Old Woods

I was sitting by the edge of the meadow when I heard it fall. Just sitting, in a Zen sort of trance, in one of those folding camp chairs, the kind that has some nylon pack cloth strung onto an accordion frame of lightweight metal tubing, which can articulate open to provide a home for one's butt, or closed to become a bundle for one's shoulder.

This this particular camp chair. once a bright lipstick red, is now faded and questioning the solidity of a black frame on which bits of rust have set up shop. The seat is low-slung, with a mesh cup holder sewn to a hole in the arm rest. Through regular use, I have come to the conclusion that the cup holder was carefully designed to be just the wrong size for anything you might want to keep handy. Including any number of actual cups, such as a coffee cup or a tea cup. A mug is strictly out of the question.

The holder is too small in diameter for a respectable water bottle, too shallow for a wine glass, which being top heavy when full, hits stem bottom, and spills its contents out onto the grass, provided it gets the trajectory right, and onto the sitter otherwise. On the other hand, it is too deep for a stemless wine glass, or a cup of ice cream, which disappears to the bottom of the well, never to be retrieved again.

I suspect this poor cup holder is a vestige of a time long ago when a beer can did not need to trick the consumer into thinking they were purchasing a full keg.

I had been trying to coax my telescope into taking a peak at the Iris nebula, NGC 7023, a very beautiful nebula dressing up the constellation Cepheus. The weather over the past months had been abysmal for anything looking up and anything not looking up. Drought conditions put the fear of wildfires in everyone, and smoke smothered any chance of seeing deep into the night sky; lovely, cloudless, new moon skies in June were completely etched away to invisibility by drifting smoke.

Then, just when everything was crispy dry, Madam Climate turned heel on a dime and dropped buckets of rain from saturated clouds for weeks at a time. We fared better than Indiana, but that isn't saying much. The stars were a no-show in July. Look up and you were greeted by bright white cloud bottoms illuminated by the light pollution of nearby Charlottesville.

I had checked the astronomy forecasts earlier in the day, and they were very definitely ambiguous; partly cloudy skies, with potential clearing after midnight. Desperate for any escape, I gave it a try, and set up the telescope by the meadow's edge. Around dusk things actually began to clear up. A little. It was a corrupt tease. I had stars long enough to get the telescope level and aligned. There was a clear field of view for 30 minutes of imaging. And that was that. The clouds came screaming in from across the horizon, a rowdy bunch, the flash mob playing bumper cars in the arcade sky.

I gave up on space travel and leaned back in the camp chair to just enjoy the spectacle.

It's humbling. Miss Weather doesn't give a hoot about what I'd like, about what conditions best suit my needs. She doesn't care a whit about making exceptions for our human insults to her environment. You can shut down all the weather balloon launches you want and the only gain made is by ignorance. Weather still arrives on her schedule. Everyone talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.

Well, not quite.

Some hardy souls, pumped up by inexhaustible human hubris, think that having first thrown garbage into Madam Climate's backyard, we can now geo-engineer our way out of that predicament, one of our own making, we can escape out of the corner into which we have painted ourselves. There is a lot of level headed, common sense thinking going around, such as filling the atmosphere with reflective particles that will block the warmth of the Sun. Reflective particles that, incidentally, will need to be reintroduced, at reasonable global cost, on a regular basis. A feature, not a bug, for the geo-engineers. Having made billions by screwing up the World's climate, remedial interventions can now make billions more by mitigating the consequences of that destruction.

What could possibly go wrong.

Perhaps the geo-engineers can arm-wrestle with the space-engineers at Reflect Orbital, who now have permission from the federal government to fly giant Mylar mirrors in low Earth orbit to monetize sunlight by reflecting it down on everyone 24/7.

So I gave up on personal space travel. Go with the flow. Lean back and take in the tumultuous rumblings of the clouds.

And that's when I heard the crash behind me. Turning in time, I watched an old dead tree trunk fall through distant branches, animate the gloaming, and collapse, back in the woods, on the forest floor with a resounding thump.

The woods are "newish" old. Not old as in virgin forest old. But still relatively old by Boomer time. Judging by the frequency with which I trip over half-buried stretches of broken barbed wire fencing, these woods were once pasture. Old wagon roads can be found, if you look carefully, making their way across the hillsides with little regard to the lay of the present day woods. A rough guess is that reforestation began somewhere around 100-150 years ago.

These are oak, hickory, and tulip poplar woods. In soil that is not the richest in the oligarchy. Many of these trees are hitting middle age now, and they've been competing with their peers for light and water the whole time, and with the under-story beech and red maple upstarts for the last 50. It is not unusual for one of them to decide their destiny is to enrich the forest floor and just punch out the clock. Especially with the recent heavy rains, which loosened the soil around roots no longer able to maintain purchase in the ground.

Mushrooms pop out of their hiding places, to take stock of the world since the last heavy rains, and pay homage to the fallen tree trunks that enrich their lives.