Prayer

I happened upon a poem today -- "Praying," by Mary Oliver --  and although I had read it at least once before, this time it truly spoke to me, as if it were calling me by name.  It surely speaks to how I respond to nature, and to the Great Goodness that lies at the heart of creation and surrounds us everywhere.  I was especially struck by this coincidence: that the three specific images Oliver names in her poem are exactly those that have also many times stunned me into silence and reverence.  I post a fourth image here, too, of sunlight rippling across underwater sand, a play of color and light as gorgeous as any stained-glass window in church. It brings me exquisite joy and profound gratitude each time I gaze on it.  As does Mary Oliver with her poetry,  I hope that the words and images I post on my blog would be my own way of praying.


Praying

It doesn't have to be
the blue iris,  it could be

weeds in a vacant lot, or a few

small stones, just

pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don't try
to make them elaborate, this isn't
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.



From Thirst: Poems by Mary Oliver,  Beacon Press, 2006

Eagle!

I know they're around, the Bald Eagles, because all my friends have been seeing them. But not me, despite my diligent efforts.  So I didn't really have my hopes up when I snowshoed around Moreau Lake yesterday, having heard reports that an eagle was feeding on a deer carcass laid out on the ice along the back bay.  I would just enjoy the expansive view of forested mountains ringing the lake, the low sun like a round golden pearl,  its soft glow barely penetrating the veil of clouds that were wafting a fine mist of snow.  I did let my eyes survey the row of trees along the shore, but at first glance, I could not see any eagle perching there.

But wait!  Is that a bit of snow up high in that tree?  Or is that an eagle's white head?

My camera's zoom lens could see better than my eyes.  So I saw my Bald Eagle at last!

As I tried to creep closer to obtain a better view, I began to see remnants of the deer carcass scattered across the ice.

There was still quite a bit of dead deer remaining below the eagle's perch, but it was such a bloody mess I won't post its photo here.  At my approach, the eagle flew off, swooping over my head and winging across the lake to disappear beyond the far shore.




Surrounding the carcass were prints from the many animals who had moved in to share the feast: coyotes, mostly, but also ravens and crows.  Most of the prints were muddled by all the commotion, but I did see this series of crow prints tracing a rather elegant pattern on the snow-covered ice.  It made me think of a Greek frieze or a wallpaper border print.  Pretty.

Here's where a crow landed, its spreading tail feathers leaving an imprint that looks like a Thunderbird.  Very cool!

Spare Beauty

 On a day as dim as it was yesterday, it can be hard to find much beauty in the winter landscape.

But it's there.

Back to the Ancient Tupelos

When Saturday morning dawned well below zero, I wondered if anyone would turn out for the hike to a grove of ancient Black Tupelos that Saratoga PLAN (Preserving Land And Nature) had organized.  Well, I needn't have worried.  A large group of thirty brave souls bundled up and strapped on their snowshoes to follow PLAN intern Andrew Gillcrist on a two-mile trek to visit these venerable trees that have stood in a Saratoga County swamp since at least as far back as the 15th Century.

Before we headed into the Lincoln Mountain State Forest in Greenfield, PLAN Stewardship Coordinator Devin Rigolino provided some background on this mixed hardwood forest, which consists of almost a thousand acres of forest and wetlands, protected by New York State since 1933 to ensure natural resources preservation. 

Although this state forest is not one of the many tracts owned or managed by Saratoga PLAN,  Devin explained that it is just such incredibly rich natural areas that his organization is attempting to preserve.  By offering nature experiences like this one,  PLAN hopes to increase public awareness of Saratoga County's many natural treasures deserving of protection from commercial development.


And so we set off along old logging roads, keeping up a brisk pace that soon warmed us well, our snowshoes crunching through the deep crusted snow.

