Days in Boston

"One phase of those days must by no means go unrecorded – namely, the Broadway omnibuses, with their drivers. The vehicles still (I write this paragraph in 1881) give a portion of the character of Broadway – Fifth Avenue, Madison avenue, and Tweny-third street lines yet running." – Whitman, from Specimen Days, "Omnibus Jaunts and Drivers





June / July '17


Downtown Boston at Copley Back Bay on Huntington and Stuart Avenue, what stands out is the grid of streets forever wrapping – as New York does Central Park – around the Great Commons and always the question to walk or taxi.  This becomes the very network the traveler comes to see – the great park in the center, the ponds there, the grass that itself seems to stand out considerably green against the surrounding high-rises and old churches, the golden Beacon Dome, and the Charles River bi-secting the city from Cambridge.  We walked miles and miles on this trip, one most recent, from Huntington on this side of the Charles, across Harvard Bridge where the foot traffic was continuous to and fro, into MIT campus and along Cambridge Avenue down into the belly of the city where the locals live in apartment housing and yards so small hardly worth mowing.  We were on our way to

the Peabody Museum of Archeology off Harvard Square on Divinity Street when we finally decided to hail a van cab driven by a gentleman who casually told he did not know where he was going.  To Peabody, we said, and he was afraid that this was something of a different city, maybe at the outskirts of Cambridge itself.  We mentioned Quincy Street and recalculated our Phone maps and followed the lagging arrows as best we could to Memorial Union where the Food Trucks waited.  To ride the city in the cabs is a shaky experience – front seats littered with the personal belongings of the drivers, seat

belts may or may not be in order, the shocks on the cars worn down to a num so that every city pothole rattles the frame and the axles seem to complain at every turn.  We may or may not arrive at the precise spot on the campus, buildings at Harvard on squares and inter-linked and the passengers will need to get out and walk to look for signs.  Peabody off Oxford part of the famous Natural History Museum, we walk to the backside and, like the Memorial Union doors, old, nearly

crumbling, tall black wooden frames barely opening so that the front desk worker has to pry them open for us.  Pristine museum, perfect lighting, exhibitions meticulous and the air conditioning set to precise degrees. The Lakota Indians the first exhibition, then Penobscot Canoe, South American Indians, a room dedicated to Alaskan Totems.  An hour ago we were walking the seedy backroads of Cambridge, now we are towered by the 150 year old masters of wood cutting, upstairs the great collection of ancient world-wide weapons, and one floor up, the most uniform of them all, a dedication to the two great Harvard founders of the new of the discipline of anthropology and

archeology, Putnam and Boas.  Our second visit here in three days we now know Harvard, all of its shops and institutional buildings, the library with 7 levels dug underground, the statue of John Harvard who is not really John Harvard at all and the freshman dorms off the square that George Washington once garrisoned during the trials of the Revolutionary war.  The ghosts of the past, the travelers of the new, where old dusty books meet shiny new phones, where lecture rooms or chapel halls, stained glassed and iron fortified windows a sort of fortress of old knowledge forging out into the new world like old flames that never surrender.

Monarch Chronicles

"Men sleep. The cassia blossoms fall.
The spring night is still in the empty mountains.
When the full moon rises,
It troubles the wild birds.
From time to time you can hear them
Above the sound of the flooding waterfalls."
 –Wang Wei, "Bird and Waterfall Music"





From inside the prairie the last day of spring.
We walk through the old hip high plantings
seeking the whorled and swamp milkweed.
We push aside the waves of prairie like water.
A single rattlesnake master among the spiderwort,
among the goldenrod, the common St. John's,
stands as sharp as a head of green needles.
As we lean down to see if it is flowering
a monarch flits by at ten feet silent as a thief,
prairie dust snagged by luck on its black legs.

