Ironweed Festival!

The Ironweed Festival is spotty; it's not going on everywhere. That's because ironweed (in southeast Ohio, we have Tall Ironweed) only grows in masses in badly overgrazed pastures. It is distasteful to cattle, so they eat everything around it, and as a result the ironweed takes over, enjoying the fact that its competition has been chewed to the ground. The main Festival Grounds are waay down at the end of Dean's Fork, about 2.5 miles from where I park.

I don't mind the walk at all.

I've made this walk/run more this summer than in any season before. I found three pairs of breeding rose-breasted grosbeaks down here in early June, and I was hooked for the summer. It's been a pure joy to see the vegetation grow up and different flowers come into bloom, to hear the periodical cicada chorus finally silenced, and to welcome the swamp cicadas, with their swelling oscillation, as they take over for shrieking hordes of periodical visitors.  To make a bird list every time I go out; see it swell past 80 species in May and shrink to barely 35 these days; to look forward to the total surprises like blue herons and skunks, snappers and redtails and Hannah the Appaloosa. 

Truth is, I've gotten hooked on it, on the peace it seems I can sometimes find only here. Shila helped me figure out something about running, and why it keeps us sane in an upside-down world. 

If you're caught in turmoil, whether it be from overly demanding work, relationships, indecision, world events, or some nasty combination of all those things, and you can't see your way out of it, go for a run. 

If you think of what's bothering you as a beast that's snapping at you, what makes sense? 

To run away from it. When you run, you send your primitive brain the signal that you're fleeing the beast. You've taken care of the problem. You've gotten away. 

And your brain says, "Oh, good. OK. Whew! Good going! You're going to be fine now."

And at the end of the run, you feel better all over. You could call it an endorphin high, and you'd be right, but I think the feedback loop is something as I've described it. Running makes you feel better. It shuts up your primitive brain, which is always screaming, "Well, DO SOMETHING about this!! Get the hell out of here!"

We all know that sometimes there is no getting out of the particular mess we're in. There's just picking the best way through it, living our lives as well as we can under the circumstances.

I usually fit in four miles a day, 7 or more when I have the chance. It keeps me going.

It's the best. I get out and see all my friends. 

The combination of tiger swallowtail's sweetcorn yellow and tall ironweed's royal purple is a mighty fine one. 

I love to watch them diving deep into the flowers, thorax pumping, head dipping--there's so much butterfly behavior to watch. They aren't just decorations. They are goal-driven, methodical little beasts.

On this cloudy morning, a surprise awaited me at the Ironweed Festival's Main Grounds. 

Oh no. What fresh hell is this? 

It was actually worse than it looked from afar. 

A five-foot deep trench where there had been a culvert. 

It ran clear out into the Main Festival Grounds. Damn, damn, damn it. Why can't they leave Dean's Fork ALONE???

All right then. A  huge new culvert is going in, right by the black barn I love so much. Whyyyyy?  I don't know why an untraveled dirt road needs a yard-wide culvert, but there you go. They've been working on Dean's for several years now. It used to be impassable, with ruts two feet deep, but now I could drive the Subaru top to bottom. There are new culverts going in all over the place in our area. I have a sneaking suspicion this is because they're expecting greatly increased traffic from huge heavy trucks in the near future.  See previous post. It comes down to oil and gas development.

Chet and I pushed around the mess and entered the Festival Grounds. Exhale. Accept what is, move on.

 All is well there. The ironweed is coming on strong and tall. 

 I have to be careful that I don't lose Chetty in the ironweed. It's hard to keep him in sight, and with his deafness, I can't call him anymore. When he loses visual contact with me, he starts zigzagging, head high, searching. It touches my heart. I've got to dash after him and make sure he sees me, or he'll light out for home, thinking I've left him behind. He's gotten much better, isn't so quick to panic and take off now, just as I've gotten better at making sure I stay in his sight.

We have an understanding. We keep an eye on each other now.

From this angle, I couldn't see the culvert dig.

I knew that soon enough the pipes would be in place and the road would be replaced. It would never be as beautiful as it was, but that's change for you. 

Sometimes you have to cling to what remains all the harder.

A female indigo bunting with a nest nearby gave her "SPIT!" call over and over. 

On the way home I looked at leaves that had fallen early. This one looked like a weather map of Florida to me, when a tropical storm is attacking.

The leaves that fall in August have something wrong with them.  Red maples shed a lot, and some disease has the yellow buckeyes dropping all their leaves, which turned red in July. 

Black tupelo. Mmm. They can make a red like no other, even when they're sick.

