Thoreau Farm

By Corinne H. Smith

“I have been into the lumber-yard, and the carpenter’s shop, and the tannery, and the lampblack factory, and the turpentine clearing; but when at length I saw the tops of the pines waving and reflecting the light at a distance high over all the rest of the forest, I realized that the former were not the highest use of the pine. It is not their bones or hide or tallow that I love most. It is the living spirit of the tree, not its spirit of turpentine, with which I sympathize, and which heals my cuts. It is as immortal as I am, and perchance will go to as high a heaven, there to tower above me still.” ~ Henry Thoreau, “Chesuncook,” The Maine Woods

I used to live in a second-floor apartment that had a view of a driveway, a garage, a woodshed, a hillside, and a sunken backyard complete with garden cottage. Standing in the midst of it all was a full and picture-perfect Douglas fir. A Christmas tree allowed to go wild, perhaps. She stood almost three stories tall.

I called her Momma Tree because she supplied shelter for many of the birds in the neighborhood. Cardinals, blue jays, juncos, chickadees, sparrows, and mourning doves all hid in her dusky green depths, at one time or another. When the nearby bird feeder was stocked, everyone politely took turns launching to it from her branches. Oh, a few squabbles erupted every once in a while. The noisy blue jays often seemed to be the culprits behind the disputes. But Momma Tree was a comforting presence to all. It seemed rude to start a fight at her fingertips.

One day, the air was filled with big wet snowflakes. Hour after hour, they kept falling. Hour after hour, they combined to lay down a beautiful blanket of thick, heavy snow. By nightfall, Momma Tree was covered. Her once-perky arms now aimed straight down toward the ground. She still stood tall, but she was burdened. I wasn’t sure if she would recuperate from the encounter.

M-tree points to the west from which came the storm.

The next day arrived with a bright blue sky. The sun popped over the hillside in full blast. When I looked out the window, I saw a poof! of snow falling off Momma Tree. A sunbeam had helped her begin to shed the weight. I plopped myself down with a cup of tea to witness the rest of the show.

If you asked for an explanation from the guys on The Big Bang Theory, they would assess the scene as a sample of pure physics. Sunlight hits a snowy evergreen branch. The warmth on the dark green needles and brown bark turns the adjacent snow into water. The process of melting causes a frozen chunk to release its grip and slide off the branch. Suddenly relieved of this weight, the flexible arm of needles bounces back and upward. Since a body in motion tends to stay in motion, the up-and-down swaying lasts until its momentum can fade to stillness again. In the process, more snow slides off that branch. When the falling snow or the branch hits other branches, a chain reaction takes place. More branches sway, and more snow falls. An occasional light breeze may aid in the process, too. Soon the whole tree appears to be alive, shaking off its cold and unwanted covering as easily as a dog sheds suds after a bath. It’s just that easy.

I watched Momma Tree shuffle off that snow until the sun sank behind the farthest hill. She was almost entirely green again. All of her branches had bounced back but for one. It still carried a frozen mass that looked like a white Persian cat, with its eyes closed in sleep and its nose flush to the tip of the greenery. Its fuzzy legs dangled down on either side of the branch. That part re-froze when the temperature dropped overnight. It took Momma Tree the rest of the week to rid herself of the icy snowcat. Then she was back to normal.

Of course, I know that trees are living things. But until that afternoon, I had never seen a tree actually do something, really undertake a task. Momma Tree had a “living spirit,” all right. I felt honored to have seen her in action. I felt an even greater connection to her from that moment on.

Don’t believe that a tree can move on its own? Watch a snow-covered evergreen on a sunny winter day. The poof! you see as the first sunbeam hits the ice will be your invitation to pay attention.

I moved away from that address in July 2012. That’s the last time I saw Momma Tree. Before I left, I walked out to thank her and to wish her well. I heard the wind whispering through her needles in reply. I think about her from time to time, and I wonder how she’s doing. How many birds is she boarding? How did she deal with this last snowstorm? I will never forget the priceless lessons she taught me: about the aliveness of a tree, and of the value of time spent on one winter afternoon, just sitting and watching.

After the latest storm blew through (leaving a good deal less than hyperbole’s prediction), we thought it a good day to strap on winter’s big feet and snowshoe out to a nearby point for a look at the February ocean. Back in post-thaw January, when the cold returned, the whole salt bay had been iced over, and some of the cast-up chunks of sea-ice had been the size of Volkswagens. What, we wondered, might the rising sun angle have wrought, even amid the long cold and repeating storms?

After the usual remembrance and wrestling with our bindings, we ‘shoed up over the plowed berm and out along the track into the woods. The winter-blue sky was deep and the northwest wind stripped sleeves of snow from the trees, seeding the air with snow-grains that curved and recurved like flocks of tiny birds. Snowshoeing is slow going, and it took us about a half-mile to remember this. But then we stopped trying to stride forward (which catches the toe of your ‘shoe, pitching you forward) and fell into its deliberate lifting rhythm. We were in no hurry.

Under the few inches of new snow, the recent rain-crust cracked, dropping a half-foot at every step in oversized indentations. We were leaving monster tracks; some explorer, stumbling across then for the first time, would be wary – how big must this creature be to leave such tracks? As we ‘shoed on, leaving a path of possible wonder, I fell to thinking about our far western cousin, Big Foot himself. (There have, I’ve read, been sightings of Big Foot in every state, except Hawaii.)

