Quo Vadis?

On Thursday, the temperature rose about twenty degrees (making it just a hair above freezing), and the setting sun knocked on the living room window and asked me to come out and play. I bundled up, and my cat and I went out to see what we could see.

A few days earlier, we had gotten another coating of ice, and shortly after that, about a half-inch of snow. The wind had died down for a short time, and the end result was a beautiful splatter of animal footprints, all frozen in time like so many fossils.

Among them, as far as I could identify, were juncos and blue jays, whose prints centered on the patio and under birdfeeders; the wookiee (my cat), whose larger-than-average footprints look like a small dog’s patrolling every corner of our yard; rabbits, who remain fully hidden during the day, but evidently scuttle around the yard when no one’s looking; and squirrels.

The squirrels took me a while to identify, because they were in little clusters of four, each cluster spaced anywhere from 6 to 12 inches apart. I suppose they must have hopped. Or maybe they weren’t squirrel prints after all.

In any case, as the wookiee and I wandered around the yard, following footprints and chasing each other across the smooth drifts of snow, I turned around and traced with my eyes just where I had gone that evening.

I saw my footprints to the mailbox and back to the patio, to the garden swing and around the back of the tool shed, a group of bootprints where I had stooped to examine the squirrel prints under the pussywillow, and a line of footprints smashed through the icy layer parallel to the wookiee’s when I chased him back to the house.

The snow makes it clear where we’ve been. What it doesn’t as effectively reveal is where we’re going.

Quo vadis? Wohin gehst du? Where are you going? In whichever language, it’s a valid question. Our footprints, whether traced in snow, in carbon, or even in emotion, will tell a candid story about us when we’re gone. If we choose carefully the direction we’re heading now, our footprints will leave a valuable path for the ones to follow.

Know Your Dirt

Living in your parents’ house at the ripe old age of 24, while your best friend and her husband have the idyllic newborn, dog, and two-story brick house with a fenced-in backyard (not to mention a Nintendo Wii), gets you thinking about what you really want out of life. This past week, I remembered with renewed energy that I want to raise bees.

Bees aren’t exactly a dog or a newborn, a husband or a house, but they have begun to symbolize in my mind the things I want most, or perhaps better phrased, the lifestyle I want to lead.

Today I read two blog posts online that have similar themes: “Locals Only” (a post on naturalpatriot.org) and “The Garden” (a post from one of my classmates at gentleplanet.blogspot). They both discuss the idea of planting native plants in your yard and discouraging the growth of nonnatives.

Pam at gentleplanet.blogspot lives in El Paso and is xeriscaping with plants that already know how to deal with desert life, as compared to the lawns her neighbors are wasting water to try to keep green. Emmet at naturalpatriot.org takes it a step further and discusses the effect that nonnative plants have on local animals. I might be a German-American who thoroughly enjoys Chinese food, but the rabbit who lives in the thicket behind/under the garden shed doesn’t necessarily share my views on culinary diversity. He prefers to nibble on the native weeds.

Which brings me back to bees. The lifestyle I want to lead involves at least one beehive and at least a small meadow in my backyard. (Ideally, it will involve miles of fields and moors with sheep grazing on them, too, and a windmill, along with the bees and meadow, but let’s not get hasty.) Before doing this, I would research the plants native to my area that local bees like best. I would encourage the growth of native plants to replace the nonnative, and I would make sure that the bees I raise belong to the climate and geographic area that I live in.

And I’m sure I can get help from my mom in choosing plants. Ten years ago, she went through the National Wildlife Federation to make ours a certified Backyard Wildlife Habitat. It may only be ¾ of an acre, and there may be humans living in (gasp!) an unnatural house right smack in the middle of it, but still our yard functions as a sort of nature preserve, because my mom makes sure to encourage native plant life and animal life. (No one can I say I don’t come by this naturally!)

With a backyard like this to enjoy, it’s not too pressing for me to leave home just yet. And until I do graduate and move away and begin my beekeeping dream in my own backyard, it’s important to remember: no matter where you are, encourage what should be there naturally. Whether it’s your yard, your home, or yourself, everyone will be happier if you do.

Westsylvania

In the 1700s, my corner of Pennsylvania, most of what’s now West Virginia, and a slice of modern-era Kentucky, formed a plan to become the fourteenth state: Westsylvania. To those of you impertinent enough to think, “Fancy name for Pennsyltucky,” I must say . . . you’re absolutely right.

A glance at the topography of the region tentatively christened Westsylvania reveals the sense behind such a division.


To the east, the natural barrier of the Appalachians; to the west, the Ohio River Valley. And in between, a unique landscape and a mindset to go with it.

Think back to your American History lessons in eighth grade, and you’ll recall that by the Revolutionary War, the only populated areas of the colonies hugged the coastline: Philadelphia, Boston, New York. In Pennsylvania, when most colonists reached the Allegheny Mountains, they settled at their foot, uninterested in crossing the mountain range and establishing homesteads in the wilds of Fort Pitt or Kittaning. The insert on this map shows that, by the 1770s, the region of Westsylvania still wasn’t considered a proper part of the thirteen colonies.

