The second week of May turned out to be hot. Not the sweet heat of May with its heady scent of flowers on a soft breeze. During the second week of May the temperature soared up to ninety degrees with a heavy humidity in the air. It felt more like late July than May. In short, the second week of May offered a glimpse of my favorite kind of weather.
On Monday I pulled my truck around to the garage and loaded up my new lawn mower and old but trusty string trimmer and blower. I drove two blocks over to College Street where I had just picked up my first yard to mow. Twenty-five dollars for what I expected to be forty-five minutes of work. It was a little yard behind a great gothic Victorian mansion, complete with lightening rods disguised as weather vanes and turrets. I unloaded my gear, pushed it through the century old iron gate, then walked the yard picking up sticks. There were several. Then I mowed. The whole affair took about an hour, not a bad exchange rate of my time for the money. In most any other venture I sell off my time for much less and often its for labor that isn’t half so fulfilling and worthwhile (in a city setting anyway) of giving someone’s lawn a manicured appearance. I find most work to be tolerable so long as I can see the effects of my efforts and so long as I feel the trade off of time for compensation was worth it.
I’ve had jobs before where I didn’t really see what was happening though I knew I was performing designated tasks. When I was in the Navy I was a professional administrator for the most part, filling out reports, reviewing requisition form turned in by those I supervised. I wish I could say lead, isn’t the job of a military officer to be a leader? I did lead, especially at sea or anytime I was assigned to a ship. Young sailors need guidance, just as a butter bar such as my self had needed some gentle prodding and pointers from the Chiefs’ Mess. There is a way a Navy Chief, who has been on sea duty for fifteen or twenty years, has of saying “Sir” that let’s a newly pinned officer know his place in the overall scheme of things. That lasts for a couple of years. It’s a long period of training. But, ideally, young officers are being taught by the technical experts. A man or woman is born with the ability to lead if they are going to have any aptitude for it. But its impossible to do, even for someone who has the ability, if those under you don’t think you know what you’re talking about. That is one flaw I see in the system of military rank, the overnight transformation from cadet or midshipman to officer without having to put in the years of work required to really know the job. But the military addresses this issue by having senior enlisted personnel take new officers under their wing to train them. I became an efficient administrator, and a decent leader in my opinion. But I still had rather cut grass than fill out paperwork. That said, I do miss the sea.
I miss going topside to smoke a cigar, watching the day slowly dissolve into night on a slate blue sea of gentle swells. I miss the strange creatures that lurk in the depths, occasionally breaching the surface to reveal themselves to the astonished eyes of a Tennessee landlubber. The most impressive animal I have ever seen was a whale shark, thirty feet long, the largest fish on the planet. We had run over it somewhere off the coast of Ecuador near the Galapagos Islands, the bow having cut deeply into the animal’s side. Down in my little office I had felt the bump, then the jarring vibrations as we reversed engines to back off of the large, slow moving and harmless creature. I ran topside to see what was happening. Looking down from the starboard gunwale I watched the big whale shark sloshing languidly but no doubt painfully from side to side. I watched the broad strokes of its massive tail. The whale shark was brown with white spots. After a few minutes it slowly rolled over revealing a whitish belly. A sense of finality hung in the air, a feeling that some irretrievable wrong had yielded an uncorrectable result. Slowly, heavily the large fish sank into the clear glassy water, never to know the wonder of the sun’s light again. People say what they will, the death of a large creature carries an impact that no one can deny. What the creature lacked in humanity it made up for in size. There is an emptiness in the death of all things when they die due to human actions that no amount of evolutionary selection could have prepared them for. Even the squirrel that runs under the tires of my truck puts a little kink in my day. Call me a softy but you’ve felt it too. Why else would we swerve into the lane of oncoming traffic to avoid running over a squirrel or turtle crossing the road? As for the big whale shark, I suppose his death wasn’t a total loss. Even as his big dead carcass drifted down beneath the swells a pod of pilot whales approached across the waters in response to some sort of distress signal, be it vibrations or chemical, the shark had released into the water. Once again death sustains life.
Alas, such is the ease with which one can get sidetracked when writing a rhapsodical piece loosely based on the nature of cedar glades. I was talking about cutting grass (which isn’t really what I meant to be writing about either) and wound up describing the death throws of a whale shark off the coast of South America. How ‘bout that for some arm chair travel?
After I finished with the yard I drove back to my house and unloaded my lawn care equipment. In its place I loaded a one meter long by half meter wide PVC rectangle, a soil moisture probe, and a backpack with a fieldbook, a couple screwdrivers, a ruler, a wildflower guide, and a couple of water bottles stuffed inside. I called my dog who bound into my truck without hesitation, always ready to go for a ride.
I drove out Hall’s Hill Pike with Flatt & Scruggs blaring from my radio. I love the banjo wizardry of Earl Scruggs, even more so since he invented the way people play bluegrass banjo today. My favorites are “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” (of course) and “Shuckin’ the Corn”, both fast driving little numbers played by musicians so good you can almost feel the smug arrogance in their performance…the kind of confidence I like in good music.
I pulled into the parking lot and sat in the truck for another minute to hear the last bit of a song play. Then I took a big pull from one of the water bottles, shoulder the pack and hung the PVC rectangle (henceforth to be called a sampling plot) and moisture probe around my neck and began the long trek back to my transects.
