Feeling Out Boundary

For years I have been looking across the wetland, visually leaping from this side to that. I hardly noticed it was a farming plot, hardly recall seeing corn or soy. When visitors see it from the upper floor in the snowy winter, they say how nice it is that we have a view of a lake, which is of course, an illusion. For quite some time I wanted to follow the edge of the wetland, crossing the wide drainage that marks southwestern boundary of our land, and I knew well enough this had to happen in winter. It turns out March is a good time, the soil is deeply frozen, and the air might be fifty degrees.

At the beginning of this great March melt, snow becomes puddles, ground frost begins to let go.

Water is beginning to move. A warmish day, sunshine, and then an attraction to any hint of burbling, the sound of moving water, is the first symptom of spring fever.

Crossing the wide drainage at the southwest corner of our lot where electrical infrastructure meets the woods, marsh grass and cattails meet the scoured land of the gravel mine. This is a boundary I've often met, but never crossed.

Along the western edge of the wetland we find the most Eastern Cottonwood, Populus deltoides. It likes wet feet, and can be found on wetlands, along streams and rivers, on lake edges, and occasionally upland. Large trees with trunks often bending and soft wood, they are prone to break. This is the source of its common name, I think, not the downy white fluff it distributes in late spring.

The wooded hillside slopes sharply, then levels out in a zone that accommodates occasional flooding. I have found that the four-legged and the two-legged creatures like to share paths whether made by us or by them. Here, we walk along a well-trodden deer path, one well-scoped by bow hunters.

As we gain on the farm field, the land rises up just enough to take it out of the soggy soil well-defined by the Cattails, Typha latifolia. Here I see a close resemblance to an oak savanna, a wonderful little spot containing grasses, annual and perennial plants, a large Bur Oak, Quercus macrocarpa (I think) and several smaller ones.

Growing too are large buckthorns with their countless berries. The oaks probably pre-date the buckthorn. New oaks are unlikely to be seeded, sprouted, and survive the shading without the regular fires that give oaks an edge.

Lichens (maybe orange Xanthomendoza weberi and grey-green Physcia aipolia) grow on even the lower oak branches. Rampant buckthorn growth will shade out the lichen too. I have to start seeing the positives of buckthorn, what were they again?

The farm road, which bisects the wetland and forces the drainage through a culvert.

The immaculate, stone free, black earth of the farmed hill to our south. I wonder why cover-cropping is not practiced in this region and have yet to do the research. I suspect that there might not be enough growing season to get soy or corn and sprout a cover before a freeze sets in, but then I am guessing. According to the MCWD, an agency that monitors our watershed, our sub watershed is draining phosphate-laden water to Dutch Lake. This field is near the head of the shed and yet another guess is that it's providing a good part of that input. Residential septic systems and lawn fertilizers are providing the rest. 

My knee-jerk response is to worry that it soon will have homes on it. The owner leases it to a local farmer, and from what I can find, its owner does not live on the property which totals 68 acres of woods, wetlands, and farm fields (other than this farm field, which is isolated by topography, woods, and wetlands). A quick search shows the owner as Stone Arch Development, but a google search for that shows only a corporation named Stone Arch Organizational Development. Adding more complexity to property ownership, the notion that our own "development" is acceptable, but any future development should be off limits, or at least out of sight. 

At the culvert, water flows in from the big marsh.

And flows out toward the south, draining another few miles of wooded hillsides, residential yards, and horse fields until it reaches Dutch Lake, and ultimately into Minnetonka, overtops into Minnehaha Creek, sent over the falls, then into the Mississippi, and off to a stint in the Gulf of Mexico. 

Turning back to the north we get the only wide open view of the woods within which we live, apart from satellite views. The cropped view highlights the house, toward which I drew an arrow. Witnessing the open, bright marsh and dark woods together was an eye opening experience.

A Walk Around The Block

Across the road (it's wrong to call it a "street"), a stand of Quaking Aspen, Populus tremeloides. These are roughly forty feet tall, and maybe thirty years old. The trees grow in clonal stands, suckering off roots from the initial seedling. These stands can go on for hundreds or thousands of years if fire burns through at supportive intervals. The bark color can vary depending on the region, but in our locality they trend toward the white of a Paper Birch.

