Trees to Thoreau to Terroir

 

Lately I have been noticing a lot of connections between things. I think about one thing and while researching it I run across other interesting things and these things often connect back to something else I had been thinking about.

Well, a couple of posts back (Silent Skies) I was hanging around a wood pile watching the evening deepen and I commented about the unique scent of the fresh cut logs:

“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.”

At this same time I happened to be reading “The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson”. I got down toward the end of the book and there is a reprint of Emerson’s memorial address on the death of Henry Thoreau. He makes this comment about Thoreau:

“He thought the scent a more oracular inquisition than the sight – more oracular and trustworthy. The scent, of course, reveals what is concealed from the other senses. By it he detected earthiness.”

Interesting. I was just thinking about the scent of wood and the earthiness that could be detected in it. So I thought I would look into just what makes earth (dirt, soil, mould) smell like it does.

We have all smelled it even though we might not know what causes it. The smell you get driving past a freshly plowed field, or the smell of the soil when you dig a hole to plant a tree or a rose bush in the garden, or the scent on the air after a summer downpour (smells like worms).

That scent is caused by a chemical called geosmin and it is produced by bacteria in the soil called actinomycetes. No one is quite sure why the bacteria produce this compound or why humans find it to be pleasant. However, I did run into this interesting tidbit – this type of “friendly” bacteria can act as an antidepressant leading the researchers to wonder whether we should spend more time playing in the dirt.

This lead me to an article about how bacteria in the soil alter the makeup of certain fragrance oils. The investigators found that they could alter the fragrance by controlling the bacteria and what they are fed and reached this conclusion:

“This finding may go some way to explain why the properties of the Vetiver oil change significantly depending on the environment in which it was grown.”

At this same time I was also trying to come up with a title for an upcoming show of my photos. I want something that isn’t too strictly defining yet points toward the idea that nature can and should be appreciated wherever it is found and not just when it is located in far off national or global scenic hot spots. Something along the lines of the recently coined word ”locavore” that describes someone that prefers locally grown foods to those shipped in from thousands of miles away.

This path lead me through tangled vines of related words like autochthonous, indigenous, propinquity and foreign words like the latin proximum, the japanese ma, and finally to the french word terroir. Terroir brought me back to the soil.

Terroir seems to translate to something like “a sense of place” or “a taste of the soil” or as one author put it; somewhere-ness. It is a quality imparted to a crop, wine in particular, by the locale in which it is grown. So some might say that part of what makes a great french wine great is that it comes from grapes grown in France, on a particular vineyard in France, and maybe even on a particular section of a particular vineyard in France.

Terroir is a complex and controversial concept in the wine world. I find wine making fascinating, but my taste buds are much too crude to appreciate the subtleties involved. I can’t argue the pros and cons. I just liked the idea that places have a taste.

In Silent Skies I also wrote:

“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.”

This was before I learned about terroir. Maybe the scent of the wood, like the taste of a wine, not only depends on the species of tree, but also on the plot that reared it. Maybe locust wood from near my home has a slightly different scent than wood from say Pennsylvania - I’ll bet that it does.

MDW

P.S. Another tidbit I found was that geosmin is often implicated (along with other compounds) in “cork taint” a taste that destroys otherwise good wine.

P.P.S. Another quote from Thoreau where he seems to confuse his senses:

“I put on some hemlock-boughs, and the rich salt crackling of their leaves was like mustard to the ear, the crackling of uncountable regiments. Dead trees love the fire.”

Furry Little Creatures

 

A few weeks ago I took a little trip to Ricketts Glen State Park in Pennsylvania. The park is just west of Scranton on PA 487. Here is a blurb from the park brochure:

Ricketts Glen harbors Glens Natural Area, a National Natural Landmark. Take the Falls Trail and explore the Glens, which boasts a series of wild, free flowing waterfalls, each cascading through rock-strewn clefts in this ancient hillside. The 94-foot Genoga Falls is the highest of 22 named waterfalls. Old growth timber and diverse wildlife add to the scenic area. Ricketts Glen State Park is one of the most scenic areas of Pennsylvania. This large park is comprised of 13,050 acres in Luzerne, Sullivan, and Columbia counties.

It was a long drive from my house in western NY so I only had time to hit the main attraction – the Glen. As advertised, there were a heap o’ waterfalls here. Of course this is a state park so it isn’t a wilderness experience – the trail is wide and groomed, the falls all have little name plates screwed to them, and there is a fair amount of traffic even on an autumn weekday. Still PA went relatively easy on the ”improvements” – no concrete or snack bars (in the glen anyway) and the signage was not too conspicuous.

The falls are pretty and the number of them in one small area is amazing. I’ve sprinkled some photos from Ricketts in this post and in a post a couple three back from this one. From the parking lot off route 118 around the full loop and back is only about seven miles and even with stopping to take photos I was able to do it in a long afternoon.

Now what about those furry animals…

Up ahead of me along the trail I saw something moving along the ground. As I got closer I saw that it was a mouse foraging along the path edges. He seemed to sense my approach rather than seeing me because he never turned in my direction. He just ran across the trail and hid on the hillside. I came up to where he had disappeared and found him sitting just inside a little depression so that he was plainly visible if anyone cared to stop and look that way. He seemed to think he was quite invisible.

