Unknown Aetiology

Now, the first day of fall, there's always a leaf falling. The splintered light constantly moving. It's quite dramatic. The fox was back, alone. I rolled her an apple, then as she hung around, another, and watched her eat. Her paw to eye coordination is excellent, and she's quite dainty. Then she perked up her ears, picked up an apple core and disappeared. I knew someone or something was coming, and it was a root digger, wondering where he could dig. The other side of the next ridge east, or this side of the next ridge west I told him, everything between is a Ginseng Wilderness Area. I must have looked a fright, a look I cultivate by not cultivating any look at all. What you see is what you get. He left very quickly, looking back over his shoulder. The legend grows. The ticks are not gone. I'd edged into the woods, after some mushrooms, and when I got home I had to bag my clothes and wipe down with alcohol. Since I had the Norton out I went back and read the intro to the earliest text, Anglo-Saxon, then around 1200 into Middle English. In London they were speaking a Norman-French; there was Manx, there was Jersey, there was Gaelic. I think of Claxton, fairly often, when I think about language. Movable type is one of the great things ever, but you need a codified language, AND you have to assume a reading public. I can't even begin to imagine. I could run a small boat rental business, one of those estuaries in south Georgia, a few crab pots, a trot-line. It's the perfect place to be, to watch lily-pads float on the water. Dark and very still, I can hear two small animals, nosing through the duff. I remember a night in Utah, south and west of Bluff. I'd driven to the end of the road, then hiked in for several hours. I knew there was a spring up the blind canyon that was marked at its entrance by a balanced stone. The Utes had a name for it that meant, roughly, "unhappy mother-in-law", just a couple of more miles, at the end of the canyon, there's a dwelling place. It could have housed and supported maybe eight or ten people. There's a perfect rock shelf, that protects a granary, a fire-pit, and places you might imagine sleeping on pine boughs. This was one of the finest spots I've ever found myself and I camped there maybe a dozen times. I never saw another person. Two rock faces of drawings. Five hundred years of flaked chert. The spring itself came out between two rocks and there was a basin, silted in, that had been carved into the rock. In the dry season it only flowed a gallon an hour, but in the spring it would have flowed enough to raise an early crop of corn. I carry a little piece of plastic pipe in my pack, to direct the stream out and into a pan. A gallon of water an hour is actually quite a lot of water. Glenn had noticed the new devices fitted on the end of guard-rails, they added miles of guard-rails this past year. The ends used to curve back and down, and die into the ground, which was stupid because it provided a ramp for flipping cars over. This new device absorbs impact and peels back. On the trip into town, one of them had been deployed. I stopped and looked, and I think it did exactly what it was supposed to do. I was coming back home on Forest Service roads and I was completely lost, someplace between the Boy Scout camp and the Forest Service horse trails, when I saw an apple tree, heavy with fruit. I stopped to collect a bag for the fox, and they were pretty good, so I collected another bag to make applesauce. Lost is relative, better to say I didn't know where I was. The Forest Service roads always come out on 52 or 125. Back home I had to shelve some books and I pulled out some early Beckett, Molloy in particular because I remembered a section of that [Molloy And His Sucking Stones] that I wanted to read again. It's a very funny passage. Another book from JC, Wildwood, by Roger Deakin, who's one of the people Macfarlane references in Landmarks. Deep clover. The library called and they were holding a book for me, in the interest of making every trip count, I picked up a few things for the larder, another cured smoked jowl, some charred red peppers in olive oil.