Mowing like a boss

I smiled when I finished mowing this morning, and not just because I managed to finish before the rain started up again. When I mow, sometimes my lawn smiles back at me, but today it was entertaining me in other ways.

The contours of our yard are uneven, to put it mildly. There’s not a straight line or a square corner anywhere; I mow along slopes, around obstacles, and as close as I can get to the cliff without falling over the edge, and the result is always an uneven shape near the center of the back yard. Often that shape resembles a smile, not a quiet grin but the uneven open-mouthed clown smile that has come to be known, in our family, as The Mom Face. (I was teaching my granddaughter to make The Mom Face last weekend. She’s a natural, I tell you.)

Today, though, The Mom Face was nowhere to be seen. I’d shifted my usual mowing pattern to avoid disturbing a box turtle that was making its plodding way up the hill, so the unmown shape in the center of the back yard eventually looked a little like the state of Ohio. I enjoyed trimming the Lake Erie coastline, where I’ll spend most of next week. (And why bother making the lawn look nice when I’m getting ready to leave town? I guess I want the house to look inhabited even when I’m not here.)

A few more swipes around the edges and Ohio resembled a puffy lozenge or a shield—or no, the boss in center of a shield, perhaps bearing the insignia of the Royal Order of Merry Mowers. Just a few more turns around the yard and even that disappeared. Done! The lawn may not have smiled at me, but finishing the job certainly made me happy. 

On the trail at Old Man's Cave

Whenever I'm out communing with nature on a busy holiday weekend, I'm torn between conflicting opinions: first, I'm delighted that so many people are out appreciating the wonders of nature; and second, I wish they would all go away--and take their cigarette butts, pop cans, and candy wrappers with them. 

This morning we arrived very early at Old Man's Cave, hoping to miss the heat, rain, and holiday crowds, and on the first half of our hike we pretty much had the place to ourselves. By the time we'd turned around to hike back from Whispering Cave to Old Man's Cave, though, the hordes had descended, hundreds of people and their dogs. 

They were nice, mostly, both the people and the dogs, and I don't begrudge anyone their time in the woods, but the narrow trails got crowded with young people in a hurry while we made our plodding way up and down steep slopes and across mud pits. We took some grocery bags with us to collect trash and easily filled two, making the experience a little nicer for those who came after us, but it's annoying to have to think about picking up other people's discarded water bottles and candy wrappers and even a pair of muddy T-shirts.

Recent storms had knocked down trees and scattered leaves all over the trails, and rains saturated trails and created waterfalls where we'd never seen them before. At Lower Falls it's not unusual to see people wading out through the shallow pool to stand under the trickling waterfall, but no one would have dared to do so under today's deluge. The sound of rushing water filled the gorge and propelled us onward, up and over rocks and through mud and under overhanging rocks and branches until we were soaked through and worn out.

And then we did what I kept wishing everyone else would do: we went home refreshed. (Taking some of their trash with us.) 

I don't know what this is but it looks cool.

Devil's Bathtub. You should hear the roar of the water.

No one was standing under these falls today.

That's the trail. Lots of mud and debris.

Wild columbines near Whispering Cave.

These rock constructions near Whispering Cave make me very happy.

They're tucked under a ledge.

Whispering Cave.

 

Down the river with Peter Heller

Two college friends, Jack and Wynn, paddle their canoe down a remote river in northern Canada, reveling in the wilderness experience before they have to return to classes. Seasoned and skilled, they pick wild berries, eat fish they catch in creeks, and marvel at the wildlife so close at hand--moose, mink, loon, bear. Peter Heller's novel The River begins as an idyllic tale of joyous adventure until it veers suddenly toward Deliverance.

Catastrophe arrives from several angles, first in small dribbles and later like a tsunami battering their fragile craft. The problems start not with a storm--"The two of them loved paddling in a storm"--but when the storm suddenly ends:

Then the wind died all at once as if throttled and in less than half an hour the lake glassed off and they felt suspended in fog. They moved within a moving nimbus in which only a few yards of black water were visible in any direction, and the pale fog drifted in tatters like stubborn smoke. The water whispered along the hull and it had a silver sheen that reminded Wynn of rayon. All of it was dreamlike; he thought of a Poe novel he had read in which the castaways are pulled toward the South Pole and the current they are riding gets warmer and calmer as they go.

The calm is punctured, though, by a scream from shore, and from this point on things get more complicated, and more deadly. Some problems loom large and allow them to prepare, like the waterfalls that force them to portage and the wildfire screaming its threats from a distance, but they're not prepared to deal with the unexpected threats posed by the destruction of their food stores and the presence of men with guns who may or may not wish them ill.

