More Feathers, Hope

We spent today worrying about a female house sparrow in our  yard. She clearly has an injured wing and spent most of the day splayed on one of our feeders. Every time we tried to have a closer look, she would attempt, and fail, to fly away, usually just landing in a heap on the ground. By nightfall (when birds should be in their nests), there  were eight inches of snow on the ground - with just as much more forecast by morning - and she was still there, limply resting on the feeder. Knowing that she would freeze to death by morning, we placed a call to the wildlife rehabilitators up in Roanoke who helped  us with our baby squirrel situation earlier this summer, who gave us some suggestions about how to capture her and bring her inside. The suggestions were irrelevant;  in her exhausted state, she didn't even put up a fight. For tonight, at least, she is warm and safe with food and water in a cardboard box in our downstairs bathroom. We shall see how she is in the morning. The injury doesn't look life-threatening, and she doesn't appear to have any eye problems like the wildlife rehab person says they've seen with sparrows around here. The Preschooler was enthralled with this whole situation, watching her father capture her outside through the living room windows, and then insisting on having a look at her once she was moved inside. She's been asking a lot of existential questions lately about life and death, which are hard for anyone, harder for those of us with out-of-the-mainstream ideas and beliefs. We're hoping the sparrow makes it, so that we can avoid some of those Hard Questions for a while longer.

During all this bird-rescuing chaos, my father-in-law called and thought we were crazy for going to all this trouble to help a common bird. Certainly house sparrows don't get much love from me, as far as local birds go. They are ruthless in their role at displacing the disappearing Eastern bluebirds, and while they're not as horrible as say, cowbirds, they definitely aren't the kindest, gentlest species. Still, there was just nothing else we could have or would have done but this. Nothing at all.

Happy Ending Postscript:
House Sparrow seemed to be rejuvenated this morning, with no sign of any serious wing injury. So we all just released her into the yard, where she promptly flew away quickly and eagerly. Good thing, since it doesn't look like there's any bird rehabilitators within a two-hour drive of here!

I Am Not Ready, But the Color's Here

Gray, in anticipation of white. This rumpled landscape swathed in a colorless season. Darkness outweighs lightness for a few more hesitant weeks. A time when I have to push myself, stretch beyond self-imposed boundaries, the confines of warmth and comfort, go seeking sustenance in a still and quiet world. My least favorite time of year, when it is so hard to remember that this dormancy is temporary. In a momentary lull, I read for pleasure - how long has it been? - nourish my soul with language and metaphor and image:

I'm looking for summer, but I can't find how or where it begins. Is it a prick of light, the spark from a horseshoe striking rock as I ride into the mountains? Can it be found in the green eruption of a leaf? It's my obsession, you see, to seek origins...That's how summer is: no past or future but all present tense, long twilights like vandals, breaking into new days.

-Gretel Ehrlich, Islands, The Universe, Home

Z says: "You like to watch snow through the window."
I say:    "Yes. I like snow without the cold."

Until the light returns, I must ask myself this question, over and over, until I have accepted the answer: Isn't one's true abode any wild place, any fire storm or night of discontent?

The Return of Terrible Things

So I guess last year's truly epic battle with brown marmorated stink bugs was not an isolated incident. In the last few days, a literal brown blanket has appeared, covering the entire outside of our house, as these critters all try to find a way inside, a place to over-winter (turns out it is primarily the females who do so). And thus far, many of them have found a way in. This year, we've gotten a bit smarter after last year's experience and much research - air conditioning units are fully sealed and are running 24-hours-a-day (at least the fans, since we suspect that's one entry point). But this house is a crack-and-crevice nightmare; there are still so many other ways in. And in they will come. And since we were still seeing them in the house all the way till spring last  year, I can only imagine that it will be the same this season.

