Pilgrim at Clemons Fork
May 9th - May 21st
Tuesday, May 10th, hydrology day. We were standing on a fern-covered slope in Falling Rock watershed. A caterpillar hung out on a drooping lousewort leaf. Who will you become? A fly buzzed as it landed on my hand and crawled about frenetically. I flicked it off. A jumping spider leapt from wood fern to mayapple leaf. Heart-leaf foamflowers burst like puffs of white confetti. Palmate veins of a violet leaf furrow out from the base to meet again at the tip. Eastern hemlock needles seemed to sparkle, charged with sunlight. A swallowtail flitted just above the water where waterbugs glided to and fro on its surface.
I thought back on the day before. Shelby and I hurtled down the mountain parkway, past Clay City, past the Red River, east-bound and down to Breathitt County. We walked and learned about trees and played in the water. After dinner we decided to take the rough, steep route to the fire tower. As we traveled forth to upland forest, far above camp, the sun came to kiss the crown of each tree, electrifying the canopy with a warm glow. We went up into the orange and found the Forestry interns, Chase and Tucker, already up on the tower. They came down, said, “It’s all yours,” joked about the brutal trail and how the tower swayed a bit in the wind.
Hands tight on the railings, scaling level by level. The platforms get smaller and smaller as we ascend, changing perspectives, getting a glimpse of the forest as a whole family of trees–like a sea, undulating over hills, swooping into valleys. A world tinged gold because of a dying sun. I’ll have to go up again to try and note the nuances of the forest family surrounding us. Are those white oaks? I can’t make out the margins, the eye fails to discern venation and individual shapes from so far up.
May 11th. Wednesday morning, heat rising quickly, hitting the tops of the ridgetop trees, filling this valley. The base of a tree is a cradle of life. Mosses, clover, little sprouts of shrubby weeds.
Tiny flowers of lyreleaf sage like faerie bells. Like if I ran my finger gently over these stalks, a sweet chime would issue. They grow in a shaded patch behind the men’s cabin. I plucked a bit off the top to crush and see if it’d smell nice, and more little flowers tumbled to the ground. I stole one from the dewy grass to take to the sun, to get a closer look. I imagine a puckered mouth, with light purple lips hanging over the fluted opening. As the flower narrows down it deepens into a shade of lilac. Stamens grow up out of the mouth, ending in delicate dark anthers.
We went back into the depths of Falling Rock. Stalks of stonecrop flower like stars bursting, growing heavy to topple over. Wiry umbrella magnolia, broad leaves fanning out from slender branches. My beloved rue anemone growing right alongside poison ivy. Sitting on a carpet of fallen, half-eaten leaves, high above the intermittent stream. The green of maple leaves electrified under the sun. Hemlock needles struck white in the mystic daylight. Light. It falls in channels onto aged bark, down trunks of tall, proud trees.
Sitting silently, trying to decode the music that birds weave. A patient ant crawls over a broad, rounded trillium leaf. Bloodroot lobes. Tendrils of moss holding firm to the decaying, fallen tree I sit upon.
Then a barren field of rocks that was once a surface mine. Some oak saplings trying to hold on in this valley fill once tossed out as waste, as a consequence. Tadpoles eking out some sort of existence in turbid pools of rainwater. What do you eat, little ones? Swimming to and fro with oblivion in this razed, upturned landscape.
A succession of landscapes. Today after dinner Shelby and I headed up that graveled road following Clemons Fork, then took a left to mount the ridge. We climbed and found ourselves higher and higher away from the water. We stopped to straddle a large, decayed fallen log, stopped in its roll down the steep hillslope by thick trunks of trees that soared up from just beside the road. This we saw beyond the trees: Gold-red going up into the sky to overthrow the reign of the azure blue of the day.
We continue on up the road to the fire tower. Succession–the clear-cut area we passed, with its skinny new trees straight and proud. A field site, now overrun by forest. We leave our scars, but the whims of the world absorb our marks.
I want to know the name of each weed and wildflower that makes up these families of undergrowth. The moss, the ferns, other gentle forms of being we mindlessly trample as we walk these hallowed corridors. I see myself in the shy, delicate flowers of miami mist, emerging from wiry stems off the side of a gravel road. She who hangs on. The way partridgeberry holds steady to a mossy boulder, across the rich forest floor. The vast wealth of detritus.
“Who are you?” I muse as I stare down at the sea of trees from above. When you look down at a valley and wish it would swallow you whole. Phacelias rise from the dirt wherever I go. Trills, songs, chirps. What do they call me? My name is sweet thing.
