FoxCraft

No Tree-Hugging Needed Here

These are not trees to be hugged.

Not even if you ignored the stern signs about staying on the path. Not even if you had arms long enough to embrace their enormous trunks. Not only would hugging a Sequoia sempervirens be impossible; it would be disrespectful. Ancient redwoods are too dignified for hugging.

On a visit to California's Bay Area last week, we had a chance to walk through Muir Woods. This stand of old-growth coast redwoods was preserved a hundred years ago by a local couple, William and Elizabeth Kent, who bought the land and later donated much of it to the federal government. It was set aside as a national monument by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1908.

Since nearly a million visitors show up every year, we were fortunate to be there in December instead of July. There were still plenty of people on the main pathway, but on the less-visited secondary trails we were able to walk with the silent attention this place deserves.

Muir Woods has neither the oldest nor the biggest of the giant redwoods. Its trees are the taller but more slender cousins of the Sequoia-dendron giganteum. The tallest one here is only about 250 feet high and the widest a mere 14 feet in diameter. Give them time, though. Most of these trees are still young adults of only 500 to 800 years old. They haven't seen half their expected life spans yet.

Redwood trees were around some 150 million years ago—in fact, they covered a great deal of the continent until climate change limited them to the Pacific Northwest. One of the reasons for their endurance may be their unique methods of reproduction.

Seedlings sprout from the tiny seeds carried in the trees' cones, of course. New growth can also come from burls, which are woody growths on the bases or sides of the trees that contain dormant buds. If a tree is injured, new trunks can sprout from these burls.

It's common in Muir Woods to see a ring of trees forming a family circle. Sometimes they surround the fire-scarred hollow trunk of a long-dead giant. Sometimes all that remains of the mother tree is the space where it grew centuries ago. I don't know whether these burl-sprouted trees are genetically identical to their parent trees. If they are, that makes such trees almost immortal.

Maybe that is why such a sense of ancient life and wisdom pervades these woods. Walking here, it's easy to believe in wise gnomes and ageless tree spirits. This isn't a malevolent place like the dark, frightening forests of old fairy tales. Instead, it seems to regard human visitors with benign detachment. We may be a little larger than the squirrels and birds, more numerous than the deer, but our comings and goings are still of little import in the long lives of the redwoods.

One section of Muir Woods is called Cathedral Grove, for obvious reasons. I assume the great cathedrals were a feeble attempt to recreate the awe-inspiring grandeur of old forests like these. But the whole place, with its towering elders, feels like sacred ground. It's a place to walk softly and with respect.

These trees don't need any hugs from the likes of us. But if you happened to see one of the gnomes, and if you asked nicely, maybe it would shake your hand.

Keeping the Wolf From the Door

It was late for dinner—which was beside the point, since it hadn't been invited in the first place.

We spent a beautiful late-summer evening sitting out on the deck with several guests, enjoying good food and better conversation. It was well after dark before anyone got up to leave.

As we were standing in the doorway under the porch light, saying goodbye to the last two guests, I happened to glance down at the doorsill. There, just coming in past the open screen door, was the largest spider I have ever seen. Well, actually, I have seen a couple of larger ones in the tarantula exhibit at Reptile Gardens, but they were safely behind thick glass. This one was a good three inches long and at least two inches wide, counting all eight of its long, thick legs—and it was crawling into my house.

I'm not particularly afraid of spiders. I don't consider myself a screamer. There are times, however, when extraordinary measures are called for. I screeched and pointed.

Alarmed but determined, the spider scuttled past our feet and into the entryway. The departing couple came back in to see what the commotion was about. Despite, or maybe because of, our efforts to stop it, the spider slipped under the door into the coat closet.

My partner slid open the closet door and started tossing out winter boots, backpacks, and stray coat hangars. Our guests joined the pursuit. The spider took a defensive position on the back wall of the closet.

The husband said, "That looks like a wolf spider. Get the Raid! Get the Raid!" (This man, a paleontologist, once told us a memorable story of waking up in the Brazilian rain forest to find that he couldn't open one eye. He had to peel off a tarantula that had planted itself on his face. Perhaps he had arachnid issues.)

Issues or not, I thought his suggestion about the Raid was a great idea. But as I headed downstairs to get it, his wife, a biologist, asked me for a container with a lid. By the time I came back, armed and ready to do battle, she was maneuvering the spider into a plastic bowl that had once held macaroni salad.

She popped the lid onto the container and headed outside. Okay, if she wanted to take this lethal-looking critter off to show to her students, that was fine by me. Instead, she carried the spider halfway across our yard and let it loose. Ordinarily I find compassion to be a virtue. In this case, I would have been willing to make an exception.

A couple of weeks later, we again had guests for dinner. Again, we were saying goodbye at the door under the porch light. Again, I glanced down—and there was the spider, or its identical twin, reaching its first long gray leg over the doorsill.

