better—these blooms come in late summer or fall—I’d think it was spring: water, odor, and primary yellow.

But back at the trailhead, something I earlier missed, a sure sign of autumn: four bent legs of a deer hacked off and neatly piled, as if running so quickly they’d left their body behind; a few feet over, a square of hide; and further still the carcass, snout raised mid-howl (as if it could), ribs exposed, innards gone mortician-style.

Mixed Up

The astringent air, fragrant as a washrag dipped in rubbing alcohol and lime—no doubt from the Witch Hazel blooms that abound in the understory of this autumn forest—carries a sound shrill and repetitious as a blacksmithing hammer, but more organic. It comes from far off, and from something small—a frog smaller than a pea-coat button: Hyla crucifer—the Spring Peeper.

Why does he call in fall? Amplexus—his pseudo-coital hug—accomplished long ago, his months of foraging nearly over, he should be hopping from his human-knee-high perch on a tree or shrub to slip noiselessly under a forest-floor leaf or log, where he’ll spend the winter sometimes frozen, sometimes thawing. Instead he chirps, over and over.

It’s likely the photo-period that has him going. October 10th could be April 9th as far as he knows, sunrise and sunset the same. He has no memory of mating, no knowledge of orbits and equinoxes, no calendar to keep him straight, only the sun on his throat, which seems to draw his call out and into its own fiery heart.

I listen to him sing, alone with the sun, doing what he thinks is right, no one to judge.

The Book is Out!

Interested in more lyrical accounts of encounters with nature? My book, Deranged: Finding a Sense of Place in the Landscape and in the Lifespan has just been published by Apprentice House of Loyola University Maryland. You can order it from your local bookstore or on Amazon.com.

Alert

Driving over, a new friend sees a bear.

I am all eyes on my walk later.

Two garter snakes out for one last bask on the sunny trail rustle through dry grass—long, dull, and flattened—as if leaving behind their stripes for the winter. Next, I spot a fallen bird’s nest, small, constructed of birch bark and lichens. In the distance, something the color of sandy soil flung from a recently dug hole takes the shape of a deer. Prom-gown purple, aster is everywhere. But what I love most: a witch hazel bloom, like the hair of a cartoon character, sparse and frazzled.

Born

What looks like a dollop of manure dropped from the spreader that regularly travels this road turns out to be a just-hatched snapping turtle headed for water. Supposedly he instinctively knows which way to go—by scent? by terrain?—but this one is bearing straight for the cornfield, away from Brekke Lake, where his indifferent mother has likely been swimming, her labor of digging and laying forgotten, for the last three months, and where his father has probably been living incognito for just as many years (in turtles, a single mating provides enough sperm to fertilize eggs for several seasons).

His shell is the size of a half-dollar; his tail, a little longer. His head and legs already have the fat, secure look of an animal that does not have to worry about predators. But it is premature: I notice one of his siblings a few yards down the road, smashed. I pinch his carapace between my thumb and forefinger, admittedly, in spite of his tiny size, a bit afraid. Yet snappers get a bad rap. Pester an adult snapper on land and you could lose a digit, but in the swimming hole the snapper glides away from your kicking foot to more practical foods: aquatic plants and minnows. I carry him home to a plastic terrarium I fill with a half-inch of water, a trilobite fossil from a Kansas friend’s farm that’s been on display on the windowsill, and a Tupperware lid that I garnish with a few fresh vegetables.

That night, I fantasize about keeping him until he is too large to slide down the gullet of a great blue heron. But he swims relentlessly against the corner of the terrarium as if his birth has been a joke, as if to say, Is this all? He doesn’t touch the slice of burpless cucumber or the bright shreds of carrot.

The next day, (and the next week, for I will find another like him, even further from the water) I carry the baby snapper to the lake. I place him in shallow water and he begins to swim. He keeps his head out of the water until I grow impatient, worried I have caused him to imprint on a certain depth, a depth that will surely result in his being eaten before night falls. I tap his shell and he goes under, and it is as if he is suddenly born—his journey across the road and to my house all contractions pushing him toward this moment. His front and back legs have met their proper medium like a lover, and carry him swiftly from the shore. Surrounded by a council of small fish, he hesitates, then swims through them, toward the cattails and lily pads and algae that edge the pond next to the boat slip. I watch him until he has become mud in the water. I look for him every night, but he is gone.

Beware

Red-Spotted-Purple, they call him, but at rest, wings open, he screams blue. It’s as if the Caribbean sprouted hind wings and flew onto the forewings of night. He’s as regal as the velvet that might line a coffin, or the bottom of a church collection plate. And make sure you tithe—or at least give thanks—when you see him because, God or not, he’s worth it.

I once saw Red-Spotted-Purples in my rear-view mirror like falling leaves all around my car as I sped home after a hike. They had gathered en masse on the road to suck up mineral-water from the gravel. They may appear for this same purpose in the ashes at your campsite after you extinguish the fire.

