History, Natural History & the Arts
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.
A Whine Not a Rant
My late sister Karen was our camping family’s
early warning system for mosquito bites.
When she got bitten, the rest of us knew we
had ten minutes to put on repellant—or else.
Repellants began as 612 liquid then gave way
to Off spray and now anything laced with deet.
If you were nostalgic, Woodsman’s Fly Dope
doubled as backpacker deodorant. Its pine-tar
fumes smothered yours and kept other folks
well outside your body-odor dissipation zone.
My friend Raoul romanced Woodsman’s
one teen summer, which may be why after
med school he would specialize in infectious
diseases of internal medicine, not dermatology.
It’s known that only female mosquitoes bite
humans, so if one bites a woman, regardless
of race, might that still be illegal in Georgia?
Mosquitoes model why one person can truly
make a real difference—if you’ve ever spent
the night alone with the bug in your pup tent.
Boy Scouts Then
Fields of flowers and leaves
Fill ditches full of water
— Tao Chi
We called him “Preparation H,”
whose real name was Harold,
but when we went camping
he took so much stuff—maybe
took our Boy Scout motto “Be
Prepared” so to heart—that he
was ever ready for any and
everything, from Scoutmaster
von Limburg giving birth, to
maybe polio ransacking us all,
or even the Asian flu, despite
how it had already flown then.
He carried so many pots and so
many pans, we also called him
“Julia Child’s porter.” And what
with all the food he would pack,
he was sometimes “Corny Copia,”
which nickname was so lost on
so many of us that we variously
dubbed him, with our machete,
The Count of No Accounting,
The Count of Paraphernalia, or
The Count of Mounting Crappo.”
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?”
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
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.
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
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.”
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.”
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.