Find Your Own Pond: On the Usefulness of Trees.

Welcome

This blog is a chronicle of life and the seasons at the New Concord Reservoir. The manmade reservoir lies about a mile and a half outside the village of New Concord toward the end of a country road lined with small farms and homes. A half mile long and about 150 yards wide at its widest point, it is bordered by forests on its eastern, western and northern shores. New Concord is a village in Southeastern Ohio, which, like its New England namesake, originally served a hinterland of small farms. Today, life in the village is shaped primarily by the presence of Muskingum College, a private, residential liberal arts college founded by Scots-Irish Presbyterians in 1837. The New Concord reservoir lies about the same distance from the village of New Concord as Walden pond lies from the village of Concord, Massachusetts. It is only about one quarter of the size of Walden, and no great works have celebrated it. While Walden is a natural pond, carved by receding glacial moraines, the New Concord reservoir required human intervention to emerge. It only came into existence a few decades ago, when the village created an earthen dam near the headwaters of Fox Creek, and its first function was to ensure a dependable source of water for the village. Neither Walden, nor our reservoir are notable for their extraordinary majesty or wildness; both exist in the midst of civilization rather than remote from it. In chronicling the days of Walden Pond, Thoreau sought to encourage us all to appreciate the ordinary natural world we live in rather than only valuing that which is remote and seemingly untouched by human hands. This blog is intended to encourage you to find your own Walden in your own neighborhood. Visit it frequently, learn from it, find peace and inspiration there, share it, cherish it, and protect it.

Friday, February 16, 2007

On the Usefulness of Trees.

The Sun came out today, so I took the dogs out to the reservoir after work. The air was cold but the sky was amazingly blue. The village work crews had been out earlier in the day. The village decided that this year, instead of mulching all of the town's discarded Christmas trees, they'd use some out at the reservoir to create bird and fish habitat. The village workers had dragged a few dozen trees out on the ice, and tied concrete blocks to each one. When the ice eventually melts, the trees will sink where they've been placed, and serve as spawning grounds and a protective habitat for the reservoir's fish. It was nice to imagine that our own Christmas tree, so recently undressed and dragged to the curb, might serve as a happy hiding ground for baby bluegill and bass a few months from now.

There is nothing quite like a blue sky on a frigid day to highlight the austere beauty of deciduous trees in winter. I think I prefer the winter tree to the summer one--when their complex structures are unveiled and highlighted from a distance. Up close, in the midst of the woods, the absence of canopy brings light and shadow onto each tree's distinctive skin, whether it be the furrowed oak or the silvery smooth Beech. But the shagbark hickory is my favorite.

A few years ago, before we cut a trail around the reservoir, I came across a gentleman hacking his way through the multiflora rose with a machete. He was looking for the largest, healthiest specimen of shagbark hickory he could find, hoping to gather some nuts to plant in his yard. I was impressed by his forethought, and his patience. Shagbark hickory is a slow growing tree, and it can be forty years old before it is producing a significant crop of nuts. But once it does, it will often continue to have large yields until it is two hundred years old. This was a man working in the interests of his grandchildren, great grandchildren, and beyond. He wasn't having much luck, which should be no surprise, as the trees typical only bear high yields of fruit about every third year.

The shagbark is commonly found in the oak-hickory forests of the region, but it is not so common to be ordinary and unnoticed. Its distinctively disshevelled bark resembles my hair during class after my morning swim, and it makes it easy for even someone with my limited botanical knowledge to identify. In Thoreau's calendar of Wild Fruits, he includes several entries on the shagbark, including these two:

December 18, 1856. Am told that they sometimes get a dozen bushels of shelled shagbarks from one tree. . .

September 1, 1859. "You must be careful not to eat too many nuts. I one winter met a young man whose face was all broken out into large pimples (or sores) who, when I inquired what was the matter, announced that he and his young wife being fond of shagbarks, he had bought a bushel of them in the fall, and they spent their winter evenings eating them--and this was the consequence."

So, if you happen to stumble across a mature shagbark during a mast year, go ahead and fill your pockets with its fruit. But don't eat too many, lest you suffer the same fate of the poor young man Thoreau encountered in 1859.