ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, June 17, 1996 TAG: 9606200001
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: MONTY S. LEITCH
SOURCE: MONTY S. LEITCH
NO MATTER how quietly I think I'm walking through the woods, a deer will hear me from 50 yards away or more. She'll snort and stomp and leap away, while I freeze in place, alarmed every time by the warning she's given me.
"Oh," I'll finally realize, "that's just a deer." But by then my heart is pounding and my adrenalin insisting, "Fright or flight, fright or flight!" I settle on fright, take a deep breath, and walk on slowly. Quietly, I think (again), craning my neck to get a better sight of the deer. I rarely succeed, although I'm sure she's always standing mere yards away, watching me intently, following each of my steps with flicks of her elegant ears.
I think I know my woods, but I could spend the biggest part of every day in them and still be a stranger there, lost in a strange land. Every trip presents me with secrets and surprises.
This morning, for instance, I was stopped by an elegant stinkhorn that had, overnight, reared its alarmingly flesh-toned and anatomically shaped head beside a half-buried rock.
My field guide describes Mutinus elegans with these words: "Greenish slime covering top part of long, tapered, pinkish, stalklike mushroom with whitish cup above base; odor fetid." Whatever prompted anyone to label this thing "elegant"? It looks more like a piece of a particularly showy, and probably naked, snake, poked up out of the ground. I didn't test the field guide's promise of a fetid odor. I merely nudged the mushroom with my well-shoed toe to make sure it didn't move off, of its own accord.
Secrets and surprises.
Last week, in that part of the woods that's primarily pines, I found a seashell in the pinestraw. This is true: a tiny shell, half a bivalve, about the size of my least fingernail, very like a miniature quahog, or perhaps a tiny clam.
How does one go about identifying a shell found in the woods? My field guide for the coasts is pretty vague on this. My field guide for the forests offers not one word at all.
Secrets and surprises.
The lady's slippers, wake robins and bellwort have all bloomed. Now the galax and cucumber root are showing flowers, the rattlesnake plantain putting forth shoots. Something has nipped the tender tops from all the sprouting jewelweed that grows in the bog under the oldest apple tree, and I suspect that very same deer that startled me by the poplars. But it could be crows. They swoop through incessantly, raucous and impolite.
I call these "my" woods, but the only things of them that I really own are the memories I make there: the observations and imaginings, the wisps and risks of emotion that carry me along the path, the secrets, the surprises.
Is this different - either more or less - than any other kind of human ownership? What do any of us have that we can really keep? That we can really know? Nothing more than those fragile, mysterious, cryptic shots of chemical and current that detonate, and resonate, in our brains.
Monty S. Leitch is a Roanoke Times columnist.
LENGTH: Medium: 64 linesby CNB