blog 8 - urban nature through a window

     The streets are dark and damp from last night's rain. Cars splash over the road, wipers swiping back and forth, as a few people walk down the street with an umbrella or raincoat. The rain increases. The sky is gray, just a solid white-gray with no clouds. From my desk, I watch the trees across the road. A slight wind blows the highest tips gently back and forth. The bark is dark from rain. They stand on the corner of the block, in someone's yard, and I've never touched or climbed or identified them, but I've watched them for years.

     Straight across the street, behind the row of houses, there's a small stand of hundred foot conifers. In the late of winter, the branches droop and big clumps of cones hang around the tree. The tops move in the wind, and I think of John Muir climbing trees. My imagination floats through the window and out to the trees and rests among the pine cones, rests among the birds, and the squirrels running the telephone wire. Can you imagine the insecurity of a pine cone or a bird, or maybe it's faithful confidence? A single bird sits in the very top of the tree, grasping with claws, riding branch and wind, swaying an inch this way, an inch that way.

     From the comfort of my office, I watch the rain come down heavier. It looks cold, and water begins to drip from the telephone and electric wires. The trees are dark bark skeletons, but in a few months they'll bloom and fill. Spring leaves will change the color palette of the window and offer privacy from neighbors. The summer wind will rustle the leaves, and summer rains will keep the roots wet. By fall, though, when the chlorophyl degenerates and leaves turn to red, yellow, brown, someone else will sit in this apartment. With plans to move in June, small features of my current place come into focus. The trees have changed for four years, and the conifers have kept a steady appearance. Sunlight, rain, snow, and wind have availed the trees. There are days when branches are filled with birds, when their song fills the air.

    

Every morning, the sun rises above the trees. Every morning, it's different, brighter, darker, clear or obscure, red, orange, purple, never the same. It's only visual perception of light, it's only trees and birds and squirrels, rain and wind, but it's what fills my window. An evolving picture, a perpetually changing painting of one Squirrel Hill street, a part of my mind and memory—the city streets, the light poles, the electric wires, the grass and sidewalks, conifers and children, noisy cars and singing birds, the wind and snow, the changing leaves.

blog 7 at night

    After dark, the streets of Squirrel Hill quiet down as less traffic travels through the neighborhood. Yellow apartment windows dot the sky. The moon waxes crescent, and tall apartments tower in the distance while squatter buildings line the streets. Through an intersection and under streetlights, I walk toward Schenely park. The temperature whispers spring as the wind echoes winters. Trees lay shadows over lawns of grass, and orange clouds hang above. Lamps line the road, a few cars pass, and down the hill from where I stand, below Beacon Street, three deer smell the ground and forage. I'm surprised, by their location and timing; however, “Movement may occur at any time of the day or night, especially when it's sunny or warm compared with the preceding few days … [Actually,] Nighttime feeding is common” (126)

    One of the deer lifts it head to look at me but goes back to eating. They stand out in the open, in the middle of a wide grass lawn. I've never seen deer after nightfall, and I wonder how common it is for them. In the The Deer Watcher's Field Guide, John H. Williams discusses distribution and activity levels of deer throughout the year, and he says, “It's long been accepted that once cold weather sets in, the deer's daily movements, general travel patterns, and level of feeding activity all decrease dramatically. 'Up to 40 percent' is the figure often given. My observations show that this is a misleading oversimplification” (122). Williams claims there are many variables to deer activity and feeding habits. Cold weather and seasonal changes alone do not deter the deer, he says, but rather, the harsher conditions of strong winds and heavy, deep snow are important factors. The last snow melted about a week ago, and the temperature is higher than the week before.
    “The deer's reaction to snow and cold in late winter is strikingly different from that of early winter … If winter breaks early, the deer immediately become very active and widespread throughout the habitat … Their activity will be spread throughout the twenty-four-hour day, no longer confined to the warmer, less windy times of day.” (126)

    Maybe their late-evening walk through the park isn't abnormal this time of year. Are these deer strolling the neighborhood, exploring their surroundings—like me, out for a walk? John H. Williams says their spring exploration is “a reflection of their curiosity and investigative nature more than anything else. By early spring they've been cooped up in their winter areas for a couple months, and they're trying as quickly as possible to see what's happened to the rest of their world while they were away” (127).

