Squirrels and Coyotes Out in the Open

Because the weather is so hot, I don’t spend my whole lunch hour walking. Rather, I stroll over to MSU’s Beal Botanical gardens, to better familiarize myself with all of the herbs and weeds by reading the little placards which explain the different plants’ uses. On these strolls, and walking around the campus in general, I notice squirrels all over the place, including the black squirrels, which I had never seen until I moved to this part of Michigan. I am a former Detroiter, but also lived in California for 20 years, and then moved here, to mid-Michigan. There were no squirrels in our California neighborhoods; for some reason they don’t thrive there like they do in the Midwest and elsewhere. The only squirrels we saw were California Ground Squirrels that live in burrows in more natural areas, not residential neighborhoods. My younger son, then in Jr. High School, came to Michigan with me, and mentioned that neighborhood kids were always surprised when he would shout, “Look, a squirrel!” because to them it was such a common sight. (One of our favorite sights was the way squirrels ripple as they run across leaf-piled lawns in autumn.) A Japanese MSU student I knew also commented on how she and her boyfriend took all kinds of pictures of friendly squirrels, because they’re apparently not known in Japan.

My son is now back in California, and mentioned that when he was walking in Huntington Beach’s Central Park last week, the ground squirrel population had become so dense that seeing them poking their heads out of their burrows, they’re so close together that it looks like a meerkat colony. This is likely what attracted the coyote, which he also saw on his walk. The coyote was just relaxing on a sunny, open lawn where other people were picnicking, playing, and pursuing their other recreational activities without taking notice of it. A couple walked past with their dog, and the dog became alert, although they did not. When another bystander asked them, “Do you see that coyote over there?” they replied, “Oh, we thought that was your dog.” There’s no reason coyotes shouldn’t loll about in public places, because who, actually, would chase after a coyote? A dog catcher or game warden might, but nobody else would have a reason, and where would they chase him to? I would only go after a coyote if he was menacing somebody’s dog, cat, or child. Now that this coyote has discovered that he can go about in open daylight unmolested, the rest will probably follow suit, and soon we’ll be seeing coyotes in all the public squares.

Trees that Reach Across Time

Picking up on the previous topic, interactions with trees form an important part of many peoples’ childhood memories, and they also tie into family stories—so I’m always interested to hear about my friends’ and families’ connection with trees. Because of their relatively longer life-spans, trees are witness to history, so they enable us to experience connections across time. As a genealogist, it would help me feel a greater connection to my roots if it were possible for me to visit trees that individual ancestors had been fond of. Many of the trees I have planted on my 2-1/2 acres come from family properties, the offspring of trees that had been planted by my father or grandfather, and I always appreciate those connections.

Trees can also enhance our connection with historical figures. We know that the story about Washington cutting down the cherry tree is phony, but he may well have climbed some trees as a kid. Maybe that’s a bit too long ago for those trees to still be around, but knowing that “George Washington climbed here” would interest me more than “George Washington slept here.” I believe I’ve heard about certain communities having honored trees that came from seedlings of trees that Jefferson planted at Monticello. When my Texas son was visiting a few years back, we stopped by the spot “Under the Oaks” in Jackson, Michigan, where the first Republican convention took place in 1854, and I joked whether he’d like some Republican acorns to take back to Texas for George Bush.

Getting back to my campus walks, MSU, like any such institution, has had a number of notable graduates as well as illustrious visitors, so it would be interesting to know if some of them had clasped specific trees, or patted certain sculptures, or leaned out of certain windows, or relaxed on a certain bench or patch of ground, or what have you. On passing that same spot, it would enable us to have that imaginative encounter across time.

WALKING AT MSU

I’m back to walking now that my broken toe is mostly better. Unfortunately, I lost my groove for walking and blogging back in the spring, because I took on more course work than I could balance with my now full time temp work and family obligations. As my goal in walking is to find whimsy, imagination, and magic in the landscape, my current challenge is the MSU campus; I work here as an office temp, so I get deployed to different parts of the campus, depending on the assignment. Something you can really appreciate here are the trees, because the whole campus is an arboretum. Even in areas that are mostly buildings and parking lots, there are still some interesting trees, and many of them are labeled with little signs that provide their names and a bit of their natural history.

I particularly enjoy looking at very old trees with interesting shapes, including those with multiple trunks separating near to the ground, because those are the sorts of trees that young people can climb and play around in. No doubt, successive generations of students have interacted with those trees, and some must have memories of relationships with special trees. It would be interesting to interview MSU alumni about their memories of trees—as well as how they have imaginatively engaged other distinctive landscape features and architectural features of the campus. I know that when my Dad went here, he was in the forestry department, and the students would knock the juniper berries off the bushes and use them to brew gin in the huge creosote cookers in the basement of the department. I shall have to ask him if he has any other memories of trees.

One person whose memories of MSU would be worth recording is the poet Theodore Roethke, though, unfortunately, he is dead. He briefly taught here, (in 1935), shocking students and staff with his eccentric wild-man behavior, which included climbing out of the classroom window and creeping along the ledges while making faces into the windows. (This was for a writing class.) One night, Roethke went for a walk in the woods near campus, hoping to experience a mystical oneness with the trees, and came back in a disheveled and delirious state, which got him fired. Because Roethke used a great deal of botanical imagery in his writing, I have to wonder if he had some favorite trees on campus, as they may still be here. Indeed, it would be interesting to know which window ledges of which building Roethke had been climbing around on. (You can read more about this at Bill Peschel’s blog, www.planetpeschel.com/index?/site/.../theodore_roethkes...; the article is “Theodore Roethke’s Walk in the Woods.”)

