A Creek with No Name

On June 6, 2016June 6, 2016 By trashonthemonocacyIn Memoir, Photography1 Comment

Frederick City lies in a valley, cut through by the Monocacy River and surrounded by the Catoctin Mountains, which are part of the ancient Appalachian Mountains that range through the eastern United States, from Maine to Georgia. When I’m feeling romantic, I tell people that I am from the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, which is another name for this region of the Appalachians. On hazy days, which are plentiful, the mountains do indeed appear blue, a result of the isoprene released by the trees that cover them.

Beside a winding road up to these mountains, runs one of many small streams that flow through Frederick County. Although this stream is small enough to lack a proper name, it is significant in my family as the site of “Uncle J’s property,” which was given to him by my grandfather, who purchased it after proposing to my grandmother along the stream’s banks. Since it cannot be built upon, it is worthless as real estate, and, in fact, no one has ever made an effort to fence in or claim the small plot in any official manner. It’s nothing, really, but a cool escape – quite literally, actually, since it averages about ten degrees cooler than the city proper – where we can splash in the clear water, let the dogs go to roam freely over the fern-covered slopes, and be left entirely alone.

Snakes in the Water

On April 22, 2016April 23, 2016 By trashonthemonocacyIn Monocacy River, Snakes5 Comments

If you see a snake in the Monocacy River, don’t panic, because whatever your mean-spirited friends may have told you, it’s not a water moccasin. We really don’t have those in Maryland. Instead, it’s most likely a harmless, though sometimes ill-tempered, Northern Water Snake.

Yesterday, while moving large rocks from one place to another (because it’s what they do), my boys found a baby Northern Water Snake at the edge of the water. It was rather unfortunate for the poor snake, who had to endure being moved in and out of the water repeatedly so that they could watch him swim sinuously against the current. He was a docile infant, gazing at us patiently as water dripped from his smooth head, and posing on the rocks, in the river, and on my son’s jeans, until the boys finally let him go.

My younger son had a more unfortunate encounter with an adult Northern Water Snake a few years ago, as we played in the deep waters of the main river. It was a hot July day, when the sun and humidity were intense enough to make swimming in the polluted water tempting for the boys. I remained on the shore, likely daydreaming as much as overseeing their play, when one of them called out excitedly, “A snake! A snake!” Immediately they agreed to pursue it as it swam toward the opposite bank. “Leave the poor thing alone!” I commanded repeatedly, honestly more afraid for the snake’s welfare than my sons’ safety, although I did add, “You’ll get bit!” “Grab it! Grab it!” my older son insisted, as he waded noisily through the water, his excitement (and, yes, general disposition) rendering him deaf to my warnings. Just as my younger son began to say, “Got it!” he uttered a cry of pain and turned to me with wide eyes, holding out his bare, wet arm. A trickle of blood flowed from four perfect fang marks on his wrist. Swallowing my I-told-you-so’s, I reassured him that everything would be okay, that he wasn’t going to die, that we would clean his wound, and that we would look up the snake on the internet so that he could see that it wasn’t poisonous.

Fortunately, I’m not terribly afraid of snakes, particularly in Maryland, where only two are venomous, the Northern Copperhead and the Timber Rattlesnake. When I was hiking in the Catoctin Mountains as a teenager, I almost stepped on a Copperhead, but I haven’t seen one since, and the Timber Rattlesnake is so uncommon that it’s on a watchlist. I was raised encouraged to be unafraid. One of my brothers, at least, would have teased me unmercifully for being squeamish, and even I thought it was funny when, on one of our camping trips, my dad had to remove a snake from a woman’s bathroom to stop a lady from crying. (We begged to take the snake home, but he said that it was against the law). Besides, snakes didn’t always inspire such fear; in the past, they were even good omens, such as in Minoan Crete, where snake goddesses were worshipped as chthonic deities, or in Classical and Hellenistic Greece, when snakes were a part of healing at the temples of Asklepios.