I have never, ever in my life been able to say that I *hate* another creature before. Until these bugs. And my hatred runs to a truly unfathomable depth. We have come to the unfortunate realization that there is just no other alternative - well, relocation, which given our lease, is not an option - except insecticides. J. has spent the entire day spraying every window, every crack and place outside where he sees them. That would be upsetting on its own, but coming on the heels of my having just finished Silent Spring (in entirety for the first time, shameful for a nature writer I know), I am conflicted to the point of going straight out of my head. I honestly don't think I would be quite so upset if I didn't have children to consider.

Four Months

That's all the time it took for the wolf to finally be removed from the Endangered Species List and for two states to declare a hunting season on them. I wonder what Barry Lopez would say.

What We Should Do

I've been thinking a lot since the weekend about some ideas that came out of one of the writing craft lectures at the Chatham residency. Some ideas that seem a bit problematic to me. I've been struggling to make sense of these thoughts. I realized yesterday that the term I've been reaching for, the idea that feels problematic to me, is atavism. In a social science context, atavism is used to discuss culture, the concept of modern people reverting to ways of thinking and acting that are throwbacks to a former time. And in this sense, that former time is usually looked on nostalgically, almost reverently. This seems to be a common thread in a lot of nature/environmental writing, especially in the contemporary works, given the urgent environmental crises we currently face. Writers who feel that we need to get back to basics, a simpler life and time, before technology and science mucked things up so badly.

What's been problematic to me about an atavistic attitude is that I'm just not sure it's such a great idea. I love many writers' absolute conviction that environmental issues are the single most critical thing we humans are facing, and I would also agree with that. I can even agree, to a certain extent, with the assertion that our advancements, our technologies, are the root causes of many (or most) of our social problems, especially environmental. But these writers too often also have what feels like an overly romanticized view of "nature." Maintaining what seems to me an idealized view of life as it used to be, the agrarian, close-to-the-land lifestyle, or the belief that we all, unilaterally, need to to aspire to return to that, to heal ourselves and the planet, is where I diverge. While I think that is a lovely, admirable goal, it's just not that realistic. And it idealizes a way of life that is impractical and perhaps impossible for a lot of people. It's a way of life I'm not sure I myself would want.

Sure, it would be nice to quit society and move to the country and live lightly, live off the grid. But unless everyone commits to that - which is unlikely - there are lots of people who can do really amazing environmental work within the society we've created, who can find ways to see, and help others see/find the "wildness" and "wilderness" (terms that get tossed around a lot by nature writers) in their own spaces and places, as they are now. I like to think that I can do that. People I know can do that. And that we too can make a difference.

On Feathers and Foreigners

I have realized that now that I no longer have a job where I sit in front of a computer all day long, to maintain this space as I have in the past, as I would like - which means long, meandering, thoughtful posts - is an impossibility. So I shall have to retrain my Blog Self, to write smaller things, less meandering but, I hope, not less thoughtful.

I am reconsidering my commitment to the birds here, the ones that visit our feeders, for purely selfish reasons, ones I feel most guilty about. Basically, it's economic. Daily I am astounded by just how expensive it has gotten to keep these birds - especially all the cardinals - sustained. Pesky squirrels aside, the birds themselves can literally empty a huge feeder in just a single day, if feeling motivated (which they are, always). With three of these feeders, we are spending a small fortune on this new hobby. When I complained about it to a friend the other day, she warned me that once I start, I really can't stop, especially not in winter when food becomes so scarce and they've come to rely on us for help. Probably we'll just keep buying it and keep filling them. But it's become not entirely a small burden.

As I predicted earlier this spring, the chopping down of the ailanthus forest in our yard has been futile. And if anything, culling them seems to only have hastened their propagation to a wild degree. I'm finding even more - which didn't seem possible - saplings, all over the yard now. In Pittsburgh, my foe was Japanese honeysuckle. And here, it is that ailanthus. But it's a battle I know I cannot possibly win. On my run this morning, I stopped to admire a mimosa tree, another pesty non-native species. It is a tree that, like the honeysuckle, has a scent that is so beautiful, almost intoxicating. I can understand why people brought them to a place where they don't belong.

