Wild Turkeys Take Cambridge!

I love love love going to Cambridge and Boston. It feels a bit like going home. I’m too deeply rooted in southeast Ohio to feel completely at home anywhere else. But it’s as close as a city is going to get. Cambridge has a part of my heart, because there’s so much beauty packed into its narrow streets; because it is stuffed with highly evolved, sentient people who appreciate its architecture and plant to enhance. Remarkable, really, to see the roses and daylilies spilling out onto the streets in an overabundance of beauty; to stumble on a moonlight garden, all white roses, hostas and hydrangeas, or a secret grove of river birches with a stone path winding through them. To see people bending over backward to save this fair city’s immense copper beeches, thankfully far outnumbering the ninnies who would cut them down. Oh, there are ninnies, and it doesn’t take many to ruin a place, but Cambridge somehow holds most of them at bay. As I watch the giant sentinel trees being cut down all along my county road, I think some of them have come to live in Ohio. Grumble.

Being an observer of changes both small and immense, I like pointing out the things that are different now than they were when I last lived in Cambridge in 1981.

photo by Kris Hodgkins Macomber

For one thing, there are a LOT more places to sit now. It’s a much kinder, homier place. Harvard Yard blossoms with multicolored chairs each May, and people actually use them, because they can move them around and form fluid groups for conversation and study. I find myself, with delight, arranging to meet friends "in the chairs in front of Weld," whereas before I'd have had to sit on the dorm steps. There's something so lovely about walking through the Yard and seeing healthy, thriving turf and groups of people visiting, studying, texting, snoozing and even reading analog books in these colorful Luxembourg chairs. Just beautiful. It's like a happening, every day.

Photo by Kris Hodgkins Macomber

Photo by Kris Hodgkins Macomber

Radcliffe Quad, where I lived, has white wooden Adirondack chairs sprinkled around in shady spots! And Adams House courtyard now has teak benches, chairs and a rope hammock, where I gladly melted of a lazy Sunday morning and gazed up at a flawless Massachusetts summer sky.

So humane, so welcoming, so homey. The man behind it? Michael R. Van Valkenburgh, Graduate School of Design professor. Read the wonderful story here.  Harvard, I salute you for opening your arms to students, visitors, and local folk alike. Probably the cheapest yet most profound change in use that could have been effected in this private space turned public.

And speaking of changes...

It was probably four years ago on a brink-of-spring night when I looked up into a tree next to the Harvard U. Science Center and saw what looked like a bag of laundry in a pin oak, backlit by the glowing urban sky. Is that a…turkey??? And it was a wild turkey, roosting alone in a concrete courtyard. I would see her walking alone on the sidewalks on that trip. I knew there were turkeys in Mt. Auburn Cemetery, but here in midtown Cambridge, she looked very much out of place.

Hodge, John and I saw the Harvard Turkey, or one of them, while enjoying a Saturday evening lime rickey and a burger at Mr. Bartley’s Burger Cottage, a Harvard institution that neither takes credit cards nor has a bathroom, and doesn’t need either to be slammed all the time. Burgers are generous and delicious, onion rings and sweet potato fries are light, tasty and authentic, and I could drink their raspberry lime rickeys all day long. And it was while filling our empty ten-mile hike bellies that we spotted the Harvard Turkey. She came stepping across Mass Ave, allowing a sedan to come to a full stop for her before she finished her crossing. She walked like a queen, like she knew she was worth stopping for. And who would want to argue with a 16-pound turkey? A hard bump she would make in your grille.

Our Mr. Bartley's waitress was chagrined when we told her the Harvard Turkey had just graced us with a sighting. This gal was born here; she lives and works here and she’s never seen the famous Harvard turkey. Huh. I see turkeys every time I come to Cambridge. Maybe it’s because I’ve been looking for them ever since that wintry night when I saw the duffel bag sleeping in a pin oak.

Still, I wonder how they manage. I wonder what they eat. The answer is probably everything, from sweet potato fries to crickets to crabapples to flower buds to acorns. Ah, acorns—the staff of a turkey’s life. It seems like a meager existence, but apparently is not. I marvel that a creature of such majesty and presence, not to mention mass, can make its way in such an artificial environment. The formidable brain of a wild turkey, applied to the conundrum of living in gardens, cemeteries, sidewalks and streets, would be more than adequate to the challenge.

I have live, hot off my iPhone video evidence that this odd experiment in colonizing the city is a success. Not only are wild turkeys making their way; they’re reproducing. Leaving Hodge’s Den of Sleep at 7 AM, I walked barely two blocks and lucked into the ultimate Cambridge wild turkey encounter.

 I’m pretty proud of this bit of hand-held wildlife cinematography. Seeing the hen walking slowly down a bricked garden path, I guessed from her watchful demeanor and rapidly turning head that she might have poults trailing behind.  I led them a bit, following the trajectory of the hen, and hunkered down to make this video about where I figured the chicks would be crossing the sidewalk. Bingo!

Enjoy the June parade!  

Back to Cambridge

Harvard's  Memorial Hall, whose recently reconstructed hat perfectly matches the one taken down by a fire in 1956. It didn't have a hat when I went there for the Freshman Mixer and final exams. At the time of its construction (1874), Mem Hall was the largest meeting room in America, a Hodgefact which amazes me. It's a ridiculously cool and imposing building, and it makes my heart sing that the University managed to rebuild its imposing chapeau.

