By the Numbers: An Album of October Moments

Here's a poem I wrote last year in an attempt to capture the feeling of autumn as a homeland of the human heart. 


Searching For Home

We pass through two fields,

but it feels like more,

like all the fields in heaven and on earth,

because our path has been gilded by golden light

on golden fields

Butterflies, monarchs of the open meadow,

pass among the goldenrod,

and twine around one another,

and spin off on their own quests

Above: the fertile green of a lavish region

Hillsides extend their flanks

like the green man of the forest reaching for the sky,

embracing the valley in which we proceed

on our regal, healing progress

And higher still, beyond the deep and furry green of the treeline

the rich blue vault holds the sun in its place

while evolving nuances of air

linger like forgiveness,  

teaching us to be as we are and should be,

Creatures who breathe in

and let it out.

This year I'm trying to use this space to compile a photo album for the weekend of Oct. 12-14, in four parts:
 
1. The boardwalk in Parson's Marsh, found off Under Mountain Road (in Stockbridge and  Lenox). Pictured in the top photo, the boardwalk allows you to walk into a wetlands without damaging the environment or needing rubber boots (which also damage the wetland). It leads through the trees, past the dense shrubbery and out to the cattails and sword-grass, where a railed viewing platform gives you a view of open water, water fowl, the woods and hills on the other side of the water, and the bare trees at the water's edge where we saw nests last year.

2. Photos of Pleasant Valley Wildlife Sanctuary in Lenox. The first of these images below depicts fall colors reflected in the water of Pike Pond. Then two images of the sanctuary's Beaver Pond: some open water with surface vegetation; and a view of how the steady year-after-year incursion of wetland plants narrows the remaining coves of surface water. Finally a view of the mountainside, at the bottom of this page. For more about Pleasant Valley, see the previous post at https://prosegarden.blogspot.com/2019/10/autumns-garden-more-light-on-october.html

3. Photos of Bullard Wood, which wraps around a carefully maintained path that takes visitors down to the banks of Stockbridge Bowl and the along the lake, linking up with another lovely preserve called Gould Meadow.

In a bright, late-morning sunny stroll, Anne and I got off the main woodsy, shaded path and explored a long grassy meadow we've somehow overlooked before. We found lots of color in the woodland margins, as shown in the images below. The meadow lead us eventually down to the lake, where we stared hypnotically at the lovely, light-splashed water.  

4. On Monday evening, with the sun declining, Sonya and I walked through the a favorite conservation area across the road the Tanglewood, called Gould Meadow. Them we turned into the woods, got a little lost in the gloaming trying to follow a new path that leads visitors to a piece of property owned by Kripalu -- where a prominent sign forbids entrance into private property. We retraced our way back to a path that tooks us down to the Stockbridge lake at a particularly quiet point. 
          Twilight outdoes itself on this evening: Purpling the night, as the trees sing in the soft exhalations of a seasonal apex and then shake loose a gentle rain of leaves that coat the surface of the lake, like tiny boats on an ancient harbor. 
        Driving home, just to wrap up the evening, we surprise a black bear on the side of the road. No photos of this encounter. (Unfortunately? Fortunately?) Both bear and humans are happy to go their own way. 

Autumn's Garden: More Light on October

The pond in the picture above is found along the first trail -- there are many -- within the Pleasant Valley Wildlife Sanctuary, a woodland preserve of hundreds of acres that we visited many times when our children will still, well, children. As you can tell from the photo of Sonya looking at the map to plot her next adventure, that was some time ago. For a while, as the kids grew and discovered their own mountains (and cities, and rivers, and preserves, and countries), and we explored new sites in Berkshire County, an ongoing ambition despite all the year we've visited this region -- especially in autumn, occasions that are treated in my household as pilgrimages.... well, the point is we sort of lost track of how much we loved the place. 
        How varying its landscapes. Woodland walks, ponds, hillsides, little wooden bridges over brooks shiny as they ambled through shaded needle-strewn forest floors. Also paths that run up mountain sides, zig-zagging through mixed deciduous and conifer woodland floors to sites such as the intimidatingly denominated 'Fire Tower,' and whatever you expect to find at the end of the Hermit's Trail. 