Illuminations

Fireflies in the Garden
Here come real stars to fill the upper skies,
And here on earth come emulating flies,
That though they never equal stars in size,
(And they were never really stars at heart)
Achieve at times a very star-like start.
Only, of course, they can't sustain the part.

—Robert Frost

This morning Z sat eating a bowl of cereal and I attempted to sweep the dining room around her - V The Toddler has discovered how fun it is to throw food, made worse by the fact that we have spent this summer waging The Battle of the Ants - and in my sweeping, came upon a dead firefly. I said to Z, "How sad," and she insisted on getting out of her chair to look at it, as she likes to do with most creatures, alive or not. I finished my job and grabbed the dustpan to sweep up all the little piles, when she told me, "It's not dead. It's alive." I knelt down to have a closer look and sure enough, she was right. Alive, but barely. Probably too far gone by this point. Z has truly discovered the wonder that is a yard full of flickering fireflies this summer, has in fact gone to bed far to late most nights because she stands in bed watching them out the window, and she was visibly distressed at the plight of this lone firefly. "We HAVE to take it outside," she said, "it needs to go out there." Carefully I collected it in a tissue and placed it into the Invasive Species Jungle that is the backyard. "There," she said. "Now it will be okay because it will find all its firefly friends. Now it won't be lonely anymore because it can fly away and be with them."

I of course didn't have the heart to tell her that I didn't think so, that it was dying (not that she really *gets* death at 3 1/2 anyway). Better to let her believe. Better for me to learn how to believe from her. Better for us all.

A Gesture

On my way out of the house to the car yesterday, in the front yard I saw a strange sight: a squirrel was carrying something odd in its mouth, something enormous. The squirrel was startled to see me, appeared to panic, dropped what it had been carrying, and took off into the neighbors' yard. When I went over to investigate the dropped thing, I realized it was a very tiny baby squirrel. I also realized that I have never in my life actually seen a baby squirrel. An hour later, when I returned from my errands, the baby was still underneath the shrubs, and Mama was nowhere to be seen. Baby was lying very still, flat to the ground, in what seemed an effort not to be noticed. There are a lot of outdoor cats here, and I was certain that would be the fate of this animal if we didn't do something. So we found a big, empty box and put it on top of the planter by the shrubs, off the ground. Our hope was that the squirrel would seek shelter in the box on its own while awaiting its mother's return. And it did. And while we figured it was probably so young that it wasn't yet weaned, we left out a bowl of water at the edge of the box.

All day, that little squirrel sat in the box and chirped periodically, calling to its mother. After a few hours of this, I began to wonder if it had been truly abandoned (hard to know for sure, because I know deer leave very young ones alone for whole days at a time as well, so that the babies often just *seem* to have been orphaned). But since I couldn't just stand by and watch it die, and as young as it was, that's where things would be heading, I Googled all over, trying to find some sort of wildlife rescue in this area to help out. The closest I could find was in Roanoke, about 40 miles away. But they didn't laugh their heads off at a person calling for them to rescue something as common as a squirrel; their intern, who lives in Radford, said she would drive down after work, pick it up, and drive it back up to the rescue.

By evening, when we checked, Baby was gone. I have to believe that the mother did eventually come back for her baby.

Twitterings

For the second year that we've been in this house, a pair of European starlings has set up house in the crevice alongside the chimney (this house is full of crevices, hence our Neverending Battle of the Bugs). One of my most vivid memories of the first days with newborn V. exactly a year ago, was the seemingly incessant sound - right next to my head while lying in bed - of many newborn baby birds CHEEPING! for food. At the time, I remember considering the parallels between helpless chicks and the brand-new one I had of my own, how utterly, singularly focused they were on the same exact thing: sustenance. Funny, and sad, how much less dependent my little chick is now, a year later. Her whole world is so much larger now. I used to be the center of it, and now I am simply a (still huge) part of it.

