David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

Looking at Lichens

The beauty of lichens . . . How they flourish! I sympathize with their growth.
        H. D. Thoreau

There’s a lot to like about lichens. Found in wild and urban places, from the arctic to the tropics, in deserts and on mountaintops, affixed to buildings and monuments, they are tenacious organisms unlike any other. Even on my quarter acre house-lot I come across lichens on tree trunks, the stone foundation of my home, brick walkways, fences, and the old cedar shake roof of my woodshed. Under our feet, out of sight, often fading to background, they can serve as reminders of remarkable and subtle natural forces all around us. They create mosaics of incidental and accidental beauty where least expected.

Combinations of funguses and green algae or cyanobacteria (blue-green algae), lichens are the essence of symbiotic cooperation. The fungus encloses the algae and supplies water, organics, and minerals from its surroundings, while the algae manufacture carbohydrates by photosynthesis. This self-reliant relationship withstands extreme temperature changes and can completely dry out without dying.

Beaver Empire (New England Trail Haibun)

A faded logging trace on an easy grade leads through a forest of oak and pine on the way to Shutesbury’s Town Farm Road. Suddenly my eye is drawn to light on one side of the trail. Through the trees I spot a long, linear swamp. I walk down to it through open woods dotted with pointed stumps, felled trees, and half chewed trunks of oak and black birch oozing sap. As I approach the ground softens, becomes mucky and begins to give way. I’m awestruck by an eight-foot high dam of tangled, sun-silvered sticks arcing across the head of a large impoundment.

Cupped by low hills thick with white pine are a series of dams, each one longer and taller than the next, the pools behind them higher and stretching further than the one below. The oldest downstream structures are leaky, half collapsed and overgrown, partially hidden in cattails, sediment, and sedgy tussocks. In the top pond is a large conical lodge of mud-plastered sticks topped with a tall, slender dead tree looking like a flagpole.

I listen to the trilled peeping of tree frogs, watch a sharp-billed kingfisher dart across the water, and see a harrier on the hunt. With bleached standing deadwood and lush marshy edges, this purposefully designed, curated space is the wildest of places.

landscapes engineered
paradise for birds and frogs
new worlds created

(Haibun is a marriage of prose and haiku.  It was first practiced by seventeenth-century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho who perfected the form in a journal he kept on a trip to the remote regions of northern Japan. Gary Snyder, James Merrill, and Jack Kerouac are among American interpreters of the genre.  Haibun best expresses the spirit of the New England Trail because it combines clear-eyed prose descriptions of people, objects and places along with poetry that awakens the imagination.  To travel the entire New England Trail with 90 haibun go to https://www.ctwoodlands.org/blue-blazed-hiking-trails/half-million-footsteps-journey-through-poetry-the-new-england-trail)

The New England National Scenic Trail, a unit of the National Park Service, runs 215 miles from Guilford, Connecticut to the Massachusetts/ New Hampshire border.  The trail is maintained by volunteers of the Connecticut Forest & Park Association in Connecticut and the Appalachian Mountain Club in Massachusetts.  For more go to https://newenglandtrail.org/