May 12th. It’s Thursday and the great white flowers of the umbrella magnolias are unfurling from their buds. Shelby and I noted one by the weir where we took samples and Annie saw them splayed out over the water as we left camp in the vans. We are sitting in a shady 18-year-old Loblolly stand. I pick up a needle bundle, 3 dried strands brittle like straw. They fit together, like they split apart from one strand. A thick, rich layer of pine needles, light splayed out and playing among the fallen needles.
When I was peeing in the bush across from the road from the oak saplings I surely picked up a gaggle of ticks. But I also saw a snail shell set into the thick carpet of pine needles. I picked it up, and inside the barely translucent shell was something bubbling, something alive, a shimmering membrane pulsing weakly with a trace of life. Mayapple flower hanging heavy–with shame? Christmas ferns of old weighed down and speckled with the pain of exposure to many seasons changed.
Today Shelby and I went to throw our clothes in the dryer and she noticed a lizard skitter into the dank room. It had a rich blue tail that it shook proudly as it ran away. Walking down gravel Clemons Fork Rd, fleabane tottering on the shoulder. A clump of Appalachian Tiger Swallowtails gathered around one spot in the mud. We look up at parasols of umbrella magnolia leaves.
I was on a rocky bank in Clemons Fork, overturning some rocks to make a space for my mug of tea. I uncovered a two-lined salamander, sitting quietly, calmly, unperturbed by its loss of shelter. Wet little body amongst sandy shady rocks. Sharp lobes of maple falling down from the branch.
A crawdad with a clutch of eggs. A sheet of water crashing over black layered rock that comes off in flakes. An empty gall, the rattlesnake carcass that Shelby pointed out in the road. Its skin was withered and fragile, like if I gathered my hand up in a fist around it it’d shatter into hundreds of delicate pieces.
The pale moon comes through a window in the canopy to say “Good Evening.”
May 13th. A freaky Friday. 6:40 AM. I dragged myself out of bed today to begin the climb to the fire tower in the dark which was: Light coming in as I passed the sign for the upland oak habitat. Streaks of cloud’s adding drama to the sky’s stage. Opposite of where the sun would take its place, a band of purple held vigil for the night. The moment she lifted her eye over the tree-swathed horizon, pouring her light upon the crowns of the forest. Sublimity.
Wind too that pours past the beams of the tower. I hurtle back down to camp. It takes half the time it does to mount the ridge.
Later, sunset. We had followed Clemons Fork upstream. Thunder growled low and distant. Rain prickled down, but it felt good on our skin. Twice we stopped to stare at some creatures. Two efts, and snail. Those distinct-looking yellow poplar leaves, a nubile shade of green. The sun flooding in between trunks of trees. A sky primarily clouded, with spats of blue. A rainbow spotted in a window where the canopy thinned. We ran to the ridge-top, to get to the vantage point of the tower.
Shelby got to the stairs first, and I could see the whole arc stretched across the sky. I was scared we’d miss it, that as suddenly as it appeared it would be gone.
As the sun lowered in its slow descent the colors intensified, a second rainbow appeared to faintly frame the first, which seemed to rise straight up out of the understory. As if we could grab some survey equipment and make some measurements and calculate where the pot of gold was.
The gold was gleaming opposite of the rainbow. Molten light smeared into the clouds of a moody, humid afternoon. The sun dipped down into the low clouds guarding the horizon, like a yellow eye settling into a shroud of red-violet. Then the show was over, where once a rainbow took the stage was now an idyllic landscape, valleys swirled with fog, wan evening light finishing up its residency on the crowns of the upland oaks and maples. Darkness crept in, so we set on down the gravel road again, admiring the last of the colors beyond the trunks of Robinson Forest. An underpainting to this freaky Friday’s work of art.
Tonight the near-full moon shines from behind a translucent veil of clouds. The world’s majesty. The real unreal, the real surreal.
May 14th, Saturday. Done with class early, so I drove with Shelby down to Bad Branch Nature Preserve, whose waterfall I’d been wanting to visit for a while.
An American giant millipede is curled around the bud where a cluster of young rhododendron branches emerge from the wiry trunk of a younger tree. I saw two others on the trail down to the falls, both lazing on mossy wayside boulders.