Another red maple, all blotched and spotted. Fantastic.

I looked up, and Chet Baker was waiting, smiling fondly. You and your leaves.

So, for those who miss the Ironweed Festival, this is how it looks this year. With Whipple's version of The Big Dig going on, perhaps it's best that there not be a full-blown Festival in 2016. Maybe we'll wait until it's all smoothed over. 

Torn up as it is, Dean's still saves me. Please, may it never see pavement.

Butterflies And Other Matters

Something happened to me in Sedona, Arizona, where I spent a week hiking and shooting photos with Shila while working at the Sedona Hummingbird Festival. I got my eye hooked back up with my brain, through my cameras. And I haven't been able to stop collecting images. Everything is so damn beautiful.

It was all I could do to leave home in late July. The birds and animals have been coming to me, right up to the window, right into the yard, and in the wild, too, whenever I go out.  It happened there, too. It's like the enchanted state I felt in Sedona has followed me home. 

The first couple weeks in August, there's an Ironweed Festival going on here. That's when the Ironweed does its thing, and the Joe-Pye weed, and the milkweed and butterflyweed too. I'm keenly missing my fellow celebrants. We're all just too busy and beset by life to eke out a gathering this August. I'm working extra long hours cutting double mats for my art for the American Birding Expo in Columbus, where I'll be doing my first show in a long, long while. I'll get to hobnob with a breathtaking array of vendors from more than 35 countries at this unique event. It's going to be amaaazing.  We're expecting more than 3,000 visitors. I'm hoping to sell some prints and originals and a lotta books, notecards and puzzles! I've made eight new prints of favorite paintings and I'm excited to debut them. Gotta crank that cash flow up...life and kids are expensive. 

Minor detail: I'm guiding a trip in South Africa Aug. 24-Sept. 9. Expo setup starts Sept. 15. I've got to have all my show prep done before I leave. Flat out doesn't quite describe it. So Casa Zick and the entertaining that goes on here is shut down for the foreseeable future.

But enough about me! There are butterflies out there, and I promised my friends an Ironweed Festival post or three, so they won't feel they've missed the whole thing.

It's so hard to photograph Joe-Pye weed in masses. A photo just cannot convey the majesty of an entire meadow stuffed with its hazy rose glory. I take these landscape photos, and sigh in exasperation.  Sifting out the pink from the green, which is of similar intensity, is a job for the human eye and brain.  The task just befuddles the camera's lens.  But you can see that the Joe-Pye Weed Festival is in full swing in the first part of Dean's Fork!

Tall ironweed, asserting itself, a foreshadowing of things to come farther down the road.

A bit of wingstem adds a welcome dash of lemon.

Joe-Pye is really best in closeup. And oh, those tiger swallowtails. Photographing butterflies in flight has become a pleasant obsession. It's hard to do. You have to keep your telephoto lens focused on them while they go through dozens of florets, and watch for little cues that they're about to move on, and hope that you have them in focus when they suddenly take off. Luck plays a huge part in capturing a photo like this. Rewards are few and far between, but they come often enough to keep me utterly engaged.

We move down the Fork, shooting butterflies as we go. 

A freshly emerged northern pearly-eye flies frantically, zigzagging like a crazy moth, until it stops to rest. WOW. What a bug! Be sure to click on these photos for a closer view. They're worth it.

I'd always wondered why this nymphalid is called a red-spotted purple. I'd always seen blue on it before this.

Catch a RSPU at the right angle, and there's the purple. Fantastic!

And then it turns and catches the sun and BAM! there goes that blue light.  Sometimes I call this butterfly the American Morpho.

And the underside is well worth getting down on one's knees to shoot.

While I'm looking down, as I always am, I notice frass in a puddle, right where it was last August 6.

I smile and look up, to see very young catalpa sphinx caterpillars chewing away on the big heart-shaped leaves.

They'll get big. People around here call them catalpa worms, and use them for bait. Not me!

They're just Zickbait. Love the little sphinxy prong off the tail end.

The Bacon comes along. He enjoys creekwalking most of all. Kerplop, kerplop, kerplop. Dean's is an ideal walk or run for hot days, because it's almost all shaded, and there's cool water for Chet the whole way.

The rose of Sharon planted in front of one of the two dwellings on Dean's three mile length is abloomin'. I frame it so it's silhouetted against the mancabin's dark front. Ahh. 

I find dodder, a parasitic plant, throwing its long orange tendrils around the ironweed. It will use their chlorophyll-made food for its own purposes, blooming and throwing seed, powered purely by sucking the life out of other plants.

