Our place in nature

 The most haunting part of Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks, a remarkable book about how the notion of place shapes our thinking, is a passage about what our attitudes about the natural world have done to children. 

A 2012 ‘Natural Childhood’ report recorded that between 1970 and 2010, the area in which British children were permitted to play unsupervised shrank by 90 per cent. The proportion of children regularly playing in ‘wild’ places fell from one in two to one in ten. In another study, participants from three generations were given maps of the places in which they grew up, and asked to mark with crosses where they remembered playing. The spread of the crosses — the so-called ‘roaming radius’ — tightened from generation to generation, until in the third it was cinched right down to house, garden and pavement. Screen-time has increased dramatically. Environmental literacy has plummeted.

 

What we are doing to the environment we do to our children and their children. They, like us, are part of the natural world. It’s not just the loss of habitat, although that’s tragic. It’s the loss of imagination.

Macfarlane tells another version of this story at the start of the book in discussing the revisions to the Oxford Junior Dictionary. Children now can look up blog, broadband and bullet-points but can no longer find acorn, ash and beech. That’s a bad trade.

If your kids and grandkids don’t know how to play in the natural world, show them. 

• Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks; London: Penguin Books, 2016, pp. 323, 3.

Oh, how Oliver Sacks could talk

 A professor I know said that Oliver Sacks was a spellbinding talker one-on-one or in small groups but was a terrible lecturer. Time disappeared when you were in a seminar with Sacks. But the magic went away when he entered an auditorium.

The professor was baffled and still is. The ability to give a good lecture is a mysterious thing, he said. Some people can do it and others simply cannot.

I have no insight but was reminded of the story when I heard someone say that prepositions are always important.

Sacks was good at talking with people, not to them. The difference in the prepositions is the difference between a conversation and a lecture.

After the storm

 After Hurricane Helene passed through, we got out of the house, wanting to see what had become of the woods.

We tried to make it to Panola Mountain, but the South River was angry and high. It was across the road in two places — Panola Road and Flat Bridge Road. I turned north to Arabia Mountain.

If the eye of the hurricane is to the east, you can feel the wind shift from the north to the west as the storm passes. The air is fresh, and there’s something about seeing how the forest recycles itself while the demonstration is in progress. The storm had dropped some trees — the largest I ran across was a sweetgum, 8-inches in diameter — but there was something wrong with almost all of them. Although the sweetgum had green leaves, it was largely rotten. It shattered when it hit the ground.

The winds culled out the weaker trees, opening the canopy, allowing stronger, younger plants to get some sun and to grow.

Along the way, we saw about 60 vultures on the ground in one spot, not far from a powerline tower, which I think had been their roost. The vultures stayed on the ground, looking bedraggled. A few tussled over a dead snake. I’d guess it hadn’t been able to get out of bottom as the water rose.

Later, the skies were full of vultures, another example of how the nature recycles itself after a bad storm.

And now the latest from Euripides

 It’s exciting when archeologists find fragments of ancient manuscripts. It’s especially exciting when they find fragments from Euripides’ plays that include lines we didn’t know about.

Robert Cioffi, a Classics professor at Bard College, has an account of a new find. He quotes a passage from Polyidus, in which Polyidus chastises Minos, who thinks he can govern the world because he’s fabulously wealthy: 

 

So you’re rich. Don’t think you understand anything else.

Wealth makes you useless. It is poverty that produces wisdom.

 

Some of my friends say I’m overly fond of the ancient Greeks. But so much of what those old guys had to say seems fresh to me — almost like commentary on today’s news.

• Source: Robert Cioffi, “Euripides Unbound”; London Review of Books, Vol. 46, No. 18, 26 Sept. 2024.

A quick calculation

 When the water is low in the Yellow River, a little island or sandbar splits the current just south of the Rockbridge. Nine mallards, male and female, had blocked the narrow channel and were herding minnows into the shallows. The ducks moved in a line, driving the minnows before them — a roundup without horses, cows or humans.

