Flash Friday ~ The Oak

The oak came down on Thursday morning. The sky was blue, the temperature around 34 degrees to start, later warming to nearly 50, which in March is balmy. Our arborist friends put a rope around its limbs, above the point where the trunk split into two leaders, threaded the rope around a distant maple tree, and hooked it up to the winch on a blue tractor. 

The arborist cut a notch out of the base of the tree, near the ground, on the north side, the direction it was intended to fall toward. Then he cut lines perpendicular to the notch and began the working the chainsaw into the meat of the tree. The bar was not much longer than the thickness of the trunk, and he came at it from different angles, until only a narrow strip of bark on either side of the notch remained intact. I thought about how the living tissue of a tree is only a thin layer of cells beneath the bark, how those two strips of connection might be enough to keep the tree alive, until a windstorm took it down.

The arborist turned his saw off and all was quiet for a moment, then the winch started up, pulling the rope taught. The oak stood up, vertical, its limbs reaching toward the sky; it had developed a houseward lean over the years, reaching for the sunlight that grazed the roofline from the south. Then it tipped over and lay down almost gently among the scrubby saplings that grow on that side of the house, its own twigs and branches breaking its fall.

The oak was originally scheduled to come down in November, when I would be gone, visiting my family in Colorado. I measured it before I left, wrapping my dressmaker's tape around it at chest height: 57 inches in circumference, making it 18 in diameter. Later, after the arborists left and the tree lay in the yard in bucked-up cordwood lengths, I measured the stump at ground level: 27 inches across its widest dimension.

I have a picture of the oak from when out house was a framed-in box of raw wood. I stand where one day our purple front door and a granite step will be, holding M, a few weeks old, all big head and scrawny limbs. The tree stands in the foreground, and because of the perspective it's hard to say how big it is, but it looks almost small enough to wrap my two hands around. Counting off the thick growth rings of the last twenty years, it appears it was about eight inches in diameter then, meaning it's more than doubled in thickness in less than half its life.

We never intended to keep the oak. C had cut down most of the trees that inhabited the little, mostly bare, knoll where we planned to build our house. The oak tree he'd left for some reason--he thought it was too far from the house's footprint to bother with, perhaps, or he figured the excavators would take it down with their bucket. As it turned out, however, the tree was too close to the foundation for comfort--its roots would eventually gnaw at the basement walls, its branches overhang the roof and encroach on the chimney--and the excavators went to great lengths to avoid knocking it down. 

Because they'd saved it, we let it stay, leaving a little well around its base for water to collect in and to allow some of the roots to breathe when we backfilled the front yard. I planted white-and-apricot daffodils in that well. Our first clothesline hung between the oak and a poplar in the scrubby area north of the house, where I hung M's diapers, gathering them in in the twilight to an audience of mule deer. Each summer I'd hang the hummingbird feeder from the clothesline. We strung the hammock between the oak and a hemlock nearby, and I whiled away many summer hours reading and writing and daydreaming in its swinging embrace, the dappled shade of the oak leaves filtering the sun.

Then the brown-tailed moths came. The first caterpillar dropped from a different oak tree in the yard onto the back of my shirt. The rash formed in minutes, covering me from chin to shoulder in an angry, stinging red patch of raw meat. I am a sweller and an itcher, reacting redly to everything from cheap jewelry to synthetic waistbands. Mosquito and blackly bites give me welts; bee stings swell to the size of footballs; don't even think about fire ants and chiggers; poison I've spreads and weeps and oozes. But none of these irritations have kept me indoors. However, for weeks after my brown-tailed moth run-in, every time I stepped outside, my skin erupted in goosebumps. Burn the trees down, I thought. Burn them all down!

We did not burn the trees down, and we tried to live with the moths. For the first time ever, I prayed for a cold wet spring. But they kept coming and coming. By night the caterpillars would rain out of the oak tree and by day they would climb up the front of the house. I knocked them off with a twig into a bucket of soapy water. One day I counted more than 200 caterpillars caught in my bucket. C considered pruning the tree back, to keep it from overhanging the house, but our arborist friend issued the death sentence: take it down; take the whole tree down. Not long after the poplar, where the other end of the blackened clothesline was tied, long-dead and swollen with water from a rainstorm, collapsed on a still day. A sign.

