Bartleby the Boulder

An old joke:

The first time I stood on the edge of the meadow where I planned my garden, I tossed a rock as far as I could.

When I began to prepare the garden I was amazed at how quickly that little rock had sprouted, and how productive it had been!

I have been long-accustomed to the rock piles that accumulate as I open up new beds or planting areas. And I've developed a a familiar, even practiced approach to extricating the rocks and stones I encounter. My "new ground kit" includes two shovels (wide blade, and narrow, angled, and pointed trenching shovel), a mattock, a pick, a pry bar (that's only rarely been needed.

The kit and I have dealt with everything from run-of-the-mill(stone), palm-sized rocks, to grapefruit sized stones. Some offer more resistance than others, but few resist for long.

But we may have met our match.

When my shovel blade, about two inches into the ground,  first encountered what I have come to think of as "Bartleby the Boulder," I dropped into what I assumed would be my familiar pattern --

• find the edges 
• find the depth 
• excavate until a bottom edge is located 
• pry out
• add to pile

Still working on the first three, and am doubtful of the fourth, have abandoned the fifth. Bartleby will have higher purpose than just being part of a pile, or even a pile unto himself, once I remove him from his lodgings.

But I may leave him there, expose as much of him to the sun as possible, and work around him. My garden stone, Bartleby.

The more I think about it, the more I think that Batrtleby stays in place. I have (next to) no doubt that I could move him. But, as his namesake said more than once, "I would prefer not to."

Hawk's Eyes

Robert Heinlein once noted that the high point of any freelance writer's day is checking the mail -- "the low point is usually  immediately thereafter.".

True enough, but sometimes the trip home can be the best part, even when the post office box is empty.

Today was one of those days. Nothing in the PO box. But once I left the state-maintained blacktop and turned onto the stretch of private, unpaved road that we share with only four other households, I saw:

• A neighbor's flock, the spring's lambs now large and  independent.
• Another neighbor's fine garden, best in the area, now shifting to toward fall production; earlier this summer they had the best stand of sunflowers I've seen in ages.
• A startled deer moving so fast across the road and into the trees that I was convinced that this one, this time, was going to drive herself headfirst into a tree and knock herself unconscious. Didn't, of course.
• A brace of decidedly unstartled wild turkeys who actually stopped at the lip of the forest that borders the road, cocked their heads, and stared at me until I was nearly upon them. Even when they did move into the woods they did so nonchalantly, at their own pace. Neither I nor my car was going to ruffle their feathers.Not today, anyway.
• A hawk, a beauty, slicing fast through open air in pursuit of something, and disappearing into the woods.
• Four pools of standing water on our road. I had noticed them on the drive out, I;m sure, but they hadn't quite registered. It's been so long -- two months at least -- since we've had enough rain to saturate the ground sufficiently to allow a puddle to stand. Even the heaviest of the very few rains we've had since spring disappeared into the ground as soon as they fell. But the remnants of Isaac, here for the last three or so days, has dropped enough rain slowly enough that we have puddles again. Not so much, thankfully, to was out any of my steep driveway, nor to super-saturate the two boggy spots down here at the farm that are the bane of delivery trucks during rainier seasons.
• Green -- everywhere green: another gift from Isaac.
• More butterflies of more varieties than I can recall in recent years.

And at the bottom of the drive, the first glimpse of this old barn which is our home --  and I saw as well, as always, ten thousand things that need to get done and that I need to get to doing.

Which I believe I will, right now, with the sun out late in the afternoon for the first time since last week.

I love this little farm.

I love living here.

Especially when my eyes are opened.

Rachel Carson Revisited (And About Time, Too)

Diane Rehm this morning had a lovely, thoughtful hour with William Souder, whose new biography of Rachel Carson,On a Farther Shore, is just out today.




The hour went quickly, and covered lots of ground, articulately and insightfully, but not so quickly as to avoid the ongoing lies told  about Rachel Carson being a mass-murderer, with Silent Spring her weapon.

