Bi-Weekly Topics for Aug. 15, 2004

If you have a place you want to go back to ... if you have an idea you want to improve upon ... if you go, again and again, to the same place ... here, at the height of rerun season, is where to write about it (P).

RePlace

By Hoarded Ordinaries

This is the view from the summit of Lovewell Mountain in Washington, NH. Lovewell isn’t a high peak: it’s only 2,473 feet tall, well under the height of New Hampshire’s famed 4,000 footers and substantially shorter than our own Mount Monadnock, whose 3,165 summit is, along with Mount Fuji, one of the most-climbed peaks in the world. (For the record, although I’ve climbed Monadnock several times, in the five years I’ve lived in New Hampshire, I’ve only climbed two 4,000 footers. I’m a great walker but not much of a climber.)

Although Lovewell Mountain isn’t a challenge for true mountaineers, it’s a wonderful day hike: the portion of the Monadnock-Sunapee Greenway that goes up and over its summit wends through lovely rock- and fern-dotted woods, and the trail is never crowded. On a beautiful Saturday when the parking lots at Mount Monadnock were probably brimming, the dog and I had the mountain to ourselves, the only other humans we saw being a threesome of incredibly fit, lycra-clad men who pedaled to the summit and then “interrupted” our solitary enjoyment of the mountain’s southeastern vista. Although I encouraged these fellows to stay while I enjoyed the view (did I mention they were incredibly fit and lycra-clad?), they opted to head up to the southeastern summit before descending the mountain, and the dog and I saw nothing more of them after that. Alas.

After having visited Washington, NH on my own about a month ago, yesterday I decided to ReTurn with the dog in tow in order to ReVisit Lovewell, which Chris, the dog, and I had climbed with our friend X (of Boys’ Weekend fame) a summer or two ago. I remembered Lovewell as being a moderately heart-pounding but not dauntingly strenuous hike with a vista (and accompanying solitude) that made it well worth the effort. It had been a while since the dog and I had been hiking, so the thought of ReVisiting a semi-familiar place was appealing.

When you ReTurn to a place you’ve been before, one thing you inevitably do is compare then and now. One of the most noticeable changes at Lovewell Mountain is a current real estate boom: not only are the cottages on Halfmoon Pond Road on the approach to Lovewell Mountain dotted with a striking abundance of “For Sale” signs, the woods bordering the fireroad at mountain’s base sport realtors’ signs as well. Although the summit of Lovewell Mountain itself lies within the protected jurisdiction of Pillsbury State Park, the base of the mountain does not: the Monadnock-Sunapee Greenway, like the Appalachian Trail, runs through a mix of public and private land. In light of my recent posts on human construction, I thought it only fair to post a picture of a scene that broke my heart: although people admittedly have the right to buy and build wherever the law allows, I’d much prefer that folks build and reclaim property within the already tampered with confines of cities and towns (even if that does translate into “urban blight”) rather than clearing isolated plots of forest land. In the sake of fairness, Lovewell Mountain is crisscrossed by centuries’ old stone walls: this used to be pastureland. But the landowners who ordered this land cleared are presumably looking to dwell in woodsy solitude, their own mountain version of Thoreau’s pondside idyll. I’m sure these landowners “love nature”: they love it so much they want to live right in the middle of it. But the sight of such “nature-loving” construction sobers me more than the bulldozing of some birches next to a factory: by yearning for country solitude, these folks are destroying tranquility in the process of acquiring it. In a word, the philosophy of “not in my backyard” begins only after you’ve built that backyard: once you’ve cleared your own 10 acre plot, then you can start telling others that they shouldn’t clear theirs.

Once you’ve turned onto the Greenway trail from the fireroad that skirts the base of Lovewell Mountain, though, it feels like you’ve ReTurned to an older, more pristine land. It isn’t accurate to call this “land that time forgot” since the signs of civilization are everywhere. The Greenway itself is well-marked with white blazes on trees and rocks. Small wooden signs point toward water sources and vistas, and at the summit itself there is a trail register where you can note the date and conditions of your hike along with any comments you’d like to immortalize. (The entry previous to mine was from a “Florida girl” who’d summitted the mountain several days before: “Just like Miami, but no espanol.”) Although the desire to be the first or the only person to capture a summit seems as deeply pervasive as a toddler’s unwillingness to share her favorite toy, the fact remains that Lovewell Mount has been loved, and loved well, by countless people both past and present. I’m sure every hand that touched the trail register loved their time on Lovewell; I’m sure the cattle and cattle-owners from the days when this land was grazed loved it well as well. You don’t have to be the first to happen upon a place to love it as if it had never been loved before; you don’t even have to be a first-time visitor to love it as if for the first and only time.

