May 4, 2003

• Solo Water Run

  I went to the spring by myself yesterday.  It’s the first time
  I’ve done that since I got back on my feet after my severe illness
  three and a half years ago.  I only took two jugs and two buckets,
  two trips up and down the path from the waterhole.  I was only
  thirsty, not stupid.

  By the time Doug is back in shape they will be empty and we can load
  all twelve containers in the back of the station wagon and make a full
  water run as a team.  Doug apparently didn’t catch this
  respiratory crud from Seph when he was here, but probably from me a bit
  later.  He’s in the miserable stage I was in a week or so
  ago.  I’m still hacking and wheezing, but it’s tolerable,
  especially when compared with the fever and malaise that’s gone before.

  I took the camera along, to show you how much the vernal season has progressed here:  not all that much, really.

  A few feathery leaves of yarrow (Achillea millefolium, soldier’s
  woundwort) are coming up in the perennial clumps around the spring.

  I deliberately didn’t take pictures of the litter, and cropped out a
  few bits that got into my pictures by accident.  Next trip to the
  spring, I’m taking a trash bag and wearing my rubber boots so I can
  wade in the creek and collect garbage.  Windy weather has made
  this one of the most litterful spring seasons I can remember.

  These
  coarse stoloniferous grasses were the only other signs of green on the
  ground.  I know it’s not exactly a pretty picture, but I almost
  fell backwards into the creek trying to get it, so it has value to me.

  This stuff is great.  It stablizes hillsides with its roots and makes the roadsides green.

  The only time it’s a problem is when it invades my garden.  It
  spreads by stolons in the leaf mulch or just under the surface of the
  soil.  If I pull up a clump of it, pretty soon I have a circle of
  clumps all around where I pulled it up, from the bits of root I left
  behind.  The only thing more invasive and harder to get rid of in
  the garden is poplar.

  This time of year, the young top growth of poplar looks like this at
  left.  Leaves are just unfurling and their catkins, the
  fuzzy-looking green pollen spreaders that pass for its flowers, are
  open and doing their allergenic best.  Our only spring wildflowers
  here are such catkins on the willows, alders and poplar.

  The stuff grows in interconnected groves as aspen does.  Some
  roots spread horizontally to cover a lot of ground, while others dive
  deep to anchor and support the trees that develop from them.  They
  grow fast, too.

  Their straight height and flexibility make poplar our favorite
  choice for sweat lodge frames or other pole construction.  My
  first big greenhouse at the old place was built of poplar poles. 
  With me, it’s a love-hate relationship.  It would be all love if
  they would just stay out of my garden, but the soft fertile soil I put
  so much sweat into is like a magnet for them.

  Other than a hazy suggestion of unfolding leaves high in the tops of
  a few birches, and some grass and herbacious clumps on the ground, the
  moss in the creek at right was all the green there was at the
  spring. 

  The pic of poplar catkins was taken across the highway from the
  spring, on the edge of the big muskeg.  The whooping cranes are
  back, nesting over there.  On my trip to the waterhole before this
  one I saw the distinctive black primary flight feathers on a pair doing
  their noisy aerial mating dance out over the marsh.  Love those
  big birds!

  My new profile pic is a self-portrait I captured yesterday in
  that grove of trees between the highway and the wetland.  You can
  see that the trees aren’t leafed out yet.  The water
  run before this one, I was able to walk fifty meters or so out
  onto the frozen marsh, but this time it’s all muck.  Spring really
  is here, and very early this year.  We usually still have heaps of
  dirty snow in every shady spot this time of year.  It’s all gone
  now.

  

  • 2:25 pm
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