An unsolved case

 I found the shell of a musk turtle, Sternotherus odoratus. The occupant was gone. The black, 4-inch shell was as clean as a museum specimen. Not a trace of the victim.

Musk turtles don’t usually wander far from water, and the shell was 60 yards from a pond. I suspected foul play.

I love British murder mysteries, and I tried to find some clues.

The shell was on a hill where the ground was hard. I found no tracks.

I checked the shell for talon marks, suspecting the red-tailed hawks that nest near the pond. Not a scratch.

I checked for odors, since skunks prey on turtles. Nothing.

My last guess: a raccoon. But it was just an evidence-free guess. I simply couldn’t think of any other animal that might have left the shell so clean.

On television, the detectives always crack the case. But the mysteries I stumble across in the woods often remain mysteries.

A notion about learning

 Epicurus wrote an epitome of his system of thought about the natural world.

His system was complicated, and he prepared a summary for students. He explained that he thought it was important for a person who was learning to keep the overall system in mind. He kept returning to the basic principles. 

 

For a comprehensive view is often required, the details but seldom.

 

Epicurus was talking about the way we learn about the natural world, a subject he called physics. It seems to me his maxim might apply to just about any subject.

• Source: Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers; translated by R.D. Hicks; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991, Vol. II, pp. 566-7.

Juneteenth

 Juneteenth is the day slavery ended in the United States.

The main rebel army surrendered in Virginia in April 1865. It took a while to mop up the smaller rebel units. It took a couple of months for the Union Army to get to Texas, a backwater of the war. For enslaved people, the nightmare of slavery didn’t end until the soldiers arrived.

On June 19, 1865, general orders were read in Galveston proclaiming that the enslaved people were henceforth and forever free. The news set off celebrations across Texas.

If there had been states further removed from the war’s center, slavery would have endured a little longer. But Texas was the end of the line. Texas was where the nightmare ended.

The heartbreaking part of the story is that other nightmares followed. The nightmare of the Jim Crow Era ended during my lifetime with the passage of the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act.

The heartbreaking part of that story is that we now have a government that is bent on undermining the principle of equal rights.

I celebrate Juneteenth to remind myself that the nightmare of slavery ended on this day. I also remind myself that, while this country seems to have a capacity to generate new nightmares, it also has the capacity to end them. Good people always stand against injustice.

A garden on a boulder

 We stopped to rest by a boulder at Panola Mountain. It was about the size of a car and was covered with lichens and mosses. It seemed to me that nature had created a small Japanese garden on a bare chunk of granite in the Georgia Piedmont.

A better naturalist would have been able to identify every species. Most were primitive forms, but I saw two little trees growing out of crevices: a winged elm, Ulmus alata, and a sweetgum, Liquidambar styraciflua. 

The winged elm has seed in a papery case called a samara that is adapted to fly on the wind. The sweetgum puts its seeds in spiky balls that roll down the slopes until each finds a crevice. There is no level ground in the Piedmont, and sweetgum balls find every crevice. We have sweetgums growing out of joints in sidewalks.

Middle of June

 We walked around Alexander Lake at Panola Mountain in a light rain, celebrating the cold front. Temperatures were in the 60s, almost chilly — hard for a transplanted Texan to fathom. Mist was rising off the lake, and 32 Canada geese paddled across, making noise. Do geese honk for joy?

In places where the foresters had burned the underbrush, yellow crownbeard, Verbesina occidentalis, was 7 feet high. In places where the fire had failed to clear the underbrush, we saw a vigorous vine, Calystegia sepium,covering the shrubs. I usually hear it called bindweed but have heard binderweed. The flowers look like big white trumpets poking out of the undergrowth.

The little lavender flowers of Carolina reuellia, Ruellia carolniensis, were covered in raindrops. 

Because I’ve been reading Roy Bedichek’s The Sense of Smell, I stopped when I saw a sycamore and plucked a leaf. Bedichek contended that the smell of a damp sycamore is unforgettable but hard to describe. He was right that the smell always brings back memories. Mine were from Texas, and the Wise Woman’s were from Virginia.

• Source: Roy Bedichek, The Sense of Smell; London: Michael Joseph, 1960. His remarks on sycamores are on pp. 16-17. For an early note on Bedichek, see “Stumped by sycamores,” June 4, 2027. It’s here:

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/2026/06/stumped-by-sycamores.html

Lightning bugs

 At dusk, we looked up into the woodlot and saw hundreds of lighting bugs.

When I was a boy, I heard fireflies mainly in the North. The usage is changing. The scholars at the University of Georgia call these wondrous creatures fireflies, although they’re flying beetles in family Lampyridae. 

We have more than 50 species in Georgia. Some synchronize their flashing. Some cast a blue light.

The light shows are to attract mates. Typically, males do the flying, while females flash back from a perch. Eggs take about three weeks to hatch. The larvae are notable slayers of slugs. The larvae grow and enter a pupal stage that involves a casing like a cocoon. The adults feed on nectar and are pollinators.

I’m pretty sure the lightning bugs in our woodlot were the most common variety, Photina pyralis. The specimens I saw had a yellow outline around their black wings and a shield covering the back of its head.

Almost-Great Books

 I’m out of my league talking about the Great Books. I argue for the Almost-Great Books.

I understand what people mean when they talk of the influence of Shakespeare. But when I have an hour to spend with a poet, I’m likely to read William Stafford, Norman MacCaig or Mary Oliver.

Instead of reading writers who speak to humanity, I usually spend time with writers who speak more directly to me.

I sometimes wonder whether genre has anything to do with a book’s chances of ending up on a list of books that are taught in schools. My 5-foot bookshelf would be heavy on letters and essays.

One genre that I love seems neglected: books that provide a “deep map” of a place, to use William Least Heat-Moon’s phrase. His PrairyErth is a detailed look at an overlooked place. In my mind, this genre begins with Gilbert White’s The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne. I’ve mentioned other examples: Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain, Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, Ronald Blythe’s Next to Nature and Akenfield, and Roger Deakin’s Notes from Walnut Tree Farm.

I suppose that the Great Books folks would say they included a sample with Thoreau’s Walden. I love that book, but I’m not sure we’re talking about the same thing.