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Communities – Spruce-Fir and Kathryn Stripling Byer

Posted in Imagery, tagged balsam wooly adelgid, conservation, ecology, Fraser fir, Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, GSMIT, GSMNP, Jacar Press, Kathryn Stripling Byer, Kay Byer, nature, nature poetry, NC Poets, poetry, Snake Den Ridge, Southern Appalachian Naturalist Certification Program, Southern Appalachians, Southern writing 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]

. . . . . . .

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.

. . . . . . .

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.

. . . . . . .

Three for My Trail Guide
for Jim

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.

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.

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)

. . . . . . .

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)

. . . . . . .

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

. . . . . . .

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 Bill Griffin, Ecopoetry, Emilie Lygren, Geology, Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, imagery, Janet Loxley Lewis, nature, nature photography, nature poetry, poetry, Robert Wrigley, Southern Appalachian Naturalist Certification Program, Southern Appalachians on November 15, 2024| 5 Comments »

Thunderhead Sandstone outcrop below Ft. Harry Falls, GSMNP

[with poems about Geology . . . (say what?!)]

Erosion

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

Subtle rubbing of days shapens us anew,

weathering, the

slowest song of change

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.

No wonder the children build castles

made of sand at water’s edge,

even though the castles fall.

They are practicing for

when they too will feel

what once seemed enduring

slip inside the rising tide.

Emilie Lygren

❦ ❦ ❦

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.

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.

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.

USGS map & quartzite vein in Elkmont (?) Sandstone GSMNP

Common Blue Wood Aster & Thunderhead Sandstone GSMNP

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Anything the River Gives

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.

Robert Wrigley

❦ ❦ ❦

“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.

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.

Success. No one falls into the river.

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.

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!”

Nodding Ladies Tresses growing up through Anakeesta Slate GSMNP

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

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The End of the Age

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.

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.

Geology

“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.

Fossil

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.

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.

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.

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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Connect

Posted in Ecopoetry, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, Frank X Walker, Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, GSMIT, GSMNP, imagery, Jeannine Jordan, Kim Hayes, nature, nature photography, nature poetry, Renee Whitmore, Sarah Small, Sophia Fortunato, Suzanne Bell on November 3, 2023| 14 Comments »

[with poems by the 2023 Tremont Poetry Cohort]

Awaken

. .

You came because the river quiets your soul,

the sassafras soothes and sweetgum settles.

Have you gotten your breath? Do you remember who you are?

Leave us, now; it’s our time to sleep. You go, awake.

Sarah Small / Alcoa, Tennessee

postcard – Mother bear & cubs

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The Little River is singing ‘October Blues’ and I can listen if I’ll just roll down my window. Leaving the Smokies on a Sunday morning, who would have imagined such a glut of traffic, but I can make the choice to gentle my right foot and blend with the flow. And here on the right comes another choice: I pull off at Chimneys and flush the press of schedule and itinerary from my mind.

A ten minute climb into old growth hardwood cove and road noise no longer penetrates. Every few steps another chipmunk whistles its alarm. Fecund – whoever coined that word was smelling this place. The carpet is bright green hepatica saving up to flower in just a few months, the understory is summer seedhead bounty and autumn wood asters blooming like crazy, and the overstory is way up there, crooked and knobbed, reaching and mingling and only allowing an occasional glimpse of Balsam Point.

I’ve been waiting since breakfast and now I pull out the small slip of lined paper Renée gave me, a personal parting note; she prepared one for each of us in the cohort. “Read it later,” she had said. I’m going to trust she won’t mind if I share one line: “I came to this conference with some heaviness and I’m leaving with light and a sense of belonging.” A mystery, a wonder, an inexplicable blessing that in just a few days eight strangers can so deeply connect.

❦ ❦ ❦

[untitled]

You’re not a flightless bird,

+++++ your wings held tight

against your breast;

+++++ unfurl your plumage,

Go from here with boldness,

+++++ revel in your glory.

Jeannine Jordan / Lima, Ohio

postcard – Wild Turkey

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Community

(the Park speaks)

Inspire, breath in, be filled with spirit –

think I’d tip you like a funnel and pour

right in? Look around this circle and take

a lesson from the Queen of Connection.

Bill Griffin / Elkin, North Carolina

postcard – entrance to GSMNP

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Frank fans the deck and asks us each to select one. They’re postcards, of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, face down so we can’t see what we’ve picked. “The card has picked you,” Frank suggests. “What is it telling you about why you are here and what you’ll take with you when you leave?”