Of course, there are snakes that one should fear and avoid, but not here on the banks of the Monocacy River.

Happy Earth Day!

The Wild Life, Part 1

On April 18, 2016April 19, 2016 By trashonthemonocacyIn Monocacy River, WildlifeLeave a comment

After a spate of recent frosts, the warm, sunny version of spring finally seems to have arrived, along with an uptick in animal appearances. Over the weekend, my boys got their hands on a few American toads, most of whom were clearly just waking up from their long winter’s sleep in the mud. They were far more docile than they are midsummer, two of them even sitting comfortably on my sons’ open hands to pose for the camera. In July, fingers will have to be closed around those amphibians to prevent escape, and I won’t be able to take my time fishing out my phone.

The boys did extensive work on their dam this weekend, which left me free to explore. While I need to supervise them, I don’t like to hover. Although an imaginative adult, I’m still an adult, and, therefore, will inhibit their creativity by watching over them. (That’s a fact, but I’m not footnoting it). In my wanderings, I encountered a pair of mallards that were less skittish than I expected considering I had two dogs on leash. Likely they have a nest nearby. Or they’re really stupid. Or really, really smart. They let me take a picture, too.

A large and growing herd of white-tailed deer occupy the protected land along the stretch of the Monocacy where I walk. There are over twelve of them, now, and this morning I encountered about half of them lounging in the shade of a few trees. They’ve grown so used to people that they’re hesitant to move if they’re comfortable, and this was the case this morning, when, with my two very alert dogs, I stopped to take a few pictures. Camouflaged by the brush, they flicked their ears and casually watched me watching them.

A groundhog I encountered wasn’t nearly as blasé. Even before I noticed him, he was hurling his fat body over a hill in an effort to escape me. I believe I’ve seen his hole before, but I have no intention of bothering him. When I was a kid, my father had to live trap several of them to protect his garden, but it’s the rabbits that are problems for me now. I did see one of those later, but the picture I took wasn’t very good. They’re not as complacent as the deer about my overeager dogs, who, only a half-hour before, where chowing down on loose rabbit fur left behind by another, more successful predator. (Maybe that barred owl who loves the neighborhood so much?)

And the trash for today? An empty maxi-pad bag.

A Bridge Over

On April 16, 2016April 16, 2016 By trashonthemonocacyIn Environment, PhotographyLeave a comment

There are so many irresistible, pop-culture puns on bridges, and all of them are awful and overused, therefore I will not finish the title of this blog with a nod to Simon and Garfunkel. I refuse. Because you can finish it yourself.

I’ve done a pretty poor job lately of pointing out the beauty in the ugliness of the Monocacy River, as I originally promised to do in my “About” introduction. Really, there’s just too much conventional beauty this time of year to focus on the unconventional, or, at least, it can seem so when you when you shut your ears and imagine away what doesn’t suit. In fact, as an urban river, the Monocacy can be a loud, brown, smelly place, particularly where I walk every day. For instance, as I took this picture yesterday, I was inundated not just by birdsong, as the peaceful photograph suggests, but by the windy roar of cars passing over the bridge to a nearby highway, the distant grumble of a jet on its way to Dulles, and the industrial drumming of a helicopter landing at the local airport. (A fun fact: sometimes the helicopters I hear are carrying the president to Camp David). Also, there was a distinctly fishy smell emanating from the bank below, not to mention the sulfuric funk traditional to standing water mixed with rotting organic material.

I could drift into poetic enthusiasm about the joy of witnessing a kingfisher dive into the river and emerge successfully with a minnow in its beak, or how the setting sun sparkled on the miniature tributaries in the muddy shallows, or how a swallowtail slipped through the trees in mute conversation with the goldfinches and cardinals, but there is another truth. The kingfisher’s bickering chatter competed with belching diesel trucks, the water was choked with muck (and a random metal grate), and the swallowtail flitted over cellophane and alien species choking out native wildflowers. If I am a reliable narrator, which truth do I share with you?