After a mile or so of close woodland, we emerged onto a large open swamp, where standing snags held the remains of old Great Blue Heron nests.  Although herons no longer use this heronry to rear their young (water levels have fallen too low to sustain the fish the herons feed on), the old nests are occasionally used by Great Horned Owls.   On a previous visit to this swamp a few years ago, I was privileged to see these magnificent owls occupying a nest.   But not this year.

At last we arrived at our destination.  And there they stood, those ancient Black Tupelos (Nyssa sylvatica), craggy witnesses to centuries gone by, having started to grow in this wetlands long before European settlers arrived in this part of New York.  As this photo reveals, the trees are not really enormous, since this species tends to die from the top down.  They also become hollow as they age, which makes core sampling something of a challenge.  But dendrologists have managed to obtain enough samples to estimate that these trees are at least 500 years old.  (Some foresters have claimed that some trees could be as old as 800 years.)

They certainly do have an awe-inspiring presence!

A couple of years ago, my friend Laurie escorted me to some craggy old Black Tupelos she had discovered in a mountainous swamp at Moreau Lake State Park.  These trees were very nearly as large as the tupelos in Lincoln Mountain State Forest,  and the bark displayed the same pattern of growth typical of very old trees:  one side of the trunk has deeply furrowed bark, while the opposite side is relatively smooth.  This photo below is from one of the tupelos at Moreau.

Here's my friend Sue embracing one of the tupelos in the mountains of Moreau.   We will be returning to this site next weekend, hoping to show our remarkable finds to Andrew Gillcrist, our guide on the hike this Saturday at Lincoln Mountain.  I hope someday that someone will try to determine their age.

COLD!

Man, it is COLD!  Below zero this morning, and will be again tomorrow.  Hey, tomorrow's the first of MARCH! It's time to start warming up.  If there weren't so many beautiful places to hike, and the sky hadn't been quite so beautifully blue, I probably would have huddled inside today.  But the river was calling to me to come visit, so that's where I went.  And oh, what a sight awaited me, when I came down through the woods at the end of Potter Road in Moreau, with West Mountain perfectly profiled against a radiant sky, the frozen bays and backwaters brilliant with sparkling snow.

If I stayed away from where streamlets entered the river, I could walk along on the frozen bays, my showshoes barely denting the dense, settled  snow.    The riverbanks were lovely, with bushes studded with Winterberries, the fruit still remarkably red for this late in the season and gorgeous viewed against that blue sky.

High-bush Blueberry twigs and buds vied with those Winterberries for ruddy color.

But the prize for super-saturated redness had to go to this solitary fruit of a spindly single-stemmed Staghorn Sumac.

Not so colorful, but elegantly beautiful still, was this tuft of Meadowsweet and its perfect shadow.

Rounding the point of one of the promontories that thrust into the river here,  I discovered this campsite someone had gone to great pains to furnish with benches and tables made from tree branches.

 I recalled the camp furniture my friends and I used to make as Girl Scouts, except we constructed our tables and benches with lashings of twine that we could dismantle when we broke camp.  These furnishings were put together with screws.  It will take some effort, then, to restore this site to pristine woodland.  This may not be state park land (where such a campsite would definitely  be disallowed), but I don't believe, either,  that such permanent campsites are allowed by the power company that has jurisdiction over the riverbanks in this catchment between their hydroelectric dams.

Many animals use the frozen river as an energy-saving highway, avoiding the deeper snow in the woods whenever possible.  I believe these tracks are those of a coyote, and they led to where many other trails of coyotes converged.

The prize find today was this trail laid down by an otter, scooting along on its belly after pushing off with its big webbed feet.

I followed the trail for quite a while, after the animal left the frozen river and continued pushing and sliding along on the deeper snow in the woods. Deeper for me, anyway, as my snowshoes crunched in as deep as a foot, while the otter blithely skidded along on top of the snow.

When the otter trail entered this area of dense undergrowth, I declined to follow after.  Just a bit further beyond this brushy area lies another bay of the river, which is fed by a stream that probably keeps an area of the water open for the otter to dive into.