The ducks were feeding when a small red-tailed hawk, which had been screaming all morning, swooped in and landed in a limb over the river. The hawk, hardly bigger than a duck, looked down. The ducks looked up — and then went on feeding.

I would love to understand that calculation: how the ducks determined they had nothing to fear.

‘The Whaleboat’ again

 Yesterday’s note sideswiped Barry Lopez’s fine essay, rather than hitting it head on. If you’re a writer and like to think about writing, I’d recommend it. Here’s a better attempt at telling you why the essay is intriguing:

Lopez was sitting in the room where he writes, reading Adolphus Greely’s mammoth account of the disastrous expedition he led into the Canadian Arctic in 1883-4. The report was interesting, and Lopez wanted to read it. But he kept getting distracted by the living environment in front of him — his room with its many interesting artifacts, including a model of a whaleboat, and the world outside his windows.

It’s the tension between wanting to read a reflection of a human encounter with nature world and wanting to encounter the natural world in front of you right now.

 

Two separate realities, inside and out, but they elide subtly.

 

Lopez argues we need both. We humans build whaleboats — inventions made of natural stuff — and we build them better by studying the experiences of other thoughtful people who’ve left us an account of their own struggles. But at some point, I must make my own and try it in a natural world that is dangerous as well as beautiful.

• Source: Barry Lopez, About This Life; New York: Vintage Books, 1998. “The Whaleboat” is on pp. 175-87. The quotation is on p. 176.

Lopez: ‘The Whaleboat’

 The whaleboat in Barry Lopez’s fine essay “The Whaleboat” is a model. It sat in the room where Lopez wrote.

It reminded him that the people who built whaleboats in 1860 had a sophisticated knowledge of the properties of the wood from the many species of trees in the forest. They understood that different woods had different properties, so they used white oak, spruce, pine, cedar, ash and hickory for different parts of a small, efficient boat.

That intimate knowledge of the properties of trees in the forest was used to ravage creatures of the ocean. Such is our knowledge: knowledge of the natural world in one area leads to the destruction of the natural world in another. 

That’s not the point of the essay. But it’s the point in the essay I couldn’t get past.

• Source: Barry Lopez, About This Life; New York: Vintage Books, 1998. “The Whaleboat” is on pp. 175-87.

Living in The Verge

 We all know the city and the country. What of the lands in between?

Robert Macfarlane, in his wonderful Landmarks, calls these places “edgelands.” Under his influence, I’ve been thinking about that word verge. The noun means an edge or a boundary — in the United Kingdom a verge is what we’d call a highway right of way. The verb is one of those verbs of being — being on the edge.

I walk in the woods almost every day. I’m trying to understand the natural history of this new place, and I’ve come to think of the place as The Verge, the edge of the city and the forest. It’s a fluid boundary — really a frontier.

I’ve gotten interested in the natural barriers I find in the forest: thickets of river cane in the creek bottoms and thickets of native azalea in higher elevations. When I find a barrier — I call them hedges — I look at the plant associations. That is, I try to see what smaller plants are associated with the bigger plants that form the barrier. But instead of finding a pattern for my inventory, I find puzzles. On recent outings I found, instead of native plants, Japanese chaff flower and marvel of Peru, a dazzler prized in gardens.

Here’s a piece of that puzzle: The greater Atlanta area has 6.3 million people, and a lot of them are gardeners. Seeds that should be in the garden end up in the woods in these lands between the city and the country.

I think this frontier is an interesting place. Small details in the way we live — decisions about what we plant in our gardens — are going to decide what this place looks like in 50 years. I hope we won’t ignore the larger decisions — those about how we preserve public lands.

I suppose I’m setline into this place. I’m beginning to think of myself as a verger.

• Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks; London: Penguin Books, 2016. The chapter “Bastard Countryside” is on pp. 231-48.

