Just Off Main Street by Steven Mulak

JUST OFF MAIN STREET

A Neighborhood Naturalist’s Almanac

Just Off Main Street is my latest book. It is an attempt to be recognized outside of the genre of “outdoor writing.” In Main Street, I string together a series of essays about nature and the suburbs—subjects as diverse as gardening, the night sky, maple syrup, and wildflowers, all held together under the format of a month-by-month almanac complete with observations on the weather and the changing seasons. And to prove you can’t get away from who you are, there are pieces in here about woodcock and migration, decoy making and black ducks, scenting and bird dogs, and trout fishing. Of the thousand topics I would have liked to have covered, I settled on a small fraction of them. In truth, Main Street is the sort of book I could write again and again for the rest of my life and never run out of material.  

If Wings of Thunder was a salute to William Harnden Foster, this one pays homage to Hal Borland. I’ve filled my book with references to and quotes from Borland, and my chapter titles are lifted from his essays. Hal Borland set the standard of reflective nature essays, and any comparison of my writing to his I consider a compliment.

I gave some ink to the part of me who paints landscapes in oils and watercolors, with references and explanations and a view of nature through the eyes of a painter. We couldn’t include the paintings I mention in Main Street, but I did a bunch of sketches for the book, all in pencil. 

The book, unfortunately, was published in soft cover form. As with my other titles, this book is available from the publisher, Countrysport/Down East. I’ve also seen it for sale in a dozen places on line and at the Orvis store and at Kittery Trading Post, If you’d like an autographed copy, please contact me. As often as not, people buy books for someone else, and I’ve been asked to write something nice about that person in the flyleaf. I’m always glad to do that sort of thing. 

Below are three excerpts from Main Street.

Excerpt from “The Flower’s Beginning”:

The first woodland wildflowers are in bloom now in an annual but very limited engagement. Beneath the leaf-barren birches the white blossoms of bloodroot appear like scattered bits of tissue above the forest floor. In the litter beneath the pines are the sometimes-white, sometimes-lavender, sometimes-pink hepatica, as delicate as the African violets my wife pampers on the window ledge at home. The delicate blossoms of wood anemone and arbutus are worth seeking out, if you can find them. They are not nearly as common as they ought to be.

In the low areas, if you're not afraid to get your feet wet, you may find my own personal favorite, the Jack-in-the-pulpits and the buttercup-yellow marsh marigolds growing in and around running water. And, as if to offset the rarity of anemone and arbutus, there are the violets—blue, purple, white, with varieties and variations that seem infinite.

          Woodland wildflowers are mostly bulb-type plants, springing anew from roots that lay dormant through the winter. The only sun available to them on the forest floor is in early springtime before the woodlands leaf out. To take advantage of it, they get going as soon as the frost is out of the ground. These first flowers are short-lived blossoms, taking the sun while they can and often fading before the plant sends up its first leaf. Perhaps it is for this reason that nearly all of the flowers that man has taken into his garden trace their origins to the blossoms of the field rather than the forest.

In a few weeks—once the trees leaf out—the shade-loving spring flowers will make their appearance; Canada mayflower, Solomon seals, (both true and false,) starflower, trillium, and the impossibly delicate lady slippers. Those are all part of the second act of the woodland flower show, and it waits until the forest shade is established.

          March and April can seem the tired part of the winter-to-spring transition. The mantle of snow no longer covers the damage of the winter season, and we all feel an impatience as nature pauses before beginning her spring cleaning. In the woodlands, early spring's first blossoms belie that pause. They're not as showy as a pasture grown to daisies and black-eyed Susans, nor as fragrant as milkweed or wild roses, but those come later, when the world is green and the sun is high. At this impatient time the pure whiteness of a bloodroot flower is a signal that spring at least has its foot in the door.

Excerpt from “A Blind Date With Summer”:

Young red tailed hawks are learning to hunt during these first weeks of July, and not doing too good a job of it. They act like fast cars with bad brakes, and crash into power lines and bushes and, as I’m enjoying the shade, the Cady Street elm. Afterward, the young hawk sits on a near-by utility pole looking disheveled and dazed.

It all seems comical in a Marx Brothers sort of way, but it has to be the controlling factor on the hawk population. If a young hawk breaks a wing during the learning process—and it seems apparent that such damage is not an unusual event—it’s the end of the line for that particular bird. 

There was a time when I tried to become a hawk expert. By that, I mean I was going to become someone who could identify more hawks than the ubiquitous red-tails and the little sparrow hawks on the roadside fence wires. I worked at my education for a few months one summer, and always had binoculars and bird books at ready. It soon became painfully evident that most species had light and dark morphs and completely different adult and juvenile plumages. The males of some species are different than females—in some instances, completely so. Size variants overlap. There are geographic variations, seasonal plumages, and infinite degrees of variations and differences. Then there’s the fact that the names of hawks sound like adjectives but aren’t; red shouldered hawks don’t have red shoulders, sharp-shinned hawks don’t have sharp shins, and if you would identify a rough-legged hawk, don’t look for rough legs. It was all enough to make an ornithology student switch to phys-ed. I finally gave up.

