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red ginseng berries
Saturday, September 1 2001
setting: Silver Spring, Maryland
Today Gretchen and I borrowed Gretchen's mother's white Dodge Neon and we headed off to Staunton, Virginia via the usual roads one would take from Silver Spring. I'm so familiar with I-66 and I-81 at this point that there isn't even much point in looking out the window unless I'm driving. Westward across the Piedmont, the Blue Ridge gradually grows to a certain size and then, on I-66 at least, it seems to disappear and you barely even notice as you cross it. Down I-81, Massanutten Mountain forms a straight line well above the horizon to the left until it ends spectacularly in a half-cone of talus northeast of Harrisonburg. From there most of the sensory experiences are olfactory: the pukelike stench of chicken and turkey death camps or the characteristic Shenandoah Valley fragrance of cow manure and ozone. Today, though, there were no such odors. The soundtrack for most of the drive was from the movie musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch. "When the Earth was still flat and clouds made of fire, the mountains stretched up to the skies, sometimes higher..."
As always, my childhood home was exactly as before, only slightly more along the progression towards a state of absolute entropy. The front yard was a late summertime riot of weeds and small trees, many of the latter of which were inconspicuous seedlings the last summer I was here ('98). At the rate things are going it won't be many more years before the yard is completely replaced with forest. Fred the Dog, who is nearing twelve years of age, was soon basking in all the pro-dog affection of both Gretchen and myself. He's not used to being off his zip line when people are socializing in the backyard, so he took the opportunity to stretch out on the picnic table (a now-structurally-unsound wooden thing that I built back in the late 80s).
My father suggested Gretch and I join him in walking Fred the Dog around Muellers' Mountain, the ridge running behind the house. This seemed like a great idea, since it's been a long time since I saw a deciduous forest in summertime that wasn't littered with malt liquor bottles, condoms, and pieces of besmirched toilet paper. As we passed the upper goat pasture gate, I pointed out to Gretchen the Chinquapin Oak that has been eating fences and gates since we started keeping track back in 1976. Originally there was a gate made of metal pipes hinged on this tree, but the only trace of that gate now is the horizontal end of an elbow joint that has been nearly completely engulfed by tree bark. "I pity the person who would try to cut that tree down," said my father.
Up above the goat pasture in a fenced forested parcel called "Restoration Field," my father immediately began making botanical observations for our benefit. When my Dad gets into something, it quickly becomes a single-minded obsession. For him there was nothing worthy of discussion except plants, plant restoration, and the relationship between underlying minerals and plant communities. Mind you, it was interesting for a time, but there comes a point in any such discussion where it would be nice to start talking about something else, such as the Backstreet Boys' careful avoidance of iambic pentameter.
A year ago or so my father planted some ginseng from seeds in the restoration field and it's been doing well. He'd told us we'd be seeing some, but he didn't even have to point it out when we approached it. At this time of year it features a tall seed stalk with bright red berries, a difficult plant to miss in forest. Now I knew why Ginseng has been harvested nearly to extinction in much of the East. Perhaps there's a surviving strain that has green berries instead of red.
In the westmost "back pasture" Black Cherry trees have nearly succeeded in replacing grassland. The few patches of grassland left were choked with Ragweed and Pennyroyal, two plants disliked by the goats. The Pennyroyal was being aggressively pollinated by small elongated orange beetles whose leisurely vertical-bodied flight resembled that of Fireflies.
Later in the evening my Dad and I were sitting together up in the Shaque examining the humble stats for his Virginians for Wilderness website. The stats had spiked a few days before because of a flurry of activity concerning my Dad's proposal of an Ernie Dickerman Wilderness Area. Ernie Dickerman, an Oberlin graduate and nationally-known naturalist, was a Shenandoah Valley resident until his suicide at the age 87. Soon after his death, my father got the idea to rechristen his proposed "Shenandoah Wilderness" as "the Ernie Dickerman Wilderness," both to commemorate Ernie and to better "market" the idea of big wilderness in the East. It seems the proposal was recently picked up by the wire services, and several newspapers even published the URL. The resulting publicity aggravated some age-old animosity between my father and the representatives of less radical environmental organizations. These other organizations like to claim the late Ernie Dickerman as their own. But in the face my father's wilderness proposal, all their attempts at commemoration seem anemic at best. Who can get excited about a plaque on the wall when the alternative is a 65,000 acre wilderness?
My father also showed me what other sorts of research is being published by scientists studying the relationship between plant distribution and various physical realities. He showed me some of the charts that come out of their research, and suddenly I knew what he was talking about when he told me that no one else is doing what he is when it comes to botanical field research. These charts, such as they were, said nothing at all. The points plotted for various species were all jumbled across a round bloblike Cartesian form without any apparent correlation to either x or y axis. My Dad's data, on the other hand, shows clear correlations between such factors as pH, soil moisture, and soil temperature. According to my Dad, most botanical researchers toss out the majority of their data when they average over wide regions and ignore factors such as microclimates. One such microclimate my Dad had shown me earlier on Muellers' Mountain. It was a simple outcrop of limestone on an otherwise acidic north slope and around it was a halo of forest floor completely devoid of Red Maple seedlings. Red Maple evidently does not like alkaline soil.
Meanwhile my brother Don was sitting at the kitchen table recounting the mid-70's antics of the Khmer Rouge to Gretchen. As always, he wasn't much interested in what she had to say about the things he was saying. He just wanted someone to listen, since usually no one does. She was amazingly patient; I think he talked to her for about an hour.
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