Autumn equinox

 When we moved to Georgia in the autumn of 2022, the Wise Woman developed a mysterious cough. It recurred in autumn 2023 and again a few weeks ago.

The Wise Woman and her physician have been discussing the matter. I have not been consulted.

But on my own initiative, I’ve been digging up the common ragweed, Ambrosia artemisifolia, goldenrods, genus Solidago, around the house.

I don’t think that will help much — maybe a little.

I spent 67 years in Texas, where people said everything was bigger, including the stands of goldenrod.

It just ain’t so. I’ve just thought I’d seen goldenrods before we moved to Georgia.

Goldenrods and ragweed are among the commoners, plants that you see so often you tend to overlook them. Many of the plants blooming now are commoners. Here are a few:

• American burnweed, Erechtites hieraciifolius, is a towering plant, maybe 10 feet, with frilly, white flowerheads. Maybe it was a trick of the light, but white flowers I saw near Panola Mountain had a feint pink tint.

• White-panicle aster, Symphyotrichum lanceolatum, is a perennial, and you can see thickets of them along the banks of ponds. 

• Texas aster or Drummond’s aster, Symphyotrichum drummondii, is another perennial. This one has purple flowers with gold centers.

• Poorjoe, Hexasepalum teres, has blade leaves and small purple flowers with four petals. Some people call it rough buttonwood.

• Arrowhead sida, Sida rhombifolia, a small plant with woody stems and yellow flowers that look like pentagons. The University of Georgia says this plant is invasive. Medical researchers are studying its high concentrations of anti-inflammatory compounds. I don’t know what to think.

In praise of a certain kind of neighbor

 On a walk through the neighborhood, I passed a freshly mowed lawn. The lawn was well kept, but unless you are interested in Bermuda grass, there was not much to see.

Oddly, this unknown neighbor had not cleared the dirt that collects in the storm gutters, and Silverleaf nightshade, Solanum elaeagnifolium, had found an unlikely home. I counted 47 plants, many in bloom, in the gutter in front of the freshly cut grass.

A small service for a chipmunk

 Barry Lopez made it a practice to remove animals killed by cars off the road. I read about his practice a month ago.

While walking the dog through the neighborhood the other day, I came across a chipmunk that had been killed by a car. I stopped and put the little body in a vacant lot — vacant so long that it had become woods again. The big dog, whose body language is often expressive, did not comment, and we went on with our walk.

Books are fascinating, and many people study them. One of the real mysteries is how a few can change your life, sometimes in small, barely noticeable ways.

• Source: Barry Lopez, About This Life; New York: Vintage Books, 1998. “Apologia” is on pp. 113-18. For my original note on his essay, see “Lopez: ‘Apologia,’” Aug. 31, 2024.

A stand of wildflowers and the wasps that love them

 I’ve been watching a stand of dogfennel, Eupatorium capillifolium; yellow crownbeard, Verbesina occidentalis; white beggarticks, Bidens alba; and giant ironweed, Vernonia gigantea. The giant ironweed is 12 feet tall and everything else is more than 6 feet.

One of the things that makes an English garden beautiful is the varying heights of the flowers. To grasp the picture, your eyes have to move — in and out, up and down.

This stand of flowering plants along the Yellow River is stunning — far more beautiful than any lawn. You could spend a long time looking at the colors: the magenta of the ironweed, the school-bus yellow of the crownbeard, the stark white of the beggarticks and all those shades of green. You could compare the feathery texture of the dogfennel with the girders of the ironweed.

On this visit in mid-September, the stand was a wasp-loud glade.

There were honeybees and bumblebees, but most of the fliers were blue-winged wasps, Scolia dubia. The wings are so black they’re blue. The thorax and top of the abdomen are black. The bottom of the abdomen is brown with two yellow spots.

