Hen of the Woods

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Mushroom hunting is a practice best approached with caution, so I've only just added a second species to my foraging.  Number one was the morels that come up among the asparagus.  They are as unmistakable as they are delicious.

(click to embiggen)

The second is hen-of-the-woods, Grifola frondosa, called also the sheep's head or ram's head, known to Italian-Americans as the signorina mushroom, called maitake by the Asians.

I know the frilled clusters can be found in the woods beyond the stone wall.  In fact the only time we see anyone in this part of the woods is during mushroom season.   Since I'd just had a chance to handle examples at the recent mushroom festival, it was time to take a knife and a bag and go out foraging.  Not 50 feet from the property line I found the remains of one, nine-tenths cut away by another hunter.  I left it there to spread its spores.  It didn't take long before I found one of my own, right were it was supposed to be, at the base of a mature oak.  I followed the example of the other gatherer and left a tenth or so there.  On the way back, in the hollow of a dead oak, nearly back to our wall I found another one, smallish and dark, and with a rich, earthy smell.

I washed and tore up the larger one and sautéed it in olive oil with garlic, salt and pepper.  It came out wonderfully, with a delicate flavor, and firm, varied texture.  I served it up with roasted garden potatoes and a beet, apple and onion dish that Monica taught me (which I fondly recalled from Almaty).  With a pint of Murphy's Irish Stout to wash it down.

hen of the woods fer eatin'

Monbiot's Climate Breakdown

When it comes to climate change, I’m not a huge fan of George Monbiot.  He’s too fond of playing the calm, reassuring voice of reason, and tut-tutting at those who are more aggressively sounding the alarms.  But like many scientists before him he has that sinking feeling that no one is responding to the voices of reason, and we’re really just going to stumble our way to catastrophe.

In this essay he bluntly gets to the crux of the matter.  The science of climate change is settled in all but the details.  Also, there’s one crucial and unavoidable path to a solution, and the nations of the world are taking exactly zero steps down that path:

The only effective means of preventing climate breakdown is to leave fossil fuels in the ground. Press any [UK] minister on this matter in private and, in one way or another, they will concede the point. Yet no government will act on it.

 . . . all governments collaborate in the disaster they publicly bemoan. They claim to accept the science and to support the [UN] intergovernmental panel. They sagely agree with the need to do something to avert the catastrophe it foresees, while promoting the industries that cause it.

 It doesn’t matter how many windmills or solar panels or nuclear plants you build if you are not simultaneously retiring fossil fuel production. We need a global programme whose purpose is to leave most coal and oil and gas reserves in the ground, while developing new sources of power and reducing the amazing amount of energy we waste.

Obama’s “all of the above” energy plan is the current U.S. version of this suicidal orientation.  He at least has the excuse that US legislatures at every level brim with people more ignorant and misinformed than any in Europe, but still the unanimity of cowardice is damning. 

I've harped on this before, (here, and more indirectly, here) so I'm glad that even an analyst as cautious as Monbiot is finally making it explicit.  If the plan doesn't insist that fossil fuels remain in the ground, then it is not a plan to stop climate breakdown.  Renewable energy, nuclear power,  conservation and efficiency do absolutely nothing in and of themselves to counteract climate change.  They are not the solution -- they are only meant to make the solution possible.

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Autumn Greenbriar

autumn greenbriar

still life with purple sneakers

hay field across the road

Scorched Earth Retreat

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Years ago, when I was traveling in Norwegian Lapland wearing a backpack and my first beard, an old man showed me a souvenir that he preserved from World War II.  It was tin cup that had been punctured by a knife.  When the German occupiers left his village, they had taken what they could and destroyed everything else - including this man's metal cup. 

When I look at the political circus being played out in Washington, D.C. today and for the past two decades, I see older privileged white men in a scorched earth retreat away from a government that had served them well - but which they fear they can no longer own and control.  When I see these Congressmen yammering about defunding health insurance reform, I see a retreating army trying to make sure there's no tin cup left behind that can still hold water.