Instead of trying for “firsts,” I think it’s more fruitfull to try for ReCollection. What was the weather like the last time–the first time–I set eyes on this cairn: was the sun in a similar or different quadrant of the sky? Yesterday I saw a plump gartner snake sunning himself on the trail only to watch him retreat into piled rocks as I approached: how many snakes did I see the last time I walked here? Who was it who laid these summit-leading stones, and when; how many different hands have painted and ReTouched these countless white blazes? Every step we take on mountains and elsewhere is a new, never-before-taken step…yet every step we take is also a step into someone else’s or even our own prior footsteps, every turn a ReTurn, every place a RePlace.

I think that instead of lusting after our own plot of “virgin” land, we should seek out and then love well those lands that are, like that ’80s Madonna classic, like a virgin: lands that don’t care whether you’re their first or last or somewhere in between, but that love you well and unabashedly. Even mountains that have been tamed and then abandoned and then tamed again–even lands that have had an endless string of hikers and bikers and farmers and homebuilders and real estate agents loving and even abusing them in succession–can sometimes stun you into silence with the shocking green of new moss: surely this spot has never been seen or touched before! And yet I’ve walked this trail before…I’m sure I thought the same thing last year, and I’m sure that Florida girl felt the same thing–en ingles o espanol–only a few days ago. In a word it doesn’t matter how many times (or how many lovers) Lovewell Mountain has loved, only that she loved me well when I needed her, and with an exuberance that suggests she never loved before and never will love again…until (of course) next time I or someone else happens to RePlace me.

Source: http://hoardedordinaries.wordpress.com/2004/08/page/2/

Replacing / Control

By London and the North

I have a feeling that I could have started with something a bit more deep and meaningful (for this contributition to Ecotone: Writing About Place on RePlace) than this nasty pink stuff but it's really on my mind - and in my sightline.

Pretty. My mum showed me a few innocent years ago how to may the seed pods jump out by touching the flower heads. I'm talking about Himalayan Balsam. Scurge of woods and river banks. Not enough walkers are pulling out the damn stuff so it is seeding and reseeding and taking over, covering banks where ground creeping plants grew and dominating forest floors where bluebells and other smaller plants have thrived. The bees love it. I guess they trigger the catapult mechanism of the seeds.

We live in a changing world. Some changes are just scarey to see happening so fast around you. It's also hard to know whcih changes to be philosophical about and say that's just life, and which are ones to jump out and stop.

Posted by Coup de Vent at 08:23 PM

Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20040907201654/http://www.airenet.co.uk/alife/2004_08.html

Back to the complexities

By Via Negativa

This is my contribution for the Ecotone wiki topic RePlace.

A spot of poison ivy between the first and second knuckle of my left thumb has been lurking there since late May. I never knew exactly where or how I made contact with the plant, but by now, in mid-August, its berries must be ripening. In two weeks or less they will redden and the leaflets three will color up to match - signal flags for the small birds of passage who will drop from the sky each morning for a quick nosh. For them the first leaves turn: poison ivy and Virginia creeper along the woods' edge, fox grape and dogwood and a hundred acres of tupelo, red-orange-yellow right underneath the canopy's stalwart green. The migrants won't have much time and the banquet is overwhelming, so the foliage has to shout: Get your high-fat berries here, at the drive-thru window!

But Jesus, these birds! Only a fool could dismiss them as ordinary because frequently seen. Steering at night by the stars, their vision by day encompassing ultraviolet light and polarization caused by the earth's magnetic field, traveling thousands of miles through every kind of weather, year after year venturing everything to come and breed in woods like these, then leaving their nests and returning to the far more fecund South - the Indians were right about them. How could they not be messengers, couriers of the otherwise undeliverable hope to the otherwise unthinkable destination?

It is the time of year that approximates that late stage in an urban civilization when works of art and language start to give off a faint odor, bending under the weight of footnotes and allusions. Wasp nests bulge with larvae, Luftwaftes of termites take to the air. More moth species than lepidopterists have yet been able to catalogue, most of them naturally rare, seine the forest air for the exact scent of their shorter-than-a-needle mates in the landscape's haystack. Overlooked for their apparent sameness by generations of collectors, agog at polyphemous, the leaf-winged luna, the riddle-winged sphinx.

The last of the huckleberries are ripening, and the first of the apples. The peaches are at their height. The air we breathe teems with more life than most of us would even want to imagine. The soil in the woods gives off an odor so much a part of the general gestalt that the overwhelming majority of humans heading out for a week or two of camping have no clear notion of what it is that draws them, year after year, to the same spot in some park or national forest, relinquishing the hard-won comforts of home for the pleasure of sleeping on the ground, their nostrils just a couple layers of fabric away from the sweetly rotting earth. The sternest teetotalers are led around by their noses. The juice in its stoneware pitcher grows mutinous with yeast.