           You can pick your elevation. Last week we stayed low, Anne and I restricting ourselves to circuits around two substantial ponds, Pike Pond and the one we call the Beaver Pond.
Pike Pond has narrow, winding trails that pin you close to it low-land banks. The even-leveled footing is good for both young children and unsteady elders. For the second year in a row I was amazed at how much variety in woodland and water and hillside perspective this little trail offers.  The top photo, with foliage reflections on the surface water was taken here.
           The body of water we call the Beaver Pond was the site where we were first introduced to the unmistakable works of beavers behaving wildly in the wild. Chewed logs and tooth-marks on trees. Those unmistakable humped-up beaver lodges, made of thick limbs and mud and branches with the leaves still on them. And the crowded wetland creations of downed trunks amid broken branches, leaf piles and growing stuff in various stages that serve as the 'dams' the creatures throw together (with their teeth) in the never-ending challenge to create deep-water pools surrounding their lodges and sufficiently expansive to deter predators. 
          We glimpsed the occasional beaver head back in the day, as I recall, but mostly we saw their works. And now, the decades having mounted, we see those beaver works overtaken by nature's implacable "succession" strategy and turned into wetlands. When we circled the pond this time, we saw more plant-life incursions than open water: Huge pockets of Phragmites lining the banks at several places. Water lilies, a few with ducks sunning themselves in the autumn sun among them; and other wetlands species working away at the earth-creating job of turning water into mud. 

         It was all quite beautiful.
When we made our way clear of the shade of the trees, the views of hillsides and surrounding woodlands opened for us, as in the photos of the bottom of the page.
         Last weekend, when we visited, lots of other folks had found their way here too.

The Garden of the Seasons: Putting the "Oh!" back into October

The color over the Columbus Day Weekend -- whoops! I mean "Indigenous Peoples' Day" or some such more enlightened nomenclature -- was the best we've seen in several years. New England fall foliage, a brand name pleasure, a sure source of tourist attention (and dollars), a claim to regional fame, and an almost copyright hold on the month of October, began slipping after a few years of what commentators referred to as "muted" color. 
          TV weather reports used to show maps of the region with percentages penciled in for what percentage of "peak" could be expected in the coming weekend for various parts of the region. Connecticut: 30 percent this weekend. Massachusetts: 60 percent. And up in Vermont this week -- look at that -- 95 percent at peak!

           Local wisdom this year, we were told, anticipated a stronger year for brightly colored foliage because the region -- at least in Berkshire County -- received a lot of rain this summer. (Not so much, I can attest, in the Boston and South Shore coastal region.) And on the clear days the color was certainly stronger.
          My theory is the havoc that rapid climate change is causing to the notion of well defined, predictable "seasons" is eroding the whole notion of "peak" color. Our daughter Sonya, a great fan of our Berkshire Octobers, estimated that about 50 percent of the region's deciduous trees had "turned" last weekend. About quarter of the trees were still to come. And another quarter had already lost their leaves. And in fact all of the woodland trails we walked were well littered with fallen leaves. But still -- lots more up in the trees!
           On Saturday of the three-day weekend we visited the Basin Dam trail in Lee, Mass., a Trustees of Reservations property adjoining October Mountain State Forest, where we encountered a party of avid mushroom gatherers happily engaged in a harvest. We followed this up with visit to a new gem created by the Berkshire Natural Resources Council where a short walk, partly over a newly created wood-plank walk leads to a marvelous view of a wetlands called Parson's Marsh, glimpsed in the photo below. Cattails in the foreground, a broad pond with lilies, ducks, and signs of beaver-work in the middle distance, a framing hillside beyond.  

         On the way back to the parking area, I took some photos (one of them above) of the foliage along the path in the foreground, backed by the hillside that walls in a favorite Stockbridge-Lenox back road aptly and poetically named Under Mountain Road. Happy are those who live beneath such picturesque contours. 
           That evening (at least I think it was the same day) Sonya and I went down to the lake called Stockbridge Bowl to take in the twilight falling over the hills on the opposite side and on the lake water itself. The few lights faintly appearing in the hillside, and reflected directly below on the lake's placid surface belong to Kripalu, the famed (and pricey) healthy living spa.
            That was Day One. More to come. 

The Garden of Forever: What Trump's Betrayal of the Kurds and the American Troops Who Fought Beside Them in Syria Will Mean for His Afterlife

Kurdish protesters hold photos of Kurdish political leaders killed by Turkish-backed militias in Syria.

            There's a warm place in Forever for People Who Betray Their Allies. 

            Trump’s next stop, after we impeach him, has got to be The Hague. That’s where the International Criminal Court prosecutes war criminals.

