Riverside Rambles

Yesterday I spent some time wandering though the digital wilderness. One link leads to another and I eventually found myself at the Flickr photo page of a French citizen who calls him/herself Licorne.

Licorne’s father worked for the French nuclear program back when the thinly-populated Pacific Ocean seemed to be an ideal place to set off H-bombs. The date was July 3, 1970. This was before the test-bomb treaty discouraged such rash and heedless acts. Licorne cleaned up (dust-removal, etc.) three amazing photos which his/her father took during that test. Take a look:

These astonishing man-made atmospheric structures became known as “mushroom clouds” during the cold war post-WWII era. The analogy is apt, and in the third photo you can see an analog of the skirt-like “partial veil” which I’ve seen so many times arrayed around the stems of the fruiting bodies of Amanita mushrooms.

Sheer luck and the self-preservation instincts of politicians have preserved us from the nuclear apocalypse fate which seemed so possible during the postwar era. Now we have other things to worry about …

Larry

Sometimes I feel like I live in a different world than the one most of my friends and acquaintances inhabit. Evanescent stories of the deeds, misdeeds, and foibles of the media celebrity people (a category which includes politicians) are like the sound of distant surf in my ears, or the background susurrating hum of the summer insects which outnumber humans around here during the summer and fall.

The other day I was talking with a Kahoka man who has been working out in the timber, cutting trees and skidding out logs. He said to me: “I kept getting into these patches of thorny little trees — they only grow ten or fifteen feet tall. I’d walk by a patch and I swear the branches were like pouncing cats! One would always manage to snag me!” He showed me crosshatched networks of scratches on his forearms.

I replied “Those little trees were most likely Prickly Ashes, also known as Toothache Trees. Snap off a twig sometime and chew on it; it has an interesting tingly and lemony flavor.”

The Prickly Ash (Zanthoxylum americanum) is in the Rutacae family, along with the tropical citrus trees. The tree and its fellow understory tree Ptelea trifloliata, the Hop Tree, are the only woody members of this mostly tropical family which grow in this area. These trees are probably more common in the local woodlands now than they were during pre-settlement times, as grazing cows don’t seem to like them. These understory trees are very common in this area, but I have yet to meet anyone who knows them by name.

Here’s a photo by Elizabeth Czarapata which I stole from a Wisconsin state flora site. It shows the oppositely-arranged leaves which do vaguely resemble ash leaves:

A week or so ago I was listening to NPR while driving up to Canton. The Olympics hadn’t started yet, but several NPR reporters had gotten to China early and were filing stories about other aspects of Chinese life and culture. I listened to Melissa Block relating this story about her visit to a Szechuan cooking school in Chengdu:

Savoring the Spice in Kung Pao Chicken

Szechuan dishes tend to be spicy-hot but Block discovered that it isn’t only chiles which provide that culinary heat. A spice known as “Chinese Pepper” is a widely-used ingredient. It turns out that this spice is the seedpod of a Chinese species of Prickly Ash! The pods are also used in China as a toothache remedy due to their numbing qualities. The American Prickly Ash twigs and pods once were used for the same purpose. Perhaps the American species could also be used as a cooking spice?

Our national cuisine, if it can be even called that, has such a short history, and the majority of our recipes are derived from European, Asian, and African sources. There is precious little truly North American cuisine. We just haven’t inhabited this continent long enough to have fully explored the culinary possibilities of native plants and animals, and now that our culture is so divorced from daily contact with the remnants of local ecosystems we are unlikely to learn more about what the land can offer us.

In contrast, the Old World continents have a long history before the modern industrial era, thousands of years in which every possibility of finding palatable food in local landscapes has been repeatedly explored by hungry poor folks; this has resulted in ancient culinary traditions, many of which we have bastardized and simplified. “Ethnic” fast food franchises come to mind.

I’m going to pick some Prickly Ash berries this fall and experiment with them. According to Melissa Block in her NPR story, they add a subtle “zing” to many traditional Szechuan dishes.

Larry

Addendum:

I just thought of a Prickly Ash story from my past:

Twenty-five years ago I was on a walk at my old Knox County place. I discovered an enchanted grove of Prickly Ash trees growing in full sunlight on a depleted subsoil hilltop mostly inhabited by Eastern Red Cedar thickets and owls.

Unlike the typically leggy understory Prickly Ashes, these trees had relatively stout trunks; they looked like ancient spreading oaks with smooth bark like a beech tree, but they were less than three feet tall. I’ve never seen anything like it since. The trees were probably about fifty years old, with two-inch diameter trunks. Lichens grew on the spreading branches; the grove reminded me of a miniature elfin forest.

