Skunk Cabbage

It was a gorgeous day today. Blue skies and temperatures about 50 degrees. After work I slipped on a shirt, shorts and running shoes and went out to soak it in. Sunday's seven mile run with Peter, the Religion professor, and Jim, another History professor was hard. Both are quite a bit faster than me, and we took a new route with some monster-sized hills. I finished that run sore and demoralized, with rising doubts about whether I'll be ready for the half-marathon in one month.

But today I felt great, and headed down to the National Road, and ran west for a mile or so before turning back and heading to the reservoir. It seemed as if everyone was heading out to the reservoir on a day like this, and there was much to see. Young calves and lambs were in abundance. Turkey Vultures soared on rising thermals. Canada geese splashed down into farm ponds. Barn cats stretched out in the sun, near the shelter of a tractor. As I ran past the White farm, I noticed some movement out of the corner of my eye. I turned and there I saw a small black lamb racing me along the tops of a long line of hay rolls. As I watched him leap rather gracefully from the top of one to the next it reminded me of Billy Elliot leaping across the rooftops of Birmingham, England. As he reached the end of the line of hay rolls it became clear to me that Billy was not so much racing me as he was runing toward the safety and security of his mother grazing at the other end. It was nonetheless one of those magical running moments.

When I got to the reservoir I took a cool down walk along the earthen dam, then turned around to discover my departmental colleague Jim stretching on a picnic bench. He had been following me down Shadyside road, and had not quite caught up to me on the hill up to the reservoir. We ran back to town together, chatting about the beauty of the day, problem students and great students, office politics, and the upcoming half-marathon. Once we got back into town he headed home and I ran down to the Jitterbug, for my favorite warm weather drink--a Gilligan--iced coffee with a dash of coconut syrup.

It was such a glorious day that when I got home I couldn't stand to remain indoors as long as there was some sunlight left, so I loaded the dogs into the car and we drove them out to the reservoir. The ground was wet and muddy from a week's worth of rain, but it was great day for going off trail and exploring the woods and marshes, as the shrubs and multiflora had not yet had time to take off and fill in the understory. While the dogs busied themselves with getting thoroughly wet and muddy I explored the edges of the marsh, looking for early signs of spring.

Not surprisingly, I found it in the spathes of skunk cabbage. Some were green, some were wine red, and some a mottled mix of both. The largest were already rising about six inches from the floor. The skunk cabbage is usually the first of the spring flowers. The plant actually generates a substantial amount of heat as it emerges from the earth, and can melt the snow when the snow decides to hang around that long. Their pungent smell was not yet noticeable--though I confess I didn't stick my nose right up to it to see if it was there. The skunk cabbage's flowerhead remains sheltered in the "spathe" leaf for most of the plant's annual growth cycle. It was probably the fact that the flowerhead resembled a hooded head that inspired Thoreau to call the skunk cabbage "the hermit of the bog." By May the oldest plants will be three or four feet wide and almost as tall. By July, the leaves dissolve into a slimy mold, and the dried out fruit/flowerhead is left behind as a woody-looking sphere. In this picture, you can see the new flowerhead sheltered inside the spathe, and last year's nut-like dried-out sphere in the foreground.

The environs of the skunk cabbage are where spring really starts. The remarkable amount of heat they generate draws the season's first insects. The skunk cabbage's smell resembles the decaying meat, and attracts the same kinds of insects that are attracted to carrion. Spiders understand the attraction of heat, and often spin webs across the spathe opening, hoping to get their first meal of the season. Beyond its attraction to insects, there are few creatures interested in eating the bitter fruit of the skunk-cabbage. Some early settlers called it "bear-weed" because they noticed that bears seem to like it. About the only other creature willing to try the skunk weed fruit was Henry David Thoreau, whose passion for botanical observation nearly always incorporated not just the use of his senses of sight, touch and smell, but also taste. In his posthumously published calendar "Wild Fruits," Thoreau writes of the skunk cabbage fruit:

When I carry it home my friends can scarcely guess what fruit it is, but think of pine-apples and the like. After being in the house a week, and becoming wilted and softened, it emits, upon being broken open, an agreeable, sweetish scent, perchance like a banana, which suggests that it may be edible. But a good while after I have tasted it, it bites my tongue.

