trying to find my blog
Monday, December 20, 2010
Sunday, February 07, 2010
Journeys
When a man is deeply unsatisfied with his life it seems his thoughts always turn toward journeys, pilgrimages, motion through time and space. "Black care can hardly catch the rider whose pace is fast enough." said a troubled Theodore Roosevelt.
How else does one explain men running away to sea. There's no need to explain it. Ishmael already did that for us in Moby Dick. Or what of the Chitaquas Pirsig gives us in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance? These inquiries into absolute values couldn't have been throroughly explored sitting at home on the couch.
I forsee a journey in my not too distant future. I hope it will be the beginning of my life.
How else does one explain men running away to sea. There's no need to explain it. Ishmael already did that for us in Moby Dick. Or what of the Chitaquas Pirsig gives us in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance? These inquiries into absolute values couldn't have been throroughly explored sitting at home on the couch.
I forsee a journey in my not too distant future. I hope it will be the beginning of my life.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Field Biologist at Waterfall
“Field Biologist”
I love the goddess
As she calls to me from the tumbling waters that are cold in January or the bathtub waters of August
I examine the little blessings she leaves along my path:
Mushrooms, trillium, bloodroot, hickory trees
I think that there is something special in the salamander that crawls under the decaying leaves of the forest floor
The bracket fungi that spring from the rotting logs that are returning the gift they had once been given;
I try to appreciate all the life, all the energy around me -
The constant recycling of nutrients -
Everything in the forest is being sustained and intellectually I take it all in,
Knowing the processes, having studied them.
But sometimes the sun weaves through the trees a certain brilliant light, seen through tears, humbling me with its beauty.
And that’s when I go deeper, to a place I have a hard time reaching:
Going from head to heart where the mind lets go and a new force of nature opens eyes that so often stay closed
And somewhere the biological activity comes together in a way I can only describe as “whole”.
Throwing all my field guides and training aside
The only thing I can identify is love.
I love the goddess
As she calls to me from the tumbling waters that are cold in January or the bathtub waters of August
I examine the little blessings she leaves along my path:
Mushrooms, trillium, bloodroot, hickory trees
I think that there is something special in the salamander that crawls under the decaying leaves of the forest floor
The bracket fungi that spring from the rotting logs that are returning the gift they had once been given;
I try to appreciate all the life, all the energy around me -
The constant recycling of nutrients -
Everything in the forest is being sustained and intellectually I take it all in,
Knowing the processes, having studied them.
But sometimes the sun weaves through the trees a certain brilliant light, seen through tears, humbling me with its beauty.
And that’s when I go deeper, to a place I have a hard time reaching:
Going from head to heart where the mind lets go and a new force of nature opens eyes that so often stay closed
And somewhere the biological activity comes together in a way I can only describe as “whole”.
Throwing all my field guides and training aside
The only thing I can identify is love.
Friday, January 29, 2010
Minamata Disease
Here's a brief paper I did for my Ecotox class. It was an interesting topic. I took the picture of the sunset there in sasebo and I can imagine such sunsets might be enjoyed around Minamata City despite the pall of the unfortunate heavy metal poisoning discussed in the paper below.
Introduction
In April 1956 a five-year-old girl was taken to a hospital in Minamata, Japan. She had difficulty walking, speaking, and was experiencing convulsions. Within a few days other patients were being seen and by October 1956 a total of 40 patients had been diagnosed with the mysterious disorder, fourteen of whom had died. Government officials investigating the outbreak of the disease found that affected individuals were often members of the same families, all of them living around Minamata Bay who ate diets high in fish and shellfish. Since all individuals affected by the disease (and animals eating table scraps) had been eating diets heavy in fish researches initially assumed some sort of food poisoning was to blame. But by early November researches from Kumamoto University had deduced that the victims were all suffering from heavy metal poisoning.
Investigators examined the effluent from the nearby Chisso Chemical plant and found it contained many heavy metals including lead, mercury, selenium, and arsenic. To further analyze the specific pollutant causing the disease researchers took hair samples from residents of Minamata suffering from symptoms and those that were symptom-free. They found that patients being treated for the disease had mercury levels of up to 705 ppm whereas subjects with no symptoms had mercury levels around 190 ppm. The mercury levels for the general population outside the Minamata area was around four ppm.
Physiological Impacts
Methylmercury ([CH3Hg]+) such as that found in people affected by Minamata disease is a heavy metal toxin that was once produced as a byproduct of industrial processes such as chemical production as was the case with the Chisso Chemical plant. Free mercury can also be methylated in the environment. It is associated with aquatic systems where methylmercury is produced by the anaerobic organisms.
Methylmercury causes sickness in people by combining with cysteine, an amino acid which readily binds with the poison, carrying it throughout the body. It can lead to blindness, deafness, loss of motor control, and reduced mental capacity. Fetuses subjected to methylmercury poisoning can be born with mental retardation, cerebral palsy, and microcephaly (small head).
In a study published in Environmental Research in 1999, researchers surveyed residents of a town (Town A) located next to Minamata City. As a control they also surveyed residents of another small town (Town B) located on the Ariake Sea but not associated with the methylmercury poisoning around Minamata. Residents of both towns were asked about general health complaints ranging from hearing loss, to arthritis, to loss of touch sensation. Forty years after the first reports of methylmercury poisoning residents of Town A had a significantly higher complaints across all categories of factor analysis than the residents of Town B (Fukuda et al. 1999).
Legacy
Over 2200 residents of Minamata, Japan have been certified as having Minmata Disease. As 2001 1,784 of them had died. A 1973 arbitration ruling ordered Chisso Chemical Company to pay approximately $60,000 to persons certified as having Minamata disease and $66,000 to the families of people who had died from the disease. Another 10,000 have shown symptoms of methylmercury poisoning and received financial reimbursement from the Chisso Chemical Company as well. Though the discharge of heavy metals into the Yatusushiro Sea stopped years ago, the study cited above shows many people still suffer from the lingering effects of the pollution both in their bodies and in the sea which provides the fish that are the staple of their diet.
Despite the public awareness that the Minamata disaster brought to methylmercury poisoning subsequent devastating pollutions have occurred. In 1965 another outbreak of Minamata disease occurred in Niigata, Japan and has affected nearly seven hundred people to date. In the early 1970’s Iraqis ate wheat and meat from cows that had been feed grain treated with methylmercury as a preservative. Over 6,500 cases of poisoning were reported and at least 459 deaths were associated with this event known as the Basra Grain Disater.
Sources:
"Basra poison grain disaster." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 27 May. 2009. Web. 29 Jan. 2010.
"Methylmercury." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 28 Jan. 2010. Web. 29 Jan. 2010.
"Minamata disease." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 3 Jan. 2010. Web. 29 Jan. 2010.
Fukuda, Yoshiharu, Ushijima, K., Kitano, T., Sakamoto, M., Futatsuka, M., 1999. An analysis of subjective complaints in a population living in a methylmercury-polluted area. Environmental Research Sec a 81, 100-107.
Introduction
In April 1956 a five-year-old girl was taken to a hospital in Minamata, Japan. She had difficulty walking, speaking, and was experiencing convulsions. Within a few days other patients were being seen and by October 1956 a total of 40 patients had been diagnosed with the mysterious disorder, fourteen of whom had died. Government officials investigating the outbreak of the disease found that affected individuals were often members of the same families, all of them living around Minamata Bay who ate diets high in fish and shellfish. Since all individuals affected by the disease (and animals eating table scraps) had been eating diets heavy in fish researches initially assumed some sort of food poisoning was to blame. But by early November researches from Kumamoto University had deduced that the victims were all suffering from heavy metal poisoning.
Investigators examined the effluent from the nearby Chisso Chemical plant and found it contained many heavy metals including lead, mercury, selenium, and arsenic. To further analyze the specific pollutant causing the disease researchers took hair samples from residents of Minamata suffering from symptoms and those that were symptom-free. They found that patients being treated for the disease had mercury levels of up to 705 ppm whereas subjects with no symptoms had mercury levels around 190 ppm. The mercury levels for the general population outside the Minamata area was around four ppm.
Physiological Impacts
Methylmercury ([CH3Hg]+) such as that found in people affected by Minamata disease is a heavy metal toxin that was once produced as a byproduct of industrial processes such as chemical production as was the case with the Chisso Chemical plant. Free mercury can also be methylated in the environment. It is associated with aquatic systems where methylmercury is produced by the anaerobic organisms.
Methylmercury causes sickness in people by combining with cysteine, an amino acid which readily binds with the poison, carrying it throughout the body. It can lead to blindness, deafness, loss of motor control, and reduced mental capacity. Fetuses subjected to methylmercury poisoning can be born with mental retardation, cerebral palsy, and microcephaly (small head).
In a study published in Environmental Research in 1999, researchers surveyed residents of a town (Town A) located next to Minamata City. As a control they also surveyed residents of another small town (Town B) located on the Ariake Sea but not associated with the methylmercury poisoning around Minamata. Residents of both towns were asked about general health complaints ranging from hearing loss, to arthritis, to loss of touch sensation. Forty years after the first reports of methylmercury poisoning residents of Town A had a significantly higher complaints across all categories of factor analysis than the residents of Town B (Fukuda et al. 1999).
Legacy
Over 2200 residents of Minamata, Japan have been certified as having Minmata Disease. As 2001 1,784 of them had died. A 1973 arbitration ruling ordered Chisso Chemical Company to pay approximately $60,000 to persons certified as having Minamata disease and $66,000 to the families of people who had died from the disease. Another 10,000 have shown symptoms of methylmercury poisoning and received financial reimbursement from the Chisso Chemical Company as well. Though the discharge of heavy metals into the Yatusushiro Sea stopped years ago, the study cited above shows many people still suffer from the lingering effects of the pollution both in their bodies and in the sea which provides the fish that are the staple of their diet.
Despite the public awareness that the Minamata disaster brought to methylmercury poisoning subsequent devastating pollutions have occurred. In 1965 another outbreak of Minamata disease occurred in Niigata, Japan and has affected nearly seven hundred people to date. In the early 1970’s Iraqis ate wheat and meat from cows that had been feed grain treated with methylmercury as a preservative. Over 6,500 cases of poisoning were reported and at least 459 deaths were associated with this event known as the Basra Grain Disater.
Sources:
"Basra poison grain disaster." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 27 May. 2009. Web. 29 Jan. 2010.
"Methylmercury." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 28 Jan. 2010. Web. 29 Jan. 2010.
"Minamata disease." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 3 Jan. 2010. Web. 29 Jan. 2010.
Fukuda, Yoshiharu, Ushijima, K., Kitano, T., Sakamoto, M., Futatsuka, M., 1999. An analysis of subjective complaints in a population living in a methylmercury-polluted area. Environmental Research Sec a 81, 100-107.
Saturday, January 09, 2010
Espey Cave
In the fall of the year when the bronzed girls in golden sweaters stand under the translucent bows of the golden ginkgo as the wind sheers away an entire season of leaves in the afternoon I am tempted to stand in the sun and stare into its autumnal radiance. It is the last glow of warmth before the years settles down into the cool grey rain of winter in middle Tennessee. It isn’t a bad way to end a nice afternoon, soaking up the rays on a solid bed of golden leaves. Perhaps it was a celebration of the life that the sun represents and all the light of the world that comes with a good day.
