Nothing I Can See Scares Me. What I Can't See...

I’m looking into the woods from the end of my driveway. The wind is blowing due west so the pine trees beside me howl like organ pipes and do nothing to keep me sheltered.  At least the wind is at my back and not stopping my breath. It’s a balmy twenty-five degrees and my hands feel relatively warm bare and taking notes for what I’ll type later.

I’m looking into the woods and thinking of Kathy Ayres, her bears and the one bear, somewhere out there, I’m sure is looking for me. I don’t know why that bear would want me, but I know it does.

Kathy has published a book of essays titled, Bear Season. I’ve read some of it as a class assignment and have been to a reading where she read from her book. Kathy loves her bears and keeps her distance. She’s seen them countless times. She studied bears and knows their needs and habits. I’m pretty sure she can even tell them apart.

I’m looking into the woods and seeing farther in than I can any other time of year. The bare trees are farther apart since the loggers came so I can see farther than I could before.  I see the other side of the valley, the small pond at the bottom and the abandoned car beside it. There’s a gas well I see through the remaining trees and the enormous house a mile away the trees and gas paid for.

            The forest isn’t ours. It borders my yard and belongs to other people. The swath from our yard to the base of the hill and the valley bottom belong to my neighbor next door. The owner of the enormous house owns the valley’s far hillside and a chunk of land behind it. I felt as safe as the French behind the Maginot Line. I knew the steep hillside and wetland at the bottom meant nothing could be built. I never thought about the forest being destroyed.

I can look into the woods in the day or night and see anything that moves silhouetted against the white background. Its motion accentuated by the unmoving flora.

I’ve seen pictures of bears eating apples in one neighbor’s yard and standing on the porch of another. I walk my little dog before dawn on the edge of the woods that reach our street. In the dark between the trees are shifting leaves or worse silence that every one of my footsteps erases the sounds in. I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve heard or read, “They are more afraid of you than you are of them.” I doubt it.

My dog is oblivious to everything he isn’t sniffing. He’s walked up to groundhogs, bunnies and deer with no reaction or semblance of caring. So what happens when he doesn’t see, hear or smell the bear?

Now isn’t the time of year for seeing bears. They are smarter or luckier than us and they spend the harsh winter months hibernating. I wonder if they dream of spring with the same fervor I wish for it.

Not a new poem, but it tells my story:

Midnight Stroll

Bare branches battle in the dark.

Their fencing echoes with my footsteps

in uncountable rhythms. The gravel betrays

my uneven gait as I pause or spin

to stare ahead or behind in the darkness,

even into the trees that send dry leaves

scuttling across the road

distracting me from noisy secrets

the forest holds too close to my throat.

I Shot an Arrow

I Shot an Arrow

Lucky for me my chosen spot for these observations on nature is close to our driveway. I am a coward today. I sit in my car, which isn't running, because outside it is colder than I can stand to hold a pen in a bare hand. Colder than my tablet or laptop can take. So in this car I sit and listen to the wind mock me. Wasn't bullying me into shelter enough? The west wind is spraying my Chevy with shotgun pellets of snow and ice that it scrapes off the driveway. It's not like last week’s tinkling melody of falling water drops. Thirty degrees makes a difference in the sound water makes when wind plays with it.

Water does interesting things in our yard.  We live on the crest of hill that is the nexus of three watersheds. This yard is the exact point of that concurrence. If I walk due west to the top of the driveway, move south about four feet and spit it will take a trip down my street, to Saltsburg and Mamont roads to Haymaker Run. (We didn’t have runs in New York. Those miniature rivers were named streams or creeks and sometimes, “kills” as in Peekskill and Fishkill if the Dutch name was still being used.) Back to my spit’s journey, Haymaker Run empties into Turtle Creek, a tributary of the Monongehela River. If I spit to my right it meanders down the hill makes a left turn on to Greensburg Road and dribbles into Pucketa Creek, which ends in the Allegheny River. Making a one-eighty to face the back yard and anything I spill finds its way into Beaver Run Reservoir by way of an unnamed stream in the woods behind my house and Poke Run. Almost every faucet in three counties pours out what I do in in my yard.

