Return to Two-Boulder Hill

Posted on August 5, 2014 by | 1 comment

By Corinne H. Smith

I last led a nature writing walk to Two-Boulder Hill at the end of March. Back then, we had to walk around a few patches of ice, but we still had a terrific time. (See https://thoreaufarm.org/2014/04/a-visit-to-two-boulder-hill/ for the whole story.)

What a difference three and a half months can make! During The Thoreau Society’s Annual Gathering in mid-July, three of us took the same walk. Well, it can never be the SAME walk. We followed the same general path, and we witnessed the sights and sounds of Summer this time.

Charles and Lucy and I met at Thoreau Farm and began walking north. After we passed the Gaining Grounds fields and the woods behind them, we reached a little-used access road. Here we caught sight of flowers that like to live in these kinds of disturbed areas: the yellow bird’s foot trefoil, yarrow, tiny Deptford pinks, and Queen Anne’s lace. We watched as the smallest butterfly we’d ever seen lighted upon a small dark log. Upon further inspection, we thought that its perch may have been coyote scat. We had indeed approached Wildness pretty quickly.

On this steamy July day, with no clouds in the sky, the sunlight was too strong for us to stand in one place for very long. We walked along the trail and looked around for a shady spot to sit. We ended up just plopping down in the middle of the path, only an arm’s length away from one another. But we all had writing experience, and we quickly got ourselves into the proper frames of mind. We watched, we listened, and we quietly wrote in our journals.

We were surrounded by a dense forest that the wind brought to life. Breezes fluttered through all of the trees and branches above us. Lucy noted later that it sounded as if we were sitting at the edge of a big green ocean, with waves of leaves cooling us off instead of water drops.

After about fifteen minutes, I caught a hint of familiar flute-like tones. No! Was it possible? Had we been discovered by Henry David Thoreau’s favorite bird, the wood thrush?

I waited a few seconds, and the call came again. I was sitting a little closer to Charles, and I whispered to him, “I don’t believe it.” He cocked his ears and listened, and we heard the song again. Charles understood and nodded. He lifted his binoculars to see if he could see the bird. We alerted Lucy, too. Somewhere in the overgrown thicket in front of us, a wood thrush sang its beautiful tidbit song.

Thoreau called the wood thrush “the finest songster of the grove.” He wrote glowingly of the bird and its music. His journal entry for July 5, 1852, puts the thrush on an especially high pedestal, for the length of a full long paragraph. “Whenever a man hears it, he is young, and Nature is in her spring,” he said. It was true. The temperature suddenly became more tolerable for us. We listened as the bird came and went: always out of sight, but always sharing its music. I scribbled a rough transcription of the thrush’s jagged but magical melody line:

thrushsong

(You can hear the typical wood thrush song on Cornell’s All About Birds web site at http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/wood_thrush/id.)

Eventually I glanced at my watch. It was time to start walking back. I told my companions that we had to leave. Charles looked at me and said, “I could stay here all day.” Lucy and I felt the same way. Now THAT’s the sign of a worthwhile nature-watching and writing outing. Reluctantly we got up, brushed ourselves off, stretched our legs, and sauntered back to Thoreau Farm.

Charles was inspired to write a poem about our forest visitor.

Wood Thrush

Sitting in woods listening for sounds —
airplanes the winds shifting in the trees
cicada catbird then the faint
silvery voice, “come to me” “come to me”
the winds blow hard tossing treetops
we wait longer then the bird is nigh
“come to me!” yet closer “come to me!!”
I aim binoculars cannot see him
then silence — only the wind remains
this shy liquid-voiced singer
is the soul of the listening forest
~ Charles T. Phillips

This was indeed a day that the three of us will remember. And all we really did was take a walk in the woods.

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Posted in General, Henry David Thoreau, Literature, Nature, The Roost, Thoreau Quote

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Outward or Upward Bound

Posted on August 2, 2014 by | 1 comment

One of the writing projects I’ve taken on is a biannual column about mountain accidents and searches and rescues for the Appalachian Mountain Club’s Appalachia Journal. The column’s primary purpose is educational – if we read the stories of those who fall or go astray in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, we may become wiser walkers. At least that’s the theory. The column’s readership also knows the lure of disaster stories. Along with these stories of misfortune and perseverance in the backcountry, I offer analysis of what went wrong (and right) in each instance. And I hear from readers who like to point out their own takeaways and share their own stories.

So during the warm ease of summer’s heartland, I take some days to revisit mountain tales accrued during the winter past; the column then will appear at the outset of winter next, and, theoretically, its readership then goes wiser into the winter hills.

The Winter Hills - White Mountains

The Winter Hills – White Mountains

The other day, as the rain pattered companionably on the roof, I was mulling over an incident, and, at the same time, wondering what familiar walk I would take later when the rain let up. This wondering brought Henry Thoreau to mind. Famously and early in “Walking,” Thoreau sets his criteria for a walk: “If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk.”

It is, of course, an “extreme statement,” and in its extremity designed to jar us from the complacency of routine – a little work, a little walk…ho hum…what’s for dinner?

