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Posts Tagged ‘Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont’

Communities – Spruce-Fir and Kathryn Stripling Byer

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 12, 2026| 2 Comments »

[I originally posted this essay, including two poems by Katherine Stripling Byer, on October 24, 2020. Now I’m packing for another trip to the Smokies, the Tremont Writers’ Conference. Enjoy this trip through the archives as we journey through Autumn. — Bill]
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Appalachian Trail near Clingman’s Dome, 2003

[with two poems by Kathryn Stripling Byer]

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Summer has skimmed the high ridge like a chimney swift, rarely perching for long. Now on September mornings you can see your breath. First frost certainly won’t dally. Above 6,000 feet you wonder, Where is the South in Southern Appalachians?

And what about these bleached spines and gnarled knucklebones? This phalanx of snags that palisades the highest elevations against the green upon green below? The balsam wooly adelgid arrived on Clingman’s Dome in 1957. By the 1980’s the tiny insect invader from Europe, order Hemiptera, had destroyed more than 90% of the Fraser Fir in Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

This year, though, the Park Service has declared a tenuous truce. Some of those dead snags are forty years old but younger trees spared by the adelgid have matured and are making fertile cones. The very oldest trees, with thicker bark, also seem less susceptible. The insects are still around but you have to hunt for them, whereas during the earliest infestations biologists described the branches covered in wooly bugs as if they had been “whitewashed.”

What is the fulcrum of this new equilibrium? Perhaps the adelgid found easy pickings among whole communities weakened for decades by acid deposition, bad air. Coal-burning power plants up the Appalachian ridge to Canada have added scrubbers. The red spruce that had stopped growing in the ‘80’s are laying on new rings of cambrium. Leave a patch of ground alone long enough and it will grow into what it is meant to be.

Or will it? Depends on what you mean by leave alone. The fir that survive are a little more resistant to the insect, a little more acid tolerant. But what happens as their subalpine microclimate becomes less like Canada and more like Atlanta? Scrubbers remove the nitrogen and sulfur that oxidize to form acids but when you burn carbon you get carbon dioxide. Can’t scrub that out. How many degrees of warming can Fraser fir tolerate? Go higher, it gets cooler. Here in the Park you can’t go any higher than Clingman’s Dome.

Mountain Angelica, Angelica triquinata (Apiaceae - parsley family)

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Last week I shared two poems from Kathryn Stripling Byer’s first book (1986). The two poems that follow here are from her final book, Trawling the Silences, published in 2019 two years after her death.

Kay Byer takes me into wild places and she brings me home. She names the earth, just naming a thing is a prayer, and she leaves nameless the mysteries that mist from her verses into my soul. She has left this earth, and she has left this earth to me to hold close for the days I will remain. Notice. Learn. Cherish. Tell it.

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Three for My Trail Guide
for Jim

1.

Ascent

Before I can catch
my breath you right away
start to identify

Wild Ginger,
Mayapple,
Bloodroot.

I’m dizzy with switchbacks
I see rising into
the hardwoods you hail

Sarvis,
Sycamore,
Tulip Tree.

Trillium sweeps down
the hillside like angel wings
come to rest creekside.

You chanting hepatica,
stonecrop, anemone,
we climb until

we reach the summit,
where underfoot
some stubborn lichen

you can’t name
has already claimed
the best view.

2.

Star Grass

You name it
and there it is
at the edge
of the outcropping
over the Gorge.

Not to worry,
I placate the ravens
that harry us,
we won’t be lingering
long in your aerie.

See? Even now we are
striding away
into star grass,
its small spikes of clear
recognizable light.

3.

Galax

Squatting behind bushes,
I smell it nearby, neither bear scat

nor carrion vine, to which naturalists
liken its scent, but the breath

of an old woman lowering herself
to her chamber pot, sighing

as I heard her sigh while I tried
not to listen. Hoisting my backpack

I leave her behind in the underbrush,
glad to be back on the trail

with you, sidestepping tree stump
and blowdown, splashing through

creek bed, striding from switch back
to switch back toward sky we see,

step by step, open its window,
when, almost to summit, I stop.

Breathing hard. The scent
of her following me.

