In the Sands, the Dust, the Snows, and the Mud of Time

[A] track is a temporary thing. Unless the mud goes suddenly hard and turns gradually to stone, tracks do not last. They fade, and as they dry, the wind sweeps them relentlessly level to ease its way across the ground. Tracks exist at the interface where the sky drags along the surface of the earth. They exist for a relatively brief time in a narrow level near the surface of the ground where the wind and weather move across, changing the temperature and building information into the track. Nature conspires to steal even the traces of passage. Most tracks made in the world go under unseen. I try to follow every one I can.
- The Tracker: The true story of Tom Brown, Jr., as told to William Jon Watkins.

One of the many glories of an unpaved road is the way it holds tracks. On our morning walks, Sarah sniffs the grass and weeds at the side of the road: that’s her morning newspaper, her nose telling her who’s been where and what's gone on. While she uses her nose, I depend on my eyes to note the patterns made by a tractor, trails of another, earlier walker, the narrow, winding path of a snail, tiny bird footprints, a place where a deer leaped or stepped daintily across the road or where a coyote trotted or strolled, or the surprise evidence that sandhill cranes have been in the neighborhood. 

Until the rains come, that is, washing the slate clean until the next round of news is printed.

Noting tracks, following trails gives me an anticipation for winter and reminds me of the year I spent an hour a week just sitting outdoors, being in one place.

The more we learned to let our attention wander and come to rest on the thing at hand just often enough to catch the disturbances, the better we became as trackers and as observers of the woods.

I was reading those words one morning out on the front porch, before sunrise, with many different messages coming to me through the window – tapping of a woodpecker, crow’s call, screech of jay, rustle of linden leaves, my attention wandering easily and seamlessly from the words on the page to the outdoor sounds and back again.

Our intrepid Ulysses reading group will be getting together next week to discuss Hemingway’s Nick Adams Stories and to propose our next reading adventure. Now that summer is over, we will probably return to “challenging” books, books for which we feel the need of “a support group,” as one member called it when we first came together to read James Joyce. But first we’ll be talking about Hemingway, and I’m still sorting through my responses on that score. Never mind separating the man from the myth – it’s separating the writer from the myth that concerns me.

A recent New York Times “Bookends” piece asked, “Do We Mistake Inaccessibility for Brilliance?” In other words, if a book is very, very long and difficult to read, do we think it must be a work of genius? Hemingway does not force us to that question, especially with his short stories. His style can hardly be called convoluted.

Out through the front of the tent he watched the glow of the fire when the night wind blew on it. It was a quiet night. The swamp was perfectly quiet. Nick stretched under the blanket comfortably. A mosquito hummed close to his ear. Nick sat up and lit a match. The mosquito was on the canvas, over his head. Nick moved the match quickly up to it. The mosquito made a satisfactory hiss in the flame. The match went out. Nick lay down again under the blankets. He turned on his side and shut his eyes. He was sleepy. He felt sleep coming. He curled up under the blanket and went to sleep.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Nick Adams Stories

Does the simplicity of Hemingway’s style mark it as as a work of genius? Did he, as has often been said, as he himself seems to have claimed, give us a new way to see the world?

In a way, it seems, every writer with a voice of his or her own cannot help giving a new way to see the world, for despite our commonalities and connections and dependencies, despite the cultural grids through which we perceive, each of us must perceive the world for ourselves. I cannot see through your eyes or hear through your ears: what world do I have to offer except the one my own eyes and ears, my own hands and feet and nose and mouth and skin and muscles give me?

So that can’t be the question. The question has to be, instead: Do I see the world differently for having read Hemingway? Do you? Or can any of us only read his work through the myth of Hemingway the writer? 

I’ll leave the questions there for today, but please feel welcome to leave your two cents' worth. It's a quiet, rainy Friday. Sarah and I are at the bookstore. What are you doing with this only September 18, 2015, of your life?

Back in the Woods Again, Part II

Cutest FOOT!

As this is Part II, you may want to refer to Part I to compare some of these. My top photograph here, for instance, is a single track in the same trail as the two prints I called the "dearest" in Part I. This one is dear, too, don't you think?

The animal double-registers, i.e., steps in its own tracks.

Another hopper--this one obvious, eh?

Remember the foot-dragger? Here is the length of stride.

Little underground trail revealed

Back down the hill

All in all, this was one of my most exciting and satisfying days in the woods ever. And then it was back down the hill and back home to inspect photographs more closely and open my tracking book for another kind of excitement. Life is good! It's good to be back on my feet and back outdoors again.

Back in the Woods--At Last! Part I

Up the hill we follow the tracks

What with one thing and another (David's cold, my sprained ankle, my cold) it’s been weeks since I’ve been up the hill. Finally came a sunny day when I felt well enough to tackle it. Sarah has been ready all along--no need to ask her twice!

Another pair of strollers had been on the slope before Sarah and I arrived on Monday afternoon. Those are the tracks we saw on our way up the hill.

So who else has been in the woods lately? I’m not confident enough to claim to identify in a public forum the tracks I saw, even the easy ones, but here is a sampling from one exciting expedition, and let me say that the traffic patterns in the snow were incredible—armies of mice, volumes of voles, squadrons of squirrels, rabbits and birds everywhere, and maybe? Maybe? Maybe a bobcat, and maybe a woodchuck? What do you think?