But I still enjoy watching hawks, even if I can’t always tell one species from the other. Among the few things I managed to learn is that the most visible of the hawks are the family known as buteos. You’ve seen them sailing high overhead in the summer—they seem to be able to glide forever without beating their wings. Red-tailed hawks outnumber all the other buteos put together, so if you have to guess what kind of hawk that is, “red-tail” is a safe bet. This bird’s name is about as close as we come to a descriptive handle in the hawk family. Having said that, it should be noted that only the top side of the tail feathers are colored terra-cotta red, and immature birds have a nondescript gray-brown tail.  

Hawks spend their every waking hour hunting. There is a fascination in trying to figure out what they’re doing; Harriers hover in the air, waiting for a hiding mouse to reappear; kestrels float and drift and reverse, every bit as maneuverable as the flying bugs they feed on; Cooper’s hawks speed along through back yards and woodlands, hoping to surprise a squirrel or a songbird; red-tailed hawks soar like high altitude bombers, ready to become a falling bomb when their target appears. Hawks make their living while operating in full view of anyone who wants to observe them.

That’s me. I’m not a devoted birder—I may not always know exactly what I’m seeing, but I’m in love with the looking. And here, in early July, its fun to watch the antics of the young red-tails earning their wings. They haven’t quite mastered the maneuver at the end of a power dive, but it seems they’re getting closer with each mistake.

Excerpt from “A Brisk Wind in the Treetops”:

A few years ago, my home town of Chicopee celebrated its 150^th anniversary, and when I visited the local Chamber of Commerce recently, some of the old souvenirs from that celebration were still on prominent display. One of the artifacts was a photomontage taken to commemorate the dedication of the city hall in 1871, with vignettes of the various town landmarks from more than a century ago. Prominently featured was the then-new city hall, modeled after the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. There were also photos of several then-important factories, all long-since gone.  The two Romanesque grammar schools in the photo are still in use today.  And there was the highly-recognizable gothic stone Catholic church on South Street. I studied the old black-and-white picture. The church was different—younger, somehow—but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what that difference might be.

On the way home I went out of my way and drove up the hill along South Street. When I got a glimpse of Holy Name Church behind the screening grand old beech tree on the front lawn, it finally dawned on me what had changed: In the old black-and-white photo, there was a recently planted sapling next to the sidewalk. In the 130-odd years since its planting, that sapling has grown into a hundred foot tall beech tree,  and it has spread just as wide. It has enjoyed the luxury of growing in the open without competition from other trees, and over the years it become huge and full the way beech trees will if left alone. It’s smooth bark fits around the trunk like a too-tight dress on a fat lady, with bulges and sags in unusual places, and the shallow roots have humped-up the sidewalk and taken over the lawn. Like all old beech trees, it is monstrously beautiful.

What had the tree seen in 130 years? It was there when trolley cars climbed South Street, and it endured the famous blizzard of 1888. It saw JFK drive by when he campaigned for president in 1960, and stoically suffered countless school kids scratching their initials in its bark. It was already an old tree when the Elms College was founded right around the corner—it was The College of Our Lady of the Elms for Women back then. Things change, but some things endure.   

People have an almost universal inability to envision a future (or a past) that is unlike the present. That inability is often demonstrated when they plant trees and shrubs. The crowded, flat-sided yews and boxwoods that populate the foundation plantings here off Main Street are testimony to that failure, as are the trees that overhang the roofs of their owner’s homes. As nursery plants, they all begin as tiny, pathetic things that look lost and forlorn when spaced properly. Looking into the future and seeing the size they’ll be in ten years is tough to do, and imagining them as mature trees and shrubs is tougher still. Finding the right place for the sapling that someone planted on the lawn of Holy Name Church 130 years ago took more than a little imagination. 

On a stop at historic Old Deerfield Village in northern Massachusetts, a visitor almost immediately notices the full and graceful trees that dot the lawns and line the streets. Conspicuous by their absence are utility poles and overhead wires. At Deerfield, in order to preserve the appearance of things as they were before electricity, all the cables have been run underground. The improvement from an arborist’s point of view is remarkable. The Holy Name beech was lucky enough to grow in the open space of the church’s front lawn. Most other city trees aren’t so fortunate. Because of the universality of overhead utility wires, urban trees are hacked and disfigured and made to grow in the shape of wish-bones or doughnuts.

Trees outlive us, sometimes by several life spans. As such, they are living connections with the past. There’s a horse chestnut tree outside the farmhouse where my father was born in Hazardville, Connecticut. It was there and reportedly producing nuts in 1909 when my grandparents moved in, and was there when the gas station down the road was a livery stable. My father can show me where a swing used to hang from a horizontal limb, and where the farm horses were tied in its the shade during lunch breaks.

The trees I have planted in the thirty years that I’ve lived in this house have all grown taller than the roof but are still young trees. The linden in the back yard and the pin oak on the front lawn will still be young trees when I’m gone. I hope I’ve done them as good a service as did the arborist all those years ago who planted the single beech at Holy Name Church.

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2005 photo by Dave Roback

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This site was last updated 07/21/06