Blue-winged wasps prey on June bugs and Japanese beetles. You can see the wasps flying low over lawns. The female wasp, sensing a grub, will tunnel into the soil, paralyze the grub with a sting and then lay an egg on the helpless host. The wasp larva eats the grub as it grows.

These wasps are also pollinators, going for both pollen (protein) and nectar (carbs). An extension agent in neighboring Fulton County, quoting research from Penn State, says the wasps especially love goldenrod. (That observation is intriguing, but I’m irrationally dubious. So I’ve become an inspector of goldenrods.)

A new trail

 We walked along a new trail — part one-lane road, part paved path, part clay track through the woods — along the South River.  We got to a bluff and looked down on some shoals. The big dog went to the edge of a boulder and looked down at the straight drop, ears cocked, for a long time. The sound of water on rock is enchanting — and not just to humans.

We disturbed two big does. Perhaps they were browsing, but they might have been just listening to the river too.

I’ve been reading Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks, which has made me think about place and about how a lifelong Texan adapts to a new place like the Georgia Piedmont. I scratched out a list of the places we’ve found to park the truck and get into the woods of this larger place — the Piedmont. The list has more than 20 places we know and visit regularly, not counting the places we’ve visited in the Appalachians, which begin about 90 miles north.

That’s how I got settled in Georgia. I have to get a sense of the place — to know something of its geography, geology and biology — before I feel comfortable.

I go out, park the truck, walk till I get off the pavement and look around.

I know that doesn’t work for everyone, but it does wonders for me.

Looking for the dobby stone

 A couple of days ago, the Deeside Field Club appeared in this concatenation of notes. I think the Notional Research Group for Cultural Artefacts might be a descendant of those old field clubs.

In one of the group’s publications, I learned about dobby stones and haining stones.

Dobbies were among the United Kingdom’s many household or farmstead spirits. Every place had one or two: fairies, brownies, boggarts and their kin.

Dobbies were mostly Northern folk, often found in Cumbria. They were prone to mischief and famous for annoying milkmaids but were fond of milk and cream. So farmers set up dobby stones, stones with a natural bowl or indentation — like a small birdbath. Whoever did the milking would leave a taste in the stone as an offering to the dobby.

Haining stones are harder to sort out. They were found on sheep and cattle farms. The word “hain” was used to refer to land set aside for the local spirits. The fairies and their kin were said to live in the tall grass beyond the cultivated land — or perhaps on the border, in the last sheaf of grain. (In common practice, the last sheaf was not consumed but offered to the spirits, who got the benefit of the doubt.)

Haining stones came in two varieties: large field stones like the dobby stones and smaller hand stones. One theory is that the offering was put on the field stone, and the hand-held stone was then used to pound the larger stone, calling the local genius to dinner.

I’m interested in field clubs and notional research groups because I’m interested in places. I’m mainly interested in the natural history of a place. But humans are a part of the natural history, and I’d be hard pressed to say where natural history stops and folklore starts.

• Sources and notes: Notional Research Group for Cultural Artefacts, Supplement One, Haining Stones, 2016. It’s here:

https://nrgca.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/nrgca-haining-stones.pdf

I found out about the Deeside Field Club from Robert Macfarlane’s wonderful Landmarks; London: Penguin Books, 2016. That’s where I also found out about Richard Skelton and his wife, Autumn Richardson, who led me to their Notional Research Group.

Today, we’re tempted to think that dobbies were the creations of ancient peoples. But farmers were leaving milk in dobby stones in the 1920s. My father was a boy then, and the stories he heard in the American South were similar to those told in Cumbria.

It was in a class by itself

 While doing research on a regiment of African American soldiers who fought in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, I ran across a reference to the USS Vesuvius, the Navy’s only dynamite gun cruiser.

Artillery featuring high-explosive shells was in its infancy in 1898. You couldn’t use gunpowder to throw one of those early shells at the enemy without risking disaster. So the Navy tried using gigantic air guns to throw “dynamite” shells.

