Homebound

I have had an intercourse with the earth.  But I realize that reproducibility is an essential requirement of relationship with the natural and of science.  It differs profoundly from authoritarian ways of thinking.  The universe has stood these past three weeks continually open to my gaze.  From quarks to quasars, but more closely to rocks.

 

Painters make patterns with spots of paint    

poets make patterns with words

rocks make patterns with lichens and moss

mathematicians make patterns with ideas

and provide more accurate descriptions

no one knows why

they sit too close to the seat of secrets

These pages of an ancient seabed, now opened and turned on as a book, are presented to us for understanding of prehistoric history.  I have yet to understand their words, but I few insights come after a tramp in the woods.

Thin layers of rock, just enough harder than their peers to have survived and to show their words.  Bloyd Shale, Prairie Grove member of the Hale formation, Morrowan period, Pensylvanian era of the Carboniferous Period.  Derived from silt that settled in a warm ocean some 300 million years ago. This according to a geologist’s map. I wonder.

Three weeks I showed pictures of leaves just emerging from buds and I showed a hillside like this one that was brown near its top.  Now, the leaves of spring are fully emerged and the hills are no longer brown with bare branches, but green with summer leaves.

A tornado passed through here a few months ago, driving this broken tree deep into the ground.  We never hear about tornados unless they hit us.  How unkind is that?

Just an interesting scene along a country road.

Farewell until next time. 

Not a Single Hiker Crossed My Path

To the small creatures who live under its shade

a forest of moss is like a dog to a flea

my dense umbrella of leaves in this forest

where I’ve been short on human contact

now fully grown since their early sprouting

is but fuzz on the hills air travelers see

on their way to New York.

but to a small creature under the canopy

still smaller ones look up for bees

I look down to them for comfort. 

a goose swims by and honks    

a fish turns gently downstream

and the crunch of branches on this still day comes from heavy feet, a bear? 

driving back to Clarksville

back from ridges and streams     

where water curtains trickle over limestone  

to splash on a seabed now raised above the sea

to wear away hard silt, the kind these waters carry

to take it home again

a journey to another trip  

an envelope of wildflowers  

How Far We’ve Come

Ask whether in 10.000  BC  it was better to  hunt giant mastodons, and sloths using spears.

Or if in 1000 BC it is was more fulfilling to make pottery and build mounds and become a little more homebound.  Or whether agriculture brought satisfaction

Fayetteville, Walker Stone house
built 1845 by David Walker

Ask if American settlers along the Arkansas River thought it worth the flooding and the draught, and the anguish of separation from eastern culture  

And now that all that is gone and the interstate carries us, the government feeds us,  if it is really any better.

I go to the Ozark highlands where settlers fled after all the good land along the Arkansas River was taken, where they fled to mountaintop flatlands where soil was poor and water scarce.

After the best land had been takes, settlers moved into the Ozark Mountains on less fertile land, rocky hillsides and rocky wooded uplands that had been avoided by earlier settlers.  Subsistence farms of corn, with lesser amounts of oats, wheat, potatoes, fruit.  Cattle, hogs, and corn liquor too.  

Ask and receive an answer from the hills that saw it all and to which I go back.

It’s an old and mysterious country, not grand and majestic like our western mountains, but slow, relaxed, settled in its ways.  The people move with solid slowness, with steady roots in the land. They get as much done as we do in frantic Southern California.  It seems to me that getting things done has little to do with speed.  And in just two weeks here the leaves are already fully grown. 

Folks I’ve Met Along the Trail

Three women came along one day.  They had their own conversation going and wanted to keep moving.  Friendly though, hiking sensibly in a group.

I passed two guys and a dog at their campsite.  The guys returned my hello and went back to their breaking camp.  The dog didn’t even look at me.

A broken boot speaks of some serious problem at least ten miles from any trailhead.  I looked around for some other sign of trouble and found none.

I hear the broad-winged turkey vultures often as they talk to one another with screeching over miles of open sky.

The snakes have all been the shy kind so far, none of those belligerent poisonous kinds.  

This young couple have it made—wilderness, safety in partnership, and apparently a good deal of love.

With a hundred legs there’s no danger of falling and no hurry either.  A centipede just plods along without any apparent worries.

Plenty of spiders dangle from threads in the morning.  If only I had someone taller than me to walk ahead.  At least this one stays in his house.

This man, hiking alone like me, had plenty of time to talk.  We’d been on some of the same trails.  His Arkansas talk and manner, with “Good morning, mam” and “Had a big ‘ol tree blow across the trail, but it was rotten.”  He’s even been to California just to hike some of the trails.  He was headin’ west and I was moseyin’ east, so I told him a good place to camp, and he said to watch out for the snattle rakers.   

Flowers and Rocks

A rock fence stacked about 200 years ago
by someone who may have asked these same questions

I come to these flowers and rocks, a simpleton, with a bit of research, a trifle of knowledge, and absence of wisdom.  I came to study earth, and have only pictures to show.  Flowers come and go in their yearly cycles.  Rocks likewise rise and erode away, or sink back into the mantle below some dominate plate.  And I can’t figure any of it out.      

Perhaps I should ask the one of whom it is written, “Without him nothing was made that was made.”  But he’s been silent on the subject, perhaps delaying his return until some simple and obvious light dawns on just one of us.  And left his logo in the rock?

I have found little to read concerning how this high and deeply dissected plateau we call the western Ozark Mountains formed.  The rocks here are little disturbed—flat-lying sedimentary layers of Paleozoic age, formed maybe half a billion years ago, so I’m told.

This used to be the bottom of an ocean, they say, limestone at lower layers, sandstone near the top.  They say the layers are rippled because ocean waves formed them.  But I see ripples in all the rocks and wonder how the entire bottom of an ocean can be rippled by waves?

Some of the rocks have little round potholes in them.  And in another rock I see a hard round ball.  Did they mate here and produce baby rocks?

Some of the surfaces of split layers look like ancient inscriptions or hieroglyphics.  Others look almost like fossils of plants or animals.

Higher up on Hare Mountain, limestone gives way to sandstone, which they call Pennsylvanian Sandstone, same as found throughout many states,  as if the matter is settled.

This rock looks completely out of place.  It appears warped and heated like hot taffy, but no metamorphic rocks are supposed to be here.

I am hoping that some of you can help me with the names of the wildflowers.  On the left, she reaches out with six arms to welcome the bees.  On the right, she takes the plump, short, three-arm approach.   

On the left she jumps out of her red dress.  On the right her soft green flesh lures the unsuspecting.

A shy one, you seldom see her, but on occasion she peeks out from under her shroud and shares herself with a kindred spirit.

Beauty in the leaves of a common green tree.