We’d ambled down KY 15 to this gorge where aged limestone cliffs lead the way to Bad Branch Falls. Water rushes past an incision in the cliff above, tumbling down with a roar into the boulders below. I go down the slope to sit among them and let the mist engulf me as I contemplate the volume of water crashing before me. The water collects in deep pools, only to cascade further downstream. Shelby and I sit on huge boulders, speckled with toadskin lichen and sprightly moss patches and decaying hemlock needles and patches of black fuzz. Well-loved rocks, planes of biodiversity. The canopy has opened up for the sky to pour in some afternoon light. I heard low-rumbling thunder this morning, and now sheets of clouds still roam across the blue. Arms of hemlock and beech extend into the scene. I’m going to the wet base of the cliff right by the falls for a look at the locals.
It’s little fingers of bright green moss and ferns and a family of little bluets, and scattered violets, white, with those lovely heart-shaped leaves and long stems. A life spent trembling in the mist. And I knew I’d find my favorite little mountain meadow-rue here too–the delicate little rounds of green connected by dainty little stems staked their claim in the bottom of a crevice running up the length of the cliff.
Crouching over rich soil next to a baby hemlock. Will you be spared the scourge of the adelgid? A stalk of wild yam drops out from the crevice between the knobby knee of a rhododendron root and a lichen-speckled boulder. Tufts of grass, ferns bobbing in the breeze, even what looks from here to be a bigleaf magnolia all grow from mossy divots in the boulders by the falls. Lichen of all creeds plastered over these boulders in patterns like a Mandelbrot set. A swallowtail dances among the big white flowers of a magnolia on the other side of the falls. Little windows of light upon the bark of an older hemlock. Behind it stands the red stone of the cliff, brushed with striations and patches of green-tinged lichen. Shelves of wet-loving plants grow behind and right next to the falls, all along its length.
The visual cacophony of the woods. A slim birch trunk studded with an even armor of turkey-tails.
There’s rain coming in over the Cumberland Mountains.
May 15th, Sunday. Yesterday we saw a rainbow as we pulled into the Dollar Tree parking lot, a pitstop on the way back to camp. Now we are at the fire tower again, admiring a moody sunset draped with blue and purple clouds, pink streaks interspersed in the sky above these forested hills.
Now the sun has fallen behind a wall of ash-blue clouds. Only a sliver of the blood moon is visible through evening clouds. I pause to listen. Birds call out, frogs croak, insects chirr and flit among the trees. A whippoorwill whines to the moon. It’s lifting up higher now, glowing red. Magenta streaks lay low over an island covered with deep green trees. Tune into the clamor below.
As the moon breaks through a field of billowing clouds it casts out a reddish tint on the clouds framing it. A streak of dark cloud segments the moon unevenly; it slowly squeezes out of its grasp.
Now it’s past 11. The super flower blood moon is in eclipse. We are watching a sliver of moon slowly disappear behind the earth’s shadow. A thin blade of light straggles as the shadow snuffs out the moonglow. Stars shimmer brighter now, uninhibited by the growing darkness. Waiting for the shade to clamp shut. A segment to a sliver.
May 16th, Monday. Fog pours into these valleys. A foreboding front of clouds rolling in. I went down to the creek to grab my hammock on the far bank, hiking up my pants as I waded through the riffle. The serrated, maple-like leaves of a hairy alumroot spread out along the creek’s brink, some speckled with black radiating from the center. What genetic quirk causes this discrepancy, this diversity within one species? Their flowers shoot up in a raceme, white buds emerging from a stalk.
Kneeling on a hillside by the sawmill piled high with leaf litter. A delicate network of veins on two long wings folded over each other on the back of a stonefly. Wading through streams to find little beings throbbing among the rocks. Later, on a ridge: a red eft on the forest floor sits on a little rock covered with wispy moss and diminutive partridgeberry leaves, surrounded by a rich layer of decay. A tiny red maple seedling rises beside. Oak saplings, licorice bedstraw, Christmas fern in festive bundles. Mature trees rising high to shade us. Cycles of life on the quiet slope. Clemons Fork babbling somewhere below. Opulent yellow light streaming through gaps in the canopy.
May 17th, Tuesday. Over a week we’ve been at Robinson.
I woke at 5:30 to meet once more with the dawn at the fire tower, walking at first by headlamp-light, shining up beads of dew and spiders’ eyes along the trail. A quiet, breathless race against the sun. I beat her to the tower, and I’m full of glee and I climb the stairs to see the valleys below full of fog, winding with the contours of the land. I am paying my respects to the unfoldment of the day.
A full moon paling above soft blocks of cool pastel hues above bowls of mist. Opposite in the sky, neon colors spread out, making way for the coming sun. Then a red eye rises above the horizon, casting warm rays and shafts of light upon the canopy, the pooled fog, my skin.
