TREES ON THE ROAD

There I was, enjoying the daylights out of these long, long days of June, reading the local paper in the backyard of my urban cabin, when a headline caught my eye:

Wildman Throws Spear at Passing Vehicle in California.

It’s been a while but here we have our first sighting of the Wildman for 2013, timed perfectly to the first super-moon of summer.

Ain’t that just like Coyote?

The Wildman has been lurking on the outskirts of our civilization since the very beginning of tamed society, usually appearing as figments and fancies of the imagination: centaurs, minotaurs, mermaids and werewolves, shamans turning into eagles, hunters becoming the hunted, husbands waking up as buffalo, bear or antelope…

…doomed souls who answer too frequently the call of the wild: Merlin and the Green Knight, Tarzan and Mogwai, Santa Claus, the shipwrecked kids from The Lord of the Flies and, my favorite, the half-man half-plant superhero called Swamp Thing.

But it’s wrong to pigeonhole the Wildman as pure fiction.  Sometimes, he is as real as you and me, right there in black and white.

That’s Joseph Knowles, one of the most famous Wildmen in American history.  That’s a publicity shot, when he made his triumphant return to Mother, and civilization, after spending two months, living like a primitive, in the Maine Woods near Bear Lake.

He turned wild in August 1913. 

Surrounded by the New England mass media of the day, he stripped down to his jockstrap, took a few drags of a cigarette, said a hearty “See you later, boys!” and jumped, head-first and barefoot, into the wilds.

According to his memoirs, he constructed a little lean-to shelter in the pine woods, learned how to forage and hunt and fish, how to build fire, carve weapons and make clothing.

Before leaving the rat-race, he was an illustrator and cartoonist, so he also spent the free days observing the College of Nature, as he liked to call it, drawing the placid, pastoral scenes on the backsides of birch bark.

It was a story that captivated the nation back in 1913.

Have you ever noticed that stories of the Wildman, no matter what’s happening in the bigger world, always make it through the scuttlebutt, always seem to get some sort of headline?

According to the press, Wildman has legs.

Now, let’s see what he’s doing over there in California.

A 56-year old man with long wild hair and beard tossed a spear at a passing vehicle in Sacramento, California.

A caller told police that a man standing on the road had hurled the spear at the vehicle.  The spear then became stuck in the vehicle’s front fender.

It was not clear why the wild man threw the spear.

Ha!  Not clear why?  Open your eyes, Reuters!  The answer is very clear.

It’s called traffic, man.

And sometimes it’s a doozy. 

Cars and more cars everywhere you turn, major roadways closed, construction around every corner, watching out for bicyclists and pedestrians and jaywalkers, bumper to bumper all along the highways, nothing but volume up and down the Roosevelt Boulevard all the way from Academy to the Blue Route…

…it ain’t easy being cooped up in a sweltering car, inching forward to the next detour or the next red light.

If you got any bit of Wildman in you, it’s horrible…just a bunch of expensive cages sitting still on the hot asphalt, pumping exhaust and burning fuel, going nowhere.

And as far as trees go, there’s not much to see along most highways…

…frigging ailanthus.

It’s enough to make anyone batty.

That’s why I keep a few road-side trees on my mental map, just a few notable and rare trees always on my radar, sturdy and dependable landmarks right along the roads and highways that make the slog through traffic just a little more bearable.

THE HARVEST MOON: PUTTING ON THE POUNDS

It’s been about three weeks since my last post.

What have I been doing?

I guess it’s time to come clean.

It always happens at this time of year and yet, even though it happens at the same time every year, it always seems to come as a surprise.

One day, you wake up, same as usual…you have the standard breakfast of coffee and a breath mint…you find your cleanest dirty shirt, you check the farmers’ almanac, you hit the day and then you look down and…well, there it is. 

Citybillies, I done got fat.

It wasn’t my fault.  It was Coyote.  Coyote did it…him and his last moon, this Harvest Moon. 

THE NOTORIOUS TREE HOUSE OF FELTONVILLE

Just the other evening, I was out tree-hunting in West Philly.  It was blazing hot, steamy and sticky, so I headed to Clark Park.  I wanted to catch some shade.  I wanted to cool off and I wanted to spend the last few hours of the day watching one of my favorite oaks in the entire city.

On my way through the park, I noticed that one of the recent thunderstorms had split a branch off a yellowwood tree.