As I lifted my sights from the trail I'd been following, I realized I had entered a frozen marsh, thick with Narrow-leaved Cattails, the fruits of which are more slender than those of ordinary cattails.  I was intrigued by the presence of neat little holes drilled into many of the fruits, no doubt the work of some bird.  I have read that Blue Jays will sometimes hide food bits inside the cattail fluff.  I dismantled several hole-drilled fruits, but didn't find any treasures hidden within.  Perhaps they had already been retrieved.

Winter Trudgery

Only one strap of my snowshoe was fastened around my boot today, when suddenly the wind came roaring down the river valley, bringing along a stinging blast of driven snow, so thick the very air was opaque as chalk, and I couldn't breathe without sucking in icy lungfuls.  "Oh, the heck with it!" I grumbled, undoing that strap and throwing my snowshoes back in the car.  I didn't really want to go trudging through those deep heaps, anyway, and although the sun resumed shining brightly only a mile or so later, I didn't turn my car around but continued on home.

I'd had quite a workout the day before, slogging along through thigh-deep drifts in the rolling hills above the Hudson at Moreau.  Not another human soul had ventured along this powerline clearcut, so my snowhoes sank deep with every step, and every footstep was weighted with clumps of heavy snow that clung to the tops of my boots.  I almost gave up before I had gone 20 yards, but I soon found my stride and pushed ahead, happy to have this beautiful windswept height of mountains and forest to myself.

Well, almost to myself.  From the looks of all these animal trails, it appears that many other creatures travel these heights.  Most of the trails were made by deer, and I pitied them for how their small pointed hooves plunged deep, deep down in the snow.  The foxes and fishers and porcupines managed to mostly cruise along on top of the drifts, but the coyotes also must have found it hard going, to judge from the depth of their tracks.  There were turkey tracks, too, and these hardly dented the crusted snow around a thicket of hawthorns.

The temperature rose to almost 50 degrees yesterday,  and that warmth -- along with the heavy work of breaking deep snow -- soon found me stripping down to my longjohn shirt.  After less than an hour, I figured I'd had enough exercise and looked for the streambed that I would follow down the mountainside to where it joined the Hudson.

I found the river wide open below the Spier Falls Dam, its wind-rumpled waters a dazzling blue beneath a clearing sky.   There were bright-white dots of American Merganser drakes out on the water as I approached, but of course they flew away before I could take their photo.  I sat on the riverbank a while, hoping to maybe catch sight of a Bald Eagle fishing, but not today.

On Sunday, Sue and I had visited a stretch of the Hudson further downstream, at South Glens Falls.  There, the river was still solidly frozen from shore to shore, so we didn't see any eagles fishing there, either.  We did see dozens of Robins, though, flocking in Staghorn Sumac trees to eat the persistent fuzzy red fruits.   More and more often, we are seeing Robins all winter long, so we can't consider them harbingers of spring anymore.

Although we're just beginning to hear the Cardinals and Black-capped Chickadees start to sing their spring songs, we know that winter still holds us in its grip.  In fact, the weatherman is forecasting a return of polar cold this coming week.  Sometimes, just to keep my spirits up, I look through my photo files to remind me of the delights that lie in wait, in not too many more weeks.  Spring Beauty and Bloodroot are two of our earliest flowers to bloom.  How I will welcome them!

Cooking Up a Cure for Cabin Fever

Yeah, I admit it.  Winter starts to feel a little old, come late February, even for folks like me who love to get out and play in the snow.  But that snow is getting soggy now, and muddy around the edges, and more often it's a sense of duty, rather than pleasant anticipation, that pushes my long-johned, rubber-booted person out the door.  Some days I just don't bother.  It's cabin fever time.

One of my favorite cures for this late-winter malady is to fill my cabin with the wonderful smells of long-braised pots of comfort food.  Here are a couple I cooked up recently.