After the tree was cut and bucked, it lay in the yard, the chunks of log giving off the vinegary smell of cut oak. When Z got home he asked why we hadn't left the log whole, to be cut into lumber, and I felt panicky ache in my chest, the feeling of having made a mistake you can't undo. The tree could have yielded the wood for the quarter-sawn oak end table I've always wanted. It could have ended its life with a little more dignity than sixteen-inch chunks of cordwood. We could have honored its place at the front door of our home for the first twenty years we lived here, but instead we will burn it, to keep that home warm, the tree reduced to nothing but smoke and ash and heat.

You can order my book, Uphill Both Ways: Hiking Toward Happiness on the Colorado Trail from any of the retailers listed here, or ask your local bookstore or library to order a copy. And if you want more Andrea, you can subscribe to my newsletter here.

Flash Friday ~ My Rocket Scientist Alter Ego

I googled myself earlier this week, to see if my book, Uphill Both Ways, was showing up in the results yet (it was, but not until the middle of page two). This gave me a chance to check in on my name twin.

I have an unusual name, and as far as I can tell, only one other person on earth shares it. He's a man, and I believe he's originally from Italy. This may explain why he got stuck with Andrea, which in Italian might not be the feminine version of Andrew, but an ordinary everyday unisex name. We may even be distantly related. My twice-great-grandfather was born in Trieste, which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at that time but is now part of Italy. I'm no expert on the ever-shifting borders of Europe, and I attribute my father's father's part of my heritage, variously, to Slovenian, Yugoslavian, and Austro-Hungarian. Why not add Italian to the mix?

I've known about my name doppelgänger for as long as I've googled myself, which I don't do frequently (I'm not that big a narcissist) but do do occasionally (as research into the effectiveness of my self-promotion as a writer). The first time may have coincided with my first publication, in 2008. So the other AL and I are old acquaintances, in a stalkerish kind of way.

Beyond our names, we have nothing in common. He appears to be some kind of aerospace engineer. I've never clicked on the links to his research articles and profiles on various platforms (I'm not actually a stalker), but phrases like "computational scientist" and "fluid dynamics" and "mathematical plasma astrophysics" pop up in the teasers to the listings on Google. I feel like there's a great joke in there somewhere: "Do I look like a rocket scientist to you?" "No, but the guy on Google who shares your name does." It needs some work.

I wonder if rocket scientists google themselves, when they're not busy doing rocket science? I mean, even mathematical plasma astrophysicists need a break now and then, right? And if my name twin googles himself, does it rankle him that his research articles on fluid dynamics alternate in the results, in almost a one-to-one ratio, with essays about motherhood? Or does his mathematical brain see some kind of beautiful symmetry in the listings: man/woman; numbers/words; the endless vacuum of space/the endless vacuuming of the living room; launching rockets into the stratosphere/launching humans into adulthood? 

I think my twin and I have more in common than it might appear at first glimpse. I have no idea what fluid dynamics is, but I'm going to believe it has something to do with the mysterious ways of the universe, where very unlike things come together in surprising ways.

Flash Friday ~ Extraordinary Days

 

I'd planned to go birdwatching my first morning in Mexico, but I didn't make it farther than the balcony of my hacienda, where a cacophony of new and unfamiliar birdsong filled the new and unfamiliar trees. I sat with my binoculars, my journal, my bird books, and a cup of tea and watched as great-tailed grackles, great kiskadees, Yucatan jays, a Yucatan vireo, an Altamira oriole, a golden-fronted woodpecker, and a plain chachalaca paraded through my temporary backyard. These are, no doubt, the crows, blue jays, and cardinals of the Yucatan Peninsula, but to me they were rare and wondrous sightings. On the ground below, a Mexican  agouti--a cat-sized rodent that looks like a guinea pig that swallowed a squash and is trying to walk on stilts--traipsed past the swimming pool. 

The trees, vines, and shrubs planted in the lush and meticulously maintained gardens and all things you might buy at the garden center to keep in a pot, only super-sized. Coconut palms grew right out of the sand on the beach, just like they do in cartoons. Beyond the walls of the resort, the jungle grew in a dense, impenetrable tangle. Over the next several days, I watched a troupe of howler monkeys parade across the tops of walls (tiny ones clinging to their mothers' bellies) and saw white-nosed agoutis nose among the tables of an outside dining area. I sat in the plaza one morning and watched two actual parrots steal a woodpecker's stash of seeds from the hole in a dead palm tree. I snorkeled in the warm, salty, and buoyant water of the Caribbean, watching schools of sequined fish flash among the coral, anemones, and urchins. I snorkeled in the cold, mineral water of a cenote, where sunlight filtered blue in the water, tiny fish nibbled at my skin, and scuba divers disappeared into a deep, scary cave. 

