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.

Great Books

 My argument for Great Books is not that they are right but that they are serious.

If you read them, they will change the way you do things — even little things that no one else would notice. I thought about a Great Book — or what I’d consider a Great Book — when I was weeding the garden and noticed that a leaf on the okra plant was dotted with a row of tiny eggs.

I’m not enough of an entomologist to know what I was looking at. I think the eggs had been laid by a ladybug, a kind of beetle that keeps the population of some garden pests under control. I think the eggs will hatch into larva that will be destroyers of aphids, which would otherwise eat on a lot of the plants in the garden.

But since my knowledge of insects is so limited, it’s also possible that the eggs will produce voracious caterpillars that will consume the okra plant overnight.

I should say that this is my okra plant, a single specimen in a row of beans and squashes. I’m in the minority in my family: I like okra, panfried in cornmeal. I’m not an objective observer. I have hopes for this plant, and my first instinct was to get rid of all the bugs anywhere near it.

I almost pinched off the egg-laden leaf but instead thought of a scene from Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler, allegedly a book about the delights of country life and pleasures of peaceful reflection while fishing.

The hero in this story loves fish and because he does, he’s all for the extermination of otters, whose chief sin is that they also love fish. The protagonist relishes an otter hunt. When the poor otter is caught and torn to pieces by dogs, the next mission was to hunt down the otter pups and kill them. Then the gentle sportsmen could repair to the pub and sing “Old Rose” and have some  ale.

This is not one of the great moments in environmental literature. There is nothing right about this story, but there is something serious here. It’s the question of what to do when you don’t really know enough to guarantee that you are not going to do any harm.

I left the bug eggs alone.

Gardens are places that allegedly lend themselves to peaceful reflection, rather than disturbing ethical questions. But questions pop up everywhere, and it’s good to have a story in mind — a landmark that helps you get your bearings.

I know that some people go through life without reading Great Books, but I can’t imagine it.

• Source: Izaak Walton, The Complete Angler; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985, pp. 39-40.

A smelling mistake

 Asifa Majid, a cognitive scientist at Oxford, presented Michael Rosen, the host of a podcast on language, with little containers that looked like yogurt cups. He could smell — but couldn’t see — what was inside.

Correctly identifying the coffee was easy. But when Rosen mistook a cinnamon bun for a blueberry muffin, Professor Majid said he’d made a common mistake.

But what kind of mistake is that? And how do we make it?

I wouldn’t describe it as a physiological mistake. (The sensors in Rosen’s nose seemed to be working.) But I wouldn’t describe it as a mental mistake either. It’s not what anyone I know would call a logical error — which might suggest that I have a defective sense of what logic should be.

One clue to this muddle is that Rosen determined he’d made a smelling mistake by looking inside the cup and seeing a cinnamon bun. (Roy Bedichek called the sense of sight the despot of the senses.)

Mistakes are helpful in clearing up our thinking. But when we can’t even grasp what kind of mistake we’ve encountered, we’ve usually run across a conceptual problem.

I think this one is a relative of the mind-body problem. No matter how often I bury the ancient distinction between mind and body and their realms of mental and physical phenomena, I find that it’s still finding new ways of confounding me.

Our perceptions don’t fall neatly into either category.

• Source: “Smell” was the topic of the BBC’s Word of Mouth podcast, 11 June 2026.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002xgzt

Thanks to Michael Leddy of Orange Crate Art for telling me about it.

Another utopia

 It’s odd what writers think readers want to know.

Consider how the concept of writing a life has changed. St. Matthew starts his gospel with a genealogy. Diogenes Laertius doesn’t get far in his life of Epicurus before he quotes the text of his will.

Epicurus’s will made me think of another genre — the literature of utopias.

The will is a legal document, but it’s also a vision of an ideal world. Epicurus made provisions to allow his friends to live in a garden where they could investigate how the world works and could have philosophical discussions about their questions.

Epicurus  couldn’t imagine anything better.

• Source: Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers; translated by R.D. Hicks; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991, Vol. II. The text of the will is on pp. 544-8.

A bit like dreaming

 I don’t think the notion of time travel makes much sense, but I can smell a plate of biscuits and gravy and be back in my grandmother’s kitchen, a leap of 50 years.

Many writers have noticed that some odors seem closely linked to memories. Roy Bedichek put it this way:

 

Poets speak of the ‘gates of memory.’ If this gate metaphor is apt, then we may expand it, referring to the sense of smell as the surest key with which to unprison and reanimate scenes and forms filmed yesterday or long ago with such fidelity as, now unreeled, to absorb and fascinate, but not completely to deceive the eye of consciousness. I say ‘not completely to deceive,’ for, whenever in recalling the past, consciousness becomes completely curtained off; it is no longer ‘remembering’ but ‘day-dreaming.’

