A lovely plant and a thorny concept

 I saw a few strands of moss phlox flowering. The leaves of Phlox subulata are shaped like little awls, which you might guess if you’re a Latinist. The plant is a perennial and forms mats that might remind you of moss. The flowers are usually purple or pink, but the ones I saw were mainly white. It was as if a watercolorist had touched the wet petals with a brush and the purple had run.

Is this lovely plant a native or an invasive species?

I’d say it’s an example of what’s wrong with that concept. The experts say the native range covered much of Eastern North America, extending south to North Carolina. But the plant did well in the Appalachians, which spill into northern Georgia. The line between the Piedmont and the mountains is tricky, so maybe part of the Piedmont.

The experts say Stone Mountain is beyond the native range, but close. Moss phlox does well in our rocky soils, so the garden centers sell seedlings.

What of the plant I saw? How did it get there? As a practical matter, I have no way of knowing whether it found its place with the help of wind, bird, squirrel or gardener.

Native or invasive? I don’t know. I don’t see how experts could know.

Scientific concepts are useful to the extent that they provide answers to questions on a case-by-case basis. With moss phlox, I don’t think there are answers on a case-by-case basis.

Timing the seasons

 I have been watching my dwindling woodpile and thinking about my grandfather.

As the days got warmer, my grandfather would go to the barn and look at his dwindling supply of hay. Each year, he would estimate the number of bales he’d need to get his herd through winter. Old hay loses its nutrients, so leftover bales were discarded with sadness. Any waste is mourned on a farm. Grandfather didn’t want to have a lot of leftover hay — but he sure didn’t want to run out of it either. 

It always pleased him when the weather warmed up and the grass came out just as the barn was empty.

My firewood is getting low just as the weather is warming up. There’s an odd satisfaction when things like that work out.

Frogs

 I first heard the frog chorus the last week of February. I’m not talking about solos or chamber choirs. The chorus I heard was made up of a gazillion frogs in the marsh where a branch runs into Alexander Lake. The frogs weren’t as loud as a jet engine — but they were close. The peace and quiet we seek is not always quiet.

The chorus reminds me that spring comes in dribbles. Frogs are always early. They start before the lawnmowers do.

The chorus always reminds me of Roy Bedichek’s remark that frogs don’t so much eat to live as live to be eaten. Frogs are so prolific and nourish so many predators that Bedichek saw them as symbols of the food chain.

As I was thinking about it, a great blue heron moseyed up the lake toward the chorus.

Edward Hoagland said the frogs say jugarum. I don’t think that’s quite right, but I can’t do better today.

What strategy requires

 Good strategy presumes good sociology and good anthropology.

That’s a maxim of Bernard Brodie, sometimes called the American Clausewitz. Brodie got his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago just before the United States entered World War II. His point was that you can’t control your adversaries without knowing something about them.

Brodie was among the people who changed the way we think about war — and even Americans do think deeply about war. If you allowed ordinary citizens to tour a fleet headquarters, the big surprise would not be the technology but the number of people who have graduate degrees.

I think the U.S. military has an excellent idea about whether it’s reasonable to expect a regime change from the president’s war against Iran.

But I’m prejudiced. I don’t think anyone at the White House knows enough about sociology and anthropology to conquer Minneapolis, much less Iran.

Independence Day

 Texas was declared an independent republic on March 2, 1836. It was the shameful era of “Indian removal,” when Native Americans were driven from their homelands in places like Georgia to lands west of the Mississippi. It was a defining feature of Jacksonian democracy, which was kind of like the democracy we have today.

The Anglos who settled Texas were mostly Southerners who were filled with the spirit of that day. The policy of the new republic was rid the country Native peoples.

The new republic spent so much money doing that it went into debt. If you’re puzzled by why Texas has so little public land compared to other Western states, it helps to remember it had so much debt it had to sell everything. If you’re puzzled why Texas has almost no reservations for Native peoples, it helps to remember that shameful history.

The stories about Texas are like the myths of the ancient Greeks. Homer says the story of Jason and the Argonauts was popular in his day. But there were problems with the tale even then. If you look at the route Jason and Medea used to return after stealing the Golden Fleece, you see that the tales were invented before the Greeks knew much about geography.

Some of the rivers that Jason and Medea took didn’t run into lakes that the myths imagined. The rivers that connected into a kind of escape route didn’t connect. Rivers didn’t run into the right seas.

Geographers and historians gradually learned better, but they couldn’t contradict the hallowed myths without getting into trouble. So the myths kept splintering, getting ever more convoluted, ever more impossible to believe.

If you’re from Texas, all this might sound familiar. It’s what folks call heritage.

The disappearing bridge

 The Rock Bridge, a landmark in the map in my mind, was gone when we went to check on it. The Yellow River, high and angry, covered the boulders that make up the bridge that the ancient peoples used.

The authorities reported the river crested at 23 feet to the north. That’s a lot of flooding. At the Rock Bridge the river was mainly in the channel, though just barely. Usually, you see steep banks along the river with a drop of perhaps 10 feet. The river was within a foot of the top and spilled over into the bottom in places.

The rains came at night. When people awoke, they awoke to news of a war, rather than to the wonders of nature.

Hoagland: ‘Small Silences’

 When he was 8, Edward Hoagland discovered Dr. Green’s magical pond by following a shallow stream through the woods. The family had moved 45 miles from New York City to Connecticut during World War II. 

I’d lie on my back on a patch of moss watching a swaying poplar’s branches interlace with another’s, and the tremulous leaves vibrate, and the clouds forgather to parade zoologically overhead, and felt linked to the whole matrix, as you either do or you don’t throughout the rest of your life. And childhood — nine or ten, I think — is when this best happens. It’s when you develop a capacity for quiet, a confidence in your solitude, your rapport with a Nature both animate and not so much so: what winged things possibly feel, the blessing of water, the rhythm of weather, and what might bite you and what will not.

 

Hoagland’s essay “Small Silences” is about our connection with the natural world. I think the loss of that connection is behind our penchant for destroying the Earth. It’s hard to abuse something you have a connection with.

The essay has an interesting point that you might not expect to find in an essay on natural history: how some children have to cultivate their interests in secrecy.

Hoagland’s father boycotted the Metropolitan Opera when it invited Marian Anderson to sing. Hoagland’s father fired the maid, fearing young Edward was developing an attachment to a Black woman.

 

I learned from the episode not to betray to a third party affection for anybody who might get fired because of it, or to divulge any passion that might thereafter be denied me.

 

The budding naturalist kept his passion for nature to himself.

• Source: Edward Hoagland’s essay “Small Silences” is in Sex and the River Styx; White River Junction, Vt.: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2011, pp. 11 and 8-9.