Not long afterwards I hired a neighbor to bulldoze some brushy ridgetops nearby. Every time I have ever had bulldozing done the driver has destroyed an area which I valued for various reasons which are difficult to communicate to a typical bulldozer driver. I surveyed the results and was saddened to see that the miniature Prickly Ash forest had been scraped into oblivion. “Why didn’t I tag it?”, I thought morosely. The bulldozer driver probably thought he had been doing me a favor when he detoured and “cleaned up” what he saw as a patch of offensive low brush.

Last night I was flitting ftom web-site to web-site, following links like a butterfly visiting a series of flowers. I ended up at West Virginia photographer Stephen Cresswell’s site. If you like wildlife photography, I recommend that you visit his site:

Stephen Cresswell Photography

Here’s a photograph from the site which impressed me; it’s a view of an Elderberry Borer beetle on a leaf of its host plant:

What knobby antennae!

I’ve never seen this beetle, but the photo aroused my curiosity and I read about the insect’s life-cycle. The beetle and its larvae depend upon the common elderberry for both food and habitation. I always enjoy reading about and seeing insects whose lives are closely connected to a particular plant species.

Larry

Hannibalians don’t tend to kill each other very often. Yes, we have our druggies, alkies, social misfits, and felons, and even one blogger, but the various stabbings, fights, and shooting incidents I’ve heard about during my three years in this town haven’t until this week resulted in any fatalities. I live in what is commonly thought of as “the worst part of town” but the law-defying fringe folks tend to keep to themselves, I’ve found, and muggings and burglaries are rare.

Take a look at these two characters:

David Ater and Nathan Stice are “serial offenders”, having been convicted during the past few years of various crimes such as burglary, drug offenses, and much more. They evidently had been living in the mostly-black Hope Street area and they were being “supervised” by state employees at the newly-constructed Hannibal Supervision Center just three blocks from where I live.

Look at those faces. Stice, the one the left, has that jug-eared Scotch-Irish Ozark hillbilly look; his flat sociopathic gaze reeks of a trailer-trash upbringing. Ater looks almost Polynesian, but he is probably one of the results of those experiments in racial mixing which are so irresistable to many poor West-side Hannibalians.

Sunday night a 45-year-old Hannibal man was riding his Honda moped down Broadway. He worked for his father’s fencing company and was a respected and law-abiding citizen. He happened across Ater and Stice beating up a woman and stopped to intervene. Ater and Stice beat him to death.

The Hannibal police, to their credit, were on the scene before long and quickly apprehended the two amoral guys on Hope Street. I believe there was a foot-chase. Ater and Stice are now snugly ensconced in the Palmyra jail.

I heard about the incident yesterday but as usual the Hannibal Courier-Post was scanty on the details. The Quincy Herald-Whig had more information, but today the Courier-Post people stirred their stumps and managed to present more info.

I went in to the Pickadilly station across the street yesterday morning to buy a cup of coffee. I asked the clerk, a thirty-something blonde woman who has a world-weary and cynical attitude, if she knew Ater and Stice.

“Nathan Stice is a regular customer here, but I didn’t recognize Ater from the photo in the paper.”

A slim and reputedly gay man in his sixties overheard the exchange. He works at another convenience store on St. Mary’s Avenue, not far from the murder scene. He said “I’ve seen both of those guys over at my station. I think they are both on parole.”

Some questions remain, though: why were such obvious criminal types released into the general population? Why was the Supervision Center built just a block or so from the druggiest neighborhood in Hannibal?

Larry

Here are some images I captured while walking up Bridge Street here in Hannibal yesterday evening. I was accompanied by commenter Sarah, who suggested some of these photographic subjects.

Bridge Street runs along a narrow ledge just above the river and the railroad tracks. The steep slopes of the Riverview Park bluff crowd the ledge, leaving barely enough room for a string of houses, some of which are occupied while others are decrepit.

One of my favorite houses on Bridge Street is a two-story structure with a walk-in stone basement in which lives a horse. The house’s windows are long gone and plaster is falling from the ceilings and walls. The basement is rather dark but provides shelter for an old white horse, whose day job is pulling an open-walled-but-roofed tourist trailer or wagon around Hannibal’s historic district. The horse will come to the slatted door if called and enjoys having his nose scratched:

Bridge Street once turned into River Road and led all the way to Rt. 168 on the north side of town, but a section of the road collapsed onto the railroad tracks some years ago and the road became a walking path. Now it’s a dead-end street, sort of a linear neighborhood.

