Over
one hundred and fifty years ago, in a February, Henry David Thoreau wrote in
his journal: we have such a habit of
looking away that we see not what is around us.
It
is, naturally, a February thought.
No
other month is harder to catch.
I
mean, it’s already half-way over.
I
must’ve blinked.
It
goes by so fast.
And,
like Thoreau noted one February so long ago, it’s a month that’s too easy to
miss, so easy to leap over.
And
it’s not just because it’s the shortest month or, according to the history of
the Gregorian calendar, one of the newest months.
It’s
because nothing is really happening now and, yet, that is exactly what we
nature writers are trying to find.
That
is, after all, the grand subject of nature writing. It has to be about catching the now, finding
the here, living the moment.
Nature
writers, tree hunters, birdwatchers, storm trackers, leaf peepers, herb
seekers, stargazers, moon lookers…foragers, anglers, scouts, rangers…it’s all
about resisting the urge to look away and learning the skill to see the now…turning
the act of observation into an exciting adventure…the passive bystander as the
most dauntless and intrepid explorer ever in the history of this exact moment.
Now. Right now.
That’s
the prey.
Those
fleeting, spontaneous moments happening out of the corner of the eye. Those rare instances that take place right here
in the present time. The epiphany. The coincidence. The haiku.
The now.
That’s
the catch.
In
my experience, it’s never something you can really go out and actively
hunt. It’s just something that happens
while you’re out there looking for something else.
A
certain slant of shadow. A deer on the
highway. A color, a ripple, a snow. Running into an old friend. An owl passing over the moon. Dust mites in a shaft of sunlight. A snap decision, a rash judgment, a blind
leap, a wild laugh. The plunk of an
acorn hitting the roof of a car. A
perfect strawberry. A red hot
Valentine’s Day kiss.
Hey,
compared to other nature hunters, I got it pretty easy. All things considered, tree hunters have a much
better chance of catching the now than other observers.
Flowers
are mostly predictable, leaves are pretty much out all year round, fruit is just
hanging off the branches or rotting by the curbside, and the trees
themselves? They don’t move around that
much.
My
now is much easier to catch than, say, a birdsong or a tornado or a dinosaur
fossil or a meteorite.
But
there are certain moments that happen out there in the tree-scape that, I know,
I have no chance of catching.
It’s
true. No matter what I do or where I go,
no matter how long I stay on the hunt, there are a handful of tree events that
I will never see with my own two eyes.
Things
I’ll only read about in books.
And
no other tree reminds me of this sad fact more than the Hamamelidaceae hamamelis…sometimes called the winterbloom but more
commonly known as the witch hazel.
THE WITCH HAZEL
I
caught up with the witch hazel last weekend at the Clark Park Farmers’ Market.
