SWEET LAND OF LIBERTY, OF TREE I SING

It’s Independence Day Weekend here in Philadelphia.  What a fine time to be in the city.

Block parties and live music, barbecues and picnics, burgers and ice cream, sparklers and fireworks, road-blocks and detours, this city truly lives up to the standards and expectations of Founding Farmer John Adams, who once wrote that Independence Day ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade…

…with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more.

Well, actually, he always thought it should be celebrated on the Second of July.

Sorry, old man.

In the Fourth we trust…a celebration of the tried and true totems of American history: the bald eagle and the buffalo, Yankee Doodle and Uncle Sam and Lady Liberty…

…the light bulb and the television and the arcade game, the steamship and the automobile and the space shuttle, the pioneer and the cowboy and the rock star…

 

…and that Old Glory herself…

…that grand old flag we call the Stars and Stripes.

In the spirit of Independence Day, I made a quick pit-stop to pay my respects to our most famous seamstress, Betsy Ross.

She’s buried, right there in Olde City, at 2nd and Old Sassafras Streets, underneath that monumental American elm…

…rocketing over the colonial courtyard, bursting with heavy branches high up in the muggy Coyote sky.

Or, at least, we’re told that she’s buried here.

It turns out that Betsy Ross’s funeral was held on 5th Street.  Twenty years later, her body was exhumed and moved to the now abandoned Mount Moriah Cemetery near Cobbs Creek in West Philly…

…and then, just in time for the Bicentennial of 1976, her body was moved again to this half-museum-half-gift-shop restoration, to be closer to the parade of her colonial brothers and sisters.

 

Or was she?

Rumor has it that, back in 1975, her gravediggers found no bodily remains under her tombstone there in Mount Moriah. 

Only a few bones, found elsewhere in the family plot, were hastily authenticated as Betsy Ross’s and moved to this courtyard…

...just in time for the opening of the Betsy Ross Bridge in 1976.

It doesn’t matter.

Fiddle-de-dee.

Like we say here in America, when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.

And so the legend stands.

She’s buried here, First Seamstress of the United States, the beautiful and noble widow who made, with her own blistered hands, the very first version of the American Flag.

Or did she?

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 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.

PIONEER TREES

The other night, I went for a walk to enjoy the last moon of spring, the last moon of Wabun, the Golden Eagle.  This be the Corn Planting Moon.

According to the Farmer’s Almanac, the days right now are long, fourteen hours and thirty-seven minutes long, to be exact.  By the end of this moon, on June 20th, the day will be ten minutes longer, the longest days of the year, clocking in at fourteen hours and forty-seven minutes, the summer solstice.

According to the Wheel, people born under these spring moons are full of wonder and curiosity.  They are awake.  They are spontaneous and creative and, like Wabun himself, they are able to soar high, see clear and see far.  Wabun’s children are, by nature, explorers, hunters, scouts, trailblazers, navigators, pilots and cosmonauts. 

 

THE THIRD AND FINAL MOON OF SPRING

The Wheel always moves forward…but to what?  Usually, it’s about food.  The trees and plants have mostly flowered and budded and leafed and they are now beginning to fruit.  This is food, whether it comes in the form of flowers, stems, buds, roots, bark, leaves, fruit or pollen.   

The wild dinner bell is ringing. 

The new growth of spring rings that bell.  On the farm, this is the time when new lambs and piglets wean off the milk and taste, for the first time, green food.  In the forests, wild berries are just about to burst, the perfect food for bears.  In the woods, the beaver family swims out of the lodge and chomps down the weak new trees to repair the winter damage to their dams.  On the plains, the grass is growing high and that provides a cover for the rabbits and mice as they dart across the fields and lawns, looking for food, hiding from hawks and owls.  Bats are born in May and June, just in time to catch the bees and insects hunting for pollen in the roses and peonies and sunflowers.  Down by the sea, the blue crab molts under the first full moon of May and becomes soft-shelled.  The seagulls and pelicans have been waiting.

And for us?  This third moon of spring is salad: lettuce, carrots, cucumbers, baby turnips, baby beets, spring onions, green garlic, the radish, the rainbow chard and the spinach.  

Eat up…but don’t forget to plant the corn.

This is the Corn Planting Moon.

This moon actually has many different names.  It’s sometimes called the Strawberry Moon.  If you take a visit to any local farmers’ market, it’s easy to see why.

It’s also called the Rose Moon.  I like to do my rose-hunting by night.

But I prefer to call it the Corn Planting Moon.  Here on Turtle Island, it’s hard to think of a plant more important than corn, our native grass, the maize, the food of the ancient Wheelmakers themselves. 

I’ll wait for summer to talk about the corn.  It’s the moon that fascinates me now.  This one is for Wabun’s children: the pioneers.  These curious pilots?  Sometimes, they bring back trees.