 

Imagine yourself in a mathematics examination trying to remember a formula. Memory is involved, certainly, but so are your reasoning faculties as you try to deduce what the formula must be. We’re apt to use the word conscious in describing that process. What happens when I smell biscuits and gravy is something else. I think Bedichek is right that it’s more like dreaming.

• Source: Roy Bedichek, The Sense of Smell; London: Michael Joseph, 1960, p. 219.

One way to measure a life

 The news story, in Spanish, began: There are those who say that a life is measured in World Cups.

I didn’t really understand that point of view until I got to know some fans of El Tri, the Mexican national team.

Mexico, Canada and the United States are hosts to the World Cup, but it’s not an equal partnership. I’m not sure you can measure the seriousness with which something is taken within a culture. But consider the number of appearances each country has made in El Mundial:

• Mexico: 18.

• United States: 12.

• Canada: 3.

There are those who say that fútbol is becoming a big deal in the United States. It’s something else in Mexico.

When people ask, I say I have two teams, not one. I hope Canada does well, too.

Piedmont, early June

 Have you ever seen trumpet vine before the long slender flowers form trumpets? The immature tubes of Campsis radicans are closed at the end, though you can see the seams in the tissue that will open and roll back, forming the trumpet’s bell.

The trumpets were just forming in the vines along the Yellow River the first week of June. I wondered about the weather. We’ve had overnight lows in the 50s — in June — something that’s hard for a Texas native to imagine.

At Arabia Mountain, the sundrops are out. Oenothera fruticose produces beautiful yellow flowers. The yellow is muted — almost as soft as the yellow of a buttercup, but not quite.

Every time I pass a neighbor’s big oak, I count the squirrels below. I usually see at least four and have seen six. I was puzzled one day when the yard was empty.

But around the bend, a perched on a power line, was a Cooper’s hawk.

Poetic noses

 Roy Bedichek did not say that Christopher Morley was a great poet. He said that great poets had written some silly things about the sense of smell. By contrast, Morely’s list of common odors reminds us of the pleasures of paying attention to our noses.

Bedichek recalled a passage in Milton’s Paradise Lost in which Satan’s ability to smell carrion is compared to that of vultures. The poet pictures a horde of vultures, drawn to the scent of an army of men who are about to die.

It’s an astonishing image. But it doesn’t hold up. In Milton’s day, people believed that human beings who were about to die smelled of death. People also believed that Old World vultures found carrion by smell, rather than by sight. The beliefs beneath the image were wrong.

Bedichek admired Milton and quoted his poetry. He didn’t have much to say about Morely, other that in the 1920s, he wrote “Smells,” a short poem that was popular. The charm is the list of familiar smells: ground coffee, pipe tobacco, campfires.

Morely’s list prompted me to make my own.

• Sources: Morley’s poem “Smells” is here:

https://allpoetry.com/Smells

Roy Bedichek, The Sense of Smell; London: Michael Joseph, 1960. The essay “Famous Literary Noses” is Chapter 16, pp. 187-202.

Morley's note to friends

 When Christopher Morley died, two newspapers published a message he’d written to friends:

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.

 

I like to think of it as an alternative to an obituary, but I’m an old newspaperman and like alternative ways of doing things. I’d rather read a note than an obituary.

Morley was once well known as a writer. I got curious and looked up some of his poems because Bedichek mentioned him in The Sense of Smell.

• Sources: The Literature Network’s article on Morley is here:

https://www.online-literature.com/morley/

The Bryant Library in Roslyn, N.Y., where Morely and his family lived, has several pages on the writer. This is a good place to start:

https://bryantlibrary.org/local-history/articles/christopher-morley-a-brief-biography/

Tolstoy's 'Calendar'

 A few years ago, we renovated a little house, and I became a reader of Cool Tools, a blog in the spirit of theWhole Earth Catalog. I was interested in reciprocating saws and disc sanders when I started reading, so I smiled the other day when I saw a note recommending Tolstoy’s A Calendar of Wisdom.

It’s a good recommendation. The jarring part was thinking about the book as a tool.

Tolstoy thought his Calendar was his most important book — and he didn’t really think of it as his. He was interested in collecting the world’s wisdom as a kind of common property, and so he kept commonplace books and copied aphorisms that helped him.

