Rants from the Hollow

Sign resting on cut sandstone from the old log cabin

My uncle, Dr. Gordon Grender, is a Professor Emeritus of Geology at Virginia Tech. Sometime during the 70’s, he took a sample of the sandstone that is ubiquitous at the Hollow, had a slide prepared, and provided us with this report on its composition and characteristics:

Here’s specimen HEIHOL, which we picked up on our walk down near the creek last summer. This is the stuff that litters the hillside across from the trailer and makes the pond leak.  It’s pretty dull stuff except to a dyed-in-the-wool quartz-lover.

Medium-grained quartzite with rare accessory minerals, loosely cemented by quartz and hematite. Extreme porosity of about 40%; excess porosity probably once occupied by calcite, long since leached away [note: the neighbor's spring goes cloudy white after a heavy rain].  This particular specimen has probably been on its way to the creek for at least 20,000 years; perhaps more.  Long enough to remove all of the calcite, anyway.  Originally it accumulated on a gentle, stable beach about 200,000,000 years ago (give or take a few million), before the collision of Africa and Eurasia with North America, which raised a Himalayan-scale mountain range about 250 to 350 miles Southeast of the Hollow–if you’d been there you might have been able to see it’s snow-capped peaks on a clear day.  After that, no more quiet beaches! These rocks were buried a few thousand feet deep by other rocks; they “floated” upward as the overlying mass was removed by erosion–a process that continues unabated, but which will slow and stop sometime in the next 50 to 100 million years as the region comes into equilibrium–unless something else happens to disturb it.

Sandwich the thin-section between the polarizers.  The salt-and-pepper texture is QUARTZ.  How dull. Many other minerals are so colorful in polarized light! Gravestones and foundation stones made out of this rock go to pieces quickly –its that calcite cement, which is soluble in rainwater over a few decades.

Last Saturday was one of the best days I’ve ever had at the Hollow.

It didn’t start that way. I woke up to a gray and damp day, and by mid-morning, it had started to rain. It wasn’t enough rain to even start refilling the pond, and it petered out. By noon, it had become a lovely, breezy summer day, with temperatures in the low 70s, a blue sky with puffy white clouds, and just enough breeze to be refreshing. It was delicious weather–there is no other way to describe it.

I’d been skunked during the last couple of trips to the Hollow, and last July was an angling dud. This trip, they were biting better, and I got a bit more adventurous in trying out some different lures. Although it was a sunny day, which often seems to discourage our fish, this turned into a day of incredible fishing. After catching a dozen or so bluegills off the dam, I decided to try my luck at the relatively new section of pond that had excavated in the back a few years ago. I loaded up all three fishing rods, putting a small surface popper on the ultralight spinner (with a clear plastic float to give it enough weight to cast), a small jig on the second rod, and the biggest jig I’ve got on the third rod.

I sat on a large boulder that our Amish excavator had placed on the edge of the back 1/3 of the pond, and started casting towards the other hillside, about 30′ across the pond. I caught pan fish on each of the first 5 casts. Noticing that one of those lunker bass was lurking in that section of the pond, I tried the big jig. A large plastic minnow with a single hook and a lead head for weight, the jig was too heavy for the ultralight spin cast rod & reel I tied it onto (I was too lazy to untie whatever was on the medium weight spin cast rod & reel). I cast it across the pond, narrowly missing a fallen tree and the far shore, and started reeling it in. Wham! A bass latched onto it before I’d reeled it in more than 10′. The largemouth don’t really put up a fight like the bluegills and sunfish, but still, catching a 3 pounder in your own pond is a thrill. I wasn’t sure if the 4# test line would pull him out of the water, so I landed him on the shore, grabbed him by the lower lip, and after I finished admiring him, he went back–hopefully to raise up a brood of bass like they did last year.

The beautiful breezy weather meant that it was a perfect day for inner tubing. Admittedly, the pond can get…well, not scummy, but still kinda messy, with an oily film full of dead bug bits, pollen, and whatever comes from the pond up, and the trees down. The best floating requires a light breeze to send the floating film to the far side of the pond, and discourage horse flies. Elizabeth and Kirk, who unfortunately were not with me, are a lot less keen on the organic swimming pool, but this weather would have been perfect for them. I floated around for a while on one of the floats that Steve Towne and I bought 10 years ago when we spent a weekend at the Hollow with our boys (perhaps fitting for the news of that week, the floats are purple, and are labeled ‘Thriller’). I did a bit of swimming, and then dried off to go for a walk to some of the spots I don’t regularly visit.

