Sky Watcher Lays Down

Windthrown trees toppled by Helene on Friday, September 27, 2024: a 160 year-old red oak and a younger, long dead ash.

Fourteen days now since Helene winds laid the holler’s oldest tree on its side. A red oak. Another much older ash, long dead, hugged close to its side and toppled, too. When the red oak fell, the dead ash fell with it.

The ash’s naked trunk, having several years ago shed its bark, is inscribed with ash borer hieroglyphs, but those meandering assassins of ash stands are long gone from this scene. They’ve moved on. Scads of dead ash around here. Neighbor mentioned once that it is a bad omen to mess with dead trees. Don’t cut them down, he said. Along came Helene, not a superstitious one.

The red oak’s trunk is forty inches in diameter, which timestamps it to 160 years old, give or take. I emailed the photo above to a local arborist who last winter stopped out to pass his knowing eyes over the trees around here and to bid on some corrective pollarding for the black walnuts nearest to the house. But the arborist lives in a place that was washed hard by New River flood crest, plus no doubt the crew is taking on more urgent work over the last little while.

Wednesday I called a local sawmill. The hulking oak is too big for many loggers to cut on site. He told me about a couple of chainsaw millers from the Floyd area who might be able to slab it on site, thus making it possible to haul away. While red oaks are valuable, they are not as valuable as white oaks, black walnuts, and so on. He explained, too, that the size of this hyperion would be a problem for most mills. So although the tree has a lot of “board feet” lumber to it, getting someone to take on its transport and milling will be difficult. I listened. It was an earnest and generous conversation; free consultation of a sort. And afterward I wrote to the one chainsaw miller whose contact information I could find.

We haven’t decided to do anything with the windthrown tree. It stood there flourishing such a short time ago that it is taking some getting used to, its collapse. Walking Feta on the loop means witnessing accelerated leaf exfoliation, and the hummock and hollow shows for where an animal has burrowed beneath it, where water is puddled, where the upper third of the hummock is drying out. I read about how the hummock and hollow is a site for bursts of living, what might count as a bloom space, a swell of activity. So maybe that is that. The resting oak has already been disturbed enough. And in another 160 years how many of its acorns will have rooted?

In the among the branches, the post where I had mounted the phone of the wind is also on its side and the phone itself is tossed, not unlike the two times I accidentally bumped its edge with the mower’s roll bar and sent it dialing its own long gone elders with a plea of will somebody please discourage this clumsy fool from mowing back here. Heard! Heard. Left as-is, the sprawled crown won’t allow me to mow there again. But I would like to recover the phone, reconnect for this spectral time of year, maybe fasten it to the red oak. Or let the ash have a turn.

Nothing much especially conclusive in this. The uncertainty, the surprise, then wobble, then wilting loss, maybe, is the feeling set. A dry, cool feeling set, and crunchy. When a storm blisters a region as forcefully as Helene did western North Carolina, Asheville and surrounds, something about noting the end of one special tree and noticing it as an intensity doesn’t seem entirely appropriate. Sure, it is unfortunate, but the feelings, like breeze sweeping last summer’s tall standing grasses, are not quite structural enough to write into emotional terms. Whatever sense of loss folds into the everyday, a puff of metabole, ferried by a flash of rain and wind, thus crossing over, quietly, wondering what tomorrow holds and the day after that and next spring, too.

The towering red oak shown here, two weeks after the storm took it down.

A Five-question Series

The latest bulletin from The Common Table reached subscribers last Wednesday, May 29, this time announcing an article titled “Food Thinking.” The article’s premises were inviting, in that it works across a few theoretical beacons, Anna Tsing, Horst Rittel, and Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, to expand the thesis that food studies is suited to dusting off design thinking, reviving again those dimensions of design thinking that have worn thin or blinked out. You’ll find good stuff there, worthy of reading and worthy of returns, on mindsets, or questioning attitudes; with such practiced, inquisitive dispositions follows something almost ritualistic in noticing taken-for-granted interdependencies, in a feel for the organism, whether the corn plant or the baby bok choy leafing dark green hopeful from the raised beds where we planted them in mid-May. I don’t quite identify with design powerfully enough to prefer that same language (or field of specialization), but I did read in this piece something akin to a foodwise network sense, an atoll whose cartographic attempts I imagine would be delicious and intriguing at once. And this, in turn, relayed me to look around at more of The Common Table, to explore a few of the other recently published pieces beyond “Mother’s Hand Taste,” the piece on Jiwon Woo’s ever-fascinating work about son-mat, which I wrote about a few months ago and also explored in the spring semester with students who were taking Food Writing.