Ever wonder why it’s called a yellowwood?  Well, here’s your answer:

The oak tree that I was hunting was on the other side of the park.  It’s really one of my favorite oaks in the city.  I love the way it leans over the grassy bowl.  On this particular night, the leaning oak was the setting for a Shakespeare in the Park rendition of The Merry Wives of Windsor.

William Shakespeare was, like many artists, a romantic fan of trees and flowers, plants and herbs, nature and the wilds.  Who can forget the bloody climax of Macbeth…when Thane Macduff disguises his army as trees so they can secretly advance upon the murderous Macbeth’s castle, inspiring my favorite Shakespeare quote of all time:

Macbeth’s Messenger: As I did stand my watch upon the hill,
I look'd toward Birnam, and anon, methought,
The wood began to move.  

I, too, have seen the woods move.

So, there I was, enjoying the oak, enjoying the shade, enjoying the Shakespeare…finally cooling off, just getting used to the Old English…when my cellphone started blowing up with voicemails and text messages, all saying the same thing: Jon Spruce, turn on the local news.  There’s a tree attacking a house in the Northeast.

I need a vacation.

QUICK PICKS: THREE TREES

An average weekday in June, sun setting at 9:00pm, a quiet night at home, waiting for the rice to cool off, waiting for the thunderstorm to break, waiting for Cliff Lee’s first win, just sitting around waiting for the phone to ring, ladies…and I make the heart-breaking mistake of delving into the photo archives to look at tree-pictures I never posted.

What happened?

There are just too many trees and not enough time.

Out there on the mean streets, I always end up running into trees that don’t quite fit into my planned posts. 

I mean, I’ve missed a lot of great trees. 

The yellowwood and the black locust?   

Never got around to writing about that deep-ridged bark.  Never got around to describing their brief spell of dangling flowers in mid-spring, though I have loads of pictures.

Honey-suckle and fringe trees?   

Yeah, I missed that boat too…although even their pretty pictures can’t capture the spring breezes that always belied their presence, wafts of honey out of the corner of your eye.

The horse chestnut?  Now, that’s a big regret.   

What a spectacular miss.  It’s got everything I’m looking for in a tree.  Droopy branches.  Big-fisted, tear-drop leaves.  Bright steeples of spring flowers just popping out of the green. 

What happened, Jon Spruce?  I was busy, horse chesnut.  Busy and lazy.

Well, I won’t make the same mistake this time.  Here are three quick sketches of three notable trees…trees I just can’t watch pass by.

GOTTA WEED

FROG FOUND: JUST IN TIME

The other day, I received an urgent message from one of the many citybillies following this blog: FOUND A FROG.

Just in time too.  She sent the following photo within the last days of the Frogs Return Moon:

This particular citybilly works in the produce section of a supermarket and, as she was unpacking a box of local asparagus, she found a frog.

I think this photo would’ve really tickled the ancient Wheelmakers.  Frog and asparagus, two totems of the second spring moon of Wabun, the Golden Eagle. 

We enter, this week, Wabun’s third and final moon of the year, the Corn Planting Moon.  It’s time to start preparing for the long slog and the bountiful harvest of the upcoming summer months.  Most of the tree-flowers are gone, the leaves are out, the frogs have returned and the asparagus?  That quintessential spring crop?  Time to let it go wild and weedy.

STALKING THE WILD ASPARAGUS

Just recently, I asked one of my farmer friends, “Why does asparagus season have to end?”   

I mean, as I understand it, the asparagus shoots out of the ground, you let it grow, you snip it at the base and you take it to market…then, a week later, another asparagus breaches the surface…and it’ll keep coming back and coming back.  “Can’t you just keep picking it all summer?”

“No time,” she said.  “There’s too much else coming up.  Got to pick, got to plant and you gotta weed.”

Gotta weed. 

I went over to her place, the Urban Girls Produce farm located at the Schuylkill Center, to watch the wild asparagus. 

 

So this is what happens when asparagus goes wild.  This is what happens to your favorite vegetable when you gotta weed.

Trees can go to weed too.  There is a whole roster of trees that are unwanted, uninvited, undesired, blackballed and ostracized.  In the books, it’s called spontaneous urban vegetation.  In the college classrooms, it’s sometimes called Urban Ecology.  Down here on the mean streets, we call them weed trees and I’ve found a couple worth talking about.