The Red-Spotted-Purple practices mimicry. He looks like the Pipevine Swallowtail, which is toxic and distasteful. To all things he cautions, “Beware.” To the Blue Jay and Praying Mantis he may be the memory of a dangerous meal, and to me he is a warning that nature can be almost too beautiful.

Katydid

In the sizzling voice of deep summer insects, somewhat mechanistic, or like office supplies clattering inside plastic containers—brass fasteners and paper clips—"Katy did, Katy didn’t," the True Katydid says outside my open bedroom window.

At least, that is the onomatopoeic language ordinarily ascribed to them—"Katy did, Katy didn’t," an argument. But really, in the song of the northern populations I heard in my central Maryland home growing up, it’s more of a gentle persuasion: "Katy did, she did," the insects collectively urge back and forth almost till morning, with only the occasional dissenter emitting a four-pulsed chirp.

The next time you find a small leaf, look closely—it might be a Katydid wing, laced with veins and chlorophyll-green. Katydids, a type of grasshopper distinguished by antennae often longer than their bodies, can also be identified by their large size and prominent, leaf-like wings. But Katydids prefer to walk to the tops of trees (mostly Oaks) to sing their mating song and from which they can complete a sort of expert fall, if need be, rather than fly.

The True Katydid has three main populations east of the Mississippi and south of the Great Lakes (there are 6,399 other species, no less true to the family, but perhaps less common, all with spectacular names: Splendid Shield-back, Gladiator). Each population of the True Katydid has its own dialect. The dialects are characterized by how quickly and how often the insects pulse—a sound made by rubbing the serrated edge of one forewing— called the file—across the smooth edge of the other—the scraper. Where populations overlap, the songs vary, giving evidence of interbreeding. Large groups of Katydids call collectively, interacting with other large groups, often increasing the speed of their chirps.

As a child, I didn’t claim to understand what the Katydids said, whether their constant back and forth chatter was quarrel or applause. But lying in bed, unable to sleep in the way an 8-year old often is, I wondered which group of Katydids called and which answered. Who had started this conversation?

I flipped the calling Katydids’ chirps back and forth in my mind in the same way one alternates between foreground and background in an optical illusion—is it a picture of two faces or a wine glass? Which square is the forefront of a three dimensional cube sketched on a piece of paper?

Each night, I promised myself the next evening I would listen for the first calling Katydid. I would follow that dialogue through to be sure of the answer. But somehow, I could only become conscious of the True Katydids' song after it was already well underway, and that is the problem with understanding anything, isn’t it? Love, God, the cosmos, earth’s systems: it is so terribly difficult to detect things at their beginning.

Trespassers

I have always been a borrower of forests.

Currently I borrow a linear segment of Maples, Oaks, and planted Red Pines covering the end moraine behind my house, the ridge of glacial drift—unsorted boulders, gravel, sand, and clay left by the most recent glacier. In spring, I trek through a farmer’s field to get to its base, a slow runner hurdling over ridiculously close rows of soybean and corn until they get too high to justify my intrusion. Post-harvest, the plowed field hardens like the surface of Mars, solid, cracked, and dusty, devoid of life, easily navigable.

I have borrowed a forest of Hemlock and Beech split with a tannin-orange trout stream; an overpopulation of Black Bears (according to Homo Sapiens); Porcupines that wintered in a fallen tree across the trail, that moaned and grunted when I tapped the tree with a broken branch; and the bounding tracks of Mink in deep snow like pair after pair of eyes dropped along the frozen river’s bank.

For most of my life I borrowed a forest of Locust, Sassafras, and Red Oak, fragmented by fields of hay and feed corn. The fields led to a creek in a steep valley, easy to walk to, exhausting to walk away from. We made domed forts there from saplings, with Crow’s Foot carpet.

I have always been a borrower of forests. I have never needed to own land, but will forever require neighboring one who does. This is not out of laziness, or frugality, but because I am and always have been a trespasser, like we sometimes mistakenly view the plants and animals that actually inhabit the forests we claim to possess and love.

Fourteen

There is one bird whose song I could do without—not the American Crow, which seems to have perched in the early hours on a branch outside the window of every bedroom in which I’ve ever slept, repeating its unselfconscious screech; or the Canada Goose, with its car horn of bird calls; or the Sandhill Crane, who bellows like a slender elephant from the bowels of recently seeded fields.

The bird whose song I could do without is not loud, or dissonant. Its shortcoming is no fault of its own, but merely an association I have made with its song: it reminds me of being fourteen. Of waking in a tangle of humid sheets on a twin bed in an un-air-conditioned house on a wooded 3½ acres after a full night’s sleep. The sheets are threaded between my arms and legs as if I had tried to knot together an escape rope in the middle of the night. It is nine o’clock in the morning, and I am trying to decide whether to turn over for another nap or wipe the mucus from my eyes and get up. But for what?

Summer vacation. Homework has disappeared like sand fleas after a receding wave, no holes left to even imagine its existence. The house is half empty, but full of industry: one sister is married and has moved out; the other has a boyfriend and a job. My mother is already outside hanging up her second load of laundry, hair washed and curled. My father left hours ago, in a tie, for work.

