As both of my long-time readers know, I take my dogs for a walk down Fouche Gap Road almost every day. As I walked along the road one day in September, while it was still summer, I felt transported to my summertime youth. This was a typical walk down a typical country road on a typical summer day. Listen to the cicadas; this is the sound of summer as I remember it. These are annual cicadas rather than the more famous periodic cicadas.
For some reason I have not been able to insert the video the way I normally do, so I have to insert a link here. Click on the link, then, when you are finished, hit the “back” button on your browser.
If you listen carefully, you can hear acorns falling out of the trees. You may also hear a pileated woodpecker in the background. Of course every time I started recording, it seemed like the acorns stopped falling, and when I stopped recording, they started falling again. Shy oak trees, I guess.
We have lots of oaks on the mountain, and this year was a particularly good one for acorns, a mast year. They accumulated almost in drifts at the side of the road.
Zoe likes acorns, but she can’t figure out what to do with them once she picks them up.
It’s been a while since I last posted, but, fortunately, not much has been going on. Leah is still having pain issues. I am still here. The dogs are still here. And one cat is still here.
Fall has fallen here. We have had lows in the lower 30’s. Thursday morning it was 39F, a little warmer than the previous night. One of the people I see on my dog walks stopped Thursday morning and told me they had 29F and lots of frost in the valley. Leah still hasn’t quite internalized the temperature workings of a mountain top. It seems counterintuitive, but on the coldest, stillest, clearest nights, it’s not unusual for us to have lows 10F higher than at the base of the mountain.
I have been semi-busy trying to get firewood for colder weather. I was afraid we were going to fall short, but it looks like maybe we won’t. A large hardwood that smells like an oak fell last year down the hill from the house, and has been seasoning in place ever since. I took my old Mule — the Kawasaki type rather than the four-legged type — down to cut some wood. It’s a rough ride down, and a somewhat concerning turnaround because of the slope. Here the Mule is, waiting patiently for me to cut and split some wood.
The photo is a little misleading, because the slope of the hill is not really obvious, but I was pointing the phone camera pretty much level, so, aimed below the Mule. The slope is steep enough that it’s kind of hard to walk on.
There is a stump just below the left rear wheel of the Mule. That was a standing dead tree I cut on Wednesday. The top of the tree got caught in a fork of a nice-size green tree and wouldn’t let the dead tree fall any further. I had to cut the green tree, which I don’t like to do, to get the dead one down. They both resisted, but I managed to get both on the ground. Unfortunately the standing tree had been dead for a while, and was pretty rotten in the middle. The tree I was originally working on has also been dead for a while, but most of its soft, punky wood in in about the outer inch, leaving some nice, hard wood on the inside.
That kind of wood makes me think of my brother, who would have loved to get some of it for his shop.
Here is our current hardwood supply in one of our firewood racks.
It’s nearly half full. There is an empty rack the same size behind it, and a third rack almost filled with pine as well. I don’t like to burn pine, but I was afraid that’s all we would have, so I got some.
I’ll get more Friday, when this should post. Eventually I think I will have to make a new rack for the hardwood, but that’s a problem for another day, one when I actually have a truck to haul material.
I couldn’t get firewood without the Mule. It’s 13 years old, and has done a lot of hard work. It wouldn’t run last summer. I replaced the carburetor twice before I discovered a leaky fuel line coming out of the gas tank. Now it looks pretty rough, but it runs well. I wouldn’t buy a 13-year-old UTV like the Mule, and I wouldn’t sell it either.
But about that Fall. We have several patches of morning glories around the yard, slowly fading away. They’re a messy plant, but I leave them because I like them. Unfortunately, ours don’t have much in the way of blooms. Here is one by the driveway.
That’s my finger pointing at the flower. It probably looks impressive to an ant. And here is one down across the corner from our lot.
Why don’t these grow in our yard?
Speaking of yards, our front yard has been mowed only once this summer. I chose to plant zoysia specifically because it looks good unmowed. It’s deep, probably eight inches at least. Sam is up to his knees in it. Zoe finds it comfortable for a quick nap.
The grass is actually greener than it looks here, but it’s on its way to brown. Once it’s fully browned, I’ll mow it short so next year’s grass won’t have to fight its way up.
And, finally, it’s stinkbug season here. They light on sunny surfaces and window screens, and sometimes they come inside. They are not particularly troublesome, but they are a pest. I was glad to see this on Thursday night.
It’s a granddaddy longlegs eating a stink bug in our garage. Granddad’s body is the short oval on top, and the defunct stinkbug is the longer, horizontal oval on the bottom. I didn’t know granddaddy longlegs preyed on stinkbugs, but now that I do, I’ll be especially careful of them.
