Landscape

Rockfrost

December 21, 2016 In Fall Landscape Photography Weather No Comment

[View with images] A week ago Sunday, when the sun rose a little higher, the rose color of sunrise faded and was replaced by the purest white. Frost burned like tiny arctic flames from every feature of the landscape. I went back out to take more pictures. I climbed the tree again and photographed ice crystals clinging to branches, now backlit by the sun.

Seeing that the orchard is even more heavily frosted, I move on to photograph rock stacks in the meadow, along with a few stones I have placed in the apple trees. (Woodwaterstone taking on new meaning in this case, crystalized water pulling me from wood to stone.)

I like to imagine these countess miniature pinnacles of ice erecting themselves over night, molecule by frozen molecule. How does Coleridge put it? “The frost performs its secret ministry / Unhelped by any wind.” Cold condensing moisture from the air, transfiguring it into crystals; erecting crystals into towers. Water now pointing outwards like millions of tiny porcupine quills. As purely white as freshly covered alpine slopes.

I take some photographs of apples still hanging in the orchard, and I can’t resist including them, even though they are neither maple tree nor rock sculpture.

I spend some time reading about frost and its formation, about the differences between advection frost and radiation frost (often known as hoar frost). What I’m seeing is clearly radiation frost, formed from air moisture on cold, clear, still nights, when heat radiates from objects into the unobstructed atmosphere quickly enough that water goes from gas to solid on available surfaces without passing through the liquid phase. It happens all the time down in the valley along the Ompompanoosuc, where the air is rich with moisture from the river, but up in our meadow it is much less common.

I find the edge of a snowbank with larger crystals, feathering out from the snow like little ice ferns. I think of window frost, which also often has a branching structure–in fact called dendrites, from dendron, Greek for ‘tree.’ And dendritic snow crystals are the ones we think of when we imagine the classic snowflake. Each arm tree-like in structure, and fractal: branches emerging from branches emerging from branches, the pattern replicating itself on an ever smaller scale. (As does a tree, less precisely, from trunk to branch to twig.)

Patterns repeating across realms: the vegetative and the crystal; the organic and the mathematical. Branching and re-branching and branching again.

A maple tree. Hoarfrost. Dendritic snowflakes. Fractal replication. Featherfrost. A beautiful sequence. But only one of them has arms large enough to hold a human; so I head back across the meadow to the tree.

Subzero: A Rose-Frosted World

December 11, 2016 In Fall Landscape Tree Weather No Comment

[View with images] Sunday morning, December 11. When I get up the temperature is 1.3 degrees. An hour later it has dropped to -.3. Our first subzero temperature of the winter! I throw on snow pants, boots, coat and gloves, grab the camera, and head out.

There is a rime of frost over everything. The first light is on the opposite hills, and it is rose-colored. The world is white and rose. Separate ice crystals are visible on the twig-ends of the branches in front of me. There is no air movement, so it doesn’t feel that cold, even using the camera with bare hands. There is that perfect stillness that comes with very cold mornings, as light breaks over the world.

Week of Many Snows

December 10, 2016 In Climbing Evening Fall Landscape Snow Weather No Comment

It was a week of many snows. Flurries, gusts, light snowfalls of a few inches. One afternoon a few flakes dropping from dark clouds, the next morning just enough on the ground to require boots, and more falling thickly. I climb at odd times, usually briefly, tucking the tree into gaps in my schedule. Snow becomes customary; cold becomes familiar. Boots and snow pants are useful, since climbing with only one arm you end up getting up onto branches with a knee, instead of being able to pull yourself up properly with two hands onto your feet. I am still not climbing high, because of my injured shoulder. Just into the lower branches. They are brisk climbs, and pleasant, but also routine.

And then one evening it isn’t. There is nothing unusual about the day. Several inches of snow have fallen and piled up on everything. I go out in the near-dark, and even just walking up the lawn everything feels different. There is that bluish-dark light of deep winter, though it is only early December. The world is silent, and vast. There is a sense of presence in the woods, the orchard, the open meadow. Shriveled plant stems are just visible in the field. And when I climb the ladder and enter the treehouse the act feels full of meaning. Stepping from the treehouse into the branches feels sacred. As though I am entering a temple.

