“Drawing Nigh, Summer’s End”

Posted on Aug, Tue, 2023 in Landscapes, Musings from Still Point

“Drawing Nigh, Summer’s End”

August breaks with torpid grace across the dunes of northern Michigan as Big Sable lighthouse lends distant perspective. Here, striated above Lake Michigan, morning light recedes into wisps of melancholic blue.

August, when asters bloom in random clusters and alders clump and shimmer almost unnoticed amid the undulating sweep of reed and marram, here live the grasses that color and cowl these dunes and texture the landscape. The change in hues, all but imperceptible by late August, subtly signal the end to summer is nigh.

Light breezes and shadows, discernibly longer by late afternoon, bring with them nostalgia, one’s yearning for fixity and a reluctance to accept the abiding change in seasons. An early provocation perhaps and reminder of summer’s mortality, the landscape resisting the slow, inexorable drift of dunes through time, reluctantly, implacably into the next season.

 

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“Time Irresolute, Tummond’s Bog ”

Posted on Feb, Mon, 2023 in Landscapes, Musings from Still Point

“Others will see the islands large and small; … A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them …” “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” Walt Whitman

“Time Irresolute, Tummond’s Bog ”

167 years after Walt Whitman published these prophetic lines, technology, capitalism and exigent political and religious ideologies now conspire to change at least one dimension of time’s long held notion; that some things are immutable, that some things transcend the temporal, that some things will endure. How can the simple beauty of a wetland that has survived for 11,000 years fall to the whim of man in the course of a few years? Entropy comes to the natural world with surrealistic speed disguised in many colors but almost always motivated by profit and power.

This scene of mallards flushing over a beaver lodge is at once iconic and timeless but imminently precarious. Imagine a world devoid of these creatures and the everyday quotidian beauty of the landscape.

Sunday (Feb. 19), Kate and I were visiting Tummond’s bog, a little known wetland in Mantua, Ohio, when mallards exploded over a beaver lodge at the west end of the marsh. It was the same location and scene we might have experienced 11,000 years ago with the end of the Pleistocene era as Ohio’s last glacier receded leaving eskers and kames behind to delineate the wetland, effectively arresting it in time. Pin oaks, white oaks, beech and shagbark hickory trace the slopes to the water where rush and sedge frame nesting areas for waterfowl and supply material and food for beaver lodges – a remarkable ecosystem, symbiotic, self-sustaining yet fragile.

One can walk, as we did, along the top of the serpentine eskers that still shelter the bog. As this scene existed in the past, it remains today. Tomorrow is less sanguine.

Oscar Bruggman Sand & Gravel, a privately owned, local company, is strip mining the wetland’s contiguous boundaries first removing surface vegetation (trees and brush), then topsoil and eventually the gravel to be sold. The mining impact to the hydrology, water chemistry, soil acidity, the underground aquifer, wildlife and myriad other critical components of this natural system presents an imminent existential crisis.

Perhaps it’s not of any real consequence. There are millions of bogs of course and when they disappear few will be aware of the loss and few will care. My personal hope is we come to see this obscure little bog as a microcosm, a metaphor that somehow helps, ever so minutely, to affect public opinion and, perhaps as a long shot, to galvanize action to preserve beauty and silent wonder.
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“Winter Amour”

Posted on Feb, Fri, 2023 in Landscapes

Winter Amour

 

Nothing like a February romance. Even a snuggle appears beautiful but illicit among starlings.
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“Reaching”

Posted on Feb, Fri, 2023 in Landscapes

“Reaching”

A trip to Mantua, Ohio today (Saturday, Jan. 29th) almost went unrewarded in search of the “Tummonds Bog”, a natural wetland and nature preserve, managed by the Ohio DNR and virtually impossible to find. After an hour wrestling with Siri and the directions of Mapquest, then another making concentric circles looking for the trailhead, I resolved to try another day.

In a serendipitous twist, driving north on Rt. 44 from Mantua, I spotted this old maple in the distance on what appeared to be a 19th century farm. Silhouetted and standing alone against a gray sky, appearing to reach into the abyss, it likely marked several generations that had spared the tree from the time the land was first cleared.
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“St. Theodosius Cathedral”

Posted on Feb, Fri, 2023 in Landscapes

St. Theodosius Cathedral

St. Theodosius Cathedral

This extraordinary Eastern Orthodox church, known or recognized by most Clevelanders, is a legacy of the 19th century, perched on Starkweather Ave. in Tremont overlooking a vast industrial landscape of steel mills. From its vantage point, one could watch as three to four successive generations of husbands, fathers and brotherscarried their lunch pails, descending the pitched slope each day to toil in the blast furnaces, coking ovens, open hearths, BOF’s, hot and cold strip mills and myriad support facilities that drove Cleveland’s economy through much of the 20th century.

Rt 490 and other freeways have severed the foot traffic that once wore paths down the steep grade of W. 7th.  The great assets of Republic Steel and Jones and Laughlin have since been been acquired by ArcelorMittal, a Luxembourg conglomerate. As industrial, economic, social and cultural changes have obscured much of Cleveland’s history in the last few decades, St. Theodosius still stands, listed on the National Register of Historic Places and still sustains a way of life and worship rapidly disappearing elsewhere.
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