Earlier, before the clouds had burned off, when there was still a chill to the air the girl in the golden sweater and I had made our way east across the super highway that is 70S coming out of Murfreesboro, to highway 64, then down an unmarked road I guessed was the right one, to a road that lead up onto a high ridge and then down a winding country lane to a dead end.
“Where to from here?” she asked.
“Down,” I said, pointing down the hill. We stumbled and slid down a sixty degree slope of dry fallen leaves under a canopy of oak, hickory, and maple. At the bottom of the quick but steep descent we walked down a narrow creek bed, not really knowing where we were supposed to go but having some idea of what we were looking for.
At length the narrowness of the enclosing hillsides opened up and we could see the creek was about to plunge off of a precipice. Somewhere down there, about fifty nearly vertical feet down was what we had come to see. We couldn’t see it yet but geologically it just made sense. Sliding down rocks and falling through tangled undergrowth we made it too the bottom and were greeted by the face of the bluff we’d just scrambled down. But we followed the gurgle of running water there found another, much high wall of rock but at the bottom of which was an opening roughly fifteen feet high and thirty feet wide.
This was Espey Cave and it is one of over 8,000 in Tennessee, a land of karst geology where the myriad streams cut across the open plateaus and down the hillsides, seamlessly disappearing into underground caverns where the cold gentleness of running water carves the rocks for eons leaving behind miles of small tunnels and scores of grand underground rooms. The air is damp and consistently refreshing, summer or winter; where, except the water the silence if complete and the darkness is total.
It is in these caves that creatures who have no Platonian inkling of the light of day live their lives in submerged darkness. Creatures such as the Tennessee cave salamander, cave crayfish, the [some kind of fish]. Not all species live in every cave, some are confined to only one cave in Arkansas or Tennessee but sill they hold in common their odd little lives in these subterranean worlds where the darkness has deprived them of eyesight as well as eyes and their bodies have grown translucent and pale for lack of pigmentation.
These creatures which have adapted so wonderfully to their niche environment live off the richness of bat guano, left behind by the mobile little flying mammals that reside on the walls and ceilings of the caves by day and venture into the comparative brightness of the upper world at night.
These fragile ecosystems are at the mercy of the world above as good ol’ boys throw beer cans and old refrigerators down sinkholes thinking they will one day make solid ground out of these slowly dissolving ground if only they throw in enough junk. And run off from agriculture, highways, and drainage ditches from the world above flow into these cave systems wreaking havoc on fragile ecosystems which remain hidden and unknown to most of the world as it flies by at seventy miles an hour.
We walk across gravel until the floor of the cave is only a small channel of rushing water, at which point we climb up onto a ledge and scramble farther back around a bend where the light of the upper world leaves us and we are left at the mercy of a small flashlight no bigger than my index finger. Here the cave opens up again and we continue back to a wall where the splits off to the left and right. In all this Espey Cave goes back for six miles and drops two hundred feet below the surface. But our light is already flickering.
We sit down on a flat rock and turn out the light to let it recharge. We share a cigarette in a darkness more complete that can ever be known in the upper world where even at night the stars provide a glaring degree of illumination unknown to the creatures of this underworld. This darkness is safe and anonymous, caves are good places to talk and make confessions. The cherry glow of the cigarette ash takes on a ceremonious glow in a living cave which can feel like the vaults of a great cathedral when the conversation turns to the right subjects.
Afterwards I build a small cairn on the rock where we had sat, a little shrine that will be washed away some great rain event of the oncoming winter. Then we walk out.
Back in day light we scramble up, sometimes climbing hand-over-hand but always up until we reach ground we can walk on. Up and up through old red- and yellow chinkapin oaks and yellow hickory trees.
Four hundred vertical feet later we pause at the top of the ridge and look out across the early November Tennessee landscape, breathing heavy in the crackling air. The leaves have really been coming off the trees in the past few days opening up the view across the gorges to other distant ridges. But there is still color, and heat, the golden yellows of autumn. If there is a heaven I can only imagine it is this, this all infusing light, and when we first see it maybe we’ll feel like we’ve just come out of a cave.
Earlier, before the clouds had burned off, when there was still a chill to the air the girl in the golden sweater and I had made our way east across the super highway that is 70S coming out of Murfreesboro, to highway 64, then down an unmarked road I guessed was the right one, to a road that lead up onto a high ridge and then down a winding country lane to a dead end.
“Where to from here?” she asked.
“Down,” I said, pointing down the hill. We stumbled and slid down a sixty degree slope of dry fallen leaves under a canopy of oak, hickory, and maple. At the bottom of the quick but steep descent we walked down a narrow creek bed, not really knowing where we were supposed to go but having some idea of what we were looking for.
At length the narrowness of the enclosing hillsides opened up and we could see the creek was about to plunge off of a precipice. Somewhere down there, about fifty nearly vertical feet down was what we had come to see. We couldn’t see it yet but geologically it just made sense. Sliding down rocks and falling through tangled undergrowth we made it too the bottom and were greeted by the face of the bluff we’d just scrambled down. But we followed the gurgle of running water there found another, much high wall of rock but at the bottom of which was an opening roughly fifteen feet high and thirty feet wide.
This was Espey Cave and it is one of over 8,000 in Tennessee, a land of karst geology where the myriad streams cut across the open plateaus and down the hillsides, seamlessly disappearing into underground caverns where the cold gentleness of running water carves the rocks for eons leaving behind miles of small tunnels and scores of grand underground rooms. The air is damp and consistently refreshing, summer or winter; where, except the water the silence if complete and the darkness is total.
It is in these caves that creatures who have no Platonian inkling of the light of day live their lives in submerged darkness. Creatures such as the Tennessee cave salamander, cave crayfish, the [some kind of fish]. Not all species live in every cave, some are confined to only one cave in Arkansas or Tennessee but sill they hold in common their odd little lives in these subterranean worlds where the darkness has deprived them of eyesight as well as eyes and their bodies have grown translucent and pale for lack of pigmentation.
These creatures which have adapted so wonderfully to their niche environment live off the richness of bat guano, left behind by the mobile little flying mammals that reside on the walls and ceilings of the caves by day and venture into the comparative brightness of the upper world at night.
These fragile ecosystems are at the mercy of the world above as good ol’ boys throw beer cans and old refrigerators down sinkholes thinking they will one day make solid ground out of these slowly dissolving ground if only they throw in enough junk. And run off from agriculture, highways, and drainage ditches from the world above flow into these cave systems wreaking havoc on fragile ecosystems which remain hidden and unknown to most of the world as it flies by at seventy miles an hour.
We walk across gravel until the floor of the cave is only a small channel of rushing water, at which point we climb up onto a ledge and scramble farther back around a bend where the light of the upper world leaves us and we are left at the mercy of a small flashlight no bigger than my index finger. Here the cave opens up again and we continue back to a wall where the splits off to the left and right. In all this Espey Cave goes back for six miles and drops two hundred feet below the surface. But our light is already flickering.
We sit down on a flat rock and turn out the light to let it recharge. We share a cigarette in a darkness more complete that can ever be known in the upper world where even at night the stars provide a glaring degree of illumination unknown to the creatures of this underworld. This darkness is safe and anonymous, caves are good places to talk and make confessions. The cherry glow of the cigarette ash takes on a ceremonious glow in a living cave which can feel like the vaults of a great cathedral when the conversation turns to the right subjects.
Afterwards I build a small cairn on the rock where we had sat, a little shrine that will be washed away some great rain event of the oncoming winter. Then we walk out.
Back in day light we scramble up, sometimes climbing hand-over-hand but always up until we reach ground we can walk on. Up and up through old red- and yellow chinkapin oaks and yellow hickory trees.
Four hundred vertical feet later we pause at the top of the ridge and look out across the early November Tennessee landscape, breathing heavy in the crackling air. The leaves have really been coming off the trees in the past few days opening up the view across the gorges to other distant ridges. But there is still color, and heat, the golden yellows of autumn. If there is a heaven I can only imagine it is this, this all infusing light, and when we first see it maybe we’ll feel like we’ve just come out of a cave.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Big South Fork
The Big South Fork of the Cumberland River forms at the confluence of the New River and Clear Fork River. From here it winds ninety river miles cutting a six hundred foot deep gorge through the sandstone highlands of the Cumberland Plateau, flowing north into Kentucky where it lends its waters to the Cumberland River. The Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area encompasses 125,000 acres of the watershed of this wild, free flowing river. Formed in 1974, the BSFNRRA protects rugged mountain land that had been stripped of timber and mined for coal from the late 1800’s until the middle of the twentieth century. The extractive activities left the land scarred and the environment of a once pristine place in a dubious state. But nature heals her wounds and through photosynthesis and the freeze and thaw of the seasons the efforts of man crumble when left unattended and green creeps back over denuded landscapes.
It was in this high terrain that a friend and I retreated with a couple of good trail dogs to take breather during the fall break of my first college semester in fifteen years. Conceived as a get away three years previously after I first got out of the Navy the initial plan had been to wander cross country with my dog and a back pack with nothing but a compass and topographic map to guide me. But plans change. Still, we had planned on backpacking but that turned into car camping (a tip of the hat to Mark Sundeen’s cult classic of outdoor/slacker living), and ultimately what had started as a trip into the backcountry of the Big South Fork became a somewhat rollicking sampling of the surrounding region.
After the interminable twisting, drive over pretty country roads through the ever intensifying colors of autumn we arrived and set up camp in Bandy Creek Campground, site 49. At $19 per night to tent camp the park is proud of their camp sites. But the location is really good and central to anything one would ever want to do in the southern portion of the park.
Though a ranger had advised us against taking dogs on the Honey Creek Loop, we decided to do it anyway, starting a bit late in the afternoon and jumped into the woods. The trail walks down a very small creek which was soggy after days of rain though every day of our trip would prove to be nothing but outstanding with the painfully blue clear skies and increasingly warm days of an Indian summer. An unusually wet summer season had left the ground well primed for a plethora of fungi which we marveled at and photographed over the entire three days we were in the area. Along the trail we also found a fine example of a euonymus called strawberry bush or hearts a bustin’.
After three miles or so we came to a place to either continue on the long loop trail or take an abbreviated side trail directly to the Honey Creek Overlook, a spot the Audubon Society Field Guide to the Southeastern United States calls one of the most beautiful overlooks in Tennessee. The terrain is rugged and there was no easy way to get to the overlook…I tried to find it for the sake of the dogs. It turns out the only way up about forty feet of rock face is to climb up a couple of steel ladders that are pitched at a good 55 or 60 degree slope. Lilly, the smaller dog was hesitant but managed to go on up with a little encouragement. Maze Dog, sixty pounds of wild energy who has intrepidly lunged into raging rivers from the Cascade Mountains to flooded low country rivers in middle Tennessee, got about a third of the way up then started to whimper. I stood immediately behind her, helping her raise one paw above the other until at last she made it up.
The effort to get the dogs up was worthwhile. Honey Creek Overlook is a beautiful spot, looking down a long gorge where the oaks, hickories, and poplars were turning with the season. The river below was slightly flooded and powerful. The overlook is situated on a wooded platform. Countless visitors had left messages to lost loved ones written in Sharpie or carved into the railing…and on the benches…and on the posts. Below by one of the rockhouses (the overhang of a bluff where one can go in and rest on a dry bed of sand) we passed there was an unopened pepsi can which had been placed ceremoniously on a rock and a somewhat ambitious memorial spray painted on the rock. “Remember the sunrise has never failed us” was the quote my friend and I took and ran with as the recurring theme of our upper Cumberland expedition.