I didn’t expect this; I wasn’t looking for it. I thought this would be another routine climb. A few branches up, look out across the lawn, climb back down, and head for the house. Back to making dinner, or whatever was next in my day. Most climbs are like that.

But instead, every curve of branch and mound of snow feels fraught with significance. With every movement of my body I feel like I am participating in a ritual, or a solemn dance.

As I climb, I brush each new branch free of snow with a gloved hand, and I find myself pausing in mid-motion. The snow is capped three or four inches high along each limb. I sweep, and the snow cascades down alongside the trunk and disappears below me. The branch is laid bare. I can see the corrugated patterns of bark, set off by the snow still packed into its crevices. I climb onto this branch and brush the snow off the next, examining the patterns of snow and bark.

I would like to climb the whole tree this way, but I have promised myself not to do so until I can use both hands again. So I content myself with spending some time here, fifteen or twenty feet off the ground, savoring a world made strange. I thank the tree and the night, lower myself back down the few branches into the treehouse, and head for the lights of the front porch.

Quiet; Or, The Twilight Seat

December 1, 2016 In Climbing Evening Fall Landscape Rumination Weather 4 Comments

My destination in the tree has shaped when I choose to climb it, in recent days. Since I am limited by my injured shoulder to the lower branches, since I can’t roam freely about the tree to explore or take pictures—since I can’t swing from branches—I nearly always go out now to climb at twilight. Because the branches I am in offer a natural seat, I end up spending more time in the tree than when I stand at the top. And to sit there at twilight for a long time is deeply beautiful. It has been raining much of the past week, so I go out—in rain pants or snow pants, coat, hat and gloves—pull myself one-handedly into the tree, and just look out over the world.

I watch trees on the opposite hills vanish into the mists. Or disappear behind curtains of rain. And slowly darkness comes down over the world. As it falls, it looks like you could peel the world back in layers of white, gray and black. Mists roll up the hillside and the trees at the far side of the meadow disappear. The house and garage grow dim and distant through the lowering twilight. The near branches, all around me, their bifurcating twig-ends reaching spindly fingers toward the sky, become silhouettes, and then are swallowed up. Lights from the house stand out, soft through the rain, against the darkness.

The soft percussion of raindrops on fallen leaves rises up from below. It is a soundscape very different from summer, when the sound of rain beating on leaves comes from above as well as below, and from every side. When you are in the center of the soundscape, as of a sphere, rather than up above it and looking down on it with your ears. Eventually I bring down my own darkness by closing my eyes so that I can enter this soundscape fully; it replaces the landscape, which is disappearing anyways. For a little while it is my only scape, and I roam around in it.

The shoulder injury has slowed me down, and quieted me. It was so much fun to run up the tree and clamber around that I forgot to stop and just be. From the beginning, being in the tree was supposed to have been an exercise in slowing down; it says a lot about human nature–or my nature–that even so, I needed further constraint to force me to just sit there for a long time, every day, for days at a time.

And so I find, yet again, that, as so often when things go ‘wrong,’ there are unforeseen fruits, unexpected gifts. Maybe grace is as good a name as any for this, in a naturalistic rather than theological sense. But it is the kind of grace that only comes from maintaining a practice. With doing something frequently enough, for long enough, that the unexpected can emerge from it. It comes with climbing, and refusing to not climb, even when climbing is curtailed. It comes from being open to whatever experience might come. It comes from sitting in the tree and listening to the rain, and watching the world get swallowed by mist and slip away into darkness.

The Lower Branches

November 21, 2016 In Climbing Fall Landscape Taoism Weather 2 Comments

[View with images] Overnight I have decided on a compromise. I cannot justify climbing to the top of the tree, but I refuse to not be among the branches! For a time I will have to content myself with hoisting myself one-armed into the lower branches of the tree. There is less risk to my right arm, and if I slip and fall the tree house is not too far below me. These are larger branches than those higher up, and closer together, and form a more easily navigable structure.

