THE STRONG SUN MOON

It’s a jungle out there.

The city is stewing.  The streets are roasting.  The roof is on fire. 

Baby, it’s hot outside, during these final days of the Strong Sun Moon.

Citybillies, take cover wherever you can.

This is not my weather of choice, this is not my season.  After all, I am an Elk of the Thunderbird Clan, born under the Long Snow Moon of mid-Decembertime, but I refuse to stay inside.

Can’t let this brutal heat wave keep me off these scorching streets and away from those steamy woods, still lots to catch and hunt.

Nice try, Coyote.

Windows down and sunglasses on, I’m going out, through the swelter and into the sizzle, head-first into the fever.

Gotta love the burn.

This might make me sound like a glutton for punishment but I’m going straight for it.  I’m going hunting for the highest, hottest totem of this season.

Set the controls for the heart of the sun.

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.

COOKERY WITH JON SPRUCE

In 1747, a young British wife of an Irish soldier wrote and published what would become a most popular book.

Her name was Hannah Glasse and the book was The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy.  It was reprinted twenty times by the end of the 1700s and could be found in just about every kitchen in the English countryside and the American colonies.

It is considered one of the first collections of rural recipes, designed for the home and the hearth instead of the court and the castle, and written in plain English to help and instruct wives and domestic servants instead of chefs, hunters, butchers and gourmets.

It was the first cookery book to take into account a house’s purse and economy, favoring the local herbs, fruits and wild game that could be found and hunted, for free or for cheap, in the typical rural village, out in the street markets or along the country roads.

This, in itself, was revolutionary.  The subtitle of the book says it best: far exceeds any Thing of its Kind yet publifhed.

At the end of her introduction, Hannah Glasse states her simple mission: only hope my Book will answer the ends I intend it for; which is to improve the servants, and save the ladies a great deal of trouble.

Flipping through the table of contents, there are recipes for every sort of occasion and audience. Chapter Four is entitled: To make a number of pretty little dishes fit for a supper, side dish, and little corner dishes for a great table.  Chapter Ten contains recipes under the heading, Directions for the Sick, and Chapter Eleven is written For Captains of Ships.

There’s even a recipe for moonshine, plus directions on how to make homemade wines using raspberries, quince, cherries, elderberries and dandelion.

She cooked with a whole different menagerie of animals.  Sure, you got the usual proteins of beef, pork, poultry, mutton and eggs, plus salmon and carp and cod, anchovies and mackerel.

But then there are recipes for tame ducks, teal, wigeons, woodcocks, snipes, partridges, pigeons, lark and eel.

One of her most famous recipes is for traditional jugged hare.  We would call it rabbit stew except, when making jugged hare, you stuff the hare in a jug and place the jug in the pot of simmering broth.

That’s a technique that hasn’t survived into the twenty-first century but I’m not complaining.  In the end, Hannah’s directions are to just pick apart the meat from the bones of the hare and add it to the flavorful broth, serve hot.

Skipping that step seems okay.  Saving trouble was Hannah’s goal, after all, and in today’s modern kitchen, actually jugging a hare seems like a whole mess of trouble.

But what about the first step of her recipe?

Go catch ye a hare.

We've made it pretty easy to skip that step too.

Well, not me.

Not this time.  Not now, especially not now. 

Citybillies, these are the days and nights of the Strawberry Moon and there is plenty of food out there for the taking, just ripening on the vine, ready to be plucked and picked from the mean streets of the city grid and into the warm kitchen of the urban cabin.

So, in the great tradition of Hannah Glasse, I humbly present Cookery with Jon Spruce…

…wherein I will forage and prepare one of spring’s best recipes, featuring two of my favorite Strawberry Moon ingredients.

“OUR DIET MUST ANSWER TO THE SEASON…”

First step in this recipe?

Fetch ye some honeysuckle.

MEMENTO MORI ME

I grew up in this house.

This isn’t a particularly original thought but, boy, it sure looks a lot smaller than I remember. 

It just seems too small to house all those memories, all those holidays, all those meals, all those toys and all those birthdays…and it doesn’t look big enough to contain the big family that used to call it home…one happy couple, one beatnik sister and five rambunctious boys, including one future champion tree-hunter.

It’s also missing some trees.

There used to be larger roses and more evergreen shrubs guarding the walkway to the front door.  There used to be a dwarf pear tree and a rose of sharon on the driveway side of the house.

On the other side of the house, there used to be a sour cherry tree. 

At the end of long summer days, I would cool down under the sour cherry tree with the Lippincott brothers and we would throw our pits over the fence into the neighbor’s in-ground pool, sorry about that.