This year, all I can think about is How. Very. Loud. those little creatures are. And how they seem insatiable. And how I wish the nesting birds were something much more interesting and less nuisanc-y than starlings. Like bluebirds.

A Cleansing of Heavenly Trees

Sometime before 8 am a few mornings ago, a large truck arrived in front of our house, a group of strange men piled out with chainsaws in tow, and began chopping down a sizeable portion of trees on the side of our house and yard. Who commissioned these men? Certainly not the owner of our rental house - he was too cheap to even agree to put window coverings in this place. We concluded that it must be the neighbors, and that these trees which seem in "our" yard must actually be part of theirs. We still are puzzling over why, if someone were to go to such trouble, they would only remove some of them, and not all, why they'd merely cut a five-foot swath between the tallest trees and the fenceline. At the end of the day, the landscape was significantly changed.

Usually I would be sad at such a violating gesture, but not this time. The removed trees are all "tree of Heaven," ailanthus altissima, a highly-invasive species native to China and Taiwan. They are the foundation of what is literally a non-native ecosystem in our yard. I once spent two days in Schenley Park in Pittsburgh with no other goal than to remove ailanthus seedlings, fought with them in my own yard there, and I know firsthand what a pervasive, stubborn, impossible species it is. I know too that because those men left behind remnants - the stumps - by the end of the summer, it's likely that much of that work will have been pointless. It can, and will, come back with a vengeance. That's what it does. Always.

Just more evidence that things out of place are usually out of place for good reason.

Hope Is the Thing with Feathers

I've talked here about my "bird issues," how despite my being an animal person wholeheartedly, I've never really liked birds, except for the big, impressive birds of prey ('charismatic megafauna' anyone?). There's just something twitchy, unpredictable, and more than a bit creepy about them to me. All of them - in a sweeping generalization kind of way. And really, since I've mostly lived in fairly urban areas, I've been too busy paying attention to other animals where I can find them to notice something that's always seemed insignificant to me as birds have. And then I came here to Appalachia, where birds are the most abundant wildlife that I encounter regularly. They are everywhere, always. And it turns out that the three-year old really digs birds.

So, last fall, we went and bought a bird feeder for the front yard - which has now multiplied into three in the front yard and two in the backyard. And I dusted off that Audubon Guide to North American Birds - Eastern Region that's been sitting largely unused on my nature writing bookshelf for years, sat down at the front window, and I have forced myself to start paying attention. And this act has surprised me, in ways I couldn't have imagined. Such a diversity of birds. Such an unexpected thrill when I see a new one and *need* to figure out what it is ("I saw an eastern bluebird in the park today!"). Such fun to pore through the book with that three-year old, identifying what we look at together. Such sadness for four long days after a Terrible Squirrel Incident when the front feeders had been emptied and few birds came to visit.

I will likely never be a bird person, not even when The Toddler tells me she would like a *pet* bird. But I am learning to appreciate them, for the first time. And I guess it isn't only the big ones that can mean something to me.

Apologia

It seems I have terrifically underestimated the time - and energy - demands of full-time parenting & part-time teaching. I've spent almost the last two months compiling the beginnings of nature blog entries & sticking them into a Word file, which is now many, many pages long. Will those fragments ever become manifest? I certainly hope so. I keep up with the reading, but not the words, not the thoughtful part of things. I have a tiny moment to breathe, and I hope to catch up with responding to all those Words Not My Own this week. But as for the currency of this blog, I can safely say that I definitely do not get a *passing* grade for my own assignment!

Landscape & Intimacy

I’m now comfortable in the darkness of the sequoia forest as if it were my own skin. When insomnia awakened me at night as a child, I would feel my way deliberately down the hallway and across the furniture, without turning on the lights, remembering instead the placement of each obstacle in my path. Mastering the darkness was exciting, the way it tested and forced me to be brave. The darkness taught me to see with my senses, not simply through my eyes. It is the same way now with the forest.