The guns were enormous — 15 inches in diameter, in the days when battleships carried 12-inch guns. The compressed air could throw a 1,000-pound shell about a mile. The shell carried about 500 pounds of blasting gel. Lighter shells did less damage but could travel more than two miles.

To carry such a punch, the ship was tiny: less than 250 feet long and less than 1,000 tons. Vesuvius was a big yacht, rather than a cruiser. Its small size was possible because the pneumatic tubes were much lighter than conventional guns. The “barrels” were 55 feet long. Only the last 15 feet of the muzzle showed above deck.

The guns were fixed at an 18-degree angle. To aim them, you had to aim the ship.

At this point in the war, the Spanish fleet had been destroyed. Santiago de Cuba was besieged. The coastal artillery in the Spanish forts was the only risk.

At night, Vesuvius would sneak beneath the Spanish guns and fire a few rounds into the city.

Since Vesuvius’s air guns made little noise and produced no muzzle flash, the Spanish were baffled. Things blew up, but as you can imagine, you couldn’t really talk about accuracy in discussing this exciting new technology.

After the war, admirals said nice things to justify the effort and expense, but Vesuvius went to the shipyards where the pneumatic guns were removed. The ship had a second career testing another emerging technology: the torpedo.

The Army invariably makes for better movies than the Navy. There’s drama in people fighting people.

Navies fight with machines. Machines change, and the only way to tell whether a technology that offers great theoretical promise is practical is to build a prototype and try it. It’s expensive. Sometimes, it’s barmy.

I’m prejudiced, of course, but I think any democracy would be well advised to keep a strong navy. I wish ours were better at communicating with the average citizens that support it. I think we’d have a better democracy if the average citizen understood something of the difficulties — and the zaniness — of trying to provide the common defense.

Field clubs

 Nan Shepherd, the star of yesterday’s note, was a member of the Deeside Field Club.

Field clubs, alas, were a creation of an earlier day. The one in northeast Scotland was founded in Aberdeen in 1920. It was a group of people interested in the place: its topography, natural history, folklore, literature, archeology.

The summer programs of the club involved field trips. The winter programs were for articles, papers and notes. (Collectors of notes, such as the proprietor of this site, will take heart at the acknowledgement of intellectual life below the levels of articles and papers.)

The club’s magazine came out every three years.

The club made it to the 21^st century but was dissolved in 2005.

I like the idea of a group focused on place. A field club in Stone Mountain, Ga. would have been a gift from heaven to a transplanted Texan.

The ‘heaven-appointed task’

I think we all ought to have one. I think those of us who are older ought to help younger folks find their own.

Nan Shepherd, a remarkable Scottish writer, taught at the Aberdeen Training Centre for Teachers from 1919 to 1956. Instead of talking about her job or her career, she talked of her “heaven-appointed task.” She said hers was “trying to prevent a few students who pass through our Institution from conforming altogether to the approved pattern.”

Shepherd never married, lived her own life, thought her own thoughts, wrote her own books. She had a cottage in the Cairngorm Mountains and spent her free time there. Shepherd is one of those writers who can somehow convey what it is to be part of a place, rather than to be an observer passing by.

Robert Macfarlane has a wonderful chapter on her in his book Landmarks.

 • Source: Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks; London: Penguin Books, 2016, p. 56. 

Arabia Mountain, mid September

 We went to Arabia Mountain and took a 4-mile walk, moving slowly. On the way out, we went mostly through the woods, past a spot the Wise Woman calls the Cathedral, a lovely stand of tall trees in a creek bottom. We then went on to the little falls at Arabia Lake to see if water was coming over the dam. It wasn’t. Mitchell Creek was almost dry, with water only in the holes.

You can see leaf fall now. The leaves would come down with each gust of wind. But the canopy is still thick and mostly green.

