One month of southern spring
March 13th, 2023
Conecuh National Forest, Southern Alabama
So quiet here. Windrush and scattered voices from other campers carry. The moon is waning. This morning just as we passed the stateline that gradient of loving color came down for us, then the golden morning light. Tonight I’m a secret beneath the arms of an old water oak rooted deeply into a pond’s bank in southern Alabama. We got to Open Pond Campground, our home for a week of prescribed burning in the Conecuh National Forest, at about 3. I wandered from our campsite onto a wooden boardwalk jutting into the pond. Little waves pulsed and reflected the blue sky. The sky turned its lovely colors, mirrored movement from the morning, as I stirred a pot of lentil soup.
The next morning I am hung up on the half moon fading, then golden light hit the longleaf pines. I had never seen anything like it–open woodland dominated by towering pines, arms held out straight bouquets of long needles.
That first work day we burned. I dripped diesel onto a fluffed clump of long brown needles; a clear-winged dragonfly landed next to the flames. A dogwood stood among the pines, dressed up in white-petaled flowers, crying out springtime, springtime again.
Squelchy mud, tufts of grass scorching. I schlep along a bulldozer line and see longleaf, endlessly patterned upon the flat horizon. In a wet thickety grove, tall cane folds down upon itself, popping and crackling as it burns into a confetti of white ash. Like glass shards, scattered over scalded earth. The woods warming towards an equinox offered up flowers i’d never seen back home–white-pink with long, droopy stamens, some sort of buttercup, another marvel of little pink buds…and copses of dogwood. Beautyberry and florida anise in the bog.
On the fourth day, I think I saw a red cockaded woodpecker flying among the pines, through the smoke clearing steadily from a smoldering blanket of needles and cones. I’m no ornithologist and at this point not even a birdwatcher. But it was about the right size, right pattern. And selfishly I’d like to believe that my eyes met the benefactor of our burn.
Rural Alabama–maples budding in front yards guarded by yawpping mutts and horses and little baby cows. I emptied my drip torch and my chest was gripped by the hopefulness of life to be leafed out.
8:18 AM sunrays streaming through the longleaf pines. I ate a whole can of beans for breakfast, cold.
It was my coworker Greta’s 24th birthday.
My tent smells like feet and piss.
March 19th
A sugar maple forked, then knit back together, then split apart again. Devil’s urns tucked into the sides of a rotting log.
March 23rd
Sumter National Forest, Upstate South Carolina
The day of the spring equinox I woke up in my tent in Tuskegee National Forest wearing 6 layers to ward off the cold. Then we burned alongside the comedically lax staff of the United State’s youngest & smallest national forest.
Fleshy ganoderma protrudes from the mossy boles of old trees. Karsen poked at them along our rainy Foothills Trail trek. I’m backpacking with my coworker past the creeks and falls and ephemerals of upstate south Carolina. Mountainside patches of rhododendron growing prolific and wriggly, arms rising up from sloped earth, holding out long deep-green leaves, which they retain for 2 to 3 years.
We make it to Spoonauger falls, where Karsen and I laze upon a good nap rock. She’s wearing her Vermont Land Trust ballcap backwards, as the water falls in many tiers down a rock wall covered in lush wet moss. A salamander, small, spotted juvenile, at home in a sandy rocky little pool. I look away from the falls, across the Chattooga river, at Georgia’s blue mountains standing beyond and above greening hills.
March 24th
I’m in the Pisgah National Forest watching two experienced trail crew sawyers cut up a huge silver maple blocking the treadway. The bottom half still stands with its uneven concentric patterns and splintery bark. Rich humus from the rotted belly of an old maple.
April 1
Pisgah National Forest, Western North Carolina
Broad afternoon. I packed a bag with water, my sketchbook, and some pens, and started on the logging road to get up to Rich Mountain. The trail curled up to the knobtop; a rutted climb. Blue ridge all around, black cherry, tinderhoof growing from a black locust snag. The sunlight was being so sweet. White pine, eastern hemlock. Hills full of dying hemlock–will my children know how hemlocks translate a sunny afternoon, how the spring gusts ply the tree to sway, so the light scatters and gleams and sparkles as it catches on the trembling needles? How in winter, when icicles hang still off the roofs of Kentucky rockshelters, hemlocks capture the energy of the sun, coves glimmer and hold out promises to young women, that life is soon to unfurl, if she would just have some faith and patience.
I sat up there, lost in memory and divination. I realized I was late for dinner then ran back down to the valley. God. I thought about God on the way down. The sunlight’s grasp on the mountains slackened as I followed the old roads down to the elevation where streams babble, and rhododendron forms a tunnel ‘round the trail. I looked up and saw the sky, and a band of blue mountains, the gold of evening over a canopy still bare, still all-naked buds. Dark bodies of timber in the valley.
I drive back to Kentucky to hear Robin Wall Kimmerer speak at UK and Transylvania. She proposes: if plants are teachers, how can we be better students: PAY ATTENTION!
What do we learn when we remember? Last fall, running through the arboretum to find the fruit-laden persimmon trees. My hands were sticky with fruit juice. A fruit tree, hope hanging. You don’t grow a seed without hope.
Back down through that rhododendron tunnel, into time, into future, into kinship.
April 12th
Cherokee National Forest
A red sun through smoky skies. Dogwood hangs over the gravel, as maple samaras whirl through the air, the way moths trying to mate flit around each other. They perish, shortly–I found one severed luna moth wing in the grass where I sleep, after having seen an adult a couple nights ago with Karsen, waiting on the pavement for a mate–or maybe having already filled its biological purpose, waiting around to die. I spy buckeyes on the riverbank, That’s patchy, white-gray bark, and palmate leaves hanging down loosely from the branches Each leaf’s margin bears an edge of fine teeth when you get a close look.
Firefighters and fire practitioners laughing loud before a morning briefing. Foamflower and pink buds of laurel! A sprig of yellowroot, flowers like stars strung on a line, caught in my helmet from a bushwhack. Now standing by a burning hillslope across the road from the Tellico River. Behind me, three sycamore, all wearing their small new green leaves. It’s past 7 and I just pissed under a bridge like some kind of troll. Birds sing their eveningsong, magenta dusk rises over the ridge.
Today we’re burning along the cherohala skyway. Someone told me that rich people fly their cars down here to whip them down and around these mountains, and I do spot some slick-looking rides on the road in spite of the billowing smoke. On a berm by the road squirrel corn grows up from the leaf litter. Karsen cracked open an acorn and found a grub. Like an arthropod kinder surprise. I dragged fire underneath a towering concrete bridge, valley looking out at the hills of Cherokee National Forest.
April 13th
I woke up this morning with my gears stuck on the words “sprawling sycamore”.
No comments:
Post a Comment