Kathryn Stripling Byer, from Trawling the Silences (Jacar Press, 2019)

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Silvery Glade Fern, Deparia acrostichoides (Dryopteridaceae - Wood Fern Family)

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Trawling the Silences

This end-of-March day, I’d rather watch hawks surf the
thermals than contemplate what lies ahead.
Or behind in its wake. In the few hours left, let me keep
my doubts shut, my windows wide open, their sheer curtains
billowing. It’s March, after all, having come in
a lamb and departing a lioness, stalking my back yard,

leaving her paw prints alongside the patient ephemerals
rising again out of leaf litter. Squirrel corn. Spring beauty.
The first rue anemone. Today I would rather
read field guides, repeating the whimsical names
of our nice-dwelling mussels about to be wiped out by backhoes
and bulldozers. Pimpleback, Snuffbucket. Monkeyface
Pearlymussel. Don’t let their names be forgotten,
I’d pray if I prayed, though just naming a thing is a prayer,

wrote Simone Weil, turning her face to the almighty
silences. The silences. Where would we be
without them, what were we, what will we be, oh to be,
and again be, that damn linking verb. I’d rather be tracking
my lioness up to the rim of that mountain top,
I’d rather let be and let go. Let the anemone
cling, the hawks soar, the lioness squander another day
trying to find what she’s looking for. Give her another day,
I ask the Almighty. Give the birds one more day
scolding the rapscallion squirrels stealing birdseed.
I rest my case, carapace, my own little voice trawling
the silences, the bully wind boasting its presence in present-tense,
no linking verb to shut down the show. Let
my lioness lounge in the sally grass. Licking her paws.

Kathryn Stripling Byer, from Trawling the Silences (Jacar Press, 2019)

 

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Spruce-Fir forests covered vast areas of the Southeast when glaciers reached their southernmost extent 18,000 years ago. As the glaciers retreated north the Spruce-Fir communities also retreated to higher elevations and now remain only along the highest peaks and ridges above 4,000 feet elevation, mostly higher. Clingman’s Dome at 6643 feet is the highest point in Great Smoky Mountains National Park and indeed along the entire Appalachian Trail. Its impressive swath of Spruce-Fir is also home to the rare Jordan’s Red-Cheeked salamander (Plethodon jordani) found only in the Park. The naturally acid soil and severe climate limit biodiversity compared to lower elevations, but other distinctive high elevation species include mountain ash (Rose family), mountain wood sorrel, mountain asters, glade fern. After sixty years the Fraser Fir seem to be surviving the balsam wooly adelgid invasion, air pollution, acid rain; it remains to be seen how long they will remain in the face of advancing climate change.

from SNAKE DEN RIDGE, A BESTIARY, illustration by Linda French Griffin

from SNAKE DEN RIDGE, A BESTIARY, illustration by Linda French Griffin

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Photos by Bill Griffin from Southern Appalachian Naturalist Certification Program; Southern Appalachian Ecology, September 2020, Great Smokies Institute at Tremont; instructors Jeremy Lloyd and Elizabeth Davis.

 

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Deep Time

Posted in ecology, Ecopoetry, Imagery, Photography, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 15, 2024| 5 Comments »

Thunderhead Sandstone outcrop below Ft. Harry Falls, GSMNP

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[with poems about Geology . . . (say what?!)]
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Erosion
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Edges fall first,
silt grains cemented
under thousands of years
sloughed away by wind, rain,
footstep of dog,
sandstone alchemized beneath
weight of mountain
turns sand again
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Subtle rubbing of days shapens us anew,
weathering, the
slowest song of change
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No wonder we wake up some days
wondering at who we used to be.
No wonder we don’t always notice
as our outer edges strip away.
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No wonder the children build castles
made of sand at water’s edge,
even though the castles fall.
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They are practicing for
when they too will feel
what once seemed enduring
slip inside the rising tide.
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Emilie Lygren
from What We Were Born For, Blue Light Press, San Francisco CA. © 2021. Reprinted by permission of the author.
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Geology never intended to trip us up. A mountain’s day is steady and measured, calm as the drip of water, languid as the North Pole’s precession that turns to aim the spinning globe at heaven. All night the mountain’s flow, her stretch, recumbent but restless; at first light she yawns and shudders, her turn and crouch and slow rise; then all morning’s long knotting and gathering to her full height; her relentless stride; a forceful journey, this full day’s labor into evening even as her form, still imposing, diminishes and she reclines.
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Did the mountain even feel the pinprick of water seeping and freezing in minute fissures at her neck? Perhaps a vague itch as lichens scratch to enlarge their circumference, little acid fingernails, a thimbleful of soil. Windborne seeds – would she notice such a light caress when one descends, then its rootlets, its swelling cambium and lignin? One and now another trunk emerges from the crevice, breathing, drinking sunlight, and here comes the day in mammal-time when gravity prevails. A crack, thunder without lightning, slabs and chunks release and roll downslope until they hold at a narrow rib where it crosses below the mountain’s shoulder. Bedrock settled into the new bed it has found.
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Ten thousand human-years pass until you and I puff into view. We slow our pace to climb over and around. Here embedded in the footpath is a softer stratum that has been polished to ebony by a thousand boots. Here alongside the trail we greet the rounder edges and pitted face of earliest falls, sharper clefts and angles  from falls a mountain-day later. Water proving its strength. Lichens still hard at work. Wait a while and this path will open. Geology never intended to trip us up. She simply hopes that we will slow our frantic climbing. Pause here with her for a moment. Look, and simply see.
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USGS map & quartzite vein in Elkmont (?) Sandstone GSMNP

