ANOLES FIGHTING ON THE FENCEPOST
Thursday as I passed by my garden I noticed two male Green Anoles, Anolis carolinensis ("chameleon" lizards), circling one another on a fencepost. Clearly they were contesting territory. One was a little larger than the other, and the small one had about a quarter of his tail missing. The larger was slower but kept the high ground while the smaller was more aggressive and willing to attack. Both were bright green.
Finally they lunged at one another, their open mouths ending up crosswise to one another, each with a good bit of the other's upper or lower jaw in its own mouth. At first it appeared as if each was in an equally bad situation but then the larger one, in a matter of less than 30 seconds, turned dark brown-gray. During most or maybe all of the matings I've seen, the male remained bright green while the female turned a dark, leaden hue, so the thought occurred to me that maybe the big male sensed that he was at a disadvantage in the fight, and his darkening signaled his desperation or submission. Closer up I saw that the big one not only had one of his eyes inside the other's mouth, but also several of his head scales were dislodged, and he was breathing much faster than his smaller opponent. I think he considered himself to be losing the fight.
They remained locked together like this for ten minutes, the smaller one constantly shifting his body to get a better grip, the larger one just holding on. Finally they disengaged and the circling continued, the big one walking stiffly and seemingly dazed. Soon they attacked again and the same situation developed, except that this time no eye was covered by a jaw. After about ten more minutes the big one began turning green again and the small one started looking nervous, shifting his position more frequently but never improving his situation.
Somehow they came undone, circled one another some more, the big one always maintaining the highest position despite his swollen, wounded tongue hanging from his mouth's corner, and then they attacked again. The big one continued regaining his earlier bright green color and now the small one had as many loose scales and raw-looking spots as the big one. As they chewed at one another, sometimes one would lose his grip and the other would hold him in mid air while clinging to the side of the fencepost. Then the loose one would gain a grip, give a mighty twist and flip the other into the air. It was a tremendous fight.
After about 40 minutes from the beginning they disengaged, circled one another for a while, and then I saw it: The big one had returned to his former brilliant bright greenness but the small one now for the first time was darkening. And now the small one, for every five steps he'd take forward or sideways, would take six backwards. He still looked aggressive but unmistakably he was withdrawing from the fight as he grew darker and darker.
Finally just the bright green big one remained on the fencepost as the dark small one slinked away through the daylilies.
*****
COMPOSTING THE DOMINANT PARADIGM
My dictionary's first definition of "poor" is, "Wanting in material riches or goods." I wonder if the dictionary's editors meant to be as profound with their definition as it seems to me they were? For, in their choice of words they reflected this society's dominant consumerist paradigm by employing the term "wanting," when, in my mind, they should have written "needing... " A person is poor, I believe, when someone is "needing" of material riches or goods, not just "wanting" them...
I became especially sensitive to these opposing concepts of being poor this week while draining water into the bathtub prior to washing my Kentucky quilts for the first time in a long, long time. That morning as the water poured, I made my rounds seeing what new plants were blossoming or producing fruit, how high my Moonflower vine had grown in the night, whether new mushrooms had sprung up, how my anoles and fence lizards were doing, and I was feeling prosperous and fortunate beyond description.
Yet, I could probably qualify for welfare because my yearly income is so low. Despite my sense of affluence and despite my having much more than I really need, and certainly not wanting more "material riches or goods," the world around me often classifies me as "poor." Moreover, many would be annoyed that on a weekday morning I myself was not in a car hurrying someplace to a paying job.
The crystalline, soul-pleasing water gushed from the ground joyously gurgling and splashing after long confinement in the aquifer. The sun sparkled in the water and I drank deeply and bathed in it, and watered my plants and compost heap with it. What enormous potential I envisioned for us -- me and this water -- and how many degrees of fulfillment I experienced at that moment!
I wish I had a way to compost this culture's dominant motivating paradigm that assigns one to poverty simply if little money is at hand, and declares that one is wasting his or her time if not perpetually employed with earning a weekly salary. I should like to shred that paradigm and ceremoniously dump it into the straw and dried pig manure of history, then stand yodeling and lustily pee on it.
What pleasure it would be one morning to see it black and spongy, steamy in the morning air and smelling wholesome and well intentioned. If I could do that, I believe I should enrich the whole world many-fold, and happiness would emerge everywhere like well-formed mushrooms from perfect compost.