Spring weather may be variable in Georgia, but one thing is going to be pretty consistent — pollen.
I walked around in the front yard on Tuesday. Later in the evening, when I was sitting with my feet on a pillow on our coffee table, I noticed some yellow smudges on the pillow. It was pollen off my socks. This is what my shoes looked like. I brushed the pollen off my left shoe for comparison.
The pollen count here was 3336 particles per cubic meter, high, but nowhere near as high as the record. Atlanta’s highest recorded pollen count was 9369 particles on March 12, 2021.
They say that tree pollen is the highest contributor now. That’s mainly pine and oak. Around here, it’s mainly pine that produces the billowing clouds of fine, yellow particles that coat everything. I have to rinse my truck windshield with a hose every time I go anywhere. We park our car in the garage, so it stays relatively clean, but an hour outside leaves a fine layer of yellow particles over the entire car.
It’s really quite annoying. A locally well-known gardening expert recommends avoiding painting outside from mid-March to early April. It’s early April right now, and I wouldn’t paint anything outside that I didn’t want yellow.
Most of the pine pollen should be gone by May. I hope.
There are thousands of acres of forest land around where we live here on the mountain. Berry College, which backs up to Lavender Mountain to our south and east, has a 27,000-acre campus, much of it in forest. Their property extends across Fouche Gap Road. Boral Brick Company owns hundreds of acres along Fouche Gap and Huffaker Road, which we take into town. Most of that is forest land. A few weeks ago we noticed that there was logging equipment along Huffaker Road four or five miles towards town. It didn’t take long for a huge swath of mostly pines to be cut, delimbed, and trucked away.
And then I noticed that an entrance had been cut into the woods at the intersection of Fouche Gap Road and Huffaker Road at the bottom of the mountain. It took only two or three days for the area to look like this.
As you can see, to the right of the road the woods are still intact. The area in the image used to lookd like this.
And now a large part of the area to the right of the road has been logged.
Loggers have pretty amazing machinery these days. They have equipment that can grab a tree and cut it off at the base. They have other equipment that can skin the limbs off the trunk. Then they have yet another piece of equipment that grabs a bundle of trunks and places them onto a trailer. When they finish, it looks like a battle has been fought. And it has, a battle in man’s war on nature.
The forest they are cutting is not mature; it’s really not even a healthy forest. The trees are mostly pine, which is what pulpwood loggers want, and they are crowded, tall, and thin. This is a Google Earth image of the area at the intersection of Fouche Gap Road and Huffaker Road.
Although this image is obviously from prior to the logging, you can see pretty much where the logging is taking place. It’s the area that looks smoother, with a finer-grained texture compared to the other wooded areas. This area has been clear-cut before, maybe 30 years ago. It’s much closer to flat land than the area just to the top of the image, where the road starts climbing the mountain. The forest that’s higher up the slopes is older., Although I don’t think it’s mature, it is approaching maturity, with a mix of pine and hardwood. The trees are bigger with wider crowns, and they are more separated from each other.
Everyone in the area is wondering what’s going to happen with the land now that it has been cleared. The brick company has had the land for sale, but the signs are gone now. Some neighbors are worried that Georgia Power plans to use it to store coal ash from nearby coal-fired power plants. There is already one storage area on the opposite side of Huffaker Road just out of sight to the right of the image. The closest coal-fired plant that is still operating is visible from our front porch about 25 miles away. I think some of our neighbors worry about heavy truck traffic, which is bad enough, but coal ash can contain arsenic, lead and mercury, among other things. I would just as soon not have another storage pit in the neighborhood.
I think the wood is bound for pulp, probably a few miles away at the International Paper mill where they make liner board for corrugated cardboard. The sulfur stench from the mill used to provide eastbound travelers from Alabama with their first hint that they were approaching Rome. If the wind was just right, we could smell the mill nearly nine miles away where I grew up.
A lot of the machinery of the modern world is either unpleasant itself, or leaves the world a less pleasant place.
A cold front moved through Wednesday afternoon, bringing clouds and rain. After the front, there was some clearing, just enough for the sun to illuminate the clouds to the east, over town.
The more I look at this shot, the more I like it. I took it with the panorama mode on my iPhone. I keep being impressed with what nice shots it can make.
I walked the dogs before noon, while it was cloudy but not raining. We are past the fall peak for the leaves, but some maples still held onto some color.
I hope everyone has a good Thanksgiving.
Copyright 2013 Mark V. Paris
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