Night Vision

Another in the occasional series of "The Rural Life" short essays by Verlyn Klinkenborg from the New York Times' editorial page (November 30, 2010).  That we could all write as evocatively as he...

I pull into the farm from the city.  It is early in the evening but well after nightfall, and the moon hangs over the hills like a hypnotist's watch.  I drop a few things in the house and then wander out to check on the animals.

I used to take a flashlight when I was new to this place.  I no longer do.  My eyes adjust slowly, but part of the pleasure of walking out in the night is watching the flat opacity resolve into the three dimensions of this farm.  All the nocturnal creatures are out and about--somewhere--and I will never be one of them.  Even the horses are more nocturnal than I am.  They live in natural light year-round, and by the time I get home they're a couple of hours into watching the night.

In summer, you can pretend the night is translucent and that even the Milky Way is emanating warmth.  By late November, those illusions are past. The sun feels benevolent, but when it vanishes, after 4 p.m., the rising darkness becomes continuous with the deepest, coldest reaches of space.

The chickens pretend not to notice when I look in.  The horses stand impassive in their pasture, though if I opened the gate and walked in, they would drift over to share their heat.  I have no idea where the barn cat is, but he is so black that he would stand out in a night like this.  I complete my rounds and still my eyes haven't opened fully to the night.

I light a fire in the wood stove and settle in to read in the kitchen.  Light spills onto the deck, and I see a movement.  It's an opossum, come up to investigate the cat-food dish.  It walks up to the glass door and peers in, surely blinded by so much brightness.  Perhaps this is the one I met--to both our surprise--on the ladder to the hayloft a few months ago.  Now it stands in the light looking hopelessly disorganized, as opossums do, and then it wanders off into the darkness, where the seeing is much better.

Arborglow

 I was cleaning up my vegetable garden and raking leaves late Friday afternoon following Thanksgiving, and looked up just as the sun was setting to see the tops of the trees ablaze. The effect reminded me of alpen glow, but translated to the Piedmont foothills rather than snow capped peaks.

A Rafter of Turkeys, and a November Bat

Wild Turkeys

Wild Turkeys (Meleagris gallopavo) were reintroduced into our heavily suburbanized watershed 15 or so years ago.  I know the individual who released the farm-raised wild stock in a county park downstream of my natural area.  The turkeys have securely established themselves, though their population density fluctuates annually.  The immigration of a healthy coyote (Canis laterans) population three years ago, which I thought at the time might doom the flocks, doesn't seem to have had a significant impact.

This year has been a banner year. 

Three hens coalesced their broods at the end of the summer and now there are at least 30 yearlings in my yard most of the time.  It doesn't help that I feed them, of course, but I like to enjoy their beautiful colors and their distinctly prehistoric gestalt.  Though they will eat whole corn, they prefer oil sunflower (naturally), and it gets expensive feeding 30 turkeys after a while.  People ask me if they're wild, and I tell them the flock's history and explain that feeding them has made them almost like pets.

I learned over the weekend, by the way, that a group of turkeys is called a "rafter."

  
Saturday afternoon, Kali and I went for a walk (at the county park where the turkeys were introduced, incidentally).  There, flying over an open field, was a bat gleaning insects. It was 55 degrees, and November 20, and there was a bat in mid-afternoon.  We watched  for several minutes while it cruised the air in search of prey.  We didn't know whether to be amazed or saddened, since the sighting was so strange, unexpected, and out of character for a bat.

November Paean

This short article appeared in the New York Times on Tuesday, November 9, 2010, on the editorial page.  It was entitled "The Rural Life: Seasonal Slippage," and was written by Verlyn Klinkenborg.  It really captured my feelings about November; maybe it will do the same for you.

Just about now, I remember that the trees on this farm will be bare for the next six months.  It always comes as a surprise.  The maples and hickories have mulched themselves with their own leaves, and they seem to have gone rigid now that they carry so much less sail in the wind.  Everything that can die back has done so.  The last of the woodchucks have gone down their burrows.  The tide of dormancy is rising all around me, and on a rainy day with the woodstove going, I wonder whether I'll sink or swim.

Even as the temperature hovers in the 40s, I can feel January in the back of my mind.  I try hard to keep it out, as if that might guarantee a mild winter.  By the time the hard cold gets here, I'll be inured to it.  But, truthfully, I'm still back in mid-August, before the Barn Swallows vanished, before the pokeweed berries were ripe enough for the Cedar Waxwings, before the chipmunks gorged on the dogwood drupes.

This month, more than any other, I slip in and out of the season, never quite able to coincide with the calendar.  Looking southward from my office, the sky above the treetops is more than overcast.  It's a squirrel-gray, beech-bark sky...

Soon I'll put on my barn coat and work gloves and muck boots.  And the minute I step ouside, I'll step back into proper time. January recedes because it's so purely November, the mud deep in the barnyard, the rain picking up again.  I walk down to the barn and stand in the doorway, taking shelter with the tractor and all the implements of summer--the spade, the garden fork, the pig fence and the chicken fences.

I realize that I'm filled, as always, with expectation.  It's a look I see in the horses' eyes when they know their grain is coming.  On a dark afternoon, rain falling, they stand in the middle of the pasture with no thought of the shelter they could take.  They are November horses now, just the way they were June horses not so long ago.

Quicksilver

Quicksilver

We had a fine autumn weekend (for a change) here in the Mid-Atlantic--temperatures in the upper 50s and sunny skies both days. On Saturday, we went to an Orvis trunk show and I bought one pair of poplin slacks, two pairs of shorts and seven new shirts. Whoo-whoo! I cleaned up. Then we went for a six-mile walk along a river in a park in the western suburbs.

On Sunday morning, we went for a four-mile walk in the county park downstream of my usual natural area. This park has a new rail-to-trail path paralleling the same creek that flows through "my" natural area. The light of the late morning sun glinting on the creek from the path made the stream look like it was quicksilver.

Along the opposite side of the trail, a small tributary draining a beech and tuliptree forest poured over a tiny falls created by leaves caught in the roots of a streamside tree.
Further downstream, we came across a runner enjoying the park's hilly terrain. I liked this image because there's a hint of mossy green to enliven the sere November landscape.
At its southern end, the rail-to-trail path runs within a deep rock cut excavated into the schist bedrock of the valley. The locals call this cut "the gorge." I like it because the excavation intercepted the groundwater and produced a long series of weeping springs emerging from the uphill side (left side in the image) of the rock cut. Unfortunately, the rocks are covered with non-native vegetation--especially English ivy (Hedera helix) and Japanese honeysuckle (Lonicera japonica).
Novertheless, clusters of ferns manage to cling to the stony walls in places. If the invasive vegetation weren't there, imagine what kinds of native gems might gain a footlold in this unusual niche.