*****
DEW-BATHING TOWHEE
Early Tuesday morning before the dew had begun burning off I noticed a commotion at the forest's edge. That particular spot was very densely vegetated with Chinese Privet up through which grew blackberry canes and honeysuckle, and the whole thicket was topped with a canopy of grapevine.
My binoculars revealed a young Eastern Towhee still wearing his brown, streak-breasted juvenile plumage, and he was taking a dew bath. Systematically he'd pull himself up to the thicket's grapevine roof and then body-surf one or two feet down a downward-arching cascade of wet leaves or else he'd position himself atop the vegetation's surface and simply flutter his wings, twist his body, throw his head back, and let himself sink through the dew-slick herbage. After about ten minutes his feathers were dark with wetness and then he flew to a perch to preen exactly as if he'd taken a puddle-bath.
The young towhee's body language clearly indicated that he regarded his bath as a pleasure, not a task. It was the bird's first August and he was just learning how an August fog can coalesce into a blissfully cool, wet dew. What a revelation it would be if I could just see the world for a moment through the eyes and mind of that young bird rejoicing so prettily in his wet leaves.
*****
GHOST-HAWK
Another powerful cold front barreled through here Thursday afternoon bringing a second shot of coolish air in two weeks. The storm announcing the front was impressive, a really dark one with a well-defined boundary between the rainfall below and the roiling clouds above.
Right during the windiest, darkest moments preceding the white curtain of rain's arrival here, a white-looking hawk came into view. The binoculars showed it to be a Red-tailed Hawk and really I can't say whether he was any paler than normal, or whether he just looked white because of the very dark background.
Whatever the case, that hawk presented a majestic, ghostly appearance. The wind must have been terrible where he was, for he was being blown before the storm like a sheet of newspaper high in the sky experiencing violent downdrafts, updrafts, and vortexes. Not quite like a newspaper, though, because he had some control and -- this is the thing -- as with the young towhee, his body language told me that he was having a lot of fun.
On the ground other birds were frantically seeking shelter, flying hard and low, the sense of emergency clearly indicated in their demeanors. But that white specter in the fearful-looking sky for the few seconds he remained in view was like a teenager catching his first good wave with a surfboard. He had enough control to descend if he wanted, but this is the season when hawks get the wandering urge, so maybe he just didn't want to. Maybe this storm just struck some kind of chord in him that said "Instead of scrambling for shelter like a mouse, just latch onto this mightiness, go with it, and exult in being a free-sky hawk!"
It'd been one of those super-sultry afternoons when you have to fight to keep focused and busy, so that storm with its sudden gushes of coolness and powerful animations all around me, and that ghost-hawk performing one broad laugh all the way across the sky, was just what I needed.
*****
PEARS, SCYTHING & YELLOWJACKETS
Exactly as the fig harvest petered out, the pears began dropping, so this week each morning my first job has been to collect pears. Last year we had almost no pears because in spring a late frost nipped nearly all the flowers, but this year every tree is heavy with fruit, some branches simply overwhelmed with them. Some pears are big as cantaloupes, and when I bite into them the juice mats my beard, but I don't care. Before I began gathering the pears, tall grass and blackberry brambles had grown up beneath the trees so I’d had to do some scything.
Now, scything is something beautiful to me. You probably know that a scythe consists of a long, curved blade at the end of a handle about five feet long, and that the handle is curved in a special way. It's the implement carried by Grandfather Time. I feel very fortunate to have been taught the basics of the art of scything when I lived in Belgium, by a fellow who, when he had been a shepherd in Normandy, had learned from an old scything master.
Scything across a field of tall grass, having your rhythm going, seeing the tall grass collapsing evenly where it should, and leaving a clean swath behind you is a form of mediation, a sort of communion with the Earth and the seasons. Few people experience it nowadays, though at one time scything was a basic agricultural task in many of the world's economies. Unfortunately here I don’t have a blade meant for tall grass, nor do I need to cut much tall grass. Still, with my shorter-bladed "briar-scythe" I can recall my earlier classical scything in Belgian meadows.
So, I was scything short passageways through tall grass between trees and I felt my blade slice into a hill of dirt. I figured it was just a fireant hill and continued. But then something bulletlike zapped my right ear, I felt little legs tangling in my hair and beard, and I knew instantly that I'd scythed into a yellowjacket hill.