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For this house in the woods, 

it's the season 

when mice try to move in, 

and the cats enact 

lengthy, 

drawn-out 

executions.

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Wild Mushroom Festival at DPNC

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Every fall, at the end of September the Nature Center in Mystic puts on a Wild Mushroom Festival.  The local mycologists all bring their foraged samples to show off.  They spread them all out upon a long table -- poisonous or edible, from giant frills and volleyball sized puffballs to dainty parasols of orange, white brown or purple -- dozens of varieties of fungus that can be found in the local woods and pastures.  The experts and mushroom stalkers, many of them wearing their best fungus-themed sweatshirts and t-shirts, answer questions and compare notes with one another.

Restaurants bring their hotplates and chafing dishes to serve up samplings of wild mushroom dishes -- risotto,  sauces, canapés, and soups.  One restaurant grilled traditional, flint corn johnnycakes with oily mushrooms dribbled upon them.  Another had concocted a bread pudding.  The Mystic Drawbridge ice cream makers brought ice cream made from candy cap mushrooms that tasted like maple syrup.  

A small band played sets of roots music (mycelium music?) under the eaves of the Nature Center building.  Monica was working in the drink tent, serving out wine, beer, cider and blackcurrant juice.  Nico hates any taste of mushrooms, so he munched on the bread that was meant to be soaked in gravy.  He warned his friends to not be fooled into eating any of that ice cream.

I had him lead me on a hike back through the woods of the nature center.  He knows them better than me from years of Monica working there and going to camp and outings there.

I've always wanted to know my way around the mushrooms better.  Around our house we get our handful of morels in the spring as the asparagus first sends its spears up.  Otherwise, we have stinkhorns, amanita, cups and puffballs, but nothing else edible.  One of the most sought after fungi locally is hen-of-the-woods.  It grows back in the woods beyond the stone wall, but I think savvy locals usually get to it first.  The neighbors have shared some with us in the past, fried up in butter with black pepper.  Maybe I'll go have a look tomorrow, just in case.

A Praying Mantis in the Amaranth

Tachinid Fly

Here's an ugly little ally for the garden, a bristly tachinid fly.  

There are over a thousand members of the family in North America alone.  Most of them plant their eggs in caterpillars, though I have no idea what species this might use as host.  It could also be making use of beetle or grasshopper larvae.  Tachinid species tend not to specialize, but be more opportunistic. 

Technically, the larva of this fly would be considered a "parasitoid" rather than a parasite, since they kill off their host by eating it from the inside out.

It's not easy being a caterpillar.  

And that put me in mind of Jack Handey's take on nature's miracles (via McSweeney's):

In the jungle you come to realize that death is a part of life. The bat eats the moth. Then the giant moth sucks the life out of the bat. Then the monkey eats the giant moth, pulling the wings off first, because he doesn’t like that part. Then the monkey gets a parasite from the moth that slowly eats his brain. It’s all part of the beautiful circle of life.

364,000 Dead

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According to the Guardian, since the September 11 terrorist attacks, about 20 Americans have been killed by terrorists.  During that same period about 364,000 Americans have been killed by privately owned firearms (including suicides).

The commentator wonders - only partly tongue-in-cheek - whether it's enough of a humanitarian crisis that the international community should intervene.

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Constructing a Kid: Schooling and Playing

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A friend of mine has been writing about her experience putting her free-spirited 5-year old into the local public school Kindergarten.  It's an anxious and heartbreaking time, made more difficult by the ways that schools have been changing.  School's entire purpose is to shape and mold our children, but where does that leaves us when we doubt that they are up to the task -- or even worse -- when we fear that the schools may be designed to shape them in malign or destructive ways?  Is elementary school really just designed to crush their spirits into something more tractable -- to create subjects for our hierarchies?  

School has never been a utopia of creative freedom of course, and Kindergarten has always been a kind of academic boot camp.  It is and has been the place where you learned to stand in line and wait your turn.  You learned that time is divided up into regimens of minutes and activities.  You learned to be a consumer of orders and knowledge delivered by authority, and so on.

