History, Natural History & the Arts
Ed Zahniser retired as the senior writer and editor with the National Park Service Publications Group in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. He writes and lectures frequently about wilderness, wildlands, and conservation history topics. He is the youngest child of Alice (1918-2014) and Howard Zahniser (1906–1964). Ed’s father was the principal author and chief lobbyist for the National Wilderness Preservation System Act of 1964. Ed edited his father’s Adirondack writings in Where Wilderness Preservation Began: Adirondack Writings of Howard Zahniser, and also edited Daisy Mavis Dalaba Allen’s Ranger Bowback: An Adirondack farmer - a memoir of Hillmount Farms (Bakers Mills).
Toward a Covid School of Poetry
Dante self-quarantined for the Black Death,
which killed his muse Beatrice, as well as
Francesco Petrarch’s muse Laura, inventing
modern poetry, even as it killed one-third
of Europe’s population. Folks fear bears
and mountain lions now, but lowly fleas,
rat-vectored, proved the executioners,
to become the world’s most deadly being.
Metaphysics with No Sunblock
If the crescendo of soundbites
holds you back from that inner
silence touted as metaphysical
just turn your eyeballs inward
where it’s dark inside your head.
Now, conjure up a placid river
Then watch just how cautiously
deer come down to drink as you
imagine floating by on your back
trusting the river’s buoyancy.
But try not to think things
like: “I should wear sunblock.”
Cabin Pantry Discovery
On first opening the cabin for summer,
in the pantry, a mustard jar sits ringed
with the mouse turds of ubiquity.
Mice are so sly that we do not deny
they’re adeptn at coining speech, here
homonyms of spices and species.
Local But Epic
A semi-straight crow
lands on the palm reader’s
arthritic index finger.
Our futures—we must
understand—will
now never again
be the same.
Reciprocity
Walking the paved path atop the embankment
leading down to the long-term-care facility,
I recall how poet William Stafford stopped
his car to roll a dead deer off the highway,
down into the canyon below, out of simple
respect for this other blood, in witness to our
reciprocity with the more-than-human world.
Legacy of Heights
Mountain peaks are shy today
Having cast about themselves
Dense cloud coverings but
After seventy some summers
Their outlines have long
Since implanted themselves
In your brain’s soft tissues
Subject to fond recollection,
The residue of aspirations
Now cast on your grandkids
Like a cloak that empowers.
Summer Cabin Life
Joy came measured in water buckets hauled.
Heavy loads of firewood pushed out their songs.
We lived long lives daily in our semi-solitude.
As old age looms now, these moments matter.
Absence turns into its own strange presence.
The old fieldstone fireplace radiates warmth,
So that should-be field mice move in with us,
But conflict-free — if we secure all foodstuffs.
Hyperactive at night, they hold their Olympics.
We wish they’d hunker down, cap their appetite.
Of mice and men revolves around sleep routines.
Crane Mountain Summit, Adirondacks
Steep climbing into more rare air underscores
how what is most immediate takes primacy
You may even suspect an expansive mind
goes before your own like explorers’ scouts
Knowing-ahead was essential to their role,
to evoke the intuitive grounded in experience
Each encounter with the unknown may ape
unlocking our entire panoply of experience
as Beauty and Sanctity chat across disciplines
like circus barkers auditioning for Heaven.
Electric Fence
This is my barbed wire dress. It protects the
property but doesn’t hide the view.
— Candy Darling
My concern for critters is by no means
mere sentiment. Not that I won’t swat
mosquitoes and house flies, do war
with ants in the kitchen area, or even,
in the past, trap the occasional mouse.
To such as these I confess and apologize.
But as a young kid I had a telescoping
flyrod made of metal. And once, as I
negotiated a barbed-wire fence along
Edwards Hill Road, I placed the rod, as
I held its metal part, on barbed wire
with current flowing through it — and
so through me, too. It was no pleasant
sensation, only smoothed-over somewhat
by my then catching a few brook trout.
Rattlers Working Northward
The late Cub Schaefer swore he once
dodged a rattlesnake on the trail up
Crane Mountain from the Putnam Farm.
But Cub had a reputation for the magical,
plus a smile broad as the Hudson River
—to put the utmost polite spin on it.
Years later, eastern rattlesnake expert
Martin Martin told me rattlers live no
farther north in the Adirondack Region
than Lake George, far south of here,
not to mention Crane’s elevation.
Global climate change does urge rattlers
on now, pushing their range northward.
Still, it’s a far cry south to Lake George,
and summer nights can be cold here.