I like dodder. It's interesting. I might not want it twining through my delphiniums, but in its place it's awesome to see.

There is human dodder here, too.  I don't enjoy seeing this kind. This photo has a lot encoded, for an eye that knows what it's seeing. 

First, the tall grasses behind the cordage I found strung all along the road are Miscanthus grass, probably the most horrible invasive exotic in our county, among many, many horrid invasives. This grass comes in by windborne seeds wherever soil is disturbed. It follows the bulldozer. And it makes impenetrable thickets of razor-edged grass, higher than your head, that are lost to diversity, lost to ironweed and Joe-pye, lost to butterflies and deer, too.

And the extension cords? Those supply power to sensors that are strung all down Dean's Fork's length, all down our road, all down every road in our area. Those sensors will pick up vibrations from enormous jackhammers that will come and pound the roads, and will by the profile they present  convey where oil lies beneath the Marcellus shale that underlies all this beauty. That will tell the oilmen where to site their drillpads. It's coming. We residents are kept in the dark. We don't know where the huge rigs, lit by kleig lights 24 hours a day, will go. We find out where the drilling rigs will go in when they start construction. We bear witness, and we live through it.

Some of us get paid by signing with oil companies. Some of us haven't, and don't. Whether you sign or not, it's coming, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. 

And my little dog waits and wonders what I'm doing, why I've stopped for so long.

Come on, Mether. The main festival grounds are just ahead! 

Bill reassures me. This is not the first oil boom that has invaded Washington County. It's the eighth. His grandfather came in on the first one, came in from Tulsa to work the drilling rigs, the shallow ones that look like toys compared to the miles-deep rigs they're putting up now. Each time, they drilled and got all the oil and gas they could, and left. This time will be no different. They're drilling deeper and fracking wider; they're making a lot more noise and felling more timber and cutting more roads, but by and by these oil men will leave, too.

And the tigers, who neither know nor care about sensors and drilling rigs, prowl the ironweed

and it's all too beautiful.

Shooting Blind

I never know where these posts are going to go when I sit down to bang one out. Reminds me of the E. L. Doctorow quote:

"Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as the headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way." 

I'm still on Dean's Fork, enjoying a springy day in the 70's for once. Reveling in it. I moved over to the black barn near road's end. Now that the huge chestnut boards of the gristmill have all collapsed, the standing barn has become my object of contemplation and desire on the Whole Dean's Fork run.

 It's a worthy object. In August it is drowning in tall ironweed and it looks like this.

The fields around are filled with towering violet-topped tree-plants. That's Shila, takin' it in during the Ironweed Festival.

The black barn, adorned in summer's finest.

The gristmill as viewed from the black barn. 

You would never believe that it all strips down to this in winter without even being mowed.

Those straight tall stalks are the bones of the ironweed. Without love, which for a plant is sun, water and warmth, a magnificent being like that can melt away to damn near nothing. 

But under the warming ground, their roots are waking up. Ironweed is the toughest, most tenacious plant I know. In four months, it will reign supreme, and the meadow will look like this again.

The barn is dehiscing bits of its beautiful slate roof, more with every ferocious windstorm that buffets it. I seem to pick such windy days to visit. And a piece of its slate had flaked off.

It looks substantial, but turn it on its side and it's paper-thin. This is native slate, the same found in the streambed in my last post.

Smiling to see the dirt on my FitBit band and under my nails, from digging the Naked Lady bulbs just up the trail. Must be spring.

Draft horse shoe, found on a previous visit. Huge. Very heavy. Couldn't carry it home. You can see the barn and the collapsed mill in this shot! I'm on downstream from them.

I turned to the irresistible textures of the black barn and began to fall into them.

I shoot this hinge every time I visit.

Random bird poo. Phoebe, I'd bet. One was chipping and singing around as I shot these. Ahh.

Squirrels run along the sides, looking for a way in. Their claws leave permanent marks.

Maybe they're flying squirrels! I bet they are. Something in the flowing horizontal signature of their claw scratchings says flying squirrel to me. Not to mention how close together they are. Yep. I'd love to think that there are jewel-eyed baby kitesquirrels balled up in a soft nest somewhere in this barn right now.

The barn isn't telling.

I wish I could see inside. My iPhone can.

I stick my phone through a wider crack and let it tell me what's inside. I can't even get my hand through, but the phone slots in nicely and I can just reach the button to trip the shutter. 

 Not bad for shooting blind. Shooting blind, writing blind...it works.