September 29, 2024, afternoon
The East Woods are clearing out, breezes brittling the Joe-pye weed pappuses, walnuts thudding to the ground and decomposing where they land, squirrels hustling across the trails, trying to remember where they cached acorns just a few weeks ago, faking each other out as best they can so that the ones they don’t retrieve no one else does, either. It’s a cutthroat world. Jumpseed achenes and the burlike capsules of enchanter’s nightshade have blackened on the stem. White snakeroot is past its prime, leaves inscribed by miner trails, flowers tramping toward the far edge of autumn. The gangly ray flowers of Short’s aster are cerulean-warbler blue. The branches of calico aster are buttoned up with tiny flowers and bobbing in the wind. Bees are keeping busy till winter hits. The pale jewelweed in the upland have all gone to pieces. One flower remains on single plant I pass. I pop it into my mouth as I walk by.
Spring peepers are squeaking just above the rush of the interstate. It takes me a minute to recognize their insistent, thick, high-pitched calls. The notes are ragged at the ends, as though the frogs were not quite warmed up. I had forgotten that they start singing again at the end of September. I don’t know why they do, but they do, as the fall warblers have nearly finished moving through and the prairie is beginning to senesce, and the forest understory is becoming sparse with the last flowers of broad-leaved goldenrod.
I had not noticed before this afternoon the black walnut gashed open along one side near the top of the hill, its wound spiraling clockwise down the trunk for about 15 feet. The tree has been excavated by rot and cleaned out by fire. The cavity, blackened on its inner surface, opens cleanly along the inner walls of the tree down to the soil’s surface. It extends upward ten feet or more. The outer bark and the rim of wood inside form a husk just thick enough to grasp in my hand, about two inches thick and platy-coal-charred. Yet the tree is growing fine: the canopy is half or two-thirds as full as the crown of an equal-sized but unmaimed tree 200 meters downslope. Both trees are shedding huge, well-formed walnuts that scatter across the forest floor, intermixing with last year’s eastern white oak seedlings, whose young leaves are hardly more lobed than the leaves of the Mexican royal oaks that inhabit the Sierra Madre Oriental of Tamaulipas, where I learned them, southward to Veracruz and Oaxaca. It’s a connection that the trees bear unconsciously, an ancient bridge to the tropics. Standing here, you’d never know there was such a link. The forest bristles with fruits and seedlings and improbable trees.
I scare a flock of starlings gathered on the road as I bike out. They cloud up to roost on the horizontals of the ComEd transmission tower. I turn around to get a closer look. I could do them no harm from this far away, even if I wanted to, but still they fly piecemeal into the trees flanking the prairie as I approach. I spend a few minutes enjoying the din that envelops us, trying to get a good look at the starlings between the branches, concentrating on their whistles and chirrups, before I realize that a handful of the birds I am looking at are not starlings at all, but cedar waxwings that have moved in from the side. I recognize now their thin “hisssss”’s etched over the starling chatter. They follow each other along the edge of the woods, and I follow outward along the road. Grasshoppers buzz in the reeds behind us.
A mourning cloak flits in and out along a path parallel to mine as I ride. A palm warbler darts into a buckthorn, then back out to the road behind me, where it tail-pumps and hops along the edge before disappearing again into the thicket.
Morton Arboretum East Woods, 9/29/2024