The first photo?

Or this?

Fairyland, Maryland

On April 12, 2016April 19, 2016 By trashonthemonocacyIn Childhood, Nature1 Comment

At this time of year, the silver 2-week period when the Virginia Bluebells bloom in concert with the delicate Spring Beauties, Trout Lilies, and even the alien Lesser Celandines, I can’t help but feel that I’m in Fairyland. And today, when the white sunlight shone beneath the gray rainclouds, it lit the world in crisp, clean, and almost metallic shadow, and I felt as if I was walking through a photograph. With one effect on top of another, I might have been unreal myself, and, as must always be true when a proper fairy has you in its sphere, I was a little unnerved.

A few years ago, my father showed me an old drawing of mine that he had found in his basement. Surrounding a smiling girl were curlicues and flowers, mice and birds, and I had written across the top, “Nature is Love.” My father, who has a wry sense of humor, laughed at me for having been a young, secret pantheist, and I was suitably embarrassed by the naivete and simplicity of my early drawing. Only a year ago, I was even more embarrassed when my nieces started reading aloud from my early diaries. They contained the usual, painful nonsense about boys, family problems, and worries about my appearance (listen to the podcast, Mortified, and you’ll get the idea), but they also had the affected, pretentious prose of someone who wanted very much to be a a writer and had read way too much Louisa May Alcott and L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables series, not to mention piles of Andrew Lang’s many-colored Fairy Books (Olive! Pink! Orange!). I wrote in high-flying language of my love of nature, of the joy of sitting by “the creek” and making up stories, of the respite from the “real world” it offered me.

In Fairyland, you lose time, or maybe you gain it. At any rate, Fairyland changes time, so that you can be in two places at once, be two people at once, and yet be one person in one time all the same. Am I 10 or 40? Have I grown up at all? I’m not a pantheist. Or a pagan. More often, I’m a simple rationalist with a Lutheran upbringing. But I can feel the magic, even if I don’t believe in it. That’s why there can be trash in Fairyland.

Teasel

On April 9, 2016October 28, 2016 By trashonthemonocacyIn Environment, Trash, WildflowersLeave a comment

Teasel is what is called a “noxious weed.” Spiny throughout, from leaf to stem to seed pod, it grows tall, branches out, and lasts through winter as a brown, hollow version of itself. Even as I trample it, it catches and tears at me, scratching my hands, pulling at my boiled wool jacket, yanking my hair. It shreds holes in my garbage bag, too, forcing me to abandon my trash-gathering task earlier than planned, but it’s hard to resist venturing into the thistle, when tattered plastic flaps from its bones like a poor man’s banner.

Trashology

On April 7, 2016April 18, 2016 By trashonthemonocacyIn Environment, Monocacy River, TrashLeave a comment

Yesterday, just for fun, I recorded the brand of every piece of trash I gathered. I was exploring new territory, an open meadow with lots of prickly shrubs that I usually avoid (see the sign above), and the quantity of cups and cans overwhelmed me. There was much more than I could carry:

Deer Park Water

Mountain Dew (Diet and otherwise, many times over)

Dairy Queen

Sheetz

Monster Energy

Bud Light

Wegman’s

Harris Teeter (migrating trash, apparently)

Powerade

7-11

Coca Cola

Domino’s

Olive Garden

Utz

Starbucks (for Tammy, whoever and wherever she is)

Pepsi

Tropicana

Rockin’ Refuel

Fanta (orange)

A&W Cream Soda

Gatorade

McDonald’s

Rita’s Italian Ice

I brought all of these home, some for the trash can, but most for recycling. Unfortunately, the city only gathers the recycling every other week, so I always end up filling the recycling can, bin and extra cardboard boxes of my own to overflowing. I’m a little concerned about how much more trash warmer weather will generate. I might have to start begging my neighbors for recycling space.