The Europeans who made their home on the western side of the Alleghenies felt—quite naturally—separated from the rest of the colonies, and a political separation logically followed. However, the interruption of such minor events as the drafting of a certain Declaration and a rather conspicuous bullet shot in Massachusetts put an end to these plans.

But despite northern Westsylvania becoming western Pennsylvania, the inhabitants aligning themselves with the politics of Philadelphia, the landscape of the Alleghenies remained a sharp contrast to the comparatively easy hills in the east.

And the people who chose to live in this rugged and remote environment matched the land they now called home. My ancestors made their living by logging and making moonshine. You may remember that it was the Monongahela Valley where the Whiskey Rebellion originated in the 1790s. The residents simply wanted to be left alone. The rebellion all started because the feds dared to tax the whiskey coming out of the Monongahela region. They didn’t appreciate interference from the Outside World.

To a degree, that mindset still reigns supreme today, at least in the less urban areas outside of the Pittsburgh metropolis. The influences of the Internet are still suspect; immigrants, and even fellow citizens from other parts of the state, are looked on with a wary eye; and social interactions are forced, as though one is thinking, “I don’t know this person’s entire family history because they [or in my case, on of my parents] didn’t grow up here. What can there possibly be to discuss between us?”

But this makes the area where I grew up sound negative, and I’d rather not end on that note. For, as Thoreau wrote, solitude isn’t such a bad thing, and I think my fellow rural western Pennsylvanians have embraced this truth. The Alleghenies surround, compose the topography of my neighborhood, and one must really want to see one’s neighbors to climb a steep grade to reach their home. And even though the nation west of us has since been settled and turned into cities and suburbs quilted with threads of highway, something still feels remote about this region, as though we still might not belong to the rest of the United States.

And, just maybe, this is the truth that the original settlers knew when building their homes (and whiskey stills) in these mountains: we’re all just visitors on this earth, and this is not where we ultimately belong.

The Solitary Cooper's Hawk

The hawk who has attracted my fascination this winter flew overhead last week as I took a chilly and exhilarating ramble through my backyard.

First she glided, inches from the snow, into a thicket of bushes in my neighbor’s yard, where I had seen a colony of sparrows enjoying the bounty of a birdfeeder moments earlier. Then, she burst from the bushes, flapping over my head, then soaring over my roof, across the street, and into the yards beyond. I don’t know if she had caught any dinner; I was too busy watching her tail. It was rounded and not square.

I sprinted through shin-deep snow back to my house and turned to the Hawks page in my bird book. The tail distinction was what I needed to identify her, definitely, as a Cooper’s Hawk.

I watch her sit first on the peak of my neighbor’s A-frame house, then glide in lazy circles over our yards, then disappear over the crest of our hill. She returns with her talons full of a freshly caught creature and settles on a branch of a leafless tree to pick out a meal from her catch.

I never see another hawk, and my bird book says that they’re often solitary. And this may explain why I am so fascinated with her.

When I moved back to my parents’ house in June, I intended to leave in September or October after a brief and restful summer of reassessing the direction of my life. I had my family, but I no longer have my friends, who all moved away (as I did) after graduating from college.

I wonder if our Hawk considers her stint in my backyard as a temporary situation, as I still consider my stay here. She probably thinks, as she soars on the winds from the hills and mountains, that at some point, soon, she’ll fly away and find herself, if not a colony of Cooper’s Hawks, at least one other one.

She seems content here for now. But she sees the sparrows, blue jays, woodpeckers, and yellow-bellied sapsuckers, and knows that they may all be birds with wings and beaks, but they are not the same as her. Maybe she enjoys being the Only One of Her Kind watching over the activity of the neighborhood yards, but I think she’ll get lonely pretty soon. I think that someday I’ll notice she’s gone, and she’ll have found the place where she does belong, after a brief and restful winter in the bosom of my backyard.

Introduction

On Monday morning, I sat at my dining room table drinking tea, and I counted ten different kinds of birds in my backyard. Despite the gray cat from next door lurking in the bushes, and a busy red squirrel shuttling itself off the garden fence and over the branches of the ash tree, these birds busied themselves at the bird feeders and tree trunks, sharing my breakfast hour for their own repast.

Among them were, of course, blue jays, as well as gold finches, a mockingbird, both a downy and a red-bellied woodpecker, and everyone's favorite yellow-bellied sap-sucker. Later in the evening, I tried to identify the hawk whose shadow glides daily across the snow-covered lawns of the neighborhood. I believe she is a Cooper's hawk, but a definite identification remains to be made.

I include this roster in my introduction because it typifies my backyard: a variety of birds, a handful of wild mammals, and of course the cat (at least one) who stalks through the flowerbeds. Even today, when the thermometer never passed the 10°F mark, the wildlife kept the view through my well-insulated windows active and entertaining.

I look forward to watching the guest list change over the spring and summer months: which birds migrate north and which ones come back to Pennsylvania after a sunny winter elsewhere; how many rabbits dare return to a yard inhabited by both hawk and cat; and how my presence, a weekly observer on the garden swing, will affect everyone else.

A good plan might be to stock up on birdseed.