Pollen-Nation Biology

A pollen count of 120 is considered EXTREMELY HIGH in the southeast.image link

We spoke to several relatives from the Deep South last week when the pollen count in Atlanta reached 5500 particles. And small wonder that we could barely understand their scratchy voices: allergies and throat irritations are at almost record levels.

And all that yellow stuff that coats their cars and makes that yukky scummy froth on every garden pond and lake is finding its way deep into their lungs. Thank goodness for MUCOCILIARY CLEARANCE! Right?

This is one of the healthy body's unappreciated "miracles" that keeps our lungs from becoming the waste heaps they would quickly become if all the soot, fungal spores, bacteria, dust, rug and clothing fibers AND POLLEN that we breathe in every day stayed deep inside our lungs air exchange surfaces.

Two things happen: the GOBLET CELLS that are richly scattered in this epithelium or lining tissue secrete a sticky glue--MUCUS--that traps the particles.

The CILIA are living whips--cellular organelles that are constantly in motion. And this motion is not random but coordinated--even within entire fields of such cells--so that there is a POWER STROKE and a RECOVERY STROKE. The power stroke, of course, is in the direction of UP and OUT. The cilia (as you can see in these movies) push particles toward the throat where we reflexively swallow, sending those umpteen thousand pollen grains to the hydrochloric acid in our stomachs instead of ending up in our lungs. UNLESS...

Unless you kill the cilia. If you want to do that, light a cylinder of plant material with a match. Put it to your lips and inhale. Cilia in this environment beat weakly, then stop entirely. And where does all that mucus-plus-pollen end up? You guessed it. It slides so deeply in the lungs that it can't be coughed up--no matter how violently you try. Make a wonderful medium for bacteria. Can you say PNEUMONIA?

(Parents, this little biology lesson with movies makes a good visual motivator to the would-be smokers in your family.)

Bloodroot

It's happening, as it always does, too quickly. Every drive down the lane shows something else already gone by as Spring rushes through on its way to summer. Already, these bloodroot photographed a few days ago along the roadside near home have dropped their petals; the oddly-lobed and distinctive sheathing leaf that belongs one per plant will now begin to swell, growing six inches across by the middle of May.

The red-sapped rhizome that gives this plant one of its common names contains some caustic substances (perhaps accounting for the native American use of this plant as a emetic.) They also are said to have used the "blood" as a war paint or skin "tattoo".

I used to demonstrate this on field trips by digging a bloodroot rhizome, breaking it in two to show the oozing red interior (I once had a student become faint from seeing this gore) and paint a red-orange stripe across my forehead. Very dramatic. Very stupid, I've learned since.

The sap contains the toxin sanguinarine. Recently, some ill-advised breast cancer patients used bloodroot sap topically, and developed disfiguring skin lesions.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about bloodroot is a feature it shares with two other very early-blooming plants, Dutchman's Breeches, and Trillium. They all exhibit myrmecochory and produce elaiosomes.

What? These aren't familiar words? Don't you just love botanists for the way they wield Latin and Greek to their advantage and the obfuscation of others?

Very simply, these plants produce a little nutrition treat called an ELAIOSOME attached to their tiny seeds. These are "intentionally" attractive to ants, who gather the seeds, feed the treat to their young, then dispose of the actual living seed in their nutrient rich frass, or waste bin.

In a week or so, I'll see if I can show you a closeup of a dissected Bloodroot seedpod and enlarged leaf to compare to the tiny leaf wrapped now around just the base of the single flower.

Spring

Yesterday, March 28: the first day of Spring on Goose Creek.

The measure: not day length or temperature; not the blooming of Coltsfoot (come far too early this year) or pinking of the buds at the tips of trees along Nameless Creek when the sun rises earlier and earlier each day. The first day of Spring is marked by our first meal on the front porch.

This year, it was Ann--the irresistible force: Let's eat outside! And I-- the immovable object: it's too cool yet, and everything is likely wet from the hard rains we've had (though they seemed to have passed by, the air cooler, the sky clearing a bit to the north though thunder still rumbled.)

It was pretty cool for sitting, but the meal of chicken casserole (the chicken we canned ourselves last fall) held in bowls in our laps warmed us even while the winds followed the storm south, down beyond the end of the pasture, out over the Blue Ridge, surging like a wave, spilling down into the piedmont and beyond. Behind the wave, a neon strobe of pink flashed in the near-dark, thunder coming later with each flash. There: the smell of lightning.

And listen: how very Appalachian the thunder. Remember: in South Dakota, the storm that passed over us, crashing it's way toward the badlands? The thunder, for being so very close and loud, was flat, monotone, two dimensional--a sheet of sound dropped down hard against prairie that lay open to the horizon in every direction.