A dance for the dawn. On the way up, I was heaving and gasping for mercy to the tune of birdsongs, my artificial light caught on a single strand of silk falling from the apex of a beech leaf. Then I was blasting down hill, stumbling over my own two feet, away from the upland oaks and back down to the coves, the seepage, the bottomlands, my comrades.
And that brings us into the light of a day, where we hurtled out of Robinson Forest, past a little post office in Ary, KY to an exploited plot of land churning out hordes of coal yearly. Earth denuded and torn apart, gravel fields stripped bare for passage of precious cargo. A high cliff of bare rock, a seam exposed where there should be slopes, valleys, homes for squirrels, newts, saplings, deer, magnolias, roots tapping deep into rich soil. Land succession–fields thick with tall grass, new oaks taking root in once-soured and scorched earth. The consequences of progression.
Now at the moment I am swinging in my hammock by Clemons Fork. Water babbles through a riffle, the sun throws down its light through gaps in the canopy, ever shifting with the fancies of the breeze. Debris–little curled up leaves or needles–falls from above onto me and the scoop of fabric I’m sitting in. Before me on the sandy bank is nettle, ferns, and alumroot with its vertical tail of flowers. On the other bank is a wall of exposed roots, a web linking together the beeches and the hemlocks.
I waded up Clemons Fork, getting into the water by steep, gravel Ridge Rd. Quickly the water deepened, soon it lapped at my thighs. I looked down and saw fish hectically flitting in and out of view, a frog with its hind legs outstretched, mid-stroke, then simply gone.
A little bit further downstream, I stopped to notice a gnarled old beech tree, its bark flecked by fungal growth and Virginia creeper. A thick, hearty tree.
When I was walking upon the gravel I played a game with a black swallowtail, the kind with brilliant teal splashed across the bottom of its winds. I would come up to try and take a picture once it landed on the rocks, and it would rise gleefully, flutter away, and pick another spot to land, repeating this along the road, entangling flight paths momentarily with a tiger swallowtail.
Microbiomes. The life curled upon a tree’s trunk, life perched upon a boulder, an island of life in the middle of a gravel road. Slender grass stalks that end in little blue flowers, invasive lespedeza, fleabane, these recurring characters I’ve come to note.
The day ends. I lay on the footbridge and look up at the stars. A studded, darkened skyscape.
May 18th, Wednesday. It’s soil day with Dr. Matocha.
We’re hiking up the Boardinghouse Trail to the firetower as a class, taking soil samples, measurements, rolling the earth between our fingers. A maple leaf devoured by caterpillars. Little scrolls of fresh tulip poplar leaves emerge from the bud at the end of a slender stem, to join the broad leaves already unfurled for the summer. The alternating leaves of a wild yam vine, tendrils curling off of the thorny branches. The smaller, newer leaves near the tip are glossier, with a brown tinge.
May 19th, Thursday. Yesterday we got to see the hills from the firetower midday. I went on a little splash down the creek while I was on the phone and I found a baby salamander slithering about in the water. I scooped it up, felt its little limbs and belly frantically flit across the palm of my hand. I am wading through riffles, over rocks and waves in the exposed bedrock, under sycamore branches, by the gravel road.
Rain threatened after dinner, we go out to look for salamanders anyways. The simple glee of life in the palm of your hand.
Now we are measuring trees. Splotches of light falling upon us as we stand beneath a red maple. Last night, rain splattered to the earth. It let up for a moment and I went out into the starless dark to brush my teeth. How quiet and anonymous the night is without a moon.
This morning I woke late to fog filling the valley. It’s later but morning still, and sunlight is flooding the valley, the mist is rising off the roof, the eyes squint.
Today, looking up at the bright flowers of a yellow poplar, the swooping margins of the unique leaves. Yesterday as we walked back to camp before the brunt of the rain, I noticed the little cases, light colored and translucent, sheltering little leaflets, already developed with that striking shape and a couple of deeply furrowed veins. They fold upon themselves to fit into the little cases. And at the base of this delicate new life is another tinier case, with an ever smaller leaflet. And when the leaflets unfurl and break free the split cases lay open like slack wings, all around the stem.
Yellow poplars grew everywhere, each with these new growths, the delicate buds, the ever-smaller cases. I was awed by the infinitesimal possibilities for life–everywhere flowers, leaves and fronds unfurl and reach out for want of the sun.
We stand beneath an eastern hemlock and I peel off a chunk of fragrant bark, which is speckled with moss. The asymmetrical trunk of a magnolia behind a chain, flat on one side, too covered with moss and parmelia. A snail, mucousily making its slow, gentle path across a stair step. Virginia creeper wraps about the base of a sweetgum tree like a scarf. A life along the bark. The lyreleaf sages are losing their little flowers. Gnarled mossy mulberry branches that twist up to support a heavy crown.
