how's your topography?

A word about place, as befits a proper introduction. Too often, I think, it’s absent from our particulars. How are you, what do you do, whom do you know… I want to know, what surrounds you? How’s your topography? Who grows above you? Lithe aspens, stark birches, or craggy oaks? Is there water? What does the sky do?

I live in Charlemont, Massachusetts, on the Deerfield, reportedly New England’s hardest working river. Our bend of it lives up to the moniker, as it seems to rush off with many a thing to do. It’s a bit odd, this time of year, but the storms and snows have kept the level up. It still runs with sediment following the erosion of hurricane Irene, and the subsequent (and misguided) channeling of the Chickley River that runs into it. But alder reaches over the banks, and witch hazel with its spindly petals that bloom in late fall. I watched a bald eagle ride a current ten feet above the surface two weeks ago. Yellow birch, its almost flaxen peels of bark curling, populate the banks and upland, along with black oak and beech. The stubborn leaves of each keep each other company, and rattle. Come up to the yard and we have raspberries, a couple of small gardens, gray birch, white pine, and sugar maples. There’s a stand of staghorn sumac, its red seed heads, bobs, picked clean. I once read them described as painted witches’ fingers. And the two ancient apple trees that are more crag and cavity than tree. Among these old friends are the shadow-species, the invasives: Japanese knotweed, Japanese barberry, burning bush, Asiatic bittersweet, and multiflora rose.

Down along the banks I find deer and weasel tracks, piles of woodchips from both beavers and pileated woodpeckers, and once three or so weeks ago I found unmistakable black bear prints. Now I’m just waiting to find my catamount. But the mythic mountain lion, like the ivory bill, demands another entry.

These aren't just catalogues of biodiversity, these introductions. There's a biography for every individual, let alone each species. But it's the act of recognition, acknowledgment, the taking of time to see and name (though knowledge is deeper than taxonomy). I rather feel that when one let's one's gaze rest on a tree, a shrub, a squirrel, it leaps forward and is stitched a bit to ourselves. The sugar maple is not scenery, but existent unto itself. And then we step a little more carefully, feel a bit closer, and celebrate a bit more. We see.