winter pond

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It’s always disheartening when a truly wonderful book drops from the bookstore’s shelves. Such is the case with Diana Kappel-Smith’s “Wintering.” Originally published in 1984, and now out of print (the three worst words to any author’s ear) this book is a charmer, a collection of beautifully scribed ponderings centered on the winter landscape of her rural Vermont.

Written with the wide-eyed innocent eye of a curious naturalist and backed up with the real science of a trained biologist, the author uses winter as a backdrop but the musings are larger. Is it even possible for us to truly understand the interwoven workings of the natural world? Is it truly knowable? Are we always doomed to be slack-jawed wonderers?

“I have seen a friend of mine, a brilliant doctor of freshwater biology, stand wide-eyed and immobilized in front of her blackboard, chalk clutched in her hand, intricate graphs and formulae forgotten, because she has said ‘…but every pond is different from every other pond!’ and has just heard herself, with a kind of panic, admit that she knows nothing—nothing beyond the most bland generalities—about a subject on which she has spent half her life,” writes Kappel-Smith.

This book is a delight. Now that winter is here, “Wintering” is a perfect nature book to curl up with on the sofa. Look for it!

According to the counter at the left, this is my 200th posting. Wow!

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sometimes

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Sometimes things don't go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; crops don't fail,
sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes will step back from war;
elect an honest man; decide they care
enough, that they can't leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.

-From the poem "Sometimes" written in 1990 by Sheenagh Pugh, British poet who lives in Cardiff, Wales.

-Karen, thanks for sharing this with me.

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missed opportunity

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So what’s the dang deal? We go to bed thinking, perhaps even hoping, for a little snow to brighten the woodlands. After all, 'tis the season. Parts of Mississippi got eight inches of the frozen confection yesterday. Heck, it even snowed in New Orleans for only the fourth time since Teddy Roosevelt roamed the White House hallways.

So, why not us? Why was the Tennessee Valley left out? We ARE farther north. Compared to the Big Easy, we’re practically in the Arctic Circle.

I recently read that the Weather Channel has had to lay off a few people including on-air meteorologists. Does this mean they are losing a bit of the control over the weather they have had for two decades? Goodness, I hate to imagine what’s next!

Early this morning, Spring Creek near my home did manage to produce its own fog bank, albeit a mini, short-lived one. The photograph I took is very reminiscent of the painting by William Bliss Baker I waxed poetically about on November 25.

















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creepers return

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Somehow you know winter is here when you see your first brown creeper creeping along the trunk of a tree. Creep. Creep. Creep. The only North American member of the treecreeper family "Certhiidae," the smallish brown birds hop along, looking for things like spider eggs to eat that are wedged down in the bark. (So much for the mother spider that went to the trouble of hiding them there.)

I spotted my first treecreeper of the season working its way up the side of an oak near my mailbox. Spider eggs beware!

Curious little birds. (Also see my February 26 posting.)

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book signing

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Discover Life in America (DLIA) is sponsoring a book signing Wednesday evening, December 3 at 7 P.M. at the Hard Rock Café in Gatlinburg. The event is a fund-raiser for DLIA, a nonprofit that’s working with the National Park Service to conduct the All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory (ATBI), a project that seeks to inventory the estimated 100,000 species of living organisms in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

I will be signing copies of my book “Natural Histories.” Other writers at the signing will be Charles Maynard, author of “Waterfalls of the Smokies" and Ron Lance, author of “Woody Plants of the Southeastern United States: A Winter Guide.”

Books will be available for purchase and signing.

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The Garden Girls

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I’ll be the guest on "The Garden Girls" radio show this Saturday, November 29 at 2 PM. On your radio dial, it's WNOX FM-100.3

“The Garden Girls” is hosted by Andrew Pulte and features UT's Dr. Sue Hamilton and garden expert Beth Babbit. It’s a lively call-in talk show filled with lots of useful tips and information about gardens and nature in Tennessee.

This Saturday, we’ll be talking about turkeys, winter birds and, of course, my book. It’s great fun!

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fallen giant

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Today, we remember the life of William Bliss Baker who died 122 years ago this month. Born in New York City in 1859, Baker was a landscape painter in the growing Realism movement that was sweeping the country post-Civil War, a movement that began in France in the 1850s as a counter to the Romanticism so prevalent in the arts at the time. Truth and accuracy were the goals of the Realists. Photography had just came into being, but it wasn't there yet, it was only black and white, certainly it couldn't capture what the painter with a full palette could.

