Switched At Birth

Moments In The Life Of The Forest

It is not possible to walk through the woods here without remembering Hurricane Ivan. It has been almost two years, and the dead trees are still standing, their bark sliding until the shucked core is exposed, shiny and tight like fevered skin, riddled with holes, become bird and bug condo, still useful.

Some are twisted, others still standing with only a ragged trunk remaining, looking oddly like a huge, poorly sharped pencil.

Hurricane Ivan blew through our smalll forest and destroyed 350 trees outright, but only took a screen porch door for a souvenir from the house. Lucky doesn't begin to describe it.

Fifty yards to the west of the house, there was a wide ripped-up twister path.

We were out of the country when Ivan hit. By the time we returned, power had been restored, and a path from the gate to the house had been cleared by the same friends who cleaned out our refrigerator.

Nature has the benefit of a longer time horizon than people. At least it seems that way to me, looking at news coverage of Hurricane Katrina one year out.  A year for a person in a FEMA trailer is a long time.

We grieved over the loss of those magnicent old longleaf pines. One grand old oak tree would have survived, except that a taller pine, falling, split it right down the middle.

There is beauty and teeming life here again. The trees which struck the earth with such force were loaded with pine cones. More seeds than usual were shaken loose and driven into the ground by wind and rain.

The result has been a bumper crop of volunteer young trees, slash pine in abundance and many young longleafs. Combined with our longleaf planting program, the older surviving trees are presiding over a veritable nursery of toddlers. 

One of these longleafs was planted. One is a volunteer.

Look closely and you can see a young volunteer slash pine growing up through the underbrush.

As long as trees are planted here rather than subdivisions, this story has no ending. Storms are part of the life cycle. These photos are just a few snapshots in time.

August 30, 2006 in Life at Longleaf Preserve | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

It is not possible to walk through the woods here without remembering Hurricane Ivan. It has been almost two years, and the dead trees are still standing, their bark sliding until the shucked core is exposed, shiny and tight like fevered skin, riddled with holes, become bird and bug condo, still useful.

Some are twisted, others still standing with only a ragged trunk remaining, looking oddly like a huge, poorly sharped pencil.

Hurricane Ivan blew through our smalll forest and destroyed 350 trees outright, but only took a screen porch door for a souvenir from the house. Lucky doesn't begin to describe it.

Fifty yards to the west of the house, there was a wide ripped-up twister path.

We were out of the country when Ivan hit. By the time we returned, power had been restored, and a path from the gate to the house had been cleared by the same friends who cleaned out our refrigerator.

Nature has the benefit of a longer time horizon than people. At least it seems that way to me, looking at news coverage of Hurricane Katrina one year out.  A year for a person in a FEMA trailer is a long time.

We grieved over the loss of those magnicent old longleaf pines. One grand old oak tree would have survived, except that a taller pine, falling, split it right down the middle.

There is beauty and teeming life here again. The trees which struck the earth with such force were loaded with pine cones. More seeds than usual were shaken loose and driven into the ground by wind and rain.

The result has been a bumper crop of volunteer young trees, slash pine in abundance and many young longleafs. Combined with our longleaf planting program, the older surviving trees are presiding over a veritable nursery of toddlers. 

One of these longleafs was planted. One is a volunteer.

Look closely and you can see a young volunteer slash pine growing up through the underbrush.

As long as trees are planted here rather than subdivisions, this story has no ending. Storms are part of the life cycle. These photos are just a few snapshots in time.

Ode To Lazy (Creative) Wireless Joy

Lyle Lovett is singing "You Were Always There" in my left ear as I type. Oh, man, it's great to be untethered, disconnected, listening to music piped straight from Lyle's mouth to my ear, propped up in bed with a stack of pillows behind me, Buck running the day's market numbers from his laptop, and Maggie lying on her fluffy shearling bed down on the floor right at the bed's edge.

After Hurricane Ivan last year, we limped along with no landline phone for more than two months, tv service stuck together with string and sealing wax, and occasional dial-up internet service provided by an expensive cell phone connection.

Service was restored eventually and life as we had known it continued. But, somehow in the melee of rebuilding their sytstem, our cable television high speed internet signal  became anemic. It surged and ebbed, in unsatisfactory proportions.

I got a notice in the mail that Bell South in their wisdom had finally decided to extend internet service out to the back of beyond, where the busses don't even run, to our neck of the woods. Glory be.

We had just spent a frustrating week with Road Runner, their various nice fellas stringing line and new transformers, with much head scratching and mixed results. Bell South offered a rebate, discounts, and other blandishments that at the moment seemed purely irresistible.

