Visiting the Eastern Uplands. S. Dorman
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was so great that I cried out. “Allen, stop! I want to know why thistle seeds are sold.” Could not picture a gardener planting such seeds, not even a Scottish gardener. Once inside I was told that songbirds love them. So, with a sackful, I left the jolly clutter of the greenhouse-cum-lawnchair-whirligigs-shop.
The seeds in the bag are black. Seated at the oak table, I take a tiny hundred in my palm to examine. They remind me of mouse turds—narrow and curved, larger at one end than the other. Under the aspheric magnifier they bloom large, and show three sides with striations lengthwise. They are markedly different from the seeds of the bull thistle that Allen cut for me from the Portland thicket below the Promenade.
Sharp prickles are everywhere on this plant. Gingerly I lift the cutting from the aluminum can. Its leaves, green calyx, and stem are all thick with spines, an identifying feature of the bull thistle. Only the lavender petal parts, thickly coated with white pollen, are soft and velvety to the touch.
I leave this flower intact, but pull the dried brown petal parts of a gone-by bloom. They come forth in a multitude. Below these parts, inside the spiny ovary, are myriad pale seeds attached to folded dandelion-like carriers. I pull gently, drawing these forth into a feathery pile. A breeze from the open window blows on them and slowly they open and pop up in a cottony heap, poised to waft about the room.
Quickly I quash the bagful of black seeds down on the living, burgeoning pile. A few feathery puffs escape and blow across the table.
I take some, parting them from the feather carriers and hold them, glistening, in my palm. Now I examine them with the magnifier and add a few black seeds for comparison. The black ones are longer, more narrow at one end. Newcombe’s shows several species. There’s even a yellow one instead of lavender.
The cutting is several days old now. It’s been that long since we came back from Portland. I run my fingers thoughtfully along the grain of the spines. It seems that the older and dryer a plant becomes, the less piercing it grows to the touch.
I have filled and hung my feeder. The songbirds may show anytime. When I toted a bucket purse in junior high, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring came out, causing a worthy stir. It showed the significance of songbirds as environmental indicators.
Here the woods surrounding our house on two sides have been thinned considerably, causing me to wonder about the wood thrush and veery. How will they find it for seclusion and breeding in coming years? Thanks to Carson, NIMBY (Not in My Backyard) has become a worthy acronym. I don’t denigrate it: There are no backyard stewards but ourselves. It may be the closest we come to holding our spiritual ground in the physical realm.
This morning, one of those stifling dirty days, I walked up the road with the dog, picking blackberries. We left the road when we got to the powerline where dwarf sumac had been poisoned by herbicide, standing stiff, brown and dried like statues of dead trees. Here one sees the wide brutal path of the skidder intersecting the powerline’s swath.
I stepped into that swath then turned down into blasted woodland. It’d been a few weeks since we heard the roar and clank of the skidder moving in woods behind our house. The living-wage work of the logger was done. Now might be a good time to bushwhack back through the forest and see what the saw had done.
Maine has had a strange geo-history, written in earth (rock and soil) over millions of years, but the strangest may be yet to come. And this strangeness would stem from the speed with which changes occurred. They would not be written in earth so much as in atmosphere, another ancient controlling element of our life. No, the changes of the past were not small, but slow. Vast changes, both mighty and megalithic. Question: In geo-historical terms, what do Maine and Europe have in common? Answer: Cape Elizabeth.
According to David L. Kendall’s Glaciers & Granite, the warped rock of the Cape was once part of the pre-European continent. This was before it was warped. One understands that a move of such magnitude (splitting continents) could only be accomplished by forces great enough to twist rock—force, heat, pressure enough to buckle the ponderous plates of oceanic floors and shove continents willy-nilly. More recent changes include the bending and denuding of the entire lower third of the state by those crystalline giants, the glaciers. Maine has only just rebounded from that colossal event. Great changes these, but with time frame to match: 500 million and one million years respectively. Leaving volcanism aside, it takes nature almost forever to change large expanses of rock. Rocks can be altered by minute forces in stages, as with incremental dismantling process of lichens, water solutions, frost-wedging. Thousands of years are tied up in these mechanisms, yet they are quick-change compared to the slow subduction of lithospheric plates or the tireless prodigious accumulation of glaciers—flake upon flake.
But the air is an element of an altogether different character from those forces beneath our feet. The atmosphere above our heads is ephemeral and swift in comparison. Semantically it’s best not confined to that space above our heads, for it encircles and infiltrates our own bodies continuously. Momently we fill our lungs, and even the cells of our flesh respire. We commingle among gases, constantly exchanging gas for gas in this friendly reciprocal atmosphere.
Or is it so friendly? We know that it is not as kind as before. We know that it has begun to change, that progress is rapidly altering it—perhaps beyond our powers of repair. The great surging jet stream, the forceful fronts, milky swirling low-pressure systems, the spacious aerial mountains of airborne particles, all within the generous water cycle by which everything is washed—all these thunderous atmospheric mechanisms are changing. And, according to Senator George Mitchell’s World on Fire, when the oceans have sopped up as much CO2 as they can hold in solution, our atmosphere will become that of a hothouse. The projection, made by Goodwin Obasi, secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization, is for 50 to 100 years. A mere flake on the surface of geologic time. But they don’t yet know how these effects will play out.
As I entered the bruised and blasted neighborhood of my backyard my breathing was labored. The atmosphere, as in recent days, was heavy with low-level ozone, and my skin sticky with excess humidity, as though the heaviness of the hothouse were already upon me. About my feet the weathered ruins of our air cleaners lay everywhere, crumpled and broken, going only to decay and the eventual blessedness of soil. Leaves, curled and brown, crackled to dust beneath my tread. I stepped gingerly and high where broken branches of a once respiring life lay in heaps and tangles. Yet many trees still stood. This was no clearcut, but a better kind. Selective cutting. But scraggly standing bits of life, spindly and tall, were themselves bruised and torn by the skidder and many would not fully recover from their wounds, bearing hence the slow-wrecker of insectan pests and disease.
Down I came, picking my way over a river of bones, fascinating leavings broken, stripped bare. Some were pummeled to shreds. The skulls of granite, formerly hidden in soil and leaves, now popped into view. I teetered on twisted bones of boughs across stagnant pools on which swirled the resin of trees. Stumps were coated pale blue with caked sap, the dried outpourings of their vascular systems. The sweet odor of cut wood lingered, diminished and stale. The loggers, tough daring workers who support our woods economy and who must make a living for their families, had moved on to other forests weeks ago.
I clambered down, passing without seeing the flash of white revealing our neighbor’s house: I just kept walking, fascinated, upon the undulant river of bones. Then I awoke seeing the pale solid wall through skimpy trees: the lot of the wood-turning mill whose owners, in providing work for our community, had taken wood away.
Enthralled, I had gone too far, missing the path back to my house.
Comment: In its atmospheric changes, Maine will change. It will become a warm place to live but a dangerous place in which to raise kids in the sun. We will have ozone we don’t need at depths where we do our breathing, and at heights where we need it for protection from ultraviolet rays we won’t have it. Nemo me impune laccessit. This may be the future of Maine.
I’d rather fall into a thicket of thistles.
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