Tonight I decide to hike to Sunset Rock to sit beneath the stars for what may be the last time here. My headlamp is forgotten in my cabin but I don't care. The slivered moon remains hidden behind the sheer granite faces and heavy forest canopy. I drive my car to the chained service road near Round Meadow. On the other side of the road the path is wide, the direction it takes overly familiar from my years of use. I walk straight until the soft ground turns hard, then right when the forest thins out. From memory my feet follow each twist and bend along the trail at the edge of an old pine forest. Twigs and fallen branches snap under my hiking boots as I walk slowly.

I do this more to savor the act of walking than to feel my way in the darkness. Nighthiking becomes an instinctive act. I move forward. Eyes open, then closed. My heart beats loudly, rhythmically, but the sound doesn’t frighten me. Still unable to discern tangible and familiar shapes, but it hardly matters. This is a darkness to which human eyes cannot adjust. Like swimming in a blueblack ocean under a moonless sky.

There is always the possibility of falling, stumbling over a large rock underfoot. I trust. With each movement, each step, my feet will meet solid earth. I walk without hesitation. With the same sort of ignorant faith that once made me believe a former lover, when he had lied to me many times before. The air overflows tonight with the the musty forest scent of loam and wet, decaying leaves.

The trail isn’t long and when my boots scrape the huge granite boulders, I know to stop. In a clearing now, out of the darkness, my eyes focus on the outline of the valley below. The moon has risen slightly and the rocks reflect the pale light, illuminated white and shiny. We came here once my first season, to see fireworks on the Fourth of July. How could I have known that the towns would look so small, pinpricks of light in the distance, or known that the ledge where we watched was much higher than the tiny, far away explosions? I remember disappointment, because there was no sound, no loud booms or firecrackers, only the midsummer sounds of crickets and owls.

I’ve spent so much time here. We came to these rocks to drink wine and tell ghost stories, to watch sunsets, and to sunbathe in the late summer before the weather turned cold. If I could put all the time together in a straight and continuous line, Sequoia is the one place I’ve lived the longest since I was a child. This forest is my home.

Lying against the rocks, the granite is cold and rough on my back. I look up at the sky and try to find the few constellations I know. Aries, the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, the Pleiades. Since I was a small child I’ve searched in every clear nighttime sky for those same constellations. Always comforted by knowing they are there, fixed and constant.

At this high elevation the stars seem close enough to touch if I reach out my hand, the Milky Way a curling ribbon of smoke that weaves in between and around the stars. The planet Jupiter looks like a single star, not much brighter than the others. And in the place where I know a lacework nebula exists, I see nothing.

I am feeling very small, humbled by the vastness of such a sky. I’ll need to make a decision soon about where to go this time when I leave. I have clarity enough to know that I’ve learned what I needed to from this forest, have learned many of its secrets. Feeling very small, but not scared of this open expanse of life. The shadows and tall trees will outlive me.

Needfulness

Between the Cold. That. Wouldn't. Leave, the upcoming family visit/birthday party planning, and teaching, I'm finding this weekly blog business to be more challenging than I imagined. I had somehow envisioned my being able to keep right up, and the practice would feel as good for my soul as the spring that's is lurking just under the surface. I've composed many entries in my head, but haven't found even a minute to manifest the words. Funny how things don't quite turn out as we'd hoped. And now that I have a moment - a stolen, brief moment - I'm not even going to write one of the entries that has been circling without landing in my mind.