Leaving the overlook we walked a pleasant mile down a gravel country lane, testing our acumen as naturalist by spot identifying winged and staghorn sumac, sourwood, and dogwood.
Driving back into the park proper around loopy highway 297, we parked at the East Rim Overlook and hiked the 1.3 miles at the perfect time of day to Sunset Overlook. When we got to the narrow sandstone shelf the sun was at that perfect angle to set the world on fire. It’s the time of day I like to look into its brightness and imagine all that can be in the world. Its when everything is cast with the pall of that 1970’s film haziness that dissolves the sharpness of lines until the trees, rocks, people, everything in my field of view lose their sharp edges and blend into one, like some Siddharthic awakening. And like such awakenings these moments are brief and the most must be made of them, from both a photographic sense and as concerns rejuvenating the soul within.
Walking back out the trail we noted that the grey brown leaves of Umbrella magnolia that had fallen on the forest floor looked like litter. Then I found an umbrella magnolia tree and collected a specimen for my herbarium.
Getting camp going that night was rough. We fought wet wood and plunging temperatures but finally turned out a decent camp supper of roasted potatoes, onions, squash and zucchini, served along side grilled chicken breasts. Car camping with a color and little grill is really the way to go. A crystalline sky filled with a million stars and a bottle of Red Truck put us over the top, making the crawl into cold sleeping bags not quite so bad.
The next morning was coffee, boiled eggs and shivering until the sun had climbed a ways in the sky revealing another beautiful day and it was evident that the day would be considerably warmer than the day before.
After some consideration we drove down a narrow gravel road to the Twin Arches trailhead. The trail wound around the base of sandstone bluff past a number of rockhouses. We stopped and inspected each one for signs of sandwort, a plant my hiking partner had spent time protecting in nearby Pickett State park, and flint chippings and arrowheads. I really wanted to find another arrowhead but alas all we found were chippings and leaves that tricked us into picking them up.
We wandered onto the first of the arches almost without noticing it. This seems like it would be hard to do since these two arches constitute the largest formation of its kind in the eastern United States. The trail rounds a bend and suddenly the first arch is there. But unlike the formations in Arches National Park which are red and exposed the twin Arches of BFSNRRA are made of a whitish grey sandstone and well concealed by lush vegetation. But make no mistake, they are impressive. The South Arch is 70 feet high and spans 135 feet. We stood awestruck at the beauty of it for a moment. I can only imagine what the first longhunters thought in the 1760’s when they came across the arches for the first time. Undoubtedly some of them had seen the Natural Bridge in Virginia and, when viewed together, this formation is substantially larger than that one. A trail to the left leads to the North Arch. We paused for the obligatory pictures and enjoyed a cigarette. Then we climbed a series of wooden steps to the top of the arch.
A spectacular panorama of canyon and ridges revealed itself bringing up the obvious comparisons to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. The chasm wasn’t as wide, the gorge not as deep, but this is about as big as one will find in the east. And it is big. Of all the reading I’d done researching trails none of the literature had talked about the view from on top of the arches. It provided us with the inspiration which people are looking for when they go out in nature. Under a sky of cobalt blue we sat on the edge and ate some lunch, enjoying the sixty-five degree sunshine after the long, cold night. Small Virginia pines grew from the slightest cracks in the rock, contorted and windblown like ancient bonsai trees. Later, walking along the ridge above the arches we Schumard Oak, glade privet, and sassafras in profusion. We came across a phasmid, or stick bug, laying immobile in the sandy trail. It looked like one of the dogs had stepped on it. But on closer inspection it turned out that these were two bugs mating. What I had thought was a broken leg was the much smaller male latched onto the female.
We walked a short side trail that led back to the parking lot. Here’s is where plans changed. Sometimes spending days hiking in nature one feels a sense of obligation to note every last feature on every single trail. I call it the beautiful waterfall- beautiful tree-beautiful rock formation syndrome. Having already walked a good bit and seen the best we decided to see something different. We drove out and got on the highway bound for Rugby.
Rugby is a relic of the last days of English colonialism, formed in the good faith of Christian Socialism with just an air of Victorian superiority. It was the brainchild of Thomas Hughes, a second son of England who was determined to establish a settlement where the second sons of the English gentry could come and make a rough living with their hands while retiring to the cultured world they were used to at the end of the day. Founded in 1880 on such high ideals the colony lasted seven years until at last it dissolved through poor management and what remains today are some Victorian carpenter gothic houses, an Episcopal Church (smack in the land of Church of Christ and Primitive Baptists) and an old cemetery.
I’d also heard there might be a winery nearby. Turns out there was. Highland Manor is Tennessee’s oldest winery. We stopped in and sampled all the varieties they had to offer. The reserve chardonnay was extra special. But cost/taste analysis dictated our purchase so we bought the cheapest red they had along with some fancy cheese and dearly, dearly, way overpriced rosemary crackers. Then back to Rugby.
It was late afternoon when we arrived at the Gentlemen’s Swimming Hole trailhead which is a part of the BSFNRRA. But rather than immediately jump on the trail we wandered around the old Laureldale Cemetery, noting the curious English names on the headstones and the many types of fungi growing on the ground. A pair of pileated wood peckers flickered in and out of the large cemetery trees. Four British people walked around, I presume looking for some curious ancestor who had sailed off to America to settle in the Tennessee backcountry in an attempt to establish a utopia in an imperfect world.
Finally we hiked the half mile trail down to the Gentlemen’s Swimming Hole which is a short stretch of the Clear Fork, photographing fungi all the way. We saw large poplars and hemlocks, a couple of which were dead, possibly victims of the wooly adgelid which is certain wreak total devastation on the beautiful hemlocks of the Big South Fork when it arrives…if it isn’t there already. By the river we sat amid a tangle of rhododendron, watching the dogs play in the sand under river birch and silver maples. The light of day faded from the gorge and we walked just fast enough to reach the plateau before total darkness sat in.
That night, back at camp was pleasantly warmer, the fire easier to start, the meal a smorgasbord of expensive cheese, roasted ears of corn and mixed vegetables. The setting made the local wine phenomenal.
Sometimes we have to find renewal in little doses: a cup of coffee, a night out with friends, an afternoon run. But sometimes we need a couple of days away from everybody we know and every distraction that can come in on a cell phone or email. Sometimes we need rugged land and a failed utopian dream. Nothing fails that is attempted and nothing is attempted but that there’s a hole in us we need to fill. Big South Fork is a place of renewal where man can scratch the surface looking for coal and timber or a better way to live. But ultimately Mother Nature embraces her ever striving sons and daughters in the wilderness of the mountains and river, holding them close, eroding away all the karma they bring with them until all that is left is the sound of water rushing over the rocks and the wind blowing through the canyons.
It was in this high terrain that a friend and I retreated with a couple of good trail dogs to take breather during the fall break of my first college semester in fifteen years. Conceived as a get away three years previously after I first got out of the Navy the initial plan had been to wander cross country with my dog and a back pack with nothing but a compass and topographic map to guide me. But plans change. Still, we had planned on backpacking but that turned into car camping (a tip of the hat to Mark Sundeen’s cult classic of outdoor/slacker living), and ultimately what had started as a trip into the backcountry of the Big South Fork became a somewhat rollicking sampling of the surrounding region.
After the interminable twisting, drive over pretty country roads through the ever intensifying colors of autumn we arrived and set up camp in Bandy Creek Campground, site 49. At $19 per night to tent camp the park is proud of their camp sites. But the location is really good and central to anything one would ever want to do in the southern portion of the park.
Though a ranger had advised us against taking dogs on the Honey Creek Loop, we decided to do it anyway, starting a bit late in the afternoon and jumped into the woods. The trail walks down a very small creek which was soggy after days of rain though every day of our trip would prove to be nothing but outstanding with the painfully blue clear skies and increasingly warm days of an Indian summer. An unusually wet summer season had left the ground well primed for a plethora of fungi which we marveled at and photographed over the entire three days we were in the area. Along the trail we also found a fine example of a euonymus called strawberry bush or hearts a bustin’.
After three miles or so we came to a place to either continue on the long loop trail or take an abbreviated side trail directly to the Honey Creek Overlook, a spot the Audubon Society Field Guide to the Southeastern United States calls one of the most beautiful overlooks in Tennessee. The terrain is rugged and there was no easy way to get to the overlook…I tried to find it for the sake of the dogs. It turns out the only way up about forty feet of rock face is to climb up a couple of steel ladders that are pitched at a good 55 or 60 degree slope. Lilly, the smaller dog was hesitant but managed to go on up with a little encouragement. Maze Dog, sixty pounds of wild energy who has intrepidly lunged into raging rivers from the Cascade Mountains to flooded low country rivers in middle Tennessee, got about a third of the way up then started to whimper. I stood immediately behind her, helping her raise one paw above the other until at last she made it up.
The effort to get the dogs up was worthwhile. Honey Creek Overlook is a beautiful spot, looking down a long gorge where the oaks, hickories, and poplars were turning with the season. The river below was slightly flooded and powerful. The overlook is situated on a wooded platform. Countless visitors had left messages to lost loved ones written in Sharpie or carved into the railing…and on the benches…and on the posts. Below by one of the rockhouses (the overhang of a bluff where one can go in and rest on a dry bed of sand) we passed there was an unopened pepsi can which had been placed ceremoniously on a rock and a somewhat ambitious memorial spray painted on the rock. “Remember the sunrise has never failed us” was the quote my friend and I took and ran with as the recurring theme of our upper Cumberland expedition.
Leaving the overlook we walked a pleasant mile down a gravel country lane, testing our acumen as naturalist by spot identifying winged and staghorn sumac, sourwood, and dogwood.
Driving back into the park proper around loopy highway 297, we parked at the East Rim Overlook and hiked the 1.3 miles at the perfect time of day to Sunset Overlook. When we got to the narrow sandstone shelf the sun was at that perfect angle to set the world on fire. It’s the time of day I like to look into its brightness and imagine all that can be in the world. Its when everything is cast with the pall of that 1970’s film haziness that dissolves the sharpness of lines until the trees, rocks, people, everything in my field of view lose their sharp edges and blend into one, like some Siddharthic awakening. And like such awakenings these moments are brief and the most must be made of them, from both a photographic sense and as concerns rejuvenating the soul within.
Walking back out the trail we noted that the grey brown leaves of Umbrella magnolia that had fallen on the forest floor looked like litter. Then I found an umbrella magnolia tree and collected a specimen for my herbarium.
Getting camp going that night was rough. We fought wet wood and plunging temperatures but finally turned out a decent camp supper of roasted potatoes, onions, squash and zucchini, served along side grilled chicken breasts. Car camping with a color and little grill is really the way to go. A crystalline sky filled with a million stars and a bottle of Red Truck put us over the top, making the crawl into cold sleeping bags not quite so bad.
The next morning was coffee, boiled eggs and shivering until the sun had climbed a ways in the sky revealing another beautiful day and it was evident that the day would be considerably warmer than the day before.
After some consideration we drove down a narrow gravel road to the Twin Arches trailhead. The trail wound around the base of sandstone bluff past a number of rockhouses. We stopped and inspected each one for signs of sandwort, a plant my hiking partner had spent time protecting in nearby Pickett State park, and flint chippings and arrowheads. I really wanted to find another arrowhead but alas all we found were chippings and leaves that tricked us into picking them up.
