Active reflection

Elders

Really tall trees, as I learned at Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest last month, are hard to make out from the ground. The biggest eastern white pines in the little grove called Cathedral Pines, near where we're staying in the 'Dacks, are well over three hundred years old. Like Joyce Kilmer's contemporaneous tulip trees, their patch of woods wasn't exceptional when they were young, touching the hems of 

giants centuries their senior, like countless kin in all directions. They only became exceptional when all around them was razed by rapacious European settlers. It's not clear how this stand of pines survived the loggers who leveled most of the Adirondacks; they may have been saved by something as prosaic as a disputed property line! Eastern white pines don't generally live past 400 years so some of the Dacks' oldest and tallest have fallen already, with more to come.

Regreen

Back to to 'Dacks for some more spring forest bathing! If the drive down to North Carolina last month felt like fast-forwarding to spring, the drive 4 hours' north and 2500 feet in elevation to the Adirondacks turns the clock back again, the deciduous green getting lighter and paler...

Hard to believe it's just four years qgo that we started coming up here. While always in the off season we've seen all seasons but summer (unless this counts): fall in 2020, in 2021, in 2022 and of course in 2023; end of winter fun in 2020, also in 2021, spectacularly in 2023 and 2024; and spring both in 2022 and last year, 2023.

Riversides

Hard to tell from my camera's focusing (more or less) on the raindrops on windows, but these are complementary views - from our corner of Manhattan to Edgewater, NJ across the Hudson, and vice versa.

Dead bug

I've been neglecting this blog! The sciatic flareup I mentioned last week is holding on longer than my last (and first) episode in 2021. I've gotten a boost from visits to a friend's chiropractor who, among other things, has me doing the dead bug stretch.

New neighbor!

Last week I noticed that a new tree planted in front of our building seemed to be a hickory - it had the same leaf explosions from a big 

bud I'd been taught to see in North Carolina, if five rather than seven leaflets and a more common color. Perhaps this is a shagbark hickory?

Remember this one?

Kastanie!

Not the Northern Lights but welcome color on a rainy day.

Religious opera!

Haven't been to the opera in a while, happy to have got tickets for the Metropolitan Opera's new production of John Adams' "El Niño" last night. The opera/oratorio, loosely inspired by Handel's "Messiah" and the medieval miracle plays in which western theater begins, and interleaved with Latin American poetry (and a little Hildegard of Bingen and Martin Luther!), is a retelling of the cosmic miracle of the Nativity of Christ featuring not just one, not just two but five Marys. Two - a soprano and a mezzo-soprano - are in the opera/oratorio as written, but this lush production adds three more, dancers: Indigenous Mary, Tropical Mary and Golden Mary. In a production as visually multi-layered and shimmering as Adams' music, it works - as Mary does in the life of those who revere her - human, local, embodied, immediate but also divine, universal, plural, transcendent.

In search of cognizance

My Kailash adventures seem like a long time ago, but a memoir just published by one of our young Nepali team members is taking me back to the summer 2016 circumambulation. I posed a selfie of myself reading it (with curious spider plant in the background), and he beamed it back, a FaceBook yatra! I've been going back to my pictures from the epic journey in renewed astonishment. 

(It's been diverting reading about our demanding trek, too, because I've been housebound for a few days with a sciatic flare-up.)

May flowers

Spring in New York didn't wait for us... not that I'm complaining.

NYPD @ TNS

While I've been communing with trees, my university has been, like many others, convulsed by student protests at the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Gaza and our complicity in it as Americans. When Columbia students set up a tent encampment to demand their university divest from companies involved in Israel's war on Hamas, some of our students joined them, and others set up an encampment on our campus too, demanding similar divestment from our far smaller endowment. Columbia's was stormed by the NYPD, as were similar protests at other New York schools - leading quickly to the appearance of larger encampments - but our campus seemed to be an exception, the interim president having assured all that she didn't want to call the police. The exception proved the rule yesterday morning, as police arrested students who were sleeping in tents in the lobbies of three schoolm buildings. In short order, faculty bodies across the school put out statements and passed resolutions condemning the president's calling the police, demanding all charges against the protesters be dropped, voting no confidence in the university leadership and endorsing the protesters' call for the university to divest. I followed all this on my phone as we drove back from North Carolina (when I wasn't driving), amazed at how quickly it all unspooled. Who saw this coming? And what happens now, in the last week of the academic year, New School's innocence (again) lost?

Green hills

We spent almost twelve hours on the road driving the nearly 600 miles back to New York. For much of the way we were accompanied by the Applachian hills, now flush with green. Not just because outside temps were for a time in the high 80s, it felt like summer! The redbuds had given way to the cooler purple of paulownias.

Especially on the northern part of our trip, whose hills had still been wintry brownish grey though blushing maroon with maple buds, the transformation was striking. But it struck me also that every square foot of these forests had been through the same transformations I'd been witnessing on my remarkably unremarkable North Carolina walk.

Three wondrous weeks!

Mission accomplished! I wanted to see spring arrive, and did!

Say it with flowers

How to thank my friends? What days we've spent together!

Thanks for continuing to surprise me.

Keep up the good work!

I know you're only getting started.

Thanks some of you for giving me a preview of coming attractions

Rhododendrons and flame azaleas define summer here

but I know I'm going to miss all of you...

I'm not ready to say goodbye!

Daily round

Recent arrival on the daily round: sassafras!

And the mountain laurel have popped.

Et in arcadia ego

Maybe it's sour grapes because we must bid farewell tomorrow

but my forest friends seem to have entered a new, harder phase

Endings for many of the new beginnings I've been witnessing.

Old growth

Why does that picture from Sunday looks so much like an AI-generated folly? Beyond the unreally pretty colors (which I assure you are undoctored), trees usually taper, but these old tulip poplars, like California redwoods, are columnar. The tree also seems to have no canopy, which you ought to be able to make out beyond the lower leaves (unless it's really really tall!). And of course you have no way of knowing that this tree trunk is a good five feet wide! 

One reason for the illusion may be that, like many a very tall old tree, there isn't in fact much canopy left. Life's rough up there, and lightning strike and branchfall seem common. It was hard to get any view to the canopies of these venerable trees, but here's one:

These more fortunate (perhaps younger) three give some sense of the height of these giants, the kinks and waves in whose trunks (barely visible from the base) helps convey the unprocessable height:

There are kinks and waves on this beauty, too, meaning that the glorious canopy this one still has is rather farther up than it looks:

This one fits the image I brought of an old-growth grove, whose enormous and enormously tall trees create a canopy so dense that no other trees can get a foothold below them, making for a spacious 

open-seeming forest floor carpeted with flower. Not that the floor is flat, as it's littered with fallen giants. (These trees can live three centuries or more, so the ones returning to the soil are even older.)

The largest fallen trees in this part of Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest are apparently hemlocks, probably including this hospitably hollow stump. It all leaves me giddily uncertain what to think or say.

That uncertainty is connected to the fact that, grand though these trees are, they are rare only because the rest of the old forests which used to blanket these mountains - indeed the whole eastern part of the US - were felled. (I found myself feeling loggers' lust at these columns of hardwood, and wondering what buildings in Europe and 

beyond are still supported by beams from these forests.) I've known that vanishingly few of the forests from before the arrival or European settlers remain, but that's awareness you can't do much with in a sucessor forest. Will having been here make me now experience those others, as Joan Maloof describes, as mere juveniles? Haunted!