I found an old photo of the house and that’s when I remembered another tree, now missing…

…that tall Norway spruce rubbing up against the side of my childhood home.

These are the trees of my past…the trees of yore…the phantom trees that can no longer be found except in old photographs and fading memories…happy Memorial Day, citybillies.

Contrary to popular belief, trees do go missing.  I wish they wouldn’t move around so much but they do.  They come and then they go.

Philadelphia, too, is haunted by its own host of missing trees, none more famous than the Great Elm of Shackamaxon.

THE PENN TREATY

Shackamaxon was the name of the Lenape village located right here along the Delaware River within the borders of the Philadelphia charter, in the neighborhoods currently called Port Richmond and Fishtown.

According to a few histories, Shackamaxon was the capital of the Lenape nation and the seat of power for the chief of the Turtle Clan.

In the village of Shackamaxon, there was a great elm.

THE JON SPRUCE MAILBAG

People are always asking me…well, they’re always asking me everything.

It’s true.

Every week, my mailbox spills over with letters from the fans of Philly Trees, messages from old friends, invitations for speaking engagements, requests for magazine articles, pre-approved applications for money laundering schemes and correspondences from citybillies all over Turtle Island.

So, on a particularly overcast and drizzly day, I spent the early evening sifting through the mountain of mail, answering all the burning questions sent to me from the small tribe of tree-hunters trying to make sense of this bountiful, generous, cryptic mother we call Nature.

Here’s a letter…from a Troy A. Hamilton of Marlton, New Jersey, just on the other side of the Delaware River.

Judging from the handwriting, Troy is a young buck of a student, probably one of the many fearless, scrappy Jersey devils just trying to find his footing in the humdrum rat-race of monotonous suburbia. 

Troy, I know how it feels.

I just love receiving this kind of fan mail. 

When I was a kid, I was guilty, too, of writing letters to the celebrities that really touched my spirit and fueled my inspirations, local heroes like Jim Gardner and Charles Barkley and national icons like John Glenn and George Lucas. 

And look at me now, on the other end of the fan mail cycle.

What’s that quote from Charles Fort?

You measure a circle beginning anywhere.

Looking a little closer at the handwriting, little Troy seems to be struggling with the subjects of English and Composition…but let’s see what urgent mystery young Troy is asking old Jon Spruce to solve.

Hey, Jon Spruce, my teacher made us read your blog for class.  It sucks!  Who cares what a leaf looks like.  Not me.  But I have to right a report for class about a kind of tree.  I dont care which one you pick. 

PS Nice hat dork!

Let’s pick another letter in this pile.

This one is anonymous, that’s strange.

Dear Jon Spruce, is this blog making you any money?

Real funny, Dad.

Is there a serious question here or what?

Okay, here’s one...from a local Fishtown fan.

STANDING STILL IN SPRING

First flowers open.
A person looks,
The blossoms look back...

I approached the Japanese maple, walked right up to its dangling crown and ducked past its low-hanging, star-studded canopy.

Inside its dark amphitheater, the maple trunks were dark, simple, serious shapes twisting into the cloud-swept sky.

I chose a particular branch, any branch. 

This was how I could watch the wind.

I was also on the look-out for shadows.

With the sun in the right spot, with the trees just barely leafing out, this is the time of year to catch the silhouettes.

That’s actually the pawpaw…

…and those are the pawpaw flowers, hanging like little bells, green and purple and papery, caught at last.

This is a game that I can only play in the spring.

Fun with trees or catching silhouettes, whatever you want to call it.  Identifying a tree by its shadow is a good little mindbender, makes your head feel like it’s working inside out…

…that’s a horse-chestnut.

I wonder if this is how some birds identify trees, if they play this game.  

It's a fun way to test the identification skills, a different way of seeing the ordinary, like trying to solve a Zen koan or a riddle:

            green buddhas on the fruit stand,

            we eat the smile and spit out the teeth.

Watermelons.

This is also the kind of game that needs a big lawn…

…unless you’re able to find a tree massive enough to hold its own shadow.

That’s the way I could watch the sun.

MOST THIS AMAZING DAY

This was a day made for nature-lovers: cold, crisp, clear and sunny.

The wind was outstanding.  It came in waves.  I could hear the next wave approaching in the trees further away.

And the light?  The light was tripping me fantastic.

I’m not one for hyperbole but this was the most beautiful, most splendid day of the year.

And because there would never, ever be another day as beautiful or as splendid as this day, I had the insatiable urge to stand still.