 I wrote a bit about this lunacy a couple of years ago.

In a current Slate piece, Souder addresses addresses the persistence of these charges -- and both the corporate interests and scientific ignorance that cause them to persist-- and does so with admirable clarity and documentation.

If environmental degradation becomes an issue this fall -- and I don't hold out a lot of hope for it to -- you can bet that sane, sensible, scientific, pragmatic (she never called for an overall ban on pesticides, only an increased awareness of the consequences of their use), Rachel Carson will once more be vilified as a mass-murderer.

It doesn't even have to become a campaign issue -- Rush Limbaugh hit her hard during the off-year.

A mass-murderer! This woman who wrote beautifully, who loved life, and living things, and above all wanted to remind us to think rationally about what we and our technologies are doing -- and can do -- to our planet.

Her reputation can take it, of course, and more than that her work can take it, and has, and will continue to.Rachel Carson wrote with clear eyes and clean hands, honestly and truthfully, and without any agenda other than opening our eyes.Her concern can be found in all of her books. Her letters, many collected in Always, Rachel, give a glimpse into the size of her concern as well as her personality.
 
Based on the hour's conversation this morning, I suspect that Souder's biography does the same. I am eager to read it.

Souder's new book is, in fact, one of the two biographies I'm most looking forward to this season -- the other is Don Scott's biography of George R. Stewart (another clear-eyed writer who loved the earth and its inhabitants, and remains too often misunderstood).A good season for biographies of planetary caretakers (and, in a way, caregivers) -- high time, too.

  It is, after all, the writers who speak most clearly about what we do to the world who are most easily misunderstood -- and, dammit, attacked.

I'm Not the Only Thistle Fan

This particular thistle fan, though, proved awfully camera-shy:

I felt bad, actually, about intruding upon the commune between the butterfly and the thistle.

Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Hood Ornament

Back at the farm after a brief trip up the hill for the newspaper, I discovered this passenger on the hood:

Orgyia leucostigma  --  the taxonomic designation given it in 1797 by no less distinguished a naturalist than James Edward Smith, founder of the Linnean Society (and, as if he wasn't already impressive enough, the man who bought Linnaeus's personal collection -- books and specimens-- after the father of taxonomy died).

The caterpillar -- also identified as Hemerocampa leucostigma -- was a stunner and I was happy simply to watch it explore the Geo's hood for awhile. During that while, the vague bell going off in my head about yellow and tufted caterpillars kept me from touching it, which was a sound decision. Evidently its fine "nettling hairs" can cause allergic reactions. 


Energetic, fast, and beautiful:

I took its measure:

And wondered if I would encounter -- and doubtless be far less captivated by -- any of its offspring when they emerge as White-marked Tussock Moths:


 

At present the moths are not a serious pest -- according to one site, while their population can explode to epidemic proportions, such explosions are rare.They do more aesthetic damage to shade trees and ornamentals than anything else, and the aesthetics of the larva I spent part of this humid Sunday afternoon with seem to me to outweigh the risks.

Thistle ahead

Watching this summer's thistle draw toward a close, I thought of a favorite poem -- and of next summer's growth:


Are flower and seed the same?
What do the great dead say?
Sweet Phoebe, she's my theme:
She sways whenever I sways whenever I sway.
"O love me while I am.
You green thing in my way"
I cried, and the birds came down
And made my song their own.
                   Theodore Roethke, Words for the Wind, 1958

New Year's Heap

Robert Graves supposedly named his compost heaps for favored (I think) guests, and would start one on a whim.

I've done much the same myself, though I decided today that the new heap I began building would be my Holiday 2011/2012 Heap.

And so the ingredients I gathered included as well as the usual suspects -- trimmings from today's greens, the grounds from the last of the Christmas coffee, sweet potato peels, clippings and cuttings and so on --a sheet of tissue that a gift was wrapped in, and, in honor of Dickens, "a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato" although I passed on the undigested beef.

Perhaps tonight I'll  be visited by dreams of Composts Past, Present, and, Future.