On go coat, ski pants, gloves, boots, and out go I, into a gray morning. Everything is covered with several inches of sticky snow. The tree is frosted. I pull myself from the wall of the tree house into the tree, and go a few branches higher. Here I can turn around, face the field, and sit on one snowy branch with my back against another, my feet resting comfortably on a third below. There is a fourth right in front of me, on which to rest my arms. It is in fact a lovely spot. The snowfall of the day before has crusted the branches with snow and ice, and even the smallest twigs bear heavy loads. There are patches of blue sky that leaven the day with color. The world is white, dark gray, and blue. I have the camera with me, and it is a pleasant change to take photographs from a seated position, and at my leisure, albeit with my left hand, which is awkward. I sit there comfortably for some time.

I will admit that once or twice I gaze longingly upwards at the prayer flags twenty feet above me! But I am also deeply grateful just to be in the tree. In fact, my appreciation of it is even sharper now that I have been confronted with the possibility of not being able to climb at all.

And it is good—if not always fun!—to be reminded that we have to live in a state of permanent flexibility and adaptation; that, as the Taoists point out, the unyielding oak tree snaps in the wind-storm before which the slender reed bows and springs erect again.

This is a part of the tree I have rarely spent time in before. There is a whole new branchscape here to explore with the camera. And a new season to explore it in.

I sit and watch the way the light gleams through crusted ice.

Supermoon

November 13, 2016 In Fall Landscape Night Rumination 2 Comments

[View with images] I can’t resist going into the tree tonight to observe the so-called “supermoon.” It is the moon’s closest approach to the earth in 68 years and it will appear 14% larger than usual, I hear on the radio as I am driving around today.

On the way home from Hanover Emme and I check out the moon on the horizon and decide that there is nothing super about. It looks pretty much like it always does.

But any reason to be in the tree is a good reason, so up I go with the camera. I find myself in a Gothic world of tangled vines and branches. An enclosed wood, with a thousand thousand arms against the sky. Woods like a cage, protective, confining, it’s not clear. Woods haunted by the moon.

These are the woods in which Hansel and Gretel get lost and are nearly devoured. The woods in which one might search for supernatural creatures and then regret finding them. They are the woods into which one might go to burrow deep into one’s own psyche. They are the woods of myth and dreams. Dark counterpoint to the forest lush with green and birdsong and summer light. And yet—the same woods. Each living inside the other.

Everyone should go walking at night at least once, alone, and sit in woods like these.

They are, like all woods, unnervingly beautiful.

Ablaze

October 17, 2016 In Fall Landscape Photography No Comment

[View with images] Radiant. Ablaze. Luminous. Charged with light. As though the world itself were made of the stuff.

And then I give up. These last several days are ones best experienced; and if not experienced, at least seen.

And so I release myself from the obligation of writing, and you into a small world of images.

Deep Summer

July 20, 2016 In Landscape Rumination Summer No Comment

Today, up in the tree, I think: it is deep summer. The foam of bedstraw has subsided. Stretched out below me now is the milkweed meadow.

Nodding pink-white clusters of long-stemmed bells interspersed with Queen Anne’s Lace. The meadow all green and pink and white.

The flowers of spring long gone; and for the milkweed, their split silver boat-hull seedpods still a long way off.

Between them, now, the deep summer meadow. Everything quivering with heat.

Froth, Foam

July 2, 2016 In Landscape Rumination Summer No Comment

A gorgeous morning: I climb early and quickly. In my moment of standing in my arboreal perch, I think how different the sound of wind in the leaves is when you are up there among them. It is above and around and below you, the foaming of the leaves, and it is like being in the middle of an ocean of sound. The leaves all stream away from the meadow as the wind comes up the hillside and over the house and through the tree, straining at their twigs, snapping back against their branches. It is like surf rolling across the landscape.