            Because what he’s done to the Kurds in Syria, and to the American soldiers who fought with them, is nothing less than criminal on a breath-taking scale. He makes Benedict Arnold look like a scofflaw. He’s moving straight into Hitler and Stalin territory.

           And if he somehow escapes human justice for condemning thousands of human beings to death for fighting for a cause he pompously espoused throughout his campaign and directly after being sworn into office  — the defeat of ISIS — we can be sure that divine justice has its eyes on him. Eternity has a place for people just like him.

            Do you know what the Ninth Circle of Hell is for?

Traitors.

            Those who have committed the sin of treachery.

Trump’s decision to do a ’favor’ for fellow-tyrant Erdogan, Turkey’s autocratic president-for-life who regards all Kurds, one of his own country’s largest minorities, as ‘terrorists’ — because doing so is a convenient distraction from all that is wrong with his own anti-democratic governance — is a classic example of those acts that send what Republican politicians used to call “evil doers” (before they embraced one) to the deepest level of Hell.

            And of all the people to betray — not that the abomination-in-chief would have difficulty throwing anyone and everyone under the bus if he believes it will give him some advantage… Can we recall what the Kurdish armed forces were doing in northern Syria?

Defeating ISIS.

              Remember ISIS? Remember when the whole world was scared stiff of ISIS?

              What was the first thing out of Mister Bluster’s mouth after he was inaugurated in 2017? “I’m going to destroy ISIS.”

Destroying ISIS was a major campaign pledge for Trump. At a campaign rally in South Carolina he bragged, “We are going to convene my top generals and give them a simple instruction. They will have 30 days to submit to the Oval Office a plan for soundly and quickly defeating ISIS. We have no choice.”

            ISIS’s political state in Syria was by then already well on the way to being defeated — not by Trump, but by a plan put together by the Obama administration, which found that America’s best and only consistently reliable regional ally was the Kurds. Under our leadership, Kurdish armed forces fought ISIS on the ground, while the US supplied air cover and a mere 1,000 ground troops.

            In close-quarters combat with the fanatic resistance of ISIS’s converts, Kurdish troops suffered 11,000 casualties. They died so that American soldiers did not have to fight that street-to-street and house-to- house battle and suffer the kind of casualties we experienced in Iraq.

            Shortly before the Abomination in the White House decided to make a fellow autocrat’s day by giving him free reign to score points at home through destroying some of his country’s favored scapegoats — the independent-minded Kurds — Kurdish forces dismantled defensive positions along the Turkey-Syria border under assurances from the US that we would never permit a Turkish assault on them.

            And then the Bumbler, for no particular reason besides earning a reciprocal kickback from a fellow would-be dictator, said, “OK, I’ll get our guys out of your way. Knock yourself out.”

While White House apologists said they were shocked that Turkey began bombing homes and hospitals in the very region of Syria that had been liberated by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, the army that took down ISIS rightly called Trump’s decision to withdraw American troops a “stab in the back” and made clear it felt betrayed by the US.

            The Boston Globe this week quoted a local Kurdish resident, born in Turkey, calling the Turkish attack on northern Syria “a genocide… As we speak, bombs are being dropped in front of houses.” [ See https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2019/10/15/kurds-veterans-denounce-trump-decision-withdraw-troops-from-northern-syria/S5HImWDBYPYkD9jjO8MGiI/story.html ]

            The abandonment of the Kurdish forces who defeated ISIS has also outraged American military veterans. A Congressman who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan, Seth Moulton (D-MA) termed the Turkish attack on both military and civilian facilities a “barbarity…. “ He called it “disheartening” for American soldiers on the ground “to have a commander in chief that you can’t trust and who doesn’t live up to our values and is ordering us to retreat.”

            A commander we can’t trust? Who betrays allies? What can we call this conduct? Treachery, perhaps?

            And it has practical consequences. ISIS prisoners guarded by Kurdish forces who now find themselves under attack by Turkey’s American-supplied air force are now escaping.

            And once Turkey launched the assault on the Kurdish positions that everybody in the world knew was coming if the US withdrew its troops — everybody, that is, except the bumbler-in-chief, who boasted, baselessly, that he would destroy Turkey’s economy if Erdogan were to launched the invasion that he has in fact launched — news organizations on the ground in northern Syria began publishing photos of Kurdish officials, both men and women, who have been captured and promptly executed by Turkish forces. [See the photo above.]

            The blood of those murders is on Trump’s hands.