Another mystical encounter that took place in this general area involved Carlos Castaneda. I don’t recall where I read this, but Castaneda said that he was strolling the streets of East Lansing with a companion—or maybe it was someone who wrote that he had been walking with Castaneda—and anyway, they were surprised to see a strange creature which morphed into a fallen tree limb—or maybe it was vice versa. Again, no way of knowing where, exactly, in East Lansing this uncanny event took place, but it’s something to muse upon while out walking here.

Easter Morning Magic

Next to the morning after Halloween, my favorite morning for walking is Easter. Because I get to see how some families are getting set up for their egg hunts, I know that children’s excitement is soon to follow, and that some good memories will be made for those families. On top of that, I have always felt Easter morning has an air of magic. As a child, I walked to Sunday school every week, but walking to church on Easter seemed special because the morning sun always seemed to be shining more intensely, and there was that elevated sense of sacredness. In fact, I have a bit of a superstitious belief that Easter is always a sunny day, because I can’t remember one that wasn’t. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to town this morning for my walk, because I was buried under a truckload of coursework. I did finally get out locally, in the late afternoon, and am noticing that the trees are starting to shed their bud scales, though they are not yet piling up in windrows. Nature writers have pointed out that everybody notices the fall of leaves in autumn, yet the shedding of the bud scales is a second kind of fall, which largely goes unnoticed.

Robin World Returns

Before it’s even light, I can hear the morning robin songs and calls; when I step out the door to go to work, I immediately see robins flitting by; and when I return from work, robins are dotting my lawn and sitting on my roof. This is why, in Spring and Summer, I refer to all of outdoors as “Robin World.”

I have been out walking in the fields, even though they are still kind of muddy. When I’m outdoors, I like to reflect on how the metaphysical elements of Fire, Earth, Air, and Water are intermingled. Each Spring I observe that the fields have pushed up new rocks—which makes me happy because I like to look for fossils and puddingstones, though the rocks are an annoyance to farmers. It’s fairly rocky ground around here, and we also have a lot of ground water, so it fairly seems like the rocks are able to swim through the earth, like animate beings.

Spring Unveils Winter's Roadkill

Today I saw my first buzzard of the season—and I’ve been watching for them. This buzzard has arrived later than the robins, blackbirds, grackles, killdeer, and sandhill cranes. Possibly the buzzards have been detained because they had to work their way up by first cleaning up the roadkill in Indiana and Ohio. At least there is no excuse for any buzzard or coyote to starve in Michigan. Roadkill is one thing you notice while walking, and it’s especially noticeable when you first get out in Spring, once the ice gets off the roads so you can walk. Not only have you previously been prevented from getting out, but a lot of carcasses had previously been covered by snow—though they are well preserved due to being frozen. Out here in farm country, there is at least one dead deer for every mile of road frontage, (and sometimes more).

Every carcass marks not just the end of the trail for some poor animal, but also the end of its story. Sometimes you wonder about the story’s end. A very short walk from here, in a tree just a few feet from the road, is a narrow crevice about three feet up from the ground. Hanging out of that very tight crevice are the tail and hind legs of a dead raccoon, and I wonder, did the raccoon get stuck climbing into that crevice to explore it and die there, or did he maybe get hit by a car, crawl to the side and try to climb into the tree crevice for safety, and then expire there? Because I see it every time I walk that way, I can’t help but wonder what happened there.

Robins Bringing in the Spring

Because my course-work fills my evenings and weekends, I have been able to get to neither my blogging or my walking in a good while, but happily things are lightening up now.

Walking is a great way to get to “see the spring come in,” (as Thoreau put it). On today’s walk, I saw how a tidal wave of robins is flowing across the landscape. In an extensive field that was sporting some new, green growth, hundreds and hundreds of robins, spaced out but a few feet from each other, were hopping along. In the adjacent fields and wood margins were even more robins, and they spread throughout my larger neighborhood, (which would be described as an “agribusiness” area), so this must have amounted to thousands and thousands. Unlike blackbirds, which form large flocks that criss-cross the skies, robins move northward more by flitting from branch to branch or hopping from lawn to lawn, so their migration isn’t as visible as it would be if they all formed a tight flock and flew overhead.

I suspect there probably weren’t as many robins back in Indian days, because there were fewer fields and lawns. Robins did like to frequent Indian villages, and the legend goes that the robin was once a boy whose ambitious father forced him to stay on his dream fast longer than normal, in the hopes that his son would gain greater supernatural powers that way. Despite the boy’s pleas that his dreams were boding evil, the father wouldn’t relent, and the boy was transformed into a robin. As related by Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, “He looked down on his father with pity beaming in his eyes, and told him, that he should always love to be near men’s dwellings, that he should always be seen happy and contented by the constant cheerfulness and pleasure he would display, that he would still cheer his father by his songs, which would be some consolation to him for the loss of the glory he had expected, and that, although no longer a man, he should ever be the harbinger of peace and joy to the human race” (164). Elsewhere I have read the Ojibwe name for the robin is “Pitchi” or “Peechee.”

By the way, Jane Schoolcraft (1800-1842) was half Indian, and her Ojibwe name was “Woman of the Sound that the Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky.” Her story about the robin is included in a book by Robert Dale Parker, “The Sound the Stars Make Rushing through the Sky.” Parker asserts that Jane Johnston Schoolcraft is the first known American Indian literary writer, and he has tracked down and published her manuscripts in his book.