At first I think, it is not really like surf because the leaves are not moving, the wind is just moving through them. But in the ocean the water doesn’t move with the wave either. Each particle of water just moves up and down as the force, the energy, drives onward; and as the shape, the form of the wave, transfers itself toward the shore. This is not the same as leaves snapping in waves as the air comes up the hill, but it is not as different as it might seem, either.

I stand and watch the foaming of the leaves. Listen to the foaming of the air.

The meadow at this point in the summer is full of bedstraw, a fine-stemmed plant with thousands of minute greenish-white flowers that seems to tumble like waves of lace across the meadow, over the top of grasses and other plants. The whole meadow is frothing with bedstraw, foaming without moving. Tangled bedstraw, the foam on the just-poured lager of the meadow (this is all wrong but I can’t help myself).

To foam. The word intrigues me and I look up its origins. It is an ancient root appearing in many languages and going back from English through German to the Indo-European root that gives rise also to the Sanskrit and the Latin words for ‘foam’ and ‘froth.’

They are beautiful words, ‘foam’ and ‘froth’–oceanic and lacy and white–suggesting a particular kind of churning motion, and a thousand thousand parts: bubbles, rushing air molecules, tiny flowers, whipping leaves.

Trees and Mountains

June 30, 2016 In Landscape Rumination Summer No Comment

[View with images] It is a stunning, perfect late June morning, a Thursday. I climb early, 6:30, before heading out of town to climb Camel’s Hump. Both girls are away, and this is my free day this week, and one of my few free days this year, to climb a mountain. My gear is in the car, lunch and bananas and protein bars packed, hiking boots stowed away, and a bag of clothes to change into afterwards. I will be heading straight on to Rochester afterwards to meet Kim in the early evening so we can go to Claire’s Village Harmony concert there. She has been away for a week and half, and they have just begun their New England tour. Emme is still at gymnastics camp up in South Hero on Lake Champlain–tomorrow afternoon we will pick her up and head to another Village Harmony performance up in Greensboro, in the Northeast Kingdom.

But for now I enjoy the particular exultation of being in a tree early on a summer morning. The freshness of the day is incomparable. And soon I am in the car, heading north, Ken and Brad Kolodner’s album Otter Creek playing, as it always is when I head off to hike. It is my mountain music. Something about it captures the energy and open sense of possibility that greets the beginning of a mountain journey.

And climbing the tree this morning, en route to climbing a mountain, reminds me that, in a way, this is what my daily ascent of the tree is for me: a symbolic mountain climb. It is about exploration and ascent. It is a tiny quest and a tiny adventure. It is about leaving the familiar world behind for a new perspective–even if only forty feet above the ground. It is about immersing oneself in the glory of the natural world, laying oneself open to its mystery and its beauty.

It is climbing a mountain in miniature.

I have thought about this in the tree before, about the ways in which being up there is like climbing a mountain, writ small. This was in part what inspired me to start climbing the tree in the first place: I have no mountain to climb every day, nor time to climb it.

Today, while climbing the mountain, I ponder the ways it is simply an expansion, an enlargement, of climbing the tree. It is climbing a tree higher, and longer, and in greater depth.

As I turn onto the Dean Trail from the Monroe Trail and circle around Camel’s Hump until I meet the Long Trail where it approaches the summit from the south–as I rise slowly up the flank of the mountain and at last break above the tree line and turn to see the magnificent bowl of the world laid out behind and below me–I think, this is not different in essence from being in my tree.

And holding to the thread of this is what keeps climbing the same tree every day profoundly meaningful. I don’t get to see immense cloud-shadows slide across the rumpled landscape, or massive outcroppings of rock tower above me, and then drop off below me, but it is a kind of intimate version of that, scaled down in size and, especially, in time: three minutes up and down at the end of a busy day. A day that, alas, will not admit a mountain–but can nonetheless contain its essence, a kind of mountain-thread running through it: a tree.

I leap from rock to rock across the summit of the mountain when I have finished lunch. It is not unlike leaping from branch to branch in my tree. I examine clumps of Diapensia, small white alpine flowers that grow in tufts from cracks in the rocks. They are not unlike the moss growing from crevices in the bark of the tree, but in slightly larger clumps, and with flowers.

