Woodstock and Water

August 15, 2018August 15, 2018 / kathyhauswirth / 2 Comments

Riverwalking in Hartford

Before our family trip to Woodstock got fully underway, its theme began to assert itself. Tom made a wrong turn and we were in the curiously quiet Sunday city that is Hartford. We parked by the Wadsworth Atheneum with a new mission: the first visit to the Mortensen Riverfront Plaza. We took many steps down to the start of the sculpture walk featuring Lincoln’s life. Not far from where Harriet Beecher Stowe lived in her later years, here was a sculpture of Lincoln and Stowe meeting, captioned with the famous quote in which he attributed the start of the Civil War to this “little woman.” Beyond them the Connecticut River flowed, an occurrence that long preceded, and long moves past, the war that divided our nation.

Walking along it, we watched young women crewing in their long boats. They pushed the water aside with the force of one. Birds flitted into and out of the abundant greenery that grew along the path. I leaned down to snap photos of 2 kinds of purple flowers and then leaned back to wonder at the high-water marks marked on a pillar, thinking about my mom at 10 after the big hurricane in 1938, watching with amazement as sail boats traveled down her suburban street. Gavin jumped down to an outsized stump at the edge that must have seen at least a century of waterfront history. Tom spotted a miniature field of tiny bird’s nest fungi, which look exactly as they sound, complete with “eggs” that are balls of spores. When raindrops strike the spores they shoot into the air and germination can begin.

Bird’s nest fungi in Hartford

As we were en route, my sister Linda sent me a link to a short film called Sing the Water Song. In describing their vision for the project, the film makers start with the phrase “water is life.” They share their dream of millions of women (Keepers of Water in Native American traditions) around the world learning to sing the Algonquin Water Song in solidarity with the threatened water we continue to witness. (Standing Rock is just one of countless examples). The song is described by a Native elder as lullaby-like, paying loving tribute to water as the lifeblood of Mother Earth (lyrics are phonetic):

Nee bee wah bow
En die en
Aah key mis kquee
Nee bee wah bow
Hey ya hey ya hey ya hey
Hey ya hey ya hey ya ho

About an hour from Woodstock, we stopped at an antique store and peered down the hill at the creek running beside it, wondering who had placed so many odd-shaped, fist-sized stones on a particular rock. The license plate next to ours said “1-River,” which alluded to one of Gavin’s favorite books, One River, which follows the fascinating work of 2 Amazon explorers.

When we got to Woodstock, we walked around town and paused along the bridges to admire the stream coursing below. On our first full day, we were privileged to visit with local mushroom expert John Michelotti at Catskill Fungi. We walked together through light rain and admired his logs as well as his life, which centers on fungi and has led him to many good things. On the way back from his place in Big Indian, we stopped to read a commemorative plaque beside the start of the Catskill Aqueduct. On the way here we had stopped at Oblong Books in Millerton and I treated myself to Lapham’s Quarterly (on the theme of, you guessed it, water!). As I read it that afternoon I came across a piece on Manhattan’s water sources, and it recounted how 9 villages near Woodstock were obliterated as the dams were created and water was collected in Shokan when constructing the aqueduct. At least 10% of the “sandhogs” who dug the tunnel suffered injuries and deaths. (Shades of Standing Rock: the Quarterly article included a 1913 account of deaths among Native and African Americans, overlooked by most as these were “inconspicuous” people.)

fried egg mushrooms (not sure of ID).JPG

It’s probably slugs who have been enjoying these “fried eggs” at The Comeau Property.

It poured that afternoon and Gavin swam in the rain. In the morning, we walked through puddles on the trails at The Comeau Property in town. The creek was running high, fed by the buckets of rain the prior day. Slugs and mushrooms were relishing the moisture, brightening the dim woods with their colorful presences. Back at our temporary home, I strolled beside our borrowed salt water pool and found tiny snails dotting the undersides of big leaves and clinging to blades of grass. Under one particular leaf a small spider had woven a rather flat web. He stood beside it, looking ready to defend his work.

Snails everywhere!

For me, I guess not surprisingly, the best parts of the trip have involved noticing creatures (including plants) out in nature. I keep being reminded of water—how it links us, how we need to protect it. I looked back at an old diary entry on the same date as yesterday, when Gavin was just 6, and found this small start of a poem. I love how, so many years later, we are still treasuring the creatures we meet along the way, still conscious of the dew:

All along this morning walk
There were little beings,
especially funnel spiders
and slugs, who seem to like
the dewy days best.

New Year’s Wish: Snail Love Darts

January 3, 2016 / kathyhauswirth / 6 Comments

From Jason Hollinger on Flickr

The gift of some extra down time this post-holiday week has had wrapped in it another, quite exquisite gift: time to read and really absorb The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, by Elisabeth Tova Bailey.

