Autumn Colors

In our neck of the woods, a number of the maples and a few other species are showing some yellow, red, and orange colors, though most of the trees are still pretty green. The height of our color season usually comes the second week of October.

In terms of roadside wildflowers, the goldenrod is most abundant, so one sees a great deal of yellow, though the goldenrod flowers were fresher about two weeks ago. The goldenrod’s genus name is “solidago,” which means “strength.” Walk up to a stalk of goldenrod, and you’ll see assorted bees, wasps, and other insects clinging to it, because it’s getting to be the last flower around. You can make tea out of the goldenrod flowers, (it has a vegetable taste, but mild). However, that is hard to do when it gets this late in the season, because the blooms are starting to look spent, and one is reluctant to knock all the insects off, knowing that their days are numbered. I used to have a fear and dislike of wasps, but now I feel sorry for them, having read Loren Eiseley’s essay on “The Brown Wasps,” and how they cling to their memories of home as they drop off and freeze to death. When you see them clinging to that goldenrod, it’s a similar hopeless refuge.

The next most abundant roadside flower is the tickseed sunflower, which is not a true sunflower. You can also occasionally see the cultivated sunflowers—both the giant and regular varieties, in peoples’ garden patches, as well as lining their walkways. Though the area I live in is deemed “agribusiness,” I don’t see any sunflower farming being done. Sometimes sunflowers get loose, though, and you may see lone sunflowers growing in fields or ditches. Sunflowers are actually a Native American plant, despite the fact that sunflower seeds are the national snack of Russia. Some botanists believe that the sunflower may have first been cultivated in the northern (i.e., U.S.) part of North America, unlike corn and other crops that originated in Mesoamerica and were brought north. Native Americans liked to plant sunflowers around the edges of their crops, and the sunflowers were the first crops they planted in the spring, and the last to be harvested in the fall.

I’ve also been seeing some patches of small purple asters along the roadside, and a scattering of blue chicory and yellow sow thistle, though now more sparse that previously. Back in August, the chicory, sow thistle, and Queen Anne’s lace grew abundantly side by side, so their combined blue, yellow, and creamy white colors made for the dominant floral color scheme—which is actually a striking combination that could be used in some decorative schemes.

The other major colors right now are the dull maroon of the woodbine, (a vine which is Michigan’s most common groundcover), and the foliage of the sumacs, which ranges from brick to cherry red, (though many of them are still green).

Life has gotten tougher for me these past years, as increased care-taking duties have made it necessary to drop classes and give up other things, including my walks. However, today I was able to get out early and walk in Mason’s Maple Grove Cemetery. I noticed that the cemetery has its own mailbox, but it’s not up at the front gate like you might think, but more in the interior of the cemetery, though not close to the cemetery’s maintenance buildings. That means that the U.S. mail carriers would have to inconvenience themselves by driving farther into the cemetery if they ever have anything to deliver to that mailbox. I don’t know if they actually do bring mail to that box, or whether the cemetery management is out of some larger city office that has its own mailbox. The idea of a forlorn mailbox sitting in the middle of a cemetery does suggest ideas for horror novels or short stories, where mysterious messages start to appear, delivered by some ghostly postman.

Another sight noticed: near the entrance, alongside the start of the path that was probably the original central road through the cemetery, lies the upper half of the tombstone of a William Coffin, who died in 18-sixty-something. There is something bemusing about the name Coffin on a tombstone, even though we learn in Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick” that Coffin is a traditional New England name. Michigan was actually settled by a rush of New Englanders in search of less rocky farmland, and in fact, Mason is laid out on the New England model, with a central square and courthouse. Carved on this Wm. Coffin’s tombstone is a hand with finger pointing upward, a common Victorian symbol, reminding us to set our sights toward heaven. However, because the top of the monument is lying down-slope, this finger points downward. I have seen similar toppled tombstones with pointing figures now horizontal on walks in other cemeteries.

While in Mason, I also viewed the swollen and fast-flowing Sycamore Creek, though the floodwaters have subsided considerably since a couple of days ago when we had two nights of relentlessly fast and heavy downpours. Every year you hear about some part of this country where people have lost their homes—and sometimes their lives—to flooding, and at the same time, every year you hear about parts of the country suffering from intense drought. Too bad they can’t capture the floodwater overflow before it gets to the point of wiping out peoples’ houses and towns, and route it through something similar to the California aqueduct system to carry it to the areas that are parched. That would be quite a “stimulus project.” I visited California in June, and because I flew in to San Diego, the plane was flying low enough for me to see considerable stretches of irrigation channels and aqueducts—very impressive!