This is our last exercise during our last session of this inaugural Tremont Writers’ Conference. Can it be only three days ago that Frank X Walker introduced himself to us as an artist who speaks Poet? Besides the language of linebreak and word choice, what Frank so incisively speaks is creativity, challenge, connection, community. Oh yes, we learn to critique each other’s poems through his quiet observations. Yes, we engage in color studies and sound studies and we write to prompts. But Frank is not teaching us to be writers – he is teaching us to be human. His carefully considered comments touch our gifts and expose our needs, and even more than that he weaves us seven into a whole whose true commitment is to bring out the best in each other.

After ten or fifteen minutes of writing – channeling the voice we are hearing in our card’s image – Frank stops us and presents his next to last prompt: now break that all down into four lines. We probably should have seen this coming. We really aren’t ready, though, for his final instruction. He has us each pass our card two people to the left, write our home address on the fresh card we’re holding, then pass it back right to its original owner. Each of us will write our four-line poem on our card and mail it, and in a few days we will each receive a poem from one other member of the cohort.

We won’t be driving home from this gathering to resume our scribbling in isolation. We will be watching the mailbox (and text messages) with a tingle. We are now a creative family. We are connected.

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The Experience

Like me, a yearling bear,

caged and carried away.

You came for the experience.

Imagine me gone. Write it.

Kim Hayes / Weaverville, North Carolina

postcard – Ursus americanus, Black Bear

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Somewhere, Sometime

Sunlight in this open field

Safely wander, graze

Trust the treeline

Grow. (I am growing, too.)

Suzanne Bell / Pisgah Forest, North Carolina

postcard – deer graze in Cades Cove

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Connecting People with Nature is the motto of Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont. Amen! In completing the Southern Appalachian Naturalist Certification Program at Tremont, I have felt the web of connections forged there welling up in me and changing me. One begins with the name of a thing, then comes to recognize how it makes its living and gets along with its neighbors, until at last there dawns an appreciation of the deep interdependence and kinship of all life, place, and planet. One living community.

But if ecology is the study of living communities, poetry also has its ecology. How does the poem bring together all these living bits that make it come alive? Its images, its allusions, its music? How does the poem make its world equally real to or perhaps even more real than the world speeding by outside my window?

It seems to me that the technique we learn at Tremont, the Naturalist Method, is entirely congruent with the Poetic Method – Pay Attention; Ask Questions; Make Connections; Share. All of this we try to do when we “speak Poet.” And Frank X Walker has certainly enabled every bit of this in us during our few days of communion with mountains, rivers, bears, each other. It is a language of laughter and surprise. It is a language of change and growth. It is a language of discovery, insight, and awe. We are leaving Tremont bubbling with its voice and overflowing with its joy. Poetry, and Nature, are how we connect.
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[untitled]
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Born on the top, nestled through the sides, tumbled to the bottom.
Again and again.
Those mountains captured and created.
Then they carried.

Renée Whitmore / Vass, North Carolina
postcard – sunrise through mountains in Cades Cove

❦

Clouds in my Skin

You are here
Not to burn through the mist
To roll around in the slick slopes
Of your soft hope—this knowing, this peace

Sophia Fortunato / Bozeman, Montana
postcard – mountain ridges fading into blue mist

❦ ❦ ❦

The Poetry Cohort of the First Tremont Writers’ Conference, October 15-29, 2023, is Jeannine Jordan, Bill Griffin, Sophia Fortunato, Sarah Small, Renée Whitmore, Kim Hayes, and Suzanne Bell. Our teacher, mentor, guide, and brother is Frank X Walker from Lexington, Kentucky, speaker of poetry, professor at University of Kentucky, and former state Poet Laureate.

Other instructors at this inaugural conference are Janet McCue (Non-Fiction) and Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle (Fiction) and the featured speaker is Richard Powers, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Overstory. Jeremy Lloyd, Tremont Manager of Field and College Programs, has been the primary organizer, assisted by Tremont staff Elizabeth Davis, Erin Cantor, Lyndsey Kessler, education director John DiDiego, and many others.

This conference was also made possible through the integral participation and partnership of Great Smoky Mountains Association and Creative Services Director Frances Figart. Thank you!

Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont

Great Smoky Mountains Association