Wilderness?

For the first time in a few weeks I get to spend Saturday morning just being a bum, sitting in Joe Boxers, playing spider solitaire, parcheesi and pente on the computer, listening to iTunes. Funny how this makes me feel vaguely uneasy, instead of deeply relaxed. I better get up and do something soon. Wouldn't want to waste a few rare hours of solitude, now, would I?

Last night's performance went okay, but tonight's will undoubtedly improve on it. Afterwards a bunch of us went to a Waterloo pub. Moe was driving, so I had two tom collinses and came home with acid indigestion.

There seemed too few wildflowers around the cottage this year. My parents are bent on keeping the property in a pristine state, cutting as little brush as possible. The understory begins to close in with shrubs like mountain maple and striped maple—which are nice enough in themselves—along with saplings of sugar maple, yellow birch and eastern hemlock. Unfortunately this shades and gradually eliminates the diverse carpet of wildflowers I remember from 20 years ago. Among the species dwindling: pink lady's-slipper, goldthread, upright wood-sorrel, wintergreen, foamflower and Indian cucumber-root. I couldn't find any painted trillium, but one clump of red trillium, Trillium erectum, was splendid. There were plenty of violets around the place: I'm not certain of the species here, but it's probably Viola mackloskeyi ssp. pallens.

An article in the May 2007 National Geographic, Legacy of Jamestown: America, Found & Lost, discusses how the historic colony introduced an environmental imperialism that began transforming the landscape of this continent. Among other practises, European settlers began abandoning land when it became infertile. Eventually the land turned to overgrown forest. This was far from the treatment of Indians, who regularly burned undergrowth, creating a parklike habitat under the trees. It's peculiar how even the notion of wilderness we cherish 400 years later has little to do with the ecology that enriched our environment before we civilized and lost our connection with it.