I was lucky that most of the yellowjackets tangled in my hair and stung the bandana sweat-band around my head, for I managed to get away with only that one sting on the ear. I got away fast without thinking too hard on it, leaving the scythe where it fell. The next morning I returned to retrieve the scythe and to my astonishment a decent cloud of yellowjackets was still active above the decapitated nest. Four days later, however, the cloud had disappeared, though a few individual wasps were still buzzing about. The ear was puffy for a couple of days and it hurt like the dickens.
As summer ends and cool weather comes, yellowjackets become even more aggressive than they are now. One reason for that may be that the individual wasps don't have much to loose by getting into a fight, for when cold weather really arrives they will all die, except for the queen. Only the queen will survive winter, and then next spring she will find a new place and begin the colony all over again in a new nest.
*****
BIKING ADVENTURE
On Friday morning I was biking to the organic gardens, thinking only of my morning chores. Right before reaching the upper garden the dirt road passed through a narrow space between the tool shed and the giant bamboo patch. Because of recent rains water had pooled in the road's ruts, so I had to be careful to keep the bike from slipping into deep rut-water.
And then I realized that my bike's front tire had just run over the tail of an Agkistrodon piscivorus leucostoma - a Western Cottonmouth, also known as Water Moccasin. This is a very dangerous venomous snake.
My reflex was to slam on the brakes in order to keep the back tire from discomfiting the critter even more, but the moment I found myself balancing on a stationary bicycle with both legs spread out, and the snake below me stabbing at my tires, I wondered if stopping had been the wise thing to do. Even under those circumstances I realized that eventually my bike would tilt one way or another, and that my legs would have to come down.
Fortunately it was a small snake, only about 30 inches long, so when I finally had to bring my legs down I could spraddle them so that my feet didn't distract the snake's attention from my tires. I managed to inch my bike forward as the snake slipped into another rut's water, sending frogs jumping like popcorn.
I returned with a bucket, coaxed the snake into it, put a lid on it, and carried it to a lake across the hill.
*****
SOWING TURNIP SEEDS
A week ago I sowed a big bed of turnips. Now at least ten times every day I visit the turnip bed, though I know there won't be much new to see since the last time. It's clear that I go there for purposes other than to garden. I think it's purely for the magic of it all.
The seeds I sowed had been two years old. They'd resided in a brown paper bag during the frosts and drizzly days of two winters, they'd sat inside a junked refrigerator in a dusty shed at my former residence through any number of spring storms, they'd smoldered through long dog-days of summer, they'd heard evening crickets and katydids on at least a hundred fall nights, and during nearly all that time I was forgetting that they were there.
But then one morning early last week I walked over freshly broken ground broadcasting those seeds, moving my arm back and forth like a magician over a hat. The seeds were so small I couldn't see them as they fell, or hear them hit the ground, only feel them leaving my hand. I strewed mulch over them and watered the area, and then for a few nights and days I waited as each seed sought and found within its own private darkness the life inside it.
Eventually, being born, each plant struggled up through Earth's mineral clottings and debris, resulting in a bed of thousands of dark green little plants, each with its two first notched leaves (its cotyledons) being perfect solar panels elegantly aligned for gathering star-energy for the synthesis of carbohydrate -- which someday I shall take into my own body as good-tasting, soul-pleasing fuel.
It's all magic, all mystery, all perfection. How curious that reality should be constructed in such a manner that a mere hermit working in a barn should be able to delight in such majestic goings-on.
*****
ON REALLY SEEING A SEED
Back to those turnip seeds. Or any seeds, for that matter...
A seed is something Mother Nature thought up as an appropriate vessel for transferring information from one generation to the next. The transferal of this information is especially dramatic and artful because typically it involves a being at the end of one season handing off the information to an unknown being living at the beginning of a completely different season. Moreover, usually the two seasons are separated from one another by a deadly winter or dry season.
To really see a seed, your mind must penetrate the seedcase and bypass the endosperm, radicle and plumule, and focus on the coded abstraction set within the chromosomes. I mean the DNA code, the code spelled out in terms of nucleotide sequences, the code that gives instructions within cells on how to make living things and keep them alive. As far as life on Earth is concerned, there's no more important information than this.
Deep inside those seeds, how tiny and fragile are the slender, spiraling molecules on which the code is written. You can scramble or destroy the information coded there simply by exposing the seed to X-rays, alpha, beta or gamma rays, to war's mustard gas, great heat or cold, or a host of other environmental factors or pollutants.
