Every Thursday morning I make my way to the Arcadia Wildlife Sanctuary in Easthampton, Mass, to spend a few hours with other volunteer environmental educators in the area. As one might expect, the majority of our group is made up of women, age 65 and older, though there are a few of us younger than that, and a couple of wonderful retired men. We plan for upcoming events, whether it’s a group of fifth graders coming to learn about winter adaptations, or preparing for Big Night, an event centered on vernal pools (involving salamander costumes and luminaria).
I go to help with all of these things, as well as to meet the network of educators in my area. But I’ve found that I go, now, for the unique and decidedly rare companionship of an older generation.
These volunteers are extraordinary. One is a naturalist specializing in scat, one edits physics textbooks “in her spare time” and is a walking botanical dictionary. One has been pivotal in thirty years of forestry research around the Quabbin resevoir. Every single one is kind, humble, caring, and insatiably inquisitive. Together it makes quite the educational and nourishing group. I find myself bolstered and restored, as well as dumbfounded as to how infrequently I connect with a wide range of ages – and how essential it is.
Today was winter twig identification, an opportunity after all our work was done to tackle that tricky art. I learned beech buds (huge and golden and pointed) are fusiform, or bullet-shaped. Although one woman did say they look like old hand-rolled cigars. Shagbark hickory buds are shaggy themselves, and, like ash, enormous as they contain whole compound leaves. Basswood buds look like they’ve just been to the salon, all gussied up in a shiny red, and silver maple (believe it or not) sprouts whole clusters of round, red buds that look like flowers themselves. We had a group epiphany realizing what we thought was a white ash twig was actually a Norway maple – the lack of a ‘smiling’ leaf scar gave it away. Eureka! We also realized its growth in one season – over a foot – made more sense for the invasive Norway maple than for the ailing ash.
But my favorite lesson was the black (or sweet) birch, Betula lenta. It’s a bit hard to distinguish from cherry, each alternate with noticeable lenticels (little breathing speckles) and small, reddish, pointy buds. So you have to scratch and sniff. Here we are, a group of daughters and grandmothers, with our noses to twigs. If you sense something like rotten almonds, that’s cherry. Wintergreen, ah! Black birch. Yellow (B. allegheniensis) will do the same, but its golden bark gives it easily away.
Every week I feel a sense of relief, a righting of the order of things. Life is for learning, and what wells of wisdom and knowledge are those who’ve come before. I wasn’t taught this, not really. Respect? Yes, of course. But not real veneration. Perhaps because most or all of our disciplines are those of discovery … what is new and young is what is trusted – in technology, medicine, even philosophy. This is not wrong, of course, but it’s not all.
I can read my field guides, but I trust even more the woman who has watched her witch hazel bud, flower, and fruit for fifty years. There is no substitute for time and loving attention, and I must learn to ask more questions, instead of demanding my own mastery, which is nowhere near ripe.
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