February 20, 2010

Photos from Saturday's walk 02-20-10

February 13, 2010

Why I Go to the Woods on this February Day

I go into the woods for the wild
and to glimpse the sediment of wild things
I go to dream of forests ranging endlessly,
sprawling, unbounded by streets and lots
and shopping malls, huddled on river bluffs,
east and west,
fierce and vast,
Faulkner’s bear
and mountain lions
and shumard oaks and ashes,
to know what we have destroyed and are
destroying,
to honor what remains.



I go into the woods this day in February,
one day before Valentine’s Day,
to see this ruby-crowned kinglet,
shy and evasive, fluttering into flight
with each step I take closer,
I go to see him winter in these woods,
to watch him waiting until the world tilts
back into place, waiting for the signal fires
of the sunwarmed air to send him northward again.
I go to be reminded of this ceaseless rhythm
of rest and flight that grips us all,
this rhythm guided by the felt
but unfelt motions of this
endlessly restless world.



I go to see these shelf lichens,
algaed green, to see moss
and mushrooms brown and orange and white
settled on fallen trees and dead trees and snags,
to see these corduroy striped tulip poplars
and the diamond ridged ash trees.
I go to see things that have no need of me,
things as indifferent to my joy as they are
to the snow piles slowly melting on fallen logs,
to the threads of meltwater streaming along their bark,
streaming to drip down and burrow deep into the forest floor.
I go to see things that view us all as transient,
as fleeting as this snow, though our love and wisdom grow solid,
steadily narrow to a focus round as the heart
of winged maple seeds waiting to be launched by the wind.



I go see the looping and swagging wild grape vines
and the hairy poison ivy vines,
to see them motionless but always climbing, seeking light.
I go to see trees harshly bent and strangely angled
by the harsh facts of sun and wind.
I go to see the leafless greenbriar thickets,
to see their coiled tendrils browned
by winter’s cold and dark.
I go to be reminded of the hard edges of possibility,
to be reminded of how our lives,
like the lives of all things,
are bound and freed by the harsh facts
of time and sun and wind.



I go to woods on this day in winter
to see the world as it really was and is,
brown and rusty orange and green,
to read the hidden life of the world
etched into the rotting bark of fallen oaks resolving
themselves slowly back to earth.

I go to remind myself that this patient, inexorable
work of rot and resurrection
is the only real work we have.




Words by Stephen Black
Photos by Jenn Allmon

February 7, 2010

We enter through the northeast corner, at the intersection of North and East Parkways.



A crushed locust seed pod on the asphalt park road like an omen warned us that pristine nature was going to have be earned today.

We stepped into the woods, into a flat open space obviously used as a camp by homeless people. Clothes and potato chip bags lie scattered on the ground. A computer speaker – its mesh cover removed – rests on its side next to a tree.



But we soon found unlittered woods



A huge fallen tree blocks the trail





its spired snag shattered at the top



It is not a warm day and only rare things are green: euonymus vines



Green berries on a brown stem



First leaves unfurling



A strange spiky plant growing in a dry creek bed





The ground is wet from last week’s ice and snow. Puddles reflect trees and sky.



Along the edge of the woods, a ditch built by the CCC during the Great Depression. Moss sprawls over the terraced sides



In the nakedness that comes with cold, the shape of the woods is revealed: the dips and rises, and also the accidental shapes of nature’s growth:



A broken limb that looks like a sculpture of a turtle’s head emerging from a shell



Robins shuffle leaves



A mushroom looks like a hooded woman sitting in meditation



A fallen tree whose mossy ridges have caught winged seeds



A nub on a fallen tree trunk looks like a haughty toad





A rotting tree trunk standing on a perilously rotten base



The underside of a fallen tree, its splayed roots looking like a frozen explosion.



Lichens growing on a tree trunk



A broken poison ivy stem, its hairy roots hanging in the air



A tree trunk pocked by pileated woodpeckers



And, high in a sycamore tree, a pileated woodpecker itself






Words by Stephen Black
Pictures by Jenn Allmon

January 31, 2010

Winter only seems static.

In winter the woods

is never the same

from week to week,

never dormant,

never waiting for the tilting earth

to reach its spring stillpoint.

The woods is never still,

patient and waiting for spring.

Last week the warm and wet weather

fired the green lichens

and the shoots erupting

from the ground,

and human voices rang

near the trailhead

and groups of people walked the trails.

Today the ice has silenced the woods,

only the sound of birds,

sparrows and cardinals and woodpeckers,

and the rare fellow walker,

a few with dogs,

mostly on the abandoned

road through the forest.

All around us,

coming from all directions,

is the sound of ice falling,

some pieces as much as an inch long,

falling from the limbs,

loosed by the sunlight’s warmth,

sounding like rain in the forest,

and when they fall on my shoulders

or my tobogganed head

they feel like just the slightest tap,

someone’s tapping fingertip

on my skin through my clothes.

The ground is covered

with fallen ice.

Ice sheathes

the thin branches

and the few evergreen

leaves.

Snow lies piled

on mushroom shelves.

Last week we found a tree trunk

that had been sawed off

about four feet from the ground.

What had caught our eyes then

and made us stop

was the strange cut pattern

the different saw angles

had grooved into the wood.

This week what made us stop

was the smiley face someone had drawn

into its overlay of snow and ice.

The shoots from the underground bulbs

that we had noticed last week

stand half buried

by the ice and snow this weekend.

Over a part of the path

we have walked many times before,

we notice,

for the first time today,

long thin dangling pods,

soft and mustard colored,

like pecan pollen clusters.

A thin icicle drips in the sun,

connected to a limb by two ice horns.

The weather is just warm enough

and thawed streams flow between icy banks.

And in the ice and quiet,

we notice

the shell of a long dead trunk,

its heartwood long ago rotted away,

its craggy bark crumbling

and twisting into the cold air.

We walk for a long time,

almost two hours,

following a path

we’d never walked before,

grateful there are still mysteries

to be discovered

in these woods.

Words by Stephen Black

Photos by Jenn Allmon