a matter of perspective

In my old blog, Roundrock Journal, I had kept a lexicon of words and phrases I used regularly that I thought readers might appreciate understanding a bit more deeply. “Tawny tussocks” for example was not an exotic dancer but a reference to little bluestem grass. “Loathsome goo” was the muck and mire at the bottom of the pond, in which I had once sunk to my thighs when I had dared to venture in there, nearly losing my shoes as I tried to extract myself.

I had also defined the distinction between “critters” and “varmints.” “Critters” were any kind of naturally occurring wildlife, looked on benignly by me. “Varmints” were critters that had gone bad, making some affront to my presumed mastery over the place. The mice that had found their way into the cabin recently were varmints.

On our trip to the woods two weekends ago, we saw more evidence of varmints. Above is the only survivor of ten shortleaf pine trees I had planted on one of the islands in the lake. (That it is rarely an island because the lake is generally too low is beside the point; the definition stands!). I had raised a chicken-wire fence around the trees — about four feet tall — and visited them regularly to do what I could to nurture them (not much). Because they had to rely on the rain to be watered and whatever nutrients might be in the rocky soil of the island, their chances had never been good, and that one of them survived at all and even thrived was a kind of validation to me.

But you see it above. It’s been vandalized. Some buck deer needed to rub the velvet off his antlers, and rather than use any of the thousands of cedar trees nearby, he apparently jumped the fence into the smallish enclosure and ravaged my pine. Those green things you see on the ground are its lower branches. Varmint!

The bark has been stripped away but this, apparently, is not a threat to the tree. Several of the pines in the plantation suffered this similar abuse and have grown into tall trees.

We repaired the fence as much as we could and continued on our hike.

And I suppose the forest could consider me a varmint. See the evidence here:

There are many trees in my forest like this. I have wedged a round rock or two into their clefts and left them there. Sometimes I find the rocks dislodged, presumably from windy days that make the trunks sway and separate. But there are others where the rocks remain, and one of them now has three rocks wedge into it, the first being nearly completely swallowed by the growing tree.

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Tags: round rocks, Roundrock, shortleaf pine

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