Cabin at Farrar Pond, Lincoln, Massachusetts May 1991
I’m on my hands and knees in the waning light of the early evening at the base of a large beech tree scratching gently in the leaves looking for a little secretive saprophyte called beech drops. The beech plays frequent host to beech drops, but you’d have to look real close at the business in the thick mat of leaves at the base of these giants to find them. They’re tiny fragile looking things, fungus like, with no chlorophyll whatsoever, and these little plants were on my mind turning into the drive of the cabin on that first day, so I stopped for a look.
A trees plumbing is found only an inch or so deep from its bark on the far outside surface, even in a tree this large, this thick. Deeper inside yet is the real “wood”, abandoned ductwork turned a stiff and hardened carbon fuel; a structural necessity for so solid a beast. But back at these surface pipes, these are where the tree lifts its water and its nutrients high up into the canopy where innumerable leaves use these to improbably convert sunlight into more leaves. And more pipes…more wood. These same pipes bring an organic soup of nutrients back to its roots in the fall storing them below ground, shutting off the synthesizing factory, dropping its leaves and going quiet for a few months. And in the spring, the supply chain begins creaking and turning once again, and back up to the top go the nutrient sap where warmer sunnier days signal an opening of the powerful little leaf factories. Stoma, chloroplasts, phloem: all factory machines grown from scratch by the world’s producers.
A tree’s pipes are there for the tapping. Maple Sugar makers tap these pipes in the spring when these carbohydrates are flowing back to a maple’s crown and its hungry leaf buds. A tap hammered into a trunk at eye-height at just the right angle should start a slow drip of this sap. A collection bucket over a fire will break this sap down into a sugar we use to wash down a stack of flapjacks.
But the beech drop doesn’t tap these pipes as a frivolity. They sadly belong to a small select group of true plants absent of any chlorophyll whatsoever, and find themselves in the unenviable position of importer of all its goods. Its factories closed eons ago when its ancestors found the pipes at the base of some trees left unattended, and sneaking under the fence as it were, adopted this life of crime as a parasite. Like the very distant fungi, beech drops pilfer those nutrients made by the Fagus , borrowing from the fungi very simple tools called haustoria allowing for the undisturbed absorption of the food at the roots produced far away by the beech’s busy leaf factories. Does this small living scratched out in the dirt below harm the beech? Judging by the size and impressive form cut by these mighty giants, beech drops are as harmless as the gentlest of breezes through its leafs, maybe less so.
It doesn’t occur to me that I might be blocking the drive with my truck from other visitors, or that it will be dark soon, or that it’s not considered normal this scratching around with my ass in the air looking for a saprophyte likely not there anyway. But this was a grand beech, all silvery-barked and nearly 50 cm diameter at breast height, and it would be unimaginable to not stop and touch this thing.
When I first arrived a few minutes earlier, I almost couldn’t find the place as it was far off the main road out in the woods with a dirt drive marked only by this lone beech tree. And you needed to know a beech from the other trees, because that was all that was offered by MAS as directions to this place. My instructions were to drive down route 117 from Lincoln center “ a-ways” and turn left at the beech tree. Luckily a beech tree is as smooth and gray as every other tree is not, and very easy to spot. My major professor at Westfield liked to call this the paper money tree as its leaves crushed in your hand would pop back to shape like ”quality paper…like a dollar bill.” But money doesn't grow in tress so we’re told.
This is how it is. The Naturalist…the obsessive, the curious, the queer. I had maybe 15 minutes before it was too dark to comfortably navigate the long dirt road to a cabin I had never yet seen full of strangers I’d never met, and I was clawing at the ground at the base of this giant tree that would unquestionably be there the next day…and the next. But I was determined to either rule out the presence of the beech drop, or find one of these rare plants that I could memorialize mentally with my usual great enthusiasm. My sampling technique results in a ring of disturbed leaves and dirty shoes, and in completing the circle reveals only a few invertebrates but nothing else of note. It’s dark and my knees are wet.
The summer would be spent more or less here at the cabin at the end of this long dirt drive, which I found directly. It was a Lincoln log cabin (that is a log cabin in Lincoln) not too far from Thoreau’s cabin in Concord, and so I’d be inspired. There wouldn’t be much hanging around or housekeeping that I could manage with my restless proclivities. It was more a place to lie down when I wasn’t outside somewhere; maybe a place to burn a steak, or take a shower.
But it was really a lovely place overlooking a beautiful natural pond I’d come to know via canoe on almost daily or nightly paddles. My stay here would be disrupted somewhat early with a new assignment on Cape Cod, but what time I did spend here was so peaceful and reflective, I filled an entire journal with poetry and sketches during my stay. A small group of interns shared the place, but unlike myself, the ecologist, every one of them held positions at the demonstration farm nearby. They’d return every afternoon, boisterous and high with farm-dirt hands and feet, and paper bags topped with vegetables from the ground then offered up in large communal salads or sizzling pans. I spent some time getting to know my roommates, but as a hired scientist, I kept a comfortable distance in order that I use the time here to pursue the study of nature instead.
