A different day now, a week later. The false summer heat, the strange anomaly that it was, has gone. The heat has been replaced by another anomaly – freakish cold that has sat in over the whole eastern United States, subduing afternoon highs at fifteen, even twenty degrees below normal. Imagine the middle of May in Tennessee when the temperature doesn’t get above fifty-five degrees on the Farenheit scale. Cold. Yesterday was damp as well with what seemed a mist blown in from the Northwest turning central Tennessee into a depressive little Puget Sound without the water or the ferries. At least we have Starbucks.
The little garden I have planted in the backyard maintains, no tropical plant of the Solanaceae can thrive in such depressing weather. Grey skies and November temperatures turn Spring into a hell of existence, destroying any celebration of life, at least for the moment. But this too shall pass – this stretch of chill gloom. And when it does the cell divisions will amplify, making up for lost time. The tomatoes and chilies, okra and cucumbers will stretch their stunted legs and leap toward the life giving sun. In a few weeks there will be blooms and a couple of weeks later the fresh fruit of summer when the perfect supper will be small cucumbers, fresh and cool, tomatoes that drip with an aspic flavorfulness that is more complex than the most prized wine hidden deep in any of the world’s best cellars and the peppers, cayenne, that are simply put, the living heat of life on the planet captured in a slender fruiting body. Add a good chunk of cheese and some crackers to the mix. I’ll take this repast over the entire menu of the finest restaurants of Manhattan.
I believe in eating a simple diet. Not that I always do but I do believe that is how we should eat. In the mornings I have a hard boiled egg from the extras a certain sweet girl brings me from the farm where she works. For sweetness I eat an apple – Gala is my favorite. Last summer while working for the Park Service my lunch usually consisted of a turkey wrap complete with lettuce, onions, and hot peppers from my garden…and potato chips, for the element of salt which I so dearly love. In the winter I enjoy a bowl of oatmeal for breakfast and for lunch black-eyed peas or pinto beans from a can with plenty of hot sauce splashed into it. Don’t read this thinking I don’t eat meat. Roasted chicken and an occasional steak are hard to beat. T everyone’s chagrin I occasionally break out a can of anchovies, each wrapped around a caper. And of course there is the pub food. The little dive bar down the street makes the best hamburgers in town. That’s saying a lot since the population of Murfreesboro has now swelled to 100,000 people. All of them wanting new houses, crackerbox shacks built for profit more than posterity. Or little starter-castles to use a term from Bill McKibben.
All these new houses are the American way of living the American dream. I say keep the house and the quarter acre lot the developer allotted to it. Give me a tent and five acres on scrubby land. I’ll clear what I need and eventually get around to building a “permanent” structure of some sort. Or maybe that isn’t necessary. I’ll take the land as somewhere to go when I get tired of people. I’ll live in one of the hundreds of little houses in the old neighborhood where I currently rent my two bedroom apartment. These aren’t some commercial units built three or four stories high with all electric conveniences included. I live in a house built in 1948 (and it’s the news one on the block) with hardwood floors and big windows. The kitchen has old metal cabinets and a metal sink. The place has character and plenty of space. No carpet to trap allergens, no tightly sealed efficiency windows to trap in cigarette smoke, bad breath, and other poison gasses. Within four blocks of me in all directions are old historic houses, many with crumbling brick. At least four that come to mind were used as hospitals following the Battle of Stones River. Judy Garland’s father grew up in one of these. It was built by President James K. Polk’s brother-in-law. (If you don’t remember who James K. Polk was from your history books he was the president who started our war with Mexico in 1848 when we decided that Texas and the southwest, all the way to California, should be part of the United States. After sacking Mexico City and taking what we wanted the government offered up a pittance of $ 5 million as compensation.) Two blocks away is a mass grave with over two thousand Confederate soldiers buried in a big ring.
These houses around downtown Murfreesboro all sit on land that used to part of the Oaklands plantation. The ground underneath is a rich dark brown which makes growing a garden easy. The land where these new little subdivisions pop up is not rich ground. Often they are set on top of old pastures and often cedar glades. The new owners move in with not very much to work with as far as arable land. But if they are lucky they will get a pleasant wildflowers garden of showy evening primrose, glade larkspur, and glade cress – that is unless the developer hauled in too many loads of topsoil. Then all they get is a yard full of Bermuda grass and landscaped shrubs.
I finished up my glade monitoring last week, judging it a success. I don’t have to do that again until October. I still need to create spreadsheets capturing all the data I collected. Then I will sit down with my major professor and we’ll figure up some way of statistaclly analyzing the data to make a coherent statement about the work. Ecology is inseperable from statistics. The nature of life on Earth cannot be presented in a rational scientific manner without numbers to prove it exists. The beauty of ecological statistics is that they are easily scewable so that a story can be told in a away it will be accepted.
I could write a thesis where I speak of the burst of color provided by the seasonal succession of wildflowers. I could write of the buzzing, heavy flight of the bee as it wanders from one flower to the next collecting nectar in exchange for spreading pollen. But academic journals wouldn’t touch such a paper, no graduate committee would accept these valid truths as legitimate research. And perhaps they are correct not to do so. The world is full of too many poets. What constitutes good research are graphs showing linear regression and correlation between species and their environment and nimble little spreadsheets presenting lists of all soil depths and soil moisture content of all plots, accompanied by some analysis of the variances encountered. There should be lists of plants encountered and these lists should be broken down by the conditions where each was found growing. My job is to offer an interpretation of fact and to guide the reader through the charts and graphs to see how they all fit together. Eureka! Now I see what you have gleaned from months of walking the fields, looking at the ground. It is my job as a researcher to do this. Perhaps my findings will be published in a small, second or third tier academic journal. I will have a readership of two hundred people which will be twice as many readers as have bought (or been given) my first book, Mother Earth & Other Pretty Girls. What would they do if I included a poem in my thesis:
I love the goddess
As she calls to me from the tumbling waters that are cold in January or the bathtub waters of August.
I examine the little blessings she leaves along my path:
Mushrooms, trillium, bloodroot, hickory trees
I think that there is something special in the salamander that crawls under the decaying leaves of the forest floor;
The bracket fungi that spring from the rotting logs that are returning the gift they had once been given.
I try to appreciate all the life, all the energy around me -
The constant recycling of nutrients -
Everything in the forest is being sustained and intellectually I take it all in,
Knowing the processes, having studied them.
But sometimes the sun weaves through the trees a certain brilliant light, seen through tears, humbling me with its beauty.
And that’s when I go deeper, to a place I have a hard time reaching:
Going from head to heart where the mind lets go and a new force of nature opens eyes that so often stay closed.
And somewhere the biological activity comes together in a way I can only describe as “whole”.
Throwing all my field guides and training aside
The only thing I can identify is love.
I hope there is a purpose to this academic botany I have undertaken. I hope someone can build on my work and present a greater truth about the nature of cedar glades based in part on this trail I am currently chopping out of an esoteric idea. I hope my work will cause at least one person to take pause before throwing down a beer can or dumping some old tires in these unique habitats. If so my work will have been a success. Whether or not my work does get noticed likely doesn’t matter. In late February the Leavenworthia will still sprout in the muddy ground to bloom into sweet scented white flowers in March, the poke up its purple blossom toward the sky. Sunnybells will dance yellow and green in their last stronghold under a golden sun in the gentle breezes of late April and the Tennessee coneflower will turn its purple rays toward a sustaining sun as the Earth warms and the ground dries and cracks in mid summer. A landscape will persist as something more than memory, to awaken the interest of a young mind who may pick up the cause to preserve these special places for the generation that comes after them.
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