Winter is as far behind us as it can get, now, and the growing chorus of northern true katydids each night reminds us - those whose grandparents grew up on farms, and were full of such sayings - six weeks till frost. We're as far as we can get from February's spare forms, blue shadows and that crystal-clear air that always leads my mind upward and away. One may or may not tire of August's filigree and fandango, but for me the sense of mystery in this season is undeniably more profound. If in January I am a desert ascetic, in late summer I return to the full-course spread at the Life and Death Café. There's nothing like it for ambience, for service, for live entertainment: a small combo with trumpet and upright bass, ride cymbals going lush . . . lush, the blues singer shouting sundown as if he meant it.

Waiter! I'll have another bowl of the primordial soup!

8/16/2004 10:47:50 AM

Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20041129172208/http://neithernor.blogspot.com/2004_08_01_neithernor_archive.html

Da Capo

By Feathers of Hope (Pica)]

Where I sit, now, is pretty much where I always sit when I set out to write a blog entry. It's at a 12" iBook on a white tile counter (cluttered with papers) that separates the kitchen from the living room, and it faces the kitchen window. Through this window I can see an English walnut tree, in full leaf with the fruits coming in, and a wall of corn. The cornfield is now about 11 feet tall. This is the first year they've planted corn in this field; before now it's all been tomatoes, squashes, maybe sorghum that reached a maximum height of about four feet.

I've never lived in a jungle but I'm starting to get a sense of green impenetrability, and I don't relish it all that much. I didn't before Sunday.

Then, on Sunday:

A light fawn kitten emerged from the cornfield.

There's only one word for this, really: shit.

Last night we watched as this kitten AND a more orange sibling emerged to eat the food we left out for what we thought was ONE kitten, which we thought we had a chance to catch. We've even bought a humane trap to do this. With two, it's a lot harder.

What do we do? We have one bathroom which, when it's not being used as a kitten nursery, we tend to use. We have two kittens, now permanently indoors, that have been de-wormed, tested for FHIV and feline leukemia, neutered, treated for intestinal parasites, vaccinated, and are healthy; these two new kittens are so much like them in every way but size I can't help but think they're siblings who got left out of our grand roundup back in May and are stunted from a lot less to eat. But for sure they have worms, coccidia, respiratory stuff, the works, most of it contagious and all of it unpleasant. And they're not sterilised--my biggest priority. We cannot stretch this household further. Quite apart from the fact that if they really are four months old, they're almost certainly too old to be tamed.

I wish I had the meditation gene.

I guess this feels like enough of a rerun to qualify for the Ecotone Wiki's RePlace.

Posted by Pica at August 17, 2004 08:42 PM

Comments

Good luck - you really do deserve a medal, both of you! We have tamed four month old kittens using good old food bribery techniques. Just as well Mother cat has been neutered but I agree that these two need to be caught ASAP.

Have you checked around for feral cat groups in your area? Try Alley Cat Allies feral friends network at www.alleycat.org, or punch inn "feral cats" and your region into Google. You probably already have, but...

I don't suppose you have an outbuilding you can convert a bit, so you can use your bathroom again. Cat litter on wet bare toes is such a bummer.

I laughed at the "shit" expletive. I'm sorry, but I just did. It's sort of the universal expletive of choice when a new cat or kitten shows up just when things seemed under control.

Welcome back, guys!
And what a surprise!
More cats..... I hope you find a solution for this... [problem?].
hugs!

What Catlin said about expletives. I think that was my exact word when Zeke found those three kittens earlier this year.

Alley Cat Allies, for what it's worth, is strongly in favor of Trap-Neuter-Release, which is increasingly SOP these days but which has some significant drawbacks (as Pica well knows). Sometimes euthanasia is indeed the most humane option.

In either case, let us know if you want to use Thistle's old hutch as temporary lodging.

Ouch. I'm sorry for your new discovery, especially after you've already done so much! And while I hate to do it, I have to second Chris' suggestion of euthanasia. If they're already four or five months old, they're precariously near procreation themselves . . .

Actually, re: ACA, I was thinking perhaps there might be some adoption options via their feral friends network.

For example, in my area I set up off-site adoptions downtown and at Barnes and Noble etc. so people who rescue cats can find homes for them rather than get stuck with them. It's hard work finding homes for shy cats.

Trap/Neuter/Return does have some baggage if you are a person who is also concerned about the local wildlife. Of course, fewer cats outdoors is better than breeding cats. But 40 cats in the house should be avoided at all costs. :)

What IS going on at your end??? I agree, meditation - a good time to start. Perhaps the spirits are trying to tell you all so,ething. But what?

Source: http://www.magpienest.org/feathersofhope/archives/2004/08/17/da_capo.html