I just had a phone call from the doctor's office, with news about all the bloodwork that it seems every physician insists upon doing at the first meeting with a new patient. Nevermind my insistence that my cholesterol is below average, or that despite 20+ years of vegetarianism I've only ever suffered pregnancy-induced anemia (vindicated again this time!). The nurse rattled off everything I already knew, but then she said something stunning and wholly unexpected: I am, apparently, extremely Vitamin D deficient - something I've never even really heard of in an adult. How I got this way is perplexing, since even in winter I do not sequester myself in the house, run several days a week outdoors and take the wee ones to park usually every weekend. How I fix being this way - and I will have to fix it, as the consequences aren't so appealing - is pretty straightforward: intensive supplements with retesting in a few months, and a directive to get outside more.

Now I find myself considering the metaphorical implications of this diagnosis. I've always known that I am happiest and feel most thoroughly alive, something I commented on in Kristin's recent post, A Cold, S(easonally) A(ffected) D(isordered) Place, when it is sunny and warm outside. My Self was most centered when I lived in Tucson, with its two seasons of Warm & Hot. People always tell me that I'd miss proper seasons, if I decided to settle in a place like that. And I tell them I most certainly would not. It's interesting to me now that my lifelong, intuitive desire for a place marked by endless summer has not been just an emotional one. More than just desire, it is also a real, physical need. My body craves the light for physiological sustenance just as much as my soul craves it for balance and inner happiness. And it's no longer a want, but a genuine need (a difference I wish I could make the three-year old realize...). It's a large realization, this. That my body simply cannot live without the light. Well, it can. But it shouldn't. And so oddly comforting, somehow. A justification - as if I ever needed one - for being out in the world as often as possible.

Origins

I've spent the better part of the last week (or perhaps, to say "the better part of my entire life" might be more accurate) considering these, my very own words, and how I might respond to them:

Meditate on the landscape and culture that gave birth to you and nurtured you. What connections can you draw between the elements of that landscape and the elements of the culture? Speculate on the ways in which the environment of this place might have shaped the character of the people who live there (or you!).

It seems that the more I meditate on the place of my birth, the place where I lived for the first two decades of my life - northeastern Ohio - the more I come up empty-handed. Or rather, empty-hearted. I know that these formative places and spaces are supposed to have some importance, some resonance. Even if our relationships to them have been difficult or conflicted, they should, my logical mind tells me, have some meaning for us. And yet, when I consider Ohio, something I never, ever did when I lived there, it feels like a vast and empty space, a blankness, both in my mind and in my heart. It is place that has never felt like mine, a part of me in the least. I could have been raised anywhere or nowhere at all. No matter how deeply I try to make myself think of it, how much I try to conjure memories or attachments, it remains a place that almost never really existed at all. Almost as if my life itself didn't exist until I left.

And when I do look back, try to understand how little it impacted me, I realize now that although it was mostly unconscious, I did spend all my time there wanting and waiting to leave. Feeling as if I had been somehow born in the wrong place. That Ohio was just where I had the misfortune of being born and raised.

My place-related memories are so few: I remember a particularly cold winter in 1985, walking to the bus after school in the -10 degrees, and wondering what I was doing there, whether I had a choice to be there. I remember being forced on a hike in a local park so I could get my Girl Scout hiking badge. At the time, it felt like some kind of torturous, never-ending death march; I remember just wishing the entire time that it was over. Years later, on a visit back to that park, I realized the trail we took that day was only something like a mile long (in my kid mind, it was easily 10+ miles...). I found an old photo from that day recently and was stunned to realize it had been a breathtaking autumn day, in the height of the leaves changing, simply gorgeous. And yet, I saw none of that. What few memories I have are these two extremes, either utter lack of attention or a desire for escape. It's no wonder then that I ran away at the first chance I got and never looked back. No wonder that I spent most of my adult life physically and spiritually *homeless*, trying on new places wherever the wind took me. I guess all that time I must have been looking for what I had never had, had been looking for a place to call my own. My home.