Up until the recent past, however, the force of this potentially Goffmanesque institution was diminished in three very different ways.  

The first was the fact that teachers were mostly craftspeople, who tended to see themselves not only as enforcers of a necessary discipline and focus, but also as nurturers of individual students with individual interests, skills and destinies.  Everyone remembers bad teachers, and for most of us they were the ones who focused only on the first, but not the second task of teaching.  Unfortunately, there has been a decades-long assault on the craft of teaching.  It's orchestrated from the top -- where federal and state mandates have consistently ordered schools to focus on rote, standardized fact-learning - mostly with a laser-like devotion on multiple-choice testing - and have doled out nothing but punishment for teachers and schools who devote too much time to nurturing students in other ways.  And it comes from the bottom where anti-tax rhetoric and the breakdown of communities has more and more resulted in underfunded schools with over-stressed, under-appreciated and demoralized teachers.

And so we are in the process of losing one of the great humanizing aspects of school -- or to put it in more critical-sociological terms --  we are losing one of the ways in which the state's desire (or the institution's desire) to create docile subjects has been thwarted.

A second, related way in which schools seem to grow less benign has to do with their changing place within a class system.  In Amy's description of discovering her son's Kindergarten, she steps into a different class milieu than the educated, middle class settings she was more comfortable in.  Our society has few qualms about imposing harsh discipline on the poor and working classes.  Schools and other institutions that contain them are not expected to nurture individuality, but rather to break poorly socialized kids of their bad habits, colorful distractions and ugly accents and transform them if possible to more appropriate citizens - for their own good, and our own good.  

As long as schools contained a full range social classes, they had to be more than just that kind of institution, however.  They also had to nurture full, well-rounded, creative and expressive human beings.  Well-educated, middle class citizens expected it and had enough influence to insist on it.   My question would be, as first the upper classes and then the middle classes have begun more and more to abandon the public schools, does this means schools devolve more fully toward the kinds of authoritarian, unsympathetic institutions that we are happy to inflict on the lower classes?  I suspect it does.

The third troubling trend doesn't have to do with changes in schools per se, but with the loss of the greatest counter-balance to the shaping power of the institution -- namely unstructured, peer-based play.  A recent article, The Play Deficit by Peter Gray, lays out in evolutionary terms how play with peers is absolutely central to the human process of learning and developing into culturally functional human beings.  He goes into detail about what we lose when kids are given less and less opportunity for play, (and the whole article is worth a read) but I wanted to note a couple of things.  He mentions that for older generations school wasn't as overwhelmingly important to kids lives.  It was one of several powerful socializing settings in which kids developed.  There's a sense among many parents that kids aren't getting what they need, but the response -- namely driving them around to lessons, events, sports practices, and other adult-regulated extra-curricular activities -- isn't actually what they need.  They need to be let alone to run and roam and negotiate games outside of the power of the adult world.  It's only through that that we grow up.

If our kids don't have that, then school is left standing as an increasingly powerful shaping force in our children's lives.  (Well, that and consumer culture, but that is grist for another post!)  The stakes are that much higher when our schools become dysfunctional.

I think there is tremendous dissatisfaction among parents and other community members about the state of our schools and communities, but the dynamic needs to be turned away from the current pattern of disappointment, criticism and abandonment and redirected toward a constructive revitalization of our commitment to our public schools and the communities they serve.  Amy is trying to elbow her way into her son's classroom to make it better.  She has very sharp elbows, and I hope she can make an impact.  It's one of my main regrets about our lives here in Rhode Island that we couldn't and didn't, but instead joined the outflow from the public school system.  An unfortunate side-effect of looking at the Big Picture is that the trends can look too powerful.  I've considered going to the school board meetings, but it felt like I would be going to do penance rather than out of any sense that I could change something.  But I think I should try.  Kids like Amy's little Ray deserve that.