We wandered onto the first of the arches almost without noticing it. This seems like it would be hard to do since these two arches constitute the largest formation of its kind in the eastern United States. The trail rounds a bend and suddenly the first arch is there. But unlike the formations in Arches National Park which are red and exposed the twin Arches of BFSNRRA are made of a whitish grey sandstone and well concealed by lush vegetation. But make no mistake, they are impressive. The South Arch is 70 feet high and spans 135 feet. We stood awestruck at the beauty of it for a moment. I can only imagine what the first longhunters thought in the 1760’s when they came across the arches for the first time. Undoubtedly some of them had seen the Natural Bridge in Virginia and, when viewed together, this formation is substantially larger than that one. A trail to the left leads to the North Arch. We paused for the obligatory pictures and enjoyed a cigarette. Then we climbed a series of wooden steps to the top of the arch.
A spectacular panorama of canyon and ridges revealed itself bringing up the obvious comparisons to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. The chasm wasn’t as wide, the gorge not as deep, but this is about as big as one will find in the east. And it is big. Of all the reading I’d done researching trails none of the literature had talked about the view from on top of the arches. It provided us with the inspiration which people are looking for when they go out in nature. Under a sky of cobalt blue we sat on the edge and ate some lunch, enjoying the sixty-five degree sunshine after the long, cold night. Small Virginia pines grew from the slightest cracks in the rock, contorted and windblown like ancient bonsai trees. Later, walking along the ridge above the arches we Schumard Oak, glade privet, and sassafras in profusion. We came across a phasmid, or stick bug, laying immobile in the sandy trail. It looked like one of the dogs had stepped on it. But on closer inspection it turned out that these were two bugs mating. What I had thought was a broken leg was the much smaller male latched onto the female.
We walked a short side trail that led back to the parking lot. Here’s is where plans changed. Sometimes spending days hiking in nature one feels a sense of obligation to note every last feature on every single trail. I call it the beautiful waterfall- beautiful tree-beautiful rock formation syndrome. Having already walked a good bit and seen the best we decided to see something different. We drove out and got on the highway bound for Rugby.
Rugby is a relic of the last days of English colonialism, formed in the good faith of Christian Socialism with just an air of Victorian superiority. It was the brainchild of Thomas Hughes, a second son of England who was determined to establish a settlement where the second sons of the English gentry could come and make a rough living with their hands while retiring to the cultured world they were used to at the end of the day. Founded in 1880 on such high ideals the colony lasted seven years until at last it dissolved through poor management and what remains today are some Victorian carpenter gothic houses, an Episcopal Church (smack in the land of Church of Christ and Primitive Baptists) and an old cemetery.
I’d also heard there might be a winery nearby. Turns out there was. Highland Manor is Tennessee’s oldest winery. We stopped in and sampled all the varieties they had to offer. The reserve chardonnay was extra special. But cost/taste analysis dictated our purchase so we bought the cheapest red they had along with some fancy cheese and dearly, dearly, way overpriced rosemary crackers. Then back to Rugby.
It was late afternoon when we arrived at the Gentlemen’s Swimming Hole trailhead which is a part of the BSFNRRA. But rather than immediately jump on the trail we wandered around the old Laureldale Cemetery, noting the curious English names on the headstones and the many types of fungi growing on the ground. A pair of pileated wood peckers flickered in and out of the large cemetery trees. Four British people walked around, I presume looking for some curious ancestor who had sailed off to America to settle in the Tennessee backcountry in an attempt to establish a utopia in an imperfect world.
Finally we hiked the half mile trail down to the Gentlemen’s Swimming Hole which is a short stretch of the Clear Fork, photographing fungi all the way. We saw large poplars and hemlocks, a couple of which were dead, possibly victims of the wooly adgelid which is certain wreak total devastation on the beautiful hemlocks of the Big South Fork when it arrives…if it isn’t there already. By the river we sat amid a tangle of rhododendron, watching the dogs play in the sand under river birch and silver maples. The light of day faded from the gorge and we walked just fast enough to reach the plateau before total darkness sat in.
That night, back at camp was pleasantly warmer, the fire easier to start, the meal a smorgasbord of expensive cheese, roasted ears of corn and mixed vegetables. The setting made the local wine phenomenal.
Sometimes we have to find renewal in little doses: a cup of coffee, a night out with friends, an afternoon run. But sometimes we need a couple of days away from everybody we know and every distraction that can come in on a cell phone or email. Sometimes we need rugged land and a failed utopian dream. Nothing fails that is attempted and nothing is attempted but that there’s a hole in us we need to fill. Big South Fork is a place of renewal where man can scratch the surface looking for coal and timber or a better way to live. But ultimately Mother Nature embraces her ever striving sons and daughters in the wilderness of the mountains and river, holding them close, eroding away all the karma they bring with them until all that is left is the sound of water rushing over the rocks and the wind blowing through the canyons.
Friday, October 16, 2009
Meriwether Lewis Memorial Service
Back on October 7th a friend and I took the long but scenic drive from Murfreesboro, down through Columbia, and across Highway 412 to the Meriwether Lewis Monument on the Natchez Trace. We were going down to pay homage to the man whom I’ve written about and read about so much in the past two years. Two hundred years after his death Meriwether Lewis was going to be memorialized and given a proper military funeral.
Like so much of the summer and fall of 2009 the days leading up to the event had been drearily soggy with leaden skies intermittent drizzle. But this day the clouds parted to reveal that deep blue, so clear you can see the domed ceiling of the earth’s cathedral. The front that blew out the clouds also brought in some comfortably cooler temperatures with a high that barely broke the mid-60’s.
I’d been told to arrive a couple of hours early but that proved to be a bit over cautious. Yes there were crowds but then again this was being held in a park so it wasn’t going to fill up. My friend and I had a couple of hours to kill so we walked up to the obelisk that marks Lewis’ grave. It is set on a stack of stones that were rededicated in 2001 because the old from the original monument built in 1848 had crumbled with time. Limestone is like that. The same interaction of limestone and water that caused the eternal memorial to have to be rebuilt 150 years after it was placed is also responsible for the immense cave systems in Tennessee and Kentucky. The shaft on top of the stones is a broken at to signify a life cut short…Lewis was only 35 when he died.
That morning I had been reading some more of Lewis’ journal entries from his long trek with the Corps of Discovery and came across a passage where he expressed frustration at not being able to give a faithful rendition of the Great Falls of the Missouri or convey the awe which the scene inspired in him. He “most sincerely regretted that [he] had not brought a crimee obscura…”. This puzzled me because I knew that photography didn’t come into existence until the 1839 when Louis Daguerre invented the daguerreotype. Or was there something before?
I walked over to man in period costume who was at work under a parasol standing behind what looked like an old camera. His name was John Staley and he said that he had also been puzzled by the mention of a crimee obscura…so much so that he had done some research and then built two of them. One was on loan to Monticello, the other was the one he was using at the monument. He explained that a crimee obscura isn’t a camera…however its everything but one. “All that’s missing is the chemistry,” said Staley.
He showed me how it works and it is decidedly clever. The lens is aimed at the object in question, the image is reflected off a mirror and projected onto a screen in the box of the instrument. At this point a thin sheet of paper is placed over the screen and the object is traced. Its an ingenuous way to capture perfect proportion and details.
Staley had come to capture the monument in his crimee obscura but he was attracting too much attention to get any work done. I think this day his work was really presenting some living history to people who obviously had an interest.
The program finally started at 3:00 p.m. and had the hushed solemnity of a funeral service which it was. Keynote speakers included a Stephanie Ambrose Tubbs, daughter of Stephen Ambrose, whose book Undaunted Courage brought Meriwether Lewis back to life in the mind of the general public. A collateral descendent of Lewis read a poem and the great-great-great grandson of William Clark told of the remarkable friendship that grew between Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. In the only levity added to the situation he read Clarks acceptance to Lewis’ invitation to join the expedition, commenting that in a thirty word sentence his ancestor had managed to invent one word and misspell three others. Clark was known to be an adventurous speller.
The crowd sat respectfully quiet through it all under a shady canopy of post oaks and sweetgum trees. At the end of the service a large procession made its way to the gravesite to the steady beat of a military drum down a road lined with flags from the states that would eventually be formed from the territory which Lewis’ expedition had explored. Re-enactors stood in formation at the gravesite as dignitaries laid wreaths at the base of the monument. Then plant specimens representing those Lewis had first discovered for science were laid among the wreaths. An honor guard from the 101st Airborne fired a 21-gun salute then a piper played “Amazing Grace” on the bagpipes. As happens when “Amazing Grace” is played on the bagpipes people became teary eyed, weeping for the young national hero who took his own life too early…and probably moved by certain things going on in their own life that the shrill beauty of the tune can dredge up at moments of introspection.
I suppose Lewis was never given a proper funeral when he died in1809 but he definitely received on the day I was there.
Like so much of the summer and fall of 2009 the days leading up to the event had been drearily soggy with leaden skies intermittent drizzle. But this day the clouds parted to reveal that deep blue, so clear you can see the domed ceiling of the earth’s cathedral. The front that blew out the clouds also brought in some comfortably cooler temperatures with a high that barely broke the mid-60’s.
I’d been told to arrive a couple of hours early but that proved to be a bit over cautious. Yes there were crowds but then again this was being held in a park so it wasn’t going to fill up. My friend and I had a couple of hours to kill so we walked up to the obelisk that marks Lewis’ grave. It is set on a stack of stones that were rededicated in 2001 because the old from the original monument built in 1848 had crumbled with time. Limestone is like that. The same interaction of limestone and water that caused the eternal memorial to have to be rebuilt 150 years after it was placed is also responsible for the immense cave systems in Tennessee and Kentucky. The shaft on top of the stones is a broken at to signify a life cut short…Lewis was only 35 when he died.
That morning I had been reading some more of Lewis’ journal entries from his long trek with the Corps of Discovery and came across a passage where he expressed frustration at not being able to give a faithful rendition of the Great Falls of the Missouri or convey the awe which the scene inspired in him. He “most sincerely regretted that [he] had not brought a crimee obscura…”. This puzzled me because I knew that photography didn’t come into existence until the 1839 when Louis Daguerre invented the daguerreotype. Or was there something before?
I walked over to man in period costume who was at work under a parasol standing behind what looked like an old camera. His name was John Staley and he said that he had also been puzzled by the mention of a crimee obscura…so much so that he had done some research and then built two of them. One was on loan to Monticello, the other was the one he was using at the monument. He explained that a crimee obscura isn’t a camera…however its everything but one. “All that’s missing is the chemistry,” said Staley.
He showed me how it works and it is decidedly clever. The lens is aimed at the object in question, the image is reflected off a mirror and projected onto a screen in the box of the instrument. At this point a thin sheet of paper is placed over the screen and the object is traced. Its an ingenuous way to capture perfect proportion and details.
Staley had come to capture the monument in his crimee obscura but he was attracting too much attention to get any work done. I think this day his work was really presenting some living history to people who obviously had an interest.
