Day 34 Outdoors: Young Pines

Monday, December 3, 2012, 4:15-5 p.m.

Earlier today Canada geese in ragged Vs were flying northwest instead of south, and now in late afternoon the breeze is still from the south. Light is muted, colors dull, edges soft. The wind sets a brisk pace, but remains gentle and almost warm. Up on Claudia’s hill, the lilac buds are swelling green, as if they think spring has arrived. Winter is off to a strange beginning.

In an uncultivated edge of field between the old chicken house and the new orchard, trees begin to emerge from the grasses and weeds, amid brambles and small, wild shrubs also proliferating. For the past several years, a chance-sown pine has been growing on the property line. Its pointed tip was lost to a March blizzard, but the rest of the tree—that which remains--is dark, full, and healthy. Closer to the chicken house, a second pine has more recently emerged. It is the same species as the first--red pine--but so much younger that it looks like a different kind of tree altogether. The pines are undeterred by spotted knapweed and don’t mind competing with red twig dogwood and wild blackberries.

Except for the wind, the countryside is quiet and still this afternoon until a shot rings out. It's muzzle-loader season.

Day 31 Outdoors: Among the Pioneers

Thursday, October 25, 2012, 8-9 a.m.

Came the wind in the night and blew the leaves off maple trees and lindens. (Ash and walnut were already bare; catalpa yet in leaf.) Wind continued as the sky grew light, glowing rose in both east and west. Ribbons of cloud over the eastern woods now turn from pink to pewter grey.

A band of hardy little popples venture out from the bank above the stream, seeking to colonize the meadow, along with a few small cottonwoods and two or three autumn olives that escaped the spring purge. Among the grasses, purple asters, milkweed, and Queen Anne’s-lace are also the much-less-welcome spotted knapweed. This is how it is with any invasion of pioneers: all sorts pour in.

The wind arrives in a series of gusty, irregular waves. Each wave begins first as a far-off drone, rising to a dull roar, and then becoming at last a whispering and rattling and clattering in the closest leaves and grasses. The air feels as soft and fresh as early summer, but its perfume is that of fall, dense with mould and rich with decay. Milkweed seeds escape their pods and chase about, catching on other weeds like bits of wool at the edge of a sheep pasture, fluttering incessantly.

Is that a bird in the willows? A quarrelsome squirrel? The sound goes on and on. Perhaps it is the rubbing of wind-tossed branches. The willows, their heights gradually lighted by the rising sun, toss heavy-leafed branches about like wild horses nodding and shaking heavy-maned heads.

Somewhere out of sight a flock of Canada geese passes overhead. The old farmhouse and barns watch over the meadow with stoic calm. They have seen many autumns.

Day 29 Outdoors: Another Sunrise Over the Meadow

Tuesday, September 25, 7:30-8:45 a.m.

After several chilly days of rain, yesterday was clear and sunny with gale-force winds. At last, this morning, both clear sky and calm stillness came together. Before sunrise there was hardly a breeze stirring and only a few fleecy, small clouds near the horizon.

This time of year the meadow is a dessicated miniature jungle, a tangle of drying stalks and leaves and seeds. Queen-Anne’s lace has curled up to shape itself into brittle bird’s-nest cages, and the little grey-headed coneflowers have dropped their petals, leaving heavy, dark seedheads that bow the tall stems. Grasses rustle, their heads also heavy with seed, leaves beginning to curl.

A little bird throws its voice like a ventriloquist, sounding first here, then there, but always just out of sight. There are crows in the middle distance, calling to each other on crow business. Canada geese wing by overhead. One unbalanced V flies south, its left leg longer than its right, and half an hour later a ragged line of more geese crosses the sky from east to west, their voices audible long before they come into sight.

As the sun comes up over the dark trees of the eastern woods, it creates a band of light on the meadow, leaving the intermediate orchard trees in shade. Higher and higher climbs the sun, and as it climbs a breeze starts up and keeps pace, stirring the leaves of maple, popple, and catalpa more vigorously as the light increases. Finally the sun is blazing through the weeds. It lights up strands of spiderweb that tremble and gleam and dance. Morning has broken.

Day 10 Outdoors: An Old Fence Corner

Sunday, March 11, 1:00-2:30 p.m.

At the bottom of Claudia’s wooded hill (what I call "Claudia’s Woods" is behind this hill, farther south) is an old fence line corner. One old row of fence posts staggers uphill to the west. (Another, newer row of metal posts parallel to it marks the easement for a driveway that was never put in.) Running north-south is another old line of fence that runs north between hayfield and cherry orchard and south along and into the edge of the wooded hill: land east of the line belonged to the farm on this side of the road; land west was part of a farm on the other side of M-22. There is an echoing of this north-south line in another row of fence posts higher on the bare hill to the west.