    I sit on a park bench and watch the deer. They pay little attention to me or passing vehicles. They graze and nibble. In the absence of cars, there's a faint crack of teeth crunching nuts. They move forward, they eat. They move forward, they graze around.

    “A couple of decades ago it was common, even in scientific journals, to read that deer were 'browsers' as compared with 'grazers,' but now it's widely recognized that this is highly variable, depending on location … Beyond a doubt, the deer of … any heavily forested region will procure a much higher percentage of their dietary intake by browsing” (144), but tonight, the deer graze on grass, nuts, or forbs, rather than browse for woody twigs or leaves. After the scarcity of winter, they may even be eating soil. John H. Williams has “read that deer and other animals eat soil to obtain needed minerals, but [he's] only witnessed this personally during early spring” (149).
    They graze for quite a while, out in the open, with no hurry. According to Williams, “leisurely feeding is the rule rather than the exception at all times of the year … On many, many occasions, [he's] watched deer feed in a very leisurely, relaxed manner” (147).

    Above the deer, the moon hangs low among orange-red clouds reflecting city lights. Below the dome of orange-red, redwood sequoia office buildings, glaciers of hospitals, and the rock-tower of learning light the dark horizon. Trees, grass, and shadows remain silent as the deer move along. They cross the lawn until they come to sidewalk. The intersection is empty, and the first deer steps onto the road. It startles and picks up pace and jogs across the street. The other deer follow right behind and slip into the tree line. A few moments later, a car through the intersection. I stand up, and walk home.

blog 6, undulates and conifers

    A fresh blanket of snow is nature's dare to me.  A secret dare to beat the others, to be the first footsteps.  I can't stay home when my memory yearns for bright sun, soft snow, and stillness of air.  On my way to the clearing, I walk among trees draped with globs of wet snow. The snow has stopped, but flakes fall from trees and clumps of slush splat on the ground.  From every corner of my eyes and senses, the motion and movement sparks sensation in the brain.  Movement, matter, energy.

    Through the trees, there are two deer. They watch, think, then run. No time to stand and stare. I follow them down over the ridge, but they're out of sight.  In the clearing, there is no grass, only white. After ambling over the hillside at a meditative pace, I look up and there are three other deer below the ridge. They stare, loose but nervous, not stomping or stirring. I start to move around, go around and up the hill, and watch them through the brush.  It seems my position will force them to the lower ground, and from the hill, I will have the better vantage to watch. But in a second, they ascend the hillside.  This is their ground, their hill, their way of protecting life. They graze the forest but make the ridge their home, and this is why.  I've known this; it's written on the trees and over the hills, but the motion movement of their bodies up the ridge, left to right, with caution and grace and fright.  The first two climb the face incredibly fast, nearly straight (but really side to side), like mountain goats.  The third and weakest struggles at the top, catching breathe, out of energy.  From high ground, they watch me with the better vantage.
   In the clearing, the pines and spruce remain no matter how close I come, no matter what my fingers do to them, but they sense me no less than the deer.  All over the park, snow melts and falls, and water drips from the limbs. Drip, drip, thip thup thip. My brain and forehead squeeze from the sun and reflection of white, white, bright white.  Motion, energy, neuron overload.  Do the conifers have a headache too? Do their senses overload in the snow and sunshine?

