
The endangered red-cockaded woodpecker

The endangered red-cockaded woodpecker

The harlequin duck on the Farmington River

"Where the Great River Rises" is a newly published atlas of the upper Connecticut River valley. Cover image courtesy of the University Press of New England.

A canoe camper makes breakfast along the Connecticut River near Brattleboro, Vermont
There is graceful prose in places, but mostly this atlas is a kind of Upper Valley textbook with workmanlike, explanatory writing. Nothing wrong with that. There is an enormous amount of information about the river and its watershed between these covers, and it is the kind of vetted, reliable, factual matter that is valuable and needed. Connecticut River afficionados will snatch it up and add it to their increasingly sagging shelf of Connecticut River literature. We’ve been seeing a couple of Connecticut River books a year in recent years.

The Appalachian Mountain Club preserved a key piece of the 100-Mile-Wilderness in Maine. Map courtesy of the AMC.

The West Branch of the Pleasant River in Maine in Winter.

The Connecticut River near Littleton, New Hampshire
Nov. 2, 2009
At East Hampton, Ct.
Hiking with friends in Hurd State Park yesterday we came upon a most unusual mushroom, a whitish, shaggy-looking thing growing in a crevice in a silver maple on the banks of the Connecticut River.

Bear's Head Tooth growing in East Hampton, Ct.
I couldn’t recall having seen one before. In this very wet year, of course, the fungi are flourishing. Returning home, I checked the National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Mushrooms. What we saw was something called Bear’s Head Tooth, which can be as much as 12 inches wide and 20 inches high. This one was about half that size. Not only is it edible, the guide says it is “very good when cooked slowly.” Uhh. You first.

Sun-drenched Maples

Picked Today
October 14, ‘09
Farmington, Connecticut
Stopped by the community vegetable garden at mid-morning after a frost last night, the second one this week. The tender plants like basil are dead. The hardy plants, like carrots and turnips, are fine. I picked some turnips, a cluster of beautiful carrots, a couple of small eggplant that somehow survived the cold this week and some kale. The season is about over, and the community garden will be plowed under next week. It was in one way a great year for a vegetable garden – there was so much rain that plants never lacked for water. On the other hand, all that rain – late May and well into July – brought some big problems.
I think back to mid-July. For days I watched a tomato slowly ripen in my garden plot, which is beside the Farmington River. Finally, it was completely red except for a tiny patch of orange at the stem. I couldn’t wait any longer. I picked it and brought it home to have with lunch. I tossed together a salad of greens, golden beets and green beans from the garden, roasted red peppers, olive oil and sherry vinegar. I did not put the tomato in the salad. I showcased it by itself, on a small plate. The first just-picked, home-grown tomato of the season deserves special treatment. I did not want that socko flavor of a fresh, vine-ripened tomato mingling with any flavors other than a slight drizzle of good olive oil and a sprinkle of salt and pepper.
It was bland.
Not terrible. But nothing like I was expecting. Nothing like the way a mid-summer garden tomato tastes when picked and eaten within an hour. It was but a hint of what was to come.

Late blight on tomato
Within another day or two the plants became noticably sickly with drooping leaflets that turned black. Almost every day I threw away tomatoes riddled with rot, at a time when ordinarily I’d bring home a half dozen perfect tomatoes each day. With all the damp, gray weather, a fungus called late blight had taken hold in the Northeast, killing tomato and potato plants by the thousands. I did everything I could do organically to keep the plants healthy. Realizing the wet weather was continuing, I trimmed each plant of all but the most productive new growth so that air could circulate more freely and keep the plants dry. But it didn’t work. The blight was everywhere. That first bland tomato, I have to assume, was the result of a plant already weakened by the blight, even if it appeared comparatively healthy.
Last weekend I pulled up all the dead tomato plants, brought them home and mixed them in with the trash, as the town suggested. You don’t want to compost plants with late blight, as the compost could reintroduce the blight next year.
A disappointing year with the loss of the tomato crop, but otherwise plants did well. Green beans, squash, wax beans, kale, chard, peppers, carrots, beets, herbs and cutting flowers all flourished. I’ve been eating my own chard since early June, and might have enough for another dinner ready to pick tomorrow.
October 2, 2009
Prominent through much of the Ken Burns series “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea,” is John Muir, an early and persuasive voice for preservation of significant natural areas. I ran into a friend at Starbucks the morning after the first segment. He wanted to know more about Muir. “You have any books on Muir?”
I did. I loaned my friend The Library of America volume on Muir, which has as much of the essential John Muir as most people are likely to need, including his excellent autobiography “My Boyhood and Youth.” It is just that – the story of his upbringing and essentially ends when he reaches adulthood. It is a great story. Muir and his brother come to America when he is 6. They move to Wisconsin, the frontier at the time. To say that Muir’s boyhood waking hours were essentially confined to exhausting manual farm labor and prayer is not an exageration.
There is plenty more in the Library of America volume, too, but I suggested he make sure he checked the Muir essay on the water ouzel, a delightful bird now known as the American dipper. It is one of my favorite Muir essays.
Who could not love a bird that is always found in or beside beautiful mountain streams in the West, a bird capable of walking and swimming underwater? Muir watched them for hours on end, and those hours of observation enrich his essay.

An acorn woodpecker storing acorns in a tree in Coconino National Forest, Arizona
Gila woodpecker? Dead Horse Ranch State Park in Cottonwood. There’s a bird walk at Red Rock State Park tomorrow at 8, a great place to see some other western species, they said. You want summer tanager? Back toward the beginning of the trail. Red-faced warbler? Missed them by a week or two – they migrated.

Sacred datura is beautiful but poisonous
I came to Sedona expecting to find trees sparse and species few in this high desert country, but I left surprised at both the number of trees and their diversity. From my pack I pulled a leaf that I had plucked from an oak only an hour earlier, figuring I might identify the tree species more specifically once home. From its shape I assumed it must be one of the white oaks, but I had no idea which one, certainly not the white oak of the Northeast, the state tree of Connecticut. I had not brought a field guide to the trees, I told my new friends, and I was annoyed with myself. Phyllis and Kristen took a quick look and did not hesitate in their identification: gambel oak. Birds, trees, wildflowers, they knew them all.

A view of the red rocks of Sedona, Arizona