A meadow of cushion moss spreads from the base of a chestnut oak. The meandering path of some insect in the bare trunk of a peeling, sickly tree. Furrows upon an oak tree’s trunk, studded with lichen that curls out like a fractal, and lichen that bursts with boils like the skin of a toad. Minute lives among the leaf litter. A sticky speckled salamander, many spiders, a worm snake beneath a promising rock.
The bullseye marks of insects upon a maple leaf. Gazing up at the crown, straining my neck, trying to discern what sort of oak soars above us. Allegheny blackberry among the trail. Thin, splindly growths amidst a clearcut. An acre of the ones left behind. An ant crawls upon the surface of a wild yam leaf, with its strong veins running the length of the surface, like marks of longitude coming from the tip and meeting again at the other end. A beech leaf graced with silk-thin hairs that gleam in the sun. Consumed by something, patches eaten out between veins that look like ribs.
A redbud tree, forked near the base, trunks colonized by turkeytails and another orangey fungus, guarded by a lanky long-legged spider. The new leaves by the base are speckled with some disease, but the other leaves are tender hearts of a lively green. New ferns growing right atop washed-out, fallen fronds. Hickory nut shells, fruits of mulberry trees, a carpet of organic litter scattered upon this road.
I was kneeling upon the soft, cushy earth in a fragrant pinegrove and saw spotted wintergreen, alias pipsissewa, AKA ratsbane or striped prince’s pine. The many names of this curious-looking understory plant. St. John’s wort sprouted nearby, its little opposite leaves growing tall, a sure sign of summer.
May 20th, Friday. I woke up this morning and gazed out from the porch to see rolling clouds and the sun peeking through. I heard distant thunder from somewhere in these hills. Today we watch a dead ash fall. Its bark is striated with deep furrows, somewhere in those groves an insect bored to spell its doom. In its death moss grows still at the base.
We’re on a slope and at my feet bloodroot’s flower is closed tight like a fist. Why do you lobe so? I find a tiny white bug on my wrist, whose arrival upon my skin I never noticed.
Later, sunset. My last time up at the fire tower for a while. The light leaks down upon the polars, maples, tupelos, hemlocks, filtering down to the midstory, then the understory, to the wild gingers and azaleas and rattlesnake-root and ferns growing low to the ground. This cloudless sky beaming down upon us. My love is as abundant as the violets in the woods. As abundant as crawdads swimming at the bottom of a creek. A veil of maidenhairs grows like a collar, a dainty curtain.
May 21st, Saturday. We’re headed home today. I sat by the bank of the creek for a final time this morning and had a memory of dancing in my dreams. When I walked back from the bathhouse for the last time a red-spotted purple landed on the gravel just ahead of me.
Well I wipe my slate clean. I wash my feet in the clear waters of Clemons Fork, I bid farewell to the smooth and shiny dark boulders, gleaming in the light of day. But some things will just stick in my mind. Speckles of light moving across my classmate’s faces as the stood beneath a tree, a lone horse in a field at the former mine site, the sensation of a sprinkle of rain while hiking on a hot day, a swallowtail with one wing torn off, presumably by a bird. Even now the smell of campfire seeps into my mind.
When I was in middle school I started to feel like I was always running out of time. I would grow despondent and stressed when any season of my life was nearing an end. I cried on the schoolbus home on the last day of my sophomore year and I dreaded the end of each summer break and the coming bitterness of each winter. I constantly felt like the sands of time were slipping through my fingers; I was standing paralyzed at a fork in the trail, unable to move, unable to settle on any decisions or actions.
As I get older (and I realize this sounds silly because I’m not yet 21) I lose my fear of the exchange of seasons. Once my anxieties forced me to feel as if I should be squeezing as much juice from the fruit of the world as possible, lest opportunity fall away from me, into cold, into desolation. With every hike at Robinson I sensed the earth shifting before my eyes. I know the loss and dearth of life that is winter is a necessity for the bloom and fertility of spring, for the waters to swell the creeks and falls, for the coming of sumptuous, stifling summer heat.
The world takes its time. Jewelweed lies in wait all summer before its stunning flowers bloom. A newt crawls through the understory of a holler for years, biding time ‘til its metamorphosis. Young trees fight in slow, slow motion for a dominant spot in the canopy. Water weathers waves and whorls into the bedrock of Clemons Fork, a millenia in the making.
I go back home content with this cycle of growth and culling. I live to honor and trust the whims of the world, wherever they take me.
