What they do is they take that big old pointy head and if they feel like you’ve gotten a little too close for comfort they just let go of their leaf and like a planting dibble or a plumb bob that head launches them right down into the undergrouth where you will never find them, or at least where I have never found one. Conehead katydids, as apt a name as any. A bit of overkill because they have chompers too and are said to be reliably capable of drawing blood should you get a finger in the way. But it must be tough being a late summer protein packet.
The cheapest of thrills to go out with a flashlight and track down the calls. The stark shadows of the grasses lurching wildly about and the night all around.
The beguiling beauty of gas pipelines. When I was a kid my favorite room in every art museum was full of what I thought of as the muddy road pictures—sombre dutch oil paintings of the lived-in countryside. They all seemed to have a road in the foreground, and the roads were always filled with ruts of various size and shape, and most of the time the ruts were full of water, the surface reflecting partly cloudy weather conditions and maybe some skeletal tree branches. The background would be some spectrum of human-modified landscape—cow pastures and such or aggressively second-growth scrubby forest. My love of these paintings perplexed me because I was a wilderness kid, screw human habitation. But the roads invited me in to these places from long ago, and the ruts made them real—both the people who made the road and the organic world forever coming to reclaim itself.
I wish I did but I don’t hate this weird elongated forest gap, the way it beckons me down into the more expansive opening below, the ominous closeness of the towering trees, the obviously mowed plant community but with gnarly brush reaching through in a combination that says “people are here! … at widely spaced intervals”. People call forest interiors cathedrals but this is also a cathedral. It’s a soft bed. Except that we know the value of contiguous forest canopy—here is one more clump of New England forest broken into separate islands. What birds and other animals have now moved on? What non-native plants are now creeping in from that much more edge habitat. And for what? The silent gas sliding unseen beneath looms over the whole place.
I was wrong as a kid, of course—do not screw human habitation. And wilderness… isn’t even a thing? It’s all just living communities at varying degrees of thriving, and that includes the humans. Our fingerprints are the most interesting part of almost every landscape to me. But it’s nice when they’re soft, slowly receding, and tell some kind of story about how we lived with and belonged to some place. I like this vantage-point—I always wonder about the clump of trees in the far off hedge row—but it’s not a good story. When I walk by this spot, after taking a moment to appreciate the view, I always feel less anxious by the time I get back under the cool interior of the forest canopy.
Bobcat walking down heavily sheltered gametrail, surrounded by beech thickets and topped by a mostly fallen oak.
The porcupine superhighway finally yielded up the GOAT. About a minute passed between the first and second clips, it walked well away so that I couldn’t hear footsteps, then came back and walked across in the other direction. What cat brainworm led it to turn around, and to flip its stub tail in thought?
Beaver dam after a good rain, meadow-rue in flower, rich hemlock tannins, pillowy bubbles, goldenrod, some glossy buckthorn taunting us for good measure.
Pool in Otter Creek in the vicinity of Middlebury, VT.
When summer is still it is still. This riverbank echoed with the crowds that would have packed it on another day, their presence betrayed by the networks of trails that spider-webbed over exposed roots down the eroded slopes to the water. But even without the trails and here and there plastic cups and beer bottles the clean smoothness of the rock bank—perfect for picnics and wading and sun lounging—would have conjured the memory of frolicking children and their parents, gaggles of teens and scattered people fishing regardless of the nearby town. The river arrived here out of a gorge—several hundred feet of frothing, churning water between two walls of rock—dumping out into a pool that expanded both out to the widened banks and away downstream. The frothing water dropped out of the last chute and died in all that space.
But the day was hot and muggy and midweek and with no people the pool was a place of immense stillness—all the more so after the gorge. Nothing is as still as a hot summer day. The humidity soaks up all the sound and dulls the senses until time itself contracts. Like the frothing water hitting the pool it slowed, expanding outward as if it might blot out yesterday and tomorrow until the now were just a blob with no edges. I could have lay down in the shade of a riverside birch and become another Rip Van Winkle. The water whispered to me, reaching out with grasping fingers, the whole walk back out.
I didn’t like hot weather when I was a kid because I didn’t like my body, and hot weather won’t let you forget that. I got through the early years by layering imagined worlds like protective blankets on top of my real one. Winter, full of emptiness, was so accommodating. Summer was full already, and in July and August’s moments of stillness and calm what rose to the surface were not magical worlds but my sticky armpits, scratches and bug bites on my legs and arms and the baking sun on my neck.
My earliest memory of summer—maybe my earliest memory—is lying in my own sweat on top of the sheets long past bed time, suffocating on the soupy night air of the Ohio River Valley as it oozed in black through the open window. It seemed that if I didn’t fall asleep the night would never pass and in those nights years went by—I was lost in an in between time. Only the unceasing blare of crickets and cicadas kept me tethered to the present. On lucky mornings, when the overnight temperature dropped into the low 70’s I’d awake in a state of calm, the heavy air and the roaring insects a distant memory. But it was the briefest of reprieves—the heat would be back before morning was gone.
I don’t hate my body anymore, I’ve claimed back a lot of the power summer had over me, but I still struggle with the constant presence of it all. What I can see now is that the eeriness of summer is the living in a constant teetering between the endless present and being lost to siren songs. One moment it is impossible to day dream, the next it is perilously easy. It is not a time for imagined worlds—here the force comes right out of the ground. There is strange power in growing things.
There can’t be more than a millimeter or two between the back of this door and the jam. And the setting sun falls on this spot through a few pockets in tree cover that is more open than the rest of the canopy only because it sits in a marsh. My cat and I were coming back from a walk in the yard and we chose the right second. I’ve been trying for several days now to catch it again but nothing. Perhaps it is a specific-distance-from-the-solstice thing only.
I was rolling around in the underbrush a while back looking for some oak seedlings that I’d planted (and which I did not find) when I went under a robust shrub and found on the other side a kind of secret clearing—surrounded by dense thickets of young beech saplings and extending under the hefty trunk of a mostly-fallen oak. The oak had fallen a few years back along with about twenty other trees during a down-burst that lasted all of 90 seconds and that I remember shaking the walls of the house and thrumming the poorly sealed gaps in the closed windows while I listened to the pop pop pop of a whole community of canopy trees hitting the ground. This little clearing under the shrubbery looked like it was a clearing not entirely by happenstance but by virtue of being well trod—lots of small feet mashing down last year’s leaf litter. Up the slope on the other side of the fallen oak trunk a smooth track of flattened leaves snaked out into the thick brush.
A game trail for the smaller in stature! I came back with a trail cam and visions of moodily lit fishers and mink on midnight patrols—maybe even a crouching bobcat. It is several hundred videos later and while I suppose I cannot definitively say that none of those animals use the secret clearing trail, what I can say for sure is that I have discovered a porcupine superhighway. Or at least it is during the month of May. Porcupines at night, porcupines during the day, porcupines waddling and standing up and stopping to eat tree saplings, stopping to mark territory and then to intently smell where other porcupines have marked territory. Porcupines grunting, whining, and clacking their teeth and even a porcupine making a sprinter’s dash the likes of which I have never seen from the species before. And also porcupines standing up to give the quills a good thoughtful shake out before continuing on a slow but purposeful amble off into the night—with the kind of measured pace and steady bringing up the pads of the paws with each step forward that sends my lungs into a nice expansive breath and lets just a little tension out of my shoulders. The business of the world carries on in an infinite unseen corners.
