After nearly a week of rain, these woods were radiant with that freshly washed intensity that literally pulls the colors out of the landscape. It’s a vibrant time of year on many levels here, and it definitely helps to have finely tuned senses that can be called upon at any given moment in order to fully appreciate whatever sight, sound or smell presents itself.
I’ve lost count of how often when, sitting with a book, I’ve seen a hawk glide past the window from one tree to another, or some other bird whose presence would have eluded me had I sat there waiting to see it. Just last week, I spotted a flash of red outside the window, in the unmistakable form of a male scarlet tanager, flitting from branch to branch, obviously enjoying the brief respite of sunshine we were blessed with during what was otherwise a long, rainy week. The tanager’s iridescent appearance here is usually brief, as it prefers the deeper woods away from the encroachment of suburbia. Indeed, its native breeding habitat, along with that of several other birds, such as the wood thrush, is reported to be threatened due to habitat fragmentation and loss.
The ovenbird is another woodland dweller whose song greets me early almost every morning during late spring and summer, and the warmer it is out, the more certain I am to hear it. This diminutive bird, whose loud call more than makes up for its anonymity, serves as a natural alarm clock even on those mornings when I don’t have (or want) to get up early. I’m always hard-pressed to spot it, though, despite the fact that its insistent “teacher-teacher-teacher-teacher” reaches me from not too great a distance. It’s a shy creature, preferring the forest floor to perching on a high branch, one of many creatures that return year after year to grace these vast woods.
Andy Warhol once said that “land is the best art,” a reassuring statement coming from one whose most recognizable contribution was multiple renderings of a can of soup. I suspect that, like anyone who truly understands the land, Warhol knew that it can no more be owned than a canvas or a piece of marble. It is for all to enjoy, appreciate, reap from, but what’s more important, to safeguard. Unlike the years of this country’s westward expansion, when land meant stability and survival, the land is now left to the whims of those whose names appear on the deeds, a situation subject to change at any given moment considering the transitory nature of life in an ever-changing economy.
If land is the best art, then we are merely its docents, as no human hand could come close to the tangled orderliness that only nature is capable of. While we might ooh and aah over an 11-by-14 glimpse of a forest whose canopy is pierced by the sun’s slanting rays, it’s quite another matter altogether to be standing in such a place. For it cannot be taken in all at once or even totally, for that matter.
Nature overwhelms us with a myriad of details, only a few of which it is possible to capture by even the most discerning of artists, so that what we get while strolling the museum’s galleries are mere suggestions of what lies out there. Not until you have been humbled by the land’s vastness can you appreciate how narrow our vision really is, and how small the bits we appropriate for ourselves in the name of art.
When I first came here, I hung a few such pieces on my walls, but have since taken them all down save for one, a large poster-sized photograph of a maple branch just off the back porch that had turned crimson before everything else that first autumn. I leave it up as a reminder of my initial awe of this place and of how it has never failed to provide me with all that I need to live a healthy life of the soul.
— Rachel Lovejoy, a freelance writer living in Lyman, can be reached via e-mail at rlovejoy84253@roadrunner.com.
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