This corner presents a complicated view, as a bare 90-degree sliver indicates. The old wild apple tree alone takes a hundred major turns and curves before branching into smaller complications. There are several large balsam firs near the corner. And off to the west, beyond the horizon of the hills, rise the wooded dunes that moderate winds off Lake Michigan. A wider view would take in the youngest cherry orchard, old barns, a line of willows marking the stream to the north, and more.

The ground is still frozen hard, but most of the two feet of snow that fell last Friday is gone, remaining only in patches on open ground. It is on the north-facing slope of the hill behind the fence corner and out into the ground shaded by that hill that deep pockets remain. The oldest wooden fence posts and barbed wire lie partially exposed, the snow around them full of sun-melted dips and pockets like the wind-tossed surface of a pond. At what was once the base of an upright post, a wild rose flourishes, bearing clusters of rose hips held through the winter. These wooden posts seem always to belong in the landscape. Undoubtedly they were cut from trees that once grew right here.

It is a warm day, the warmest so far this season, but the wind moans constantly in the trees. The highway is close by, between the old fenced hills and the wooded dunes, and adds its sounds. For a few minutes coyotes to the south sing and yip. Now and then a chickadee announces itself, but there are at this edge of woods none of the countless robins happily flying about the eastern woods, up the orchard hills and back in the sunlight. A pounding, too regular and mechanical to be a woodpecker, sounds: it is a neighbor in the distance, putting up a bluebird nesting box along the fence line.

Bare ground gains on snow cover, and last year’s dead plants are revealed. They are very brittle, and their tawny color is turning a rusty black. Behind, in the woods, a giant beech lies, felled years ago by rot. Its trunk bears the same rusty black where the bark has fallen away, and the wood is full of tiny holes, the size of holes made by small nails, where insects have found shelter. That one log is an entire world. This corner where old fence lines came together is an entire world.

Day 8 Outdoors: Looking North

Monday, February 20, 3:10-4:10 p.m.

The view north from the hill (our shared driveway runs along it) is both panoramic and intimate. In center foreground is the little no-name creek where it comes out of the willow thicket and crosses open pasture and the old homestead. Immediately upstream are the huge, old willows, just downstream our neighbor’s Scottish longhorn cattle and old buildings—unpainted sheds, the old house--of two generations back of her husband’s family. Stretching “straight” north is cherry orchard, rows of bare trees in February a deep plum color against patches of snow, deeper the farther back one looks in the receding row, where individual trees are lost in a fuzzy, magenta-purple mass. Almost to the center horizon is a farther group of willows, their branches a vivid orange-yellow, while off to the northeast from those willows lie yet more distant hills, each less detailed than the one before it, until finally deep blue claims the farthest shadowed reaches. On a sunny, clear winter day, cold breezes from nearby Lake Michigan make for a chill in the air.

But to look north from here is to gaze on a slant, as Newtonian straight lines seem all to be laid on an angle here. This is owing to the shoreline of Lake Michigan as it tapers gradually to the end of the peninsula, and the slanted impression is accentuated by hills and perspective. Rows of cherry trees follow the curves of hills and converge upon another at the ends of their blocks. Lines of old fence posts stagger off-plumb as if the posts will collapse any minute like ranks of drunken soldiers. The newer, taller fences, built to keep deer out of the orchards, also form irregular quadrilaterals, not simple squares or rectangles.

At this distance, the cattle are almost abstract in shape. Shaggy-coated and long-horned, they animate the view with their slow, Paleolithic pace, their occasional deliberate steps bringing about a rearrangement of elements in the kaleidoscopic scene. The three are burnished russet, a color like the Crayola crayon ‘burnt sienna,’ and the last a soiled off-white. Massive shoulders and chests taper to narrow hindquarters and long tails. 

Off to the north a chickadee calls. Backlit by afternoon sun, two small birds in the tallest ash tree along the driveway (all the ash trees volunteer growth) twitter and fuss before moving on with quick, swooping darts. From upstream there is the sound of steadier bird activity, and once something large and white and graceful flies overhead, a gull or a snow bunting. Soon, in spring, the tangle of trees and brush upstream will be filled with birdsong, echoing and bouncing as if the cut through which the stream flows were a brass bowl. Soon, but not yet. In the snow between driveway the drop to stream and lower orchard are trails of deer, but the deer are too wary to venture across this open ground in midafternoon.

Below, on the bank of the snow-covered stream, a pile of rocks bears witness to the labor involved in the clearing of these fields. Perhaps barn snakes and others are passing a sleepy winter there.

As afternoon shadows lengthen, the cattle lie down. Two face west, the direction of the Lake and the wind. The third, the big white steer, faces northeast with his body but turns his head regularly to look in the same direction as the others. Dignified, at ease, they wear their horns like crowns.

Day 7 Outdoors: In the Popple Grove

Wednesday, February 15, 8:30-9:35 a.m.