Leaving Tracks

Grainy fabrications aside, all we have of Big Foot are his (or her) tracks. But unless some descendant of the Merry Pranksters is out there in the dark woods of the Pacific Northwest, strapping on outsized feet and striding gleefully through any available mud, there is something/one out there. Big Foot was on my mind because I’d recently read (here is the Thoreau connection) Robert Sullivan’s old Big Foot article in Outside Magazine. (Sullivan, you may recall, is the author of the recent The Thoreau You Don’t Know, one of my favorite modern works about him.)

From the article, originally published in Open Spaces, an attractive journal also from the northwest, a few things became clear: first, Sullivan – always drawn to quirky subjects – must have smelled a book in Big Foot. But, as he visits with various Big Foot searchers (and “researchers”), the loopy nature of the Big Foot community comes clear; circles of rivalry and self-reference form the spin of excitement and myth that keeps Big Foot alive. And yet, despite the outsized estimates of his (or her) size – upwards of seven feet and perhaps 1,000 pounds – Big Foot remains seldom seen. And undocumented.

All this mulling and slow ‘shoeing brought us to the sea, which shimmered under the race of wind and the angled sun. We walked along the bluff above the water, and as we did, we followed also fresh coyote tracks, three or four coyotes if I read the overlays well. Partway out to the point we reached a point of convergence – the tracks radiated out from a short slide down the bank next to an overhang; we must have been right above the den. Pulses a little elevated, we waited. The wind kept hurrying through the woods; the sea sparkled; we were awake to the possibility of other lives.

Then, we walked on. Any tracks we crossed were now heading the other way. Thoreau often sketched the tracks he found into his journal; they were the calligraphy of other lives, their sentences. And from these sentences emerged a sense of a world both real and mythic.

We ‘shoed on, leaving our big-footed tracks.

By Corinne H. Smith

I should have known that the place would be packed with cars and people, because our newspaper had run the story on the front page. Dozens of bald eagles had been spotted fishing in the open water by a dam in the lower Susquehanna River valley, the reporter said. The rest of the river was encased in ice. But with temperatures rising, the scenario could soon change. The ice would melt, and the birds would find other fishing options and would leave. What else could we do? We don’t usually see eagles around here. So off we went, for an eleven-mile countryside drive downriver to the Safe Harbor Dam.

Susquehanna Eagle Tree
Photo by Tom Knapp

It was noon by the time we got there. We earned a front-row parking space only because someone else was leaving when we arrived. Bunches of avid birders were lined up along the shoreline. Some of their scopes and lenses were longer than my arm. A few low and quick conversations murmured in the background. You could identify the many amateurs, like me. We just wheeled our little binoculars toward anything that was in the air. Turkey buzzards, gulls, crows, whatever. Could you see a white head and white tail? No? Darn. Where were all of these silly eagles, anyway?

I’m not totally new to these sightings. I’ve seen bald eagles in the wild on a few occasions. Most often it was when I lived in the Midwest, within a few hours’ drive of the Mighty Mississippi. River towns in Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin hold eagle-watching days at this time of year. Whenever the surrounding landscape is blanketed with snow, the eagles flock to fish the dams. I once saw 15 bald eagles sitting in a tree at Guttenberg, Iowa, and watched as they took their turns diving down to the water. That’s a special and vivid memory for me.

But there’s nothing quite as spectacular as the unexpected encounter. On a murky winter day in December 1996, I was driving south along the Mississippi River from Minnesota to Wisconsin. The river was to my left – looking like a flat white meadow — and my car and I darted among the high sandy bluffs. Suddenly I saw a large black bird flying at our level, over the river. My mind zipped through a series of mental flash cards to identify it. When it matched the size with the white head and tail, it sent the answer to my mouth. “Oh my god, that’s an eagle!” I said out loud to myself, several times. I got a real-life shiver along my spine. And then he wheeled out of sight.

Henry Thoreau may have felt this same magic when he saw a bald eagle flying over Fair Haven Bay in the Sudbury River in April 1854. He had recently bought a new spyglass and suddenly found a good reason to use it.

“Saw a large bird sail along over the edge of Wheeler’s cranberry meadow just below Fair Haven, which I at first thought a gull, but with my glass found it was a hawk and had a perfectly white head and tail and broad or blackish wings. It sailed and circled along over the low cliff, and the crows dived at it in the field of my glass, and I saw it well, both above and beneath, as it turned, and then it passed off to hover over the Cliffs at a greater height. It was undoubtedly a white-headed eagle. It was to the eye but a large hawk.” ~ April 8, 1854

Two weeks later, he saw it again:

“Lying on the ground with my glass, I could watch him very easily, and by turns he gave me all possible views of his wings curved upward slightly the more, like a stereotyped undulation. He rose very high at last, till I almost lost him in the clouds, circling or rather looping along westward, high over river and wood and farm, effectually concealed in the sky. We who live this plodding life here below never know how many eagles fly over us. They are concealed in the empyrean. I think I have got the worth of my glass now that it has revealed to me the white-headed eagle.” ~ April 23, 1854

But back at Safe Harbor on this day, among all of the other glass-wielding watchers, I found I didn’t have the patience or the proper attitude for eagle-watching. The sun was too bright. The birds weren’t hungry or restless. They weren’t flying or fishing. Some of them sat in trees on little islands that were too far away for me to focus on. When I caught a glimpse of a golden eagle flying overhead, I didn’t point him out to anyone else. He could remain anonymous and unremarkable this time. The stars of this show were supposed to be the ones with the white heads and tails. I eased back behind the wheel and slowly maneuvered us and our car out of the congestion and back into the open countryside. I’ll come back when the eagles outnumber the people.