One of the houses we passed had a detached garage with a marvellously-frayed and beribboned blue-plastic tarp hanging across the opening:

A train approached from the south. I liked this scene; notice how the setting sun has illuminated and given warm tints to the Lover’s Leap bluff south of Hannibal:

Some of these tank cars were marked “ADM”, an abbreviation for Archer Daniels Midland. Perhaps they were full of viscous high-fructose corn syrup?

At dawn and dusk the subtly-rippled surface of the Mississippi often reflects the many hues of the sky. It almost makes one forget the turbid muddiness and the freight of rural chemicals and urban detritus which flow beneath the surface!

In the above photo, if you look closely, you can see the Mark Twain riverboat returning from an evening dinner cruise.

Larry

Here’s a poem by Joan Ryan which nicely complements my earlier post On Diverse Matters:

          When All Is Said and Dun


Using nicknames like “poo” is what most of us do
When we don’t want to deal with our stuff.
For a handy nickname is considered more tame
Than our using the one that’s more rough.
When our children are small there’s no problem at all
With “Go potty!”  “Make dootie.”  “Go poot!”
But once they are grown, I would have it be known
“I went ca ca!” does not sound so cute.
In the barn it’s “manure” yet there’s little allure
Miming excrement made by a cow
And if you would assign that “manure” name to mine
Have no doubt it would cause a big row.
If you’re German you might well be calling it “shite”
But in English that really sounds rude.
Though in German, it’s fine, Yanks must sadly decline
We’d be chastised for being too crude.
Most Shakespeareans hung on that funny word “dung”
Yet it did not wear fare well in translation.
Though we mimic the bard, it would really be hard
To re-float that brown boat in our nation.
“When in doubt, ask the doctor,” I thought, so I called
To inquire for the current buzz word.
When my internist doc had recovered from shock
He repeated to me what he’d heard.
“We were under the gun but we’ve settled on one.
Saying ‘poo poo’ just sounds too uncool.
So we drew this name, son, from the place it was done
And refer to it all now as ‘stool.’” 

Last Monday was one of the hottest and humid days so far this summer. As luck would have it, my old friend Mark (an occasional commenter here) and his wife Ellen were in the area and we had planned to meet here in Hannibal. Mark grew up in Quincy but Ellen is a native Californian — and this was her first visit to the Midwest.

I drove down to the riverfront to meet Mark and Ellen at about 11:00 in the morning. Mark had mentioned that a very large excursion riverboat was docked there and I remembered reading that the American Queen, one of the largest riverboats in the world, was supposed to stop in Hannibal.

I parked my truck and waded through almost-visible swaths of stickily-humid air. I didn’t immediately encounter Mark and Ellen but the American Queen was very visible; it’s an enormous boat, like a river cruise ship. A view from the parking lot:

As I stood near the boat I saw Hannibal’s own riverboat, the Mark Twain, approaching the dock. It looked so small in comparison to the American Queen!

The American Queen has the traditional “exploded-and-frayed” smokestacks:

A view of the bow of the vessel:

This riverboat is currently for sale, along with its sister crafts the Delta Queen and the Mississippi Queen. No cruises are scheduled for the 2009 season, so it is possible that these boats will never stop in Hannibal again.

I finally found Mark and Ellen. Ellen looked rather wilted, so we retreated to an air-conditioned bar-and-grill and ate lunch. They have been married for nearly thirty years but this was the first time I had met Ellen.

Later we spent some time at my place, talking and reminiscing, then Mark and Ellen went off to take the tour of Mark Twain Cave. Afterwards they took a dinner-cruise on the Mark Twain riverboat while I played the fiddle at the Monday night session. After the cruise they came by the pizza-place where the session is held and listened for a while. Robert, a fiddler with whom I enjoy playing, approached Mark, Ellen, and I as we sat drinking beers and talking. I introduced him, and noting that Ellen was evidently a bit under the weather, Robert remarked cheerily, referring to the oppressive heat and humidity, “Isn’t it wonderful! We wait all year for this!”

Larry

A few days ago I was sitting on the toilet, leisurely perusing H.L. Mencken’s hefty tome “The American Language” while my autonomous bowels did their thing. Mencken paints a detailed portrait of American written and spoken speech circa the 1930s and contrasts them with those of the British. During that era the British were appalled and horrified at what we were doing to their language, but I think they’ve gotten over it by now, largely due to American movies and pop music.

