Thoreau's Legacy (3 page)

Black Spring

Jill Carpenter

DURING THE WINTER OF 2006-2007, THE MILD WEATHER in Sewanee, Tennessee, at the southern end of the Cumberland Plateau, made me vaguely uneasy. I told myself that we live in a transition zone, so particular natural events have taken our attention at odd times: the spring of the dogwood blight, the summer of the ringworm epidemic.

In 2006 we were still finding ticks on the dog in November, when tick season should have ended. December, January, and February came and went without real cold, and by March the nights were eerily balmy. The plants had been totting up the warm nights, and many broke bud four weeks earlier than usual.
It was a
spring without winter.
Dogwoods and redbuds bloomed, bumblebees buzzed
around wisteria blossoms, jack-in-the-pulpits sent up sturdy jacks. Tender green leaves emerged on the trees and shrubs. I filled a nectar feeder in anticipation of our first ruby-throated hummingbird, which arrived on April 3.

A few nights later the temperature dropped to 18 degrees. I arose to find the hummingbird nectar a tube of ice, flowers drooping, insects fallen silent. For four nights temperatures were in the teens. I brought in the nectar feeder after dark and set the alarm so I could put it out again before daybreak. I imagined the hummingbird frozen solid, but each day it appeared.

The wildflowers were not so resilient. When temperatures rose above freezing, they turned to black slime. The forest looked as if it had been blowtorched.

Mike and Edie Allen visited us briefly from Riverside, California. Self-described “disaster ecologists,” they have studied the effects of hurricanes and volcanoes. They added our crazy spring to their list. Long-term effects? We could only wait and see.

In June we had a new forest canopy, but the trees had to go to the bank and take out a loan to produce it. They could photosynthesize, but fruits and seeds were lost. The summer and fall commenced dry and hot. Lake levels dropped, and water supplies throughout the region were overtaxed. We were in the bull’s-eye on the drought map of the Southeast. I watered the brown and dying azaleas with dishwater. The fall of 2007 was a fall without. I swept no acorns from the front walk. No local apples were available. No berries, no rosehips—none. Sparrows looked for a few grass seeds along the roadways. Squirrels and birds used the seed feeders heavily. Millipedes and orb-weaver spiders were nowhere to be found. The deer, small and thin-sided, approached closer than usual and ate every banana peel I tossed out, including the labels.

This year seems “normal,” except for several large dead trees in our yard. Plants and animals are making up for last year’s triple whammy of heat, freeze, and drought. Hummingbirds have flowers to balance their diet, hollies and dogwoods are loaded with berries, and acorns are beginning to fall. But I look at world temperature trends and realize it may be only a short respite. The unease persists.

Jill Carpenter
has worked as a college biology teacher, used book store owner, science writer, and editor. In her hometown of Sewanee, Tennessee, she helped found the Dead Plants Society, a group of women who meet weekly to draw and share natural history observations. 

Rural Southern Georgia

Janisse Ray

I NEVER SAW A SPRING SO STORMY. SPRING IS SUPPOSED to be a time of fragrant wisteria and five blue-green eggs the size of jellybeans in a nest box. Spring is mild, emergent, translucent.

It’s March. I wake to rain, an army of clouds that darken and lower by the hour. By midmorning the weather radio pops on with an alert:
Tornado watch in surrounding counties
. Outside there’s lightning, long and brilliant and vicious, accompanied by its sidekick, thunder, rolling in great booms—bowling balls across an alley. I call my mother, who tells me that she and Daddy will get under the stairs if there’s a tornado.

“I have never seen daylight this dark,” I say. “This is like night.”

Rain is falling so hard the ground has long since given up absorbing it. The water is two inches deep in places. The alert radio alarms: a tornado has touched down in Dublin.
Prepare to take shelter immediately
.

I live in a tinderbox. The house, about eighty years old, is made of heart pine, which is very flammable. Some of the windows come out in your hands when you raise them. In the yard, thirty feet from the back door, an old-growth longleaf pine leans toward the house.

My dad calls back. He wants me to get into the ditch out by the road.

“What if I get sucked up?”

“Get in the culvert,” he says.

“And if it floods?”

We hang up because I want to listen for a roar like a train.
It’s hailing,
ice chunks so big
you could bag and sell them.
The weather radio is calling out all the places where tornadoes have been spotted.
Take cover! Should a tornado touch down you will not have time.

I put blankets on the floor of the small hallway, next to the freezer. I close all the doors leading to the hall.

Growing up in south Georgia, I never heard of tornadoes in spring. They came in summer and fall. Scientists say that warmer temperatures will favor the severe thunderstorms that give birth to tornadoes, and it’s possible that the tornado season could shift to what used to be the colder months. This looks like the climate crisis to me.

