The cows may seem to vaguely follow his whereabouts, but their attention is not vague. Mike, owner of the cows, comes up twice a day with giant hay bales skewered onto the front and back of his John Deere tractor, which he spreads in different parts of the farm, leaving swirling, Celtic patterns, figure-eights of uneaten hay all over the farm. I blame the breeders for their ungainly, top heavy bodies.Įvery time I am here I do some cow watching. Their hooves do seem extremely dainty for their ponderous bodies, and I have often wondered that they don’t just topple over on the steep hillsides of Vinegar Hollow. Perhaps the insouciance with which cows shit is part of their peacefulness, part of the patience that allows them to be thought of in certain cultures as sacred.īerger also made the observation that cows walk as if on high heels. This is his point of departure for seeking meaning in “shit” and the nature of cows: The fallen apple is too pristine to speak to the friendly cowpat. In his essay about the yearly cleaning of his outhouse, “ Muck and its Entanglements: Cleaning the Outhouse,” he describes a local schoolroom story of a conversation between a cowpat and a fallen apple. He also said, even when nearing 90, that writing never got any easier for him, though drawing did.īerger had been an influential art critic, author of Ways of Seeing, but from Quincy in the Haute Savoie, he wrote about the people and their down-to-earth work, making hay, shepherding, and the like. I think he would affirm that it is ok to be a low-level, stop-gap writer like me. Most would say that Berger was a pretty high-level, stop-gap writer. One can be a stop-gap writer of or for almost anything. I picture myself as a stop-gap man rather than a consequential, professional writer. What has prompted me to write over the years is the hunch that something needs to be told, and that if I don’t try to tell it, it risks not being told. In an essay for The Guardian in 2014, he wrote: January 2, 2017), the English writer who spent 43 years living in a small village in the Haute Savoie of the French Alps, in part to chronicle the peasant way of life (he preferred the word peasant to describe the rural worker). These first few days of January, while thinking determinedly about the yellow-stalked puffball, I read obituaries of John Berger (b. Why? Why do some people have certain inclinations that seem necessary, like a cosmic job, despite how difficult to honor along with all one’s other responsibilities? Someone posted a photo of the yellow-stalked puffball found in North Carolina about a year ago.įor some reason I have always felt the role of reporter or recorder of the hollow’s news, whether about a puffball or water-sprouted old apple trees, as my calling. It is a site where ordinary people, or citizen scientists, can upload photos for sharing and identification. My Internet search reminded me of Project Noah. It’s hard to imagine mistaking Calostoma lutescens for anything else.

It looks like a little yellow globe with puckered red lips, sporting a tattered collar, held aloft by an odd pedestal of half-digested pasta. This distinctive, funky fungus is fairly common in the southern Appalachians, but has been reported from Arkansas to Massachusetts. Stage 3 of yellow-stalked puffball: net-like, fibrous stalk elevates “balloon” for spore dispersal. As we walk down the trail, we find more and more of them in various stages of development, all of which we had missed on the way up. On bended knee, however, I come face to face with a strange life form. Even when almost upon him I do not see anything under his gaze. I am thinking about how I love these woods, and that, though they do not have the diversity and flamboyance of a tropical rain forest, there are surprises, like the British soldiers, and undoubtedly there are very beautiful mosses, lichens, and liverworts that have never been named, when I hear a loud “Wow!” I race to catch up with my husband. We walk up to a large bend and then turn around, retracing our steps. The mosses look prosperous also at this time of the year, their green rich and glowing. Large patches, like miniature gardens, occur frequently along the sides of the trail.

This seems to be their season as they look fresh and new. They are bright and bold, in lime green uniforms and orange red helmets. We notice coyote scat, blunt at one end and pointed at the other, a pale grey brown that blends with the fallen leaves. There have been other travelers on this road. Lichen-and-moss garden along logging road.

Colors of autumn 94 cucumber