After an hour or so of mucking about in bogs, examining young skunk cabbage plants, it was time to gather my three muddy mutts, load them in the back of the car, and head home. I look forward to many more of these spring days.

Visiting Reed Larrick

Pauli Cornish called me yesterday to tell me she had acquired a copy of the Salt Fork State Park book, and really liked it. I was glad she called, because I had been meaning to call her and had misplaced her number. Pauli is an 80 something year-old dynamo who restored a an old sandstone house sat above the waters at Salt Fork State Park. The Kennedy Stone House is now a museum documenting mid 19th century farm life in the Salt Fork region, and preserving the stories of the many families who once made the parklands their home. Pauli and the Friends of the Stone House museum provided many of the pictures for the Salt Fork book, and we decided to contribute the book royalties to the Kennedy Stone House museum. I wanted to get her a signed copy of the book and take the opportunity to deliver copies to a few other families who shared so many stories and pictures with us.

I was most excited to visit Reed Larrick, a 94 year old bachelor who grew up in the region, and lives alone in a small house just south of the park. We visited Reed several times this summer to hear his stories and view his pictures. And Reed is a great story teller. Unfortunately, some of his stories were so candid that we dare not publish them, for fear of offending other people. Reed's favorite activity in his younger days was raising coonhounds and going coon hunting, and his house is filled with pictures and trophies related to this activity. I snapped this picture of him this summer while he was showing off his gun--a gun he bought at J.C. Penney 75 years ago and has kept in working order ever since. He still ocassionally uses it to shoot groundhogs from his kitchen window.

It had been months since I had visited Reed. I wasn't sure he'd remember me, but he did. In fact, he let me know that he had been waiting for the book for a long time, and it was about he had about given up on it. He had told all his friends and family about it, and they were constantly asking him when it was coming out. I gave him a signed copy, and he was delighted with it. We chatted for about an hour, I took out his trash and brought in his mail. It had been a long winter for Reed, and he had not been outside in months. He told me he had to get about fifteen copies of the book to give to all the friends and family who had been asking about it. At twenty bucks a pop, that was going to cost him a sizeable sum. So when I took the trash out, I got into my trunk and gathered the few extra copies I had and left them on his kitchen table.

I had to get back to campus for some meetings, so I said goodbye, and promised to stop in soon. When I return, I'll bring him a case of his favorite beverage--Mountain Dew. If I'm lucky enough to live into my eighties or nineties, I hope I have the health and energy of Pauli Cornish and Reed Larrick.

Searching for Abraham Luzadder

While I was working on the Salt Fork State Park book this summer, I spent alot of time trudging through poison ivy, waist high grass, and thickets of multiflora rose searching for old house foundations and cemeteries. July and August aren't the ideal time for this kind of searching, but with a book deadline looming, I wanted to gather as much information as I could before sending it off to the press. The one location I was never able to find--despite repeated efforts in the summer heat--was the grave of Abraham Luzadder. Abraham Luzadder (or Lieuzaderre, or Lieuzadder) was a Franco-American from Virginia who was a private in George Rogers Clark's Revolutionary War expedition into the west. He fought at the Battle of Kaskaskia, in which American forces defeated the British and their Indian allies. After the war, he moved with his family to the Ohio country, and settled on property that is now part of Salt Fork State Park. Local legend has it that one day Luzadder was alerted that a party of Indians were raiding cabins in the area, so he placed all of his money in a crock and hid it in the woods. A short time later, Luzadder died, and on his deathbed his family asked him where he hid the money. According to this legend, he gasped the words "Tree . . . Spring. . . unhhh" and then drew his last breath. The pot of money has never been found.