I spend about an hour and a half on the summit, alternately eating, musing on the landscape below, watching fellow hikers, and venturing off again to explore the mountain top–more rock-leaping and more clumps of Diapensia. When I first reached the top it was empty but for the young man who was the caretaker for the day; when I finally sling my backpack over my shoulder to go down there are three dozen people and a couple of dogs.

On the way from Camel’s Hump to Rochester I stop at Warren Falls and wade in to rinse off the heat and exertion of the day. It is exhilarating to stand waist deep and then drop below the surface, standing again to emerge streaming with ice-cold water. I sit in the sun on the water-sculpted rocks to drip dry and watch teenagers line up to jump from cliffs down into the bowl of the river below.
The Village Harmony concert is superb: a mixture of Lithuanian, Latin American, South African, and traditional American music. The singers are radiant and the music is exuberant. It’s like being on top of a mountain all over again. [View with images]

Fireflies

June 20, 2016 In Landscape Night Summer No Comment

Each evening at twilight the meadow comes alive. Fireflies float and dart, flashing in the air. There are more this year than we have ever seen before, they drift and flash by the hundreds across the field and around the house. They are like sparks ricocheting through the night. And for the first time, when I go out to climb the tree at night, there are a small number of fireflies there among the trees. They usually stay to the meadow. Maybe sheer numbers are driving them into the edge of the woods.

After roaming along the paths have mowed through the field I circle around the house toward the tree through the dark. A handful of fireflies are drifting along above the forest floor. A few others are floating through the branches above me, higher than I remember in past years, and when I am at the top of the tree (this is how I think of it, but as much as I’d like to be up at the very pinnacle of the thing, I’m only about two thirds of the way up, where the good branches run out) two or three glide among the branches around me. It would take a spirit of iron to not be delighted at encountering this company up among the branches.

One of them lands on the opposite side of a leaf about four feet away. It is completely dark now, really black out, and each time it flashes the entire leaf lights up in the darkness. It is a cool light, very different from when a leaf is backlit by the sun, which is a luminous green-gold. This is a greenish-white green, if that makes any sense. After the leaf has flashed eight or ten times, its little engine of luminosity detaches and floats off, drifting lazily downwards among the branches.

With each flash I catch a kind of shadow-glimpse of the terrain of trunk and branches beneath me, the briefest delineation of that abysmal landscape before darkness closes in again–like dropping a spark into a branch-filled well.

The Drum

June 5, 2016 In Landscape Rumination Summer No Comment

As I stand in the tree today I hear a small flutter. A chickadee has broken through the mantle of foliage and is perched on a twig. For a little while it hops about from branch to branch and pecks at twigs and leaves. It is a rare visitor; I don’t often have birds join me in the tree. I think about the kind of relationship we have with creatures like this, and the kinds of meanings they can carry for us. Yesterday I was out in the woods on the cross-town trail doing some trail maintenance–clearing falling branches, replacing trail markers, pruning encroaching overgrowth. At one point I was walking along a straight, level section of the trail through open woods on high ground, when ear or eye caught something and I turned to see, off to my left, a large dark shape alight from a tree and glide further along through the woods–a goshawk, almost certainly. Huge, silent, winged. At the same moment, the hawk still in flight, a deer reared up out of a rocky ravine a dozen yards off to my right and bounded alongside the trail before it veered off and disappeared among the trees.

For an extraordinary few moments all three of us–the goshawk to my left and the deer to my right–were traveling together, parallel to one another, moving forward through the trees. Gliding, walking, running,side by side. And then they were both gone and I was alone.

It was a rare moment, and a beautiful one. It felt imbued with power and meaning, though I could not say what it was exactly, and had to acknowledge that I was probably just stretching a skin of meaning over the wooden frame of coincidence–how many times have I been in the woods and seen a hawk, or a deer? How long before, inevitably, I would see them at the same time?–but still I had made a drum. And still the drum did sound. And is this not how we live much of our lives?

I watch the chickadee a little longer, and then there is a flutter and it too is gone and I am alone in the tree.