I was intrigued by a section of the book which discussed the many American euphemisms for “Goddamnit!”. After all, there is an innate human need for a heartfelt utterance when a hammer strikes one’s thumb or a glass of milk spills across a table and puddles around one’s feet. Why tempt fate by invoking a feared deity, though? The euphemistic permutations Americans have come up with are impressive: the rather weak “Gosh darn it!”, the reverse-the-letters-trick used in “Doggone it!”, the substitution of “Dad” for “God” in “Dadgummit!” and “Dadburnit!”, the rural-sounding “Goldurnit!”… can you think of any others?

Aw… my defecation was complete. Isn’t it remarkable that one of the most common sources of human feelings of well-being is almost never spoken of or written about? The feeling of “all’s right with the world” which often follows a successful voiding of the bowels is a taboo subject, it seems. Notice also how difficult the subject is to discuss without euphemism piled upon euphemism.

The vocabulary of excrement is quite varied. I like the word “ordure”, which comes from a Latin word meaning “horrid”, and the French word “merde”. Interesting that these two words, along with “turd”, share that “rd” sound. “Dung” is a sturdy word with Anglo-Saxon roots which specifically refers to animal excrement. The word has an obsolete meaning which interests me:

   2. (Calico Print.) To immerse or steep, as calico, in a bath
        of hot water containing cow dung; -- done to remove the
        superfluous mordant. (obs.)

“Poop” was originally a child’s slang word but in recent decades it has become generally used as a more socially-acceptable substitute for “shit”. Medical terms such as “feces” and “bowel movement” sound affected when used in everyday conversation. I don’t hear the abbreviation “B.M.”for the latter term as much as I used to — it seems to have fallen out of favor. Until I was about ten years old I thought “B.M.” was a word spelled “beeyam”, as that was how my mother pronounced the abbreviation. Hmmm.. now that I think about it, the common yam or sweet potato, both in the vegetable’s shape and coloration, looks rather “turdish”. Pardon me for free-associating and digressing, but the term “turdish rebels” popped into my head, and I try to imagine what they might be rebelling against…

Elimination (how’s that for another vague euphemism?) is an act we all perform every single day but few compare notes, although those with constipation can be an exception at times (”Prunes work for me!”, etc.). And then there is that brief inspection of the results floating in the porcelain bowl, archipelagos of excrescence doomed to spiral oblivion. I’m sure most of us take a look — I know that I do. The color, whether the turds float or not, the cohesiveness, the shape — these are all clues to the state of one’s digestion. And God forbid that you should see traces of blood!

I set the book down on the edge of the sink, wiped (everyone has developed their own technique which is almost never shared, except with very small children) and flushed. Then I noticed that I was not alone in the bathroom.

My bathroom window is propped open with a chunk of 2X4 and there is no screen. Few flies or mosquitoes ascend as high as twenty feet but every now and then an insect will find its way into one of the second-floor rooms.

I had seen a rather striking beetle crawling up a corner. I ran and fetched my camera from its case and sprawled out on the floor. By the way, I don’t recommend scrutinizing a bathroom floor through a camera’s macro lens.

My visitor was a Long-horned Beetle with dramatically long antennae:

The beetle’s wing-covers feature four prominent spots. I scooted closer and propped the camera on an empty coffee can, an improvised tripod. Oddly enough, the creature’s antennae sprout from the middle of its compound eyes. I’ve seen a similar arrangement of sensory organs in a species of milkweed beetle. There must be some advantage to this seemingly-awkward scheme, but I can’t imagine what it might be.

I allowed the beastie to crawl onto my finger and set it upon the windowsill. The beetle flew off into the humid evening air. It was probably looking for a mate, but I’m glad that it stopped by for a visit!

Addendum: after several fruitless attempts at IDing the beetle, I think I have found a match. I’m reasonably certain that the insect is an Ivory-Marked Beetle (Eburia quadrigeminata), a beetle whose larvae bore into the trunks of ash and hickory trees.

Larry

Commenter Joan has been getting rather testy, so I’d better continue my account of a visit a week ago to Cameron Cave, which is near the more-famous Mark Twain Cave, a cavern immortalized in the novels of Sam Clemens. Here’s the first post:

A Camera In Cameron Cave

And here’s more, some of which is fanciful, or damned lies, as some would say:

Recently I put up a sign on the Market Street wall of my building:

“Time Travel Tours Into Hannibal’s Past! See Hannibal During Its Industrial-Age Period of Working-Class Prosperity!”