A week ago, I mentioned the changing colors. The early changers include sourwood, sycamore, sweetgum and tulip trees, along with muscadine vines. I don’t know how I could have left off black tupelo, Nyssa sylvatica. I see it less often, but its colors are the neon of these woods.

We came back across one of the outcroppings of the mountain, where we saw pineweed, Hypericum gentianoides, in impossible places. I think it looks like a Mediterranean herb — all wiry stems. But most people think it looks like a batch of pine needles on the ground, hence the common name. We saw it all over the rock, wherever a tiny bit of soil had collected in a crevice. It has tiny yellow flowers with five petals: five-pointed stars. 

Keeping inventory

 I like Wendell Berry’s “Sabbath poems.” In one, the poet hears a bell in town, calling him to church. He hears, but walks into the woods to

            Take up a different story.

            I keep an inventory

            of wonders and uncommercial goods.

I wonder what makes Berry and poets of like mind write such poems. I wonder whether that impulse is hidden somewhere deep down in all of us. The lines came up on a long walk over one of the outcrops at Arabia Mountain.

• Source: Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997; Berkeley, Calif: Counterpoint Press, 1999. The lines are from “1979 IV.”

Summer tanagers, fall migration

 In the fall, summer tanagers leave the Georgia Piedmont for their winter spots. Some fly across the sea to South America.

To store up energy for the long flight, they feast in late summer. The males are red, and the females are mostly yellow. I saw them catching the bees and wasps that hover in clouds over the ironweeds and bear’s foot along the Yellow River.

The last summer tanager I saw snagged a wasp midair. That was two weeks ago. I wonder whether he is already gone.

 

Speaking the language

 Other writers told me I should read Robert Macfarlane, who is interested in places and how we humans find ourselves in them. He quotes the Scottish poet Norman MacCaig:

Messages everywhere. Scholars, I plead with you,

Where are your dictionaries of the wind, the grasses?

 

MacCaig has been quoted often in my own concatenation of notes — but I had missed that later poem. It’s “By the graveyard, Luskentyre.” We leave messages behind in our graveyards, mostly trite and easy to understand, hoping to be remembered. But across the way are shorebirds doing mysterious things we can barely imagine. How do we talk about those messages?

MacCaig watches a lobsterman headed out in a sailboat and asks us to imagine his connection with the natural world, the dictionary it would take to hold his language.

• Sources: Norman MacCaig, The Poems of Norman MacCaig; Edinburgh: Polygon, 2005, pp. 434-5.

Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks; London: Penguin Books, 2016, p. 17.

A sense of place

 Robert Macfarlane tells the story of Richard Cox, an English linguist who went to Carloway on the Isle of Lewis in the Hebrides and taught himself Gaelic.

Carloway is a district of about 60 square miles. It had 13 townships and perhaps 500 people when Cox arrived in the 1990s. In that small place, Cox recorded more than 3,000 place names.

I like places like that: places where everything has been named, often more than once.

I grew up in such a place. On my grandparents’ farm there were many precise places. The Bottom was a place, and within The Bottom were many places that could become soft and treacherous when the creek flooded. But there was only one Place Where Grandfather (Always) Gets the Tractor Stuck. There were many pecan trees, but only one Pecan Where Joe Killed the Rattlesnake. (Joe was a birddog, famous in the 1950s.)

If my grandfather told me to cut nettles in a place, I knew where to go. We organized our minds that way.

I’ve discovered that’s one of the features of my mind that won’t change. I’m new to Georgia, but I’m acquiring a sense of place.

• Source: Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks; London: Penguin Books, 2016.

Big rock, little rock

 It seemed like a good idea: Big rocks fall faster than little rocks.

The idea was widely accepted. Galileo pointed out a problem.

If you tie a little rock to a big rock, the little rock, falling more slowly, should act as a drag on the big rock, almost like a parachute. The combo deal should fall more slowly than the big rock alone.

