It's the dead middle of July 2002 when I take up my position beside the creek after whisking away hemlock needles and assorted debris that had accumulated on the webbing of the lawn chair.
The sun is at high noon, but hardly noticeable through the thick canopy of foliage that keeps the temperature perfect, in the low seventies. It is a welcome relief from the Sahara-like environment of our deck not thirty yards away. The heat this summer is compounded by drought after a cold, wet spring. Both sets of conditions cast dire portents over agricultural prospects for the remainder of the growing season. On my approach to the chair I first hear then see, to my delight, a blue-headed vireo. Its trademark white spectacles are almost luminous in the darkened forest. Continuing its imploring song as though trying to entice me deeper into the woods, it flies, stops and sings, then moves on. "But I have no bread crumbs with me; I'll get lost," I almost say, declining the offer.
I settle comfortably into the chair when I am sure it is on level ground and gives a good vantage point for viewing stream and woods alike. This is the East Branch of LeBoeuf Creek which originates a few miles north of Waterford and flows into Lake LeBoeuf about a mile southwest, and thereafter becomes a part of French Creek. I feel immediately connected to other places, other times. Some of the molecules dissolved in or suspended by the water before me will eventually find their way by way of the Allegheny, Ohio, and Mississippi Rivers into the Gulf of Mexico. There they will help sustain a quite different community of organisms, one adapted to salts eroded from deposits of land millennia old.
The creek is low, as low as I've seen it, a full ten feet from the bank where I sit, elevated about twenty feet above the surface of the stream. The water, which never flows briskly except after heavy rains or after snowmelt in spring, is the color of cappuccino. It is probably discolored by the runoff from agricultural fields or any of a number of gravel pits in the area—a legacy of the last glaciation. I try to imagine if Indians had lived or camped at this very site. What was the creek like then? Clearer no doubt. Did it have more of a gradient and flow faster? I feel at once insignificant and fortunate that I am witness to such a marvelous interaction of space, time, and distance.
Bur reeds spike through the shallow water, showing greens ranging from moss to emerald depending on the play of light, and black-winged damselflies with iridescent green abdomens work their interspaces looking for food or mates. Flitty wingbeats make them seem to bounce along, unlike the strong direct flight of their dragonfly kin. On the surface of the open water near shore a hundred or so whirligig beetles, looking like tiny animated watermelon seeds, gyrate tirelessly in quest of food.
So much life here. I am tempted to go to the stream's edge and turn over rocks to look for salamanders and insect larvae. My plan is changed when I see a small bird on the shoreline’a Louisiana waterthrush. Approaching me, it bobs its head and tail, trademark behavior of the species. Unlike its other warbler relatives, it is content to walk in finding daily rations, rather than flitting through foliage of shrub and tree. Although oblivious to me, it is frightened away by the sudden appearance of a young robin that lands on a rock, displays its speckled breast and adolescent gawkiness, lets out a minor squawk and flies away too. I hear other birds now. Across the creek a house wren utters its hissy-fit staccato song, a catbird mews from the shrubbery, and a cardinal begins to sing lustily and continuously in answer to another a hundred yards away. A tiny, tinny cacophony of what sounds like baby birds in a nest in the shrubs distracts me; the wren heats up and sings more emphatically, leaving me to ponder the connection. Now more sounds. This is becoming a symphony: a common yellowthroat gives its "witchity-witchity" aria from the low vegetation on the opposite shore, a blue jay its bugle call, and overhead a red-tailed hawk emits a raspy, piercing note. Too crude for that of an adult it is obviously a young bird practicing the scales. There is a sudden banjo-like "plunk"made by a green frog, and I am puzzled why I haven't heard any bullfrogs. Their basso profundo calls done solo or in groups have been a constant through our open bedroom window all summer, an excellent antidote for insomnia. Then I hear one, "REE-DEE-DEEP, REE-DEE-DEEP." Then another. This one doesn't enunciate as well, slurring its words into two syllables. With the binocular I see the frogs hiding among the fallen bur reeds that form a flexible network in the water at right angles to those that are erect. A single leopard frog chimes in with its higher pitched grating call, completing the amphibian chorus. Just as I am about to be lulled into a deeper meditative state by the vocalizations of nature I am distracted by a great blue heron flying silently in glide pattern upstream to land across from me in the bur-reeds. It moves up onto a part of some tree limbs that had broken off and fallen into the stream. Oblivious to the glass jar and other emblems of human apathy entrapped in the tangle, it flies off, apparently frightened when I shift in my chair to get a better view of its activities.
A breeze stirs and the forest is aroused bringing me to pay more attention to it. Limbs creak and growl and crackle, giving me a start. We had seen bears close to the house a couple of years ago and have been hearing stories recently of them being seen in the vicinity. Sunflecks penetrating the hemlock, beech, and yellow birch canopy illuminate the scattered clusters of ferns and the brown surface of last year's leaf fall. Chickadees ply the uppermost branches of the hemlocks, spraying bits of needles and bud scales onto the dry forest floor as they ride the to and fro wind-induced movement of the canopy. Gnarled down-timber serves as a remembrance of the mini-tornado that cut a swath through the woods about a dozen years ago. Dense growths of ferns occupy most of the void now, along with transient thickets of blackberry. Everything else seems an even, lifeless brown. Yet I know that the whole surface that I scan and over which I sit teems beneath with a universe of tiny organisms waiting to devour the dregs of the upper world. Now and then I see a brown leaf from last year, finally breaking free from its petiole and drifting to the ground to become fodder for the soil microcommunity of sowbugs, mites, millipedes, and their ilk. They will mill it to suitable size for bacteria and fungi to reduce to minerals available to living plants. Primeval recycling. Nature reminds us that it has always been first.
The breeze dies and the woods become placid. The birds have quieted some; there are no mammals to be seen. Red squirrels, so abundant at our bird feeders near the house, are noticeably absent, although I can hear their bird-like calls in the distance. Likewise, the usually conspicuous chipmunks and fox squirrels have not put in an appearance. I use the respite to examine things closer by. Next to my chair a daddy-long legs ascends the trunk of a beech tree whose gray pebbly bark reminds me of an elephant's skin. In silhouette, the creature is a rice grain suspended by eight legs exaggerated both in length and spindliness. While it is a close relative of my childhood nemesis, the spider, this arachnid was never one to inspire fright, just wonder’éŘat how it manages on such fragile underpinnings. I see the curly, bronze bark of the yellow birch and am reminded that a friend had told me how it could serve well as tinder to start a campfire because of the flammable resins it contains. It contrasts strongly with the bark of the hemlocks whose parallel rugged ridges harbor small insects that nuthatches and woodpeckers seek. A little blackish beetle stumbles onto my wrist, then seems to get a look at where it is and hurries away, awkwardly falling to the ground at my feet. A mosquito whines and dines while I try to complete my note taking before swatting it. By then it is too late: the mosquito and my purloined blood make a grotesque work of art on my arm.
I decide to call it an afternoon, not, however, before making a mental note to do this again, but early in the day when everything is more active.