Pioneers

The development where we live now is a relatively new one, and there are patches of recently disturbed "vacant" ground dotted around its periphery. In particular, there's a knoll out our back window that was scraped and reshaped by earth-moving machinery just last year. In one growing season it has gone from bare earth to a thriving and complex meadow ecosystem. A cover crop may have been broadcast for erosion control, but most of what has sprouted up appears to have arisen from seeds that lay dormant in the ground for months or years, awaiting an opportunity to germinate.

My unscientific survey finds, just beyond our walls, Queen Anne's lace, yarrow, great mullein, hare's-foot clover and several other clovers, crown vetch, purple vetch, and bird's-foot trefoil, various grasses, fireweed (Erechtites hieraciifolius), asters and goldenrods (probably several species of both), boneset (which a worried neighbor mistook for poison hemlock), thistles, and evening-primrose. Down an adjoining embankment, where there has been growth for a longer period, there are cattails and phragmites, blackberry brambles, pokeweed, whorled and purple loosestrife, and agalinis. That's not counting the ones I haven't noticed or can't identify. A healthy percentage of these plants are so-called "aliens" that weren't part of the precolumbian landscape of North America but have long since become naturalized.

An even less scientific survey turns up a host of insects, notably various dragonflies, bees, wasps, beetles, and a scattering of butterflies (but few swallowtails and monarchs, perhaps because the milkweeds haven't yet appeared). There are orb-weavers and other spiders, and unfortunately ticks as well. We've had regular visits from wild turkeys and deer and occasional sightings of coyotes, groundhogs, and skunks. One evening we spotted a porcupine browsing unhurriedly and almost invisibly among the clumps of herbage.

Earlier in the summer there were woodcocks buzzing and courting at dusk, and goldfinches, bluebirds, hummingirds, and mourning doves have been abundant. We hear owls often, and no doubt they hunt for voles and other small mammals as soon as the sun goes down.There is certainly far more that we don't see than what we do.

A dirt road leading out of the back of the development has been widened and graded in the last few weeks, and further construction is expected. No doubt the resident and transient flora and fauna will be in flux for some time. But it's astonishing how quickly and vigorously life can seize hold, given half a chance.

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Many of the plant species mentioned above, as well as their faunal associates, are profiled by John Eastman in The Book of Field and Roadside: Open-Country Weeds, Trees and Wildflowers of Eastern North America (2003). Like its companions The Book of Forest and Thicket and The Book of Swamp and Bog it is illustrated with line drawings by Amelia Hansen, and was published by Stackpole Books; all three volumes now seem to be out of print.

Parts Unknown

A young officer named Giovanni Drogo sets out on a journey to his first post in the temporary company of a colleague, and looks back over his native city.

They had reached the brow of a hill. Drogo turned to see the city against the light; the morning smoke rose from the roofs. He picked out the window of his room. Probably it was open. The women were tidying up. They would unmake the bed, shut everything up in a cupboard and then bar the shutters. For months and months no one would enter except the patient dust and, on sunny days, thin streaks of light. There it was, shut up in the dark, the little world of his childhood. His mother would keep it like that so that on his return he could find himself again there, still be a boy within its walls even after his long absence—but of course she was wrong in thinking that she could keep intact a state of happiness which was gone for ever or hold back the flight of time, wrong in imagining that when her son came back and the doors and windows were reopened everything would be as before.

I read Dino Buzzati's novel The Tartar Steppe probably forty years ago and hadn't given it much thought since (although I kept my copy) until I chanced upon a second-hand copy of an Italian edition a few weeks back. I don't speak Italian and have never studied the language, but with my Spanish and French and regular reference to Stuart C. Hood's 1952 translation I can pick my way slowly through it. There are advantages to reading this way; not only does it give me access to Buzzati's actual language but it forces me to linger over every sentence, to read and re-read. A book I could probably breeze through in a couple of days in translation should keep me occupied for weeks.

Buzzati's book has, inevitably, been compared to Kafka's The Castle (solitary man summoned to mysterious fortress for purposes that remain obscure), but it has a lightness and a sadness of its own.

In a gap in the nearby crags (they were already deep in darkness), behind a disorderly range of crests and incredibly far off, Giovanni Drogo saw a bare hill which was still bathed in the red light of the sunset—a hill which seemed to have sprung from an enchanted land; on its crest there was a regular, geometric band of a peculiar yellowish colour—the silhouette of the Fort.

But how far off it was still! Hours and hours yet on the road and his horse was spent. Drogo gazed with fascination and wondered what attraction there could be in that solitary and almost inaccessible keep, so cut off from the world. What secrets did it hide? But time was running short. Already the last rays of the sun were slowly leaving the distant hill and up its yellow bastions swarmed the dark hordes of encroaching night.

New York Review Books, which has made a point of keeping Buzzati's work accessible in English, has issued a newer translation entitled, for some reason, The Stronghold.