The original grave marker was replaced with a veteran's stone sometime early in the 20th century. In 1939, the Daughters of the American Revolution added an additional marker to the spot. A descendant of Abraham Luzadder mailed me a packet of information about the family. I also had some very old plat maps that indicated where the Luzadder property was located. But finding the actual grave proved to be a challenge. I encountered lots of old-timers who recalled visiting the spot when they were young. They gave me directions that went something like this. "You go down Beeham Run road. When you see an old hunting road on the left, don't go down that. Go to the next old road that's not there any more. If you follow that one about a mile through the woods you'll come to a farmer's field. It's in a clump of trees in that field."

Despite these nonsensical directions, after several exploratory missions, I managed to find the farmer's field. While the Luzadder land is now Park property, part of it is leased to local farmers to grow sunflowers and corn. This actually creates a valauble edge environment--between forest and field--where deer come to feed at dusk and dawn. And the deer certainly appreciate feasting on the farmer's corn. The field stretches out in fingers in several directions, covering all of the relatively flat land on top of several ridges. And there are quite a few "clumps of trees" and windbreaks in the field. Searching for the grave in the August heat--covered head to toe to protect myself from poison ivy, multiflora rose, and mosquitos--was an exercise in futility and rapid dehydration. The clumps and windbreaks were impenetrable at that time, and I could have easily passed within a few feet of Luzzader's grave and not found it. I even contacted the farmer who leased the land from the state, and he had never seen the grave. I was beginning to wonder it was really out there.

Late fall or winter held more promise for searching, but I avoided the area in late fall because Salt Fork State Park is immensely popular with hunters at that time of year, and rustling around in clumps of tree when the hunters were out seemed like a very bad idea. This week was Spring break at the College, so I called my friend and fellow kayaker Craig "Stick" Stickelmeyer to see if he wanted to go out there and help me search. Stick is an outdoorsman to the core. He is a tree trimmer, a hunting guide, and writes a hunting column for the local newspaper. And like me he just loves exploring the woods. We met at Salt Fork and hiked up to the field. It was a perfect morning. The sun was shining and the temperature was in the 20s, but it was rapidly rising. It would reach 60 degrees by afternoon. The plowed ground of the farmer's field was still frozen and easy to cross. Within a few hours it would be a boot-sucking mud field, so it was good we got an early start. We split up and searched various clumps and the perimeter of the field. After about two hours, I was pretty sure we must be in the wrong field, and just as I was about to give up I spotted it--not in a clump of trees but on the edge of the forest, behind a patch of multiflora rose, but in a clearing of sorts. I took the GPS coordinates so I could find it again--and post them online--and pulled out the digital camera to get some pics. The batteries were dead, but I managed to get off one single shot of it before the camera shut down. I called Stick over, and he took some pics with old fashioned film. Stick asked me some questions about Luzadder, including what religion he might be, and when I told him that as a Frenchman born in the 18th century there was a good chance he was Catholic, Stick pulled a rosary out of his hunting jacket and dropped in on the stone for Old Abraham Luzadder. On the return journey we found the remains of an old house foundation, including an old squared off timber, that might have been the site of Luzadder's home. We also found a spring, and a line of old oaks that just might have been there when Abraham died in 1826. But no pot of money. When we got back to the car, I gave Stick the packet of information about Luzadder and suggested he write a column about him. And Stick gave me something too--his hand-carved cedar walking stick, decorated with a deer antler. But the search for Abraham Luzadder is over. He's been found--not for the first time, but perhaps for the first time in recent years. And with the magic of GPS technology, perhaps he will never be lost again.

View from the Jitterbug

It has been snowing heavily all morning. Looks like we might have four or more inches before it ends. I had a meeting with John Huey, the Village manager and John Morrow, the head of the Village maintenance crew this morning at Village Hall. We are planning for the building of three bridges needed to make the loop trail around the reservoir more accessible. When I moved to New Concord ten years ago, there were short trails that extended part of the way up the east and west sides of the water, but in order to loop all the way around, a hiker had to be prepared to hack through thickets of mutliflora rose along deer trails that often turned in directions the hiker wasn't really interested in going.

