Day 20 Outdoors: Back in the Popple Grove

Wednesday, June 6, 7:40-8:20 a.m.

The difference from February to June is breath-taking, even in this tiny, insignificant bit of semi-wild ground. Four months ago silence blanketed the grove. This morning all manner of sounds ring under the bell of the sky, as if a glass globe encompassed the earth. Foremost and most immediate are the morning birdsongs, almost "noisy" but in the loveliest of ways, with the steady sound of an orchard sprayer in the background and intermittent, distant sounds of traffic. 

A soft breeze plays through the grove, rustling the popple leaves and making them dance. Sunlight filters in, first very low and gradually moving up the grey-green trunks. Grasses sway gently. 

"Morning has broken/like the first morning."

Day 19 Outdoors: Visiting Horses on Jelinek Road

Thursday, May 31, 7:30-8:30 a.m.

The morning air is autumn-cool after an overnight temperature drop, but the grass sports dew, not frost. Gentle grey clouds in the east echo multiple curved horizons, layered like time in rock, advancing from east to west—thickly clustered trees, then a field, a row of wild shrubs, another field, a fence, and finally, closest to the road, the horse pasture. Metal posts stand out clearly, but thin wire’s near-invisibility creates the illusion that the horses remain where they are by choice. Their pasture is large and green, however, and they are free to return to the corral (gate open) as they please for long draughts of water.

Sounds come from gulls, crows, mourning doves, sparrows and songbirds, as well as from a tractor somewhere nearby but out of sight, no doubt spraying orchard trees. The three horses move continuously but at a leisurely pace, heads down to graze most of the time. The sound of their constantly working teeth and jaws does not carry to the road. Perhaps the breeze carries it away. The air eddies in small currents, undecided on a firm direction. The horses’ heads are large and sweet, hindquarters muscular and patient, bilateral symmetry familiar and endearing, contour lines like ancient antelope. The heady smell of them is deep in memory. 

The old barn was probably built one section at a time, beginning with the old two-story part on its solid stone foundation. Additions abound, roof slopes complicate, and weathered boards are in good shape. With big barn doors closed, the horses can still take shelter under a shed roof. There the sun will still reach in from the south, and the stone foundation will reflect the sun’s warmth.

These horses have a good life. 

Day 18 Outdoors: Meadow at Daybreak

Wednesday, May 23, 5:50 - 7:00 a.m.

Before daylight the bird chorus began. There is a bank of cloud on the horizon to the east, dark, but low enough that the sun will clear it only slightly later than its light would otherwise reach the meadow. Near the ground cool air stirs gently. It is a morning for looking, watching, seeing; for listening and hearing; for feeling the air in all its subtle movement. For being here.

The meadow was a hayfield for a long time. One summer a decade or more ago it was a cornfield, but since then it has simply been a meadow. It is uncultivated but somewhat managed. One corner seeded with native wildflowers, a strip seeded with native grasses, it is bordered on two sides by young orchard, on one side by wooded bank above the no-name creek, and the fourth side by old farmyard and popple grove. The autumn olive is kept at bay by persistent effort. The meadow was mowed last year, in early summer, but nature wants it to be woods again. Deep-rooted alfalfa, dark green and healthy, persists in spotty clumps through the grass, as do last year’s dry goldenrod, milkweed, and Queen Anne’s lace, but there are also, far out from the more recently seeded areas, wild grapevine, clumps of red osier, and seedlings of maple, black walnut, and box elder. Once in a while a pine seedling appears.

Sounds sort themselves out spatially: rooster to southwest, woodpecker to the east, crows off in the distant south, traffic to the west. Nearer, in the silver maples of the farmyard, robins sing. After a while, though, all other sounds become background to one nearby chik-chik-chik. A very plain sound. The sparrow uttering the dry note perches on a brittle stalk of last year’s milkweed and balances with continual small adjustments, so that any still photograph or drawing of this little bird would be false. Its tail and wings flick constantly, and the bird itself looks about and changes position incessantly, never still for two consecutive moments. Streaky chest, black breast patch. A song sparrow but only giving its repetitive call note. Too early for singing?