Our five mile walk around "the block" takes us by several properties with horses. That tells you something about the nature of the neighborhood (please don't feed the puns). The lots are large, generally over ten acres, many with rolling meadows and wetland basins (but little standing water). Taxes are high (but not by New Jersey standards), and there are probably property tax credits for agricultural uses ("Green Acres"). When you are this close to the city and agricultural, you need resources, you need to make the land "productive" or you will pay. The pressure to change the zoning is real and looming. Another post, another day, about what I call the development shadow.

Given such low-density zoning in this part of the "city," you'll find fairly long views often punctuated by a fairly large house.

You may also find a property named to conjure up salad dressing.

There's a little, err Long, lake, a remnant of a much longer lake, hemmed in by two fingers, one of which is a pronounced esker. In the distance, two blue ice-houses.

In winter we can walk (or drive) on the lake. In the distance you can see the road cut, traveling up the esker at its junction with the other ridge that encloses this body of water.

On this side, three fifths around the block, more horses and a varied, glacially-sculpted terrain.

The late sun gives glow to tilled acres and woods alike.

The cedars that grow on open, upland sites burn with the setting sun.

As do red houses.

To the northwest, some fields open to cultivation and livestock.

More rare, a field's infrastructure. This was dairy country awhile back.

Now, an attempt at viticulture.

To the west of our place, a partially-filled, old gravel pit has become a horse boarding operation. Rex had questions about how the open pit affected the hydrology of the area, and now that it is filled, more so. From what I've seen, and what I read, we have a complex hydrology, to be expanded in a later post.

Along the county road at dusk, about a half mile from our place, a stand of last season's weeds.

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On March 1, 2015 I will discontinue posting on NYCGarden. You can continue to read my posts here.

Mrs. Castillo

Today, as the clouds gathered for a late day rain, our neighbor's daughter approached the garden to tell me that her mother and our neighbor across the hall, Mrs. Castillo, has died. I could see how hard this was for her and yet she bravely told me, said she thought we should know and I'm so glad that she thought so. Unlike Fabio, upstairs, Mrs. Castillo had a strong support network of children and caregivers to help her with her illness. We are so often busy that we hardly saw each other, but we respected her, and helped her when she needed it -simple things like holding the door or getting the mail. I shared garden tomatoes and herbs with her, while she grew some serious hot peppers. We'd give her garlic and she'd bring us cookies. The smells of her cooking often got me jazzed for dinner. Knowing well how building cooking odors can be terribly off, her cooking actually made our building smell better! She will be missed by us, truly, we couldn't have asked for a better neighbor. Requiēscat in pāce, Mrs. Castillo.

Flowers For Fabio

Years ago, at night, me and my long blonde hair were in the shower, which abuts the stoop just outside the little, frosted bath window. With the bath light on, one could make out from the stoop that I was in the shower. A woman calls, then knocks on the window, "Fabio?" "Fabio?" "Fabio!"

The only Fabio that I knew was the one from romance covers, and me a vision of long blonde hair and all, what romance-minded woman wouldn't call for Fabio from our stoop? What could I do but slide the window open, dripping, shirtless. "Fabio?," asks the woman. No, no, Frank, says I. "Oh, is Fabio there?" No, says I. She didn't speak much English and appeared to be blind. That's how I learned that someone named Fabio, a Columbian man, lived on the second floor of our building.

Fabio and I became fast friends when I started gardening the sliver of soil outside our building. He enjoyed getting out of his steaming hot apartment on summer days, choosing instead to stand in the shade of a telephone pole on our sidewalk, moving slowly with it as the sun slid east to west, until the Yew tree cast its own shadow onto the sidewalk later in the afternoon. He spoke as little English as the blind woman who once knocked on my window, the woman I later learned was his sister in law.

He enjoyed the garden, most of all the flowers, and could often be spied from our windows with his nose buried deep in a rose or lily. I cut stems for him to bring up to his place and sometimes introduced new scents, like the pungent freshness of a geranium leaf or sweet fragrance of the native honeysuckle. We offered tomatoes, basil or cilantro from our pots when the side yard became our little vegetable patch.

Almost every day Fabio headed down Ocean Parkway on his very serious bicycle, all the way to Coney Island. Another opportunity to get out of his hot apartment, and be physical. Fabio was a vigorous, healthy man, a little over 6 feet tall, and lean. He would carry his bike down from his apartment, full riding gear on, head out and return a few hours later.