Multilfora rose is an invasive species, introduced and promoted by well meaning agricultural "reformers" in the 1930s as the ideal "natural fence." It was easy to get it established, and its sharp and plentiful thorns would keep livestock contained as effectively as barbwire or electric wire. The problem was that multiflora rose established itself TOO easily, aggressively and rapidly reclaiming neglected fields, and filling the understory of second growth forests. It is now universally acknowledged that the promotion of multiflora rose as a tool for progressive farming was one of the worst ideas in agriculture during the last century. Today, farmers and trail builders wage a never ending battle with this weed.

About three or four years ago, a small group of reservoir enthusiasts took to carrying pruners or loppers with them when they went hiking, each time making inroads a bit deeper into the thorny multiflora brambles. But individual efforts are not enough to defeat this villain. Two years ago, we decided to draft an army of our own, and organized a "volunteer" effort employing incoming first year Muskingum College students to do battle with the multiflora rose and complete the trail around the reservoir. The day began with a major setback, when students whose fingers and lips were coated in sweet, sugary glazed donuts we fed them for breakfast disturbed a yellow-jacket nest, which descended upon them en masse. A few casualties were carried off to the local emergency room, but the rest soldiered on. In one day with a crew of 80 or so we managed to get the trail completed. Since then, we've organized quarterly volunteer days to fight back the weakened but not defeated forces of multiflora, and to complete additional trail improvements. I recently convinced the village to provide materials and skilled crew members needed to get three bridges built over small creeks or runs. I've lined up some crews of eager fraternity brothers to provide the grunt labor of lugging lumber to the isolated locations, digging postholes, and helping the village crews in any way they can.

In today's meeting we set three early April dates for the three bridge builds, and next week I'll go out with two village workers to the sites, to make sure my estimates of what is needed are correct. It will be nice to get these bridges done. It will make the trail accessible to younger and older users, who might be a little less steady on their feet, or who aren't inclined to step through or jump over muddy creeks and runs in order to get around.

Now, I've retreated to the warmth of the Jitterbug coffee house, to do a bit of grading and some other mundane tasks, and to wait and see how long the snow keeps coming down.

My Kayak

Last winter after we moved into our new house, I decided to take advantage of our acquisition of a garage and use the space to build a plywood and fiberglass kayak. Using it to park a car seemed like such a waste. I ordered a "stitch and glue" kayak kit from Pygmy Kayaks. It arrived in February. Over the next few months I spent two or three hours in the garage most evenings working on the boat. I had my doubts as to whether I could actually build it, as did my friends and family. I was not exactly born with the patience and fine motor skills to take on this task. I was the type of kid whose approach to model-building was to ignore all of the instructions about allowing things time to dry before moving onto the next step, glue everything together at the same time, head outside to play, and return to a hard mountain of glued together parts that resembled a modern art sculpture more than an automobile. I was also the kid who got a "D" in 7th grade wood shop. But I learned many years ago that surest path to an unfulfilling life is to confine yourself to activities that you had decided you were "good at" by the age of ten. Humans have a pretty remarkable ability to learn new skills when they have a genuine desire to do so.

Building a kayak means, among other things, mixing up endless small batches of epoxy, and having a steady supply of yogurt cups on hand for mixing is essential. I soon had most of my friends and colleagues saving their empty yogurt cups and dropping them by my office. As the project continued, interest grew, and everyone I knew began asking me when the launch date would be here. It was hard to tell. The closer the boat got to being finished, the more small tasks had to be completed, each requiring a 24 hour drying time. In May of 2006 the boat was finally finished, and while I had promised all of the yogurt cup collecters that I would invite them to the launch, I was eager to get her out on the water. One Saturday morning I sent an email out to friends and neighbors--the boat would be launched that afternoon at three oclock at the New Concord Reservoir. I wasn't sure how many people would be there at such short notice, but quite a crowd showed up. Some were curious to see if the boat would ACTUALLY weigh just 39 pounds, after all those layers of fiberglass and epoxy. Would it instead be a 17 foot long barbell, requiring the effort of ten men to move? Others were curious to see if it would actually float. I was mostly wondering if it would go straight.