Well, as the old saying goes, there ain't no free lunch. In my haste to install the latest greatest Bell South software, I screwed up the wireless connection to my own laptop, turned the old desk top into what might as well be a fishing reef, and worsened our position by at least 33%.

Hard headedness being what it is, I have lived with my errors for months, but the shoe finally pinched enough that tonight I dug around and found our ancient wireless router, hooked back up to the old cable system, didn't think about it, analyze it, or look at a manual. Low and behold, it worked smooth as silk and here I am listening to Lyle Lovett, untethered and unattached except for my undying love for the man by my side and the dog at my other side, writing to you.

Yes, writing to you. Here's the nub of this ramble. With my laptop hard wired, I was limited by time, energy and comfort level. The days are so frenetic right now with our building project that by 10 p.m. I am ready to hit the hay. Early in the morning is walking time, crucial to my physical, emotional and mental well-being. The time in between brings stock market trading and home building on-the-spot decisions.

So you guys have been getting on-the-fly pictures with Reader's Digest condensed versions of events, mostly sans reflective thought. I do the better, acutal writing stuff best about midnight-thirty, wirelessly typing, listening to music while Buck and Maggie recharge their batteries for the next day.

And worst of all, I haven't been reading your writing. That changes -- tonight.

Missed you. Nice to be back.

09:27 PM in Day Book | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0

April Fool's Flood

Water soaked fabric can feel so heavy. I felt like that today, water-logged, rain soaked, weighted and tethered. This April fool's storm, filling the rivers, the road, the cars as they take a chance on driving through their usual, unflooded route, filling the grocery store where the roof collapsed again. At 5 a.m., I was up again changing out the towels and pots I have lined up like steel soldiers, like the little Dutch boy whose finger plugged the dam. But, as usual, we're the lucky ones. Our small leaks are from new construction, not Ivan damage repairs.

I think of the Indonesian families suffering and dying from new tremors and the families in this community who are still living with blue plastic tarpaulins covering their roofs from Hurricane Ivan. Most of the families here do at least have a roof, but nonetheless it's not easy to face a morning like this one for them, flooded yet again, the almost fourteen inches which have fallen in less than twenty hours wreaking new havoc on the weakened infrastructure.

Making my way into town for an appointment, I thought how foolish of me not to have cancelled it. Just outside our gate, a small pick-up truck was stalled out. I plunged into the water-filled road. The old Lincoln Town Car is like a boat or a bathtub on wheels. It didn't even sputter.

I headed onto Interstate-10. The westbound lane was backed up for miles. Emergency vehicles everywhere. Passing by on the other side, I saw a small silver compact car sliced neatly almost in half, and felt a sourness in my stomach rise up my esophagus. It looked so surgical.

I heard on the radio that a transformer had blown downtown, causing a fire underground. How is that possible? Think of it.

Flooding, roofs caving in. Folks having heart attacks. People just sitting down and giving up.

All around the world, we're in our tiny storm-tossed boats. Some days it feels like Pi's Bengal tiger is on board with us. Who can blame dear Karol Wojtyra for taking the last plane out?

Ah, and yet. Everything changes. Everything changes. Sitting now, waiting for my appointment, a light at the window startles me.

It's the sun.

07:56 PM in Day Book | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Curious Deer

The regular hunting season for deer will end here February 15. Buck goes to the woods to contemplate shooting a deer several times a week, taking along his binoculars and a good book. There is no venison stockpiled in our freezer. We feed the deer year round. The herd grows.

Nonetheless, I stay out of the woods during hunting season, mostly out of respect for the deer, who are reproducing, and also a native caution in the event of a careless bow hunting poacher hidden away somewhere in a secret tree stand. I don't necessarily begrudge the poacher meat if it's needed to feed his family, and that's more common than we comfortable folk might think, but I don't want Maggie or me to accidentally run afoul of danger. Hurricane Ivan made the poacher's task more difficult. There are places at the swamp's edge where a human can only travel on hands and knees, so many trees are down, the debris formidable.

But I miss the deep woods, and look forward to daily explorations beginning again in a few days. I will look for lichens, fruiting spores, budding pitcher plants and the young longleaf pines reaching, reaching.

Standing at the kitchen sink this morning, I watched a healthy young doe walk right up to the edge of the house foundation, sniffing at the block and the red clay. For a moment, I thought she might leap up the three feet or so to walk around on the surface. Instead, she found a patch of green shoots to munch on nearby, then moved gradually back into the woods, where I could see the big ears of another, taller deer.