One of the most interesting features about genetic material has been explored in Richard Dawkins's book, "The Selfish Gene." In that book Dawkins claims that "We animals exist for their {the genes'} preservation and are nothing more than their throwaway survival machines."
Among other things, it turns out that much genetic material consists of abundant repetitions of the same information. It's as if the coded information is aware of itself and rejoices in reproducing itself, even if the replicated information is of no value to us, the biological organisms carrying it.
To really see a seed, you have to make yourself vulnerable to the notion that maybe we biological entities are only notes on a sheet of music, and what's really important is the music, not the notes -- that the Creator rejoices less in us carriers of information, than in the information itself. After all, the Creator worked on us for only a few years, but the information held in any seed represents the crystallized results of experiments in life conducted during more eons than we can know.
To really see a seed, you must close your eyes and imagine a music in which the whole Earth is a single note in a vast melody that goes on and on.
Then, you get up and go look at your turnip patch and see all those little green plants with their solar panels directed toward the Sun, and what can you do but laugh with delight?
*****
IF THERE WERE AN EINSTEIN TADPOLE
Tadpoles appearing one day this week in my dishpan got me thinking about one of the essays in a book I'm reading by Albert Einstein.
In his essay "Religion and Science," Einstein considers man's religions from an evolutionary perspective. He notes that primitive religions concern themselves with gods who manifest themselves in more or less understandable forms (as plants, animals, rocks, symbols, humans), and their main job is to grant favors and protection. A later-emerging type of religion conceived of there being a single "God of Providence" ("providing god") rather like a celestially based, stern but loving patriarch in a large family. Our current major religions, including Christianity, are of this kind. Finally, there's what Einstein calls the "cosmic religious feeling," which conceives of a universality (which I would think of "the Creator") to which it is pointless to pray for favors, but which is so majestic and awe-inspiring that by reflecting upon it one is "filled with the highest kind of religious feeling," as Einstein writes.
If my dishpan tadpoles were somehow to begin feeling a need for religion, I wonder what gods they would come up with? I suppose that some might begin worshiping certain algae cells some one of them had espied glowing a certain way suspended in the water in a beam of sunlight, or maybe they would worship their own reflections in the dishpan's shiny aluminum. The more sophisticated tadpoles might sometimes catch a glimpse of me with my magnifying glass looking down at them -- this huge eye-in-the-sky, the God of Providence who thumps them cornbread -- and they would produce tadpole priests and tadpole mullahs and tadpole rabbis who would assiduously and interminably interpret and reinterpret the meanings of every little thing I did.
And if there were an Einstein among them, I suppose he would just keep quiet and write in obscure forums, suggesting that it is hardly to be expected that the God of the Cosmos would be at the beck and call of every wiggly little tadpole in a dishpan, though, admittedly, it's quite wonderful for this brief moment in eternity to be granted the perspective of a tadpole in sparkling water temporarily pooled on a random, laughing hermit's warped and moldy, falling-apart, outside table.
*****
A PLEASURE OF INSECT SOUNDS
The constant background sound of calling insects has been growing week by week. This was the week, however, when the stridulating, ticking, clicking and general tintinnabulating mounted in such a crescendo that no longer was it mere background, but rather something substantial in itself. At first reckoning you could say that the landscape shimmered with these diffuse, insistent sounds, but the fact is that sometimes the din was the landscape itself, with everything else mere staging.
There's one particular cricket each night on a Persimmon limb right next to where my head lies on the sleeping platform. Concentrating closely on each chirp I think I hear ebbs and flows of cricket feelings. This, despite knowing that if you cut off a grasshopper's head the grasshopper will still hop and wander around, so it's doubtful that insects have much feelings at all. Maybe crickets channel the night-spirit itself, chirps being pulsations in the veins of a brooding Earth-consciousness, of Gaia. Well, these are thoughts you have nodding off as a cricket calls next to you.
I became most vividly aware of this new level of insect calling one day this week when I went to the mailbox. The mailbox lies across the road, beside the property I've told you about where the owner has spent most of the summer having men "clean up" his newly purchased farm -- bulldozing hedgerow habitat and bush-hogging and lawn-mowing everything else, except what he converted to broad, brown, strips of naked soil with powerful herbicides.
At the mailbox I experienced that sensation you get when you walk out of a woods and realize you've grown accustomed to the continual rustle of tree leaves, and now you miss them. Or when you emerge from the ocean and regret leaving behind the sound of the surf. Beyond the mailbox, habitats of crickets, grasshoppers, katydids and everything else has been so single-mindedly obliterated that there the music simply ends.