With the colder days I have retreated a bit into my own shell, and reading the adventures of another sometime hibernator has warmed me. The book is also such an encouraging peek into the life of the mind, as the author wrote it while coping with a long-term postviral illness. Perhaps a small silver lining is the forced slowing down which allowed her to fully appreciate and record in delectable detail the glacial pace of her nearby terrarium friend.

I love the idea that I’ve probably walked past tons of snails back in the Cockaponset, many of them too small and/or well camouflaged to see. Another reminder to LOOK MORE CLOSELY at all around me. A great joy of loving nature is that you can never see it all or know it all. I received several gifts this Christmas, but the world unfolds endlessly, surpassing any manmade gift.

The trail of a very circuitous snail, from Thomas Guest on Flickr

I’m particularly taken with the idea of the snail love dart. I learned that about a third of snail species shoot actual darts at their intended mates; the projectiles are thought to contain special pheromones that might improve safe sperm storage. Bailey describes them as “tiny, beautifully made arrows of calcium carbonate, and they look as if they’ve been crafted by the very finest of artisans. They are formed inside the body of the snail over the course of a week.” She goes on to describe how some darts are reused, others can be carried in pouches by the snail. How I’d love to own one of these tiny wonders (although I wouldn’t want to rob any snail of its reproductive possibilities!).

Love dart of the land snail Monachoides vicinus, from Wikipedia.

My own book in progress starts with reflections on a slug (which, by the way, evolved after the snail, with the new advantage of being able to squeeze into more places). How nice it has been to read dispatches from Bailey, another appreciator of slow but persistent creatures. If we could all somehow slow down enough to regularly contemplate these wonders, how much hope there would be for a calmer and more thoughtfully deliberate world!

PS: Staying on the “sluggish” track, also enjoyed A Sloth Named Velcro on Netflix this week.

Moths, Mushrooms, and Umwelt

July 5, 2015July 5, 2015 / kathyhauswirth / 2 Comments

Lately, I’ve been reading Central Park in the Dark, by the same author (Marie Winn) who wrote Red Tails in Love. Her reports of a robust animal and insect world thriving right in midtown Manhattan are such a comfort to me. And they remind me that, with nature, there is always much more going on than what we notice at a casual glance.

Take moths, for example. They have always loved my porch, but this year they are finding their way inside more, to the grow light that overhangs my modest crop of hydroponic tomatoes. They flitter their way into the sink way too often—are they seeking hydration or just attracted to the water’s glimmer? In any case, I have made valiant, if not always successful, efforts to rescue them. The antique milk can on the porch has become a moth rehab facility–a place where they go to dry out. Bonus fact, which I learned after writing a poem about moths alighting on my arms: they crave the salt in our skin! We might not think as kindly of them if they found ways to extract it the way female mosquitoes, or ticks, access what they find to be our most alluring qualities.

I was reminded, however, by the Central Park book that most moths’ lifespans amount to less than a few weeks. This greatly saddened Gavin, so I told him about something else that I had learned about: the idea of umwelt. A musty but lovely second-hand book I found, The View from the Oak (Judith and Herbert Kohl), talks about a term used by another nature writer “to describe the world around a living thing as that creature experiences it.” Imagine, for example being an ant, living your whole life in a particular corner of a field, pebbles like boulders to you and your vibratory sense your only means of communication. That experience, that way of living and perceiving, is your ant umwelt. I apply that same concept to time, too. The moth that lives its full few weeks is likely not comparing itself with humans and crying over its piteously short stay on the earth. We humans have our own time umwelt, so we don’t tend to bristle over the lifespans of Galapagos Giant Tortoises, who live for upwards of 100 years (or Ocean Quahogs, who can live for 400+!).

Another umwelt I found myself wondering about was the perspective of the slug. Of course, I’ve seen slugs here and there throughout my life, but only on a recent jaunt at Fountain Hill did I notice groups of them sitting on mushroom caps.

Can you see the 4 slugs feasting?

How long did it take them to climb up there? Was it like summiting a high mountain peak? It made me wonder if slugs eat mushrooms, and the article I found from a 2010 issue of Fungi was called What We Don’t Know About Slugs and Mushrooms—the scientists seem pretty clear that slugs eat fungi but not so clear on specifics. One of the problems is that it’s the mushrooms, not the slugs, that are usually the subject of any the available photos that might prove slug fungus consumption, and most of the time photographers don’t want to photograph the slugs at all. It’s not just with most photographers that slugs get a bad rap—and I understand that they eat our garden greens—but I do think that if they were better looking they might be treated better. Hopefully in their own little slug umwelt they don’t realize how their slimy looks count against them. But if they do, Gavin reminded me that there is an Ugly Animals Preservation Society that they can turn to for support.

July is such a rich, moist, spilling-over-with-abundance time in Connecticut. This morning I counted 13 rabbits on my walk down to Town Dock, and funnel webs from the grass spiders, highlighted by the dew, dotted nearly every lawn—an uncountable array of spider condo complexes. My own, personal umwelt is a happy one because of this.