Fossils at Reed Creek!

Mom mowing.

At the cove.

Burn in Giles County last fall.

Conserving the Magnitude Of Uselessness
A. R. Ammons

Spits of glitter in low grade ore,
precious stones too poorly surrounded for harvest,
to all things not worth the work
of having,

brush oak on a sharp slope, for example,
the balk tonnage of woods-lodged boulders,
the irreparable desert,
drowned river mouths, lost shores where

the winged and light-footed go,
take creosote bush that possesses
ground nothing else will have,
to all things and for all things

crusty or billowy with indifference
for example, incalculable, irremovable water
or fluvio-glacial deposits
larch or dwarf aspen in the least breeze sometimes shiver in-

Suddenly the salvation of waste betides,
the peerlessly unsettled seas that shape the continents,
take the gales wasting and in waste over
Antarctica and the sundry high shoals of ice,

For the inexcusable (the worthless abundant) the
merely tiresome, the obviously unimprovable,
to these and for these and for their undiminishment
the poets will yelp and hoot forever

probably,
rank as weeds themselves and just as abandoned:
nothing useful is of lasting value:
dry wind only is still talking among the oldest stones.

moment of truth

Today a big box came in the mail: 77 rolls of film developed, mostly from my summer with the dog on the Reed Creek in 2011. The film's still too curly to scan, so I'm just cutting it up and filing it away to flatten. I'm nervous to find out whether the photos are worthwhile, but I'm also excited to try and cobble together something out of them. It's been hard to maintain a sense of direction without seeing what I've been shooting. Can't tell much from the negatives... most of the pictures are of plants, of course. From all the long wading walks we took down the creek, my dog shows up in only a handful of pictures. Somehow those few give the rest of the photos a sense of companionship.

Here's my mom! Her plants are taking over the dining room.

"Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father."

Matthew 10:29

I liked thinking about this verse after our class on white nose syndrome. But I can't put that up without wanting to quote the full context (from Luke, here).

"And he said to his disciples, “Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat, nor about your body, what you will put on. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing. Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds! And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? If then you are not able to do as small a thing as that, why are you anxious about the rest? Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass, which is alive in the field today, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will he clothe you, O you of little faith! And do not seek what you are to eat and what you are to drink, nor be worried. For all the nations of the world seek after these things, and your Father knows that you need them. Instead, seek his kingdom, and these things will be added to you. 

“Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions, and give to the needy. Provide yourselves with moneybags that do not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that does not fail, where no thief approaches and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."

Luke 12:22-34

Jeff Whetstone, Registry

Jeff Whetstone, Johnny





















Jeff Whetstone, Reflecting Hole

"I photographed these caves from the vantage point of an artist, explorer, evolutionist, and native son."

Today I went in the Buchanan saltpeter cave, and that reminded me of Jeff Whetstone's Post Pleistocene. "Inside the cave there were names and dates everywhere on the walls--some 100 years old. My older brother’s friends’ names were there. Daryll Walker found his father’s name in there--dated 1965; four years before Daryll was born. We scratched our names on the wall too."

Finally finished reading 1491: New revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann. I wanted it to be more science and less journalism and more North America than South America, so I guess I need to just read more about that now.

South America:

“Speaking broadly, their solution was not to clear the forest but to replace it with one adapted to human use. They set up shop on the bluffs that mark the edge of high water – close enough to the river to fish, far enough to avoid the flood. And then, rather than centering their agriculture on annual crops, they focused on the Amazon’s wildly diverse assortment of trees.

“In his view, the Amazon’s first inhabitants laboriously cleared small plots with their stone axes. But rather than simply planting manioc and other annual crops in their gardens until the forest took them over, they planted selected trees crops along with the manioc and managed the transition. Of the 138 known domesticated plant species in the Amazon, more than half are trees. (Depending on the definition of ‘domesticated,’ the figure could be as high as 80 percent.) Sapodilla, calabash, and tucumá; babaçu, açai, and wild pineapple; coco-palm, American-oil palm, and Panama-hat palm – the Amazon’s wealth of fruits, nuts, and palms is justly celebrated. ‘Visitors are always amazed that you can walk in the forest here and constantly pick fruit from trees,’ Clement said. ‘That’s because people planted them. They’re walking through old orchards.’” (pages 340-341)

North America:

“Between these fields was the forest, which Indians were subjecting to parallel changes. Sometime in the first millennium A.D., the Indians who had burned undergrowth to facilitate grazing began systematically replanting large belts of woodland, transforming them into orchards for fruit and mast (the general name for hickory nuts, beechnuts, acorns, butternuts, hazelnuts, pecans, walnuts, and chestnuts). Chestnut was especially popular – not the imported European chestnut roasted on Manhattan street corners in the fall, but the smaller, soft-shelled, deeply sweet native American chestnut, now almost extinguished by chestnut blight. In colonial times, as many as one out of every four trees in between southwestern Canada and Georgia was a chestnut – partly the result, it would seem, of Indian burning and planting.” (pages 297-298)

A little statriotism. When I visited my friend in Khakassia, someone told us that it's crucial for people to believe that where they live is the center of the universe. He said it's when you start thinking the center is somewhere else that your culture stops developing.

I have some money now, so I'm going to buy film today.

"To those devoid of imagination, a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part. (Is my share in Alaska worthless to me because I shall never go there? Do I need a road to show me the arctic prairies, the goose pasture of the Yukon, the Kodiak bear, the sheep meadows behind McKinley?)"

From Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac, page 176.

"'The stars are beautiful, because of a flower that cannot be seen.'

I replied, "Yes, that is so." And, without saying anything more, I looked across the ridges of sand that were stretched out before us in the moonlight.

'The desert is beautiful,' the little prince added.

And that was true. I have always loved the desert. One sits down on a desert sand dune, sees nothing, hears nothing. Yet through the silence something throbs, and gleams...

'What makes the desert beautiful,' said the little prince, 'is that somewhere it hides a well...'

I was astonished by a sudden understanding of that mysterious radiation of the sands. When I was a little boy I lived in an old house, and legend told us that a treasure was buried there. To be sure, no one had ever known how to find it; perhaps no one had ever even looked for it. But it cast an enchantment over that house. My home was hiding a secret in the depths of its heart...

'Yes,' I said to the little prince. 'The house, the stars, the desert-- what gives them their beauty is something that is invisible!'"

From chapter 24 of The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

Raccoon tracks.

Raccoon scat?

It's been -40ºF/C in Novosibirsk for the past few days. I can't believe it's December right now, and that it will never get that cold here in Virginia. It's a whole other world.

This was a cool spot, but I tried developing this roll myself and screwed up.

Archaeology building down the street (with the mammoth skeletons) in Akadem.

Finding the Scarf

by Wyatt Townley

 

The woods are the book

we read over and over as children.

Now trees lie at angles, felled

by lightning, torn by tornados,

silvered trunks turning back

to earth. Late November light

slants through the oaks

as our small parade, father, mother, child,

shushes along, the wind searching treetops

for the last leaf. Childhood lies

on the forest floor, not evergreen

but oaken, its branches latched

to a graying sky. Here is the scarf

we left years ago like a bookmark,

meaning to return the next day,

having just turned our heads

toward a noise in the bushes,

toward the dinnerbell in the distance,

toward what we knew and did not know

we knew, in the spreading twilight

that returns changed to a changed place.

Out at the cove.

By Reed Creek.

Cabin Creek Trail.

Trail Boss Trail.