This morning a gaggle of sweaty tourists stood before me in my courtyard, where I have installed the prototype time machine. They were a bit cranky and contentious, especially those with children. It was a hot and humid afternoon.

Some questions were raised:

“I thought time machines were scientifically impossible! How is it that you have one?”

I replied “This is new cutting-edge technology. I was lucky enough to obtain the one Hannibal-area license for this machine from the federal Bureau of Time Management. As the technology is new, the BTM only allows one such license to be issued in each tourist area.”

“Can you guarantee that you’ll be able to bring us back to the present?”

“As long as you stick with me and don’t wander off, I can assure you that I’ll bring you back to the present time. We are only allotted one hour in the past.”

I didn’t mention a recent unfortunate incident — an Iowa family had wandered off during an excursion and I had to leave them back in Civil War-era Hannibal. I can only hope that they adapted to that era!

“C’mon, let’s get going!” I said. I herded the tourists into the bus-like machine and settled myself into the driver’s seat.

As I carefully revved up the time-dynamos I spoke to the passengers behind me, using a built-in PA system.

“Today, folks, we’re headed back to the apex of Hannibal’s commercial and industrial era, circa 1925. Shoes, lumber, and lime provided jobs for many Hannibalians back then.”

The time-vehicle became evanescent and shimmered as it rose through the roof of my building. Soon we were soaring through the sky of another era.

“Down below you can see the enormous shoe-factory complex.” I said in my best tour-guide voice. “Closer to the river notice the sawmills and planing-mills. In these establishments lumber is being processed from logs floated down the Mississippi from Minnesota and Wisconsin. Towards your right, on the south side of town, you can see signs of dusty activity near the top of a ridge. If you listen closely you will be able to hear the rumbly sounds of limestone being ground. The cooked and ground stone will be shipped out of the quarry in wooden casks, ultimately to be used as plaster and mortar in a multitude of developing Midwestern towns and cities.”

I banked the time/air-craft to the right and headed down the west bank of the river.

The hilly and be-bluffed landscape looked hard-bitten and bare, with most hillsides cleared and pastured. In those days the hills were still populated by the descendants of the pioneer farmers, many of whom were poor. Obviously these Ralls Countians were pressing the land hard in order to scrape from it a meager subsistence.

“It looks like I calibrated our temporal destination just right, folks! See that farmstead right on the banks of the Mississippi? That’s Judge E.T.Cameron’s place, and if you look closely you can see the judge’s son Archie driving a herd of cattle westwards into the hills and valleys of the family’s property. See that plume of steam gushing from a hillside? That’s relatively-warm humid air condensing in the chill air as it streams from from a cave-system that no-one has ever explored. Archie told his father of his discovery and the pair eventually pick-axed the opening, making it wider, and ventured into the cave.”

My allotted hour was nearly up, so I headed the ungainly craft back towards Hannibal.

“If you are willing to shell out seventeen bucks, you can take a tour of the cave that Archie Cameron discovered eighty-three years ago. Is it worth the money? I admit that you won’t see the sort of spectacular cave-formations visible in the various Ozark tourist caves, but Cameron Cave has a charm of its own. There is almost no graffiti, and a visit to the cave is an opportunity to visit one of those rarest of Midwestern localities, a place which has been little-visited by people. The cave has been open to the public for only thirty years and it could be considered to be a pristine environment.”

Enough of my fantasy narrative.. here are some more photos and commentary from my visit to the cave with commenter Sarah a week ago:

Cameron Cave is a skewed grid consisting of at least six miles of passages arrayed across nine subterranean acres. It’s a dry cave due to a capping stratum of shale over the layers of eroded Louisiana limestone. The lack of percolating water in the main body of the cave has led to a notable absence of flowstone, speleothems, and stalactites, except for at least one small area.

Sarah and I were part of a group of a dozen or so. We were guided by a friendly man with a shaved head and a salt-and-pepper goatee. He was full of stories about the cave. As in every “show cave” I’ve visited, formations have been given humorous metaphorical names, such as “the Teapot” and “The Devil’s Jacuzzi”. I find this to be annoying, but recognize that it’s a necessary part of a cave tour. Caves are so removed from our aboveground environment, so beautiful yet so alien — I think these jocose names help tourists retain their equanimity and enjoy the experience.

