Thoreau's Legacy

by Richard Hayes

  That delicate skin I used to pet allows the frogs to breathe, but it makes them more vulnerable to pollution, pesticides, and ultraviolet rays than any other group of animals. Scientists consider them an early-warning system: their vulnerable skin and fragile eggs mean that they will die from global warming before other groups. To me, frogs are more than a warning system. They represent the mysterious beauty of nature, the infinite curiosity of childhood, and the discovery of youthful freedom.

  The loss of the frogs and what they represent is, to me, a boundless tragedy.

  Walden Pond, once a secret, sacred place. Photo by Melissa M. Juchniewicz.

  Melissa M. Juchniewicz worked in the professional theater before becoming a teacher of language and education. She lives with her husband in an 1812 farmhouse in Chester, New Hampshire.

  Black Spring

  Jill Carpenter

  DURING THE WINTER OF 2006-2007, THE MILD WEATHER in Sewanee, Tennessee, at the southern end of the Cumberland Plateau, made me vaguely uneasy. I told myself that we live in a transition zone, so particular natural events have taken our attention at odd times: the spring of the dogwood blight, the summer of the ringworm epidemic.

  In 2006 we were still finding ticks on the dog in November, when tick season should have ended. December, January, and February came and went without real cold, and by March the nights were eerily balmy. The plants had been totting up the warm nights, and many broke bud four weeks earlier than usual. It was a spring without winter. Dogwoods and redbuds bloomed, bumblebees buzzed around wisteria blossoms, jack-in-the-pulpits sent up sturdy jacks. Tender green leaves emerged on the trees and shrubs. I filled a nectar feeder in anticipation of our first ruby-throated hummingbird, which arrived on April 3.

  A few nights later the temperature dropped to 18 degrees. I arose to find the hummingbird nectar a tube of ice, flowers drooping, insects fallen silent. For four nights temperatures were in the teens. I brought in the nectar feeder after dark and set the alarm so I could put it out again before daybreak. I imagined the hummingbird frozen solid, but each day it appeared.

  The wildflowers were not so resilient. When temperatures rose above freezing, they turned to black slime. The forest looked as if it had been blowtorched.

  Mike and Edie Allen visited us briefly from Riverside, California. Self-described “disaster ecologists,” they have studied the effects of hurricanes and volcanoes. They added our crazy spring to their list. Long-term effects? We could only wait and see.

  In June we had a new forest canopy, but the trees had to go to the bank and take out a loan to produce it. They could photosynthesize, but fruits and seeds were lost. The summer and fall commenced dry and hot. Lake levels dropped, and water supplies throughout the region were overtaxed. We were in the bull’s-eye on the drought map of the Southeast. I watered the brown and dying azaleas with dishwater. The fall of 2007 was a fall without. I swept no acorns from the front walk. No local apples were available. No berries, no rosehips—none. Sparrows looked for a few grass seeds along the roadways. Squirrels and birds used the seed feeders heavily. Millipedes and orb-weaver spiders were nowhere to be found. The deer, small and thin-sided, approached closer than usual and ate every banana peel I tossed out, including the labels.

  This year seems “normal,” except for several large dead trees in our yard. Plants and animals are making up for last year’s triple whammy of heat, freeze, and drought. Hummingbirds have flowers to balance their diet, hollies and dogwoods are loaded with berries, and acorns are beginning to fall. But I look at world temperature trends and realize it may be only a short respite. The unease persists.

  Jill Carpenter has worked as a college biology teacher, used book store owner, science writer, and editor. In her hometown of Sewanee, Tennessee, she helped found the Dead Plants Society, a group of women who meet weekly to draw and share natural history observations.

  Rural Southern Georgia

  Janisse Ray

  I NEVER SAW A SPRING SO STORMY. SPRING IS SUPPOSED to be a time of fragrant wisteria and five blue-green eggs the size of jellybeans in a nest box. Spring is mild, emergent, translucent.