I didn't scream this time, just pointed and made inarticulate noises. My partner was fast enough on his feet to deflect the critter before it got inside. He herded it away from the door, down the steps, and off into the grass.

That's it. Two instances of misplaced compassion are enough. Any time now that we have evening guests, we're saying our goodbyes in the living room and hustling them out without turning on the porch light. In case that doesn't work, the Raid is close at hand beside the front door. If that critter sets so much as one arachnid toe across the sill again, it's toast.

Food For the Soul

“We don’t have any grocery stores downtown any more,” our Santa Fe hostess told us. “They’ve all been turned into art galleries.”

Strictly speaking, this isn’t precisely the case. We saw three supermarkets within a few minutes’ drive of the old downtown historic district, plus a small grocery store only a few blocks from the plaza. True, this last seemed to cater more to visitors from the nearby hotels than to local householders doing the week’s shopping. It ran to expensive imported chocolates, gourmet cookies, and exotic meats, rather than ordinary produce and canned goods. It’s the only grocery store I’ve ever been in that listed “caviar” on one of its overhead aisle signs.

So food for the soul has not completely displaced food for the body in Santa Fe. Still, there are more art galleries in the downtown area than it would seem one small city could possibly support. Surely the tourists can’t buy that much fine art.

Just walking casually through the downtown area, we passed at least 50 galleries. Contemporary art. Traditional Native American art. Textile art—some of it formerly known as weaving. Imported Mexican art. The art of Russia. Western art. Folk art—complete, in one case, with a sign out front proclaiming, “Jesus says buy folk art.”

A few obviously thriving galleries were housed in grand buildings with attractive courtyards and carefully designed sculpture gardens. Some of the artworks were by familiar names; all of them were priced in the range of “if you have to ask, you can’t afford it.”

A second tier consisted of galleries that were less grand, but still appeared to be well-established and presumably successful.

The third tier included the many small galleries—tucked into elderly adobe buildings crowded next to their neighbors, with small signs out front and perhaps a few pieces of sculpture crowded into a tiny front yard. Many of them featured the work of only one or two artists, who from the mixed residential/business appearance of the neighborhoods may well have lived upstairs. For all I know, some of them may reap more financial benefit from the tax deductions related to having businesses in their homes than they do from sales of their art.

Seeing this much art crowded into one small downtown inevitably leads to ponderings about what is art and what is not. My conclusion? I don’t know. My favorites tended to be the elegant, realistic sculptures and the paintings of recognizable subjects, rather than the blobs-of-muddy-color abstracts. This may mean I have classic good taste, or it may mean my eye is untrained and my esthetic sense is hopelessly provincial.

I must confess, though, that on one occasion I visited a gallery solely in search of sustenance for my stomach rather than my soul. The sign said there was a coffee and snack shop in the back. (In defense of this lapse into barbarism, my choices were limited. It was Sunday, and the downtown grocery store was closed.) I wasn’t impressed with the art, but the tuna salad and the chocolate chip cookies were excellent.

Chokecherries

To the uninitiated, picking chokecherries might seem to be pointless endeavor. The pea-sized fruits are pretty enough, hanging on the bushes in clusters that change as they ripen from a bright orange/red to a maroon so deep it is almost black. But each berry is mostly seed, covered with a thin layer of flesh so bitter that eating one will pucker your mouth for a week. Once picked, the berries have to be cooked, then mashed through a colander to separate the juice and pulp from the seeds. Producing chokecherry juice is a labor-intensive process.

That juice, however, is well worth the effort. Sweetened and cooked with pectin, it produces some of the best jelly you could ever hope to taste.

And that’s why I was out in my back yard yesterday morning, wading through knee-high grass that was still wet from last night’s thunder shower. I was wearing a long-sleeved shirt and had my jeans tucked into my socks, a fashion faux pas designed to ward off ticks and chiggers.

As I stripped off clusters of chokecherries and dropped them into my bag, I kept thinking about my grandmother. I was remembering summer expeditions when she, my mother, my three sisters, and I, armed with ice cream buckets, would set out to pick chokecherries.

We kids would pick one or two berries at a time, swat at flies and mosquitoes, complain about scratchy branches and tickly tall grass, and periodically compare buckets to see who had picked the most. We always had to taste one chokecherry to verify that they were as tart as they had been the year before. We would get hot, and itchy, and bored, and be ready to go home long before our pails were filled.

Grandma would remind us that we were supposed to be picking berries, not leaves and stems, and that the harder we worked, the sooner we would be finished. All the while she would be methodically stripping off one cluster after another, harvesting every chokecherry she could reach. They would rattle into her bucket in a steady stream, and she usually had her pail half full before any of us had even covered the bottom of ours. She hated to quit while there were any ripe berries left on the bushes.

I discovered yesterday morning that, in the chokecherry-picking department, I am still more like the child I used to be than I am like my grandmother. I certainly pick faster and more efficiently than I did then, but my bag still had an embarrassing amount of stems and leaves mixed in with the berries. I got bored. I kept checking my bag to see how much I had. Even so, I hated to quit while there was still fruit on the bushes, always finding just one more cluster that I could reach if I stretched a little bit further.

