You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
Drowning and Indians, in the colonial era.
Remember, though, that was from the English settlers’ point of view, and nearly every family was affected.
There are no records from the Indigenous people’s perspective, as far as I know. We are told, however, that diseases imported from Europe took a heavy toll. Just for starters.
Ohio and Indiana had colorful deciduous fall foliage, but Upstate New York was spectacular. Not so much the Pacific Northwest, with its conifer green forests. New England, however, is iconic, even in its everyday progression.
Sunny bursts of foliage like this, in easternmost Maine, remind me of the aspen of the Far West. Oh, the memories.
My corner of the universe is laced with apple trees gone wild. This time of the year, they especially remind me of my years in the Yakima Valley of Washington state. These, though, have a distinctly New England air.
Back when I had an hour commute home after working an evening shift at the paper, there were a few nights when I was mesmerized by what I saw in my headlights while driving the country highways in heavy rain. As the drops splashed from the shiny black pavement, they seemed to turn into frogs that were hopping wildly. That part was freaky enough, but all of the ones I saw were leaping in the same direction, say from right to left. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them. There was no way to avoid them, either. Naturally, it was difficult to see at 60 miles an hour, and I was always anxious to get home, have a martini, and hit the sack promptly.
Why one direction? Something to do with the wind? Maybe just the angle of my headlights, so I didn’t pick up on just as many hopping in the other direction?
A few miles later, I would encounter another flock (officially, a group of frogs is called a knot, a colony, or an army, go figure) all flying in the other direction, left to right.
The phenomenon didn’t appear every time I had a heavy-rain midnight, but it did happen enough times over the decade to repeat the show, something I didn’t connect to springtime.
Turns out, as a recent Sunday Afternoon presentation at the Eastport Arts Center prompted, I wasn’t hallucinating. Didn’t need my eyes checked or a pair of glasses for driving. And wasn’t losing my mind. Frogs, toads, and salamanders have a Big Night (or two) in early spring when heavy rain, an inch or more, combines with thawing ice and snow to signal the amphibians to leave their winter shelter and return to emerging ephemeral vernal pools for breading. The high, shrill chirping chorus of peepers soon fills the night air for a few weeks after.
The temporary shallow ponds are fishless, and thus free of predators in the amphibian-breeding forest wetlands. With their job done around the time summer rolls in, the pools dry up for another year.
When I see this phenomenon where I’m now living, I’m reminded of an ice floe stampede one Sunday afternoon on the Susquehanna River back in the winter of ‘71. For two hours or so after an ice jam upstream had been dynamited, the river was a racetrack of large jagged white wedges three or four feet thick crashing down the riverway. Viewing it was terrifying, mystifying and unforgettable. Slabs of the ice that had been thrust into shrubs along the riverbanks remained visible until nearly May.
Hobart Stream at Cobscook Bay, Edmunds Township, Maine.
Sometimes, in blogging, an intended post gets caught unposted. Here one of those finally appears. My, it was drafted long before I lived this close to the sea.
however elegant, talisman bowsprits
cast gelatinous shadows
along shoreline and then blackened wharf
grappling irons of the hull or side gateway
expertly, the customs master inspects
postgraduate credentials in each captain’s script
and assesses the excise due
the crew, returning well-off in some dividend
of dexterity, superstition, and chance
fathoms contempt at the helm
some hauled fishing mesh or harpooned leviathans
or transposed merchandise from Shanghai or Liverpool
while privateers or warships are porcupines passing by
while on the other hand, coming downstream
through melting forest ignorance
deadly as any rip current, as any metropolis
with charts, rudimentary as
a canoe or kayak
traverse bitter
names for the same stars
argument or laughter, depending
on the embrace
in all that I found welcome
still, you know seasoned voyageurs
who will fear water
In my household, like many others in northern New England, the Fedco seed catalogue and ordering from it are something of a fond ritual this time of year, even a devotion.
Here’s some background.
Details from the company’s website and from Jeffrey B. Roth in Lancaster Farming.