And still, despite my own lack of history and connection, I'm still not sure whether it's possible to grow up without some sense of place, even if that sense is absence or disconnection. Is it the fault of my parents, that I almost never considered where I was from and what, if anything, it meant? Like the Hungarian language, history, and culture my immigrant father never taught me, Ohio is something I never taught myself, never allowed myself to learn. If anything, what I have learned now only in retrospect is that I do not wish for my daughters to feel the same sort of lack, placelessness. It has become critical that I teach them how to truly see their world, their places, this one, and all the ones to come. That they feel connected in some way to the land. I had no such teacher myself, so I fumble my way through.

Tobacco

In reading others' blog entries this week, I am immediately intrigued too by MAR's commentary on smoking in his first place entry. Perhaps it's the reformed smoker in me that relates to these ideas. I remember thinking about this issue often while in Sequoia National Park: sitting on the side of a trail during a long hike and taking a smoke break, being far into the backcountry away from all other humans and smoking around camp at night, climbing a mountain with a pack of cigarettes easily-accessible in my pack. Tobacco was a huge part of my life there, then, as it was for everyone I knew. And I remember thinking so many times how its very existence seemed in conflict with my that place and that very life. How hypocritcal I felt.

It makes me think about that question of "natural" vs "unnatural" - is smoking a natural behavior? Is there some contradiction in the idea of being in a natural place while doing it? Tobacco also grows, much like the dormant plants in the community garden that MAR describes, so that should mean it's inherently a natural process. But at the same time, there feels, intuitively, like something unnatural in it.

And while I'm four years reformed - now it's so hard to even imagine that I was ever a smoker in the first place - this entry made me want to know more about the whole aspect of tobacco growing, the history and culture and myth. These are facts I should know, living now in a state where the primary revenue source is tobacco. A state where it's really a whole way of life. I've been given much to meditate on further!

Shades of Gray

It's very hard to craft a *place* entry when my place for the last week or so has mostly been my house, more particularly, my living room, where I can still be found coughing uncontrollably and existing on a diet of soup and popsicles. I wonder why it is that whatever illness Z brings home from school always seems to hit me hardest (well me and now her baby sister). So I have no choice but to write a place-by-proxy entry...

One of my only excursions into the outdoors this week, an early morning walk with Pepper, rushed because it was cold, because we were running late and because there were, as always, things to do and places to be. On the return home, in a yard, there was the briefest flash of white and black very nearby. Instinctively, my mind immediately went back to the the last time. As such is the nature of The Peppy, she barked and lunged. And I couldn't help but immediately panic. And how sorry I felt for that poor hapless black and white kitty on the receiving end of such an unwelcome morning greeting. I guess some things will never change, some instincts are just that, instincts, overwhelming and hard-wired.

But the encounter got me thinking more about these creatures - not the kitties, though the whole indoor vs. outdoor cat issue is definitely post-worthy - who are such a ubiquitous part of this place. Until coming here, I'm not sure I ever saw a skunk in real life, had only experienced their presence left behind. I think about my English friend, smelling one for the first time in California, since there are no skunks where he comes from (a place where there are also no fireflies, sadly). And I realize that although I have always known of them, like my friend, I really don't know them at all. But I am learning. Just last week I watched the PBS episode of "Nature" "Is That Skunk?". Fascinating stuff. I am most compelled by the idea that skunks are marginal animals - literally and figuratively - that live on, in, around the borders between natural and unnatural spaces; they make their homes in the artificial borders that we humans have created. I think of my UK student Johnny, and his interest in these borderland areas. And wonder whether there is an English animal counterpart, some animal there that makes its home primarily in these blurry places.

That show, and my recent skunk encounters, serve as good introductions to what will probably be more research, more of my own learning about this place where I live (and where I shall probably live for quite a while longer).

Joining the Flock

Since I've asked all my students in the nature & environmental writing course this semester to keep a nature blog, I feel like I also should do my best to complete my own assignments as well. Doing so would be a useful and much needed exercise for me too. What I've asked them to write, during most weeks:

1. One posting from a chosen “place” where students will go weekly;
2. A second posting in response to a directed question/prompt related to the week’s
course topic;
3. A third posting that reflects on or responds to:
a. Either a blog post by one of the fellow students OR
b. A blog post found on an outside nature blog through the Nature Blog
Network (http://natureblognetwork.com/).