This is a very poor photo, I know. Here is where knowing something (anything) about camera settings and how to take a picture at a distance would have made a difference. I promise to learn. But perhaps -- I hope -- you can sense the sweetness of the moment in this dim outline.

 

07:26 AM in Homeplace, Longleaf Preserve | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

The Joy Is Back

Maggie and I walked to the gate early this morning to fetch the Sunday paper. Whoa. How did it get so beautiful again? The bright rising sun and a heavy dew combined to sparkle up the woods. Everywhere I turned there were soft cottony white webs, a spider's bed and breakfast. Wild blueberry branches are already turning reddish purple, their tip ends swelling.

The hurricane rearranged my own personal walking woods, and I've been damn put out about it. That's the blind, self-seeking, pride-filled truth of it. My meditation walks became distracted ramblings which I had begun to eschew for the bland indoor treadmill.

But this morning, it's as though some fog of depression or grief had lifted, bouyed by nature's insistence on reasserting itself.

I'm eager to get out there tomorrow morning and start pulling dead branches out of the stream to help restore the natural flow and eliminate the stagnant, mosquito-breeding pools that have developed.

The joy is back.

Beam me up!

10:45 PM in Longleaf Preserve | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

Death With Dignity

An odd phrase, really. I understand what it has come to mean in our culture, kind of a code for pulling the plug. Life with dignity. A rich thought stew there, but for another day.

Walking this morning, I saw heavy drops of dew shimmering in the sunrise as they clung to the dead pine needle clusters. The last time I photographed this fallen giant, about a week after Hurricane Ivan took it down for the count, these needles were still bright green. They were laying on the ground, tragically askew.

But now, look for yourself and I think you'll agree that they are exquisite, burnished to a fine pecan color, providing food and shelter for a variety of woodland creatures, and beauty for my eyes. Truly, death with dignity.

 

10:16 PM in Longleaf Preserve | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

The Ivan Album

Most of these photos show some of the tree damage at Longleaf from Hurricane Ivan. Storm-spawned tornadoes snapped huge old longleaf pines like twigs, twisting them and using their tops in some cases to knock down an oak.

A few of the photos are from downtown Pensacola. Fortunately, not nearly all of it is rubble as these pictures might seem to suggest. Just next to a smashed storefront, I visited Reynolds Music House and they had no damage at all, all of those fabulous pianos safe behind a row of steel shutters which were put up to cover the store's series of plate glass windows.

And what you don't see amongst the ruined trees are the thousands of baby trees we have had planted over the past two years, coming up strong. It's hard to see the old trees this way, but the silver lining is that the new generations coming up now have more sun and space and will grow more quickly, beneficiaries of nature's brutally efficient clear cut.

08:23 AM in Longleaf Preserve, Pensacola Scene | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)

Stay Tuned For A Mesage From Our Sponsor

This is scenic Lamlash, on the southern end of Arran. We're back home at Longleaf. No phone yet and shocking devastation in our little town. More later. Thanks for checking in.

09:04 AM in Day Book | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack

It's the Lives

It's early morning on the Isle of Arran in Scotland. I am sitting in a celery-colored, velvet wing chair at The Kennels, Buck and my residence for the week. My view into the blue sky outside the large window is partially blocked by a tree whose leaves are bathed in shade on one side and sparkling with morning sun on the other. Janis Joplin is coming straight at me through the laptop's headset. Her growly, rough, sometimes little girl voice is a reminder from my days at the University of Florida in the early 1970's. I bought the bargain rack "Greatest Hits" CD to download onto my laptop before we left home. I think George and Ira Gershwin would have been dumbstruck by her keening version of "Summertime."

I've visited Steve, the fishmonger at Creeler's Restaurant and Smokehouse several times during our visit to pick up some tasty morsel to fix for dinner: salmon twice, scallops and monk fish.

Steve greeted me Wednesday. "Halloo, Beth from Pensacola. Have ya heard how yer fam'ly fared in th' storm?"  Steve is a solidly built guy, tall, strong with years of running his fishing boat, hand filleting thousands of fish, brining and either hot or cold smoking them for sale on Arran or sending up to their other Creeler's restaurant in Edinburgh. Standing in the doorway, we talk about Hurricane Ivan, my family's good fortune in coming through virtually unscathed, and the poor suffering people in Haiti and the horrendous loss of life from Tropical Storm (now Hurricane) Jeanne.

Steve stands with a fillet knife in his hand, contemplatively fingers the point and then wipes it on his apron. A long scar just under one eyebrow pulsates. We pass the time for a few more minutes and agree that trees can be replanted, but "it's the lives that matter, aye?"

Aye, Steve, so right.