On the other hand, if you tie a little rock to a big rock, the combined weight is greater, so the package deal should fall faster than the big rock alone.

Therefore, tying the rocks together should make them fall faster and more slowly than the big rock alone.

It was Galileo’s way of saying: There’s something wrong with this idea.

When I was in college decades ago, this argument was called a “thought experiment,” which seemed unfortunate to me. The term suggested that philosophers were doing something that was similar to what the chemists were doing in the lab.

Galileo was working on a concept. He was not conducting an experiment.

The scientists who taught me how to do research would have denied it, but they did a lot of philosophy in going about their work. They tinkered with concepts all the time. Often, what counts as data is a philosophical question. Sometimes it takes a leap of imagination to see what data might look like.

You can see obvious examples of conceptual problems in neuroscience, where notions such as “consciousness” are famously thorny.

I gather that the term “thought experiment” is outdated, replaced by “intuition pump,” a coinage of Daniel Dennett, who recounts Galileo’s thinking as an example.

I don’t like that term either. Maybe, instead of being philosophical or scientific, I’m just grumpy.

• Source: Daniel C. Dennett, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking; New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2013. His account of Galileo’s argument is on p. 5. 

A modest proposal

 One argument for gun control is that this country has the highest rates of gun violence among wealthy, developed countries. It’s a comparison among peers.

Maybe a better argument would acknowledge that some countries have higher rates of gun violence. Some of the rates in Central and South America are spectacular. And we could be like them — if we gave up on the idea of regulation and just let everyone shoot it out as each saw fit. We could also be like Japan, England or the other countries that have stricter laws and lower rates of violence.

It seems obvious to me that we not only have a choice, we have a range of choices. We could put ourselves anywhere on a spectrum from Japan to Nicaragua.

Many of my neighbors in Georgia see no choice. Any regulation would infringe on freedom, a sacrilege. Regulation is not a matter of choosing policy but of betraying values.

Since we’re divided, and gridlocked by our division, I’ve been wondering what would happen if we incorporated a feature of ancient democracies: the lot. Suppose we cast lots. If the advocates of gun control won, they could add five proposed laws to the books. If the opponents won, they could remove five laws from the books.

We’d cast lots each year, and we’d allow ourselves to be steered by lot, since we are incapable of doing the job. We’d go a year at a time with new laws and we’d note whether we had more violence or less, whether we became more like Japan or more like Nicaragua and El Salvador.

I think we’ve become so wrapped up in our politics we have lost the ability to see cause and effect. That is, we’ve lost touch with reality. Would regaining that ability be worth the bloodbath?

Do you think it would be hard to convince our fellow citizens to give this proposal a chance? Leaving the safety of innocents to chance would strike many people as monstrous. But if you ask me, that’s exactly what we’re doing now.

Apalachee High School, the site of the latest tragedy, is 33 miles from the front porch at Stone Mountain.

Panola Mountain, early September

 The leaves are beginning to turn in The Piedmont. Sourwood trees had some red leaves in August. Now you see branches of red leaves on otherwise green trees. You see yellow on sycamore, sweetgum and tulip trees.

Muscadines are yellow to gold. Sometimes, you can pick out long vines by following the trail of gold on green high into the canopy.

We had a week of cool weather in August — lows in the 60s, highs in the 80s — but summer returned. Thursday was cool again.

We have walked around the upper end of Alexander Lake at Panola Mountain State Park many times. On Thursday, we went around the lower end, exploring. The trail disappeared along the way, but fishermen had made paths.

On the north shore, dandelions, sunflowers, vervains and late boneset were blooming. Butterflies were everywhere.

One to keep in mind

 People say that an old man can’t learn poems by heart, but I learned this one over a cup of coffee: 

The fish has too many bones

and the watermelon too many seeds.

 

Maybe a 12-word poem is cheating. But I think of my gold star for memorization as one of the benefits of reading poems that don’t make the textbooks.

