Florida Wild

See you there.

Florida Wild

Terminal Ecology

The end of the road. This road. These clover and daisies and oaks and ash, all of the familiar insects and spiders, rodents and farm animals. Everything left behind. Here where it belongs in the temperate zone of central New England. I watched thunder storms roll in last night, powerful, sky-blackening, cool air churing, rain exploding thunder making cells of disturbed air and water. I felt the heat of the afternoon sun standing ankle-deep in the water of Walden Pond. Felt its photons trace my skin as I made a breast stroke across the aqua-marine waters. It has become something. Perhaps it was always something. I said my utterings of gratitude to the diminutive French-Canadian recluse whose insistence on something true led to something real. And I dried my feet as wind turned up and people were called from the waters, an ominous thunder rumbling in the near distance, barely wavering your ear drum.

Roads not ending but forking. Dividing. The new one on sand covered limestone. These will not be the plants of my youth. This will be novelty at every turn. Unexpected and much to learn. Florida lies the future.

May it meet me well.

Shrub

This northern white cedar (Thuja occidentalis) has scale-like leaves that emerge from inside the previous leaf; one leaf erupting right out of the next, no discernible stem. Underneath the surface, a living tissue connects leaf to leaf and, layer after layer, it eventually builds wood. You can see the effect of the process here. An unfolding has occurred. Rumor has it that this species of tree was the first North American tree species to cross the Atlantic to Europe, to Paris to be precise, in 1536; un arbre à feuilles persistantes des colonies. This one hand-picked and planted on this fine corner of Earth finds itself too far to the south, out of its ordinary range of temperatures and light, but it presses on. They are capable of living four centuries, although I must confess my doubts to the ability of this one to do so - not where it is, not with so many forces lined up against it. The resinous tissues is highly acidic, filled with citric acid, vitamin C, a fact that saved many a sailor and malnourished colonist from scurvey. Given the latin title Arborvitae, tree of life, for its miraculous qualities. This one bears the weight of snow in winter and suffers scalding sun for half the day in summer; but persistently and ever so slowly it presses itself out into the world changing the very nature of life.

It is only a half turn from this delightful plant to the horrifying scenes of bloodthirsty revenge. We murder and call it justice, then we taunt the world by hanging the dead corpse from every television, newspaper, and web page to be found. The self-assured Secretary used the word "medieval" as he bragged about his "hunt and kill" (as if 500 pound bombs have anything to do with hunting) and in those squinting lying manipulating eyes of his I see he knew he meant himself. He has done the math, though, we cannot catch him before his earthly time is up. Hard to picture, despicable. And the shame piles up, leaf emerging from leaf, solidifying into wood, until we have built a structure out of our very failings. Despair.

Morphology

One could call it genius. This understory oak shrub (is it black or scarlet? Quercus unsertanus) whose leaf profile is lost to the plant's own need to capture as much sunlight as is oakenly possible. A wide net, they say. This morphological tendency is most pronounced in the oak. It seemingly goes against reason, does it not? If there is less of something to have, most organisms respond by shrinking their needs, whether by force or by choice. This oak here across the right-of-way, nestled in the little patch of untrammeled ground between the road surface and the neighbors' yard, has decided it won't abide by those principles. As if principles alone ruled the world, it seems to me to say. If so, no doubt, this oak would have long ago died. But principles, it seems, are difficult to stick to something so lively as the wild. Principles of conservation are vital in a state of scarcity. But sunlight is abundant beyond imagination, even in the understory. Given the freedom, life expresses life. Circumstances change and life changes with them, somehow. This is not to justify unwarranted destruction or intentional rampage. It is to recenter the critique.

Stories of continued carnage lead the headlines every day. Worse than Vietnam in it that it is now today this minute. And worse in that it has somehow muted what used to be a well-developed sense of decency. May we be like oaks in the understory, our indistinguishable leaves powering a healthy set of roots, awaiting the toppling of the dying maple overhead. These days will end. We can be sure.

Context

This redcurrant sprout (Ribes rubrum) stands out amongst the other species of plant life populating the strip of land across the right of way. There are maples sprouting here, too, but despite its similar appearance, this redcurrent sprout is not one. The lobes are too rounded. It is distinguishable from the flowering weeds (forgive the term) by its more complex leaf structure; it has sprouted a leaf that reveals that its plant will produce wood, something in its glossy heartiness, as compared to the more soft and fragile hairy leaves all around it. Redcurrants are a shrubby plant that have adapted across the temperate zone in the northern hemisphere, but not the southern. Mi esposa no los conoce antes estas viviendo aca, por ejemplo. They produce a a bitter fruit full of acerbic acid and they are delicious in a cold chicken salad, as I learned. These sprouts prove the tenacity of life, the miracle of the living context. Last July I was charged with assembling a meal entirely out of locally grown and raised food; it had to have come from less than 50 miles. I needed flavor for my salad and something to baste the chicken when I barbequed. Redcurrants, growing in clumps in the backyard of a friend in the next town, gave me the help I needed. I picked a bucketful and brought them home and pressed most of them through a wire mesh, leaving behind a pile of skins and seeds. I deposited the so-called waste material in amongst the grasses here, and this spring, without hesitation, they have taken root, sprouted, carried my own energy and life force back into the history of this little strip of land across the right-of-way. There are raspberries (Rubus idaeus) growing further along the right-of-way that, no doubt I now realize, have a similar history. Our lives are all connected in our landscapes, human hands and thoughts and natural growth and expressions. Nothing escapes context.