On a beautiful spring day, Fabio was outside, and we were pulling our bikes out of the apartment for a commute to the studio. Excited by our ride, he went up to get his bicycle. But he didn't understand that it wasn't a round trip for us and apparently he needed company. Demoralized, he returned his bike to his apartment as we rode off, a vision of harmony in the face of his own internal anguish. We often asked his wife, who we call Mrs. Rojas, how Fabio was doing and she would always say that he was okay. We had noticed he wasn't riding his bicycle as much, or at all. When Betsy would speak with him in Spanish, she could gather that he wasn't feeling as well, but had a hard time pinning down the problem.

Within a year's time, Fabio went from a vigorous, athletic man to a shaking, weeping, screaming man unable to dress himself, unable to care for himself, unable to communicate anything but stuttering gibberish. Out of fear and dementia, he would find himself on the landing without any pants on, as we tried to talk him into returning to his apartment. He would try to escape his apartment, or our building, half dressed, and upset. One evening, as I spoke on the phone with an artist friend, there was a knock on our door. It was Mrs. Roja's sister, who in broken English tried to explain that Fabio snuck out and because she was blind could not go to find him. I told my friend that I had to go.

Betsy went one way, and I went the other. There were kids on the street and I asked them which way did the old man go, to which they responded that way, hands pointed in opposite directions. I chose the path given by the oldest, a girl, maybe 13, and made my way to Church Ave, where I stood on the corner, looking in all directions. There! Across the street, trying to get on the B35 Eastbound, but he had no money. I called Betsy and she ran the few blocks and we lured him away from the bus stop. He remembered and trusted us (for a reason unknown to us he raged verbally about his wife). Taking his arms, we crossed the street, slowly walking him back to the building. We stopped in front of the garden, lilies in bloom. I plucked one for him, held it up to his nose, and he buried himself in it, orange dust now all over his face as he smiled.

It was easy to imagine a bad situation on the street, a raving man without pants (he simply could not lift his legs into pants any longer), a tazer, or worse. We weren't always around to help, nor could we be there because of work or otherwise. Sometimes he was cared for by a health aide, sometimes his blind sister in law, sometimes his wife, but there were times when he was left alone out of some necessity or a late train. This is when the police would be called, an ambulance arrived, and although we did this with some hesitancy, most often they were helpful, and sensitive, although they rarely had a Spanish speaker in the group despite my insistence that this was necessary.

Mrs. Rojas, a health aide herself, asked us not to call the police, and we could only presume this was because there was no health insurance available, or possibly for reasons of immigration, but there were times that we simply had no other options as we tried to convince Fabio to head back up to his apartment, tried to lift his legs into his his pants, his feet into his shoes, to calm him down. He appeared to like the ambulance, always relaxing within its box, under its oxygen, soothed by its questionnaire. His part-time aide was late in one instance, and she pleaded for his release from their care. I had to sign a form, holding the EMTs free of responsibility for his release. That was last spring.

This summer Fabio's son was getting married, and so came up from Florida to visit his father, to fit him into a tux. He told me he would get them out of NYC, move them to Florida as soon as he could. I hadn't seen much of him in ten years and wasn't sure if this was just bluster. Fabio couldn't make it to the wedding, it was in Columbia after all, and the day before we were to leave for Minnesota, Mrs. Rojas asked if I would look in on him while they were in Columbia. I wanted to help, but I had to tell her we were on our way out too, and wouldn't be around to look after him. His son was there, in the hall at that moment, and maybe that is when he realized that this arrangement, a hodge podge of aides, family, and neighbors doing their best was untenable.

We continued to listen to Fabio's wails from the apartment upstairs, opposite. Often Mrs. Rojas would come down to ask that I help lift Fabio off the floor, onto a chair or couch. It was sad, upsetting, but okay. And life went on like this for the months of autumn, through Sandy, through garlic planting and school finals. When we returned from Minnesota after Christmas, a trip mired in our own family's health and age issues, we learned that the apartment upstairs and opposite was empty. The Rojas had moved out, down to Florida. I felt terrible that we couldn't say hasta luego, Fabio. And we would do anything to have him upstairs, wailing and demented, over those who live above us now. A true neighbor.

Hasta luego, Fabio.