  It’s March. I wake to rain, an army of clouds that darken and lower by the hour. By midmorning the weather radio pops on with an alert: Tornado watch in surrounding counties. Outside there’s lightning, long and brilliant and vicious, accompanied by its sidekick, thunder, rolling in great booms—bowling balls across an alley. I call my mother, who tells me that she and Daddy will get under the stairs if there’s a tornado.

  “I have never seen daylight this dark,” I say. “This is like night.”

  Rain is falling so hard the ground has long since given up absorbing it. The water is two inches deep in places. The alert radio alarms: a tornado has touched down in Dublin. Prepare to take shelter immediately.

  I live in a tinderbox. The house, about eighty years old, is made of heart pine, which is very flammable. Some of the windows come out in your hands when you raise them. In the yard, thirty feet from the back door, an old-growth longleaf pine leans toward the house.

  My dad calls back. He wants me to get into the ditch out by the road.

  “What if I get sucked up?”

  “Get in the culvert,” he says.

  “And if it floods?”

  We hang up because I want to listen for a roar like a train. It’s hailing, ice chunks so big you could bag and sell them. The weather radio is calling out all the places where tornadoes have been spotted. Take cover! Should a tornado touch down you will not have time.

  I put blankets on the floor of the small hallway, next to the freezer. I close all the doors leading to the hall.

  Growing up in south Georgia, I never heard of tornadoes in spring. They came in summer and fall. Scientists say that warmer temperatures will favor the severe thunderstorms that give birth to tornadoes, and it’s possible that the tornado season could shift to what used to be the colder months. This looks like the climate crisis to me.

  I wait a long time, thinking, We are being taken by storm. But after a while the sky lightens, and finally the weather robot says that the storms are beyond us, farther east, and our county is no longer under a warning. I can come out.

  Janisse Ray, an author, activist, and naturalist, lives on a family farm in south Georgia. Ecology of a Cracker Childhood is her best-known book.

  God’s Glorious Gifts

  Diego Paris

  “FEAST YOUR EYES!” MY FATHER SAID TO ME ONE autumn morning. The sun was at just the right angle to hit the leaves of a burning bush in a lucky man’s front yard, making the shrub’s already vibrant red leaves glow with autumn fervor.

  I have been lucky enough to grow up in New England, where we see such wonderful sights each fall, but I have also been lucky enough to visit my mother’s tropical homeland, Puerto Rico, every year. Some people may think that the island’s exotic climate and always-warm weather must make it paradise, but I tell you that in New England we have it better. It isn’t that P.R. isn’t a wonderful place, but here we have more to ogle in our own back yard. The glory of God and Mother Nature is the seasons, and nothing is better than autumn leaves and winter frost. I still love to see my breath and pretend it’s dragon fire, breathed gallantly on encroaching knights and cooking them to a crisp while I rest in my snowy lair. Yes, fourteen-year-old teens enjoy making the odd snow fort. Isn’t that wonderful?

  Anything and everything that threatens my autumn and winter glory and frolic would be bad, unnatural, and unwanted. I have read about global warming and its impending effects, and I confess that I don’t care if the “demon” behind it is fossil fuel, some screwy temperature cycle, giggling aliens with giant mirrors in space, or even that slightly off guy down the street who gives me odd looks when I walk around the block with my old camera to take black-and-white pictures for my Photography 1 course. I just want whatever or whoever is causing global warming to shove off, and I’m willing to make some sacrifices to help that process. I love my New
England seasons with all my heart, and the idea of one long summer or one long winter—whatever it is the scientists have lately been predicting—is enough to make me scream in anger and pain.

  So the next time you enjoy our wonderful seasons, experiencing the brightly colored leaves, that wonderful fireplace smell in the streets, and snow angels, I want you to walk over to your thermostat and turn it All the Way Down. Shiver a bit. Curl up in bed and read books about kings, dragons, and knights, and stop every other page to act out the dragon’s part with your smoky breath. Hell—catch pneumonia and spend a week in front of the fireplace sniffling with family and friends and know that you wouldn’t have a fireplace if it weren’t for God, Mother Nature, and the seasons. And then look at the red-hot coals in the fireplace and remember that if there’s even a snowball’s chance in Hell that you’re helping protect the seasons, God’s glorious gifts, it’s worth it.