The western slope of the Hollow was planted with white pine, maybe about 50 years ago. It used to be an intimate little pine grove, with several inches of fallen needles and a lovely Christmasy fragrance. The trees got bigger, and some of them are at least 60′ high and almost 2′ across at the base (log cabin?). We should have thinned the trees, which are too close together, and now sort of messy, but it is still a breezy and relative open part of the Hollow. On days like last Saturday, it has a distinct and pleasant pine smell. Walking through the pines to the southern property line and the upper meadow, I found a sycamore tree that I didn’t know about, bringing the total to 5.

After dad and I cleared the downed tree and stump a couple days earlier, we were able to bush hog the upper meadow, which is a bright but cool and breezy spot. The clearing has been there as long as we own the Hollow, and we’ve been mowing it, on and off, for at least 20 years. There have probably been raspberries all along, but I never really noticed them until the last few years. It seems like the number of berry thickets has increased significantly over the last few years. Certainly the big ice storm and last year’s ‘tornado’ opened up a lot of the forest floor to sunlight, but that doesn’t really explain why the periphery of this clearing should so many more raspberry bushes than it ever has had in the past. I’d been watching the berries ripen all week, and had picked enough to share with my parents a couple days earlier. Saturday, the berries were finally coming into their own. I picked and ate a couple handfuls, and then walked down the trail that we’d cleared.

I finished my walk in the SE corner of the Hollow, going back to investigate whatever animals were living in the ‘cave’. As documented in the previous post, this turned out to be a pair of very large vulture chicks (and presumably their parents). One of the properties near the Hollow used to be called Buzzard Rock, and I thought I’d seen turkey vultures descending into the trees in that part of the Hollow, but I’d never found a nesting site before. That was pretty cool.

We took an evening trip to Coshocton to have a steak dinner with Mom’s cousins, who live in town.  After a very quiet week,  all the frogs in the pond finally started singing, so after a memorable day of simple pleasures, I fell asleep to an amphibious chorus.

The SW corner of the Hollow has some large sandstone boulders, and a very burled stump that Dad has carved into a monolith to provide some turning blanks for a friend who does artisan woodworking. One boulder has some particularly interesting honeycombed erosion patterns. Lying directly next to another boulder, a sort of small ‘cave’ is formed between the two. A couple years ago, the large tree growing on top of the boulders blew over, creating a 15′ long 2′ diameter oak bridge to another boulder uphill (if I only had a Wood-Mizer).

Exploring that area of the Hollow last week, I thought I heard a funny noise coming from inside the boulder–”clack, clack, clack, clack.” I climbed up on top of the boulder, and realized it was coming from the cave. Climbing back off the boulder, I peered into the cave from the back. Suddenly, this incredibly loud hissing noise came from inside the dark cave. Woah! I couldn’t see a thing. I was pretty sure that bears didn’t hiss, or clack, but I still decided that this wasn’t the right time to figure out what was making the noise.

So a couple days later, I return. Sneaking up on the front of the cave, what should I see, but two big, furry turkey vulture chicks peering around the mouth of the cave. Maybe circumstances exaggerated my perception, but they seemed to be at least 18″ tall. I wasn’t sure if they were turkey chicks or turkey buzzard chicks, but whatever they were, they were the biggest baby birds I’ve ever seen.

I took a couple of shots using the on-camera flash, and then went around the back of the cave to see if I could get a different view. It seemed that mom and dad were not home. There was no clicking, nor any intimidating hissing.

Given that the chicks were almost 2 foot tall, I wasn’t sure what an angry adult of that species would do when cornered. There are many stories of geese actually breaking peoples’ arms (and Elizabeth tracked down several stories of fatalities), and I just didn’t know how aggressive a large carrion eater would be. Certainly they must have some significant wing muscles to soar so elegantly and for so long. As it turns out, I was probably right to avoid a confrontation

According to Turkey Vultures: Facts, Maps, and Statistics, the primary form of turkey vulture defense is to vomit on their assailant. The site further warns that this can sting and stink. I’m not afraid to admit that I’m pleased I didn’t have the opportunity to learn this fact through actual experience.