Light increases, reaches higher, the dark cloudbank giving way to diffuse, trailing scarves. As at dusk, the cool air rises from the ground, and the breeze gains momentum with the rising sun, as if eager to be in motion after the stillness of night.

Another small bird on another dry milkweed, this one surprisingly more musical than the song sparrow, keeps its head tucked down between choruses but stretches its head, beak upward, to trill its song. These birds have no idea how tiny they are and how big the world is, but the world of this small meadow is all-sufficient to the break of day--the cool morning air, a clump of young black walnut, a nervously twitching sparrow, another bird’s throaty, trilling song, and the clouds evaporating by degrees as the sun clears the tops of the trees.

Day 17 Outdoors: Old Dairy Barn

Saturday, May 12, 7:30-8:35 p.m.

(The title of this post has been changed.)

When farmhouse and barn were new, the house sat high on the hill, and the barn was in the backyard, but since the house was moved downhill, their respective positions have been reversed. This view of the barn is from the west, as the farmer would have approached it in the old days to milk cows morning and evening. The barn would not, however, have been as dilapidated then as it is today, no longer housing livestock. The tall and massive section was originally roofed with wood shingles. Later, sections of metal roofing were laid on over the shingles, but on half of the western slope of the roof the metal is gone, and the shingles have been deteriorating rapidly. Old boards curve and sag inward. Gaping holes appear. Framing and side walls (of vertical boards) are in better condition.

Cows were kept in the shed on the north end of the barn. Inside, troughs in the concrete floor of this section received their body waste. There was a door between the two sections so that old Joe could transfer bales of hay and straw—the latter their bedding, former their winter food when pasture was snow covered—to their stalls. At either end of the tall section of barn are doors high in the walls where the last bales would have been delivered to the tops of the mountains inside by elevator.

The cowshed walls were simple boards laid horizontally, but at some point in the barn’s history these had been overlaid with sheets of stamped metal. Now, all these years later, much of the stamped metal has been peeled back and torn off by wind rushing down the hill, so that sections of old board are exposed. One small window is boarded shut, as is the small door on this side, while the other window is opaque silver-grey with the grime of decades.

The east side of the barn is kept mowed, but the west face
has been ungroomed for many years. Weeds and large shrubs grow up against the large old doors (not seen here) where machinery and wagons could once go in this side and out the other. This barn was built by a Bohemian farmer and shows his saving ways. Its decay shows the history of farming in Leelanau County: as livestock declined and orchards came to predominate, the old hay barns were no longer needed and not kept in repair. This one was also built without a foundation, its old twisted cedar uprights, seemingly as strong as iron, set directly on the ground, so over the years the barn has settled more and more, wanting to lie down and return to earth.

Late evening sun, soon to set behind the hill, warms the wood. The light changes almost by the moment. The lower its angle, the more detail appears: wood grain, knotholes, the subtle shading that weathering has brought about.

Sparrows flit in the shrubs. Mourning doves call. 

Day 16 Outdoors: Kovarik Road Again

Friday, May 4, 4:25-5:20 p.m.

Sand and clay, unpaved, this section of road is rain-braided after yesterday’s downpour. Warm sunshine has brought out birds and insects, all busy about making their respective livings here where a tributary of Houdek Creek is crossed by the lowest point of the road. This tributary creek, very small and easily overlooked at this point, takes a winding and circuitous path, not directly to nearby Lake Michigan but joining Houdek Creek to debouche at the north end of Lake Leelanau, the nearest inland lake.

This small scene resists simplification. Every tree limb has its complicated branching, every branch its complex leafings and buddings, and the ground beneath is thick and rich with last year’s dead grasses and weeds, in the midst of which this year’s green shoots spring. At the edge of the road are horsetails, in their small, ferny stage. Sapless stalks of old cattails, brittle and sun-bleached, stand, lean, and lie all about. A small willow clump leafs out in the streambed. Red osiers mix with cattails, and tamaracks sprout this year’s fresh, young green. On slightly higher ground are birch and cedar. Up the hill, maple and beech.