To be honestly practical, I have to admit that I will likely not have the luxury of setting aside time each week for writing about a chosen place - though my several-times-weekly runs in the park could probably fit. I have so little time, still, and parenting and teaching takes up most of it, still. But I can write to the other two requirements. In fact, I actually look forward to trying.

Under the Vulture Tree

(I know I'm getting a little obsessive about these birds these days...)

A couple of weeks ago, a Wednesday morning, skies grey, temperatures in the mid-40s. I am taking my morning run in Wildwood Park a little later than usual. On all my runs, I've grown accustomed to seeing them soaring overhead in groups so large the sky is sometimes a swirling sea of black wings. They've become a comforting sight, somehow. I approach the bird-watching platform and realize that there are hundreds of black vultures all perched together in a cluster of oak trees. I pause the music and walk down to the platform, and suddenly, I am standing beneath them all. To my surprise, none of them move, none seem to acknowledge my presence. I've seen turkey vultures up close like this, but never the blacks. They are literally right above my head and I spend a good ten minutes or so watching them. And then, without warning, a couple spread their wings and leave - I wonder what reasons motivate them - and all the rest follow.

By now it's clear that there's more thinking, and probably writing, real writing, to be done with the vultures. Some larger metaphor in this that I need to meditate on more closely. In all my researching, some of the most interesting details I've learned: to the ancient Egyptians, vultures were deities, emblems of motherhood, giving life and then later taking it back, and to Mayans they also represented fertility. I meditate further. And wait until the next time.

Mysteries of the Bear

I watched a Nat Geo show recently, "Mystery Bear of the Arctic". The mysterious bear in question turned out to be, discovered through extensive DNA testing, to be a polar/brown bear hybrid, with a polar mother and a brown father, the only one of its kind yet found (they speculate that because both species often birth multiple cubs, there could be others still out there). I'm not entirely convinced by the "reasons" given for such a union - that grizzly would have had to travel an unheard of distance, into a range where they are not known to go. But given that both species either avoid interaction entirely if they do meet, or that such interactions usually involve a violent conflict, this is a curious and fascinating idea to consider. Then again, I'm a little over-informed and over-interested in bears.

Still, I can't help but dwell on the reasons the bear was discovered in the first place. Ridiculously rich American man spends $25K to participate in escorted polar bear hunt by Native Inuit guide. The whole situation feels morally questionable and exploitative. That photo says it all.

Roar

A few nights ago, late, I sat in the office working and again paused from my work to listen to the wind, roaring and howling and shaking, as I often do. Before coming here, the presence of wind was something I rarely considered, something I simply took for granted. But now. Here it's necessarily become something I have no choice but to think about often, an omnipresent companion that remains always close. I have never before seen, let alone lived in, such a windy place. At least several times, every single week, we have 40-50+ mph winds that come in usually suddenly and without warning. I've researched and researched, but have found no one that mentions the phenomena particular to this region. Geographically, the presence of such frequent and powerful winds makes sense: the New River Valley lies tucked quietly in between the Appalachian and Blue Ridge Mountains. This is a very economically depressed area, with little in the way of commerce. I remain puzzled, then, why no one here has yet considered harnessing these winds for power.

In thinking about the wind, I am reminded of this poem by Ted Hughes:

This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Till day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as
The coal-house door. Once I looked up -
Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes
The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope,

The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,
At any second to bang and vanish with a flap;
The wind flung a magpie away and a black-
Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house

Rang like some fine green goblet in the note
That any second would shatter it. Now deep
In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip
Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,

Or each other. We watch the fire blazing,
And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,
Seeing the window tremble to come in,
Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.