Pioneers

This red maple (Acer rubrum) has been sprouting out from underneath my front porch for two seasons now. Its seed could have come from any direction, as it is a common tree along sidewalks and in yards in this part of the country. Its brilliant red folliage makes it an attractive fall tree. It grows rapidly, a sign that it is a pioneer tree, accustomed to finding open fields and launching forests. But because it is a fast-grower, it has relatively soft and light wood. It doesn't make for sturdy furniture or flooring. Red maple is better used for hangers and other low stress applications. It's tannin was once used by native Americans as a dye, and, in desperate situations, red maple could be tapped for (teeny amounts of) sugar. This one invaded beneath the porch, poking through the sides and growing enough leaves to put down sturdy roots. I have considered transplanting it when I replace the porch next year, but that may be too much trouble for a common species like this one. It grows everywhere because it can thrive in a variety of conditions. It prefers wet or moist soils and large stands of this tree can be found in swamps, giving it one of its monikers, swamp maple. But it can also be found on upland and dry soils. In the lowland swamps, these trees turn in mid-August. This one is just beginning to turn now. It's persistence has endeared it to me and it will survive another season.

The threads of the conservative coalition's cloth is giving out at the seams and in its very weave. Yet, still, we wait for the emergence of a new dialogue. Some have argued that all the appearances of power are just that, appearances. The dirty secret of modernity, they argue, is failure. Persistent, regular, unavoidable, anticipatable, failure. Power did not derive from rational planning, it was usurped from ordinary people, such that they ever had it, by extraordinary institutions of private wealth and gain. These are merely its latest days. We have moments now and again, cracks, like you might find in fault zone rocks, openings under the porches where something else more common might send out a shoot and flourish in the sun, pressing down roots into moist soil and fill. We need the red maple of democracy to sprout. The miracle of seeds.

Builders

These two earthworms (Lumbricus terrestris) jumped into my basement when I opened the door to the yard this morning. The common night crawler, a favorite for fishmen the world over, is a burrowing worm. It can dig up to eight feet down into the earth, where it lives in the day, digesting organic matter consumed on the surface the night before. At night, this anecic earthworm crawls to the surface and nibbles on the dead grass and leaf litter and whatever else it can find, converting cells and fiber into small particles of soil - you've seen the piles in your yard. night crawlers bring air and water to the subsurface through their worm holes, which are held open by a hardened mucus secreted by the worm when they burrow. Too much water, or an abundance, floods these busy creatures out of the depths and to the surface in daylight, to my back door, where they become disoriented and lost. Worm watchers tell me that worms, without eyes or a nose, without fingers or toes, can find their way back to their specific worm hole after any given night of leaf consumption. More rain than usual and all bets are off. Without worms, soils grow slower, if at all. Without soils, no agriculture. You can follow the logic from there. The worm is a muscle surrounding a digestive tract, mostly protein to the hungry robin. I released these individuals back into the yard. They both tried to twist away from my fingers when I reached for them on the steps. They did not realize that I was trying to help. They may not find their original homes, but they can build others, improving my soils and feeding the birds that live in my neighborhood.

In one of our many bastardizations of metaphor, a lowly, sneeky, back-biting individual is called a worm. I have heard this word used to describe our president. But worms deserve better respect than that. "They like to rape babies," a medicine man once said of the first family extended. "Everyone in Texas knows that." To this day, I do not know if the charge was meant literally or metaphorically, but I do know these worms would not cause the wreckage being caused by this Bush. I know that the political moment of Katrina and New Orleans has passed and no-bid contracts and no worker protection requirements and an opening of the field to profit-makers has taken place on the ground. Republicans are using the potential dialogue about race and poverty to further eviscerate government aid. Shameless. I know that a paper writing process in Iraq somehow trying to replicate our own 18th-century state-making moment (presided over by slaveholders, remember), a process that forgets how steeped in the naive idealism of Enlightenment-era political science the proceedings in Philapdelphia were, has descended into a laughable political process and a bloody tragedy in the streets. Our imperialism has replaced tyranny with tyranny, causing continued killings and heinous deaths where too much killing and death have become part and parcel, like a trip to the market for most of us. Shameful. Perhaps, when looked at from the right angle, 'worm' could work. He has burrowed deep into the subsoils of our most cherished vows and convinctions and lined his hole with mucus, one big muscle surrounding a digestive tract, no sight, smell, and only simple spontaneous reactions to external stimlulation. If only robins came large enough.

Prey

This grey squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis) lives in a nest in the Norway spruce (Picea abies) tree at the corner of the yard. She or he summered in the trees next to the Mill Pond, but has moved back to the vicinity of my yard since August when the sunflowers and watermelon started coming in. This one got both of the backyard sunflowers and about an eighth of one of the front yard sunflowers. It ate an entire watermelon and took bites out of the zuchinni and gourd (it didn't like either squash). It has also buried and stored hundreds of nuts around the neighborhood. I see it wander across the right of way find a spot on the ground, dig a few inches down and pull out a well seasoned nut. It will be busy restoring in the next following weeks. There is an enormous white oak just to the south of us and a scarlet oak growing up over the right-of-way outside my kitchen door. This squirrel has no doubt planted more of both across this little landscape. It eats only fruits and nuts, only has conflicts with woodpeckers, whose hollowed homes it likes to steal, yet it must fear for its life at the screetch of the red tailed hawk. As if to punctuate this point, three hawks glided overhead as I wrote those lines, battling with each other aggressively for air space, they circled and circled, slowly downstream, and the squirrel was suddenly absent. I have mixed emotions for this gray squirrel. I have cursed him or her for shredding a neighbor's red nylon scarf and throwing pieces in the Norway spruce. I have wished her or him harm after finding broken sunflower plants and scattered seed shells. I finally just had to laugh when I found the hollowed out watermelon in the front yard raised beds. This squirrel is at home in my yard, my home is in its yard, what else would I expect? This species is the most common of all wildlife species in eastern North America, it is the only wild critter that just about everyone has seen. It has adjusted to our presence, populated our parks, and inhabited our borderlands.