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Autumn Insects

A little wasp on the petal of a fading brown-eyed susan

A grasshopper regards me warily from a milkweed leaf

Greenbriar encroaches on the house

A katydid is too green for these dogwood leaves

The Autumn Nectar Flow

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asters

honeybee on goldenrod

After the summer dearth, when the heat and dryness slowed the nectar to a trickle, there comes an autumn nectar flow.

It is the time of goldenrod and asters, and the bees, who've been robbed of their surplus by their beekeepers will top off their combs with thin autumn honey.

Bad gardening

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Sad, sad broccoli

I've mentioned that I haven't been a very good gardener this year.  

The squash plants withered (though this year so did most everyone else's) and the cucumbers were under constant assault.  

I got small potatoes because I let the blister beetles defoliate the plants in July.  

Deer ate off half of the sunflowers and the Jerusalem artichokes (which have since grown back).  

My greens mostly struggled, though I had plenty of tasty weeds.  

Thai peppers and nasturtium

I raised sugar snap peas for Monica, but it turned out she wanted snow peas, so they mostly went to waste.  Scarlet runner beans I planted had pretty flowers but didn't set a single bean.  

We had plenty of herbs, especially cilantro and I gathered a jar of coriander when it went to seed.  Nasturtium and the Thai pepper plants are happy.  And we've got pesto in the freezer.

Not a bad crop of tomatoes, (at least before we went off to California for 3 weeks and the amaranth experiment collapsed on them).  

The beets look good although the blister beetles are still chewing on the leaves.  I should pull them up soon and pickle them.

Jerusalem artichoke, 12 feet tall

I'm fortunate I'm not depending on my gardening skills for my subsistence.

Fortunately the neighbors have been more diligent than I and they came by this evening with a bag of tomatoes and peppers.  I have some cilantro still going strong, (these were buried so deeply under the vetch that they didn't go to seed with the rest).  With this haul and the Thai peppers I'll make us a good, fresh pico de gallo.

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Harvesting the Honey

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Just robbed the bees of some of their honey.  The thievery went quite a bit smoother than last year, when I was on a very painful learning curve.  The key to not getting stung seems to be to use a smoker, bang the bees off each frame in front of the hive (by striking the corner of the frame sharply against a rock or something else solid), tidy up the last stragglers with a bee brush, and have a bee-proof container standing right by to place honey-filled frames into - in my case an ancient Coleman ice chest that I borrowed from my Dad and never gave back.  It may also have helped that I did one hive on Saturday and one on Sunday, so only one was riled up at a time.

This time no stings, and for the most part I was working in a cloud of confused, milling bees rather than angry, hostile bees.

The harvest seems about the same as last year -- maybe a bit lighter.  But still something over 50 pounds of honey taken from two first-year hives.  One of my hives never even filled the first super, so I let them be.

Tomorrow I'll put the wet comb back on top of the hives for them to clean up and depending on how heavy the remaining boxes feel (with their winter stores of honey), I'll start feeding them a bit and check for mites.

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The task now is to help them get prepared to survive the winter . . .

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Blackcurrant liqueur

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The blackcurrant liqueur experiment seems to have been a success.  I finally got around to squeezing the berry-vodka mix through a cheesecloth, and stirred in a couple spoonfuls of sugar.  (I prefer my liqueurs on the less sweet side.)  It's really very nice and Monica and I shared the bit that didn't fit into this antique bottle.

(As for the blackcurrant jam I also attempted back in July -- the flavor is wonderful, but the cooking wasn't long enough to break down the berries obviously, because they are still a little too sturdy to spread.  Still, I'll count that one a success as well.)

And as an extra bonus, the kimchi that had been fermenting in the cellar the whole time we were gone came out delicious as well - spicy and tender and alive - and I had to dig up potatoes to accompany it for dinner.

Time to set the next one into motion . . . 

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The Armstrong Redwoods

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the curly bark of madrone 

dessicated moss 

Hiking in the Armstrong Redwoods -- a state nature preserve.