Braised Oxtail

 I could hardly believe it when my husband brought me this recipe from The New York Times food section, because he just won't eat red meat, usually, and oxtail is not only red, it's also pretty fatty.  Lusciously, wonderfully, melt-in-your-mouth fatty, with lots of gelatinous tissue and deep-meaty marrow to add incredible flavor to the sauce.  This recipe called for chunks of celery root, carrots and onions,  as well as red wine and beef broth.  Just before serving, a handful of gremolata (chopped parsley, minced raw garlic, and shredded lemon rind) is scattered over the dish.  I doubled the amount of beef stock so as to have lots of gravy to ladle over mashed potatoes, and I baked the stew for  nearly six hours at 250 degrees, instead of three hours at 325, as the recipe directed.  Braised that slowly, the meat becomes so soft you could eat it with a spoon -- although I preferred to use my hands and suck every savory morsel from all the convoluted nooks and crannies of the bones.  Heavenly!

To lessen the artery-clogging aspect of this dish, I made it the day before we ate it, then skimmed the cold-hardened fat off the top.  It was still deliciously rich.

Chicken and Dumplings

I think that chicken and dumplings has got to be the ultimate comfort food.  And the way I make this dish, it's actually pretty healthy.  I pull off the skin and scissor-trim all visible fat from chicken thighs, using just a bit of that fat to saute onions, celery, and lots of carrots, before adding the chicken, a dash of thyme, and a quart of chicken broth to the pot and simmering all for a half an hour or so.  Then for the dumplings, I stir up a soft biscuit dough using whole-grain King Arthur white whole-wheat flour and olive oil instead of butter.  The dumplings steam, covered,  on top of the broth for 20 minutes or so, rising up into plump little pillows of tender fluffy deliciousness.  The dumplings also serve to slightly thicken the broth, so it seems almost creamy when ladled over the dumplings in the soup plates.  Fresh parsley goes on top.  Oh yum!

Winter Pleasures at Spa Park

We had another pretty snowfall today, just enough to turn every woodlot into a fairy forest.  I had planned to go for a walk in Saratoga Spa State Park, but by the time I cleared our walk and cleaned off my car, it started to rain.  Darn!  I can enjoy a winter walk at sub-zero temperatures, but I sure don't like to go for a walk in freezing rain.  So today I stayed home.

I did go out to Spa Park on Monday, though, a beautiful blue-sky day, frosty cold but with a bright sun that warmed my back and spangled the marshmallow billows of snow with sparkles.  Sometimes I just don't feel like struggling through heaps of snow on my snowshoes, and that's when a walk along the Avenue of Pines is just the ticket.  There, I can be surrounded by tall pines and snowy forest, while freely swinging my legs on cleanly plowed paths.  Nice!

About midway along my planned route, I stopped off at the Gideon Putnam Hotel in the heart of the park to warm my face and visit the ladies' room just off the lobby. 

 Not a rustic Adirondack-style lodge but rather an elegant luxury hotel, the Gideon Putnam is leased by the state park to a private company, which operates the hotel year-round.  It makes a great place to stop for lunch or drinks after golfing or skiing or skating or swimming at nearby swimming pools.  Or just walking around this beautiful park or attending a concert at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center or a stage play at the Little Theater.  Spa Park has lots to offer.  And let me tell you, that ladies' room is REALLY nice!


So is the Gideon Putnam's lobby, with its comfortable furniture and blazing fireplaces.  These ladies were enjoying an after-lunch cocktail to celebrate the birthday of one of them.  Teresa, in the blue coat, had just turned 97!  Isn't it wonderful that she is still enjoying her life?

This trio looked so happy I just had to stop to chat with them.  And I'm so glad I did!  Turns out, the lady seated at left is the mother of two of my son's favorite high-school buddies, so we had a grand time catching up on what our respective kids are doing.  One of hers, she told me several times, is now a doctor.

(Personal to my son Steve:  Do you recognize Mark and Marty's mom?  She sure remembers you.)

I love living in this wonderful town.