Perhaps among all other failures of the present travesty of politics is this last little nugget. The pre-modernist notion that one people or state or ruler or class can somehow transcend context, ignore discussion, and fail to behave with diplomacy should have died with Napoleon. Yet here we wallow, hoping for the warming daylight of a political spring to sprout new seeds from the waste of last year's dinner party.

On April 17, 2006 I predicted a tapestry of maple, grape and choke cherry would block the view of my neighbors' house, and them, me and mine. Alas, the predicted future has arrived. Am I now a fortune teller? How did I possibly see the future so clearly? And, before snickering too much at what sound like facetious questions, ponder this: Can these 'common sense' predictions help us to see something about the essence of chaos and order, something about where each of them reside?

Fern

It is an old plant. Not this one. This one is not very old, but its genes are. Its genetic code and its anatomical expression - genotype and phenotype - are older than anything that flowers. Flowering plants appeared in the Mesozoic period, about 150 million years ago, along with small mammals, birds, and the mighty dinosaur. The genetic code for ferns was old then; this unfurling had been witnessed by untold life forms for an eternity before the dinosaurs and proto-rodents nibbled on its unrolling fronds. They had grown into trees once, an initial dominance, the age of the fern, in the Pennsylvanian epoch. They had grown into forests and developed seed bearing species. Their work of filling out the various ecological niches has come back to haunt our present in this: Their carbon-catching processes, the photosynthesis of a sun shining bright 300 million years ago, now fuels our unquenchable thirst for energy today. They are coal and oil - their bones and cells, the work they did - the carbon caught rebound with oxygen and sent aloft. These fern, here in my yard, evolved, they say, from a small group that survived their intial dominance. They retreated from seeds, opting to stick with spores. And as its forefathers and mothers have done for eons, these fronds produced sporangia this past week, the spore capsules that carry its code into a new generation. The recent rains seem to have stimulted the process. The heavy grey leaves, they are covered. The sporangia are soft and spongy to the touch; their spores will be carried across the yard, perhaps, or to the edge of the Mill Pond. It is the ability of living things to adapt in their own time that gives some species a staying power, or so says a book that I am reading. Complexity and variability within stable bounds. Life.

Some folks smell victory at this point. A turning political tide. The end of this neo-liberal travesty called the first six years of the 21st century. I say they still have a trick or two up their sleeves. These are not idle men when it comes to power. Their stakes are different than ours, this is a certainty. But perhaps the recent rains have stimulated spores of other sorts, seeds of democratic sensibility and civic engagement. May we seek the persistence of the delicate fern and adapt where necessary when we have overreached. Enough with the distractions. Turn off the television. Go witness life.

Construct

This is the last view through these woody sticks this year. In less than two weeks, a solid wall of green leafy matter will fill in every blank. The fence and the house and the rest of my neighbor's yard will vanish behind a tapestry of grape leaves and maple leaves, choke cherry and raspberry. In the mean time, I can watch the flowers on the dog wood swell and bloom and drop like spring snow onto the ground around the tree. Another pink bush, I do not know the name, flowers as well. These will finish their work before the leaves have come. The proximity of houses will then disappear. Each of us will have more privacy in spring and summer. But I do not mind my neighbors in the way that they seem to mind me. Is it the fear of loss that attaches itself to every item they have stuffed into their house? The still uncertain relationship that they themselves have with that inner voice, and such uncertainty causing a habitual dislike of exterior voices - lest they somehow foul the nest, as it were. These might be insulting thoughts, could they be heard. Or they might be that essential love we are all missing these days. Too much may overwhelm, not enough does other harm. And it is not even the abstract to which I appeal. I have thought and pondered and wondered with some ferocity this spring season. I will not accept an idle excuse. We are all blessed with eyes and all given the same quotient of reason and wildness. Childhood, from which so many have still not emerged, is merely a luxury of abundance that trains us to want even more. We are quite on track - quite on this track - with these unfettered appetites. But the best individual is the one who recognizes the whole and acts with dignity. We do not love our neighbors because at bottom, we are ashamed. Either they are with us in a superficial skate across the physicality of life and only use language as a toy to keep the truth at bay, or we fear they know our secret. Silence draws the conscience and the conscience tells no lies. So, go ye brave cells of maple and grape, of choke cherry and raspberry, cover these open spaces with your perfectly tuned photon collectors, fill our eyes with the joy of life, let us forget these too grounded thoughts, too much like wild grape vines choking a pine sapling by the edge of a campground road.

And speaking of choking. It is a mad waving of hands and a pointing of fingers as the reprehensible men who will stand trial one day for war crimes they committed slowly back toward the door hoping to make a successful departure. There are words that emerge to define a travesty, sometimes they become associated with a single name. These devastating early days of the 21st century are no doubt what we will mean when we use the insult "bush" in the not too distant future.