There is much to admire, appreciate, and learn from at The Common Table. I found especially standout the series “On Food and Education,” which follows the pattern of five-question interviews. The five questions invite responses from a host of respondents, and each is featured in elegant, readable posts, organized with the questions as the governing structure. The five questions are

  • How would you explain your perception of food as an educational discipline or tool to someone who might think that means just cookery lessons?
  • What are you doing/have you done to change understanding related to food?
  • Who are you trying to reach and teach and why?
  • Where would you like to take your work in this field; what are your goals?
  • What is the big-picture perspective in terms of the future of food education and where is it coming from?

The repeating pattern causes me to find the series more inviting as a series; there is so much good stuff here. It got me thinking, too, and again, about the substitutive interplays with food, writing, and visuality, about how this interviewing format, because it is simple and consistent, coheres multiple responses and fashions them into a genre unto itself. Semi-structured, multi-phase interviews have, as I conceive of them, ascended as the interview method that has the best chance of summoning in-depth perspectives, yet these strictly structured, one-phase interviews, like we find in The Common Table‘s series, offer just as much for the researching writer’s repertoire. I suspect that part of what explains my quiet, unchecked bias in favor of semi-structured interviews is that academic publications rarely publish in plain view the uncut and unfiltered responses from interviewees. This is a meandering way of expressing my own realization that the value of the strictly structured interviews has been skewed by wading too deep for too long in academically styled prose. What would a five-question series on writing be? Or visuality? What would the questions be? Who would be the interviewees?

So many pieces in the five-question series prompt new ideas and invite thoughtful responses, such that it is hard to choose one as a paragon, though I suppose “On Food and Education: Marije Vogelzang” rises to the top because I have already bookmarked it for a future section of Food Writing. Her response to the first question strikes connection with our lesson on apple and orange mindfulness, the day when, with Thich Nhat Hanh’s guidance, we linger, slowing down with a piece of fruit to listen for the crunch or to test edges as we pull a Mandarin orange apart, segment by segment. Vogelzang’s lists are rangy and uncanny, playful but not self-consciously so. I love this as a model for the inventional copia generated from something simple, ordinary, everyday. That this piece strikes in so many directions—and all from the repeating five-questions—is why I am holding onto it, tagging it for returns in my teaching, my writing, and my glimpsing thoughts for what would one day be a striking feature in a rhet/comp journal, perhaps.

Deterministic Footfalls

Here’s a fascinating RadioLab podcast on deep patterns in cityscapes, “Cities.”

After listening, follow it with a sip–a chaser–from Calvino’s Invisible Cities:

In vain, great-hearted Kublai, shall I attempt to describe Zaira, city of high bastions. I could tell you how many steps make up the streets rising like stairways, and the degree of the arcades’ curves, and what kind of zinc scales cover the roofs; but I already know this would be the same as telling you nothing. […] The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls. (10-11)

Manovich, "Data Visualization as New Abstraction and as Anti-Sublime"

 Manovich, Lev. "Data Visualization as New Abstraction and as Anti-Sublime."
Small Tech: The Culture of Digital Tools. Eds. Byron Hawk, David Reider,
and Ollie Oviedo. Electronic Mediations Ser. 22. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P,
2008.

Why render data visually? Lev Manovich, in "Data Visualization as New
Abstraction and as Anti-sublime," the opening chapter in Small Tech
(reprinted from ArtPhoto, 2003),
responds to this with an answer that, in spirit, moves beyond the "data
epistemology" of a cumbersome, old (perhaps even mythical) scientism. Why render
data visually? "[T]o show us the other realities embedded in our own, to show us
the ambiguity always present in our perception and experience, to show us what
we normally don’t notice or pay attention to" (9). By the end of this brief
article, Manovich begins to get round to the idea of a rhetoric of data
visualization, even if he never calls it this. Despite being caught up in a
representationalist framework as he accounts for what data visualization does,
Manovich eventually keys on "daily interaction with volumes of data and numerous
messages" as the "more important challenge" facing us. That is, we are
steeped now in a new "data-subjectivity."

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Peeples, “‘Seeing’ the WPA With/Through Postmodern Mapping”

Peeples, Tim. “‘Seeing’ the WPA With/Through Postmodern Mapping.” The Writing Program Administrator as Researcher. Shirley K. Rose and Irwin Weiser, eds. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1999. 153-167.

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Flower, Swarts, and Hayes, "Designing Protocol Studies of the Writing Process: An Introduction"

Flower,
Linda S., Heidi Swarts, and John R. Hayes. "Designing Protocol Studies of
the Writing Process: An Introduction." New Directions In Composition
Research
. Richard Beach and Lillian S. Bridwell, eds. New York:
Guilford, 1984. 53-71.

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Flower and Hayes, "Uncovering Cognitive Processes in Writing: An Introduction to Protocol Analysis"

Hayes,
John R., and Linda S. Flower. "Uncovering Cognitive Processes in Writing: An
Introduction to Protocol Analysis." Research On Writing: Principles and
Methods
. Peter Mosenthal, Lynne Tamor, and Sean A. Walmsley, eds. New York:
Longman, 1983. 207-220.

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