One of the pleasures of returning to Cambridge is wandering through Harvard yard, mulling on all the things I first experienced there as a freshman. Alas, it was closed to me and anyone without an active Harvard ID for the duration of my visit and who knows how long? The Yard was being Occupied, and Harvard police understandably wanted the occupiers limited to Harvard students/faculty/staff. So the students had a bunch of tents they'd gotten from the Harvard Outing Club and they were all tented up in there in the mild fall weather and nobody among the general rabble could go in or out. Caterers arrived regularly to feed them. Food looked great. I was hungry. As Hodge's Harvard freshman son dryly observed, "It's not much of a stretch to occupy a gated community." Occupiers would have it otherwise, as this PostHarvard article observes. Still, how can the University allow everyone access to the Yard when students are sleeping in tents out in the open? Much as I didn't like walking around the Yard, I got it. And wondered what impending winter weather would do to the protestor's resolve.

 I was sad to be locked out. I wanted to linger under the elms and think. I wanted to peer into my single in Weld Hall, the one right by the back door which was fab except that I woke up every time somebody came in at 2 AM. I wanted to walk by John Harvard's statue and remember standing there and watching when the Yard's resident barred owl (ca. 1976) flew down and snatched a grey wool hat off a very surprised bicycling student. I saw that. It was excellent. She almost fell over but regained her composure and looked up as only a student whose hat has been snatched by an owl can look up. I am sure the owl thought a squirrel was hitching a ride on her head. I am sure he was disappointed to bear it back to his elm, tear into it and find not warm meat but only more fuzz.

Even then I was noticing what there was to notice in nature,  in the heart of a bustling city. Sometimes I wonder how I made it through. I was meant to live in the woods. I knew that, even then.

 Memorial Chapel looked mighty spooky with the full moon rising.

 Outside, the streets were bustly with people. Maybe it was because nobody could cut through the Yard, but I don't remember Cambridge being quite so congested. Eep. Lines and packs everywhere. I've lost many of my adaptations to the crowded life. A bicyclist was coming at me on the sidewalk in the dark. Dazzled by his light, I moved to my right and he moved to his left and he cursed me for getting in his way and making him almost topple over. Well, I'm sorry. Where I come from people don't ride right at you on bikes with blinding lights on the sidewalk. I knew then just how a deer feels when a car comes at it on a road at 3 AM.

Where I come from it is hard to find a nice crabcake, too. So Hodge took me to Henrietta's Kitchen where an affable barkeep served us crabcakes.

This is Hodge, trying to biggen hers. It works on the iPad...

We laughed. We had fruity drinks. We yakked. I miss her. But I'll be coming back to Massachusetts in the spring, when the winter is past, the flowers appear on the earth, and the time of the singing birds is come.

I'll have a new book to talk about! (see banner ad at right).

By then, I hope Harvard Yard's iron gates will be open again. They'd better be.

The Dawn Redwood

photo by Kris H. Macomber

As I walk Mount Auburn Cemetery, there are things everywhere that grab me. Trees, vistas, stones, tombs, birds, shrubs...I love almost all of it. (There are a few bad stones here and there, hence the qualifier). Here, I'm photographing a dawn redwood (Metasequoia glyptostroboides).  This incredible tree is literally a living fossil; it is the sole living representative of its genus (three are known only from fossils). 

Though the species was thought long extinct by 1944, a small stand of trees was discovered growing at a shrine in Sichuan Province, and all Metasequoias now alive are propagules of that one population. A sobering thought, but also kind of a beautiful one. I was told as an undergrad at Harvard that the first dawn redwoods were brought from China by a 1948 expedition launched by Harvard's Arnold Arboretum in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.  And that these two here at Mt. Auburn Cemetery were the very first to be planted anywhere outside that shrine in China. The plaques on their mighty trunks say they were planted in 1951, only seven years after the "living fossil's" rediscovery. 

Knowing that makes my awe at their beauty all the deeper.

An evergreen with the perfect audacity to color into flame, then drop every needle in one swell foop. 

They light up Spectacle Pond with celestial fire.

Hodge says that the window of beauty is very narrow; that when they drop their needles that's it, and it's very sudden. How blessed we are to be here when they're in full flame! and how blessed to have the sun peek out just as I am seeing them with brand new eyes.

I move to their bases to appreciate their weathered trunks and glowing needles. A neighbor of mine down the street in Richmond, Virginia made the mistake of planting one quite close to his house. It grew fast and dominated his yard, looking something like a feathered telephone pole, towering impossibly over his dwarf crabapples and his cowering split-level house. It reminded me of this lovely verse by Jane Hirshfield, titled simply "Tree."

Tree

It is foolish

to let a young redwood

grow next to a house.

Even in this

one lifetime,

you will have to choose.

That great calm being,

this clutter of soup pots and books—

Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.

Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.

Jane Hirshfield

Long may they grow and light this pond with their ancient fire.

Since the species' rediscovery, several natural populations have been found in Hubei's Lichuan County in China. The largest numbers around 5,400 trees. Yay and sigh.