Chestnut oaks on steep slopes

 The acorns of chestnut oaks look like chestnuts. I had to look twice when I thought I saw chestnuts on the ground, albeit without the hulls.

Quercus montana is not found in Texas so it’s new to me. People say it’s a ridgetop tree, and I could see why.

The acorns are round and big: if you played marbles as a kid, you’d call these taws or shooters. The slopes on the mountains of North Georgia are steep, and these big round acorns roll. I found several in fissures. They had “planted” themselves about as snugly as a farmer could have done it.

I’m not sure that’s the story I’ll find when I check the scholarly papers. But it seems like an evolutionary advantage to me.

I found Quercus montana in bunches on the steep slopes around Amicalola Falls.

Among the October blooms:

• Lobelias, with lovely tubular flowers. The ones I saw were lavender. I know they are in genus Lobelia — the trumpet flowers had five lobes, but I’d be guessing on the species. 

• Common jewelweed, Impatiens capensis, with deep orange flowers.

• Turtleheads, in genus Chelone. The common name comes from the flower’s shape. You can imagine a turtle sticking its head out of its shell. The common species in Georgia, C. glabra, is white. The flowers I saw were purple-pink-magenta and white.

Amicalola Falls

 Imagine that you’re on a ridge in the southern Appalachians. The ridge drops sharply — not 90 degrees but close — and the next ridgeline is miles away. Now imagine a creek running over the edge. It seems like the water is running into air, but you know that’s not true because it’s noisy.

You have to go down the trail and look up to see Amicalola Falls in North Georgia. But I can’t get over that place the natives call Top of the Falls, where the water seems to disappear.

The Wise Woman, who is a better observer of people than I am, said everyone on the trail stood and watched a long time and finally left with enormous smiles. She struck up a conversation with a woman who has been walking the trail with her husband for years. They once lived nearby and walked the place often enough to have seen a black bear. They now live in South Carolina, but they drive two hours, about once a month, just to see the place.

The Wise Woman, who comes from a long line of Cherokee and African-American herbalists, thinks such experiences are healing in a way we perhaps don’t understand.

Little things suggested by genius

Thoreau felt a little guilty about going cranberrying. You can ruin a good walk by looking at the world with utilitarian eyes.

But he made a good argument about portion control: A pocketful of berries does not set you up in business. And a pocketful will give you a taste of the place.

 

Many of our days should be spent, not in vain expectations and lying on our oars, but in carrying out deliberately and faithfully the hundred little purposes which every man’s genius must have suggested to him. Let not your life be wholly without an object, though it be only to ascertain the flavor of a cranberry, for it will not be only the quality of an insignificant berry you will have tasted, but the flavor of your life to that extent, and it will be such a sauce as no wealth can buy.

 

When we speak of having a sense of a place, we don’t often mean taste or smell.

I feel a little less guilty about sampling the late blackberries.

• Source: Henry David Thoreau, Wild Fruits, ed. by Branley P. Dean; New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2000, p. 166.

The problem with media

 I read an article that claimed that myths have sustained the American republic and that the collapse of those myths wouldn’t have been possible without social media.

I was interested but skeptical. Most of what’s said about new media doesn’t age well — the phrase “old as yesterday’s news” comes to mind. But I love this line about the constraints of media by the novelist George Gissing:

 

Everything must be very short … their attention can’t sustain itself … Even chat is too solid for them; they want chit-chat.

 

Gissing was complaining about the mass-circulation newspapers of the 1800s. I don’t think he’d have been astonished by Twitter, now known as X, but I don’t think he’d have liked it either.

• Source: The line is from Gissing’s novel New Grub Street, published in 1891, but I found it in Frank Muir’s An Irreverent and Thoroughly Incomplete History of Almost Everything; New York: Stein and Day, 1976, p. 168.

Monarch butterflies and naturalists

 An interesting scientific paper suggests that Monarch butterflies are not arriving earlier in the United States but are staying longer in late summer before heading back to Mexico.

If you’ve been wondering about how the Monarch’s migrations have been affected by climate change, you’ll like the paper. The lead author is Diane M. Debinski, an ecologist at Montana State University.

