Painted White

     So, here we are at the top of Whitman's Rough in the morning, looking through some cedar elms and other trees dying in this Drought.

     And here at the Cedar Elm Field just after you pass through the front gate.  Again, the sign of Drought here is the tall grasses--spring 2010 grasses, that is.  Last year we had lush rains to make grow tall grasses.  But after they went dormant during the winter, they remained.  None took their place.

And a view alongside the lower Boulders at the bottom of Whitman's Rough.  I could stand and look for a long time at these massive stones formed in the warm waters of three hundred million years ago during the Pennsylvanian Epoch.  The Boulders slide slowly downward within the fault of this small canyon, their gentle weight giving way to acidic rains, fern root, lichen, and the scratch of small claws in the night.

Here the limestone has given way to a trickle of water only a memory these days.

Gum bumelia (Sideroxylon lanuginosum ssp. Rigidum)

     This has always been one of my favorite trees.  The early settlers of this area used the wood of mature gum bumelias for making the handles of axes and such because of its fine strength.  The children of these pioneers chewed the sap that oozed from cuts in the bark.  People have called it Black Haw, Woolybucket, Chittamwood, False Buckthorn, Gum Bully, Gum Elastic, Gum Woolybucket, Woolybucket Bumelia, Wooly Buckthorn, Ironwood, and Coma. 

     Drying one's naked body by the wind is one of those things I'll miss when I'm dead.
     Last Sunday morning I hurried out to the Creek to get in a couple hours of concrete work, shoring up the flood-exposed northeast corner of the Hog Shed's slab.  
     I finished four bags of concrete mix and had worked myself to a sweaty lather of salt, dirt, and cement lime.  Afterwards, I showered under the Oak with a cool hose full of Pond water.  My body dried by wind there in the dappled shade.  
     Many, many things are good to me, but few that are much better than the feeling of drying skin up against a wind driven up a small canyon.
     
     The turkey vultures and black buzzards were at it again.  I could hear them croaking up above the boulders on Whitman's Rough while I watched others flying about in front of me, over the Stone Field.  I know they benefit by thermal updrafts created within this Canyon, but I still don't know why they find the place so attractive.  I've never seen them feeding.  I've never seen even the smallest bit of carrion lying about.  But here they are, day after day, circling away and spending hours upon hours perched in the trees and on the boulders where they leave behind a surface painted white by their calcareous feces.

Road to The Creek

     Sunday morning.

     It’s middle April, and according to a quick estimate, the fifteen hundred fortieth  Sunday morning since I quit going to church and started spending my holy day of the week outside among the marsh birds, wildflowers, creeks, grasses, and pines.  Still, whatever my thoughts now are concerning religion, one thing is for sure: Sunday mornings are sacred.  I’ve occasionally tried working or watching television on a Sunday morning, but I cannot.  Even agnostics know what sin is.

     So I drove down to The Creek for some sunshine, water, and wind.  I love wind in the morning.  Not a “breeze,” but a wind (breezes are for Romantic poems—real air is a wind).  Grass-stem and horse-mane wave to its prompting.  The presence of morning wind is one of about ten ways I can know I’m really alive.  

     But before I even arrived at Church, I passed through scenes from a world that little resembles any sort of Paradise.  Three miles from our house, I drove up on a twenty-something year old man hiking into town and not quite walking the white line.  A car would approach him, and he'd stumble down the ditch slope like a drunk and then back up to the edge of pavement.  I turned around and picked him up.  He just needed a ride into town, but along the way was hoping to find sufficient numbers of used cigarettes to resuscitate.  Once he was sitting on the seat beside me, I recognized him as the former patient I treated one day.  I had just left the emergency room in our ambulance when I saw what appeared to be a manikin lying in the weeds on the shoulder of the highway.  We turned the ambulance around and found the poor fellow just coming out of a seizure and still wearing the white wristband he had been issued in the emergency earlier in the morning.

     After I dropped him off at the nearest convenience store, I drove past the laundry with the fat man sitting outside on a little plastic chair.

     And past the metal barn where the double-amputee sits every day with his parked wheel chair in the open doorway.

     And closer to The Creek, past the site where another of my patients met his end because his car collided with a power pole at a bend in the road.  An officer's green spray paint remains on the pavement, marking the position of a vehicle.

     And past the broken carcass of a white-tailed deer with two hopping buzzards at its side.