The guide pointed to a gray ceiling layer above our heads at one point. It was dark gray and uniformly flat and I surmised that it was a concrete slab poured over a crumbly section of cave passage.

The guide said “No, no, that’s the shale layer which keeps this cave so dry!”

I said “So that’s why this cave is lacking in stalactites and soda-straws!”

The guide looked hurt. He just works part-time guiding cave tourists, but he was obviously fond of the cave and wanted us to like it.

“Just wait, Larry!” he exclaimed. “There are some really nice formations up ahead!”

He was right — a few minutes later we came across some nice calcite flowstone formations. Forgive me for not remembering their fanciful names!

At the beginning of the tour I felt hindered and constrained by the guide and other tourists. I like to explore on my own and take my time with my photos. The guide evidently picked up on this and he went out of his way to help me take photographs. In this one his hand holding a flashlight ended up in the frame — he was trying to help me locate the scene in my viewfinder:

I was impressed by this surreal scene:

We encountered a few clusters of bats clinging to the cave walls, such as this one:

At one point a moth which had wandered into the cave flew over my head, followed by a bat in hot pursuit.

The Louisiana limestone from which the cave had been carved is remarkable for its lack of fossil marine organisms. The guide said to me “I’ve been through most of these cave passages, and I’ve been lost several times, but I’ve only seen one fossil down here. It’s just ahead!”

We came to a waist-high block of stone which had probably fallen from the roof of the passage thousands of years ago. A bas-relief fossil crinoid was embedded in the surface of the stone. I took a quick available-light shot as we paused to regard the anomalously solitary crinoid:

Were there eras during the vast time-spans during which these marine sedimentary strata were being slowly built up when there just wasn’t much marine life? The common Mississippian limestone which abounds in the Hannibal area is often just chock-full of fossils — quite a contrast to the Louisianan limestone from which Cameron Cave was hollowed.

Someone else had evidently been lost in Cameron Cave. The cave is remarkably free of graffiti and inscriptions, but this one was prominently visible high on a cave wall:

A jagged pillar and some of the other folks on the tour:

Calcite flowstone:

After a couple of hours we emerged into the 12X20 structure which has been built around the cave entrance. The guide said “This is such an unusual group! All of you are from the Quincy-Hannibal area — that hardly ever happens. I think the owners should charge local people less for a tour. You’d be surprised at how many people in Hannibal have never been to these caves!”

I’m not surprised. The Hannibal tourism honchos make little effort to cater to the locals, who are mostly poor and have a bad or indifferent attitude about the whole Mark Twain tourism schtick. As gas prices rise this may change…

The group emerged from the structure into a sunny and humid July afternoon, blinking and squinting at the unaccustomed light, and walked down the trail to the parking lot.

So was it worth seventeen bucks? I thought the fee was a bit high — $12.00 would be more appropriate. It’s unlikely that I will ever repeat the experience, but I’m glad I took the tour once.

Larry

Postscript: Commenter Dave Thomson somehow obtained a photo of one of my first flights in a prototype time machine:

It was brutally hot and humid in the Canton timber-frame workshop today. My mind works sluggishly when I’m dripping with sweat, but I have to keep on top of things — my three workers are diligent but they rely upon me to make accurate timber layouts. I was just one step ahead of them today.

John, a curmudgeonly felon, carefully steered a forklift towards a sturdy pair of saw-horses. Another fresh timber, a fourteen-foot 7X9 piece of bur oak. I evaluated the timber, deciding which faces should be planed and sanded.

John parked the forklift and stood by me, waiting to plane the selected timber faces with a 6-inch portable planer. But then I noticed an intriguing display of fungal mycelia emanating from a narrow check, a drying crack in the timber.

I said “John, hold off for a minute while I fetch my camera!”

John gave me a look, as if to say “Larry, you’re one weird dude! On a day like this, though, any excuse for a break is welcome!”

I ran to my truck and brought back my camera. I thought this structure of mycelia radiating from the check was worthy of being recorded:

The white fan-like mycelia probably belong to a wood-eating agaric; if left alone in a humid environment capped fruiting bodies (mushrooms) would have developed.

The background, with parallel lines left by the Amish-guided bandsaw mill which produced the timber, has tones of gray-green and black, most likely evidence of simpler fungi species, commonly known as molds and mildew. The orange patch at lower right is yet another species.

How fascinating! I’d love to be able to see the further development of these fungus species, but I had a job to do. I said to John “I’m done! Have at it!”

John revved up the planer and this fungal society was sheared off and whirled into a pile of shavings.

Larry