Silent Skies

 

For weeks the skies have been alive with squadrons of Canada Geese taking off, landing, circling, or just passing through. They never stopped flying and they never stopped talking. I would hear them honking and causing a ruckus even before I got out of bed in the morning. All day they would confab overhead. In darkness well after sundown they flew unseen, but not unheard. Sometimes they would fly low right past the house and I could observe their stiff-armed powerful wing beats and between the honking I could hear a sort of buzzing as their wings vibrated the air.

Tonight the sky is quiet, empty - kind of lonely really. I went away for a week or so on a trip and when I came back they were all gone. They couldn’t wait for me. The party is over.

I was down in the pasture making firewood out of a big locust tree that fell during a storm. Being late October, the sun goes down early so in the twilight I was collecting up my gear and getting ready to walk home to supper. I decided to have a seat on the pile of freshly sawn logs and take my ease in the dim cold light just to watch and to listen for a while.

Oddly enough in a few minutes a group of about twenty geese flew past. They were serious - all business. Only an occasional short clipped honk sounded to set the pace of their wings. They were late, no time to talk. They flew by fast and straight; desperate to catch up to the others. They passed out of sight and hearing in just few seconds.

I leaned back on my bed of logs and watched the sky slowly darken. The shadows warily stole out from their hiding places behind the boles of the trees. Slowly they began to fill up all the open spaces. They came and lightly covered me as well.

Most of the trees have already shed their colorful autumn dress. Tangled limbs steeled for winter’s onset show black against the dying glow of the western sky. An old sycamore, every bit of eighty feet tall, stands alone in the center of the open pasture. Many of its leaves, wide splayed, browned by the sun, curled and deeply veined like giant hands, are not yet ready to relinguish their high vantage points. They clutch at the branches fighting against wind and frost and the unrelenting pull of gravity.

Mingled with that of damp earth and fallen leaves is the aroma of the fresh cut wood that makes up my rough recliner. Each species of tree has its own unique scent just as each one has a unique grain pattern, color, and texture. I’ve heard that veteran woodworkers can identify species of wood by smell alone just the way oenophiles can identify vintages. If you think about it, wooden barrels figure prominently in the making of many wines and the type of wood used is critical to imparting just the right flavors and aromas.

Oak is hard and dense with an acrid scent. Pine is soft with a wandering grain and of course that wonderful resinous turpentine odor. To me locust wood has an earthy, mossy, slightly sweet, and almost but not quite musty scent. It reminds me of the wonderful sweet perfume of the flowers that cover the tree in white raiment each spring only it is muted and mixed with the dark richness of the soil that feeds the tree’s inner life.

Many trees have very clear structural divisions – roots, a central trunk, and a canopy of branches that are often regularly ordered in distinct patterns. Not so with the locust. It may start out as a single stem close to the ground, but it quickly splits, bends, and twists every which way it can. Branches spring out at random spots heading off in any direction that pleases them. The tree that I’m cutting up is actually just one half of a larger tree that split off leaving an oddly shaped but complete tree still standing.

Locust bark is gnarled and deeply grooved. The wood inside is stringy and sinewy like tendons wound together. Ash logs split straight and clean, but locust cracks and tears and clings so that sometimes you have to pull it apart by hand after opening a seam with the axe. It makes me think that the locust is all root except that some of it is below the ground and some above. Sometimes I think it could be planted upside down and go on growing.

Well, I’ve wandered a bit from the migration of geese to the structure of trees. That’s the way it goes. Nature, like thoughts and like locust trees, twists and turns and sometimes goes off in unexpected directions.

MDW

Personal Nature

Last night I was on my back deck grilling some chops. We tend to eat late and what with the days getting shorter it was just starting to get dark. My house sits on a small hill looking southward over a horse pasture. While waiting for my supper to cook, I stood at the deck rail for a while to study the sky.

The air was clear and still with a little autumn bite to it – frost warnings tonight. All the heavens above me were clear, clean, richly robed in blue and purple without a trace of cloud. The purest blue was in the west where the sun, recently fallen behind the rim of the earth, still gave off a faint rumor of its presence. Rising up from the west, I let my eyes trace backward along the sun’s long arc. The blue became darker and deeper as I traveled toward the zenith and then little by little, wavelength by wavelength, as I slid down the other side, it transformed to a lush royal purple and so further down darker and deeper until at last I reached, rising up from the east of the world, a thin sliver, the edge of night, slowly peeling back the thick strokes of color leaving only transparent black.

Stars that had been covered by bright blue all day long were getting ready for their unveiling, but for now only two things broke the otherwise perfectly smooth surface. The moon, waxing toward its first quarter, looked like a hole cut neatly through the canvas letting hot white light from some unseen source behind stream down on me. Up a bit and a little to the left of the moon was another hole, this time just a pin prick piercing through; Jupiter, the moon’s companion for a few nights.

I stood in the semi-darkness of my own little auditorium quietly watching nature paint until finally I needed to head inside to finish up supper - back to the lights, the TV, the clatter of dishes, my family, the warmth. Later in the evening, after the washing up, play time, reading bedtime stories to my son and turning out the light, I stepped back out to see what had happened while I was away.

Now was the time for stars. The moon had moved off to one side yeilding the center to them. Using the clear black of night as a background, they showed themselves off – shining, sparkling, twinkling, singing. The beauty of the stars was of a different kind than the smooth richness of the early evening; cold, lofty, sharp, pointed.

Earlier the colors had changed even as I watched and only lasted a few precious minutes. The stars move at a slower pace, gleaming the whole night through. A camera with its unblinking eye would show up their spinning, but with only my impatient human eye I couldn’t precieve them moving at all. Again I watched until cold and need drove me inside.

“The stars at night stoop down over the brownest, homeliest common with all the spiritual magnificence which they shed on the Campagna, or the marble deserts of Egypt. The uprolled clouds and the colors of morning and evening will transfigure maples and alders. The difference between landscape and landscape is small, but there is great difference in the beholders.”  Ralph Waldo Emerson

We don’t always need to trek all over the place seeking out the great nature meccas, like Yosemite Park for instance which is visited by 3.5 million people a year. Certainly these places are vital to us and should be preserved and enjoyed as much as possible, but nature can and should most often be found close to home - in our back yards, our gardens, our fields, and our local parks.

We need to slow ourselves down and look out the window once in a while. We need to go out on our decks or up on our rooftops, look up, watch the heavens play. We must learn to preserve and enjoy the life of the earth all around us everyday, not just for a couple weeks a year when we load up the wagon and drive off to some “destination”.

MDW