In a few seconds he scampered down the hill past my feet and went about his little mousey business. As long as I stood still, he paid no attention to me at all – mostly he had his back to me. When I started to walk on, he sensed the movement and again ran for his hiding spot without ever looking. I walked backwards for a bit to see what he would do after I passed. Sure enough in a few seconds he headed down to the path and started rooting around again. I think that he has become so used to people walking past that he just feels someone approach, jumps aside for a few seconds to let them pass, and then heads back out. He doesn’t bother to check if the intruders have indeed passed or if they have stopped like I did – they always pass - just count to ten and go back out.

Along this trail I also spotted a squirrel which might not seem too interesting – squirrels are a dime a dozen in the woods. Ah, but this one was a red squirrel. I haven’t seen a red squirrel around my home since I was a kid. I distinctly remember one day my father and I were in the woods behind our farm and we saw a rare (at that time) grey squirrel. My dad said that it was a bad sign for the red squirrels and that they would eventually all be pushed out. Sure enough these days we are lousy with greys, but nary a red is to be seen.

There is a post at Flandrum Hill about the squirrel situation in Nova Scotia. I actually saw both red and grey squirrels around Ricketts – I wonder how long that will last? Maybe there is enough space and diversity among the trees to hold them both.

My final tidbit about furry animals is about bats. You might not think of them as being furry, but they really are (except for the wings) and they actually aren’t bad looking in a kind of “so ugly their cute” way. We have always had small brown bats around the farm. We kids would often find them hanging comatose in the barn rafters on cold mornings. Our grandmother (of course) sternly warned us about getting rabies and told us to stay away from them – we (of course) ignored her.

One evening a few weeks ago I decided to sit on my deck and watch the sky for a few minutes before going inside. It was a warm night for October. The east of the world was falling into darkness, but the western sky still glowed softly.

The first thing I noticed were bats – three or four of them black against the sky. The next thing was a flock of geese flowing past low and close to the house. Here was a contrast.

The geese flew in tight formation with strong wings beating in measured unison. They came so close that I could hear the buzzing sound made on each down stroke as they stiff armed their way through the air. They kept up a constant chatter among themselves that could be heard for a long time as they flew straight true and level to the horizon and beyond.

On the other hand, the bats are silent. Their ears might be filled with the sound of buzzing insects and their own sonar pings, but I could hear nothing. They spoke no word to me and their wings did not disturb the air in the least. Their flight is frenetic. Each one moves independent of the others. They zig and zag up and down side to side – they seem to be flailing around totally out of control and yet they never falter. Their wings are not stiff like goose wings. They are supple and loosely fitted so that the bats can twist and turn them at need. I’ve read that bats often use their wings like a basket to scoop insects out of the air and into their mouths.

I thought to myself that it must take a lot of insects to provide the energy for such wild movement. I found from a little research that a bat’s heart rate may go from 300 beats per minute at rest to 1000 during flight. They can eat 1200 insects an hour which can increase their body weight by 50 percent during a single feeding. Yikes!

MDW

Time

 

It’s November, most of the trees have dropped their leaves, and last week we had a smattering of snow, but it is going to be warm and sunny today. As I drove along the rises and falls of back roads I could look out from the ridges across valleys brimming with soupy swirly fog and when the road plunged down into them, my windshield clouded over with a thin layer of clinging water.

I stopped at a spot that I often visit. My plan for today is simple; just start at the bottom and follow the ravine all the way to the top - walk the stones, climb the falls, and slosh through the water.

Many times I start out my hikes moving way too quickly. Inured to the pace of life outside the forest, I rush ahead to see what is around the next bend forgetting to look at what is already at hand. At times like these my camera brings perspective.

Something catches my eye and I’m forced to pause. I walk back and forth checking various angles. I have to drop my backpack, dig out the camera, open the tripod, and get set up in a good spot. I like to get close to my subjects so getting into the good spot often requires crawling over around and in between rocks and logs; bending and twisting, crouching and kneeling. The exposures are long so once I hit the shutter, I have time…

Time. Sitting still. Looking. Listening. Touching. Breathing. I begin to feel time. I sense it just as I sense the warmth of sunshine or the cold splash of a waterfall. Time. No longer an abstract concept marked out by the hands on my watch - it is something palpable. Something to be heeded.

It flows in the ever changing yet never varying musical movement of the water. It seeps down into the ground as undermined stone crumbles away inching the ravine deeper and deeper. Time twists and turns along the pathways of unseen breezes that animate the trees. Its rhythm beats in the unaffected movements of insects and birds and forest animals. The sun walks with measured pace across the sky drawing out shifting shadows upon the forest floor. The nomad clouds come and go – without power for movement on their own; they are content to be pushed about by the streams of the air.

If I had nothing to slow me down, if I pushed ahead intent on reaching some goal, if I never paused to look intently at the things around me, I could cut a swath through this time. I could thrust it aside and keep it from touching me. I would be in the woods, but outside it at the same time. Though physically present I would be in my own little time bubble – almost in another dimension. The forest would go on around me and close behind in my wake. In passing I might catch a glimpse and think to myself that I was there and that I had experienced it – been part of it. But it was just scenery.

Now sitting still on cold living stone the time gets on me. Water splashes around me, a breeze chills me, trees lean over me and a squirrel scolds me from his high perch, shadows move across my face, I watch the sun to see what it will slowly reveal. Time sinks into me. I feel its pulse and the forest transforms from scenery to life.

“Most people are on the the world, not in it – have no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them – undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate.“ John Muir

It seems to me that the true experience of wilderness depends not on how far you walk or how high you climb but on how often you stand still - when you rest your hand on stone and wood and embrace the time of that place.

MDW