Behind the Vows

I'm still swooning in the sultry heat and the soft hazy last of June light of my niece Claire's wedding to Cam.

 

Vows.  

 

Perfection. 

I'm just going to lift this from Farm Forward, so you can ponder what's packed into this angelic creature. Brains and ethics and a keen sense of what's sustainable, sensible and kind.

With a background in food systems, public health, and environmental ethics, Claire directs Farm Forward’s outreach to institutions, food retailers, and food service companies to improve the welfare of farmed animals by aligning institutional food policies with consumers’ values. Prior to joining Farm Forward she managed the Food Systems Policy program at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future, and was a U.S. Borlaug Fellow in Global Food Security. Claire has written extensively on issues related to animal agriculture, institutional food procurement, and labor in the food system. She earned her MSPH in Human Nutrition from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in 2014.

 

Sealing it with a kiss, or three.

 

Together, Cam and Claire are going places, on land or sea. Cam not only knows everything about sailing; he and Claire know about brewing too. Look for Forward, their artisan brewpub, coming in Eastport, MD; follow them on Instagram @forwardeastport 

I'm so proud of my niece, of my sister and brother-in-law for raising three amazing women, and I'm thrilled to have been there with Phoebe and Liam to witness this wedding.

After the ceremony, I was delighted to turn my lens on my grand-nieces and nephews. Kids love a wedding, especially one with plenty of room and soft grass to run around on. Here are BigBasket Flower Girl Cait, raven-haired Clara and her sister Maddy.

 

Oh look! My kids, with Max, Maddy and Clara! Later in the evening, when it was too dark to take pictures, Max tore up the dance floor with his Michael Jackson moves.

Needless to say, watching Liam and Phoebe interact with their cousins is always a delight.

 

Charlie tackles sweet Will, who fielded the roughhousing with good humor.

 

The kids helped fold up all the chairs, and Will and Charlie led the charge.

Sometimes it's bewildering to be so much smaller than everyone else.

 

Especially when your mom keeps slipping away from you! Ben, Cait's little brother, holds back a wail as he searches the scene for Christy, who's occupied with bridesmaidy duties. I'd like to raise a salute to Will and Tyler, for their long, good service as dads, doing their level best to keep young mothers Christy and Courtney free to enjoy their sister's wedding.

 

 I fell deeply into watching and photographing the kids. Kids, after all, are most of the reason for the binding legal agreement that underlies all the flowers and vows. They are why we promise to have and to hold, from this day forward, with all that "til death do us part" stuff that I find creepy, which Cam and Claire jettisoned altogether. Hear hear! It's hard enough to stand before 200 witnesses and promise the rest of your life to another person without bringing The Grim Reaper shuffling into the gathering.

Kids are worth all the plans and the machinations to keep two human beings together, for as long as it takes to launch them.

 Charlie may turn out to be the naturalist of the bunch. He's intensely interested in birds, herps, insects, fish...and his great aunt Jules is standing by to help.

A leg lifting contest.

Maddy, running. What's better than Maddy, running?

Answer: Clara, Cait and Maddy, running.

And cartwheels, with Cait in awe, and Amy studying a flower.

 

 As night fell, the girls got their dresses good and dirty making sand castles on the bank of the Severn River.

And as the sun set over lavender water, the two wedding photographers took Cam and Claire out to the end of a dock. The osprey nesting just off the dock was none too pleased, and she circled, complaining bitterly, as memories were made. 

 

I love this meta-shot of the process! Such a private, intimate moment...a ticked-off osprey flapping, creaking and chirping just overhead...hold that pose! So romantic. Such is one's wedding day--a mix of the sacred and mundane that still takes your breath clean away, and leaves you wondering what hit you.

I poached the poses at a great distance and a much less interesting angle with my 300 mm. telephoto. Here's what they were getting (again lifted from Instagram, with thanks to Jenn Manor Photography.

Photo by Jenn Manor Photography.

I would imagine that professional wedding photographers have a name for people like me, who imagine themselves photographers, but often wind up blocking your carefully set-up shots. I'd love to know that name. Tools? Goobers? Anyone?

I had a ton of fun being That Annoying Photographer, and I spent most of the next day selecting, cropping and editing the best photos for a decidedly nonprofessional wedding album for the newlyweds and my family.  I decided to share the love with you, too.

I hope you'll join me in wishing Cam and Claire best of luck in all their endeavors on land and sea.

 Crape myrtle snowfall. No rice was thrown at this wedding! Rice is food, and Zicks don't throw food.

Scenes from a Wedding

I had the privilege of attending my niece Claire's wedding to her love Cam last weekend. Took my kids and drove all day, over the mountains and down down down to almost sea level, on the coastal plain of Maryland, to the beautiful home of Cam's parents, the perfect setting along the Severn River.

Rehearsal dinner Friday night featured three crates of enormous blue crabs, freshly steamed. I learned from Cam's lovely stepmother how to pick a crab. My brother wasn't so keen on separating all that crustacean anatomy, so I kept filling a little bowl of melted butter with lumps of crabmeat, and Bob obligingly devoured it with his blue fork. To my left, my four-year-old grand-niece Amy was begging like a baby bird for crab, so I was poking sweet crabmeat in her mouth, too. Anyone who knows me knows I love to feed critters and people, so these were commensal relationships. I probably picked 15 crabs. Tore my fingers and thumbs up something awful. Crab claws and shells are sharp, and Old Bay stings. But I didn't mind. Didn't get a single speck on my new shirt, perhaps the biggest feat of all.

Bob was to sing a song and accompany my nephew Evan on guitar. He had to keep his strength up.

The music was delightful, wafting on a summer breeze.

 

 

 I love my family. I felt lucky just to be there, to see them all. They are all such good people. Solid, kind, self-effacing, mutually supportive, and good. I don't get to see them nearly enough. Weddings are a great blessing, bringing us all together.

And weddings are interesting, beautiful, and in many ways strange to me. They're a mix of ancient ritual and new preferences. Many of us feel the need to break out of the iron box of tradition and change it up, so we don't feel we're doing what everyone before us has done. That's what I find interesting: what parts of the ritual we choose to keep, and what we leave behind. It all matters a lot to those of us who are planning the ceremony. In the end, though, the ceremony is simply how we enter that binding legal agreement, one that's the same for everyone, and one I've been thinking about a lot.

It's nice when the weather cooperates, and the sheets of rain, thunder and lightning that haunt our dreams for months beforehand fail to show up. This one in Arnold, Maryland, had some pretty intense heat, but there was a breeze and all would be well. It was a fine hot summer day, and there were around 200 people gathered to witness. I liked watching people arriving, making their way down the sloping green to the shady spot where the ceremony would take place.

When I go to family weddings, I like to take my big lens and make myself useful shooting photos. Maybe I can capture some moments that the professional photographers didn't snag. I try, anyway. I need to occupy myself, like a border collie finding a job that feels meaningful. It's a pure pleasure when the setting, the light, and the people all conspire in beauty.

My sister Nancy and brother-in-law Larry both walked Claire down the green. I loved that. There was no "giving Claire away." Just welcoming Cam in.

 

Cam waits while his folks make their way down.

 

Our gracious and generous hosts, Tommy and Renee.

Ringbearers,  Charlie and Ben. They executed their job perfectly, Charlie gently leading his cousin Ben.

 

It got interesting with the flower girls. Just before they were to come down the aisle, we heard a loud wail. Then beheld this spectacle:

 

 It had to do with one basket being bigger than the other. Cait, on the left, noted that Amy had the bigger flower basket, and no explanation that Amy was older so would get the bigger basket was going to placate her. Nancy didn't want to reward Cait's howl with the bigger basket, but it quickly became clear that nothing good was going to happen, at least not in the next hour or so, unless Cait got her way. 

Toddlers are finely tuned to look for and root out inequity wherever it occurs. They watch each other and the adults around them like young raptors, making sure that everyone gets the same treatment. Any whiff of favoritism, somebody getting one more noodle or a bigger scoop of ice cream than you got, and there's a loud wail queued up and instantly deployed. Equity, and its relentless pursuit, is one of the most important concepts in a small child's world. And if you think about this in a sociobiological way, it makes perfect sense. If your parents are hunting and gathering, and food supply is intermittent and iffy, and you sense that you're getting the short end of the stick, you might not make it to the next encampment. They might be phasing you out as one more than they can realistically feed. So you put up a howl. You make your need impossible to ignore.

 At the last minute, Nancy apologetically explained things to Amy, and asked Amy to give up her big basket so Cait would walk down the green at all. You can see it in Amy's stoic mien. Great. I get the small basket just so she won't wail! And Cait's all, I got the big basket, so I'm not gonna cry any more, but I still feel bruised. And where's my mom when I need her? Wearing a pink dress and several hundred yards away, that's where she is.

 

  Pretty soon Amy-with-the-small-basket outpaced Cait, and she tromped determinedly straight to the altar, head down, not strewing any flowers from her basket.  Just getting the job done. I'm taking this puny basket of flowers down front. 

 

 

Furious was never more adorable. 

When her dad gently suggested Cait distribute some flowers on her way down, there was resistance. All in all, the mini-drama was tough for the girls and their folks, but awfully fun to watch, knowing how small girls think about such things, and why. Had they tiptoed down strewing hydrangea flowers and smiling, it would have been sweet, but not nearly as memorable. This mini-drama was food for thought.

 

I thought about the ospreys in their nest just off the dock; the way young ospreys peck, sometimes viciously, at each other, trying to command the food supply. Very young humans are not so different. They are much closer to our origins, the predictable behavior some might label "spoiled" clearly linked to the fight to survive at all costs. Their mission is to get the full parental attention they crave, and they are very, very good at it. As Nancy said later, "Who ever thought that having two different sized baskets was going to work?" Snort!

 

Flower girls' passage completed, we got to watch Nan and Larry's beautiful daughters make their way to the shady spot by the river, to wait for their sister Claire.

Amy's mom has got it goin' on!

 

And so does Cait's! Sometimes we Zick sisters sit around and try to figure out how we managed to make kids who look like movie stars. Alchemy, we conclude. 

Here comes the groom!

 

Cam is a professional sailor. Winning races or getting sailboats where they need to go--he's the guy who can do it. I cannot even imagine what this man knows about the sea and wind and how to handle boats.

 

I was so busy shooting handsome Cam watching his bride come down the aisle that I almost missed the moment that Claire swept down the hill, flanked by her parents.  They were upon me before I knew it, and I had to quickly switch to my iPhone to capture this shot.   

As the wedding photography pro's shot it. I couldn't resist showing you this one because everyone looks so fabulous!

photo by Jenn Manor Photo, lifted off Instagram.

 

 A spontaneous hug from Nancy just before the service. 

 Claire and Cam's adorable, sweet, smart, cool dog Sirius was part of the ceremony, too. I imagine his last name is Black. He is the blackest, slickest, sweetest gemmun! Many were smitten, including me! He wandered about off-lead most of the day, meeting and greeting, like a good dog will. Channeling someone we remember with fondness, and doing it beautifully.

Since this is a massive post that has taken days to edit, write and put together, I'm going to split it into two parts. Spoiler alert: In the next post, Claire and Cam say I Do, and little girls run around.  :)

A Song for No One

 I've been running daily, and it feels so right. It helps to have Phoebe in the house; she's my inspiration and personal fitness advocate. We don't run together, because we'd be running together a half mile apart, ha! But we do bike together, and there is not much that's more fun than zooming down these hills and toiling up them with my kids. Proud to be a beast, schooled by the endless Appalachian foothills.

I usually run on my road, but I need a change of scenery now and then. Because I make lists of all the birds I hear and see on each run, it's fun to change it up and see what's singing elsewhere. I can get 50 species on my two-mile stretch of road in a single run in mid-June. The number I can hear drops steadily throughout June and July, not because there are fewer birds, but because they're too busy making more of them to sing. Boy, do I know the feeling. Busy launching my fledglings and painting pictures. It kind of rules out spending a lot of time behind the keyboard.

So I took a different road, and I found some beautiful things. If I didn't already love chicory for its inimitable blue, it's even more ravishing when punctuated by goldfinches.

 You can't crop off the guardrail or the road. They're part of the story, and beautiful too, for the way they curl through the composition.

A decrepit fenceline only adds to the charm.

It was on this road that I heard a song that stopped me in my tracks. It was coming from deep in the woods, that sloped steeply away from the road.
It was a hermit thrush.
Hermit thrushes are usually denizens of cool boreal forest. In Ohio, they seek out pockets of hemlock, with the refrigerated microclimates that go along with deep rock chasms.  The closest hermit thrushes nest in the Hocking Hills, a two-hour drive west of here.

Hermit thrushes aren't supposed to be here. My county, Washington, is the big one, five up from the bottom, on the right, the one with the notch in it. Where hermits are concerned, it's blank, for Not Reported. And as you can see, there are precious few hermit thrush breeding records statewide. That's because there's precious little hemlock habitat in Ohio, and what we have is suffering badly from the hemlock wooly adelgid, a nasty gummy white sap-sucking insect from Asia. I watched in horror as it wiped out Connecticut's hemlocks in the late 1980's, and now it's happening here. I can think of only two places in Washington Co. that have any hemlock, and I'm afraid to go look at them, afraid of what I'll find.

I borrowed this map from the Second Atlas of Breeding Birds in Ohio, the one with the Zick cover. I still get a big grin on my face every time I pull this book out for reference.  It came out in April 2016, the same spring that Baby Birds did. I was so durn proud to paint the cover for my beloved state's atlas, I can't even tell you. I sure hope they ask me to paint the Third Atlas of Breeding Birds cover, whenever that comes out! I hope I can still see to paint then!

 

Here's what it says inside. Author Paul Rodewald goes on to prognosticate that the hermit thrush may decline even more in Ohio, with the death of our hemlocks. The state has designated hermit thrush as a Species of Special Interest. 

No kidding. I was taking a special interest in this songster, hearing him on June 23, 2018, when he "should" have been far, far to the north or west, in our special pocket of HETH habitat in the Hocking Hills. 

And yet he was here. And he was lighting up the forest with his song. I'd never heard a hermit sing in Ohio in June. I made some recordings, which increased in quality over the next few days. I'll subject you only to the good ones. I could listen to them all day.

              

It is instantly addicting to spend a sunrise in this forest with that bird sending out silver spirals of notes, to no one. Or to someone. I have been there three times now, and I want to go there every morning.

 

I've never been in a woodland precisely like this one. The reason it is unique is, I'm afraid, anthropogenic. Which is to say the hand of man is heavy on this land.

There is no understory vegetation in this forest. And this is the chewed-upon pelvis bone of the reason why. 

 

People in this part of Ohio will fence and run cattle in the damnedest places. Well, they do it out West, too, put cattle in our national forests, our "multi-use" land. I won't pontificate on the propriety of that, but it isn't right ecologically to put cattle in a forest, either for the cattle or the forest. Cattle are descended from African ancestors. They belong on savannah; they belong on grasslands. Cattle eat grass. But, when forced by necessity, they will also eat anything that might try to come up in the understory of a forest. Which does not include grass.

 

So what you get when you've had cattle on a piece of land for decades, maybe hundreds of years, is topography like this. Deeply cut and eroded and trampled. And you can see for hundreds of yards. Now, that makes it pleasant to walk through, to be sure, but it is practically devoid of birds and wildflowers. I found some striped wintergreen, but most everything else trying to grow there was nonnative. Like the cattle.

Tromp and graze and cut it for enough decades, and the land becomes deeply eroded, with rivulets, most of them seasonal, running between artificial pillowed ridges. This landform was made by overgrazing. By people, and the cattle they put here. It happened when the forest was cut, grew back, was cut, grew back...and they never gave it a rest from grazing.

 

The Virginia pines, I'm thinking, dominate here because the cattle wouldn't eat them. Yes, it's a wholly artificial situation, atypical of the mixed deciduous forest in our area. There are a few beeches and red maples, but most of the cover is pine.

And pine, it seems, is close enough to hemlock for this hermit thrush. The missing understory, oddly, mimics that of hemlock forests. (Hemlocks poison plants that try to grow beneath them, and the ones that don't die get shaded out). This forest is cool and very dark, and there's lots of water. It must have felt like home to this wintering hermit thrush, enough so that he decided to stay.

 The forest is practically devoid of birds. Except This Bird. 

I kept visiting, hoping to see him singing. It was funny, being a pretty good lifelong birder, to keep coming home empty-handed. But he was singing high in the canopy first thing in the morning, and I just couldn't pick him up. 

So I lay down and made videos, imagining which treetop he might be in, while the silvery streamers of his song floated down and landed gently around me. I let hearing him be enough for me, and it was more than enough. 

 On June 26, I lay there so long--over an hour--that I zeroed in on the exact pine where I thought he might be. And then I got up and circled around, staring hard at the pine top, hoping. 

And I saw him. He was lit by the warm morning sun, a little white angel topping my best Christmas tree ever.

 

And he saw me. Hrrnh? A human?

But he didn't stop singing. He noted me and took me in and paused a few moments and then went right on with his homily.

 

And for that I was grateful. To see that song come out of his little yellow maw, well, it was a sweet reward for days of patient waiting. But it got better. I was positioning myself for a better shot, using a dead limb as a stabilizer, and he suddenly disappeared. After singing for at least an hour in one spot, he was gone. 

I saw something falling down through the canopy like a big brown leaf. It was him. He came down to have a closer look at me. 

It was so, so dark down where I was, but he paused just long enough for me to get a blurry shot that showed his rusty tail--the best mark for a hermit. 

He kept singing. And I saw another big brown leaf come up from the forest floor and land near him. It looked to me like another hermit thrush.

I left then, so as not to disturb them any further. I climbed out of the ravine, exalted by my brush with this finest of singers, thrilled that I hadn't frightened him; that instead of flying away, he'd chosen to come down to have a look at me. 

The light came through the windshield of an old junked truck, and I thought about all the crap humans leave behind on the land. Not just our junk, but our misuse and abuse of the land. We turn a bunch of animals that weigh a ton apiece loose in a forest and expect them to thrive. We never even give a thought to what our huge animals destroy; to the trails and ruts they carve in the land. We throw old cars and cans and bottles full of God knows what there, because it's a place to put junk where we won't have to look at it.

And the earth thanks us in a song like this, in a hymn for undeserving ears.

I work to deserve a song like this. I figure if I share it with you, and it brings you peace and wonder, the hermit thrush will like that. There's no way he could sing a song so beautiful without caring who hears it.