            The blood of all the deaths now taking place in the corner of Syria liberated from ISIS by the American-Kurdish alliance is on Trump’s hands.

            And on America’s hands, because in a democratic political system, we are all responsible for our government’s actions. In a democratic system, our leaders act in our name.

            Let’s remember how we got here. We allowed Trump to become President — many of us by voting for a conman whose moral and intellectual shortcomings were pretty well exposed during the campaign. We allowed him to occupy the most dangerous (because most powerful) office in the world even though he lost a popular vote, and even though our electoral system was hacked and influenced by a foreign government (Russia's) that fully intended to do us harm by placing its stooge in the White House. And whose conduct Russia correctly predicted could be influenced to favor their best interests rather than ours.

            We allowed our antiquated, undemocratic “electoral vote” — a system unfairly weighted in favor of voters from less populous, more rural — and more white — voters, and against more pluralistic and more populous regions, to choose the loser over the winner of the popular vote. And we permitted this losing candidate to win by allowing these one-party Republican-controlled states to employ suppress various dodges and bureaucratic strategies to suppress the vote of their non-white and poorer citizens.

            That is to say that the American people, and its government, allowed a deeply flawed, hacked, manipulated electoral process to enable an illegitimately chosen, dishonest sicko to take the reins of power at the head of the nation’s government.

            We have allowed the voter suppression outrage to go on for years. We continue to allow it today.

            That’s on us. I’m not sure which circle of hell prepares a warm welcome for those who permit evil to be done by the betrayers, the worst of the worst of the world’s sinners, but that’s where we belong. Because that’s what we’ve allowed to happen.

            I speak these disconcerting truths as one of the privileged, self-loving American majority unwilling to risk blowing up his contented life in order to confront our current illegitimate administration with massive and ceaseless acts of civil disobedience.

            And if the survivors of the terrorist ISIS state -- freed by the attack on the Kurds -- somehow make their way into this country to blow up ‘innocent people,’ we deserve it. Because we’re not innocent.

            Trump supporters, especially those who continue to support him, whether he is caging children, destroying the environment, enriching himself, his family and his criminal cronies, or (as in the present instance) betraying allies to their death in full view of the entire world — can step forward and take a special bow.

            Meanwhile, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces have pleaded with the US and its NATO allies to establish a no-fly zone in the north of Syria and “carry out their responsibilities to avoid a possible impending humanitarian disaster.”

            “This attack will spill the blood of thousands of innocent civilians because our border areas are overcrowded,” the SDF’s official Twitter account said.

            Guess what our response was? No dice.

            Then, in a continuation of a long-running media farce — call it “Trump’s Way: Government by Morons and Liars” — news media could not help but devote much of its reporting to the absurd, inaccurate, and morally repugnant rationales offer by our Lying Leader for his disgraceful abandonment of a brave ally.

            The looniest moment came when the Bonehead in Chief defended his abandonment of an ally by pointing out that the Kurds “didn’t help us in the Second World War. They didn’t help us with Normandy.”

            Somebody, it seems, has explained to Little Trumpy that once upon a time a big, bad something called World War II happened — despite the sufferings of those with sore feet — and they even dragged his bloated bod to a place called Normandy, where many people who are, admittedly, not Kurds are buried.

            Putting two and two together and totaling up 48 percent, Trump reasoned that the Kurds could not possibly be called our ‘allies.’

            Little Trumpy was quickly hauled into the corridor, crowned with a dunce cap, and instructed in everything wrong with that piece on nonsensical irrationality by anyone who knew anything. In fact, while only four countries contributed soldiers to the Normandy invasion, the Kurds — who did not even possess a country then; and still don’t, according to the Turks — did fight alongside the Allies in their part of the world.

            OK, we get it. Trump doesn’t know anything about WWII, or history — or anything else that ever happened outside of his limited sphere of personal interests. But while it’s one thing to be ignorant of something, not shutting up about it is just plain STUPID!

            Yet while the Unimpeached One has a clear leg up on the title of Laughing Stock of the 21st Century, he may also go down in history as the man responsible for destroying anything still good in the American political system.

            Yes, stupidity can be criminal — when you’re the President of a powerful country.

            But as for treachery — the betrayal of one’s family or close associates; one’s community or guests; or one’s bonded allies — that’s a high crime in the court of eternity.

            And the deserved torments of the Ninth Circle of Hell endure forever.

            The consequences of your crimes, however, as America’s suffering allies now well know, take place in the here and now.