CLAP! And we held to our warm bowls, listening. Mountain Thunder in stereo, hi-fi, reverb and not mere percussion. Antiphonal thunder kettle drums answered by two or more pairs of tympanis back on Lick Ridge, set at fifths; and tonal heavy hammers, against steel out beyond Free State. Sound sent, sent back, modulated, amplified, and moving away. The pink-orange spilled down the great escarpment toward Carolina as Goose Creek rose clear and cold, to its own water music, and appreciative and silent, we took our empty bowls inside.

Ermine and Black Velvet

Here, for certain on this first day of March, is yesterday's last frost of February.

So maybe I was premature with Wednesday's posting of what I described as the last of cold-weather aesthetics. We're not there yet.

But the dog brought home a wet but otherwise uninjured baby box turtle the size of a silver dollar yesterday. Even the cold-blooded among us are sensing the worst of the season has passed.

Barn Red

This shot of crystal branches against the barn roof might just be my last of the frozen months (he said, with mock confidence.)

The jonquils are poking up through the sodden ground beside the house where the top few inches of solid soil is finally on a slow, prolonged thaw toward spring.

Spicebush is dotted now with barely-swollen buds, visible in the early morning light that spills over the ridge about 8:45 now with the longer days. A month further along, it's wispy, lemon-yellow blossoms will be so abundant along Nameless Creek that it will seem like a golden fog in the coldest part of the valley along the old rock wall.

Skunks are active again--a sure sign of warmer weather ahead. Unfortunately, their early emergence from hibernation is evidenced by those places where they didn't make it across the road to their girlfriend's house.

And where will I migrate now that winter is almost past? What will blossom from the dormancy of short days? What will grow from fallow hours of contemplation, from the season of mindfully tending the wood stove to hold back the cold, once that cast-iron beast is put to rest?

Cruelty Jokes

1) These two lawn chairs beckon you to come sit and relax--in the cold slush.

2) Yesterday's warmth was to make us let our winter-guard down, only to follow up with another winter event overnight. Ann: pack your bags, girl.

Ann's Falls in February

Click image to enlarge

For those of you who have read Slow Road Home, this is Ann's Falls spoken of in the book.

For those of you who haven't read Slow Road Home, what are you waiting for!

SHE drug me up the hillside last week, insisting it would be worth my time. (But then, she'll say anything to entice me out for a walk.) But she was right. I have some other pix of the ropes we've tied between trees on the way up that enable us to get to the falls--a handhold necessary even when there hasn't been a winter storm and long, hard freeze.

It's some rugged terrain, but once we get there, we're always glad we made the effort.

Sadly, the falls are likely to become inaccessible one of these days. Several large (and of course, dead or dying) hemlocks at the rim of the falls will someday rot, and the tops, or the entire tree, will fall across the trail and the little trickle below. Then it will be decades before another photographer can get a clean view and appreciate the scene we were greeted with the other day.

Perhaps it's worthy of note and relevant to this prediction that the sinuous tree trunk lying across the near foreground of this image is that of an American Chestnut, another species that belonged in the southern forest--once--but succumbed to a blight.

Warm Home in a Cold World

My mother rubs my face in snows when I lament our winter woes.

"You should never have left Alabama" she scolds me, never having quite gotten over the fact that we were meant to live among mountains and not in the deep, sultry south.

But there was never any doubt about it. My first hint of my calling was at a wildflower event in the Great Smoky Mountains back in grad school at Auburn. There was something in the air--a pheromone of ancient granite, perhaps--that pulled us north.

And it is the Blue Ridge Mountains more than the Ridge and Valley (the setting of nearby Wytheville where we spent 12 years) that seems offer the strongest pull to home.

In winter, the weather is both hostile and beautiful. And we feel very much at home surrounded by it all.

(Do click on the image above for a larger look. Landscapes like this lose so much in a teeny view.)

Out of the Cold

Well, not quite. Ann left to spend yet another night at the workplace so she'd be sure and be able to open up the pharmacy at 6:00 this morning. We've had just enough accumulating snow showers and strong winds to make driving--especially in the dark--something to be avoided.

But this week's weather promises the possibilities of a return, perhaps briefly, to some low 50's temps, which will fell positively balmy.

And how happy I am that I took the time to stop for these frozen creek pictures, because the warm rain before the last ice storm sent muddy water onto the white surface of the creek, and its transient beauty was lost. Once again, as if I needed it, I'm reminded of how fleeting each moment's light truly is. Note to self: be inclined to stop and smell the roses--or capture the moment to digital film; and indelible memory.

Study in Winter #1

The way ice grows in Goose Creek fascinates me, and I'm sorry I haven't chronicled the process over the past month. Still, where we live gets too much southern exposure. It isn't nearly as good an ice garden as down the road a mile or so where the perpetual shade of the hills spawns crop after crop of ice every night.

