Another American Adventure: Hug A Tree

Thursday, July 21, 2011

Hug A Tree

Dunno, but it's the trees (and wood), both fallen and growing, that are most catching my attention on the morning walk with Jubilee. It really is so odd and complex when you look at it. And grows in strange ways, at least in these woods. When you touch the fallen wood you sense that you know something but you can't express it.

And then there was this ...

2 comments:

BarbaraJuly 21, 2011 at 11:31 AM
O you would love Cathedral Grove on the road that connects Nanaimo to Port Alberni on Vancouver Island (near where West Coast Barbara and her Daisy live). Here is a link. http://www.cathedralgrove.eu/text/01-Cathedral-Grove-1.htm
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beth cioffolettiJuly 21, 2011 at 4:30 PM
Yes, I would love it. I love most everything about the Pacific Northwest.
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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.