The program finally started at 3:00 p.m. and had the hushed solemnity of a funeral service which it was. Keynote speakers included a Stephanie Ambrose Tubbs, daughter of Stephen Ambrose, whose book Undaunted Courage brought Meriwether Lewis back to life in the mind of the general public. A collateral descendent of Lewis read a poem and the great-great-great grandson of William Clark told of the remarkable friendship that grew between Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. In the only levity added to the situation he read Clarks acceptance to Lewis’ invitation to join the expedition, commenting that in a thirty word sentence his ancestor had managed to invent one word and misspell three others. Clark was known to be an adventurous speller.
The crowd sat respectfully quiet through it all under a shady canopy of post oaks and sweetgum trees. At the end of the service a large procession made its way to the gravesite to the steady beat of a military drum down a road lined with flags from the states that would eventually be formed from the territory which Lewis’ expedition had explored. Re-enactors stood in formation at the gravesite as dignitaries laid wreaths at the base of the monument. Then plant specimens representing those Lewis had first discovered for science were laid among the wreaths. An honor guard from the 101st Airborne fired a 21-gun salute then a piper played “Amazing Grace” on the bagpipes. As happens when “Amazing Grace” is played on the bagpipes people became teary eyed, weeping for the young national hero who took his own life too early…and probably moved by certain things going on in their own life that the shrill beauty of the tune can dredge up at moments of introspection.
I suppose Lewis was never given a proper funeral when he died in1809 but he definitely received on the day I was there.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Mary Travers - In Memorium
I just found out Mary Travers passed away today so now I’m sitting here in the dim light of a desk lamp listening to the wonderful music of Peter, Paul, and Mary.
I remember back in ’83 or ’84 when my dad brought home a 45-rpm record of “Blowin’ In the Wind” b/s “Puff the Magic Dragon”. That was the first time I’d heard the trio and Ms. Travers’ achingly haunting voice. Within a year I was learning to play the guitar, an old Ventura, and one of the first songs I picked out was “Puff the Magic Dragon”.
So much living has transpired since then: war, disillusionment, poverty,…everything I thought I’d never experience, winding up where I thought I’d never be. Now, after this, the longest of summers, I’m having my most meaningful musical moment in years. That’s the power of music and the legacy of Mary Travers. She left behind music that defined a time in America’s history and a shifted mindset, the remnants of which are still around today.
Through her death the curious of a new generation will discover her music. Seekers always do. I hope they enjoy it as much as I am tonight.
I remember back in ’83 or ’84 when my dad brought home a 45-rpm record of “Blowin’ In the Wind” b/s “Puff the Magic Dragon”. That was the first time I’d heard the trio and Ms. Travers’ achingly haunting voice. Within a year I was learning to play the guitar, an old Ventura, and one of the first songs I picked out was “Puff the Magic Dragon”.
So much living has transpired since then: war, disillusionment, poverty,…everything I thought I’d never experience, winding up where I thought I’d never be. Now, after this, the longest of summers, I’m having my most meaningful musical moment in years. That’s the power of music and the legacy of Mary Travers. She left behind music that defined a time in America’s history and a shifted mindset, the remnants of which are still around today.
Through her death the curious of a new generation will discover her music. Seekers always do. I hope they enjoy it as much as I am tonight.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Bicycles & Beer
When I was young I used to imagine myself as a fifty or sixty year old man, slightly retarded, riding around on a tricycle with three gears and a big basket. In these visions I wore a straw cowboy hat and those thick plastic glasses the Navy and Maries like to call “birth control” glasses. I think I may have even envisioned denim shorts with an elastic waist band at some point.
Thus attired and presumably homeless I would ride my tricycle around town and young jocks would chase me and try to beat me up. Pretty girls would always say things like, “C’mon Jake, don’t mess with that poor man.” I was grateful for their sympathy and would ring the bell on my handlebars and ride off while Jake’s attention was diverted.
So that brings me to today. I do ride a bicycle now, albeit a mountain bike, a fairly decent one at that. I ride commando in cargo shorts in lieu of the denim with the elastic band, wear a tattered ball cap rather than a cowboy hat, and Lasik got rid of the old birth control glasses.
But otherwise the vision has come true…or might, I’m only thirty-six so there’s still time.
I live in the old downtown part of Murfreesboro where people share $900,000 homes within a block or two of ramshackle section 8 housing. Last night I rode to the mini-market on the corner of Main Street and Middle Tennessee Boulevard and bought a 12-pack of Old Milwaukee. As I was about to walk out the door I saw some scraggly middle school kids standing around my bicycle. So, its back to this. Like so many bespectacled, pimply boys, I had problems in middle school. Not popular, pushed around, the kind of guy everybody thought would grow up playing D&D and video games. (Thankfully I actually spent my days out of doors so never got sucked into either of these geek traps).
Well, I walked over to my bicycle fully expecting some heckling, maybe a shove from behind…but instead they just asked if I’d bought the bike at the bike shop a few blocks away. “No, but I hear that place is good.” Then I accidentally stepped into one of the boys who was standing behind me and instead of a belligerent “what the fuck, nerd” he just said, “sorry, Sir.”
I got on the bike and rode toward my apartment carrying the 12-pack by its cardboard handle, hoping it wouldn’t rip and my $7.50 be shot to hell with a bunch of busted beer cans raddled with spouting pin holes. I took Cherry Street, a quiet little lane of nice houses and overarching shade trees. Coming up the street toward me I saw a young mother walking a midget child. She thoughtfully held the child’s hand as he waddled along beside her. As I got closer she looked up and we exchanged gazes.
I know the look, I’ve seen it many times. More women than would like to admit look at me with a certain desire. I’ve still got that going for me. But then they see what I’ve become: a guy in his mid-30’s riding around on a bicycle carrying a 12-pack of beer. I don’t even have the horrid fluorescent spandex of a true cyclist. It doesn’t say a whole hell of a lot about my accomplishments in life.
But maybe its just the head cold talking (I’m all stuffed up this morning). Last night at the bar this girl told me I had a glowing, enriching aura. She ate a special diet so she could see such things. It sounds like a good thing…of course she also described my aura with words one would hear in a shampoo commercial.
Thus attired and presumably homeless I would ride my tricycle around town and young jocks would chase me and try to beat me up. Pretty girls would always say things like, “C’mon Jake, don’t mess with that poor man.” I was grateful for their sympathy and would ring the bell on my handlebars and ride off while Jake’s attention was diverted.
So that brings me to today. I do ride a bicycle now, albeit a mountain bike, a fairly decent one at that. I ride commando in cargo shorts in lieu of the denim with the elastic band, wear a tattered ball cap rather than a cowboy hat, and Lasik got rid of the old birth control glasses.
But otherwise the vision has come true…or might, I’m only thirty-six so there’s still time.
I live in the old downtown part of Murfreesboro where people share $900,000 homes within a block or two of ramshackle section 8 housing. Last night I rode to the mini-market on the corner of Main Street and Middle Tennessee Boulevard and bought a 12-pack of Old Milwaukee. As I was about to walk out the door I saw some scraggly middle school kids standing around my bicycle. So, its back to this. Like so many bespectacled, pimply boys, I had problems in middle school. Not popular, pushed around, the kind of guy everybody thought would grow up playing D&D and video games. (Thankfully I actually spent my days out of doors so never got sucked into either of these geek traps).
Well, I walked over to my bicycle fully expecting some heckling, maybe a shove from behind…but instead they just asked if I’d bought the bike at the bike shop a few blocks away. “No, but I hear that place is good.” Then I accidentally stepped into one of the boys who was standing behind me and instead of a belligerent “what the fuck, nerd” he just said, “sorry, Sir.”
I got on the bike and rode toward my apartment carrying the 12-pack by its cardboard handle, hoping it wouldn’t rip and my $7.50 be shot to hell with a bunch of busted beer cans raddled with spouting pin holes. I took Cherry Street, a quiet little lane of nice houses and overarching shade trees. Coming up the street toward me I saw a young mother walking a midget child. She thoughtfully held the child’s hand as he waddled along beside her. As I got closer she looked up and we exchanged gazes.
I know the look, I’ve seen it many times. More women than would like to admit look at me with a certain desire. I’ve still got that going for me. But then they see what I’ve become: a guy in his mid-30’s riding around on a bicycle carrying a 12-pack of beer. I don’t even have the horrid fluorescent spandex of a true cyclist. It doesn’t say a whole hell of a lot about my accomplishments in life.
But maybe its just the head cold talking (I’m all stuffed up this morning). Last night at the bar this girl told me I had a glowing, enriching aura. She ate a special diet so she could see such things. It sounds like a good thing…of course she also described my aura with words one would hear in a shampoo commercial.
Monday, September 07, 2009
A Popular Tree
Not really a tree of southern rivers...I'd say southern highlands instead. But this is overlooking the Piney Creek Gorge so I guess that is close enough.
Monday, August 03, 2009
Vines (actually I'm describing Virginia Creeper
Green vines of five leaves creeps over and crawls around me
Three years of no upkeep
I look like an abandoned outbuilding covered in poison
But its only a vine that can be stripped away
And won’t hurt anyone with the hand to do it.
Three years of no upkeep
I look like an abandoned outbuilding covered in poison
But its only a vine that can be stripped away
And won’t hurt anyone with the hand to do it.
Saturday, July 18, 2009
Who We Are
So much is misunderstood in this world about our intentions and who we are.
Are we the person the world sees groping through our own shortcomings, tipping the bottle to our lips, looking for courage that is not courage, only the euphoric rush of absolute despair, vibrant for a moment then consigned to a hole, deep and dank, where camelback cave crickets crawl over our dreams?
Or are we the shining star we see behind our own smile when dancing visions of greatness free our feet from muddy ground and we take wing with the hawk who has attained magnificent heights above the crows that were chasing him?
On a good day I feel I am looking at God’s perfection in a broken mirror.
Are we the person the world sees groping through our own shortcomings, tipping the bottle to our lips, looking for courage that is not courage, only the euphoric rush of absolute despair, vibrant for a moment then consigned to a hole, deep and dank, where camelback cave crickets crawl over our dreams?
Or are we the shining star we see behind our own smile when dancing visions of greatness free our feet from muddy ground and we take wing with the hawk who has attained magnificent heights above the crows that were chasing him?
On a good day I feel I am looking at God’s perfection in a broken mirror.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Monday, June 15, 2009
Southern Rivers 0001
My ode to southern rivers...One day I'll write and play the song myself, until then enjoy Norman Blake from his Whiskey Before Breakfast album.
Saturday, June 13, 2009
From My Back Pages: Tom Wicker
Here is a link to an article I wrote in 1999 when I had the chance to interview legendary newspaper man Tom Wicker. The New York Times report of Kennedy's assasination carried his byline. His other accoclades include Washington Bureau Chief for the New York Times and being on Richard Nixon's list of most despised journalists. The piece was published on the First Amendment Center web site.
http://www.freedomforum.org/templates/document.asp?documentID=4424
http://www.freedomforum.org/templates/document.asp?documentID=4424
Wednesday, June 03, 2009
Floating Away The Day
Today I went kayaking down the Harpeth River from Kingston Springs Road to the bridge at the intersection of Highway 70 and Mound Bottom Road. The hot midday sun and blue skies made for conditions that could not have been finer. I brought along my fishing pole but had absolutely no luck despite changing lures three times.
I tried bouncing a weighted worm along the rocky bottom and then reverted to two different minnow lures that caught me a few smallmouth last summer. But I don’t let petulant fish cast any cloud on such a fine day on the water.