The incident I was contemplating and then writing up was about a college student, who during finals week, went to the mountains, purportedly to clear his head. Here’s the summary, written in the column’s reportorial style:

On December 12th at 3:00 a.m., New Hampshire Fish and Game received a call about a missing hiker in the Franconia Notch area. David F., a Lyndon State College student, had left school to go hiking and climbing in that area the day before. He was reported to be well equipped. David had also given his roommate his intended route, and Fish and Game officers decided that he might simply be delayed and to give him time to hike out on his own. Morning temperatures were very cold (on Mount Washington at 5:17 a.m. it was -15 with the wind registering 73 mph; a windchill advisory was in effect) and there was still no sign of David F., so Fish and Game began to organize a search, which would necessarily be broad and people intensive. At 12:30 p.m., as the search was getting under way, Fish and Game learned that hikers on the Falling Waters trail had come across David not far from the summit of Little Haystack.

Fish and Game believed that David F.’s condition merited an airlift off the ridge by a New Hampshire National Guard helicopter. He was treated for mild hypothermia at a local hospital. In an interview with Fish and Game, David said that he had begun his climb on the Falling Waters trail at 9:00 a.m. on the 11th, diverging later to climb an off-trail drainage called Lincoln’s Throat; eventually he became lost, spent the night in his sleeping bag and wrapped in a space blanket and tarp, then found his way to the Falling Waters trail in the morning. When found, David F. was without his pack and gear, saying he must have lost them that morning.

Such a report sets off head-wagging among the mountain cognoscenti, as it should – conventions violated, personal ability overestimated, etc. But most of us recognize too the need to slip the trap – whether it is a spate of final exams, a daily job or the overly-civil layerings of language over experience – and go free. “Westward I go free,” wrote Thoreau later in his essay, and it takes only a slight change to say, upward I go free. I remember that, even as I point out a student’s errors in pursuit of that freedom.

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Posted in General, Henry David Thoreau, Living Deliberately, Nature, The Roost

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Fantastic Beauty in the Front Yard

Posted on July 27, 2014 by | 2 comments

By Ashton Nichols

Yesterday morning, while I was pushing my granddaughter Verona on the swing in one of our large cedar trees in front of Creekside, I noticed a sudden flash of yellow against the striated brown bark of the tree’s massive trunk. As I drew closer, I could see that it was two Imperial Moths (Eacles imperialis), beautiful members of the silk moth family, the group that produces the largest moths found in North America. These two were clearly mating, joined at the hind-parts and perfectly still, presumably waiting in their nocturnal way, at least for the sun to go down.

Imperial Moths Mating Photo by Ashton Nichols

Imperial Moths Mating
Photo by Ashton Nichols

Moths can take a full 12 hours to mate. The male’s goal is to pass a spermatophore into the female’s body, so that she can then fertilize her eggs. He has located her by sensing her pheromones in the nearby air and then flying toward the source until he locates his partner. Once together, the moths unite by backing up, abdomen to abdomen until they are firmly joined. Then the male clasps the female with small, finger-like appendages– “claspers”–so that the two can remain connected, even if they have to move from one spot to another during their prolonged “romance.” Research indicates that a mating pair like this, hooked together and unable to separate until their work is done, are especially liable to predation, often by raccoons and other small forest mammals.

These two insects that Verona and I watched today were gorgeous and large examples, a full five inches across from wingtip to wingtip, the female slightly larger than the male. Their bright yellow wings were patterned with a brown that almost shaded to purple; they had a thumb-thick and sharply segmented abdomen, and a wide, furry head and face. The female has a unique–if invisible–anatomical feature, her “bursa copulatrix (literally, organ for “exchange coupling),” where she will store the spermatophore that she receives from the male. This tiny packet of his genetic material also contains nutrient materials to keep the fertilized eggs supplied with “food” in her body, not unlike the way an egg’s yolk and white support the growing chick.

Here is how complicated and technical the entomologist’s description of the Imperial Moth can get: “Both sexes have round, purplish to reddish-brown reniform and subreniform spots on the forewing, the center of each spot filled with gray; as well as a similar discal spot on the hind wing” (this drawn from the Massachusetts “Natural heritage Endangered Species Program”). The last century has seen a dramatic decline in species range and numbers so that now, in Massachusetts for example, the moth–which once covered the state–is only found on Martha’s Vineyard Island and occasionally on the nearby mainland. In our part of Pennsylvania the decline is less pronounced, but the Mason-Dixon line seems to be the dividing line: Imperials in Maryland and south tend to be doing much better than their northern kin.

So there we were, on a warm July afternoon with a single species of declining moth, bringing knowledge to me and wonder to my wide-eyed, three-year-old grandchild. “What are those two moths doing, Baba,” Verona said, with her eyes still wide and staring. “Well, my little girl, they are resting . . . um, ah, ” pause, think, speak: “and they are starting to make babies for the next generation . . . I, uh . . . I mean for their next family of beautiful moths.” “They ARE beautiful, Baba,” Verona said as we turned to come into Creekside to get the camera.

This morning I returned and the pair was gone: he to feed and hopefully to survive a few more months until winter, she off to lay her fertilized eggs and begin their remarkable metamorphic moth lifecycle again.

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Posted in Environment, General, Nature, The Roost

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