Its large numbers and wide habitat range makes it the common prey of hawk and coyote and feral dog, even kingfisher will try for one. It is a well-fed and comfortable species. Is my ambivalence toward it something akin to my ambivalence toward many of the other signatures of modernism? I do not deny the creature its right to live, and I feel a tinge of sorrow at the kill-site whenever the hawks get the best of it, I even grudgingly respect its work ethic, memory, and good planning. I like this particular individual, having watched it for the full cycle of seasons. But the bigger picture drawn by the lack of diversity among our backyard wildlife that is embodied and represented by this image of this individual gray squirrel, whose species is known to all and whose shape is familiar to everyone, is disheartening. There are many birds, there are many plants, but there are not too very many wild mammals bigger than this one in our immediate and every day experience, most of us. It must lead to an undernourished imagination, eventually, losing this vital segment of experienced life. Possibly it could lead one to assert fantastical explanations and justifications where white ash (Fraxinus americana) has been growing strong for centuries, to contend debate against one's own mirror image.

Baseball

This white ash (Fraxinus americana) has begun its colorful turn - purplish and yellow, as if gleeming. This one is a sapling compared to the 50 foot giant in my neighbor's yard that no doubt seeded it. The white ash is known in the Carolinas as "autumn purple." Its summer leaves are attractive as well, a silvery green, pinnately compound leaf cluster. But the white ash is perhaps best loved for its wood. White ash has a very strong resistence to stress (it doesn't break easily). It is, however, at the same time relatively, even absolutely, light weight. Strong and light, white ash is the favored wood for baseball bats and hockey sticks and other wooden sports equipment. You could make dozens upon dozens of baseball bats out of the giant mother tree in front of my neighbor's house. The one pictured here will need another century to reach those heights, and much more canopy space before it is done. White ash have five to nine leaves per pinnate cluster, but usually produce seven. The bark gets furrowed and thick as the tree gets older and it seems to continue to produce leaves and branches even when it has stopped adding any height. The oldest white ash in my community, planted along with the factories more than a century ago, have large dead branches reaching into the air at their tops and their living branches grow in thickets below, producing and storing energy in ancient roots for the season ahead. The old trees are symbols of persistence. The one pictured here turns for its fiteenth or twentieth time, grown in the tangle of neglected land between properties, preparing for winter. White ash lose their lower branches as they grow, leaving behind a thick knot-free trunk. They are favored in cultivated yards for their speckled shade, and favored by all birds in this neighborhood for the perches provided by the many many branches they grow.

I have looked at the giant white ash a hundred times since first setting eyes on them more than a year ago, but today when I noticed that this one on my right-of-way was turning this beautiful purple color and I realized that purple in fall was one of its defining characteristics and I looked up into the upper reaches of the giants and saw the same purple I realized that several large trees I knew were the same species. We can often be surrounded by concrete things like the white ash giants, and we can even notice these things in passing, and still never really know what they are. But they are not not there, even if not noticed by us. The giant trees, for instance, grew for more than a century before I was even born, my noticing them today did not bring them into existence. Facts and truth, I think, are the same way. They grow sturdy edifices, reach against gravity into the air, and persist beyond their years. They can be denied or go unnoticed, but they cannot be made not there. This is one of those rules that gives me solace in these days of Bush.

Predators

This pair of red tailed hawks (Buteo jamaicensis) lazily glided figure eights across the sky above my head this morning. They follow the currents of the Assabet River, grazing meadows for prey. Once a month or so they find themselves sweeping over the Mill Pond and our neighborhood. I heard them from inside, that distinctive screetch (click on the title "Predators" to hear it). Is that a teradactyl outside? It has been used for movie birds, hawks and eagles, their voice. The oldest sayings recommend paying fine attention to the content of your thoughts when presented with an eagle or hawk. They are bearers of the necessity to reflect. What was I thinking this fine autumn morning with the sun alone in the blue sky and the cold air of overnight quickly warmed when these graceful birds wafted overhead? How were the contents of my thoughts as the screetch pierced my brain with its unusual cadence? They swept overhead in wide circles, in opposite directions, apart, together, apart, together, moving downstream with the pace of a stroller or saunterer. I heard them screetch. I was noting the joys of community in my journal before I ran outside.

The red tail hunts birds, among other prey. The unlucky victims, so say the experts, are beheaded before being consumed whole. The hawks' screetch scares up the ground critters and, with eyesight that can find a mouse at 100 feet, they usually stay well fed. A kill site is bloody, scarred land, full of fur clumps or feathers, claw marks, and undigestible internal organs. Behind the graceful beauty of the hawk is a cold calculus. They must eat, and feed their hungry young. This bloody claw disturbed Darwin and came to symbolize the ugly underside of natural selection, the appalling potential of natural impulses. I feel his pain as I reflect on the carnage left behind by a hawk's meal. But the hawk must eat. What precisely is our excuse? How much unnecessary death marks modernity and the supposed maturation of culture? What prices of incivility are paid beyond the needed costs? The problem is not the existence of bloody claws, but the excessive bloodiness by which we make our every day. No grace, or figure eights, just brute strength exercised in the only way possible. The hawks watch for hours, they rest on currents of air, they take their time and only what they need.