One of the highlights was about halfway through the float when I stopped at the mouth of Turnbull Creek and waded up into its clear, briskly flowing waters. The bottom was a mix of brown river pebbles and grey slate. In one fast moving channel I came upon a school of about forty or more gar all crowded into the fast moving water and surfacing to snap at the air. At times a mildly explosive roe would ensue with the long fish breaking the water with their tangled bodies.
This particular float down the Harpeth takes kayakers and canoeists past high river bluffs. Ages ago prehistoric inhabitants painted and chipped petroglyphs onto some of these bluffs. The petroglyphs depicted the sun and the moon as well as bison, which were once common in the area. One depicted a baton. These messages from those that came before could be seen as late as the 1970’s and are discussed by James Crutchfield in his relaxing book The Harpeth River: A Biography, but I don’t know that anyone can point them out today.
The river also passes through pastureland with crumbly loess banks and some low country filled with gravel bars supporting stands of water willow and sycamore shoots. In time the tree roots and collapsing banks will direct the river into new meanders that generations too distant to contemplate will explore in their own version of canoes and kayaks.
On a less contemplative note I would liked to have seen more ladies in bikinis. I talked to one girl during my stop at Turnbull Creek but she was perhaps too young and at any rate people have different things on their mind during a working day Monday float than they do on weekend trips when the river is packed with people…and beer cans in the process of being emptied. Still, this young lady was right pretty with her full figure and country girl tan lines. The way her bikini bottom angled down just below her left hip bone was rather sexy. As for me, my farmer’s tan has left me with a dark face and arms but the sun burn I received on my chest and belly today likely gave me the appearance of a boiled crayfish in her eyes.
I am rounding out the day by firing up the grill. The charcoals are burning down as I write and it will soon be time to put on the meat. The menu is simple: thin pork chops marinated in black pepper and soy sauce, fresh cucumbers and sliced tomatoes. The beverage is Miller High Life Light…which just goes to prove that sometimes its worth springing the extra $2.50 to get the 12-pack of Miller Lite.
I tried bouncing a weighted worm along the rocky bottom and then reverted to two different minnow lures that caught me a few smallmouth last summer. But I don’t let petulant fish cast any cloud on such a fine day on the water.
One of the highlights was about halfway through the float when I stopped at the mouth of Turnbull Creek and waded up into its clear, briskly flowing waters. The bottom was a mix of brown river pebbles and grey slate. In one fast moving channel I came upon a school of about forty or more gar all crowded into the fast moving water and surfacing to snap at the air. At times a mildly explosive roe would ensue with the long fish breaking the water with their tangled bodies.
This particular float down the Harpeth takes kayakers and canoeists past high river bluffs. Ages ago prehistoric inhabitants painted and chipped petroglyphs onto some of these bluffs. The petroglyphs depicted the sun and the moon as well as bison, which were once common in the area. One depicted a baton. These messages from those that came before could be seen as late as the 1970’s and are discussed by James Crutchfield in his relaxing book The Harpeth River: A Biography, but I don’t know that anyone can point them out today.
The river also passes through pastureland with crumbly loess banks and some low country filled with gravel bars supporting stands of water willow and sycamore shoots. In time the tree roots and collapsing banks will direct the river into new meanders that generations too distant to contemplate will explore in their own version of canoes and kayaks.
On a less contemplative note I would liked to have seen more ladies in bikinis. I talked to one girl during my stop at Turnbull Creek but she was perhaps too young and at any rate people have different things on their mind during a working day Monday float than they do on weekend trips when the river is packed with people…and beer cans in the process of being emptied. Still, this young lady was right pretty with her full figure and country girl tan lines. The way her bikini bottom angled down just below her left hip bone was rather sexy. As for me, my farmer’s tan has left me with a dark face and arms but the sun burn I received on my chest and belly today likely gave me the appearance of a boiled crayfish in her eyes.
I am rounding out the day by firing up the grill. The charcoals are burning down as I write and it will soon be time to put on the meat. The menu is simple: thin pork chops marinated in black pepper and soy sauce, fresh cucumbers and sliced tomatoes. The beverage is Miller High Life Light…which just goes to prove that sometimes its worth springing the extra $2.50 to get the 12-pack of Miller Lite.
Monday, June 01, 2009
Arrowheads
Green in vast expanses is a sheet
stretched across my memory
of hills and bottomland
filled with tobacco
sprung from dirt
holding onto Indian rocks
waiting to reveal
the ages of the world
to the curiosity of
a young hand
On a rather glorious day in mid-May I was walking with my dog at Bakers Grove in Tennessee’s Long Hunter State Park. A soggy three weeks of rain and cool temperatures had left the world muddy but clean washed and the hillsides were as deep of a green as I can ever remember seeing them. Everywhere life was fresh and emerging, easing into summer. I was on a walk to photograph wildflowers but the prettiest and most interesting of these were already a month past bloom. I did find Indian pinks and wild sedum along with some nearly impossible to identify mushrooms.
I have walked this trail many times in the past two and half years since returning to middle Tennessee. It’s a good trail that skirts Percy Priest Lake and rambles four and a half miles, just far enough for a good walk without having to make a day of it though there would be far worse places to spend an entire day. It is on this trail that I have had many conversations with myself about what to do with my life: “should I go back in the Navy”, “should I quit this job”, “did I make the right move quitting that job”, and the always troubling, “I wonder what she’s doing now…”. It’s a trail I choose in part because I can let Maze Dog, my Australian shepherd/Lab mix, run off the leash while I loose myself in thought.
On one of my early hikes at Bakers Grove while enjoying the yellows and oranges of the hickories and sugar maples of the first autumn since my return to Tennessee, I was walking along a muddy stretch of the trail when I happened to look down and saw a shiny bit of flint. I stepped over it then immediately wheeled around and dug it out of the ground with my pocket knife. It was an arrowhead, right there in the middle of the trail. It had been stepped on and stepped over thousands of times. It was in bad shape. The back end was broken off but with its triangular shape, chipped beveled edges and flanged corners there was no doubting what it was. It called to mind another time when I’d been walking in the woods, wondering what path to take.
Back in 1998 I was working a job I rather detested on a loading dock for the Saturn plant in Spring Hill. One day I was out at the Gordon House on the Natchez Trace, once again looking for wildflowers, when I looked down and saw a shiny piece of flint partly sticking out of the mud of the trail. It was a well formed arrowhead with only the least bit of the tip chipped off. At that time I was struggling (if I can call making a decision that) with the notion of quitting the “good” job with Saturn in order to go to school at Mississippi State and work on a Ph.D. in botany. I agonized over the decision for about another week, then I got fired. I went to work in the garden center of a large home improvement store and went on to study some journalism at an in-state university then headed off to sea for nearly seven years. (Condensed biography).
Above are partial retellings of a story anybody who has read much by me is now familiar with. So now it is many years later in May on a day with the most beautiful blue skies and my dog is running around through the woods chasing squirrels and eating frogs. Once again I am struggling with personal issues, specifically, should I quit my job at this upscale little nursery where I work and buy a lawn mower and just cut grass in small yards and do some landscape design and container plantings for the rest of the summer? You see, in the fall I will be moving to Murfreesboro to start that Master’s in biology that I have put off for so long. I will be starting my own landscaping company while I’m there and I will be leaving the nursery where I have spent the past year. But I do like the steady paycheck and 45-50 hours a week and decent wage I make at the nursery…et cetera. So I’m rather torn up with the whole situation (along with the headache from two too many beers the night before). Thus delving into myself for answers I asked God for a sign. What did I get?
I look down and there it is. Here we go again. Lying on the rock in just a bit of mud is a broken arrowhead. Keep in mind I’m not out looking for arrowheads. If I was going to do that I’d find a ploughed field in a river bottom. In Tennessee you’ll find arrowheads all day long in such places. But no. I’m walking through the forest, occasionally looking down at where I step over uneven terrain.
What does it mean? I don’t know. I do know that there is a thrill in picking up something a human being made and that no one else has touched for hundreds, possibly thousands of years. I sent up a quick prayer to the Creator hoping that this projectile had brought food to whoever had shot it. If in fact the arrowhead is, let’s say, five thousand years old I can only imagine how alien our world today would be to the person whose hands had crafted this Stone Age implement. There is no way a person picking up my spent shotgun shell’s plastic casing five thousand years from now could live in a world more different from the present than our world is from that indigenous hunter’s so many years ago.
Arrowhead,
Tucked between two remote controls (pieces of plastic that control my evenings and some peoples’ lives) you look so out of place:
Chipped flint, cutting edges with a rounded heart. Relic of the earth when man was a child of the dirt and trees and running water.
Were you a product of war or a missed chance at communal meat?
Our meat is wrapped in plastic, our wars fought from pushed buttons.
Despite the smooth edges and erogonomic design the wars are more terrible and the lives of our food animals so much more brutal than your sharp edges could ever be.
I continued my walk. I had little epiphanies throughout the day like maybe I should start a line of outdoor apparel or maybe I should buy a $20 scratch off ticket and try to win some start up money playing the lottery. At any rate I’m pretty sure I’m receiving signs from “on high” but short of a burning bush saying “Do this”, I don’t have any real answers.
stretched across my memory
of hills and bottomland
filled with tobacco
sprung from dirt
holding onto Indian rocks
waiting to reveal
the ages of the world
to the curiosity of
a young hand
On a rather glorious day in mid-May I was walking with my dog at Bakers Grove in Tennessee’s Long Hunter State Park. A soggy three weeks of rain and cool temperatures had left the world muddy but clean washed and the hillsides were as deep of a green as I can ever remember seeing them. Everywhere life was fresh and emerging, easing into summer. I was on a walk to photograph wildflowers but the prettiest and most interesting of these were already a month past bloom. I did find Indian pinks and wild sedum along with some nearly impossible to identify mushrooms.
I have walked this trail many times in the past two and half years since returning to middle Tennessee. It’s a good trail that skirts Percy Priest Lake and rambles four and a half miles, just far enough for a good walk without having to make a day of it though there would be far worse places to spend an entire day. It is on this trail that I have had many conversations with myself about what to do with my life: “should I go back in the Navy”, “should I quit this job”, “did I make the right move quitting that job”, and the always troubling, “I wonder what she’s doing now…”. It’s a trail I choose in part because I can let Maze Dog, my Australian shepherd/Lab mix, run off the leash while I loose myself in thought.
On one of my early hikes at Bakers Grove while enjoying the yellows and oranges of the hickories and sugar maples of the first autumn since my return to Tennessee, I was walking along a muddy stretch of the trail when I happened to look down and saw a shiny bit of flint. I stepped over it then immediately wheeled around and dug it out of the ground with my pocket knife. It was an arrowhead, right there in the middle of the trail. It had been stepped on and stepped over thousands of times. It was in bad shape. The back end was broken off but with its triangular shape, chipped beveled edges and flanged corners there was no doubting what it was. It called to mind another time when I’d been walking in the woods, wondering what path to take.
Back in 1998 I was working a job I rather detested on a loading dock for the Saturn plant in Spring Hill. One day I was out at the Gordon House on the Natchez Trace, once again looking for wildflowers, when I looked down and saw a shiny piece of flint partly sticking out of the mud of the trail. It was a well formed arrowhead with only the least bit of the tip chipped off. At that time I was struggling (if I can call making a decision that) with the notion of quitting the “good” job with Saturn in order to go to school at Mississippi State and work on a Ph.D. in botany. I agonized over the decision for about another week, then I got fired. I went to work in the garden center of a large home improvement store and went on to study some journalism at an in-state university then headed off to sea for nearly seven years. (Condensed biography).