Before we launched we had to choose a name. Among the nominees were "the Yogurt Cup" and "the Learning Curve." The winning name, suggest by English professor Jane Varley, was Salma Kayak (in tribute to the actress and producer Salma Hayek). Salma was launched, and she glided easily across the water, straight and true.

Last summer and fall I paddled Salma in Rockport, Massachusetts and in many lakes and rivers in Ohio. This winter, I took her down to the basement, and cut hatches and installed bulkheads. The bulkheads will make the boat much safer, as they limit the area which can fill with water in a capsize. While the hatches came out fine, I miss the uninterrupted woodgrain deck of the pre-hatch Salma. My original motive for building a plywood and fiberglass kayak was because it would enable me to have a sea kayak at a price I could afford. Building it myself was a means to an end. What I didn't expect to happen was that I would enjoy the building itself so much. I'm looking forward to building a second boat, one of these days. Some day soon, very soon, Salma will get her first turn on the water in 2007. Probably at the New Concord Reservoir.

Cruel Reversal

I awoke at 5:15 this morning to get ready for my morning swim at the College pool. The digital thermometer told me it was 15 degrees outside. The weatherman told me the windchill was 3 degrees, that it would not get above the mid-20s today, and we should expect 1-3 inches of snow tomorrow. But it was sunny. In the afternoon, I decided to walk out to the reservoir for some signs of spring. I kept my eyes on the skies for soaring turkey vultures, but did not see any. I believe at least some of the several hundred that make New Concord their home are here year round, but they don't seem to spend much time soaring and circling in the winter. I passed the fields with new lambs, and took a few more pictures of them. Once at the reservoir, I circled the lake, keeping my ears and eyes open. The Bluejays were making some noise, but they are always around. I was three quarters of the way around when I heard a familiar "tunk tunk tunk" sound. I stopped to listen and look. Sure enough, I soon saw what I think was a Pileated woodpecker flying deeper into the woods. Then I heard the "tunk tunk tunk" a few more times, and kept searching the tops of the bare trees. Eventually I saw the flashing red crown of another Pileated woodpecker, presumably the mate of the first. I watched and listened for awhile. I didn't have a good enough camera to get a decent picture. The one included here is from another internet site. The woodpeckers weren't the sign of spring I was looking for--they are year round residents. But perhaps their activity signalled they were preparing a new nest for their young. A mother Pileated woodpecked usually lays four eggs, and the eggs hatch in just two weeks. So perhaps there will be a few more around here in the near future.

On the way back into town I encountered the most obvious sign of spring--a half dozen Robins foraging in a farmers field. As I headed back down Shadyside drive, three bluebirds--two males and a female--were occupying fence posts along the road. As I approached, they each took their turns hopscotching over each other to posts further down the road, never letting me get too close before they moved on to the next one. Finally as I neared home I wandered past the stand of conifers where the Turkey Vultures usually roost. A dozen or more were there. After I took a few pictures, most of them decided to move onto different tree, a bit farther away from me. This weekend the temps may rise back into the 50s. It is Spring break at the College, and many of the students are down in Florida. They usually bring spring back with them.

The First Lambs

My friend Stick called the other day asking if I wanted to get our kayaks out on the water this weekend. I'm ready, but the weather is not. The ice is gone from all of the moving water in the area, but heavy rains over the last few days has brought a little bit of flooding and some very swift-moving rivers. I go daily to the New Concord Reservoir to check on the progress of the ice. It is too thin to hold a person these days, but still covers the entire pond. The night time temps are just low enough to partially undo the work the sun has been doing during the day. Still, there is some hope that things will soon turn--the lambs have arrived at the White farm just below the reservoir.