Faint voices

Through the deep woods, the slanting sunlight
Casts motley patterns on the jade-green mosses.
No glimpse of man in this lonely mountain,
Yet faint voices drift on the air.*

Wang Wei, 8th century

The woods are getting quieter these days. The concert of bird families with hungry babies has faded away. No one's talking except the crows, and even they keep quiet most of the time. As I walked along the trail this morning, a silent flock of geese flew overhead, so low I could hear the whispering beat of their wings. A pileated woodpecker dropped down onto the ground not far from me, hunting for food and making not a sound except for a faint rustling of leaves. Pileateds seem to spend a lot of time earthbound in autumn. They're a curious sight--big, redheaded birds toddling belly-to-the-ground like foraging squirrels. A wren complained when I walked by, but there was no fury in her rasp. On my way out of the park I moved a box turtle from the road to the treeline. He hissed softly, then pulled into his shell with nothing more to say.


*To read a slew of different translations of this same verse, go here.


Forest in the Morning Light, Asher Brown Durand, c. 1855

The exquisite withering

Chill early morning air. Dawn light glowing through the mist that lingers around the trees. Damp spider webs draped like curtains across the trail. Wild turkeys everywhere.

Oh, yes, the season is about to change. We may be killing the earth but so far it shows no inclination to stop waltzing around the sun. Soon the trees will commence their exquisite withering. The box turtle that wanted to fight me this morning over a delectable toadstool will go to ground, and the last hummingbird will depart.

In fall, nature shimmers with an aura of good death--transformative, liberating death. Life ends so that it can begin again. Collapse is renewal. That's the mystery and the resolution.

Though the black swan’s arched neck is like   

       A question-mark on the lake,

The swan outlaws all possible questioning:   

A thing in itself, like love, like submarine   

Disaster, or the first sound when we wake;

       And the swan-song it sings

    Is the huge silence of the swan.

Illusion: the black swan knows how to break   

       Through expectation, beak

Aimed now at its own breast, now at its image,   

And move across our lives, if the lake is life,   

And by the gentlest turning of its neck

       Transform, in time, time’s damage;

    To less than a black plume, time’s grief.

From "The Black Swan" by James Merrill--a poem that has always evoked for me the beautiful face of death. You can read a very different interpretation from Charles Simic here.


Autumn landscape with a flock of turkeys, Jean-Francois Millet, c.1873

Promising visitor

The hummingbird feeders outside my kitchen window hang above a firethorn bush so neglected and overgrown that it's a menace. The branches flame out in every direction, just waiting to snag clothes or flesh. The reason I don't try to get it under control--aside from the fact that every time I go near it with a trimming implement it fights back until it tastes my blood--is that nearly every species of bird seems to love it. Flocks of cedar waxwings descend on it in winter to strip the berries, and every summer the latest crop of mockingbirds trains for future mating violence by using it as a launching platform for practice assaults. Yesterday it drew one of the most welcome avian visitors I've had in a long time--a male orchard oriole.

Even though orchard orioles are common summer residents here, they have always shunned my yard as a nesting site. I get one or two females passing through every year on their way south for the winter, but I've never once seen a male until yesterday. He lingered for quite a while, hopping delicately around those vicious thorns in search of bugs, stopping periodically to ponder the antics of the mob of hummingbirds overhead. I hope he was scoping out a location for next summer's housing. I'm keeping my fingers crossed--and leaving that firethorn alone.

Illustration by Alexander Wilson, 1808.

Oh, it's you

One of the trails I frequent has a resident pair of coyotes this summer. I see them once or twice a week. They must have a den in the area but I haven’t seen any sign of pups, though there is a third adult that joins them sometimes, possibly their offspring from last year. They fled the first few times I came across them, as coyotes generally do hereabouts. Ours are not bold, suburban coyotes—not yet, anyway. But I’ve become a routine presence to this little family now. When I walk by they look up, check me out, and then go back to the business of ferreting around under the trees in search of snacks. Coyotes will eat nearly anything, from lizards to persimmons. Right now the wild black cherries are falling in abundance, so I’m sure they’re eating a share of those. I eat a few myself.