Above are partial retellings of a story anybody who has read much by me is now familiar with. So now it is many years later in May on a day with the most beautiful blue skies and my dog is running around through the woods chasing squirrels and eating frogs. Once again I am struggling with personal issues, specifically, should I quit my job at this upscale little nursery where I work and buy a lawn mower and just cut grass in small yards and do some landscape design and container plantings for the rest of the summer? You see, in the fall I will be moving to Murfreesboro to start that Master’s in biology that I have put off for so long. I will be starting my own landscaping company while I’m there and I will be leaving the nursery where I have spent the past year. But I do like the steady paycheck and 45-50 hours a week and decent wage I make at the nursery…et cetera. So I’m rather torn up with the whole situation (along with the headache from two too many beers the night before). Thus delving into myself for answers I asked God for a sign. What did I get?
I look down and there it is. Here we go again. Lying on the rock in just a bit of mud is a broken arrowhead. Keep in mind I’m not out looking for arrowheads. If I was going to do that I’d find a ploughed field in a river bottom. In Tennessee you’ll find arrowheads all day long in such places. But no. I’m walking through the forest, occasionally looking down at where I step over uneven terrain.
What does it mean? I don’t know. I do know that there is a thrill in picking up something a human being made and that no one else has touched for hundreds, possibly thousands of years. I sent up a quick prayer to the Creator hoping that this projectile had brought food to whoever had shot it. If in fact the arrowhead is, let’s say, five thousand years old I can only imagine how alien our world today would be to the person whose hands had crafted this Stone Age implement. There is no way a person picking up my spent shotgun shell’s plastic casing five thousand years from now could live in a world more different from the present than our world is from that indigenous hunter’s so many years ago.
Arrowhead,
Tucked between two remote controls (pieces of plastic that control my evenings and some peoples’ lives) you look so out of place:
Chipped flint, cutting edges with a rounded heart. Relic of the earth when man was a child of the dirt and trees and running water.
Were you a product of war or a missed chance at communal meat?
Our meat is wrapped in plastic, our wars fought from pushed buttons.
Despite the smooth edges and erogonomic design the wars are more terrible and the lives of our food animals so much more brutal than your sharp edges could ever be.
I continued my walk. I had little epiphanies throughout the day like maybe I should start a line of outdoor apparel or maybe I should buy a $20 scratch off ticket and try to win some start up money playing the lottery. At any rate I’m pretty sure I’m receiving signs from “on high” but short of a burning bush saying “Do this”, I don’t have any real answers.
Sunday, May 03, 2009
Rain Washed World
Yesterday was anxiety ridden and uncomfortable for much of the day. I had to play my little game of fighting the anxiety, doing my best to not flee while standing in line at Borders to buy The Lost City of Z with my 40% off coupon. Part of my courage came from the story in the book itself: an aging explorer going off into the Amazon one last time in search of Eldorado. After reading The River of Doubt about Theodore Roosevelt’s Amazon adventure I eat up such stories.
All went well at the counter as I knew it would, as it always does. I walked back out into the dripping early May air and drove down Franklin Road to Radnor Lake. It was about five thirty, about the latest I’d ever been out there. I took my camera and walked the lake trail in search of trilliums and other wildflowers to photograph. I think I was too late. The delphinium and may-apple of a couple of weeks ago were fading as well. But despite the lack of wildflowers I thoroughly enjoyed my walk in the gloaming along the cushiony trail. The air dripped from days of rain and was as fresh as anything I remember in my life. It was wet, cool and heavy on my skin. The living forest floor sent up its humus smell and I felt alive, the anxiety fading.
I nearly steppe don a young squirrel digging something out of the foot path and twice walked upon a doe nearly close enough to touch.
I love the Tennessee forest in May and June. There is nothing greener in the world, not even the Amazon. I’ve never been to the Amazon but I’ve ridden horses through the jungles in Panama so it’s got to be similar.
I once wrote a poem about a rain washed Tennessee May morning:
Slow day, May 1997.
Coffee sipped on her couch
Knowing I would never be the one
Grateful for the warm rain on leafy green maple trees
That makes falling so much softer than
Nothing at all.
Where was the other one?
Working at the bakery?
Curled under a light blanket in her bed?
Wondering where I was or (true love)
When I’d come back to see her…
But I sat unwanted on the couch
Sipping coffee
Knowing I had to be at work at eleven,
Hoping it would stop raining by then.
That poem was about a real event. It took place on a Sunday morning. I worked at a garden center then and I had to go in and work a short shift though with the weather I remember it not being too busy. Afterwards I went out and planted a big Bradford pear for an older lady. That evening I drove back out to Jackson County to my grandmother’s house. We had a supper of fried salmon patties. I was dead tired having spent the last two days working, drinking, and sleeping on couches. I took a shower that night and slept as peacefully as I ever have.
I still like what that poem has to say and the feeling that comes over me when I read it. It is relaxed. Sometimes I think about the “other one” from the poem and the evenings I spent with her in that little fresh air house she lived in that college town. There was something right about the whole thing, something I ran away from and occasionally still wonder “what if” when I think about her. All of us in the poem have moved on now but I think I have moved the least distance emotionally. I’m still working at a garden center chasing girls that marginally like me. But I’m getting too old for that. I’m retreating into the woods more often now. There’s a freshness I can get from the rain which recharges me more than the smooth loins of a convenient girlfriend.
In the forest I go back in time. I remember the layer of fog that settled into that little creek bottom where my granny lived as the air cooled after a warm, rainy day. The immense greenness of all that I love and embrace as my domain. The grey-skinned hackberry and moonlight seen filtered through the boughs of a walnut remind me of exotic places and new worlds to explore. I’m ready to explore. I’m ready to flee. I’m ready to find a good woman this time, who is more substantial than a morning after, who is as embracing as the rain washed air, who is a well spring of life and an inspiration to higher levels of achievement.
After my walk the evening improved. I met up with Kyle at The Pub in Brentwood. Wesat talking to the bartender, watching the NASCAR race at Richmond, sipping on a couple of tall boy cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon, planning a day of smallmouth fishing in the near future. An award winning Nashville songwriter sang in the background. She was voted Nashville’s songwriter of the year last year. She was good but I don’t much enjoy singer-songwriter material. Having spent three years in Nashville I’m over it…even though I still write and play such songs myself. Her rendition of Bobby Gentry’s “Ballad of Billie Joe” was the highlight of what I heard. Afterwards we met up with a couple of more friends for a late dinner at O’Charley’s, a move that would have been unthinkable to me earlier in the day.
Eventually we wound up Applebee’s, our old standby. I chatted up a girl who had just moved up from Florida but wasn’t having any of it. She had to get back to her baby. She was well on her way through a series of mixed drinks. I made sure she was alright to drive before she left. Then I left and slept well.
Now it’s a slow Sunday morning in May. I sip coffee and look out on a rain washed world. The forest behind my apartment is a wall of green. The flowers have fallen off the locust trees. I’m waiting to go to work.
Monday, April 27, 2009
Wildflowers
WILDFLOWERS April 2009
I spent the morning reading a book about how to find one’s true path in the world. The book used the analogy of the North Star throughout. There were words like essential self and social self and lots of helpful suggestions about getting the two types of selves connected. After a few chapters I realized I already knew what I wanted to do. Just ask me. I’ll casually wave my hand through the air painting a broad stroke and vaguely say, I want to do something with plants. I see that in my future.
If one wants to make a lot of money doing something with plants then I suggest the plants be Otto Luyken laurels, Nellie Stevens holly, or Green Giant arborvitae. But that afternoon of April 21, 2009 I walked out and found a wealth of a different sort in the richness of the wildflowers at Nashville’s Radnor Lake.
Starting from the east side of the park I took the Gainer Ridge Trail and found an abundance of Larkspur growing on the lower portions of a steep slope. As the trail winded its way through the little hollow and up onto the ridge the flowers thinned out until up on the ridge all I found was some spring beauty interspersed among the shagbark hickories, dogwoods, and chinquapin oak. Coming back down off the ridge into a secluded hollow the forest floor came alive with flowers: Jack-in-the-pulpit, may-apple, anemone, Virginia waterleaf, yellow violet, and a morel mushroom thrown in for good measure.
The walk reminded me of long ago when I was at the end of my first round of college. In May 1995 I graduated with a chemistry degree and, like so many new college graduates, essentially no life skills whatsoever. I got a job at a bookstore and worked part time at a grocery store named Super-Rama. Even though it was small that little store did more food stamp business than any other store in the county. I saw where I was headed: I’d be that wiry little guy with a slicked back duck tail of hair that walked in everyday wearing a stained white t-shirt. I’d buy a quart of Schlitz Malt Liquor and find a porch to sot on for the rest of the day.
This oblivion lasted only a couple of months until my parents thankfully kicked me out of the house. I moved back to the college town I’d known for the past four years, got a loan and started taking biology classes that fall. I did pretty well, finding the classes more interesting and easier than anything I’d done in chemistry. But I drank a lot, and hung out with a lot of drunks. There were lost weekends of social deviancy, of road trips and walking around on public beaches in tighty-whitey underwear. The police were involved on more than one occasion.
Also, I slipped into an anxiety ridden hell that locked me down emotionally and often physically. I will never forget the last day of classes before Thanksgiving of that year when I somehow found myself stuck in a building afraid to walk to my next class. I’d come out of the library, and breaking into a cold sweat of anxiety, I dashed into the adjacent building…a building where I’d earned miserable grades in my calculus classes. I needed to walk about a quarter of a mile to the center of campus to attend my literature and technology class. But I couldn’t do it. With shaking hands and sweaty brow I would go to step out side, get in people’s way, and be swept back in the door. This lasted twenty minutes until I finally stuck my head down and walked a b-line through hedges and across parking lots to my destination. The weekend went downhill from there.
The next semester I faired better. The true tonic was getting a job in an upscale garden center where I began learning the trade which I have worked in off and on till this day. One of the classes that helped me land such an enjoyable job was Dr. Gordon Hunter’s class on local flora which I enrolled in that spring. It continues to be the most enjoyable college class I have ever taken. With the warming days the class broke into little groups and set out to collect plants from fifty different families. Or maybe it was fifty different genus…it was a long time ago and I don’t rightly remember. I had also taken highly enjoyable entomology and invertebrate zoology classes around this time, both of which required a large amount of collecting so the numbers tend to run together.
I remember there was controversy over what to name the group: the flaming orchids or the big trees…college aged manly men that we were you can guess which name won out. At any rate we chose to study the Hardscrabble Hollow/Hidden Springs area of Jackson County. Its is adjacent to Wash Morgan Hollow which is administered by the Nature Conservancy due to the presence of endangered species in the micro-watershed so our little stake promised to be rich in wildflowers. We walked up and down the hills and hollows of the area, and scrambled up creek beds exploring the local flora, armed with Peterson’s Guide to Wildflowers, a contraption for pressing our discoveries, and 12-packs of Natural Light. I never said I wasn’t still a degenerate.