Monarch Chronicles

"In the interim, field studies have developed techniques and ideas quite as scientific as those of the laboratory. The amateur student is no longer confined to pleasant ambles in the country resulting merely in lists of species, lists of migration dates, and lists of rarities. Bird banding, feather-marking, censusing, and experimental manipulations of behavior and environment are techniques available to all, and they are quantitative." – Leopold, from "Natural History"



6/26

It is quite a two-day leap to be made for the amateur citizen scientist to go from identifying milkweed species with the assistance of the local field guide, to laying transect lines through the raw prairie and sub plotting every seven feet for the sake of tallying data.  This great leap comes as a result of the amateur being willing to move past the more comfortable stage of natural observer to one who is willing to stop, bend down on a knee and take the milkweed leaf in hand in order to flip to the underside in order to detect, hopefully, the larvae of Monarch butterfly.  Eyes open, prairie sumac, goldenrod, dogwood and bluestem up to the hips, the common milkweed

Whorled Milkweed

plant now holds a far more esteemed position, the very treasure of the plant hunt itself.  The amateur is provided means for quantifying the data: lay down the subplot rectangle onto over the top of the habitat and identify the flowering species or milkweed within the A,B or C square confines...examine the milkweed for a third instar caterpillar and determine whether it is monarch or Queen Larvae by counting the tentacles.  Stay along the laid transect lines for a hundred meters, as it reaches toward a fixed point in the distance at degreed bearing you must follow by compass. Continue this procedure at random coordinates laid out by satellite imagery, north to south, south to north, until 150 subplot observations and data entries are complete.  The amateur's eye has just made the great leap from

Butterfly Weed

appreciation to counting miniature basil stalks at the bottom of a plant's stem. What had once seemed not much more that the abundant green made by the broad leaves and fibrous stalks of a hundred species, has become a rhizome-like interconnection of the thousand components that make up a butterfly habitat.  You celebrate the upcoming rare patch of milkweed because it is there, perhaps flitting along an otherwise unknowable path from plant to plant, an adult monarch might be seen in the distance and will be transcribed as incidental, our outside the parameters of your transect line.  As you scan out east and west, you look for the bobbing of wings; you wonder which of the hundred milkweed out there might carry a yellow egg and root for its quiet little tucked corner of the prairie to be safe for the duration of the instar process.

Monarch Chronicles

"Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land. By land is meant all of the things on, over, or in the earth. Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left. – Leopold, from Round River, "Conservation"





6/23


A few notes on Citizen Science based on the upcoming Monarch Conservation Science Project training at UW Arboretum...

Many instances of the need for human re-intervention in species monitoring exist.  As Leopold alludes to in the above in his more informal definition of conservation, it seems a peculiar but common situation that we might find ourselves in when the very human causes of various species trouble might be alleviated only by the very hand that caused it.  Pollinators simply fall into this category because it is the decline in habitat by human development, agriculture, or abundant chemical applications that now necessitate as many counter-means for reparation.  Monarch butterflies, among many other pollinators, need the variety of milkweed species to survive and propagate, yet milkweed availability has declined as a result of its precarious existence as a perceived common weed or noxious plant that might be mowed, gouged, eradicated or sprayed.  The irony is the difference between its extremely critical necessity for the very species that are built for the sake of pollinating, and its perception by only some, but whom hold the tools.  Here is where Leopold's early concept of the land ethic seems to enter again like the most obvious of fundamental truths: we cannot fully care for the land until we begin to see it as community not commodity.  To the land developer, the highway crew, the cattle rancher, and the chemical company, a milkweed species is an expendable part of the landscape –

Butterfly Weed can be found
in Greene Prairie Arboretum

eradicate it where it does not lend itself to efficiency or 'good numbers.'  In the meantime, although our highway shoulders might reveal a more manageable space, monarchs in the midwest might lose half of their habitat.  The concepts of bee or butterfly decline might be seen as a modifiable algorithm which is solved by more chemistry and more modification; where the real answers, based on life subsistence itself, needs to be all things conservation: identification, education, pause, plan, progress and, in this case, elimination of the very practices that have led to the double intervention by the human hand. Certain biological processes must be identified as pure priorities.  Pollination is not one that we can solve long term by artificial chemistry. When the bees are gone we've lost our bio-engines. Citizen scientists can help to an unprecedented degree because the size of the problems must be met by the size of the citizenry – just as one heroic marine biologist cannot save the Gulf of Mexico from its abundant chemistry, the lone conservationist cannot save the monarchs.  Leopold's call for a land ethic was in many ways a means to save our natural resources from ourselves, at a time when highways had taken over to form auto routes into otherwise pristine parks and the dust bowl was the easiest evidence of poor agricultural practices.  Today the problems are far more difficult to see than a car or a sandstorm.  Chemicals that barely a microscope can glance may cause the demise of two of our more sparkling, and vital, treasure species.  It might take the thousands of eyes of citizens to watch where nobody else is.