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Common Blue Wood Aster & Thunderhead Sandstone GSMNP

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Anything the River Gives
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Basalt, granite, tourmaline, the male wash
of off-white seed from an elderberry,
the fly’s-eye, pincushion nubbins yellow
balsamroot extrudes from hot spring soil,
confetti of eggshell on a shelf of stone.
Here’s a flotilla of beaver-peeled branches,
a cottonwood mile the shade of your skin.
Every day I bring some small offering
from my morning walk along the river:
something steel, blackened amber with rust,
an odd pin or busing shed by the train
or torqued loose from the track, a mashed penny,
the buddy bulge of snowmelt current.
I lie headlong on a bed of rocks,
dip my cheek in the shallows,
and see the water mid-channel three feet
above my eyes. Overhead the swallows
loop for hornets, stinkbugs, black flies and bees,
gone grass shows a snakeskin shed last summer.
The year’s first flowers are always yellow,
dogtooth violet dangling downcast ans small.
Here is fennel, witches’ broom and bunchgrass,
an ancient horseshoe nailed to a cottonwood
and halfway swallowed in it spunky flesh.
Here is an agate polished over years,
a few bones picked clean and gnawed by mice.
Her is every beautiful rock I’ve seen
in my life, here is my breath still singing
from a reedy flute, here the river
telling my blood your name without end.
Take the sky and wear it, take the moon’s skid
over waves, that monthly jewel.
If there are wounds in this world no love heals,
then the things I haul up – feather and bone,
tonnage of stone and the pale green trumpets
of stump lichens – are ounce by ounce
a weight to counterbalance your doubts.
In another month there won’t be room left
on the windowsills and cluttered shelves,
and still you’ll see me, standing before you,
presenting some husk or rusty souvenir,
anything the river gives, and I believe
you will love.
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Robert Wrigley
from The Ecopoetry Anthology, edited by Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street, Trinity University Press, San Antonio, TX. © 2020
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“Find yourself a stone, one you can pick up and carry,” our instructor tells us. “Then find me bedrock.” All weekend Elizabeth will be offering us something new every few minutes  – strange vocabulary, stranger stories in deep time, paths upward toward heath balds and downward into the past – but first she offers these two commands. Our substratum. We will build everything upon a stone from the Middle Prong of the Little River, edges knocked round, compressed bits of texture a hundred shades of gray (soon we’ll know to call those bits clasts); and ponderous gray stone rising beside the river, its layers, its planes and fissures (soon we’ll know which is bedding and which foliation). Here we begin our weekend course in the Smokies, 500 million years beneath our feet, asking how it all got here.
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I’m taking my final elective offered by Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont in their Southern Appalachian Naturalist Certification Program – Geology of the Smokies. This is the first time Linda has accompanied me to Tremont, so she’s taking her first course. We know from our readings that these are the most folded, tortured, elevated/eroded/re-elevated/re-eroded square miles in North America. We know that for the next 48 hours we’ll be continuously outdoors except a few hours to eat and sleep. From my previous nine courses, I know Elizabeth Davis as an excellent teacher, patient yet challenging. What we don’t yet fully know is just how truly challenging, physically and intellectually, this weekend is going to be. But here we are on Friday night and we should be getting a clue – Elizabeth is leading us on a hike into pitch darkness, across the shallows on a single-log bridge, and has turned us loose on an island to find our river stones.
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Success. No one falls into the river.
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Tomorrow morning we’ll be picking our way up through a pathless boulder field to a massive outcrop of Thunderhead Sandstone (its compressed sediment, clasts, recycled from the Grenville mountains built almost a billion years ago). We’ll spend the afternoon literally on hands and knees beneath laurel and rhododendron, climbing to a heath bald summit where some really cool rocks are exposed and where we’ll take samples of the low pH soil. Sunday morning we’ll hike a trail so hazardous that the Park won’t even include it on their maps, but along the way we’ll cross major and minor fault lines to discover their rocky transitions, investigate geology’s effect on plant communities, devise some crazy poems and songs about our findings, and end up at beautiful Spruce Flat Falls.
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Late Sunday night, after driving five hours, Linda and I will pull into our driveway and our old bones will creak as we lug our gear back into the house in pitch darkness. At least we don’t have to cross a log bridge to make it to the kitchen door, but when we wake in the morning, stiff and aching, will Linda have a few choice cusswords for me after dragging her along on this adventure? Oh yeah, we’re sore, but only in body. What Linda does have for me is a list of books I need to order. And this proclamation: “You know, after this weekend I really love Geology!”
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Nodding Ladies Tresses growing up through Anakeesta Slate GSMNP