         I didn’t have a clue about any of this for the first ten years that Patty and I lived here. My neighbor, Harry, told me about our unique position in the area’s geography during one of his semi-regular history lessons. I was raking leaves when he said, “You know if you stand there and piss in a circle it will go three places.” That was Harry’s way of teaching me history and legend. He’d make a statement like that and wait for my, “Huh?”

Sitting here in the car I suddenly realize something bigger. The Allegheny and Monongehela merge in Pittsburgh to create the Ohio River, a major tributary of the Mississippi. How many water supplies between my house and the Mississippi Delta depend on me?  It is beyond my imagination. I can’t even count the number of states the rivers run through without a map. I wonder if the stuff in my yard has made it the Gulf of Mexico.

I don't use many chemicals in the yard.  Weeds are just as green as grass and don’t need to be cut as often so weed killer was never part of my yard routine. In the spring I sprayed the side of the house to keep ants from crawling in the windows. Paintbrushes got washed in the grass by the driveway. It got on my hands and I was fine. Turpentine didn’t even kill the grass on the rare occasion I needed to use it. I wasn’t worried. What would my little spills matter, anyway? Where does that arrow come down?

         

      

     

Matinee Performance

        There was snow last night. It didn't amount to much. Barely made it to my shoe tops. It painted the trees white. Between the noises of the occasional cars I hear the rhythm of the drops as the white changes to water. The conductor maintains a steady pace of drops in the downspout on my right.  A breeze blows trills across the top of my parked car and on the driveway. They are upper register of the orchestra. The low strings, cello and bass, lie in the snow below the trees. The low rumble of an eighteen-wheeled bassoon crescendos with the tubas and tympani of a jake-brake half of a mile away from here.

        

Dad thought studying music was a waste. “Whata you gonna do for money,” he’d say. My father always thought about the future – or dwelt on the past. The minute he was living in was squeezed dry. I’m sitting on a stone bench he made. A solid, practical thing. He complained and paid the college bill anyway. I talked myself into switching to math after a year. He never said he was happy, but he not once complained about that choice. Now I can estimate the weight of what I shoveled this morning while I ponder the music in the air.

         Three cardinals are in the nearly bare branches of what remains of a tree my neighbor got bored of cutting down. The bright red identifies them as males. I’ve never seen male cardinals together. I am trying my best not to make a silly joke about pope picking. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions and I have a lot of them. These birds camaraderie or at the very least mutual tolerance is surprising. They are probably the sons of a bird so aggressive he spent four summers attacking his reflection in our dining room windows. I called him Il Trovatore when I began to think the crash of keratin on glass, which punctuated birdsongs at dawn, was his version of the Anvil Chorus. I’d see his Leonora admiring her mate’s bravery from their nest in a nearby tree and sing her soft aria. I didn’t appreciate his bravery in quite the same way. I put pictures of snakes and owls in the windows to dissuade his unrelenting attack. He’d pause for an hour or a day, martial his courage and throw himself against the threat. I felt the anticipation the time after the last hiccup until April the year he didn’t return. The reason for my unease wasn’t clear until I saw cadinals flying into the bushes two houses away.  I didn’t know if it was our troubadour and his Leonora. I can barely tell kinds of birds apart let alone identify individuals of the same species. Just the same, I wondered if he abandoned us for less threatening windows. I’d rather it be that to think the cold or another creature’s hunger ended. Maybe there is a one-eyed owl or raggedy-eared fox wandering the neighborhood that’s lost the taste for cardinals after a meeting with him.

         Six hundred pounds give or take. That was the weight of the snow I moved. In case you were wondering.

        

        

        

The Beginning

Hello out there. I am just beginning to try my hand at blogging. To be honest, I usually poke fun at people who do this. It occurs to me today that blogging isn't so different from me submitting poems to journals. All writers are narcissists in the sense that we believe our view of things is important enough that strangers should know them.