The only thing bound to happen on those days, at that age, in my comfortable world, was that the temperature would rise, and the Eastern Wood Peewee would call continuously.

The final tone in the three-tone song of this olive-and-gray bird is never quite as high or as strong as the first. The song descends from notes one to two, rises from notes two to three, and, on the last note, continues to rise, stretching the note like a ligament in the spine of someone who is tired of waiting.

My Audubon Nature Encyclopedia says, “This unobtrusive little flycatcher is associated in our minds with peaceful woodland scenes where its sad and pensive notes may be heard all day long in the green canopy overhead. Pe-ah-wee, pe-ah it says with plaintive accents, as if giving expression to some immemorial sorrow which had afflicted its race.”

Hmmm. Peaceful and plaintive. How can these two things go together? Yet that was what I felt at fourteen: secure in my parents’ house, abandoned by the impending adulthood of my siblings. I was on the cusp of everything—independence, love—but felt like nothing had ever happened and nothing ever would. Simply put, I was bored.

But in that Peewee’s song I heard my due: to be consumed by something so wholly as to not understand its costs or value, regret, hindsight, all those sentiments that come with life after childhood. On a hot, weedy trail in a recently logged woods I hear the Eastern Wood Peewee sing today and it still stops me dead in my tracks, pushing things to the surface: Am I where I want to be? Have I done what I wished?

Tadpoles and Tractor Puddles

One thing I hate about mowing is killing toads. It happened the first time I mowed this year. Too late, I noticed from my perch atop the John Deere, a startled hop. Then, over my shoulder, I saw him split in half like a pitted avocado—tough outer skin, dull innards, no blood or bone to be seen. He didn’t feel a thing.

I’ve run over a nest of rabbits while mowing, too, and not felt half as bad—maybe because they eat my vegetable garden. But the toads just sit under the leaves of my strawberry patch and clean the area of bugs. Hopping mysteriously around beneath the dense canopy, they keep my dog occupied so that she doesn’t run down the road and chase the neighbor’s kids while I’m pulling weeds. Toads greet me silently on the sidewalk when I take the dog out to do her business late at night—little, anonymous, unpaid sentinels in the dark, keeping the house as free of ants as they can.

When I lived in Maryland, I used to walk through the yard, down the bank, across the road and through a large field to get to a wooded valley through which a river flowed. On the way, I would often pass a puddle of water in a ditch made by the wheels of a tractor.

I used to find toad tadpoles in that tractor ditch, and I came across toad tadpoles again today, where I live now in Wisconsin, in a ditch on the side of a cornfield at a right-angle turn in the road, where said dog has paused to drink nearly every day this past week—thanks to near-daily afternoon storms—during our early morning walk. The tadpoles scattered away from her curled tongue like specks of night in the glittering water, as benign as the migrating skates my husband and I found ourselves swimming amongst one summer day in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of New Jersey: skates tipping under swells as if someone had given life to shadows, moving perpendicular to the two of us as we bodysurfed the waves; we found ourselves engulfed. Alarmed, we left the water and watched them journey by, like so many drowned kites. So, too, these tiny larvae, bursting like a firework from my dog’s point of entry in this three-inch deep puddle. She draws back, confused, not understanding what water can do except fill the backwards scoop of her tongue to quench her thirst.

Sure enough, my Audubon Nature Encyclopedia (copyright 1965, acquired in 1995 from a former boyfriend who traded a futon for the 12-volume set), maintains, “The eggs of most toads are laid in long gelatinous strings and deposited in shallow waters, often in temporary roadside ditches, and tadpoles emerge rapidly.” I read on, halfway through the entry on Spadefoot toads until I reach the reason that this set of encyclopedias is still my first choice for information, even post-internet: its nonfiction is studded with value judgments, unapologetic appreciation for the natural world. It says, at the end of a paragraph on the elliptical pupils of Spadefoot toads versus the vertical pupils of Bufo Americanus: “The eyes of all toads are notable for their beauty.”

Who wrote this? Who has looked into the eyes of a toad long enough to note their allure? “—G.P.” is listed at the end of the article, and I thank G.P for this flicker of pleasure in a world that can sometimes seem all business. G.P. is not alone in his habit of ogling the oglers of toads. In George Orwell's essay, “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad,” Orwell says a toad’s eye “is like gold, or more exactly it is like the golden-coloured semi-precious stone which one sometimes sees in signet-rings, and which I think is called a chrysoberyl.”

If it keeps raining this summer like it has, I expect I’ll be killing more toads. Our lawn, usually by this time brown and matted as a scouring pad, too painful for bare feet, is, as I write this, in need of a mow. But also, with continued rain, the breeding pools carved by tractors at planting time, now undisturbed while the corn grows, will stay full the five to ten weeks it will take for the tadpoles to become adults. So, in that paradoxical way in which humans both aid and destroy nature, I can be as sure toads' trills will reach my ears every night from May to September as I can that their eyes will haunt my dreams like souls.