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Elizabeth displays bedding vs cleavage at summit of heath bald near Chimney Tops GSMNP

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The End of the Age
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With wash and ripple and with wave,
Slow moving up the long deserted sand,
The little moon went watching the white tide
Flood in and over, spread above the land,
Flood the low marshes, make a silver cover
Where the green sea-weed in a floating mist
Creeps under branch and over.
The wide water spreads, the night goes up the sky,
The era ends.
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Tomorrow comes warm blood with a new race,
Warm hearts that ache for lovers and for friends,
And the pitiful grace
Of young defeated heads.
Tomorrow comes the sun, color and flush
And anguish. Now let the water wash
OUt of the evening sky the lingering reds,
And spread its coolness higher than the heart
Of every silver bush.
Night circles round the sky. The era ends.
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Geology
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“Look,” said God;
And with slow fingers
Drew away the mantle rock.
Man followed groping
To touch the flesh of his true mother;
And, standing in great valleys,
He saw the ages passing.
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Fossil
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I found a little ancient fern
Closed in a reddish shale concretion,
As neatly and ans charmingly shut in
As my grandmother’s face in a daguerreotype,
In a round apricot velvet case.
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Janet Loxley Lewis (1899-1998)
from Poetry Magazine, No. 111, The Poetry Foundation. © June, 1920
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Emilie Lygren has published poems and anthologies and developed dozens of publications focused on outdoor science education. Her first collection of poems, What We Were Born For, was selected by the Young People’s Poet Laureate as the Poetry Foundation’s monthly book pick for February 2022.
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Robert Wrigley has said that “poetry can have a redemptive function. It can look at the chaos you see and make a kind of sense of the smallest part of it.” His poems are concerned with rural Western landscapes and humankind’s place within the natural world.
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Janet Loxley Lewis (1899-1998) wrote novels, stories, and librettos, but she considered poetry the superior form. Theodore Roethke describes her poetry as “marked by an absolute integrity of spirit and often by the finality in phrasing that can accompany such integrity.”
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Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont GEOLOGY course November, 2024

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Doughton Park Tree 2018-02-09

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Small Voices

Posted in Ecopoetry, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , on November 10, 2023| 9 Comments »