The sayings he collected eventually went into the Calendar. A day’s entry might include three or four short quotations from other thinkers and comment from Tolstoy. He asked:

 

What is more precious than to communicate every day with the wisest men of the world?

 

I have used the book, but I’m afraid I did so with little insight. I failed to see how I used the Calendar as a tool to prompt my own thoughts, to prod a sleepy, sluggish mind into gear over the day’s first cup of coffee. I failed to notice that I started this online collection of notes just a couple of years after finding a copy of the Calendar.

If you ask me, the useful tool is the idea that each day, you will see something, read something, hear something, that’s worth putting down. The idea that something happened that’s worth a second thought.

• Sources: Leo Tolstoy, A Calendar of Wisdom, translated by Peter Kekirin; New York: Scribner, 1997, p. 7.

The note from Cool Tools is here:
https://kk.org/cooltools/book-freak-211-tolstoys-guide-to-daily-wisdom/

Terror in fiction

 It’s a cliche of drama: an opening scene in which villains terrorize the helpless.

I suppose I was profoundly moved the first hundred times I saw such a scene. But now I find myself wondering whether it’s believable, which is a bad spot to be in when you are reading a story or watching a show.

I don’t want to make light of trauma. I know that many people have been killed, tortured and scarred. But I also know that people who rely on violence and terror are sometimes disappointed.

Among the gruesome offerings of the internet are pictures of the corpses of Ben Kilpatrick and Ole Hobek.

Kilpatrick, better known as the Tall Texan, was famous. As a young man, he ran with Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid, Kid Curry and Will “News” Carver. Hobek was a petty crook who met Kilpatrick behind bars.

In 1912, Kilpatrick, out of federal prison, decided to rob a train in West Texas. It was a strategic error. The law-abiding railroad employees were meaner than the outlaws.

As I heard the story, Kilpatrick got the drop on the trainmen and rifled through the railcars while Hobek guarded the engineer. One car had a crate of oysters on ice, destined for El Paso. The crate contained an ice maul.

While Kilpatrick was pillaging, a railroad employee named David Trousdale used the maul to knock his brains out.

Trousdale then picked up Kilpatrick’s rifle and fired a shot through the top of the railcar, guessing that Hobek would investigate. Hobek did. When he peeked around a heavy trunk, the railroad man shot him in the head.

Years ago, I stopped at Dryden, where Kilpatrick and Hobek boarded the train on the way to Sanderson. They were bad, bad men. They also had no idea what they were in for.

A note of caution: The details of Baxter’s Curve Train Robbery vary wildly. Some sources reverse the roles and fates of Kilpatrick and Hobek. Some tales provide details that conflict with the evidence of the photographs. I would say that the story long ago passed from fact into fiction.

If I were writing the fiction, I’d start with a minor detail. After the photographs were taken and the folks of Sanderson had a kind of public holiday, lawmen went out to Baxter’s Curve and apprehended an accomplice, an 11-year-old boy who allegedly was paid to mind the getaway horses.

I think I’d tell the story from his point of view.

Smelling snakes

  I grew up hearing sentences like this: 

Grandmother smelled a rattlesnake by the henhouse, so she got a hoe and killed it.

 

I have never smelled a snake. The assumption was that my nose was defective. No one ever suggested that the odor of a rattlesnake was too faint to be detected by a human with a normal sense of smell.

Whether rattlesnakes smell is a question that still interests me. But Roy Bedichek, who couldn’t smell rattlesnakes either, went beyond that obvious question and got to a more complicated claim: Does the smell of a rattlesnake change with its mood?

The usual claim is that a resting rattlesnake smells like a green watermelon or a cucumber. A “mad” rattlesnake — one that’s excited enough to strike — smells like a wet dog.

Though dubious, Bedichek thought the first part of that claim made sense. Rattlesnakes are ambush hunters. If a mouse got a whiff of an odor that resembled the smell of a gourd, it wouldn’t expect to be bushwhacked. Such a scent would a kind of camouflage.

Bedichek was investigating the claim in the 1950s. He didn’t find a satisfactory answer. But he did find a researcher at UCLA who was doing electrocardiographs on rattlesnakes.

The researcher, Dr. Raymond B. Cowles, was measuring the heartrates of snakes exposed to the smells of skunks and king snakes, both of which eat rattlers. Heartrates jumped, as you’d expect. If a sensitive instrument can detect one physiological change when an animal is stressed, it’s reasonable to check to see if there are others.