These two are ugly enough that only a parent could love them.

Kirk, my parents, and I, arrived at the Hollow on July 3–Elizabeth couldn’t make it this year.

We spent some time the first couple days doing some maintenance. Before setting up the tent on top of the dam, we used the tractor to yank the willow bushes from the front of the dam.

Between the chain saw, the tractor, a lot of sweat, and a bit of poison ivy, we managed to open up some of the trails that were blocked by fallen trees during last summer’s mini-nado and the big ice storm a few years earlier. The one we call the Ridge Trail, along the eastern edge of our property, had been blocked by a number of large birch branches for at least 4 years.

We cleared several downed maples between The Valley and the Ridge Trail (shown at left) and then tackled the big birch. After all those years, the branches had shrunk a bit, and were somewhat rotted, making it a lot easier to trim them and then push the logs out of the way with the tractor.

The trail on the western edge of The Hollow, leading up to the Upper Meadow, has been blocked for a number of years by a large tree, and its half-uprooted stump, that blocked the trail just before a very sharp hairpin. In the past, I’d been able to drive the tractor around that spot, but it was too wet last year, and I wasn’t able to mow the grass in the upper meadow, the highest spot in The Hollow.

It took about an hour to saw the end off this big log, and to attack the tree stump with a shovel, cleaning off much of the clay that was still stuck to the roots. Figuring we’d have to saw the trunk off right next to the stump, I dug a hole under it saw that we could saw it without dulling the blade. As it turned out, we were able to pop it right out of the ground with the tractor’s front end loader.

The biggest project involved the felling of a 28-year old, 40 foot high pine tree. After the Northeast Blackout of 2003, the power companies have been a lot more aggressive in preventing trees from interfering with power lines. They finally reached The Hollow last year, spraying some sort of herbicide on everything within site of the incoming electric wires. Whether or not this pine tree would ever recover, it would always be horribly scarred by the loss of most of its branches, and it would always represent a threat to the power line, so we decided to take it out.

Felling a tree uphill is a bit of a trick, especially when it is bigger than a telephone pole. If we failed, the falling tree would take the power lines down with it, so I climbed up the side of the tree with a ladder, attached a chain to it, and attached the chain to a come along winch tied to the base of another tree. Taking a big notch out of the uphill side of the tree, Dad tightened up the winch, and the tree started to lean uphill. I finished sawing the other side of the trunk, while Dad continued to winch, and we managed to drop it exactly where we’d planned, without loss of human limb, or power.

I managed to squeeze a couple trips to the Hollow around a business trip to Chicago. On the last Saturday in April, I picked up Kirk at school and we spent an afternoon. The following Saturday, the first one in May, Dad and I visited.

I can’t remember the last time I’ve been down in the Spring–maybe I had a chance in college, but I don’t think I’ve been there since then.

On the trip with Kirk, the woods were white with trillium. They were already starting to fade the following week. Between the two trips, I saw spring beauties, rue anemone, bluets, violets, dandelions, and some large daffodils that Mom must have planted next to the electric pole.

Animals included a pileated woodpecker, a great blue heron, a deer, bluegill, and one very large, and still not hooked, largemouth bass.

Both were beautiful sunny Spring days with bright blue skies and yellow sun. Before picking up Kirk, I wandered around Doylestown Smithville taking pictures of barns and other country scenes, and then I went to a small Civil War reenactment in Wooster. I’ve started pulling together a gallery of rural scenes from Wayne, Holmes, and Coshocton counties.

Before they become truly amorous, fish need a certain amount of breathing room, so to speak, which varies by species. Common wisdom has it that Micropterus salmoides, otherwise known as the largemouth bass, needs more legroom than is offered by a 1/2 acre pond. I’d suspected that perhaps ours were becoming a bit less circumspect. For several years, I’d noticed some pretty small bass swimming around, which meant that the fingerlings we stocked were either not growing, or the bass were stocking themselves.

It was Elizabeth who figured it out. Before we’d even pitched our tent on the dam this summer, she’d identified a big fish and claimed first right of catch. It was the biggest largemouth I’ve ever seen in our pond, and I’ll bet it goes 2 pounds. Its got some meat on it, which is more than unusual for anything coming out of our little body of water.