I purchased junk food in a Mexican grocery store, where real shoppers bought plastic bags of raw pork, packets of dried chiles, and heads of iceberg lettuce. I practiced my extremely rudimentary Spanish by asking every shop owner in the contrived local marketplace, "Tienes los sellos para postales? Donde esta los stampitos?" With no suerte (selling stamps, or sending postcards, it would appear, is not the done thing).

I rode a rusty bicycle among the Mayan ruins at Coba and followed its song to the most spectacular bird, the black-headed trogon (see above). With each "bop, bop" of its tune, it would splay its black-and-white striped tail feathers in a V, while staring at me with that intense blue-ringed eye. 

This is why we travel, is it not, to find the extraordinary in what, to the people who live there, are likely ordinary, everyday experiences? To shake up our notions of what's expected and see the world through new eyes?

Flash Friday ~ January Twilight

It is what I call the blue time of year--even on a gray day the clouds are tinged with blue, as are the snow and the trees. Yesterday the wind blew so hard the tree trunks made animal sounds where they rubbed together. Today is so calm I can hear the traffic on the next road over, a dog barking across the river, the shifting of a board back by the garage. My ice spikes crack and crunch on the glazed driveway, each step a pistol shot. A faint breeze sends the leaves of a young beech shivering, a dry, papery, gothic sound. Otherwise the world is still. The birds and squirrels away to their roosts and nests, the predators awaiting dusk. 

The air is cold. Not the bitter, biting cold of earlier in the week, but a damp insipid cold that makes inroads at cuffs and seams, anywhere layers of fabric overlap. Even on a short walk my mind flickers to other places--conversations from earlier in the day, vegetables that need chopping, the evening's plans. I try to yank it back to the blue world. The here and now. 

Back at the house, I see the Christmas tree propped against the doorframe and remember that today is January 13, St. Knut's Day, the day Scandinavians take down their trees. I believe they burn theirs in Sweden, but I can't stand the thought and instead we return ours to the woods it came from, where it can be a refuge to small birds and animals. 

I lift the tree by its slender trunk and set off through the woods, off piste. In the chiaroscuro of a winter's evening--white snow, black twigs and branches--it's easy to find a pathway among the trees to the field below, where the dried stems of tall white aster stand chest high. I find a trail across the field, the one the boys use to get to their skating rink on the river, the snow trampled and refrozen in icy footprints, and I follow its winding route through the trees. I feel rushed by the lateness of the hour. It will be dark soon, I have places I need to go this evening, things I need to get ready. So I don't take the tree all the way to the river bank, but set it in the snow beside the trail, thank it again for bringing warmth and light and green into our house in the darkest part of the winter, and turn toward home.

My hands are sticky with balsam sap, and I bring them to my face, breathe deeply the scent of solstice and Christmas, family and winter, life and light.

This is a new series, where I plan to write a flash piece (nonfiction for now, but maybe fiction later) every Friday of 2022.

Flash Friday ~ Rare Birds

I don't often chase after rare birds. If I happen to be in the neighborhood where one's recently been sighted, or if a friend invites me on an expedition to seek one out, I'll happily go. I've seen a red-billed tropic bird this way, as well as a redwing, a dickcissel, and Icelandic gull. I've had less luck with the snow goose, roseate spoonbill, and black throated grosbeak. The rare birds are a thrill, but I'm equally content to wander the woods behind my house in search of the annual cycle of migrants or watch everyday chickadees and nuthatches on my feeders.

Yet when I heard heard about the Stellar's sea eagle making an appearance in Maine, I knew I needed to at least try to see it. My first indication that this giant raptor was in town was in a New Year's Eve social media post from a friend of mine, which showed his field sketches of the bird's massive yellow bill and fierce gaze. Despite its ice-age splendor, the sea eagle looks a bit like the giant bird that falls in love with the professor in my favorite childhood book, Professor Wormbog in Search of the Zipper-Uppa-Zoo, by Mercer Mayer. I wanted to be there the coast, trying out my Christmas gift spotting scope, sketching this prehistoric bird. The place it had been sighted was only an hour from my home--practically in the neighborhood. Besides, when would I ever have the chance to see this far-from-home visitor again? I made plans to drive down the next day.