Just put the trash down and…

On April 4, 2016April 10, 2016 By trashonthemonocacyIn NatureLeave a comment

It’s been a bit cold lately, but, despite historic winds, also vividly clear and sunny. When I went for a walk this morning it was in the 40’s, which didn’t stop any of the wildlife from going about their spring business. In a marsh a pair of Canada geese were blaring their horns at each other, barely succeeding in drowning out the insistent territorial buzzes of the red-wing blackbirds; a groundhog cautiously popped his head out of a hole on an embankment; an audacious mockingbird cycled repeatedly through his vast songbook from the top of a sycamore tree; and more than one cottontail noisily fled from me through the underbrush. There was, however, at least one creature hiding from the unseasonable temperatures. Beneath a a scrap of thick, back plastic, I found a wee beastie coiled up in a loose spiral: a baby garter snake too cold even to be bothered by me. After taking a picture (which required that I bend down only inches away from him), I recovered the poor cold-blooded baby with the plastic. Because today it was more humane not to pick up the trash.

Oh, Baby, Baby (Trees)

On March 30, 2016April 3, 2016 By trashonthemonocacyIn Environment, Monocacy RiverLeave a comment

Last summer, an intrepid group planted a number of saplings along a grassy shoreline of the Monocacy River, in an effort, I am sure, to restore the wooded habitat that development had destroyed. They bolstered these young trees with stakes and corrugated plastic, likely to protect them from foraging White-tailed Deer (of which there is a herd of over twelve that roams my small part of the river), and rabbits (who eat my native shr-, oh, never mind, I’ll start sounding like Elmer Fudd). It’s equally possible, however, that they were hoping to strengthen them against flood waters, which wash over this plain at least two to three times a year. Sadly, I’ve found the corrugated plastic hanging from branches a half mile down the river. Still, as you can see, there are lots of trees left, and their leaves are just beginning to bud in the March sun.

The Trash of Which I Do Not Speak (or Photograph)

On March 17, 2016April 3, 2016 By trashonthemonocacyIn Dogs, Environment, Family1 Comment

Yesterday, my labrador retriever turned 13 years old. She’s lumpy and bumpy, the ACL she had repaired years ago is clearly aching with arthritis, and she’s deaf and even a little smelling-impaired, but she still wags her tail when she sees her leash, insists on car rides to the woods, and pulls me like a dogsled when she sees a body of water. She and my other dog, a nervous 4-year-old rescue of unknown lineage, accompany me on most of my walks along the Monocacy. I take bags specifically for their messes, which I pick up and, despite the smell, carry with me for miles until I reach my trash can at home. It can get a little disgusting some days, but it’s worth it not to leave their piles to filthy the river or someone’s shoes, or even just mar the view. Besides, I’ve decided that if anyone is idiotic enough to attack me, I could swing the bags in their face and they’d likely decide I wasn’t worth their trouble.

While I am happy to pick up my own dogs’ messes, I’ve decided that I absolutely will not pick up the messes of anyone else’s. I know that I should, and feel guilty when I pass by the melting piles of it, but I just won’t. So, you won’t hear about this particular kind of waste, or see a picture of it, in or out of a bag, in this blog. It exists, of course; I’m just pretending it doesn’t so that I don’t activate my gag reflex on a daily basis.

There are those who will argue that there shouldn’t be any dogs on nature trails. The untended messes are part of these protesters’ arguments, but they also object to the dogs’ invisible marking, which scares off other wildlife. Dog-lovers, on the other hand, argue that their companions compel people who might otherwise just sit on their couch binge-watching TV shows to go out into nature and, as they learn to appreciate it, decide to take action to protect it. As a traditional peacekeeping middle child, I say let’s have it both ways, maintaining natural areas where dogs are not allowed and other areas where they are encouraged by making available waste bags and plenty of trash cans to their responsible owners.

Anyway, I hate preaching. And I hate picking up poop. And I’m not talking about any of this ever again.

TRASH ON THE MONOCACY

Tag: Nature