EMERGENCE

The month of March is a time of emergence, and that is a theme for me, now that I’m able to get out and walk more. In the past two weeks, the influx of blackbirds, robins, grackles, killdeer, and sandhill cranes has become more noticeable. This is always an important psychological and philosophical occurrence for me, because my birthday is on March 4th, about the time these birds are usually migrating. At first they trickle in, but one day you step out and witness a full-scale invasion force. And the other day, as I was coming out of a building, I noticed the leaves of some sort of lilies or other bulb plants coming out. Although I use my 15-minute coffee breaks to walk around my block of buildings, and I’ve also taken a few longer walks, the weather has gotten to where I can now do some serious walking.

Soon it will be April, whose name, “Aprilis,” means “I open.” I find that walking encourages an emotional and psychological opening. For example, I have a problem of getting into a negative feedback loop, where with my mental voice (my “self talk”), I keep reiterating all of the negative things in my life, telling myself and the rest of my mental audience everything that’s frustrating, or falling apart, or going wrong. When I start out on my walks, the negative self talk will often start up as well. However, I have found that when I’m out in open nature, an “opening out” process ensues, where I am being drawn out of myself and more into the world of nature, which has the effect of slowing and muting the negative thoughts.

Another thing that I find good for stifling the negative self talk, (and all thoughts in general), is walking into the face of a brisk wind, (like I did this morning). Somehow that really clears the mind. Of course, where I live in Mid-Michigan, that means the West Wind. The North, South, and East winds are considerably less common. The East Wind is something else again, because it is a trickster wind—typically both the herald and attendant of freakish weather. Last year, a driving east wind cracked some of my bedroom window panes.

By the way, yesterday evening was the “Night of the Peepers,” (immortalized in an essay by Joseph Wood Krutch), and this morning I saw some poor squashed leopard frogs on the road, which means that despite the falling temperatures at night, it’s getting warm enough for frogs to get on the move. To honor my French (and, farther back, Belgian) ancestry, I should do something special, because the first frog chorus is a big event in French and Belgian folk practice, occasioning an annual festival.

Privileged Glimpses

While walking in the field to my south, I saw large numbers of robins on the southernmost edge of the field. As I approached, they started to fly up into the wood margin, so I turned around, so as not to bother them. Whenever I catch a glimpse of the bird migration, I feel terribly privileged—especially as my work load, school load, and family load prevents me from getting out much.

Having so much work but falling ever more behind is also a reason I haven’t maintained this blog. The other reason is that I have felt I should only make entries in response to direct experience from the day’s walk. However, when I am able to walk, I don’t always have significant insights or the time to write them down. So, I am going to change the rules I’ve set for myself, and try to write some short pieces on things that one may see while walking in a neighborhood, or in a cemetery, or on the beach, etc., even if I didn’t encounter all of those things that very day, because I have made a lot of observations over the years, and the blog provides a good way for me to get these thoughts organized.

Springtime Earlier than Usual?

On today’s walk, I met a neighbor who is big into turtle preservation. (The same neighbor that has the big maple that the blackbirds go to.) He had just released some turtles into a drainage, and said the turtles were getting started a lot earlier this year. I was surprised, because it seemed to me that Spring had been pushed back by the big snowstorms. However, my neighbor asserted that a lot of things are getting started much earlier than he has previously seen, and pointed to some leafy bushes that don’t normally leaf out until later.

On my walk, I also inconvenienced a buzzard who was feeding on a road-kill possum. I saw my first buzzard of the season just last Monday. I recently read—but don’t recall where—an account by an African who says that it’s considered good luck if a vulture hovers over your village, (I think it may have been that the spot it hovers over is lucky). Of course, vultures don’t have much reason to hover over African villages, because whenever an animal dies, it immediately goes into the stewpot. I have read of incidents where an African bus accidentaly hits an animal, and half the people on the bus jump off to claim it. (Road-kill comes under the comprehensive category of “bush meat.”) Here, on the other hand, the roads are lined with dead animals, (so there is no excuse for any coyote or buzzard to starve in Michigan), and walkers eventually become familiar with every stage of decay. I wonder if there’s an inch pavement that hasn’t been covered with blood, or an inch of road frontage that hasn’t been some creature’s final resting place. As there are a number of subsistence hunters in Michigan, low-income people who hunt not for sport, but to feed their families, I wish there were some way they could be notified and allowed to claim at least the deer that get hit, considering the vast numbers of deer carcasses along the roadsides. I’m not trying to take a negative tone in writing this, it’s just something that anyone who walks on country roads can expect to see.