     And past the little home of another patient who had overdosed one morning.  As we were wheeling her across the yard on a stretcher, she screaming and we struggling to keep the cot upright in a cluttered yard, I noticed the woman's young daughter standing silent and lost on her own front porch.     

     This is what you pass by on the way to The Creek.  It's not a paradise on a different road, though.  The same road leads us to the carcass and to the creek.

     Down at The Creek, between Pond and Pool by shallow waters, we watched these tiny bugs on the surface.  Scores of them circled around and around like so many disoriented Sufi dancers.  It would be easy ignore or  mistake them for small flies from the vantage point of five feet above.

Rhagovelia obesa (?)

Rhagovelia obesa (?)

Rhagovelia obesa (?)

Rhagovelia 

Scientific classification
Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Arthropoda
Class:	Insecta
Order:	Hemiptera
Family:	Veliidae
Genus:	Rhagovelia

     The family Veliidae includes riffle bugs and small water striders.  What we are looking at above appears to be a riffle bug.  And as always, if anybody sees a need to change the identification of this insect, please let us know.



     "Rhagovelia obesa is commonly found in groups varying from 5 to 100. Both nymphs and adults have been observed to swarm in this way usually close to the banks of streams. When disturbed, such swarms tend to disperse, but reassociate later. Such swarming behavior is more  pronounced in the nymphal stages.

     "Rhagovelia  swims by means  of a  tuft of hairs spread  fanwise under the  water surface (Coker et  al.  1936). Bueno (1907) states that they swim underwater readily especially at night. Bacon (1956) noted that individuals  swimming  underwater were near death.
     "According to Bacon (1956) Rhagovelia feeds on small insects and crustaceans trapped at the surface of the water, and on  larger insects under laboratory conditions. We have found no record in the literature  of the  feeding habits  of Rhagovelia  under  field  conditions."

http://www.nrcresearchpress.com/doi/pdf/10.1139/z71-067
     This article contains some wonderful line drawings that reveal details of the bug's anatomy through successive stages of development (instars).

     And here's a short clip from the bit of Creek near where our whirling Turkish water dancers were observed.

Surface level of The Pond: Seven feet away from the gauge

Transplanting stolen water lilies

Grasses heading out among stones on the upper reach of  The Creek

damsel fly 

Look closely . . .

Redstripe Ribbon Snake (Thamnophis proximus rubrilineatus)

     Ribbon snakes like this one enjoy a semi-aquatic life, feeding mainly on the cricket frog population of The Creek's banks.  Last week, Rita caught sight of this small snake consuming one of the frogs.  Unhinged jaws become a necessity when it wants to swallow an animal that's bigger than the snake's head.

Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Chordata
Class:	Reptilia
Order:	Squamata
Suborder:	Serpentes
Family:	Colubridae
Genus:	Thamnophis
Species:	T. proximus
Subspecies:	T. p. rubrilineatus

Apiaceae

     This white-flowering plant (Hedge Parsley--Torilis arvensis?) that grows now beside the transplanted roses appears to belong to the Apiaceae family, the one that includes other of our favorite species such anise, caraway, carrot (domestic and wild), celery, chervil, coriander/cilantro, cumin, dill, fennel, hemlock, lovage, Queen Anne's Lace, and parsley.  Pretty soon, this plant's white flowers will give way to fruiting structures that resemble Velcro seeds attaching at any opportunity to socks and dogs' ears.

Seed pods quickly replacing white yucca flowers

The first of yellow prickly pear cacti flowers.  Near the top of Whitman's Rough.

These are the beautifully eroded limestone boulders at the top of the hill.

     Carbon dioxide in the air turns into carbonic acid after it dissolves in rain water.  And because limestone is basic, the acid in the water can create such other-worldly shapes as these.  When the rain water settles onto one spot of boulder and is allowed to chew away at stone, it can form flat pools like the one above.  For limestone like this to be dissolved, the following sequence of reactions takes place:

H₂O + CO₂ → H₂CO₃

CaCO₃ → Ca²⁺ + CO₃^2–

CO₃^2– + H₂CO₃ → 2 HCO₃^–

CaCO₃ + H₂CO₃ → Ca²⁺ + 2 HCO₃^–

Mustang Grapes (Vitis mustangensis) just beginning to fill out. These vines are sprawling 
out on top of short walnut trees out in The Stone Field near The Creek.

Turkey vulture riding thermal lifts above the sandstone bluff.