The coyotes have stopped taking much notice of me but I always take notice of them. Encountering them has become the highlight of the day. I love that they don’t run from me anymore, though I wouldn't attempt to approach them. That would be a breach of etiquette that they’d never forgive, and on the off chance they decided they didn’t mind me getting closer, it would be a bad thing. If they failed to avoid other hikers they’d be doomed.

I'm a little embarrassed my sentimental attachment to these critters. Coyotes are really nuisance animals. They are aliens in this part of the country, 20th century invaders who arrived and thrive thanks to land-clearing development. Aside from their bad habits of killing livestock and munching on house cats, they wreak havoc on the native wildlife, especially foxes. Wherever coyotes move in, the fox population declines. Bobcats, too, suffer by the presence of coyotes, which is a particular shame because the bobcat is the only wild cat we’ve got here anymore and they have enough problems dealing with the destruction of their habitat.

Still, I can’t resist this particular little group, so tolerant of me invading their space. (They occasionally leave a pile of scat right in the middle of the trail, just so there won’t be any doubt about ownership of the territory.) When the sun shines through the trees and dapples their fur they are breathtakingly pretty, and no other animal moves with the slinking grace of a coyote.



Photo from Wikimedia Commons

In the bramble

This morning I stood a while and watched a pair of wrens play in a bramble of vines that had colonized the corpse of a fallen poplar. There’s a special grace in the way some birds can navigate dense brush—more impressive, really, than the stunt of soaring through the air. The open sky seems easy compared to the treacherous nets the earth casts across itself. Imagine yourself inside one of those tangles. It would be torture, wouldn’t it? Thorns tearing skin, snatching ferociously at hair and clothes, the rough web of creepers holding fast against all attempts to escape—just thinking about it makes me feel a little panicky. But the birds are very happy inside the trap. They fly around fast and unhindered, no matter how tight the web may be. That dark, convoluted realm is home to them and they don't long for anything different.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

Crawdad

It was so hot and sticky at 6 this morning that I worked up a sweat just walking in the shade. Good weather for things that sting and buzz, not so good for charging along the trail, so I decided to take it easy and hang out by the creek. The water was flowing slow and clear, and I could see the crawdads scuttering between the rocks. There's something profoundly strange about crawdads--mostly due, I think, to that weird, sidelong way they move. They always look like bits of trash tumbling along the creek bed until they are suddenly seized with intention and dive under a sheltering stone. They seem to inhabit a special category somewhere between living things and inanimate objects. They disturb me, because if there's one spiritual duty I really believe in, it's endeavoring to see myself in all of nature, and I cannot see myself in the crawdad. I'm pretty sure crawdads can't see themselves in me either, but I have enough human arrogance to think they don't have the same spiritual obligations I do. I don't want to consider the other possibility. I don't mind if the deer or the crows contemplate their kinship with me, but I don't want those arthropods having deep thoughts. (See "Sandkings.") I left the crawdads to their business and ambled back up the path, where I met a barn owl on his way to bed. He perched in a tall poplar and studied me with a doubtful look.

Hawk and dragonfly

Yesterday I came upon a small Cooper’s hawk that had taken down a flicker right in the middle of the road. He was so absorbed in strangling the life out of his victim that he didn’t budge as I pulled up next to them. The flicker was lying on its side with its pretty speckled breast toward me. The hawk was perched on top of it and a little blood seeped out where talons met flesh. I stopped the car and studied the drama for a moment. Exasperated by my intrusion, the hawk lifted the flicker—which nearly matched him in size—and flew away into the trees.

At the lake a startled turkey startled me by suddenly rising out of the tall grass and taking off over the lake, weighed down by his own bulk as the hawk had been by the flicker. I walked into the woods, where a box turtle hissed at me when I passed him on the trail. Apparently, it was my day to be a nuisance.

By the time I got back to the lake the sun was high enough to start warming the water and the dragonflies were out in force. There were dozens of them buzzing delicately around me, diving for their morning feast of gnats and mosquitoes. They didn’t seem to mind my presence. Maybe they thought of me as a useful lure.


Photo by Kuribo at Wikimedia Commons