And I'd have missed the opportunity to show you three shots from yesterday if I hadn't agreed to carry one of Ann's care packages to the kids over to the Check post office. I waited until there was at least a little light striking the valley flanks before leaving, and on the way home, risked limb and equipment and slid my boots down into the creek bed and onto the ice for views east and west along Goose Creek in its winter garb.

You can just see the road in the distance.

Meanwhile, today, an ice storm looms west just off the radar, just far enough away that I'm not going to know what to do about trying to get to the clinic this morning. Getting there, I can do. Getting home as conditions worsen over the day, not so sure. Gonna be one of those days.

Winter Lights

My hope was to get to the back of the valley (the "Nameless Creek Gorge" I call it) before the sun disappeared behind the steep west ridge. I didn't make it in time.

By the time I reached my destination at 3:00, the lighting along the creek was already flat shadow. But walking back home--sad to have waited too long to get the shot I had in mind--I turned around and saw this dazzling last light behind me, a single shaft reaching the valley floor just seconds before the sun dropped away from our holler for another day.

This is another example of light looking for a subject to draw the eye. For me, the sparkle of the pines and the way the light of the snow draws the eye into the mysterious darkness is enough. The image embodies the feel of the moment, and such pictures are more for the photographer than for his audience.

Traces in the Snow

After it first falls, thick and smooth, deep enough to cover gravel and ground and all traces of autumn, I go out hesitantly into the new snow and leave the first blemishes in the unbroken white. In the beginning, there are just the boot tracks to the woodpile and the signs of the dog's quick trips out and back. For a time during the storm, these trampings will fill with the sediments of the next wave of snow, leaving smooth undulations in the surface. But life goes on, and one can do only so much admiring from the windows. By yesterday, there were tracks--our own and others--that showed what a busy place our seemingly-deserted valley really is in winter.

Over there is where the dog and I went down to wade across the creek, to rummage through the barn for the snow shovel that we needed for the first time this season. And there, past the garden, I'd remembered too late to retrieve my maul, and you can see where I rooted around with the toe of my boot to find it buried under six inches of snow next to a rounded mound of split cherry I could smell even through the snow. And those human tracks going back into the valley are not mine; they belong to the friend who called this morning and asked if he could hunt our land. He left a while ago, carrying out only his deer rifle.

Turkey tracks loop back and forth in the pasture between Nameless Creek and the opposite ridge along the old pasture road. Grasses that stick up from the snow have been nipped along the turkey trots. Here and there, the snow has been scratched away and the frozen earth bothered by prehistoric scaled feet, grubbing up a meal. At times their three-toed tracks suddenly disappear half way up the steep bank, and I know they took wing, ponderously, and only because the bank was too slick with snow for their heavy bodies to climb. Maybe they were startled to flight as the dog and I took our first walk along the creek this morning. They will roost in the tall pines up top of the ridge and be back making more tracks down here tomorrow.

Deer tracks are everywhere in the morning, each hoof mark a sharp pair of converging crescents the shape of praying hands; they are creatures of the night. In the daytime, against the snow, their gray-brown disguise is laughable. Only when they run up the hill away from us does the white flag of their tail match their winter hiding place. It is in the snow during hunting season that they are most vulnerable. And about that, I have mixed feelings.
Excerpt from "Traces" in Fred's book, Slow Road Home

Nature Imitates Art

I rushed frantically to reach the high clearing for a shot of the late afternoon light through a blue fog that lift out of the valley. That, I thought, was my reason to be there.

With great purpose and focus, I rushed from my car at a favorite Parkway overlook, and while stumbling through the windswept forest with tripod and camera bag headed toward the open pasture views of a fog-pale distant landscape, I was struck by the beauty of the autumn woods that I was hurrying through.

But it struck me: if it was the magic of light I was after, why, here it was, just at my feet.

I stopped and spent a precious few minutes there before rushing to the last of the light at the clearing. And in the end, it was these shots of windblown ferns in their last grand display of fall that pleased me most from that afternoon excursion.

Here again at the end of their season of life as at their beginnings, these hayscented ferns have taken on a pleasing translucence. Tattered by the wind, cinnamon and pale green against the dark shadows of gnarled, windpruned treetrunks, there was a kind of magic in the light.

And once home, yes, I've added to the fantasy story-book magic by applying my brushes--Photoshop--because this reminds me of the art in the nature we would otherwise rush past. This is the way I remember the moment; this is what I want others to feel when they share it with me.

But the true art comes, as it has for centuries, from those who use real pens, pencils and brushes and palettes to create solely by their imaginations those "effects" I can only bring about by clicking the right buttons. Those artists saw the same magic, and made it real by the power of their eye, heart and hand.

So I consider it the sincerest form of flattery that I imitate artists, as artists draw their vision from landscapes that wait for us to notice.