The great groves of the valley floor are crowded with walkers on the Sunday of Labor Day weekend.  I've come once before, a few years ago at a time of year when all was soggy and drizzly and flooded.

Now all is parched and dusty.

bench graffiti

I take the East Ridge trail up and away from the crowds.  

Towering, ruler-straight coastal redwoods are mixed with California bay laurel and madrone.

I have no map, but strike up with a Brazilian woman and she guides me.  She hikes here often.  There are few people on the trail.  The breeze is languid and I am glad for the shade.  

The trail climbs more than a thousand feet in elevation.  Redwoods and laurel eventually give way to dry meadows with live oak and manzanita - until we can step out above the valleys and see for miles.

In hiking sandals my feet are streaked black with dust and sweat.

Buckeye butterfly

From the height you strike out across a saddle to the Gilliam Creek trailhead and down onto the Pool Ridge trail.  You make your winding descent along the deeply folded hillsides -- back among the redwoods and laurel.  These higher trees are not as vast as the giants upon the flat valley floor, but still magnificent.

Butterflies and grasshoppers are the main insects.

Acorn woodpeckers with clownish faces laugh their maniac laughs.  I look for a red-tailed hawk that is screaming - and finally spy the trickster Stellar's jay who is trying to disconcert me with perfect mimicry.

Wild turkeys

A flock of turkey crosses the trail in front of me -- 20 strong -- with reptilian eyes.  A squirrel barks somewhere.

Eventually I part from my guide and take the rest of a twisting trail down and down to the valley floor again, where thousand year old giants loom above the wreckage of the fallen.

Butterflies flicker in the spots of sunlight, and families stroll and marvel.

In Dutch Bill Creek

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The creek is dry at the end of August.

I am laying on the cool, streambed gravel.  In the cottage, Madi and Diana are house cleaning - I can hear their music faintly.  They are happy, and I hear one of them singing along with the radio.  Each shift of my weight delves my contours deeper into the contours of the stones. Slowly creating a perfect, me-shaped vacuum to fill.  I am gazing up through the quivering leaves of California bay laurel - and above it to the gray-green towers of redwoods. The intoxicating aroma of the bay laurel is riding down the meandering watercourse.  A sprig of wild mint in my breast pocket vies.  A crow croaks and a vulture cruises the blue above the redwoods' ragged crowns.  I can tell it is hot out there, but here in the stones where the breeze flows all is cool.

In the car, riding from San Francisco up to the Russian river, I'd been talking with Diana about spirituality and paganism and how I had been turned away by California New-Ageism - corrupted as it is by a kind of weak-minded anti-materialist consumerism -- and how I hadn't found my coven among the Rhode Island Unitarians.

But on the gravel, in the perfume of bay laurel, redwood and mint, in the thick, flickering green light of August afternoon, in a haze of natural pleasure I find myself in Church, with no need for a coven or for a fellow congregant - unless it be a doe or a lizard or a satiated mink.

Eventually, I rise and return to my friends.

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Delivering Porter

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photo: Cate School

On Tuesday we delivered Porter to the Cate School for 10th grade.  Anna and Alberto met us there with the luggage we'd left with them during our travels to the Sierras.  The Cate seniors come a day earlier and are there to help each student with getting oriented, hauling bags, etc.  The returning sophomores and juniors arrive the day after.

We all helped Porter move into his room.  It's small, but comfortable -- wood paneling and french doors that open onto a small balcony.  And battered enough to feel comfortable in -- including scars that showed where a former student may have been throwing shuriken against the walls and a spot where the phrase "butt cheeks" had been carved into the wood.  "A testament to the maturity of Cate students," as one of the returning students remarked.

The Cate students, the faculty and staff are a likeable crew.  And Porter, despite a bit of nervousness showing through in the past few days - was clearly ready to get himself involved in it.

It's a pretty school -- sitting along citrus and avocado groves upon a mesa -- above the beach town of Carpinteria and below the Santa Inez mountains which rise above it in chaparral-draped stone.