In that German children's book I told you about a while back, where the hero Atréju flies over the land on his lucky-dragon, the enemy was a vast grayness inexorably spreading everywhere robbing all color and life from the landscape. Though the damage done by the enemy was all too clear, the enemy's exact nature and purposes never were quite understood.
I think I grasp at least a part of what real-life's grayness-spreading enemy is: It is that region of the human character that prefers short-cut lawn-grass to life-giving habitat. It is that part of the human character content to ally itself with bulldozers and herbicides, and not the gentle magic of cricket chimes.
*****
THREE TOM TURKEYS AT WANDER TIME
Late Wednesday afternoon I'd gone into my trailer to check something in a book when I looked out my back window and saw three tom turkeys sauntering down the grassy road to the entrance, not ten feet away. Surely the turkeys' minds registered the strangeness of the barn with its open door, and my trailer with Beethoven playing on the radio, and the danger of being in an open area so close to the highway, but there they were.
I hadn't realized what large, otherworldly birds Wild Turkeys really are. Surely when they stood erect their heads were three feet high! Being hot, they walked with their beaks open and held their dark feathers so close to their bodies that the feathers looked like scales. In fact, the first thought I had seeing them was that it was true what a paleontologist recently said -- that the dinosaurs never went extinct. It was just that the scales of some dinosaur species elaborated into feathers, and those dinosaurs are now known as birds.
From the breasts of two of the birds arose slender, black, horsetail-like "beards" so long that they nearly touched the ground when the birds walked bent low, searching for grass seeds. The third had the beginning of a beard, about two inches long, which weirdly stuck straight out from his chest like a stiff, black finger. I read that "On the approach of the first winter the young males show a rudiment of the beard or fascicle of hairs on the breast, consisting of a mere tubercle, and attempt to strut and gobble; the second year the hairy tuft is about three inches long; in the third the turkey attains its full stature, although it certainly increases in size and beauty for several years longer."
This suggests that I was seeing three male toms, two in their third year and another in his second. However, it isn't clear from what part of the country the author wrote the above, and maybe our birds grow beards on a different schedule. Another source says that females rarely grow beards, so maybe the short-bearded one was a female?
*****
BLACK RACER EATS FROG
Walking down a bayou's dry, sandy bed, a flicker of movement caught my attention at the corner of my vision. I looked up just in time to see a tangle of frog legs and loopy, black snake-coils rolling down the creek bank like a rubbery tumbleweed. I'm only half sure the victim was a Southern Leopard Frog, for most of its body already was inside the snake's mouth and throat, with just its flailing front legs and head showing. The snake's identity was clear, however: It was a Southern Black Racer, Coluber constrictor priapus.
On the streambed's sandy floor there was still some fighting to do. The frog's four powerful legs scratched, pounded, pushed, and held on in every conceivable manner to slow the body's slide down the snake's gullet. The snake, in turn, with no limbs at all, could only try to hold on. Racers possess only regular teeth in both jaws, with no enlarged fangs with which to stab into their prey, so sometimes it looked as if the frog might succeed.
However, after about five minutes the frog tired and blood issued from its nostrils. Sensing victory, the snake made a series of forward lunges, each advance taking the frog deeper inside. In the end only one arm -- unnervingly like a small human arm bent at the elbow and with fingers spread wide in alarm -- poked from the snake's mouth corner. Then even that vanished.
The racer hardly missed a beat. As soon as the meal was definitely inside, instantly the search for the next victim began as the snake moved back to the overgrown slope and disappeared inside it.
Something special about a racer is that, when hunting, the back three-quarters of its body moves across the ground while the front quarter rises vertically, with the snake's head at the top hooked forward and held horizontally. Thus, when we see them, usually the snake's back part is hidden in the grass while the front, high-held part with the hooked head seems to progress forward by no visible means of propulsion. Such a snake with its unblinking eyes' fixed forward makes a majestic, spine-tingling passage through tall grass.
*****
ON THE PLEASURES OF PAYING ATTENTION
These days are like the minimalist, modern music of Philip Glass. At first that music seems monotonously repetitive. But if you stick with it you begin noticing that the piece is forever changing. The same melody may be repeated again and again, but now it's in a different key, now it's accompanied by counterpoint, etc. Once you get the hang of it, Glass's music can be a pleasure.