The Stellar's is the largest of the sea eagles (members of the genus Haliaeetus, which includes bald eagles). Standing around three feet tall and weighing up to twenty pounds, it's the size of a toddler, a toddler with an eight-foot wingspan. This massive bird doesn't normally hang around in Maine. Its usual stomping grounds are along the coast of Siberia, particularly the Kamchatka Peninsula, with winter forays south to Japan. This particular bird is believed to be the same one that appeared in Alaska in August and has been hanging around Canada's Maritime provinces this fall, with a foray into Massachusetts last month and one unsubstantiated sighting in Texas. In other words, it's far from home and doesn't seem to know how to get back, although it could be forgiven for mistaking Maine for Siberia.

As I made my way down the peninsula--not Kamchatka, but Georgetown--on a foggy New Year's Day, I began to question my decision. There were cars--a lot of cars. Far more cars than should be driving toward Reid State Park in the wintertime. I saw Vermont, New Hampshire, New York, and Massachusetts license plates. My butterfly teacher, Bryan, has written about birders and our carbon emissions in pursuit of the next grand thing. Now I was one of them, a member of a smog-emitting flock. 

But I'd come this far. There was not turning back. As I neared eagle ground zero, I noticed cars heading back the other way. I pulled over and asked a passerby, "Any luck?" He told me the bird hadn't been seen in a while and everyone was heading over to the state park. Good, a chance to pee. I joined the flow of cars heading back inland and into the park, where I availed myself of the facilities. But now what to do? The park has miles of coastline. Birders appeared to be milling around, heading in multiple directions, no apparent direction of migration. I overheard someone saying it was back at Five Islands and watched the crowds return to their cars and head back down peninsula. It reminded me of something, this ebb and flow of birdwatchers. Murmuration of starlings, perhaps, or, more likely, characters in an old slapstick movie directed by Mel Brooks.

Yet here I was, a member of the ridiculous cast, and I joined the stream of cars, found a place to park beside the road, walked down to the dock and found myself a rock on the shore to sit on. All of the other birders stood on the hillside above and behind me, and I wondered if I was missing something by being lower and closer to the water. The crowd was quiet, birders being a sedate lot, and I pulled out my journal and sketched the islands in front of me, stopping every few minutes to scan the trees with my binocs. The fog had lifted some, and I saw a bald eagle perched on at tree at the edge of one island. I realized that even if the bird did make an appearance out there, it would look like little more than a smudgy dot. I'd left my scope in the car up the hill. Would such a sighting even "count"?

An unpainted lobster boat tootled out toward the farthest island, a handful of birders on board. Sound carries over water, especially on a foggy day, and I could hear the pilot tell the people on board that no other fishermen were transporting birders because of the liability, but he just wanted people to see the bird. I supposed I could have hung around the dock, hoping to catch a ride on a later foray, but I didn't have any cash with me--I imagined he was charging--and while I don't have a great fear of water, I do have a strong respect for the North Atlantic Ocean in wintertime. And while it was nearly flat calm, I still didn't relish the idea of heading out into the fog in a lobster boat with no transom, and likely no lifejackets, in January.

I hung out on my rock for about an hour, until I got cold and a little bored, and headed home. Later in the week my great birding friend Cheryl invited me to go on a hunt for the eagle. It hadn't been seen in a couple of days, and she and another friend of ours had hatched a scheme to search a nearby island (car accessible), in hopes of finding the bird. We spent the day on the island, and I got to try out my new scope. We saw some sea birds and tree birds, and even a red-shouldered hawk. We hiked all through the enchanted forest of a preserve I'd never known was there, we chatted and laughed together, and we discovered a new bakery on the way home. But we never found the Stellar's sea eagle. And I'm okay with that.

Because the thing with rare bird sightings is that, as exciting as it is to see and learn a new bird, it's unspeakably sad to see a creature so out of place. The dickcissel looked cold, puffed out like a dandelion in a multiflora rose bramble in Portland, rather than a jungle in Central America, where it peered out from its yellow-rimmed eye and tried to fit in among a noisy flock of house sparrows. The redwing, a visitor from Iceland or Eurasia, looked less cold, but still confused. An oversized, disheveled robin, it arched its skeptical white eyebrow and stretched its wing, playing to the crowd of migrant birdwatchers who'd flocked from as far away as Tennessee. And the tropicbird could break your heart, beelining each summer from parts unknown to a cold, barren North Atlantic rock, only lobster buoys for companionship. 

Wherever that sea eagle is today, I hope it finds its way back home, nearly halfway around the world.