At Lake Minerva
Clouds brush by my notebook to lose cohesion
downhill: No smoke from someone’s campfire.
Chipmunks beg — or worse — near the snack bar.
Fix your mind on this moment, and the mountain
asks: “Who are you?” But you hear “Who am I?”
Ed Zahniser On American Wilderness History
The history of achieving the 1964 Wilderness Act in the U.S. Congress is commonly seen as an eight-year legislative struggle. The first wilderness bills were introduced in Congress in 1956 — in the House of Representatives by John P. Saylor of Pennsylvania and in the Senate by Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota.
The Wilderness Act was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on September 3rd, 1964. My father, Howard Zahniser, primary author of the Act, had died in May 1964. My mother, Alice, attended the White House signing, and President Johnson gave her a pen he used. Three years later President Johnson sent me a letter telling me I was being drafted for two years of US Army service. [Read more…] about Ed Zahniser On American Wilderness History
Poetry: Wild Predator Attacks
Wild Predator Attacks
What’s the chance that you will
be attacked by a wild predator?
Slim. Attacks are so rare each one
rates its own listing on Wikipedia.
If the 20th Century was an indicator,
you’ll more likely die domestically.
Black bears, wolves, and mountain lions
killed fewer Americans than lightning,
bathtub drownings, or getting crushed
underneath falling vending machines.
The most recent reported black bear
attack in the Adirondack Mountains
(2018) came when a man hospitalized
after his ATV crashed lied, reporting
how he had fought off a black bear.
Ed Zahniser: Woodpecker Wake-up Calls
One morning early, as I slept in our mountain cabin Mateskared, a woodpecker landed on the cabin’s wood siding. Its profound rapid-fire pecking jerked me out of sound sleep.
Did we have robo-termites?
Not in the Adirondacks. [Read more…] about Ed Zahniser: Woodpecker Wake-up Calls
Poetry: Little Boy Lost
Little Boy Lost
I asked him “What are you afraid of?”
“Dunno,” he said, “something.” So I said
“Well, you’re in the right world!” — in case
he’d reincarnated from another realm, like
old Buddhists exit meditation with strange
looks on their faces, glints in their eyes —
“because this world is so replete with some-
things, you can spend many lives and loves
ricocheting from one something to another
something, until somethings seem to have
an n minus one relation to other somethings,
implying endless fears if you’re fearful, but
if not, I suggest you downplay reincarnation.
Instead, stop and smell the flowers, maybe
start with carnations then follow your nose
— like the girl whose seasonal walks forever
returned her home, nose dusted with pollen.”
Poetry: Did He Say Postmodern?
Did He Say Postmodern?
He told me the wild and wilderness
weren’t wild at all but cultural.
I said, “You mean like buttermilk
that has been set out to go sour?”
He said he didn’t know about that,
but yes, wildness was a construct,
a cultural construct, something
made up and dependent on where
and how you lived, maybe what
your ancestors thought about life.
“If a mountain lion bites through
your thigh, is that such a construct?”
I asked. I could sense that he thought
this was a joke. So, I told him: “Go
take a hike in the woods!” as I was
exasperated now. “Oh no,” he said,
“I don’t think I’d feel comfortable.”
Poetry: Forest Recovery
Forest Recovery
The old cabin being too small
for the escalating generations
of our parents’ offspring now
we rented a large log place
down the road maybe
one-third of a mile
whose back porch looks
out on Eleventh Mountain
closer than at the old cabin
making it look
as our sister would have said
“like a whole new mountain”
— that and how the forest
has now grown up to conceal
our former lookout rock
we would climb to as kids
as those back at the cabin
watched for us then waved
mixed forest across the road
from the old cabin may soon
keep the mountain its secret.
Poetry: Memory Verse
Memory Verse
My extended family refers to bathrooms
as the “John,” because our old Adirondack
vacation cabin has a two-holer outhouse
we cherish despite its inconvenience —
keeping wood ashes and cured hay on hand
to dry the “payloads” and sweeten the mix
eventually raked out the back onto a dried-
hay carpet to be rolled-up like a rug to compost.
This may explain why super early this morning
as my wife returned from the bathroom — we ate
watermelon late last night — I awoke to interpret
our big-type digital clock as reading “John 3:16.”
Poetry: Gray Hudson Hornet
Gray Hudson Hornet
—In Memory of Don Greene, 46-er #1949
It’s upside-down-bathtub design made
1950s Hudson sedans look like think tanks
with the shallow end toward the rear but
who knew this when Buffalo Boy Don Greene
pulled up in front of my childhood home
at 6222 Forty-Third Avenue in Hyattsville
Maryland to give me a ride to my summer
construction job working for Paul Schaefer
in Schenectady New York in summer 1962
and I fixed Don my specialty sourdough
pancakes I’d learned to make the summer
before in Alaska’s Brooks Range to fuel
our long road trip north and Don refused
a third pancake because he was a mountain
climber then and explained how he would
not carry an extra pound in his climbing
pack so why pack it on his person which
logic suited me fine because I expected
sermons from older friends then since
I was the youngest of four kids myself
and didn’t yet need the Buddha’s help
to dis-identify with my ego which mostly
looked like the derby hat Charlie Chaplin
sat on and that I inwardly chuckled over
when Don’s old Hudson motored onto
the New York State Thruway that had
no Interstate Route number back then
nor pushed northward toward Montreal
right through the Adirondack Mountains
the weekends subtext of my summer job.
Poetry: Explication
Explication
Adelaide Crapsey, poet near to death
and tubercular, wrote: “I’ll not
be patient. I will not lie still.”
Strained — her tight, short blasts of breath.
Outside her window headstones dot
her imaged landscape all must fill
one day, abruptly and forever, patient,
lying as still as microbiology
will allow. Mission means “sent.”
Do we have one? Are we? Ask the sill
of Adelaide’s thin window on eternity.
It glosses by transparency
the point between a breath
and no breath, where redundancy
ends, yet we become it — Death
as she bore Sweet Christ, all our beds are made.