In the same way, these days seem all alike, yet every day there are delightful changes if you pay attention.
The process of learning to pay attention is itself a pleasure. Years ago when I began studying yoga and for the first time in my life focused on the joy of breathing, of stretching and relaxing muscles one by one, of merging with my own heartbeat -- it was like being born again. A similar awakening took place in college when I discovered a book on Japanese flower arranging. Day after day I would look at a certain few arrangements, constantly discovering new patterns, new color combinations, new tensions in the interplay of symmetry and asymmetry.
You can train yourself to pay attention. This Tuesday morning, for instance, I consciously made the effort to absorb what I could of the essence of a certain mushroom. For a good while I hunkered next to the mushroom smelling it, admiring its rich colors and unusual shagginess. I visualized its network of hidden hyphae gradually migrating throughout the leaf litter below us, then one recent day budding and sending up this mushroom. I visualized spores dropping from beneath its dusky cap at that very moment, riding air currents I couldn't feel, heading for unknown forests perhaps far away. I spoke to the mushroom, called it by its name, and this worked certain connections in my own head.
Yesterday I spent a good amount of time standing beneath an umbrella-size, star-shaped leaf of a 15-foot high Castor Bean (known locally as Mole Plant), admiring how the sun caused the plant's leaf tissue to glow a certain bright yellow-green the mere seeing of which evoked the sparkling hum of sunlight during photosynthesis, of leaf cells dividing, and of sweet sap surging through the leaves' phloem. I imagined myself inside the leaf, sunlight-glowing, and sweet-wet myself. Like the plant I felt myself sky-reaching, issuing strange flowers with primitive-looking bunches of stamens on repeatedly branching filaments, and with those crazy-looking, purple-feathery styles.
Whenever something touches you the way my mushroom and Castor Bean plants did me, it's an invitation by that thing to commune. Maybe there's no more beautiful thing a person can do than to consciously and whole-heartedly experience the Creator's works, to rejoice in the mere act of doing so, and to be grateful for having had the opportunity.
*****
WRENS & DOODLEBUGS
The Carolina Wrens with whom I share my outside kitchen spend at least half an hour each day, mostly in the late afternoons, dust bathing beneath my kitchen's tin roof. Sometimes with my binoculars I watch them simply because it's a pleasure seeing them enjoy themselves so much.
They do every kind of fluttering and flopping, creating round-bottomed pits in their favorite spots, but their most spectacular movement is when they fluff their feathers and with their feet hidden beneath them scoot across the dust like mechanical mice with frantically wagging tails. They rub their cheeks in the dust and sometimes lie on their sides with their bottom wings held so that plenty of dust reaches the tender spots beneath the wings. They usually bathe together and often after particularly long bouts of bathing one suddenly stops, and then the other stops, and they look at one another (I see them both panting from their exertions) and I wonder what they are thinking as each gazes at the other absurdly fluffed-out, exhausted and dusty creature.
All this has been hard on my doodlebugs. Before the wrens discovered my dust, the dust was the sole domain of about 30 of these little creatures, which the books prefer to call antlions. Doodlebugs, or antlions, are the larvae, or immature stages, of an insect something like damselflies or lacewings, which are slender flying insects with delicate wings. Doodlebugs dig conical pits in the dust and hide themselves beneath their pits so that their jaws are open, inside the dust, exactly at the pits' bottoms. When an ant or other small insect stumbles into a pit, the doodlebug clamps its jaws upon a meal.
I know why I've always had a special fondness for doodlebugs. It's because my father taught me something about them, and usually my father was not a good one for teaching. Still, my father taught me that if you get onto your hands and knees and put your face up close to the doodlebug pit and say "Doodlebug, doodlebug, your house is on fire," the doodlebug will knock dust in your face.
It really does this. It's because your breath dislodges particles into the pit, and the doodlebug automatically knocks the debris back out.
I'm amazed that I take such pleasure in having a doodlebug knock dust in my face. Doodlebugs have caused me to reflect on how easy it is for a father to please his son with such modest investments of time and energy. Parents in the human species have enormous powers, and responsibilities.
*****
DEW DROPS
Each morning as I'm awakening on my sleeping platform in the woods I hear water dropping all around me. Dew has condensed on the trees' leaves above and when there's enough dew, drops fall. This has begun only recently. I don't know why it didn't happen in June and July. Sometimes a drop hits the mosquito net above my head and shatters into a fine spray. It is not unpleasant to awaken with a fine, cold mist showering your face. If there were several drops it might be messy, but, just one is more like the intellectual distillation of a kiss from a friend, and usually there is only one.