  Diego Paris is in the ninth grade and lives in Winchester, Massachusetts. An avid reader, he hopes one day to become a science-fiction novelist.

  A Grandfather’s Tale

  Thomas Huntington

  SOME YEARS AGO, WHEN I WAS WORKING IN GREAT Smoky Mountains National Park, I ran into a fellow who worked for the National Park Service. He had a team of pack horses that regularly provisioned volunteers working for extended periods in remote parts of the park. He was from the foothills of the Smokies on the North Carolina side of the park, where his family had lived for generations.

  This man spoke with a classic mountain accent, and he spoke from the experience of generations living in an area attuned to the natural world. As we talked about some of the ongoing changes in the forest, he related an anecdote that I will never forget. He told me that his grandfather had said to him, “Time was a man could kill a hog by Thanksgiving, and now a man cain’t hardly kill a hog.”

  He explained that his people had lived back in the hills long before there was electricity for refrigeration, and no one had an ice house, as people did in northern New England. However, up in the cool, damp, shady mountain hollows, meat could be cured without spoiling if the animal was slaughtered late enough in the year; it would remain cool until it was time to cook the meat.

  For a long timetheir family traditionhad been to slaughter a hog at Thanksgiving and then cure it until Christmas or New Year’s in one of those shady hollows. But his grandfather was saying that by the 1980s the climate had warmed so much that it was no longer possible to slaughter a hog with confidence that it would cure without spoiling. Too often a warm spell would arrive and spoil the meat.

  As I walk through my woodlot in Maine these days, this story haunts me, and I think about the changes going on around me. Will I be telling my grandchildren about the “olden days,” when trees cut from this woodlot warmed us in the cold snowy winters? Will the sturdy fabric of New England, like that of the North Carolina mountains, pass into memories and folk tales?

  Thomas Huntington, a scientist studying the impacts of climate change, lives in Augusta, Maine. He conducted research on acid deposition in the Smoky Mountains in the 1990s.

  Last Winter

  Michelle Cacho-Negrete

  LATE WINTER BROUGHT FOUR BLIZZARDS NEARLY

  back to back. Snow is vital to the ecology of Maine, a blanket that insulates the life germinating underground, a womblike protection, very welcome despite treacherous roads, power outages, and “cabin fever.” A few weeks earlier I’d been fearful that we would have little snow on the ground, as had happened a year or so before, leaving our flower and vegetable gardens nearly barren. Indeed, just the previous week, 55-degree temperatures had broken weather records, arousing my fears. My husband, Kevin, a research scientist whose work involves trees and global climate change, paused to examine some prematurely budding pussy willows, those furry precursors of spring.

  “Nearly two months early,” he said, running his fingers over the buds.

  The willowswere not alone in their confusion as to the season: oak and maple buds had begun to swell, and the sharp tips of daffodils poked out between layers of icy slush. Ice melted from the roof, a sparkling mini-waterfall. The snow on the driveway parted like a wintry Red Sea. The conifers seemed to suck up green from the air. Black dots, stark against the hard-packed snow, came to life: snow fleas, tiny insects beckoned from their dormancy by the April-like weather, frolicked wildly, offering a springtime dance of little hops. Meteorologists spoke about unseasonable cold in some places, unseasonable heat elsewhere, droughts, monsoons, mudslides.

  Snow fell again, slicing through the air like thorns, burying the springtails, walling roads with six-foot drifts. Freezing temperatures coated buds in latticed ice, rendering them useless for the spring to come, reminding me again how fragile and yet resilient everything is and how carelessly we challenge that resilience.

  I curled up by our wood stove and read a book about Inuit shamans on mystical journeys who take on the responsibility of atoning for tribal transgressions and restoring balance to the everyday world. I thought of how our children and grandchildren will be the ones forced to take on that responsibility, apologizing to the planet for the ways we’ve mistreated it.

  Michelle Cacho-Negrete

  is a retired psychotherapist who now works as a writer. She lives in Wells, Maine, with her husband.