As that class ended I settled into the life of a working nurseryman for just over a year until another bad decision in June 1997 found me working in a factory cut off from a girl who wanted to marry me and just about all my friends. Somehow I was Calvinistic enough in all these situations to believe that I had no choice to reverse decisions. Stick it out, suck it up, learn to hold back your tears and do not expect too much good out of life. This is how adults earn steady paychecks.
I managed to get fired from the job at the end of the following March and immediately got back into the garden center and landscaping business. But I was still lonely. At the time I wasn’t very good at reaching out and getting to know new people. So that spring I reverted to my old habits of walking the woods. This time I wandered along the Natchez Trace. Using Peterson’s trusty and now worn guide I identified wildflowers at Jackson Falls, the Gordon House area, Fall Hollow.
It was at this time that I first had the idea to write a field guide. This one would be a field guide to wildflowers of the Natchez Trace. I had the look of the book all planned out. I’d buy a new fangled “digital” camera and a bunch of 3½” floppy disks to carry around saving my pictures onto.
I transferred my job to Murfreesboro and went to school at Middle Tennessee State University, this time studying journalism. I told my advisor of the book I wanted to write. Having himself written a book about frogs he was sympathetic. I excelled for two years in my journalism classes then joined the Navy, shipping out for Officer Candidate School in February 2000. From 2001 until Spring 2005 I spent only 14 months in the United States. It was great. I won’t say the Navy corrected all my short comings but it did answer a lot of the “what-if’s” that had been holding me back. Someone else finally wrote the field guide to wildflowers of the Natchez Trace. I saw it in a book store shortly after coming back from Iraq and just smiled. The field guide had been a worthy idea.
Which brings me to walking around in the woods collecting wildflowers on April 21, 2009.
When I left the Navy in late 2006 I had vague ideas about what I wanted to do: I wanted to write copy and landscape at the professional level. Well. I couldn’t find work writing copy and I didn’t know how to landscape like a professional. So I became a land surveyor. For the nine months it lasted that was probably the most rewarding job I’ve ever had. As one who likes to wander the woods land surveying offers ample opportunity to bushwhack through dense thickets, walk old fence lines, and use historical documents to identify the work of others. I worked my way up to junior party chief status before receiving a call from the State of Tennessee offering me a job as a water quality enforcement officer. I took it and went from being in the woods to being deeply ensconced behind a desk on the sixth floor of the L&C Tower in downtown Nashville. That lasted five months in which time I surfed until one day I found the end of the Internet. There was no pot of gold, just a 404 Error.
A man of action and entrepreneurial tendencies stifles in a government job. I was earning an easy, steady paycheck but wasn’t adding anything to my tool box of skills. So I quit. I found the most high end garden center in Tennessee’s most affluent zip code and got to work. I reacquainted myself with plant material (what a phrase to one who loves wildflowers and the woods). I learned to landscape and design, putting the diverse array of plant characteristics and habits I had committed to heart to work forming a cohesive picture, melding individual elements into a living, exciting landscape.
The next move as of this writing is to head back to Murfreesboro and earn a masters degree in biology. The Navy provided the money for it years ago and I need it for credibility as a nature writer. But a man in his mid-thirties needs to be making his way in the world as well so I’m starting a landscape design company.
Today walking out into the woods I can enjoy the wildflowers of a beautiful spring in a way I never have before. Even after a winter such as one the one just past, the harshest in years, the flowers lay dormant in the ground, waiting for the light, the warmth, knowing the sun was going to shine again. Aside from rebirth wildflowers have always represented a period of refocusing to me: a season has past followed by months of cold, bitter numbness. But buried in the ground, existing in the rhizomes and seeds, encoded, entwined, infused in the mystery that is DNA, each wildflower knows it has a purpose to fulfill. All it is waiting for is the time and place, a new season of growth announced by the return of the sun.
I spent the morning reading a book about how to find one’s true path in the world. The book used the analogy of the North Star throughout. There were words like essential self and social self and lots of helpful suggestions about getting the two types of selves connected. After a few chapters I realized I already knew what I wanted to do. Just ask me. I’ll casually wave my hand through the air painting a broad stroke and vaguely say, I want to do something with plants. I see that in my future.
If one wants to make a lot of money doing something with plants then I suggest the plants be Otto Luyken laurels, Nellie Stevens holly, or Green Giant arborvitae. But that afternoon of April 21, 2009 I walked out and found a wealth of a different sort in the richness of the wildflowers at Nashville’s Radnor Lake.
Starting from the east side of the park I took the Gainer Ridge Trail and found an abundance of Larkspur growing on the lower portions of a steep slope. As the trail winded its way through the little hollow and up onto the ridge the flowers thinned out until up on the ridge all I found was some spring beauty interspersed among the shagbark hickories, dogwoods, and chinquapin oak. Coming back down off the ridge into a secluded hollow the forest floor came alive with flowers: Jack-in-the-pulpit, may-apple, anemone, Virginia waterleaf, yellow violet, and a morel mushroom thrown in for good measure.
The walk reminded me of long ago when I was at the end of my first round of college. In May 1995 I graduated with a chemistry degree and, like so many new college graduates, essentially no life skills whatsoever. I got a job at a bookstore and worked part time at a grocery store named Super-Rama. Even though it was small that little store did more food stamp business than any other store in the county. I saw where I was headed: I’d be that wiry little guy with a slicked back duck tail of hair that walked in everyday wearing a stained white t-shirt. I’d buy a quart of Schlitz Malt Liquor and find a porch to sot on for the rest of the day.
This oblivion lasted only a couple of months until my parents thankfully kicked me out of the house. I moved back to the college town I’d known for the past four years, got a loan and started taking biology classes that fall. I did pretty well, finding the classes more interesting and easier than anything I’d done in chemistry. But I drank a lot, and hung out with a lot of drunks. There were lost weekends of social deviancy, of road trips and walking around on public beaches in tighty-whitey underwear. The police were involved on more than one occasion.
Also, I slipped into an anxiety ridden hell that locked me down emotionally and often physically. I will never forget the last day of classes before Thanksgiving of that year when I somehow found myself stuck in a building afraid to walk to my next class. I’d come out of the library, and breaking into a cold sweat of anxiety, I dashed into the adjacent building…a building where I’d earned miserable grades in my calculus classes. I needed to walk about a quarter of a mile to the center of campus to attend my literature and technology class. But I couldn’t do it. With shaking hands and sweaty brow I would go to step out side, get in people’s way, and be swept back in the door. This lasted twenty minutes until I finally stuck my head down and walked a b-line through hedges and across parking lots to my destination. The weekend went downhill from there.
The next semester I faired better. The true tonic was getting a job in an upscale garden center where I began learning the trade which I have worked in off and on till this day. One of the classes that helped me land such an enjoyable job was Dr. Gordon Hunter’s class on local flora which I enrolled in that spring. It continues to be the most enjoyable college class I have ever taken. With the warming days the class broke into little groups and set out to collect plants from fifty different families. Or maybe it was fifty different genus…it was a long time ago and I don’t rightly remember. I had also taken highly enjoyable entomology and invertebrate zoology classes around this time, both of which required a large amount of collecting so the numbers tend to run together.
I remember there was controversy over what to name the group: the flaming orchids or the big trees…college aged manly men that we were you can guess which name won out. At any rate we chose to study the Hardscrabble Hollow/Hidden Springs area of Jackson County. Its is adjacent to Wash Morgan Hollow which is administered by the Nature Conservancy due to the presence of endangered species in the micro-watershed so our little stake promised to be rich in wildflowers. We walked up and down the hills and hollows of the area, and scrambled up creek beds exploring the local flora, armed with Peterson’s Guide to Wildflowers, a contraption for pressing our discoveries, and 12-packs of Natural Light. I never said I wasn’t still a degenerate.
As that class ended I settled into the life of a working nurseryman for just over a year until another bad decision in June 1997 found me working in a factory cut off from a girl who wanted to marry me and just about all my friends. Somehow I was Calvinistic enough in all these situations to believe that I had no choice to reverse decisions. Stick it out, suck it up, learn to hold back your tears and do not expect too much good out of life. This is how adults earn steady paychecks.
I managed to get fired from the job at the end of the following March and immediately got back into the garden center and landscaping business. But I was still lonely. At the time I wasn’t very good at reaching out and getting to know new people. So that spring I reverted to my old habits of walking the woods. This time I wandered along the Natchez Trace. Using Peterson’s trusty and now worn guide I identified wildflowers at Jackson Falls, the Gordon House area, Fall Hollow.
It was at this time that I first had the idea to write a field guide. This one would be a field guide to wildflowers of the Natchez Trace. I had the look of the book all planned out. I’d buy a new fangled “digital” camera and a bunch of 3½” floppy disks to carry around saving my pictures onto.
I transferred my job to Murfreesboro and went to school at Middle Tennessee State University, this time studying journalism. I told my advisor of the book I wanted to write. Having himself written a book about frogs he was sympathetic. I excelled for two years in my journalism classes then joined the Navy, shipping out for Officer Candidate School in February 2000. From 2001 until Spring 2005 I spent only 14 months in the United States. It was great. I won’t say the Navy corrected all my short comings but it did answer a lot of the “what-if’s” that had been holding me back. Someone else finally wrote the field guide to wildflowers of the Natchez Trace. I saw it in a book store shortly after coming back from Iraq and just smiled. The field guide had been a worthy idea.
Which brings me to walking around in the woods collecting wildflowers on April 21, 2009.
When I left the Navy in late 2006 I had vague ideas about what I wanted to do: I wanted to write copy and landscape at the professional level. Well. I couldn’t find work writing copy and I didn’t know how to landscape like a professional. So I became a land surveyor. For the nine months it lasted that was probably the most rewarding job I’ve ever had. As one who likes to wander the woods land surveying offers ample opportunity to bushwhack through dense thickets, walk old fence lines, and use historical documents to identify the work of others. I worked my way up to junior party chief status before receiving a call from the State of Tennessee offering me a job as a water quality enforcement officer. I took it and went from being in the woods to being deeply ensconced behind a desk on the sixth floor of the L&C Tower in downtown Nashville. That lasted five months in which time I surfed until one day I found the end of the Internet. There was no pot of gold, just a 404 Error.
A man of action and entrepreneurial tendencies stifles in a government job. I was earning an easy, steady paycheck but wasn’t adding anything to my tool box of skills. So I quit. I found the most high end garden center in Tennessee’s most affluent zip code and got to work. I reacquainted myself with plant material (what a phrase to one who loves wildflowers and the woods). I learned to landscape and design, putting the diverse array of plant characteristics and habits I had committed to heart to work forming a cohesive picture, melding individual elements into a living, exciting landscape.
The next move as of this writing is to head back to Murfreesboro and earn a masters degree in biology. The Navy provided the money for it years ago and I need it for credibility as a nature writer. But a man in his mid-thirties needs to be making his way in the world as well so I’m starting a landscape design company.
Today walking out into the woods I can enjoy the wildflowers of a beautiful spring in a way I never have before. Even after a winter such as one the one just past, the harshest in years, the flowers lay dormant in the ground, waiting for the light, the warmth, knowing the sun was going to shine again. Aside from rebirth wildflowers have always represented a period of refocusing to me: a season has past followed by months of cold, bitter numbness. But buried in the ground, existing in the rhizomes and seeds, encoded, entwined, infused in the mystery that is DNA, each wildflower knows it has a purpose to fulfill. All it is waiting for is the time and place, a new season of growth announced by the return of the sun.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
