5:59 a.m. 56 degrees, wind SSW 1 mph. Sky: visible above the ground fog, which rises out of the Ompompanoosuc River valley, and out of every stream, pond, lake, and wetlands in the watershed; clouds feathery and dispersed; one disassembles and recasts itself as tic-tac-toe board, stands thinly curved and plumed, silver-rimmed and radiant. Permanent streams: upper, a crippled flow, silent and shallow; lower, a rocky tribute to what was once a stream . . . and will be yet again. Soon, I hope. It's a thirsty world out there. Wetlands: rising mist softens colors; renders greens and browns two F-stops overexposed. Pond: a river of vapor flows out of the wetlands through a gap in the brush, crosses the road, and merges with malnourished pond fog; then, drifts southeast toward the sun; orb webs sag with dew. A hummingbird pollinates jewelweed. The dogs and I pause for blackberries, small, sweet and juicy, seeds of stone.
From out of the ground fog, a yellow-billed cuckoo swallows his voice, hollow and repetitive. He could eat all day and all night and still not keep up with the webworms, which hang homes, laundry-like from ashes, cherries, apples, and my sacred black walnut—nineteen tenements at last count. Several times a day, I loiter around my bedroom window, hoping to glimpse a hungry cuckoo. Days shorten; time runs down.
Three pewees remind me they're still here. In praise of summer, a red-eyed vireo carols in the pines; in praise of autumn, red squirrels harvest green pine cones. A titmouse, in recognition of what I'm not sure, whistles loudly . . . not loud enough to provoke a band of four chickadees, which feed diffidently (and quietly) in the beeches. One blue jay honks; another apes a red-shouldered hawk.
A hermit thrush flits across the road and joins a robin in the leaf litter, the quest for food, the possible loading and unloading of blacklegged ticks—a dance of millennia. Lyme disease did not magically appear in Lyme, Connecticut, backyards in the 1970s. Biologists working in the Dominican Republic found evidence of a spirochete bacterium similar to the one that causes Lyme disease, Borrelia burgdorferi, in the gut of a tick imprisoned in amber. The tick and its cargo were more than fifteen million years old. And, biologists from the Yale School of Public Health found evidence the B. burgdorferi has been coursing through North American forests for at least sixty thousand years, long before humans arrived on the continent. After sequencing the full genomes of one hundred forty-eight spirochetes, the biologists determined that B. burgdorferi originated in the Northeast and, aided by charitable birds, spread south to the Gulf Coast and west to California.
Mild winters and wet summers favor blacklegged ticks, which move on average twenty-eight miles further north each year. Hungry larvae and nymphs catch rides north on ground-feeding birds (robins, hermit thrushes, and catbirds, for instance)—meals and transportation all-inclusive.
I was dining in an outdoor restaurant the other evening. Sometime between the last French fry and paying the bill, I removed a blacklegged tick nymph from my thigh. Too small to crush and not wanting to toss it in the path of someone else, I had one option for disposal . . . submersion in a mound of ketchup. A rudimentary fossil, a gift for future paleontologists to explain.