A song sparrow sounds almost like a mechanical bird, as does the nearby rooster over the hill. A call note sounds: Cheet. Cheet. Cheet. Another bird has a song of two notes, Tee-oh! followed by a chirpy trill. A honeybee lands on a blossomless, leafy branch--clambers, tumbles, rests, and moves on. An ant makes its laborious way across the white page of sketchbook, then runs nervously, helter-skelter, toward more familiar footing. On the surface of the creek, water striders jerk and drift, jerk and drift. Sun flashes blindingly on the water.

Green blades, flat and narrow, stream like long hair in the flow, and shadows of air bubbles and small pieces of debris race along the sandy bottom. When the surface trembles in the breeze, even ripples cast shadows. The creek’s quiet song, small and near, is easily lost in the louder sounds of birds and even background noise of a jet overhead or a distant tractor, but the creek goes its own way, uncaring of the rest of the world. More narrow, green blades along its bank lean in graceful curves, striped with sun and shadow.

The sun is warm, the breeze slight, cool, and refreshing. A redwing blackbird calls.

Day 15 Outdoors: Orchard, Kovarik Road

Wednesday, April 25, 3:40-4:45 p.m.

It is an overcast and windless afternoon, after a sunny, cool morning. The still air is filled with the lightest of insect clicking and chirping, a thin blanket of sound so pervasive it is difficult to distinguish from silence. The air itself feels moist—not heavily or oppressively so—rather, it feels protective, sheltering life.

Here by the side of an old dirt road at orchard’s edge, cherry trees full of bloom, grass beneath them studded with dandelions and other, smaller flowering weeds, there should be a steady hum of bees, but clouds and cold have clearly discouraged the large work parties. Tiny flies flit among the higher branches, doing what they can in the way of pollination, and a few larger flies punctuate the quiet stillness from time to time with loud buzzing.

Blossoming trees do not form the undulating expanses of popcorn or clouds of snow usually seen across the hills when bloom comes later in the spring, as it should. The trees flowered too early this year and have been punished by subsequent cold. From a distance—say, from a speeding car—one might wonder if full bloom were yet to come, but close observation banishes uncertainty. Each five-petaled flower, not much larger than a thumbnail, bristles with eager stamens, but many white petals are creased or folded in on themselves at the edges, those edges browning, too. Weary, they look, tired of trying.

One flower form is repeated along a branch, that branch repeated throughout the tree, and rows of trees full of blossoming branches stand side by side, one after another. Genetically, the trees are clones, but each tree and branch and blossom has met the world in circumstances slightly different, in its own space of air and light and shadow, and has been marked by those differences, resulting in intricacy endlessly repeated in endless variation.

Sounds compose themselves into a simple map: distant traffic far to the north, distant tractor to the south; rooster to the west, woodpecker to the east. The map’s center, for a moment, is one large, buzzing fly. On the south side of the road, someone has made two passes with tractor and tiller over the edge of the field and then stopped. Visible at the western horizon, Lake Michigan lies motionless and patient, cradling its islands in its arms.

Day 14 Outdoors: Far From Home

Thursday, April 12, 2012, 9:20-10:12 a.m.

(Carefree, Arizona)

To Easterners and Midwesterners, accustomed to a verdant, intimate, embracing landscape, the desert can seem alien and forbidding—completely “other.” Cacti and succulents of necessity hoard their moisture, and nature offers little in the way of shelter, other than welcome cottonwoods along courses of water. Hot sun, dry wind, rattlesnakes, scorpions--.

But a desert garden, inside cool walls for shade and enlivened by a quiet fountain, can be welcoming indeed. Finches come to drink at the softly burbling fountain, and other birds sing in brilliantly flowering trees outside the wall. Clay tiles collect and give off warmth on a cool morning. Even the forbidding, thorny cactus plants offer bright flowers, and a soothing oasis atmosphere fills the civilized, bounded space. Here there is no hurry at all.