  Sugar Shacks,

  Snow Cones, and

  Sugar Maples

  Marian Wineman

  The Sugar Shack. My sister’s school in Hillsboro, New Hampshire, was across a dirt road from a dairy farm of rolling hills and steely gray granite boulders. Just inside the farm’s meandering stone walls was an old sugar shack. The dark wood structure, about ten by twelve feet, had multipaned windows and a chimney that looked like a miniature sugar shack atop the steep metal roof.

  One day we were shown around the sugar house, with its creaking wooden floorboards. The air inside was so thick, hot, and heavy with sweet vapor that it was nearly intolerable. Wood smoke mingled with the steam. Boiling liquid slowly migrated along a series of sloping interconnected troughs around the perimeter of the shack. We were treated to a taste from each stage of the sugaring-off. The first troughs held a watery, nearly clear liquid. Progressing on down the troughs, the syrup became gradually thicker and darker, its taste increasingly complex.

  Snow Cones. Every spring my family spent a long ski weekend at the Appalachian Mountain Club’s Mount Cardigan lodge in New Hampshire. After an eventful day of skiing the rope tow, our mittens sopping wet and the tow often breaking down, we sat down to a tasty dinner, followed by an amazing treat.

  Outside the lodge, a huge black iron kettle hung over a roaring fire. Embers snapped and danced upward in the frosty air toward the stark stars overhead. Sweet steam boiled up from the cauldron, obscuring the faces of the others stamping their feet in the snow.

  Someone handed me a cup, which I carefully filled to the brim with snow, then timidly tiptoed close to the kettle. Using a big ladle, another person poured thick, steamy dark syrup into my snow-filled cup. A maple snow cone!

  Sugar Maples. In recent years sugar maples, the source of maple syrup, have been tapped as early as January instead of in March, the traditional time. As winters warm and spring comes earlier, the perfect sap-producing combination of freezing temperatures at night and thawing during the day occurs on fewer days, and maple syrup production wanes.

  As a result of these warming trends, the sugar maples’ unique growing conditions may no longer occur in New England, and the trees may die out. Soon maple syrup may not be produced at all in New England, only in Canada. How can I tell my daughter and grandchildren that we let the iconic sugar maples disappear?

  My mom and little brother catching the rope tow at Cardigan, April 1965. Photo by my dad, Robert J. Wineman.

  Marian Wineman is an environmental consultant living in Seattle with her husband, their nine-year-old daughter, a hamster, fish, and two cats.

  The Unfathomable

  in Flux

&
nbsp; Danna Staaf

  LOS ANGELES IS NOT PARTICULARLY FAMOUS FOR natural beauty, and it is not a coastal city. However, as a child growing up in this urban setting, I was a determined naturalist, and my strongest passion was reserved for creatures of the sea, as portrayed in books and documentaries. Anxious to get a closer look, I decided at the age of twelve to become a scuba diver. Not only did my parents encourage this peculiar ambition, my father enrolled in the scuba course with me.

  Our first dives were on Catalina Island, and I recall vividly the thrill of those early underwater experiences. I once turned my head to find myself gazing into the brown, curious face of a harbor seal, mere inches away. I believe I stopped breathing. We regarded each other for one long moment before the creature swam away, leaving me thoroughly enchanted. On another dive I stumbled into a grove of giant kelp. Bright summer sunlight pierced the water in distinct beams, lighting each kelp blade in dazzling yellows, blues, and greens. Distinctive orange garibaldi, California’s state fish, swam through the majestic swaying algae, entirely unconcerned by my presence.

  Now I live in coastal Monterey, a six-hour drive north of Los Angeles, and I can dive almost in my back yard. The sea here is still full of kelp forests, but different animals swim through the fronds. Garibaldi are rare; instead I find monkeyface eels lurking beneath the kelp, their eyes and big lips full of expression. A faunal shift occurs at Point Conception, between Los Angeles and Monterey. To the south are warm-water species; to the north, cold-water. Some animals, like the frolicking harbor seals, are at home in either province, but many others must live on one side or the other.