But I’m afraid that science is progressing slowly in the area of indicators of rattlesnake moods. I haven’t found an answer to Bedichek’s question.

• Source: Roy Bedichek, The Sense of Smell; London: Michael Joseph, 1960. The essay “’A Various Language’” is Chapter 10, pp. 128-35. I think it’s a model of Bedichek’s writing — an example of the kind of thinking done by people who are interested in the natural world and consider themselves a part of it. I wish an anthologist would discover it.

Stumped by sycamores

 Roy Bedichek tells of going on a walk through a grove of sycamores. He started looking for a word to describe the odor.

Dictionaries failed. He checked the poets, but they don’t help either.

 

Indeed, there seems to be no way of imparting to the unfamiliar nose a hint of what it is like to inhale in early morning or at nightfall this damp, woodsy odour. 

 

Knowing a smell is a bit like knowing a color. It’s something you’ve experienced or you haven’t. If you don’t know what red is, a description isn’t going to help.

I don’t know what gave Bedichek the idea of writing The Sense of Smell, but I suspect it had something to do with that morning walk through a grove of sycamores.

I do know what that is like: experiencing some natural wonder and then finding myself at the limits of language — and thus thought.

• Source: Roy Bedichek, The Sense of Smell; London: Michael Joseph, 1960, p. 17.

Being smelled out

 Theophrastus, the ancient biologist, suggested that our noses are above our mouths so that they can be used to test food before we eat it.

It seems like such an obvious principle I tend to forget the rest of the story. As Roy Bedichek said, nature has done a lot of experimenting. The olfactory organs of many insects are in their antennae. The “noses” of ticks — they are called Haller’s organs — are in their feet.

I was thinking of Bedichek’s observation because the ticks are out.

And although I know that my theory that all ticks lurk in blackberry vines when the berries are ripe is an example of observer bias, I found ticks on blackberry vines almost immediately.

When a large animal such as a man with an interest in natural history is near, the tick on the blackberry vine extends her forelegs and waves them. The Haller’s organs are in the forelegs, and the tick is combing the air for compounds such as pheromones and carbon dioxide that will allow her to find her host.

It’s the equivalent of a dog putting its nose to the wind.

It’s hard for me to imagine. Like Theophrastus’s thinking, mine is conditioned by my sensory system, which favors sight and hearing over smell. It’s hard for me to understand forms of life in which smell — or what we think of as smell — comes first.

• Sources: Roy Bedichek, The Sense of Smell; London: Michael Joseph, 1960.

Meredith Swett Walker, “An Up-Close Look at the Tiny Sensory Pits That Ticks Use to Smell”; Entomology Today,” Jan. 16, 2018. It’s here:
http://entomologytoday.org/2018/01/16/up-close-look-tiny-sensory-pits-ticks-use-smell/

The budget alternative

 The ancient Greeks consulted oracles. The famous ones, such as those at Delphi and Dodona, were expensive. In addition to the cost of the trip, the seeker had to provide gifts for the staff and sacrificial animals for the gods.

The budget oracle — if you could get there — was at Mallus in Cilicia, now in southeastern Turkey.

Its founders were said to be two legendary friends, Mopsus and Amphilochus, Greeks who fought in the Trojan War. They founded the city together and ruled it together. When they had a falling out, they killed each other in a duel. As the smoke rose from the funeral pyres, their ghosts reconciled, and to celebrate they agreed to found an oracle together.

If you were an ancient seeker, you came to the temple and wrote your question on a wax tablet. You spent the night in the temple and told your dream to one of the seers on staff. Cost: two coppers.

• Source and note: Robert Graves, The Greek Myths: 2; Penguin Books, 1968, p. 346.

An osprey at work

 We watched an osprey fishing over Alexander Lake Sunday afternoon.

I once spent a morning in Scotland doing nothing but watching ospreys catch salmon in Loch Fyne. When we lived in Galveston, I’d go to the West End and watch ospreys in the marshes.

Ospreys have a reversible toe that allows them to clamp down with two toes on either side of a fish.

Pandion haliaetus is smaller than an eagle and bigger than a red-tail hawk. If you’re wondering what you’re looking at, the giveaway is the way the osprey holds its wings in flight — a peculiar M shape. (If you were a kid flapping your arms to imitate an osprey, you would have to bend them at the elbows.)

A cool front came through the Piedmont Sunday — the temperature was only 67 at noon — and this bird was flying into a light wind from the northeast. It hovered like a harrier, and I was hoping to see a dive. But then it plodded on. Even superb fishermen don’t always catch fish.