The Countless Secret Woods

May 25, 2016 In Landscape Reading Spring Tree No Comment

[View with images] I am in the tree and it is hot and humid. The leaves hang heavy and it is only May. I happen to have the Canon when a Black-and-white Warbler lands on a nearby branch. I don’t see birds often in my tree as there are no seeds, though I suppose it is as good a tree as any to a devourer of insects, as this bird is. Its plumage is startlingly precise, streaked with black and white in a world now painted green. I lift the camera and it drops to another branch; I take a few pictures but it is small and faraway now, and then gone. I don’t know if I have ‘got’ it or not.

I am reading John Fowles’ The Tree. In the first chapter he says something very perspicuous. Flat open areas, he writes, are dominated by the regular passage of time, like the ticking of a clock. Among trees, in the woods, there are a variety of times: ‘here dense and abrupt, there calm and sinuous–never plodding.’ Entering ‘the countless secret woods’ of the Devon-Dorset border country where he lives is, even now, like going into ‘another medium, another dimension.’ But when he was young, ‘this sensation was acute. Slinking into trees was always slinking into heaven.’

To read the writing of another adult who remembers this ‘heaven,’ this acute sensation, who even now seeks out the ‘countless secret woods’ in order to enter another dimension–how refreshing! Tree climbing is so deeply associated with childhood that every once in a while even I wonder if it might be a waste of time, a foolish indulgence, and ask, what is wrong with me that I never grew up?

So it is good to be reminded that there are other people who go out among the trees not just for exercise, not just to hike, or to identify plants or look for birds or have a family excursion, but to enter another world, a world that is mysterious and beautiful and other, and that at the same time feels like one’s own deepest self. Who go out among the trees to lose themselves, and, in the same moment, to find themselves again, more deeply and more truly, because this dappling of green light among the branches, this smell of bark and earth, this moving air, this sloping ground littered with twigs and leaves–this is their spiritual home. And it sings of the beauty and the wildness that lies at the depths of the human spirit. [View with images]

Sight as Fugitive as Sound

May 12, 2016 In Landscape Spring No Comment

[View with images] Climbed again around 9:00, in late twilight. Looking up as I climb, the tree is full of countless starburst shapes silhouetted against the sky. Millions of them, it seems, sprouting from the tip of every twig, though it must be only thousands.

I climb to hear the woodcock beep and fly and twitter and fall in the dark air, to see if I can spot its aerial mating dance against the faintly luminous clouds. I can hear it down in the meadow, among the apple trees; and another, behind me, further away and fainter. I listen for a while and there is a kind of counterpoint between them, one flying while the other calls, one rising while the other falls. The peepers are even louder, coming from two directions, from the small pond across the road and the larger pond up on our neighbor’s land. The air is full of sound, coming from multiple directions, as many separate voices are there are miniature leaf-clusters dotting the three-dimensional space of the tree. The way they sound in their multitude, these voices, feels something like the way these leaf-clusters fill the space. But the way we think of a multitude is so much more closely derived from our sense of sight: there they all are, arrayed in space by the thousands. But those sounds, in their many hundreds, where are they? How close together are they? Are they evenly or irregularly spaced? Well, but “spaced” is exactly the wrong term. Better to ask how close they are together in time, whether they are evenly or irregularly spaced in time. But this fails to capture the sense of a multitude, of masses of concurrent sound, of all those voices densely packing the air.

These are things one is much more likely to think about in the dark. In daylight the eyes rove and sounds emerge with a lesser vigor from the land. In the dark they move to the fore, these sounds; they are the landscape. One can get lost in them the way one can get lost in the woods.

As I listen, and think these things, my eyes not quite closed, the woodcock, air singing through its feathers, comes arcing across the meadow and over the lawn and shoots past me, brushing the edges of the treetop, just fifteen feet away. Its shape is dark, barely visible, and moving fast, but I see it dart among the shadows, and then it’s gone.

Sight as fugitive as sound in this dark world. [View with images]

Page 2 of 2

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: