I come down to my spot on a warm afternoon. The waning light filters through new clusters of foliage, burning into delicate membranes—a canopy of green flames. A crooked branch stretches itself across my path, adorned in a pale blue-green frock of foliose lichen. I stoop to feel its frilled edges with my fingertips and take a few pictures. As I sit down on my rock, saying quiet ‘hellos’ to the fishermen along the bank, I notice that the narrow, pointed Beech buds have not opened yet. They are held aloft like so many spears, despite the disarming warmth of late April.
A man dressed in tall wading boots stands in the middle of the creek, waiting. His line grows taut, the pole bends, and he lifts a shimmering trout out of the water. The other men notice and talk to him about the bait he uses, which he calls “trout magnet.” “It’s a little gold worm—there’s something about the color gold that they like,” he says. A woman on the bank casts her line emphatically and says, to no one in particular, “I just hate it when people leave their trash here in the park. I would pick it up, but I don’t have a bag.”
To my left two fishing lines are held securely in a pair of PVC pipes that had been pushed into the impressionable dirt along the bank. A man sits nearby with elbows resting on bent knees, waiting. His wife sits to his right in a chair, and their son stoops behind them to carve shapes in the sand with a stick.
I decide to journey down the bank, so I pass the sitting man and his two lines and follow the path to its natural end. I hesitate for a moment before I jump across the small stream that separates the terminal path from the unbeaten understory. Water striders are dashing across the surface in sudden, mechanical explosions and a pair of mammalian footprints wanders down a sandy bar not far from where I stand. In the understory, a colony of Skunk Cabbages grows abundantly in clusters of lively green. Reaching out, I rip off part of a leaf and smell it—and unsurprisingly, it smells skunky! I think of the several lines in Mary Oliver’s poem “Skunk Cabbage:”
You kneel beside it. The smell
is lurid and flows out in the most
unabashed way, attracting
into itself a continual spattering
of protein.
Wondering what she meant by a “continual spattering of protein,” I later did some research and discovered that the odor attracts pollinators that fertilize its little yellow flowers, which cover the rounded “spadix.” How strange and wonderful!
On my way back I find a motor lodged in grasses and shrubs, and a few other sundry parts. The motor is rusted over and appears to be a long-term resident of the understory. An old wheel hub leans against a steep incline a few paces away, and I spot more scrap metal on a nearby hill. It is a strange gathering—each part is lifeless and isolated, and yet they are planted among such growth and interconnectedness. I climb the bank ungracefully, replete with thorns, and follow the path home.