Another American Adventure: Down by the stream

Thursday, April 21, 2011

Down by the stream

It's a little colder and sunnier than usual today. We ventured off the main path to walk by the stream. That probably wasn't a good idea because it is still quite muddy and many trees are down which I had to climb over or around. Jubilee enjoys the off-the-beaten track smells though. Occasionally she sees a squirrel or chipmunk and she is off to chase it. They always get away.

The entire stream bank is literally covered with skunk cabbage.

Nobody's eating it, not even bugs.

Budding is continuing everywhere and the birds are busy, though this nest was empty and appeared abandoned. Probably too exposed.

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"In those first days, people said, a squirrel could run the long length of Pennsylvania without ever touching the ground. In those first days, the woods were white oak and chestnut, hickory, maple, sycamore, walnut, wild ash, wild plum, and white pine. The pine grew on the ridgetops where the mountains' lumpy spines stuck up and their skin was thinnest.

"The wilderness was uncanny, unknown. Benjamin Franklin had already invented his stove in Philadelphia by 1753, and Thomas Jefferson was a schoolboy in Virginia; French soldiers had been living in forts along Lake Erie for two generations. But west of the Alleghenies in western Pennsylvania, there was not even a settlement, not even a cabin. No Indians lived there, or even near there.

"Wild grapevines tangled the treetops and shut out the sun. Few songbirds lived in the deep woods. Bright Carolina parakeets - red, green, and yellow - nested in the dark forest. There were ravens then, too. Woodpeckers rattled the big trees' trunks, ruffed grouse whirred their tail feathers in the fall, and every long once in a while a nervous gang of empty-headed turkeys came hustling and kicking through the leaves - but no one heard any of this, no one at all."

Annie Dillard, An American Childhood.