More Than Throwing Shade

A woodpecker has chosen a tree out by the road. He hammers on it intermittently, all day, but in the morning, among the melody of so much other bird song, the woodpecker’s assertion is especially notable.

My neighbor, grandchild in tow, circles underneath, her binoculars drawn. “That woodpecker,” she says, “he’s incredible.”

The chosen tree is old. Many would considering it ugly. The main thrust of the trunk is there, but over the years, branches have been mangled off. There are rotten, even dead limbs. The tree has withstood the indelicate pruning of modern grid maintenance — contract chainsaws clearing, not shaping.

But trees like this one, even in their decline, are home and habitat to much, birds especially. Trees are not merely part of a landscape, their long life alone purports permanence and importance, if not the foundation for an ecosystem.

As a farmer, I deal with mainly short-lived annual plants, and every year I watch as even these regular crops become habit, chiefly feeding grounds — for the gulls now grabbing the large, squirming larvae of corn borers that the passing plow unearths, to the warblers and flycatchers who will pluck other insects from the summer greens.

Spring, like no other time of the year, indicates both planning and hopeful potential, and I am on my way to plant peas in Poxybogue. Spring in one’s step is figurative here. The bright sun warms both me and my tractor as we wait at the light. While I do have a nice, albeit original convertible, I am surrounded by true luxury cars and landscape trailers. Getting across the highway is like a reverse stunt, something ordinary but entirely out of place. Pop the clutch, stall the tractor, flood the engine, jam up traffic.

A farm tractor changes your perspective because it puts you up higher. It allows you to see things that are both directly beneath you and far away. As I cautiously accelerate away from the highway’s congestion, my vantage point allows me to see the prolonged glint of afternoon sunlight, a patch of silver nothingness reflects off the black water of Poxybogue pond.

I turn west, the road here is low and often puddled, but large trees persist. Around the bend, the bog-like wetland sports cherries and cedars, bayberry, brambles and bittersweet. This overgrowth protects and obscures the adjacent pond.

On the other side of the road is the fresh scar of a new house lot. So, seeing the road is free of traffic I fix my gaze sideways, looking instead only at the span of wetlands. Water-view housing may be vestigially linked to our understanding that the rise of civilization had something to do with proximity to water. Perhaps that is why we go to such lengths to attain it.

In purposefully not letting the house lot impinge my peripheral view, I instead, study the water view that the adjacent house will ironically command. From my tractor seat, I can see that someone, perhaps wanting to establish a vantage point of their own, crossed the road, into this wetland and sawed off all of the remaining tall trees.