Olbrich Diary

"If you suddenly lose
Your dusty eye, out of the distance
The rainstorm will gradually lessen,
And you'll see a rainbow dart out,
Striking the Immortals Palm
With a cold light."  – Heng Chao





Guarding lion,
watchful, laying on its belly,
is sculpted onto the rock wall
of the rose garden pavilion,
as we rise up along
the stairwell to weather the storm
under cover of the prairie roof.

All the visitors
had gathered at the vestibule
seeking cars as the clouds
gathered overhead,
we listened to the welcoming
of the rain and followed
as the storm played
chords over the crabapple
and peonies at the garden entry.

Time blew by
and slanted the rain
to new meaning
as the watercolors now sparkled
by drops of jasmines and aquamarines,
a wild green palm, rarely seen
by dusty eyes,
revealed new worlds.

Olbrich Diary

6/20

The smallest, and sometimes therefore the most fun, adventures might start with the question as to whether they will work at all.  When the little weather symbols suggest that the rain will come late afternoon for an hour then quickly pass it is always hard to know whether to trust such vague information.  The sky is blue and the oriole is directly outside the front window frolicking in the

juniper bush, so there might be time to hop on bikes and ride the two miles to Olbrich where, if the timing works, you might find the plants under the sun after a recent rain and the leaves and grass and wildflowers will sparkle in uncontrollable jewels.  Minutes away the gray cloud cover, which seemed as if it had been floating over Lake Mendota, marches east, the sky becomes gray, and only the

overhanging oaks on Oakridge street save you from a slight torrent.  "How did we pick this time to go. Why didn't we wear coats?" As the rain hits so the temperature drops – we are cold and wet and our prospect is to head right back into it at the gardens. We make a dash for the rose garden in under the pagoda entry and see that the exotics are lush but drooping from the new weight of the rain and make our way along the cobblestone path and up through the water features to the prairie style pavilion, a great

perch to watch the storm pass as it's now sideways rain blanketed the entire garden.  As hoped, the storm quickly passed, fifteen minutes, and as some portions of to the south and west stayed under rain, to the east the sky opened and the greens turned to glitter and the warmth seeped back into air as quickly as it had left only half an hour ago.  The cool and water had left the mosquitos bewildered or somewhere hidden -- as we toured the rest of the garden, to Thai Pavilion, the frog pond and along the edges of Starkweather Creek, there was not a bug to be found and we took the narrowest of rock paths into the depths of the many small nooks that entice visitors sit wait and listen.  We had made our goal of adventure.  As we left and we bent down to touch the thick moist leaves of a plant we had never seen, a baby frog leaped from the pool outside the conservatory and we held it in our hands for awhile wondering how something this small could be so precisely beautiful.

Arboretum Diary

"...Then I went to the dunes behind the harbor, where the roses cover the berms and also grow thickly and randomly on the slopes of pale sand, and are lively with bees, and a deep honey-smell, and I lay down." – Mary Oliver, "Roses"










6/16

Today you leave the car along the sidewalk at your home street in the center of the city.  Wallet tucked in cupboard where you might not find it easily. Some water, something to eat, and follow nothing but the wind and water by feet to become what you see.  Where Wingra turns marsh why is that you cannot become cattails stilly marching, the board walk by its sturdy shoulders bounding left and right through peat and tamarack? As the bikers slowly wheel past the Arboretum Drive I know where they are going, past the Wingra Marsh where the swamp oaks have lost their limbs and stand like signposts holding the statue ends of turkey vultures who radar in on the mice burrowing tomorrow's tunnels.

They don't know who I am – shadow of a thought, the walker of a path, the black-eyed susan I have yet to see but is coming along my path at west knoll descending onto Greene Prairie.

Here the butterfly milk weed stands out as host to the narrow trail restoration.  The only of its kinds as far as the eye can see and I can't help but wonder if it too, its marmalade petals stiff and exuberant, has purposefully lost its way in among the oak canopy of the savannah?  Black-capped chickadee asks a series of short questions from a tucked limb, so light, a mere drop upon the bough of waxy leaves.

The sky opens and never has been lost.  Steady, giving.

A temporary planet of spiderwort opens, so close to home that it is just that.