After a recent freeze and new snow and before the next thaw, the weather pauses. The sky is featureless, not much different in tone from the snow-covered ground. A slight breeze puffs rhythmically, setting hanging curls and spirals of bark in motion.

No one ever plants a popple grove.

Popples, or quaking aspen, are the pioneer species in our region. At the edge of a woodlot, or sometimes in the middle of a field, they establish a seemingly ingenuous foothold and from there, wherever mowers or traffic fail to check their forward movement, advance into field or lane. What looks like a collection of individual trees is more like a colony, united underground, and the colony’s will to go forth and multiply knows no bounds.

Our popple grove, as unintentional as any, has spread out to the north from the empty chicken house. (It begins to spread south, as well.) At one back corner, the northeast, an old silver maple, age-mate to the one in the front yard, claims a wide area, and in the midst of the popples a few young ash trees and at least one mulberry have managed to compete for space. Popples, however, are the predominant species. The ground is littered with fallen trunks and cut-off branches, and with new snow on the ground and half-covering the jumbled tree litter, footing is treacherous.

Where the grove ends at the edge of the yard is a brush pile, larger each year. Sometimes rabbits nest in the brush pile or, more simply, tucked into grass and weeds, hidden away at the base of a popple tree. There are no tracks around the brush pile today.

Popples may be weed trees, but no of them look alike. Some are fresh green-barked, straight, and tall. A few are old enough that their bark is dark brown and furrowed, almost black. Others—and not all of them old—have died standing. On these the bark has sloughed off in places and been peeled back in others. Where it has sloughed off, narrow winding trails appear in the wood. 

The more obviously present feeders on these trees, though, are woodpeckers. Each deep woodpeckers hole is surrounded by a large area of freshly worked wood, light and clean, and the ground at the base of trees where woodpeckers have fed is thick with sawdust. One woodpecker popple in the grove is also host to a quartet of shelf fungi. Each fungus, old enough to have taken on the mossy green of an old, abandoned Florida boat, today bears a cone-shaped serving of clean snow.

South of the popple grove and chicken house the view opens out to softly rounded hills—Claudia’s Woods to the southwest, then rows of orchard trees stretching to the East Woods, with dark pine trees on the horizon beyond. The open spaces ring with crow calls this morning. That sound is incessant today, the raucous cries of crows.

Day 3 Outdoors: Edge of an Old Clearing

Monday, January 16, 1:20-2:45 p.m.

Morning’s fierce north wind calmed to a gentle breeze, and by early afternoon the air was swinging gently from north to east, a lazy pendulum of a breeze, losing momentum as the temperature rose. Almost-still air amplified traffic noise from M-22, as well as occasional snowmobiles (heard but not seen). Even with cloud cover, the snow on the ground was blinding. White of sketchbook paper looked lavender by comparison with white of snow.

Directly east from the house, beyond the meadow and past the newest orchard trees, a line of straggly trees demarcates the old 80-acre line, and behind that line, as the land climbs from a stream to the north to wooded hills farther south, there have long been two small clearings. One of the trees dominating the line from a distance is a tall, short-needled conifer. Spruce? Its lower branches have been hacked off to make room for the easier passage of orchard equipment, but the tree remains very much a sentinel. Even close up, its height is obvious. Behind and on the hill above the sentinel the small clearings are beginning to fill in.

This small bit of land is in transition, not only between orchard and woods but also as the clearings evolve from grasses to brambleberries and tree seedlings to larger saplings and shrubs, almost as if the woods to the north and south yearn to reconnect and are reaching across to close the breach.

There are popples in this transition area (the pioneer tree of the region, not found in mature woods) and also young beeches and maples and ash trees and very small firs. Overhead the smallest branches and twigs of young beech trees criss-cross and interlace in a delicate filigree, the highest twigs graced with clusters of small catkins, two to four in a cluster. Perhaps deer have eaten lower ones. 

Without yet a thick, mature forest canopy, grasses still grow thickly here, bowed over at present by snow, their heads buried, and the ground is not smooth and flat but lumpy with snow-covered vegetation and full of air pockets. It looks ideal for sheltering small rodents. Not one is stirring aboveground today, and there are no tracks in the new snow in the clearing, but many small animals may be tunneling underneath the snow. Once a dead grass stalk gave a sudden, quick, unnatural jerk, nothing like a wind-caused movement but more as if something had passed by underneath the snow and collided momentarily with the stalk.

A very old, gnarled tree, long dead, continues to stand, although it has lost the central trunk of an original three forking from the main, and all of its dead branches end in severed stumps. Bark still loosely surrounds parts of trunk and branches; other sections are bare. Its bark looks like black cherry, a forest tree in these parts, but the habit of its growth is more that of an old orchard cherry tree. Snow lies along its branches.

Not a single bird visits at this time of day, though there is an occasional one-note call from nearby, and crows (as always) caw from time to time as they fly over the orchard. Now and then a tiny fir tree releases a part of its load of accumulated snow.