Can you say "foot drag"?

Hopping, hopping, hopping

This busy intersection blew me away!

These, I thought, were the dearest tracks....

End of Part I. I'm stopping here because I seem to have reached my photo limit for one post, due to not having resized as I usually do....

How Much (Snow, Winter) Is Enough?

Shouldn't we have had more days like this? And deeper snow?

It’s no secret that northern Michigan has had a surprisingly small amount of snowfall this winter, and that, like everything else in life, is a double-edged sword. For farmers, winter sports enthusiasts, businesses that depend on snow, and for much of nature, too little snow means bad sledding. For other animals and other human endeavors, life is easier with bare ground. But easy or hard, we get what we get, and we have to make do with it.

There’s a certain irony at work here Up North when it comes to winter books this year. We went into the fall with a new book from Jerry Dennis, The Windward Shore: A Winter on the Great Lakes, memoir essays that had us all smiling in anticipation of cold and snow, looking forward to it for a change, despite the certainty of heat bills and icy roads. Then—where was winter? Have we had it? Are we having it?

Winter would be the perfect time to read a new adult novel that’s been getting a lot of press this season, The Snow Child, by Eowyn Ivey, and perfect as well for a new children’s book, Under the Snow, by Melissa Stewart and illustrated by Constance R. Bergum, a delightful look into some of the winter worlds of nature hidden from our surface view.

Fortunately, as readers we are readily “carried away” by books, with or without pictures, and if there is not enough snow outside the doors of our houses there can still be blizzards in our imaginations. That is the magic of reading!

Still, I was fighting disappointment on the outdoor front until  I discovered Tracking and the Art of Seeing, by nature photographer Paul Rezendes. The book is now available in a revised edition, pictured here; all quotes are from my older copy.

Any guesses or ideas?

I have a hunch!

Does a close-up help?

The countryside where I live, you see, is occupied by all manner of wildlife. Their tracks in the snow have set me puzzling and wondering for years, but field guides on tracks and scat didn’t seem to take me very far; also, like field guides to rocks and minerals, those little books on tracks, irresistible and indispensable as they are, always left me wanting more. Then I found Rezendes.

Tracking an animal is opening the door to the life of that animal. It is an educational process, like learning how to read. In fact, it is learning how to read. Following the animal’s trail may bring you closer to the animal physically, but, more important, it brings you closer to it in perception. The longer you follow the animal, the deeper you enter into a perceptual relationship with its life.... 

...

You will also know yourself better. That is another kind of survival knowledge. The more intimate we become with other lives, the more aware we are of how those lives connect with and affect our own. There may be only a few obvious connections at first—two animals in the same woods, hearing the same sounds, smelling the same smells—but as we track the animal farther, we find that its trail is our own trail. As it moves, it affects its surroundings. What changes the animal changes its environment, and thus changes us. There is no separation; its fate is our fate. We are tracking ourselves.... 

So, lots of snow, lots of tracks, but--no or little snow.... Sigh! --But wait! There is much more to the “art of seeing” than merely following tracks, and that in itself is a whole course of study.

We don’t need tracks to track an animal. For much of the year, the forest is far richer in sign than it is in tracks. Sometimes there are no tracks at all, but there is never a square yard in the forest that does not tell us something about the wildlife within it. The forest is speaking to us all the time.... Ultimately, tracking an animal makes us sensitive to it—a bond is formed, an intimacy develops. We begin to realize that what is happening to the animals and to the planet is actually happening to us. We are all one....

Piles of scat or droppings. Sawdust at the base of a tree. Scratched bark, broken branches, nibbled bids and twigs. A track is the imprint of an animal’s foot on the ground, a trail the line of tracks left behind. Sign is everything else—everything that tells that an animal was here, what animal it was, what it was doing. “For much of the year, the forest is far richer in sign than it is in tracks.” I take heart in that sentence. I think of the squirrel tracks at the edge of Claudia’s woods and remember the broken acorns littered in the same area. During a thaw, the signs of the squirrels’ feeding will still be there.

Learning to read the signs, Rezendes believes, is still, in the 21st century, a matter of life and death. It is the difference between knowing ourselves in nature and falsely assuming that we can live apart from it. As one of my customers (who is also a friend, as is so often the case) agreed after he'd had Tracking and the Art of Seeing at home for a while after purchasing it at Dog Ears, this is a book for the Up North Lifetime Library. --What else would go in that library? There's a fruitful topic for another day.

As for tracking, once again, it is all about being present and paying attention, which to me is also giving thanks for life and the world.

Postscript February 25: 

Since this post has been up, I've looked at more tracks, talked to more people, and have received e-mails with guesses and suggestions. Amy-Lynn Bell from Nova Scotia thought the track and trail above looked like that of a fox, and today two friends whose yards are frequently visited by foxes concurred. At left is a photograph from this (Saturday) morning, and below is the shot that clinched it as far as my friends Deborah Ebbers and Susan Cordes were concerned. Fox feet are cat-sized, but no domestic cat or skunk has legs long enough to leave this kind of trail, they agreed. Along with lessons in tracking, I am receiving lessons in humility--from life, not from my friends, who are very kind when instructing me.