7:45 a.m., part clouds, a little wind, 45F
On my bike ride into work this morning, a field crew is burning brush piles in the woods. Flames rise several feet beyond the tops of the human-high piles of branches ranging from as narrow as my pinky to as thick as my forearm. One of my colleagues fans a recalcitrant fire with a leaf blower. Another transfers brush from a truck onto the fire. We greet each other, and they graciously hold up their work for a few moments as I squeeze past them.
I tie up at Big Rock visitor station and walk the trails to the north. Spring beauty shoots continue to emerge in the cool, damp dark beneath fallen leaves. Today the etiolated stems I find are as slender as a tangle of embroidery floss, so fine that I wonder if they are seedlings. I dig them out and find a dark, toothlike corm the size of a spit tangerine pip. This is the plant’s persistence from one year to the next. About a dozen short roots come off the corm. I later read that this species is nonmycorrhizal, leading me to wonder whether I have broken off long-haired roots as I dug this out of the ground. The short leaves at the shoot tips are bent sharply backward like a dancer stretching before a performance. Further on, I’ll find one with flower buds bundled into a knot the size of an ant’s head. A white-breasted nuthatch is calling.
Cotyledons and first leaves of what I take to be annual bedstraw are pushing up through windows in the litter. I have never noticed the cotyledons before, or forgotten them if I have. They are ovate in outline and nearly as large as my pinky nail, a surprise for a plant that will have long-slender leaves at maturity. Right now, they are short, fat, sharply apiculate and toothed along the margins, their upper surfaces scabrous with tough little hairs. This plant germinated in the fall or winter and has been growing for awhile. I dig one up and lay it in my hand to photograph. The roots trail across my palm, almost as long as the stem angling across my fingers. There is no corm or bulb to get these plants through the winter. They live on wits, good fortune, and the law of big numbers: every plant is at enormous risk of seeing its lineage snuffed out this season, but the species as a whole will be here long after we are gone.
Leaves are mussed up by squirrels tussling and digging up acorns. The ditch below is still, standing water skimmed with ice that covers only about a third of its surface. Some plant I don’t recognize that smacks of a Eurasian ground-cover grows rigid, tall, evergreen along the edge of the trail. I photograph it and upload it to iNaturalist, and the machine learning engine suggests woodland phlox. I accept the identification, then find that I photographed the same species in the same location almost seven years ago. There is some chance it’s the same plant.
A dead tree stands six inches in diameter and snapped off a few feet above my head. A woodpecker excavated a few holes near its base sometime in the past month or two, strewing white wood chips. The holes are too small for a pileated woodpecker. They seem a bit large for a downy or even a hairy woodpecker. I put my money on red-bellied woodpecker. All are common enough in these woods. Whoever it was dug deep. Did it find a warren of beetle larvae?
A small colony of bleached American pokeweed is still standing after the snows and winds of winter, stems dark-streaked perhaps by fungi, leaning against one another, one overtopping me. Beyond them a red oak has tipped over, huge, about 150 feet tall and as big around as any in the East Woods. Some of its larger branches fractured on impact, but the canopy lies in only a few pieces, still clothed in the past year’s leaves. The roots have pulled up clay and rock. Thick shards of bark are embedded in the ground, sloughed off hastily as the tree blew over.
Later in the day, while I am working through oak specimens in the herbarium, rain comes down in torrents, beating against the side of the building. I bike out in the early dark. It is warm and raining, but more slowly, rattling against my hood as I pass the brush piles that have burned down but still glow orange in the falling rain. I bike to the exit gate. Outside that gate, anything could happen. I unlock it and bike home to Rachel and the boys.
I am writing this the next morning, recalling my ride from notes and photographs. It rained all night, and I study the puddles in our backyard as my tea steeps. I lose a half-hour of writing to reading the news, about the U.S. invading Venezuela, about ICE agents shooting and killing a woman in Minneapolis, about health care. I think of these lines I learned earlier this week, from Bertholt Brecht:
What times are these, in which
A conversation about trees is almost a crime
For in doing so we maintain our silence about so much wrongdoing!
Are the brush piles still smoldering, rain hissing against the glowing logs?
Spring Beauty so early, even if only lurking under the leaf litter? I feel that I haven’t had enough winter.
Thank you for another thoughtful post.
Every year a few come out in December… fun to find them so early!
Enjoy the week, and thank you for writing.