The trail wended its way up a wet weather creekbed then over a stubbly field of prickly brambles that had been bushhogged the previous fall. The sun was scorching hot as I left the shade of the woods. All along the way I looked for new wildflowers to photograph for the field guide. Over the course of the Spring I had made many trips out to Flat Rock and I believe there is not a species of plant that had not caught my eye if it was in flower.
This would be an opportune time to offer an overview of the lay of the land and the vegetation I walked through.
As I said previously in this essay central Tennessee is a land of steep but relatively small hills cut with generally narrow hollows (hollers). The very middle of central Tennessee is a land of gently rolling hills much like the bluegrass country of Kentucky, perfect pastureland, most of it clay but much of it with deep, rich black soil. It this landscape cedar glades stick out like a scraps of barren wasteland sprinkled amid an oasis. They are hot and dry, covered with thin soil at best, often with none at all. Borken limestone flagstone lays scattered decaying all over the ground. Low spots are muddy holes of fetid soil in Spring and Winter, becoming hard and cracked in Summer and Fall. At Flat Rock the glades are surrounded, but never encroached upon, by post oak and blackjack oak, red cedar, and glade privet. Within the glade the casual observer will find a host of herbaceous plants producing the wildflowers that are currently the focus of my life along with prickly pear cactus, glade moss, reindeer lichen, a green alga called Nostoc, and a biotic crust of tiny brown lichens as yet unstudied as far as I know. Beneath this landscape the Earth is hollowed out and dissected by an elaborate system of caves and water ways which occasionally undermine the surface rock, causing large sink holes to collapse into the earth.
My first transects of the day were located just over a mile back. One ran through a glade streamside meadow where a spring sends cold, cold water through a series of rock fissures to eventually issue forth through a boggy glade of grass and sunnybells. From there it joins another tributary of bare rock before entering the woods briefly to fall into a sink hole. From there only the copepods and cave crickets knows where it goes…and anyone who may have performed a dye test.
A word of explanation is necessary to help the reader understand how my study is set up: I am studying the relationship between soil depth and soil moisture to species richness. Species richness is a term for identifying ever species of plant in a given area. To this end I have set up five pairs of parallel transect, each fifteen meters long. One of the transects runs through the wettest area of the glade while the other runs through a dry area. Along each of these transects I lay down the sampling plot five times at predetermined intervals. I measure the moisture within each plot with a high dollar moisture probe on loan from the U.S. Geologic Survey, I measure the soil depth with a screw driver and a ruler, and I visually observe all the different plants that are growing within the plot. This sounds pretty easy and I don’t try to make it seem like more than it is but often plants are very frustrating to identify when all you have to work with is the leaves, especially when the sprouts are just beginning to poke up out of the ground. Each transect takes an hour sometimes more, sometimes less, to complete. Such is the nature of botanical surveying.
And to what end am I performing this study? Mostly to show that I know how to set up an experiment. Is that not the nature of Master’s level graduate work? Ideally I will be able to establish a predictive model what will grow where and in what concentration, become a sought after expert in helping developers and road builders figure out where to build a house or an interstate highway while doing the least damage possible to a fragile landscape. Only time will tell.
The first two transects went well enough, took just over two hours. The heat was making me lightheaded. I sat on a flat slab of limes tone and drank some water and enjoyed an all natural, slow burning cigarette. This slab of rock is my favorite spot at Flat Rock. It sits at the edge of the woods under a scraggly by striving winged elm. It was here a couple of months before that some friends and I had sat into darkness one night when we had come out to walk our dogs. While I was off checking one of my transects, making sure no raccoon or coyote had pulled my nails out of the ground (it has happened) one of them had built a little fire of dead cedar branches. When I walked back up I was surprised and suspected that building fires in a nature preserve was probably forbidden but there wasn’t a sign (at least not here) and the fire was so nice as the chill of night came on. I asked for a pull from the wine bottle. So nice. In the dryness of the spicy smoke of the cedar and the little glow of the crackling fire I felt totally at peace. After awhile the fire died out and we hiked back in the dark. Two weeks later I returned and found a sign hanging on the little winged elm outlining forbidden activity within the confines of the nature preserve:
No fires
No alcohol
No dogs offleash
Come one Department of Environment and Conservation…let a guy have a little fun while he does his research. At least I saw the sign before I broke yet another rule: No camping.
Refreshed but still sweating like a stuck hog I walked farther back into the large glade and found the nails that marked my third transect. Sampling is tedious, if not terribly physically demanding work. Especially on a hot day with the sun beating down from above. The heat had turned the sky to a high hazy grey. I decided to break up the monotony of sampling I’d take off my t-shirt and shorts. Hell, boxers too. Why not? Getting naked is a constructive step toward alleving boredom. I sampled the next two plots au natural and in the process got a pretty good sunburn. But know this: as the day wears on sampling can get sloppy. The sampler may loose sight of the importance of taking notice of each blade of grass. He or she must be vigilant to maintain focus and make sure the sense of focus is not lost. So getting naked is a necessary indulgence at times when the day has worn on, the sun has beat down, and the thought of laying down a sampling plot to see what’s there seems like an enormous task.
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