Yet, Bliss Baker wouldn’t live long enough to reach his full potential; he died at age 27 from a spinal injury he received while ice skating several months earlier at his father’s house at Hoosick Falls, New York.

Baker’s painting “Fallen Monarch” is considered perhaps his most important work and it’s also so evocative of the season. When I walk into the woods near my house along Spring Creek, this is something like what I see.


















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lose yourself

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"Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music—the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself."

–- Henry Miller (1891-1980) American writer and painter. Miller marched to his own drummer, breaking with existing literary forms and developing a different kind of novel, a blend that mixed forms, part autobiographical, philosophical and surrealist free association, ultimately it was part real, part fiction.

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fountain of youth?

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Sasssssss-a-frasssssss.

Say the word in a whisper. It flows like a gentle breeze off the tongue.

It's a great moniker and a curious plant, one with a unique claim to fame.

The early English colonists in North America along the Atlantic coastline were eager to find gold and silver as the Spanish had done in South America. They found neither. They did find lots and lots of trees. Looking for something of value, the Elizabethans learned that the Native Americans drank sassafras tea as something of a “cure all.” (In the age before wonder drugs, everyone was desperate to find one.)

Hoping to make a little money, Sir Walter Raleigh took sassafras back to England from Virginia. The miracle elixir made from its roots became all the rage, spawning the “Great Sassafras Hunts.” Ships were dispatched from England in the early 1600s to collect the medicinal roots and bark that were brewed into the tonic. Billed as a proverbial Fountain of Youth, the golden brown tea smelled like root beer and supposedly kept its drinkers ageless and full of health. Sassafras teahouses became as fashionable in England as Starbucks are in Manhattan today.

The craze ended when drinkers realized they were indeed still aging, and perhaps not the picture of health they had hoped to be. As TV journalist Linda Ellerbee was prone to say, “And so it goes.”

This past week, on a neighborhood walk, I encountered a sassafras tree beginning to molt into its fall color. I left its roots intact and took only a photo, which in itself, will never age.

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peakish color?

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Determining when the fall colors peak every year is a subjective, wishy-washy sort of enterprise. Peak suggests that there is an optimum moment, a summit, a climax, a crossing of a finish line with the popping of flash bulbs. It all depends on whom you talk to and where they are at the time. Last week, the Top of Ole Smoky had wintery weather, i.e. snow, while here in the valley, the season blessedly hangs on.

Early November seems a bit late to use the word peak but yesterday on a walk after work from Ijams west to Island Home Park along the Will Skelton Greenway, the colors certainly seemed peakish. The warm weather added to sense that all was golden (and tangerine and orange and crimson and maroon and lemony yellow) with the world.

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walkin' the rails

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Election Day! And it was a beautiful late fall afternoon with the sun beginning to slip below the ridge line. So perfect, I decided to walk the two miles to my neighborhood precinct, a community center surrounded by trees exploding with autumnal color.

There’s a little used railroad track paralleling the road that links my home to the ballot box. So in the spirit of Woody Guthrie, I walked the rails to cast my vote, humming “This Land is Your Land” along the way.

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slowness

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“It takes a certain slowness to see. Scurrying about, thinking of this and that, obscures the view. For only as the mind quiets can its view, both inner and out, deepen.”

-Stephen Altschuler “Sacred Paths and Muddy Places.” 1993.

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fern hill

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“Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.”

From “Fern Hill” by Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who spent much of his childhood in Swansea, Wales. Young Dylan made regular trips in the summer to visit his aunt's dairy farm in Carmarthenshire. These rural remembrances provided inspiration for his poem.

Dylan Thomas was born on this date: October 27, 1914.

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let's migrate

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“And over the grass at the roadside a land turtle crawled, turning aside for nothing, dragging its high-domed shell over the grass. His hard legs and yellow-nailed feet threshed slowly through the grass, not really walking, but boosting and dragging his shell along,” writes John Steinbeck in his 1939 novel "The Grapes of Wrath."

During October, the YWCA of Knoxville and Knox County Public Library are sponsoring “The Big Read.” Everyone is encouraged to read or reread “The Grapes of Wrath,” a work that won Steinbeck the Pulitzer Prize for literature in 1940.