*****
THE BIRDS OF AUGUST
Most of the bird world is very quiet now. On muggy Tuesday morning I took a walk paying special attention to the matter, and it was clear that many birds who were here all summer now are absent and nearly all the rest have fallen silent.
That's not the case with everyone, of course. With thousands of Cypress Vine blossoms and other morning glory flowers gracing my garden fences, the hummingbirds make a continual circus -- not only taking nectar but also chasing one another. The other day I saw one performing a classic flight display, flying broad Us in the air, just the way males do to impress females in the spring. But this time there were no females to be courted, just a silly male feeling his oats before heading south for the cold months.
Crows call all year, especially at dawn. Every day a certain Red-headed Woodpecker makes his rounds flying from tree-top to tree-top, harshly kwrrrrking and accompanied by his kid, one with a brown head, not the Red-headed's splendid red. Occasionally a Blue Jay screams deep in the woods, and every day I see Mourning Doves streaking low overhead as if rushing in a straight line to work, their wings whistling sharply through the air.
Still, during my Tuesday walk, mainly I was impressed with how quiet and secretive the birds were. Sometimes I heard a Carolina Wren briefly complain about something, but not nearly as vociferously as usual. Deep inside a shadowy thicket of Winged Sumac a mere silhouette of a Catbird silently shifted from branch to branch. Here and there in the broomsedge a sparrow's solitary peep arose, and I heard single notes from Bobwhites running through the grass, but, really, there wasn't much more than that.
For one thing, a lot of birds are molting now. They don't look so good, plus they can't fly as well as they usually can, and they won't be able to fly well until strong new primaries stiffen in their wings. The lower the profile molting birds can keep, the better. Also there's the matter that breeding and nesting is simply finished for the year, so what's there really to do other than quietly eat and store up fat for the winter, and draw as little attention to yourself as possible?
Many species at this time of year get the flocking urge and my impression is that those flocks have chosen somewhere to be other than here.
So, the forests and fields are eerily quiet in terms of birdsong. However, insects are doing their best to fill the void.
*****
LATE SUMMER DAYS
This week we've seen quintessential late summer days. More than once I've found myself gazing across the Loblolly Field into the cloudy sky savoring while I can the feelings associated with skin-stinging sunlight and hot humidity.
These days most mornings begin with fog beading among my beard and hair legs as I jog. Toward the run's end the sun rises over the neighbor's pasture with a crimson glare. The smoke of my morning breakfast fire curls and recurls, not knowing how to mingle with fog. But soon the fog burns off, and then there's a brief chorus of hesitant birdcalls, the Towhee, the Cardinal, the Blue Jay, the White-eyed Vireo, the Hooded Warbler. Sometimes I glimpse these birds gorging on caterpillars, muscadines and Black Oak acorns, but after mid-morning usually they're not much seen or heard for the rest of the day.
In fact, the rest of the day would be almost silent but for the insects. Insects calling monotonously hour after hour almost define the feeling of these late summer days. Cicadas buzz-sawing from shadowy trees and, in tall grass, meadow grasshoppers bzzzzzz-zip-zip-zip-zip-bzzzzzzzzing...
By 10 AM cumulus clouds already mount into a sky that's more milky than blue. You see by the clouds' jaggedness that by afternoon they'll coalesce into thunderheads, and the only question is whether the thundering will begin early or late.
Afternoons are too hot to move through. Once the computer work is done, it's just enough to sit waiting for the storms. Sometimes it's hard to know whether the slate blue regions spreading across great regions of sky are blue sky or rain-filled storms. It's nearly always storms, and usually the storms miss, but sometimes they hit. How cool and fresh those storm breezes are, and how welcome the rain, pouring off the barn's tin roof, the odor of mud and wet grass, the feeling of wet grass beneath my feet, the treefrogs calling.
At dusk I sit in my rocking chair reading, almost forgetting whether this day is today or some other rocking-chair dusk of long ago or tomorrow. It's all the same, endlessly the same, each day being a perfect example of exactly what it is.
Then at night what dreams a hermit has, awaking now and then to sounds matching dreams. The Screech Owl and Coyote, and hisses and thumpings and whoopings completely uninterpretable, hardly fitting into any sane world.