This one is by Charles Reznikoff and is called “The Old Man.” I’ve reached the age where I need to have it in memory as a talisman against the kind of grumpiness that finds fault with watermelon.

• Source: Poems 1918-1975, The Complete Poems of Charles Reznikoff, edited by Seamus Cooney; Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1996, Vol. 2, p. 104.

W.H. Hudson on birdwatching

 W.H. Hudson, the naturalist, once went to St. James’s Park in London because he wanted to see birds. He saw a girl of about 10 who was showing two younger children the geese. The girl’s joy was obvious. Watching birds enlivened her in some way. It made her feel more alive, more connected to life. Her enthusiasm struck Hudson. 

The picture was in my mind all that day, and lived through the next, and so wrought on me that I could not longer keep away from the birds, which I, too, loved; for now all at once it seemed to me that life was not life without them; that I was grown sick and all my senses dim; that only the wished sight of wild birds could medicine my vision; that only by drenching it in their wild melody could my tired brain recover its lost vigour.

 

Hudson acted on that thought. He found a village that was a 20-minute walk from a station an hour from London and spent some time there.

I think watching birds is good for your mental health. I think this would be a better country if we could teach our fellow citizens to watch birds. 

• Source: William Henry Hudson, Birds in a Village; Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, and London: Chapman & Hall, 1893.

 

Ironweed

 A stand of ironweed is flowering along the Yellow River. The blossoms are magenta, I’d say, although I’m not a good source on color. The stand is full of bees, butterflies and wasps. Among the butterflies were giant swallowtails, the largest butterflies in North America. The average wingspan is 5.5 inches.

This stand is Vernonia gigantea, giant ironweed. It couldn’t be anything else. Some of the plants are 12 feet tall.

When I looked for information, I found a source that said Vernonia gigantea grows up to 7 feet tall. Other sources said 8 and 10. Finally, I found that the horticulturalists at North Carolina State University said these plants grow to 12 feet. It felt odd to shop for an academic source to support my observations, but I think anyone who had ever played basketball would have kept looking. These blooms were above the rim.

Under longleaf pine

 When I was young, I climbed a sand ridge that rises out of the Neches River Bottom in East Texas.

It’s called Upland Island. You go from swamps and alligators, dwarf palmettos and towering cherrybark oak onto a dry, sandy ridge. On top are stands of longleaf pine. Longleaf pines grow far apart, and since light gets beneath the canopy, tall grasses surround the trees. The grasses were belt high in places, head high in others.

I sat under the pines and looked up through the branches into the sky, watching white clouds drifting. They’d formed over the Gulf of Mexico and were headed to Oklahoma.

It seemed a good way to spend a day.

The poet Pattiann Rogers wrote of a similar experience under a ponderosa pine. She said:

 

Earth and human together

form a unique being. A brief era

of immortality is lent to each

by the other.

 

I’m not sure about the brief era of immortality, but I do have a memory, one’s that surprisingly clear, surprisingly undimmed by age.

• Source: Pattiann Rogers’s poem “This Little Glade, Remember” is at the Poetry Foundation’s site:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47642/this-little-glade-remember

Jim Harrison on his religion

 Jim Harrison devoted a chapter in his memoir to the troublesome notion of “private religion.” He said: 

I daily wonder if the bedrock of my own private religion is fear and incomprehension.

 

He didn’t question whether his religion existed or was real. He worried about what it looked like.

Harrison supposed that wonder or awe — a helpful quality for a writer — is just curiosity, and that curiosity might be the foundation of his religion. It’s the kind of curiosity that allows a person to hold many questions in mind without forcing an answer.

He collected sacred objects as he went. His examples were from nature — a feather from a crow.

He stuck closer to poetry than to theory.

A good friend and I recently talked about Harrison, agreeing that he wrote some good things and that he could be bloody-minded.

• Source: Jim Harrison, Off to the Side; New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, p. 120.