Cedar notes

We drove out yesterday, djjo and I, to Wellington Fibres, a local Angora goat farm and fibre mill, but found them inexplicably closed. No matter, I had an ulterior motive: I want to do more country drives and walks. Just around the corner from the farm we found a truss bridge (link to somebody else's photo of it) across the Grand River and access to Grand Valley Trail.

The trail angled up then along the top of the cliff (gallery of our walk). At first we walked through a dense, dark cedar stand where the ground was littered with their leaves and sparse powder snow. The air was silent, so close and insulated we could not hear the nearby river.

In other places the cedars were large and more widely spaced in bizarre clumps. Their trunks embraced or stood in tight family packs. Huge limbs poked sideways, inviting climbers. How old could those mighty trees be? Thuja occidentalis is known to achieve ages exceeding 1,600 years, but typically those are diminutive specimens clinging to the face of the Niagara Escarpment, protecting from fire, logging and browsing deer. I suppose even the largest trees we saw yesterday were less than one century old.

Further along we found yet another woods of smaller cedars so evenly and openly spaced they seemed to have been planted, but as long as I gazed, I could discern no lines or pattern. The ground there was unusually even, suggesting the trees emerged decades ago from a pasture or field. Perhaps their distribution holds some clue to old meadow succession.

Later our path scaled back down to the valley bottom. Two jays screeched and flew off. Chickadees minded their own business of pecking around for bugs. A startled cottontail skittered to hide in fallen brush. If we stopped trudging we could hear the soft, musical susurration of the Grand hurrying on its way. We rambled off the trail, down to the bank to take a closer look. The river was too warm to freeze, but clots of ice clung further up the stems of dead plants emerging from the current.

Our return trip to the car was cold. The wind roared quietly through bare branches overhead.

Though cedars predominated, we saw a diversity of trees and I became enamoured: grand maples, a solitary, scaly black cherry, clusters of pale beech still clinging to their spectral, golden leaves. Despite the cold, I took off my glove to feel bark as we passed. Beech is smooth. We found a few small Carpinus caroliniana, the tree I know as ironwood; the muscular trunks and limbs were unexpectedly hard to the touch.

But most surprising was the silkiness of cedar bark, which I had never noticed before: not the slippery softness of highly-refined silk, but the dry, downy softness of silk yarn. I couldn't resist reaching out to touch tree after tree. Rubbing it lightly even gave the rustling sound of silk.