Thoreau Farm

Estabrook Woods: In November the downed leaves make a noisy pathway, and they hide the roots and stones, forcing me to pay attention. This repeated phrase is my late fall mantra. But sometimes, when I do look up, I find pale beauty in the understory. With the leafy canopy gone, light streams into this lower region, and there, it finds the pale fire of the burning bush and the parchment delicacy of the ferns.

In its suburban yard incarnation the burning bush is often just that, a fiery flare of red leaves that, depending upon the individual bush, either burst into short-lived flame or burn steadily for days. But in the woods the bush is a subtle fire, a pastel murmur of flame that keeps in it hints of green until deep autumn.

Now seems the right time to acknowledge that the burning bush is an invasive species; in some states (our Massachusetts, for example) it is even an outlaw. Nurseries are forbidden its sale, and occasional posses of citizens root out clusters where they are found.

Here, I may start a fire of my own, but, in this case, I can’t summon alarm. In fact the whole invasive species argument seems to me arbitrary, as the floral and faunal history of the world seems one of migration rather than homesteading. Yes, I will agree that in some cases where a purple loosestrife or a water chestnut crowds out all competitors and changes a whole land- or waterscape, I feel regret. As a fan of goldenrod, for example, I rue the way some late summer fields that used to say gold now speak purple. (Added note: recently I read – and now can’t rediscover – that goldenrod is the most (or second-most) noted plant in Thoreau’s journals).

But are not we also an invasive species? Certainly in our subgroups we are, riding like so many Huns or Visigoths into the “open” territory of some other peoples and animals and declaring it open for our business.

In any event, each fall as I walk these woods, and especially as I reach the old limekiln site along the Carlisle Road, I spend time with the pink and pale fire that burns in the understory air and lights the ground. If you step into the midst of this cluster with the sun slanting in from the west, the light is so intense it feels warm, even as the wind rackets coldly in the bare branches high above.

Part of the Old Limekiln Site

Added note: help, by the way, is on the way. A horticultural scientist at the University of Connecticut has developed a sterile version of the burning bush. Soon, perhaps, as sales of these popular bushes continue, their seeds, spread by birds who eat them, will fall on the cold earth and nothing will rise from them.

a meditation on “Higher Laws”

Walden’s Higher Laws chapter rarely fails to provoke (and so, wake up?) a reader. Year after year, we arrive on its shores, and I watch as students shift from nodding acceptance of Thoreau’s portrait of the young boy as hunter and fisher to puzzlement (or outrage) when, late in chapter, he writes, “Nature is hard to be overcome but she must be overcome.” After weeks in the woods and an ongoing paean to “the wild,” this sentence seems a looped snare in the middle of the trail. Here we are, walking our leafy way through the woods, when, suddenly, we are airborne…and upside down. It seems a hard way to “invert your head.”

So there we were leafing through the chapter with these predictable results, and I had asked, “So, what might Thoreau mean when he says, ‘she must be overcome?'”

“So, perhaps,” said Daniel, “what Thoreau is talking about is the shift from hunter to poet. The poet still reaches out to take hold of the world, but he does so with words. The instinct is undimmed, but its expression has changed.” Mild confession: here, I have paraphrased, but I think I have caught the insight and the spirit of Daniel’s thinking.

Quiet ensued. Every so often in a classroom, there comes a moment of appreciative silence; the oiled click of so many locks sliding open is barely but clearly audible. In an instant, we know more. In the next instant there is nothing more to say, and we let the silence deepen for a bit before we turn to what’s next.

What the Poet-hunter Seeks

Now and for the rest of the years I read and reread this chapter, I’ll see the hunter become poet as he or she fashions the capture-cage of words that would both bring the wild close and leave it intact. Thank you, Daniel.

And up

By Corinne H. Smith

Our neighborhood sounds almost like Spring these days. Every morning before 6:30 a.m., a bird sings loudly and seemingly joyfully for about five minutes from a tree in our front yard. I don’t know what kind of bird it is, but its song is familiar. The same fellow – or one of its family members – made its winter home in the arborvitae bushes beside our carport last year. Back then it shared its melodies off and on, sometimes even during cold or snowy days. It sang quite a bit when everything turned green. Then it left to spend summer and fall somewhere else. Now the bird is back, ready to hunker down in our bushes again, preparing to escape the weather to come.

It’s not the only one. Nearly every yew and juniper on our block is teeming with little birds. You can hear them chattering to each other from the branches within. They’ll go suddenly silent if someone walks past, especially if the person is being led by a dog or two. But after a pause of only a few seconds, the chirps of conversation will start up again. I guess they’re all vying for position. If you’re a bird and you need a comfortable shelter against wind and precipitation, you’d want to find the right spot to sit in. Can you imagine holding onto a branch during a snowstorm?

Our house and carport protect these six arborvitaes from the western winds, making them perfect winter homes for birds.

I’m not a total dolt when it comes to identifying birds. But our morning singer and its cohorts hide too much or move too fast for me to train binoculars on them. I haven’t taken the time to figure out who they are. For now, they fall into the catch-all category of LBBs – Little Brown Birds. I once lamented to an avid birdwatcher that I wished that all of Nature’s creatures would wear name tags. “They do,” he replied. “You just can’t read them.”

This is not the first time I’ve been lucky enough to share close quarters with a wintering bird. Back in the early 1990s, a male house finch chose the uncovered light fixture on our back porch for its winter home. Only a single bulb was left in the old two-bulb fixture; and a metal T-shaped bar dropped down a few inches from its center. There was just enough room for a bird to sit on one of the crossbars. He perched there every evening. By the time I got up in the morning, he had already left for the day, presumably to find food. Since we rarely used this entrance, we humans were only minimally inconvenienced. I just put a piece of cardboard in the middle of the porch floor to catch the spots of whitewash that had alerted us to his presence in the first place. We never turned on the light. And every evening, we would look out the top window of the back door, see the dark outline of his body, and say, “Goodnight, Mr. Finch.”

Then one day in March, I heard one of the most amazing bird songs I’d ever heard in my life. I looked out the kitchen window. On the clothesline sat Mr. Finch, fully engulfed in the promise of Spring. He raised his head to the sky and sang and sang and sang. It seemed as if his little crimson chest could hardly hold all of the sounds that needed to come out. He imprinted his house finch melody into my brain, and I felt honored that he had shared it with me. But I also knew that the song signaled his departure. (I interpreted it as a possible thank-you, too.) Off he went. I said goodbye and wished him well. The rest of the year, I caught only glimpses of him with his female partner as they flew through our back yard, foraging. They had found a better place to build a nest.

I skimmed through the index of Thoreau’s journals to see if I could find an instance when he witnessed the bird-in-the-bush or an over-wintering phenomenon. The closest entry I came upon was from December 14, 1855: “How snug and warm a hemlock looks in the winter!” It was accompanied by his own sketch of the tree. Maybe he too was wondering what it would be like to be a bird and to hold onto an evergreen branch during a snowstorm.