Every time we saw old man bass, he seemed to be surrounded by a cloud of minnows. The funny thing was, he didn’t seem to be eating any of them. The first, and mistaken assumption, was that he was saving them for later. I dragged multiple lures right across his nose, but he evinced no interest in them at all.

He just cruised around in tight circles, always within a foot or two of the cloud of minnies. Most of them time, his territory was right around the large pipe that serves as the overflow, but sometimes he’d be 5 feet on one side, and maybe up to 15 feet on the other. His habits were predictable and he was easy to find.

It was Elizabeth who finally figured out that this was a parent, protecting its young. We did a little research and found out that the male is responsible for childcare.

Whenever the school of bass fry was disturbed, the fishlets would leap out of the water, making a series of popping sounds, like a handful of tiny pebbles landing in the water. Fun. We’d seen that effect for several years now, but never knew what kind of little minnow it was, and we thought maybe some new kind of aquatic critter had hitched a ride on a duck’s foot.

Certainly the pan fish have always bred in the pond. Within a few years of stocking it, there were fish nests all over the shallow parts. I don’t what the things are–blue gills and others. I think we had once stocked something called red eared sunfish, too, which Fenders now calls shellcracker. Maybe hybrid blue gills, too. All I know is that we’ve got more than enough of those. I don’t see any reason that our bass shouldn’t be well fed. The rule is, if you catch a pan fish, you do not throw it back.

All activity in Heiser Hollow revolves around our half acre pond. Its a constant source of aesthetic pleasure and entertainment, hosting countless fish and frogs, and playing guesthouse to an ever-changing variety of visitors (turtles, herons, otters, ducks). You can fish in it, you can swim in it, you can float in an inner tube drinking beer, or you can just stand and look at it. However you choose to enjoy it, the pond remains by far the most interesting part of the Hollow. My parents park their motor home next to it, we pitch our tent on the dam, and if we build something permanent, it will be within site and sound of the pond. There are at least two different varieties of frog–bass and tenor.

We built the pond in 1976. After extensive consultation with the state ag agent, and a series of disappointing test holes, it was decided that the only practical place to put a pond would be several hundred yards up the Hollow, towards the small and intermittent water fall. Although it would have resulted in a much larger pond, the lower meadow where we’d been parking a travel trailer just wouldn’t hold water. As it turned out, the smaller site would be an inspired one. Its only looking back at the pictures from 30 years ago that I can truly appreciate the significance of the engineering effort to build our little body of water. The dam stands 40 feet above the original ground level. It was once a big sterile pit of mud, and now it is thousands of gallons of life It took a number of months to fill with water, and it wasn’t ready to be stocked with fish the first year. That first summer, before stocking it, the pond magically became a haven for tiny tadpoles. Once we’d stocked the pond, these became become bluegill fodder.

Nasty clumps of algae were a problem during the first few years, requiring regular treatment with copper sulfate. Cattails grew up around the edges, which were scenic, but not necessarily healthy for a small pond like ours. However, after a few years, the water became increasingly cloudy, eventually reaching a balance that keeps most of the weeds down, so the pond requires very little maintenance. Willows have been a chronic problem along the face of the dam, but we haven’t seen any for several years.

The pond does leak, and dad had somebody bring in some clay once to try to fix it. It didn’t make any difference, and I’ve decided that the leak is a blessing in disguise. Although it can look pretty sad by the end of a dry summer, a large puddle surrounded by a brown layer of dried mud, the pond is deep enough that the fish are not inconvenienced at all. My pet theory is that the fluctuating water level cuts down on weed growth and the bluegill population. Most years, the dry parts of the pond include numerous depressions that had been created by the panfish for nests.

Unlike most ponds, ours is not surrounded by grass–its in the middle of the woods, which gives it a totally different sort of feel. Although the center of the pond is in the bright sun during most of the day, the sides are shaded by trees which come right down to the water. The elm trees, which are always opportunistic where light is involved, seem OK with getting their feet wet.

A few years ago, the overflow pipe finally rusted through, and dad hired someone to repair it. As long as we were performing surgery on the pond, we decided that we might as well enlargen it a bit. Some Amish guy spent 3 days with a large backhoe, scooping 30 years worth of sediment out of the back of the pond, and continuing a couple feet deeper. One side of the rear of the pond has a very steep hill, but our heavy equipment artist was able to stretch the back and eastern edges out farther, carefully arranging some sandstone boulders around the edges. He also dug a 20 foot long sediment pit behind the pond to catch most of the sand.