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[With poetry by Joy Harjo and Wendell Berry]
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For Calling the Spirit Back from Wandering the Earth in Its Human Feet
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Put down that bag of potato chips, that white bread, that bottle of pop.
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Turn off that cellphone, computer, and remote control.
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Open the door, then close it behind you.
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Take a breath offered by friendly winds. They travel the earth gathering essences of plants to clean.
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Give it back with gratitude.
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If you sing it will give your spirit lift to fly to the stars’ ears and back.
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Acknowledge this earth who has cared for you since you were a dream planting itself precisely within your parents’ desire.
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Let your moccasin feet take you to the encampment of the guardians who have known you before time, who will be there after time. They sit before the fire that has been there without time.
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Let the earth stabilize your postcolonial insecure jitters.
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Be respectful of the small insects, birds and animal people who accompany you.
Ask their forgiveness for the harm we humans have brought down upon them.
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Don’t worry.
The heart knows the way though there may be high-rises, interstates, checkpoints, armed soldiers, massacres, wars, and those who will despise you because they despise themselves.
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The journey might take you a few hours, a day, a year, a few years, a hundred, a thousand or even more.
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Watch your mind. Without training it might run away and leave your heart for the immense human feast set by the thieves of time.
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Do not hold regrets.
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When you find your way to the circle, to the fire kept burning by the keepers of your soul, you will be welcomed.
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You must clean yourself with cedar, sage, or other healing plant.
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Cut the ties you have to failure and shame.
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Let go the pain you are holding in your mind, your shoulders, your heart, all the way to your feet. Let go the pain of your ancestors to make way for those who are heading in our direction.
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Ask for forgiveness.
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Call upon the help of those who love you. These helpers take many forms: animal, element, bird, angel, saint, stone, or ancestor.
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Call your spirit back. It may be caught in corners and creases of shame, judgment, and human abuse.
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You must call in a way that your spirit will want to return.
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Speak to it as you would to a beloved child.
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Welcome your spirit back from its wandering. It may return in pieces, in tatters. Gather them together. They will be happy to be found after being lost for so long.
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Your spirit will need to sleep awhile after it is bathed and given clean clothes.
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Now you can have a party. Invite everyone you know who loves and supports you. Keep room for those who have no place else to go.
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Make a giveaway, and remember, keep the speeches short.
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Then, you must do this: help the next person find their way through the dark.
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Joy Harjo
from Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings by Joy Harjo. Copyright © 2015 by Joy Harjo.
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[Great Smoky Mountains National Park bids Bill farewell during the last moments of the Tremont Writers’ Conference:]
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Goodbye, Love. Thanks for dropping by. This is your last chance to slurp up the prompts you were thinking you might be handed while you’re here. Your last opportunity to be inspired. Which means what, exactly? Inspire, breathe in, be filled with spirit. But did you think I’d tip you up like a funnel and just pour right down? Think back to that little exercise in your application and cull one word – community. This is something I know all about, I the Queen of Connections, I the web of interactions, whether in a gram of soil beneath your feet or spanning the entire watershed of this Middle Prong that flows past you right now – community.
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I’m more than willing to speak. I live to show myself to you. Take a closer look at my image in that postcard and read the fine print: International Biosphere Reserve. But did you notice how small those letters are compared to the beech and oak overtowering? The subtext is, you don’t have to be such a geek about it. Oh sure, learn my names, my histories, my ecologies, but please, for at least one moment, forget about words on paper, Human Person, and just look around you.
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Right around you – seven faces peering back (eight, if you count Jeremy arriving with the coffee delivery). What have you found here, and what will you keep? It’s more than friendship, it’s more than a shared task and a common goal. It’s connection. Don’t drop it. Don’t lose it. And what I’m really saying is . . . See you later!
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❦
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More than a week has passed and I’m straining hard to hear the Middle Prong. Where has that connection flown? What was the sound of that beckoning? Have I traveled too far beyond its reach, too many highway miles, too many turnings within?
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Here I am surrounded by books and papers, electronics and plastics, literally surrounded: Amelia says, “Your office is a big mess, Pappy.” Surrounded and cumbered by the “should’s” and “got to’s” that no doubt fill your world as well. First phone calls of the day: a change in tomorrow’s doctor appointments for Mom and Dad; on hold and digital assistant waiting for their financial manager; negotiating the week’s schedule. If only the tinnitus I constantly live with sounded more like wind in the pines and rushing water.
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But right now a female cardinal is craning to reach the suet feeder I’ve hidden in the center of the holly outside my window. In an hour, Linda and I will take our first walk together on a new little sprig of MST I helped work on this month. I am rich in these connections and many more. I grieve for those who don’t experience community. Who walk past the little purple flower sprouted through the concrete and never see it. Who feel mostly alienation and suspicion for the human beings around them, much less the non-bipedal creatures. Who cut themselves off from the voice of wind that wants to fill them and let them breathe deep. Philosophers and poets write heavy volumes about the sickness in our human spirits when we separate ourselves from the earth. What is our reply?
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Perhaps this Voice is saying, “C’mon, little Man. You know some folks who need to hear me. Spin a few connections!” See you later. See you now!
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Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
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Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
anymore. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion — put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
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Wendell Berry
Copyright © 1971, 1972, 1973 by Wendell Berry. Excerpted from The Country of Marriage. Reprinted in THE SUN June, 2014
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Today’s poems were offered as direction for meditation while visiting our “secret spots” during several days at Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont. Any program at Tremont always includes space for quiet reflection while outdoors in nature, whether your secret spot is halfway up the Lumber Ridge Trail or a big smooth rock beside the Little River.
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Joy Harjo (born 1951) was appointed the new United States poet laureate in 2019. Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1951, Harjo is a member of the Mvskoke/Creek Nation. She is the author of several books of poetry, including An American Sunrise, (W. W. Norton, 2019), and Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings (W. W. Norton, 2015). She is a current Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
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Wendell Berry (born 1934) is an American novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer. He is an elected member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers and a recipient of The National Humanities Medal, along with many other awards and honors. On January 28, 2015, he became the first living writer to be inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame.
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Doughton Park Tree -- 5/1/2021

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