The headmaster charmed with his stories, the admissions director gave her pep talk, the faculty introduced themselves.  We met teachers and advisors and other parents.  As they said, you are not losing a kid, so much as gaining a whole set of allies in raising him.  We'll see.  I think it will be a good thing.

Porter's crew

the abuelo, Alberto

Porter on his balcony

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Lake Tahoe

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Summer Vacation:

dead tree above Cascade Lake

By Friday smoke from the raging Rim Fire filled the Tahoe basin and the mountains across the Lake disappeared into the haze.  Tahoe's blue sky and blue waters a familiar visiting place to Monica, and she was the most disappointed by the shrinking vistas.

Our hiking became much less ambitious - a half mile nature trail around "balancing rock" and a mile and a half walk to see the falls that give Cascade Lake its name.

Although the cascade creek had dwindled to a trickle, it was fun to walk the scoops and channels that a million spring thaws had sculpted into the granite.

Saturday we swam at a sandy Tahoe beach in Rubicon Bay, and spent the day relaxing.  We had planned to visit friends in Sacramento and San Francisco.  But since we were going to be dropping off Porter at boarding school on Tuesday, we chose to spend time together as a family.

Porter was getting anxious about the impending arrival, and took breaks from reading The Hobbit by reading his new school handbook.

smoky vistas

Being travelers at heart, Monica and I tend not to stay in one place for long when we go on vacation, so it was a rare treat to spend some down time before the bustle of the new school year.

We had to remind ourselves to start loading Porter up with good advice . . . 

a dry cascade

balancing rock or dreaming tortoise?

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Velma Lakes

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After our Tuesday hike by the Gaylor Lakes, we drove deeper into Yosemite National Park, down the dramatic high valleys to Olmstead Point where you occupy heights above the famous Valley and see Half Dome looming in the distance.  Lunch was a picnic of fruit, cheese and sandwiches along Tenaya Lake, where travelers rested along the sandy beach. Stellar's Jays and Clark's Nutcrackers watched for their opportunities from the pines.

We drove back over Tioga Pass, and down the stony valley.  In his imagination Nico designed the castles and battlements that should be perched upon the cirques and crags.

Family friends of Monica own a little cabin on the southwestern shore of Lake Tahoe, and they were lending us the place for the rest of the week.  We arrived in the drizzling evening.  After a couple of hours of driving I'd developed a touch of altitude sickness -- a headache and lethargy.  I'd suffered it once before - the only other time I'd traveled from sea level to the mountains and then hiked above 10,000 feet.  Fortunately, Monica was unfazed and set about settling in and cooking a dinner.

On Wednesday we explored the shore, strolling a nature trail, picnicking among the boulders (until the thunderstorms chased us away).  At the cabin all the electronics got stowed and we played cards and read books.

Thursday was our most ambitious hike up into the Desolation Wilderness.

The hike up to Middle Velma lake and back is about 10 miles all told.  The first two miles are mostly uphill - climbing 1600 feet past Eagle Lake to the high country beyond.  From there the trail wends up and down through the barrens and groves and twisted, gnarled pines.

Although the morning was clear, smoke from the fires to the west and south gradually began to haze the air - and the smell of smoke sometimes stung the nose.  

We pushed on past the reedy banks of Upper Velma lake to Middle Velma Lake, where a scramble down the hillside brought us to the water's edge.  We ate our lunch and Monica and I both swam out to one of the small islands that stud the water.

The cool breeze dried us quickly when we climbed back out.  Except for the ducks and the dragonflies, we had the lake to ourselves.  Porter wandered off to explore, while Nico took a nap upon a rock.

It was the descent back down to the trailhead above Emerald Bay that really took it's toll.  Two miles of downhill strains the knees and tendons, and we were all weary and footsore by the time we got back to the car.  But the soreness would gradually give way to a tired satisfaction that we'd managed to climb to the high country, however briefly.

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