6:19 a.m. 61 degrees, wind N 2 mph. Sky: half-moon in the east supervises sunrise; Venus vanished, in the west beyond my sightline; ground fog rises out of every geographic crease and riffle; cloudless. Permanent streams: upper, my attention held by birds above the streambed, mostly begging juvenile goldfinches attended by haggard parents, then by the water in it, which stammers home; lower, red squirrel commutes down the dry bed, rock hopping; off to work the pines. Wetlands: sheets of mist magically transform an intimate, straw-hued marsh into a lonely outpost, a slice of the primeval, unspoiled landscape . . . a delicious delusion; out of the fog, the hollow voices of yellow-billed cuckoos. Pond: all quiet of the waterfront. Basswood, a rain of yellow heart-shaped leaves, decorates dry rocks of the dry streambed, fifty-square feet of road, and horizontal branches of neighboring shrubs and saplings.
Woodbine (Virginia creeper) on fire; snakes up alders; red leaves ember-bright in an ocean of green alert migrating (and nieve) thrushes the presence of edible fruit, berries as blue as a brooding sky. What a botanist calls foliar fruit flags, the forest billboards announce "eat at woodbines." Rainbow-colored leaves of poison ivy also post foliar fruit flags, hints of waxy, edible white berries—none along my route.
Sunrise constants: crickets' hum and nuthatches' toot. Razor-cry of a red-shouldered hawk, a vocal javelin hurled out of the mist. Crows and jays noisy. Robins silent. Sapsucker's Morse Code, first I've heard in months.
Squirrel-cut pinecone lands at our feet, startle the dogs. A big, crooked pine; a hundred cones, a thousand cones, a squirrel's idea of paradise. Once upon a time, the squirrel had severe competition. Perhaps no other tree in the world, wrote Donald Culross Peattie (1948), has had so momentous a career. Certainly, no other has played so great a role in the life and history of the American people. Fleets were built to its great stands, and railroads bent to them. It created mushroom fortunes, mushroom cities. The permanency of defeat; ecological root canal—light, durable, straight, white pine wood. A towering tree that grew two-hundred feet tall in pure stands, segregated, exclusive, blotted out the sun. Early naturalists wrote of pine as growing in veins as though describing deposits of gold, which in a way it was for the colonists.
Of course, for squirrels, history means nothing (except their own). Cut and drop. Cut and drop. I try to catch a falling cone . . . no luck, too many deflecting thoughts.