In the novel, the Joads, a poor family of sharecroppers, are driven from their home by drought, economic hardship and changes in agricultural practices. The Joads are forced to sell most of their possessions, load their truck with what’s left and drive 2,000 miles from Oklahoma’s Dust Bowl to California’s lush, green central valley. Becoming migrant workers, they hope to start a new life. But, like the turtle, their journey is not easy. In fact, it's damn hard.

On Sunday, October 26 at 1 p.m., I will lead a symbolic migration along the Will Skelton Greenway to the land of opportunity, i.e. Ijams Nature Center. Along the way we’ll discuss flora and fauna both in the Tennessee Valley and the book. To make the nature walk even more memorable, period attire is suggested.

For more info or to sign up call Ijams Nature Center: 577-4717, ext. 10.

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such a day

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“O suns and skies and clouds of June,
And flowers of June together,
Ye cannot rival for one hour
October’s bright blue weather.”

By Helen Hunt Jackson

And such a day it was.

Helen Hunt Jackson (1830 -1885) American writer and poet best known as the author of the very popular novel “Ramona” about the ill treatment of Native Americans in southern California. (Ramona was originally published in 1884 and has been reprinted over 300 times since.)

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seed time

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Four months ago, I blogged about the Southern magnolia with its enormous citronella-scented white flowers that are so associated with the Deep South and sultry, hot afternoons; it's the polished, aristocrat of Southern trees. (See June 9 posting)

Well, the hot summer afternoons are gone for another year, perhaps you miss them, perhaps you don’t. It’s mid-October and we find that the tree is now presenting its bright red seeds. They are as eye-catching as the grand flowers were.

The one I photographed is on the Homesite at Ijams Nature Center.

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Ijams history

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I will be speaking tonight at 7:30 p.m. to the Harvey Broome Group, the local chapter of the Sierra Club.

My topic is “Ijams: Past, Present and Future,” an overview of the nature center’s long history that can be traced back almost 100 years. I'll also pay particular attention to the recent acquisition of—and future plans for—the Imerys/Georgia Marble property, the so-called “Dry Quarry” adjacent to Meads Quarry. When it’s opened to the public, the new property will grow the nature center and park to about 278 acres.

Everyone is welcome. The group meets at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian-Universalist Church, 2931 Kingston Pike.

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gibbous?

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“There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls.” - George Carlin (1937 - 2008)

Tonight the moon is waxing gibbous. My God, isn’t that poetic?

Our celestial dance partner will be more than 94 per cent full with waxing meaning “increasing in intensity” and gibbous meaning “more than half but less than fully illuminated; having a hump.”

If you are reading this tonight, stop what you are doing and go outside to look at it.

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at auction

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John James Audubon was this country’s seminal naturalist/artist/writer. Although more famous for his 435-print “Birds of America," the rugged buckskin-clad backwoodsman also wrote extensively about his outdoor observations. He would have loved a blog. When strapped for cash, which he often was, he sold oil paintings and hand-drawn copies of his originals.

It recently occurred to me that I could do the same. So at auction here is a hand-drawn pin-and-ink copy of my original illustration of a bald eagle that appears in my book, “Natural Histories.” This is not a Xerox copy or a laser print but a hand-drawn, tediously recreated copy. If you take it outside in the rain, the ink will flow like LeConte Creek in the Smokies.

Revisiting the composition, rediscovering its form, the weight of its line after three years was satisfying. It was like a reunion with an old friend, so much time has past, and so little. To my eye, the copy is actually better than the original, there’s more nuance, because as they say, “practice makes perfect.” The eagle’s intensity is rendered with more subtlety; an artist’s hand mellows with age.

The sheet size is 11X14, so it will fit nicely in a standard size mat and frame that you buy. You can bid here on my blog or, if you prefer a more private channel, e-mail me at lynbales@comcast.net. The bidding starts at $40 and will close in one month: November 8.

Best wishes. Satisfaction—as much as such an illusive concept can be achieved—is guaranteed. Please forward any questions.

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book signing

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Forgive me. I've been ill and away from my blog. Still shaky, but let's hope I'm back.

As part of this month's First Friday celebration, I'll be signing copies of my book, "Natural Histories: Stories from the Tennessee Valley" and the companion notecards at Woodward Books in the Old City on Friday, October 3, 5 p.m. to closing.

Woodward Books is located at 108 E. Jackson Avenue. They specialize in fine antiquarian and out of print books. If you love old books, this is the shop for you.

If you want to talk about collectible books, Tim and Jeannie will be happy to oblige!

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