   Do trees feel buried?  Of course, they do.
   The shorter trees have their lower limbs buried in the snow, so I bend down to brush the young branches. It's a prickly species with short, sharp needles—not easy to identify either.  It's a spruce, white or blue, and there are nine others with identical needles.  None of them taller than my waist, none of them native to the park, none of them caged, except an eleventh that's two or three inches tall, barely peaking from the snow. Two other conifers grow in the upper half of open, white hillside. Near my chest in height, each has its own cage. The needles are much different—longer, rounder, softer—much more edible for undulates.  The lower limbs, where the cage doesn't reach, are stripped and eaten bare, by something, and my guess would be my friends watching from the ridge.

blog 5

    Black, mysterious eyes, orbs of infinity, and black, flaring nostrils covered in thick, mucous moisture stare in my direction, fixed. Soft snow slants in the wind as a deer stands in the distance, camouflaged by trees and hanging vines, disguised by snow and stillness. I move a few steps forward, and so does he or she. We lose sight of each other as trees and brush comes between us.

   There's another deer. It moves through the brush beyond the other. I creep forward; each step is a risk that may take me further from the mystery of encounter. They are nervous, and as I step too close, off they go, four or five deer bound and weave through hanging vines and dead limbs. Where were the others standing? I hadn't even seen them, and all I see now are white tails leaping through the brush. What did they see?

   "Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration – that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively.” – Bill Hicks

   From a distance their eyes look solid black. Empty orbs, but up close, dark-brown and orange-brown pigmentation surround horizontal pupils. Do the darks of my eye look any different to the deer than theirs look to me? What am I to the deer, anything more than life existing independent of itself?

   “a great unifying life force flow[s] in and through all things—the flowers of the plains, blowing winds, rocks, trees, birds, animals—and was the same force that had been breathed into the first man. Thus all things were kindred and brought together by the same Great Mystery” – Luther Standing Bear

   Before the deer, there was a hawk. Not far into the forest, it saw me before I saw it and startled me when I came too close. With a loud flap of feathers, it jumped from its low perch to a higher branch. With dark eyes and white-brown feathers, its body blended with a landscape of bare tree limbs and falling snow. Like the third, fourth, and fifth deer, it appeared from out of sight, emerging from the landscape. From a higher perch, the hawk watched me, another consciousness. We observed the actions of the other, a short encounter, until the hawk caught the wind. High above the trees, it flew further than my eye could follow.

   “We never cease to stand like curious children before the great Mystery into which we are born.”

   Below the ridge of deer, in the grassy clearing, there are pines, maybe a few fir trees. There are two species, one with short, lanceate needles, and the other has longer, thinner needles. Some of them are caged and the others stand free, but they're all young, no more than a few years old. There are four conifers above the clearing of grass and more below. They are clearly planted between the bike trail and the clearing, on the upper and lower edges. They might be loblolly or white pine, fir trees, maybe even spruce.  For now, they remain another mystery.

    The deer, the hawk, the pine, and myself, existing separate and distinct from each other, yet flowing from the same force, from the same eternal mystery.

   “'This Mighty Mudball of a world spews out breath, and that breath is called wind,' began Adept Piebald. 'Everything is fine so long as it's still. But when it blows, the ten thousand holes cry and moan. Haven't you heard them wailing on and on? In the awesome beauty of mountain forest, it's all huge trees a hundred feet around, and they're full of wailing hollows and holes – like noses, like mouths, like ears, like posts and beams, like cups and bowls, like empty ditches and puddles: water-splashers, arrow-whistlers, howlers, gaspers, callers, screamers, laughers, warblers – leaders singing out yuuu! and followers answering yeee! When the wind's light, the harmony's gentle; but when the storm wails, it's a mighty chorus. And then, once the fierce wind has passed through, the holes are empty again. Haven't you seen felicity and depravity thrashing and flailing together?'

    'So the music of the earth means all those holes singing together,' said Adept Adrift, 'and the music of humans means bamboo pipes singing. Could I ask you to explain the music of heaven for me?'
    'Sounding the ten thousand things differently, so each becomes itself according to itself alone – who could make such music?'” – The Inner Chapters