By the way, last Sunday, Easter Sunday, I saw the beautiful white flowers of bloodroot for the first time this season, so the bloodroot can be considered a symbol of Easter in Mid-Michigan. The bloodroot is spreading quite widely in a woodlot area that previously had none.

Old-fashioned Peepers

Some heralds of spring are celebrated with festivals after their first appearance, which used to be the case with the first frog choruses in parts of France and Belgium. I heard my first spring peepers this year on March 19th, the eve of Spring Equinox. In his essay on “The Day of the Peeper,” Joseph Wood Krutch noted how this was a topic of conversation in his community in southern Connecticut, mentioning how, “one [neighbor] announces ‘Heard the peepers last night,’ and the other goes home to tell his wife. Few are High Church enough to risk a ‘Christ is risen’ on Easter morning, but the peepers are mentioned without undue self-consciousness.” Krutch remarks, “I wonder if there is any other phenomenon in the heavens above or the earth beneath which so simply and so definitely announces that life is resurged again,” [“The Twelve Seasons,” p. 4].

I previously mentioned that there seems to be less interest in watching for seasonal firsts, and I am concerned that’s a measure of how we’re losing touch with nature. The preservation and transmission of nature lore especially depends on older people spending time with the younger generation to point out the different types of plants, trees, and birds, so part of the problem may be that time spent outdoors with family is also diminished. As a literary reference to interest in nature as something old-fashioned and irrelevant, in E.L. Doctorow’s “Ragtime,” we see how the character known as “Father” is viewed as fuddy-duddy and out of touch with the times when he reads a newspaper account of the return of the spring peepers to his disinterested family.

By the way, the spring peeper has associations with Greek mythology. The peepers, (scientific name Hyla crucifer), are tree toads of the genus Hyla, family Hylidae. They are named for Hylas, a son of Herakles, who was a member of Jason’s crew of Argonauts, and who was carried off by the nymphs when he went to their pond to draw water. According to the poet of the “Argonautica,” Hylas decided to stay with the nymphs “to share their power and their love,” so when his father stayed behind and searched for him, he could find nothing but an echo. There is a natural parallel, for although the voices of hylas crucifer are so loud that a neighborhood like mine positively resounds with their evening jingle-bell tones, few people ever see them.

Old Fashioned Preoccupations

Picking up on the subject of welcoming spring, watching for signs of spring was formerly more of a communal preoccupation. When I was a kid in the city of Detroit, there used to be a bit of a competition to spot the first robin, and it was announced on different TV and radio shows. We also had robin-themed activities in our grade school classrooms. I recall a cute kindergarten production with tots dressed up as robins, hopping around, singing and dancing to that old tune, “When the red, red robin comes bob, bob, bobbin' along, along, there'll be no more sobbin'…”

In his essay on “The Politics of Ethnopoetics,” Gary Snyder, with the knowledge that rites of greeting are a practice among Earth-honoring peoples, suggests singing a salute when you see your first deer or red-winged blackbird of the day. If pop songs will do, if there were more songs like “Red, Red Robin,” we could honor more birds and animals by singing them as greetings. A song like “Bye, Bye, Blackbird” should probably not be sung until autumn, however. (And if you’ve ever seen the Isadora Duncan movie, you won’t want to sing it while wearing a very long scarf.)

Maybe I’m not tuning in to the right TV or radio shows, but I don’t seem to hear anything about robin-sighting, anymore. I don’t know whether that’s because nobody cares, or because some spoil-sport ornithologists pointed out that the earliest robins are often stragglers who have over-wintered. It is impressive when you see robins en masse, as I did earlier this week, when the large farmer’s field behind me was dotted with them.

By the way, I’ve been perusing collections of folklore and superstitions, (such as Harry Middleton Hyatt’s “Folklore of Adams County, Illinois,” and Vance Randolph’s “Ozark Magic and Folklore”), and I note that although they mention customs and beliefs pertaining to first seasonal encounters with turtle doves, whippoorwills, snakes and toads, etc., robins and blackbirds are not mentioned.