But the heart of the paper is a set of data compiled by Harlan Ratcliff, who was an environmental engineer at Camp Dodge, headquarters for the Iowa National Guard. He compiled the data as an amateur on his lunch hour, using a technique called a Pollard walk. The technique was devised with amateur naturalists in mind.

The basic idea is to imagine that you, the observer, are in a 5-meter cube or box. You walk along a set course — the technical term is a transect — repeatedly on a schedule and record the species of interest you see in your box. Ratcliff’s findings were remarkable because they run from 2003 to 2019. The data suggests that Monarchs were staying nine days longer. The warmer temperatures in autumn extended the season for milkweed.

Sadly, Ratcliff died in 2022. But his blog, The Roused Bear, is online. If you want to get an idea of what a naturalist is like, it’s a good place to start.

• Sources: Diane M. Debinski, Norah Warchola, Sonia Altizer, Elizabeth E. Crone, “Implications of summer breeding phenology on demography of monarch butterflies”; Journal of Animal Ecology, 17 Feb. 2025, https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2656.70004

It’s here:

https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1365-2656.70004

Harlan Ratcliff’s blog The Roused Bear is here:
https://therousedbear.wordpress.com/

Inner resources

 Yesterday’s note on Doris Grumbach’s Fifty Days of Solitude should have included an example of the kinds of items that make up the book. Here’s an excerpt from an entry long enough to be an essay: 

Inner resources: What are they? Are they like mineral resources, so deeply buried they require a mining operation to raise them to the surface. Or are they simply there, so that they can simply be used at will, like the ability to follow a line of thought to its conclusion, as the young Valéry trained himself to do, or like the rich muck of memory that yields useful parallels and evidence for one’s ideas at the moment they are required, or like the ability to lose oneself in books and be comforted and interested in music and live in paintings, to be able to forget the world and remember only the faint shadow of the inner being one is searching for.

 

I’d have put a couple of question marks in there, but Grumbach did not. I take the sentences as questions. Instead of either-or, I’d say both possibilities are sometimes true. Some resources can be tapped only with discipline, which is why some of us are interested in the routines and disciplines of other writers and artists. Some resources seem to require almost no discipline, although I suspect that’s an illusion — that we are simply missing something.

If you saw a course in a college catalog that promised to cultivate “the ability to follow a line of thought to its conclusion,” wouldn’t you take it?

I would. I would take that course first, before all others.

• Dorus Grumbach, Fifty Days of Solitude; Boston: Beacon Press, 1993, pp. 95-6.

'Fifty Days of Solitude'

 In the winter of 1993, Doris Crumbach spent 50 days in solitude.

Her partner, Sybil, was on a long trip. Grumbach, at 75, wanted to get away from the distractions of a full life and think. She holed up at their home on the coast of Maine with her books and music. She took walks but tried to avoid company.

I’d say it was mostly solitude.

Like Thoreau, Grumbach was trying to get far enough away from other people to front only the essential facts of life. She kept a notebook, the basis of Fifty Days of Solitude.

It’s a short book, about 30,000 words.

It’s divided into 79 sections. Some are just a few sentences. Some run several pages. An average entry is 400 words. An older reader, like me, might spend some time wondering whether these entries are notes, remarks or essays. A younger reader would see a series of blog posts in print.

Many of the entries are about aging. Writers are supposed to keep up with things, including the news. But at a certain age, is it OK to retreat and look at questions that don’t involve the news? Is it presumptuous to call them more important questions?

Many of the entries involve the tension between being a part of the larger world and being creative, which means being alone. Being a responsible member of society involves working with other people. Writing involves bolting the door and shutting others out.

We learn what Grumbach makes of the tension. We also learn about the people who’ve influenced her thinking. We learn that if she could take one novel to the proverbial deserted island it’d be Middlemarch.

What emerges is a picture of one writer’s mind. Whether you like her book might depend on whether you like people who like Middlemarch. I do.

I think the book is a good model for writers who are thinking about their own work. Recently, I posted some notes about the routines of writers and other artists. A friend sent me a note about the novelist Terry Pratchett, whose one rule was to write 400 words a day.

If you followed that rule from 80 days, you’d have something that looked like Fifty Days of Solitude, at least in form. The possibilities are interesting.

• Dorus Grumbach, Fifty Days of Solitude; Boston: Beacon Press, 1993.