I also enjoyed remembering a story that Grandma told me when she was in her 90s. One day, many years earlier, Grandpa had been a few miles away helping a neighbor with some work. Suppertime came, then evening, and finally full dark, and he still hadn’t come home. Grandma lay awake half the night, worrying that he had wrecked the car and was lying hurt in a ditch. Finally, in the wee hours, he showed up, unhurt and quite pleased with himself. On his way home the previous evening, he had come across some berry-laden bushes and had stopped to pick some. He had spent half the night filling the car with chokecherries and brought them home to her.

She didn’t tell me what her response was, but I wonder how pleased she really was with that unexpected bounty. It’s just possible that her plans for the next couple of days hadn’t included cooking a carload of chokecherries. Maybe, that once, there were more than enough chokecherries, even for Grandma.

For the Birds

Last weekend I visited my parents, who still live on the farm where I grew up. They were in the middle of an invasion. The place was overwhelmed by blackbirds.

Leaving the house to go for a walk, we could hear the birds before we saw them. The twittering coming from thousands of feathered black throats made a continuous background noise. The sound was an ominous cross between the buzzing of a swarm of bees and the shrieking of an elementary school playground at recess.

The sight of the birds was as uncomfortable as the sound. Like a new crop of black leaves, they covered the bare top branches of the dead Chinese elms in the old windbreak. Another part of the flock was lined up, wing to wing, along the wires between utility poles.

As we walked down the road, we could see still more birds scattered across the pasture. Sharp black heads stuck up out of the dry grass like a crop of late-blooming dark flowers. When, disturbed by our presence, they took to the air, it looked as if the prairie had suddenly caught fire and plumes of smoke were flowing skyward.

We walked for perhaps a mile along the road, watching the skeins of birds rise up in front of us and settle back behind us. Their sound was a steady accompaniment to our walk, like the musical score of a movie in which nothing bad has happened—yet.

I've never seen blackbirds in such numbers. Presumably they were in the neighborhood to take advantage of several nearby fields of ripening sunflowers. It would only take one or two visits by those airborne hordes to reduce a field, and the year's profits for its owner, to nothing.

This weekend is supposed to be cold and rainy. It will be the kind of weather to curl up on the couch, maybe with a rented movie. I don't think I'll get Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds.

Is It Hiking, or Is It Geology?

Spring. The time of year when a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of—rocks, if he’s a geologist.

Actually, that isn’t quite true. Geologists think about rocks all year around. The difference is that spring is the time they can start to go out into the field again to examine the rocks that have been covered with snow all winter.

Living with a geologist, one would think, means lots of opportunities to go hiking. It does. That’s the good news. Those opportunities involve geologic hiking rather than ordinary hiking. That (to a non-geologist) is the bad news.

Because, you see, when geologists are out in the field they aren’t just walking around looking at rocks. They’re stopping to examine rocks. They’re pondering. Some of the time, they’re doing geologic mapping. This is to regular hiking what geologic time is to regular time. The pace might be described as glacially slow.

Here is what geologic mapping looks like to a liberal-arts-person observer who has come along on a student field expedition in the naïve belief that exercise will be involved:

You walk a little ways, and you stop and break rocks open with your rock hammer to look at them, and sometimes you check them with your magnet or your hand lens. You discuss them with your working partner (in the case of the students) or with a group of students (in the case of the instructors) or even sometimes (in case no one else is available) with your liberal-arts-person assistant who can’t tell the difference between marble and granite anyway but is too polite to say so. From time to time you take a GPS reading so you know your exact coordinates. You stop frequently to make notes in your field book or to mark things on your map with your colored pencils. Sometimes you sit down to do this—on a rock, naturally.

The map is taped onto a piece of cardboard so the wind won’t blow it away, and quite often the liberal-arts-person assistant gets to carry it.  Sometimes she even gets to carry the rock hammer—though she has an unfortunate tendency to hit herself in the knee with it if she isn’t careful. She has been told that a geology student isn’t allowed to graduate until he (or she, though this practice seems to be more prevalent among male students) has mastered the art of throwing his rock hammer into the air so it spins, then catching it by the handle as it comes down. She admires this skill. She isn’t ever going to try it.

After tagging along on enough expeditions such as these, I’ve learned the difference between geologists and the rest of us. Most of us tend to think of the earth as static. There’s a hill, here’s a stream, there’s a canyon, here’s a piece of prairie; and that’s just the way things are. Geologists, on the other hand, understand that the earth is constantly changing. They know that this high meadow once was the bed of an ancient stream, or those hills once were deep beneath the earth, or that this prairie was once the bottom of an ocean. They understand that the planet is still being shaped and reshaped, so gradually that most of us can't comprehend it. They have the ability to think in terms of millions and even billions of years.

That, to me, is even more impressive than the ability to catch a spinning rock hammer.