Of Laptops and Lyle Lovett

Wednesday morning, almost 8 o’clock. Dark and cold here in the parlor, where I sit with laptop -- makes a great space heater – headset on listening to a music CD I picked up before we left Pensacola and had forgotten about. Oh my, it’s pure fun. Lyle Lovett’s “My Baby Don’t Tolerate.”

“A friend of mine He said to me A skinny girl Is misery I shook my head Because I knew he couldn’t be right That’s when I thought back to just last night

When I got home
It was maybe a little late
There was n’er a crumb
On n’er a plate
There was no martini
Nor glass of grape
And it was then I sought to contemplate

Some things. . .
My baby don’t tolerate, no
My baby don’t tolerate, no
My baby don’t tolerate from me

I said, “Hello Honey,”
She said, “What could you possibly
Have been doing until
Half-past-then?”

And not being completely insensitive
I could tell my ship had run aground
Because when I puckered up
You know she puckered down

Some things. . .
My baby don’t tolerate, no
My baby don’t tolerate, no
My baby don’t tolerate from me

Now a smaller more ordinary man
Might not appreciate the guidance
Of a good woman
Who truly loves him
He might drift and despair
During the ignorant, dumb misdoings
Of his dirty, daily existence

But that’s not me
No, yes sir’ree
I’m proof that true love will
Set you free

Some things. . . .
My baby don’t tolerate, no
My baby don’t tolerate, no
My baby don’t tolerate from me”

Lyle Lovett

 

We’re staying in a fantastic house called The Kennels. Back in the day, it was home to the keeper of Brodick Castle’s dogs and horses. The house itself has been upgraded, as a brochure might say, to a “very high standard.” It’s great, especially the huge bathtub. I’ve practically transformed myself into a prune with all the soaking. The tub is quite a bit longer than my 5 feet 4 ¼ inches, so I do have to stay awake. Either that or stay afloat.

The stables are unused now, but the original stalls and fittings are intact. Bags of coal for the fireplace are kept in one. A circular brass piece must be pushed until there is an audible click, then the original door swings open into a soft black quiet space, a couple of old horseshoes hanging on a post and a pile of ancient roof slates in one corner.

The low wall bordering the back gravel yard for the enclave of house and outbuildings is broken by stone steps leading to a grassy area which disappears into a woodsy path through the forest. Irresistible. A wild-growing hydrangea, ferns and ripe blackberries lead us for a few steps and then, like a light switch, the dense tree canopy plunges us into the darkness of a mature forest.

Buck’s natural compass tells him this is a shortcut to the Goatfell Mountain footpath. I’ve been his walking companion too many years now to doubt it. He knows things. Shoot. I can get lost driving to Tallahassee – and have. Buck, however, is an orienteering master. So I relax and enjoy the magical feeling woods, so soft beneath my feet, inhaling deeply. Oxygen therapy, mingled with healing herbs.

Shortly we emerge onto the Goatfell Mountain footpath. It’s a good rocky gravel path, noisy with the sounds of rushing streams and the ever-present wind. Lime green moss has covered many of the trees in this section of the path, and crimson mushrooms shaped like racket balls nestle at bracken’s edge. Hobbity, this place is!

We’re due at some friends’ home for an early dinner, and the the trek to Goatfell’s peak and back takes several more hours than we have on this day, so we go as far as the midpoint waterfall, then head back down, taking a detour around some other paths circumnavigating the castle. We stop for a late lunch of cheese on a whole meal bun at a bench overlooking the Firth of Clyde. We can see the large Caledonian MacBrayne ferry arriving from Ardrossan on the mainland. It is the island’s lifeline.

By the time we make it back to The Kennels, several hours and about eight miles have gone by, and there’s just time for another great soak and to dress for dinner.

I’m about to go into the kitchen and fix some extra-strength French press coffee and start to work on a cooking project for dinner with friends. Last year I brought over chile peppers and seasonings to make Machaca, a spicy beef dish, great with black beans, sour cream, guacamole, and corn bread. An encore was requested. The beef has been in a marinade of lime juice, pressed garlic, Worcestershire, Tabasco, chipoltle chile powder, and toasted cumin seeds since yesterday. This morning I’ll sear the meat, then add tomatoes, lots more garlic, jalapenos, onions and other good stuff, and just raise the roof

While that’s going on, I plan to wrap up in my shawl and read all day. Me and Lyle Lovett. I think we’ll invite Santana (the Shaman album), too. It’s got the right seasoning for today.

I’m sitting here laughing out loud. Feeling warm and bright. Thanks, Lyle.

03:58 AM in Isle of Arran 2004 | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)