Pressed to their limits, Wynn and Jack rely on instinct and skill to get themselves and an unexpected passenger down the river. Breaking camp with a wildfire approaching, "They took time and care to douse the embers of their fire with water carried in the pot, though they thought, but did not say, that it was a little like stacking a line of sandbags before a tsunami. Well. With everything seeming to fall apart, good habits were one thing to hold on to." They trust in the efficacy of those good habits even while paddling through a burned-over wasteland devoid of berries, game, or fish, stopping at a small creek to fish:  "They figured if they caught any they could cook them over a still-burning stump. It lightened their spirits, enacting this simple routine, the steps of a ritual--piece together the rod, screw tight the locking ring against the reel, string the guides, pick a fly--the steps of a lifelong discipline that promised joy." 

Joy occasionally ripples beneath the surface of this book, but not in this creek, where Jack and Wynn catch nothing. The emotion more frequently roiling the surface is sheer terror. Heller's well-read adventurers evoke Poe, Huck Finn, Thoreau, Eliot's Wasteland, and a number of other literary texts, but it soon becomes clear even to the more optimistic Wynn that they've entered James Dickey territory and their deliverance is not at all assured.

The River held me captive from the moment I opened it, its straightforward but gripping prose carrying me down the river deeper into danger, with occasional side-trips into quiet contemplative eddies. The novel sparks questions about how much we owe to strangers in danger, how far we should go to protect those who may not be worthy of protection, and how we keep our crafts afloat when we're swamped by disaster and grief. I won't tell you how it ends--you'll have to make that journey on your own--but the closing image suggests that the most fragile craft can survive the batterings of catastrophe, but not without a cost. 

Once again, at home on the water

Early this morning we drove out of a fog and found Jackson Lake stretching in front of us, the water still and glassy and utterly unruffled. And soon we were unruffled too, despite a stressful week and some concern about how wobbly I'd be in the canoe since it's been more than a year since we've had it in the water. Within the first three or four strokes the wobbliness went away and I felt, once again, at home on the water.

Jackson Lake is located not, as you would expect, in Jackson but a few miles down the road in Oak Hill, and it's small enough for us to paddle the length and back in just two hours, a nice easy distance for our first canoe trip of the year. Only two small fishing boats were on the water this morning, so most of the time we shared the lake with birds, bugs, and butterflies. We saw a bittern and some great blue herons along with several families of Canada geese taking the gangly goslings out for a swim, and we got barked at by a dog that looked like Hopeful, unhappy that we were intruding on that particular stretch of water.

At its upper end the lake narrows and the channel wends among small brushy islands surrounded by lotuses with creamy yellow or orange buds just beginning to open. Red-winged blackbirds were everywhere, squawking and clicking and flying amongst the lotus leaves to grab insects. The lake's mirror-like surface reflected the lotuses, multiplying their magnificence.

No photos, unfortunately. I didn't take the camera, didn't want to be distracted while I got my sea-legs back. But I won't soon forget the brilliant lotus blossoms reflecting in the glassy water, or the heron rising into the air right in front of us, or the wild yellow irises blooming along the edge of one of those tiny brushy islands. I'll hold the pictures in my head as I laze away the afternoon until I slide into that unruffled sea of sleep.  

In place of the original post

So you've just finished writing a pithy little blog post beautifully capturing in words the afterglow of a morning spent struggling to put words together into a coherent argument in the presence of your Writing Wednesday colleagues who sit around a table in a library conference room for a few morning hours and write write write on their summer projects, and you're pleased with the way you've recreated the soothing hum of fingers clickety-clicking on keyboards and brain cells wrangling with intransigent concepts, and you're eager to share the serendipity inspired by a colleague who forwarded a Call for Papers just at the moment when you were casting about for an audience worthy of that neat little insight that's been boomeranging around the back of your mind for at least a month but now the unexpected gift of a CFP has provided a clear target and sense of purpose and a shape for your summer writing time, and you really want to share how good it feels to have ideas flowing from the brain to the fingers onto the screen so you write it all down and prepare to post but then at the last minute you're distracted by a question from a friend and you click on delete instead and in a flash it's all gone--what do you do?

Maybe it's time to put down the laptop and rev up the lawnmower.

 

Over the rainbow, with unicorns

What a difference a year makes in the life of a child: last year my granddaughter's fifth birthday party brought her a pile of colorful plastic toys, but now that she's six, she was delighted to receive stacks and stacks of chapter books and art projects. She was the perfect little hostess at her party, making sure all her little friends had plenty of fun, whether they were tie-dying T-shirts, decorating goody bags, or marching around the house playing every musical instrument they could get their hands on. At one point one of her friends was trying to create giant bubbles outside but being thwarted by strong wind, but my granddaughter spread her arms and vowed to keep the wind away. And she tried!

Last year's party followed a volcano theme, but this year brought together a colorful conglomeration of rainbows, unicorns, and mermaids. My talented daughter baked a rainbow cake as beautiful as it was delicious, and the party progressed with no tears or tantrums until the one-year-old loudly objected to the presence of so many unexpected people and activities on her turf. Good thing there were grandparents around to lend a hand!

When not partying (or preparing to party or cleaning up after partying), we enjoyed some outdoor adventures--trimming trees and planting flowers around the house or hiking in some local parks, where the almost-three-year-old grandson correctly identified cardinals in the trees and jack-in-the-pulpit alongside the path. We looked at ducks and had a peanut-butter picnic and climbed on rocks and by the end of the day we went back home exhausted and slept like babies.

Now the party's over and I'm back in my quiet house sorting through the photos, which capture the color but not the raucous music, the blustery wind, or the frequent joyous laughter. But if I quiet my mind and listen closely, I can almost hear the echoes ringing in my ears--a sound that puts a song in my heart and a spring in my step as I march through a colorless, quiet week.

I love the curls.

Helping Mommy plant flowers.

If this were a cartoon character, what would it be running from?

Rainbow sisters.

An impromptu accordion lesson in the middle of the party.

Tie-die time

Giant bubbles

Books! Books! Books!

Rainbow cake!

   

Reading The Pioneers in place, and reading my place in The Pioneers

I was reading David McCullough's new book, The Pioneers, which has become required reading locally because he spent significant time on my campus to research materials in my favorite library and because it deals with the history of this area, exploring the lives of characters hailing from New England (my people! my people!) who led the way toward establishing Marietta as the first organized settlement in the Northwest Territory, and while my response was mixed, I experienced a little frisson of pleasure when I saw my insignificant little creek mentioned right there in print.

There it is on page 250: William Cutler's 1846 journey to Columbus to serve in the state legislature is impeded by a flooded bridge over Big Run, the creek that runs past my property. That bridge has long since been washed out and replaced with a modern highway bridge, but it crossed the creek where it intersects with what has long been the main road following the Muskingum River north, so I should not be surprised that the bridge played a part, however minor, in local history.

And how would I rate McCullough's presentation of that history? Mixed. I keep reminding myself that McCullough is primarily a storyteller, and so I should not be surprised that The Pioneers glosses over some complex issues and relies heavily on cliches (most disturbingly in his portrayal of Native Americans, an issue that has been dealt with in other forums, such as this New York Times review). Any book subtitled "The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West" is going to promote a particular perspective on history. I was delighted to see so many of my colleagues and my favorite librarians warmly credited in the acknowledgements, and I gained a greater sense for the various motivations that led early settlers to bushwhack their way to my neck of the woods. (And I also learned a definition of bushwhack that I'd never before encountered: "to pull a boat upstream from onboard by grasping bushes, rocks, etc.," as dictionary.com puts it.)

I was most surprised by the narrow margin by which Ohio and the Northwest Territory remained free of slavery. McCullough describes Manasseh Cutler's intense struggle to assure that the Northwest Ordinance proscribed slavery from the entire territory, a hard-won victory; and later, he shows how Cutler's son Ephraim diligently worked to make sure Ohio came into the union slavery-free, casting the tie-breaking vote to keep slavery out of the state. Imagine the impact on our nation's history if that vote had gone the other way.

Mostly I was impressed by the way McCullough breathes life into some interesting and little-known characters, like Rufus Putnam and Samuel Hildreth and various members of the Cutler family, all hardy New Englanders who packed their bags with determination, grit, and a fair share of personal flaws before heading for what they considered the howling wilderness. He also briefly brings some more illustrious characters on the scene, like John Quincy Adams, Aaron Burr, and the Marquis de Lafayette, whose name still graces the historic Lafayette Hotel down at the waterfront. 

And of course he mentions my creek, which flowed through this territory long before any Heroic Settlers arrived and will continue to flow long after we're gone. It has seen a lot of history, my little creek, and the book helps me understand the broad outlines of that history even if it skimps a bit on nuance. My creek is just an obstacle that briefly blocks the path of those Heroic Settlers, but I wonder: if Big Run could speak, what kind of story would it tell?
 

Phoebes, feeding

I'm sitting in my favorite spot in front of the big picture window when a flash of movement catches my attention. It's a phoebe, one of the pair nesting on our front porch, and he's sitting just three feet away on a chunk of firewood holding a small insect in his beak. He bobs his tail up and down and looks around, looks sharply in my direction, and then flies up to the corner to feed his mate on the nest. He repeats this pattern over and over again all day long, disappearing only when I step outside--and even then he stays nearby, usually within sight of the nest. 

The female tends to stay on the nest as long as I'm not doing anything loud nearby, but earlier today both of them fled when I had to fill the birdfeeders. The bin holding all our birdseed is located directly beneath the phoebe's nest so I couldn't get to the birdseed without disturbing the birds. I probably ought to ask one of the men to move the birdseed bin until the phoebes finish with the nest.

I keep trying to get decent photos of the phoebe sitting on the nest, but the nest is in a poorly lit spot and getting too close startles the bird. From inside I can get photos of the other phoebe through the window, but I have to be careful to avoid glare and reflection lest I end up with a photo of myself taking a photo. I want to see phoebes, not inadvertent selfies. But patience pays off: I sit very still with the camera aimed and focused and I want for the phoebe to land in his usual spot. It takes a while, but there he is--click! I get a photo, and the phoebes get fed.

He's holding a small winged insect in his beak.

Do the phoebes find me as interesting as I find them?

Quite a spectacle if you know where to look

Last week we marveled at the roomful of exotic orchids at Longwood Gardens; this morning I found several species of orchids growing wild in my neck of the woods. My eagle-eyed husband saw the tiny rattlesnake plantain orchid leaves nearly hidden alongside the path plus another variety I can't identify just getting ready to blossom, and I found some blooming showy orchis (galearis spectabilis, quite a spectacle if you know where to look), which provided the identification for yesterday's mystery plant. We also saw lots of jack-in-the-pulpit and some oddball species that don't tend to show up in formal gardens, like a tall grass producing spiky pods and a cluster of squawroot, aka bear corn, a non-photosynthesizing parasite that feeds on oak roots. Spring ephemerals are done but the magnolias are still blooming and I'm sure there's more to come, as long as we keep looking. 

My botany expert identifies this as spotted wintergreen.

Jack in the pulpit

Morning-star sedge?

Showy orchis

Squawroot or bear corn

Rattlesnake plantain orchid.

More magnolia.

Phoebe & me: mostly unfazed

I walked out the front door this morning, said a polite Good morning to the phoebe sitting on the nest under the eaves, and got in my car and drove away. The phoebe didn't even flinch, so maybe we will be able to coexist. We'll see what happens next week when the power people arrive to replace poles and cut down trees.

Meanwhile, I'm back in Jackson, driving here under ominous clouds and with the threat of rain all weekend. It's been three weeks since my last visit to Lake Katharine, so I decided to make a quick stop there for a hike before the storm hit--but I didn't have my hiking shoes with me, so I took the shorter, less steep trail, on the theory that I'd be less likely to fall and cripple myself.

The good news is that those mystery buds I found so fascinating three weeks ago turn out to belong to the umbrella magnolia trees now beautifully in bloom; the bad news is that I can find a way to fall anywhere, so down I slid into the exposed root ball of a fallen tree, ouch. I didn't break anything but I'll be sore in the morning, and I emerged from the woods with my right side covered in dirt.

Since I started visiting Lake Katharine last summer, I keep having variations on the same conversation:

You shouldn't be hiking out there alone! What about the wild animals?  
(Until mosquito season, I'm not too worried--the wild animals in those woods are more afraid of me than I am of them.)  

What about strange people? 
(Strange people are everywhere. Open your eyes.)  

What if you fall? 

(I'll get back up again, unless I can't, in which case I can't imagine a more pleasant place to merge with the earth.)

So today I tested that third question and it turns out that it wasn't quite my time to merge with the earth, although if anyone had been watching I might have wanted to sink down into the mud in sheer embarrassment. It got back up, dusted myself off, and kept walking, mostly unfazed. (The magnolias helped.)

Umbrella magnolias blooming along the Calico Bush trail.

The branches reach far overhead.

Only a few mayapple blossoms remain.

What the heck is this? I found a cluster of them near the Calico Bush trail.

Three-quarters of the way around the trail, a tree fell in the path. Climb over or turn around? I climbed over. Not fun.

Walked down to the lake and up to the waterfall, a great place to sit and think.