I wait a long time, thinking,
We are being taken by storm.
But after a while the sky lightens, and finally the weather robot says that the storms are beyond us, farther east, and our county is no longer under a warning. I can come out.

Janisse Ray,
an author, activist, and naturalist, lives on a family farm in south Georgia. Ecology of a Cracker Childhood is her best-known book.

God’s Glorious Gifts

Diego Paris

“FEAST YOUR EYES!” MY FATHER SAID TO ME ONE autumn morning. The sun was at just the right angle to hit the leaves of a burning bush in a lucky man’s front yard, making the shrub’s already vibrant red leaves glow with autumn fervor.

I have been lucky enough to grow up in New England, where we see such wonderful sights each fall, but I have also been lucky enough to visit my mother’s tropical homeland, Puerto Rico, every year. Some people may think that the island’s exotic climate and always-warm weather must make it paradise, but I tell you that in New England we have it better. It isn’t that P.R. isn’t a wonderful place, but here we have more to ogle in our own back yard. The glory of God and Mother Nature is the seasons, and nothing is better than autumn leaves and winter frost.
I still love to
see my breath
and pretend it’s dragon fire
, breathed gallantly on encroaching knights and cooking them to a crisp while I rest in my snowy lair. Yes, fourteen-year-old teens enjoy making the odd snow fort. Isn’t that wonderful?

Anything and everything that threatens my autumn and winter glory and frolic would be bad, unnatural, and unwanted. I have read about global warming and its impending effects, and I confess that I don’t care if the “demon” behind it is fossil fuel, some screwy temperature cycle, giggling aliens with giant mirrors in space, or even that slightly off guy down the street who gives me odd looks when I walk around the block with my old camera to take black-and-white pictures for my Photography 1 course. I just want whatever or whoever is causing global warming to shove off, and I’m willing to make some sacrifices to help that process. I love my New England seasons with all my heart, and the idea of one long summer or one long winter—whatever it is the scientists have lately been predicting—is enough to make me scream in anger and pain.

So the next time you enjoy our wonderful seasons, experiencing the brightly colored leaves, that wonderful fireplace smell in the streets, and snow angels, I want you to walk over to your thermostat and turn it All the Way Down. Shiver a bit. Curl up in bed and read books about kings, dragons, and knights, and stop every other page to act out the dragon’s part with your smoky breath. Hell—catch pneumonia and spend a week in front of the fireplace sniffling with family and friends and know that you wouldn’t have a fireplace if it weren’t for God, Mother Nature, and the seasons. And then look at the red-hot coals in the fireplace and remember that if there’s even a snowball’s chance in Hell that you’re helping protect the seasons, God’s glorious gifts, it’s worth it.

Diego Paris
is in the ninth grade and lives in Winchester, Massachusetts. An avid reader, he hopes one day to become a science-fiction novelist.

A Grandfather’s Tale

Thomas Huntington

SOME YEARS AGO, WHEN I WAS WORKING IN GREAT Smoky Mountains National Park, I ran into a fellow who worked for the National Park Service. He had a team of pack horses that regularly provisioned volunteers working for extended periods in remote parts of the park. He was from the foothills of the Smokies on the North Carolina side of the park, where his family had lived for generations.

This man spoke with a classic mountain accent, and he spoke from the experience of generations living in an area attuned to the natural world. As we talked about some of the ongoing changes in the forest, he related an anecdote that I will never forget. He told me that his grandfather had said to him, “Time was a man could kill a hog by Thanksgiving, and now a man cain’t hardly kill a hog.”

He explained that his people had lived back in the hills long before there was electricity for refrigeration, and no one had an ice house, as people did in northern New England. However, up in the cool, damp, shady mountain hollows, meat could be cured without spoiling if the animal was slaughtered late enough in the year; it would remain cool until it was time to cook the meat.

For a long time
their family tradition
had been to slaughter a hog at Thanksgiving
and then cure it until Christmas or New Year’s in one of those shady hollows. But his grandfather was saying that by the 1980s the climate had warmed so much that it was no longer possible to slaughter a hog with confidence that it would cure without spoiling. Too often a warm spell would arrive and spoil the meat.

As I walk through my woodlot in Maine these days, this story haunts me, and I think about the changes going on around me. Will I be telling my grandchildren about the “olden days,” when trees cut from this woodlot warmed us in the cold snowy winters? Will the sturdy fabric of New England, like that of the North Carolina mountains, pass into memories and folk tales?

Thomas Huntington,
a scientist studying the impacts of climate change, lives in Augusta, Maine. He conducted research on acid deposition in the Smoky Mountains in the 1990s.