Unfortunately, the guy who dug up the dam to patch the pipe wasn’t quite so skilled, and he didn’t do a very good job of compacting the clay when he replaced it. Not only do we have a depression on top of the dam, but the base of the dam has sprung a small but obvious leak. It has been dribbling in this new, visible spot for two years now, and the pond is fuller then ever. I assume that it should be repaired, but how do you know the next guy won’t make it worse? You could drain the pond, spend thousands on lining it with clay, rubber, or some newfangled spray stuff–all of which kills the fish and sets you back 5-10 years–and you still might have a leaky pond. I guess lots of healthy natural things leak. All in all, its a beautiful little pond, leaks and all.

Yesterday, I circumnavigated the 55 almost square acres of Heiser Hollow. I like to walk the bounds every year (at least since the neighbor had the southern property line surveyed), but this summer, I was especially curious about the storm damage, which cut two narrow swathes of trees across the entire width of the property.

The storm damage started on the western edge, parallel to the drive, topping a couple of maple trees, one of which the guys from the power company helped us clear last week. A couple hundred feet further south, 3-4 tall white pines were topped, about 30-40′ in the air. A sort of sickly looking cherry tree was down next to them, not topped, but with the root ball pulled out of the ground.

Several trees came down alongside the road leading down into the valley, and they’ll have to be chainsawed if we want to use the road any time soon. One tree was down in the valley, and then there was no damage for several hundred feet. Along the path we call the Ridge Trail, which parallels the eastern property line, a group of 5 trees were all snapped off at about 40 feet in the air. This is the strangest storm damage I’ve ever seen at the Hollow. It looks like a rotary blade descended from the sky, chopped off some trees, and then retracted.

A couple hundred yards to the north, the damage was very different, but more extensive. Instead of topping the trees, it toppled them. The combination of wet soil and high winds resulted in at least a dozen trees pulling up roots and falling over. Mostly leaving the useless aspen and poplar untouched, the freak wind concentrated on valuable hardwoods

In this picture, Elizabeth is standing next to a 20″ cherry tree which has fallen on the root ball of a 2nd cherry, which itself is lying on top of the roots of a 3rd tree. In addition to the cherries, at least one ash came down, which is especially sad given that ash in other parts of the state are struggling with borer.

There are probably enough timber grade trees down to make it worth having a small lumber operator coming in and harvesting them.

The map below shows a simplified view of the damaged (red) and downed (yellow) trees. It looks very much like two separate wind cells, several hundred feet apart, cut parallel paths. We heard that a funnel cloud was sighted about a mile to the east.

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For someone who thinks that suburban lawns are a silly and wastefully affectation, I take far too much pleasure in nuking brush with a tractor. It comes down to this: as far as woods are concerned, I like that freshly grazed look. Lacking cows, goats, horses, or sheep, the only remaining choice is diesel.

When we first bought Heiser Hollow in ‘71, it hadn’t been lived in for a couple decades, and most of the flat parts were jungle like. We could get part way up the drive, but beyond that, it was a wall of weeds. My folks bought a scythe at the hardware store in Killbuck (another victim of Walmart), and started at it. They actually made quite a bit of progress, getting as far as the woods, where we camped in pup tents the first time we stayed overnight.

Then my dad either got smart, or totally frustrated, hiring a young farmer up the valley to come in with a vintage Fordson and a bush hog. Bush hog is a generic name for a heavy-duty mower that attaches to a 3-point hitch, allowing you to power it, and raise & lower it. It doesn’t mow lawn flat–for that you need an attachment that sits under the center of the tractor. What it does is mow hard, chopping up grass, weeds, saplings, ant hills, and anything else that gets in its way. Tractors are heavy and have sturdy wheels that crunch up bushes and sticks. Small trees fall prey to the loader bucket, or the chassis, and get chopped up by the bush hog. Logs and even downed trees can often be pushed aside with the front end loader.

Eventually, Dad bought his own tractor, a Kubota. It’s only 15 HP or so, but with 4 wheel drive, a 3-point hitch pulling a bush hog, and a front end loader, its amazing how much work can be done on a gallon of diesel oil. One pass down a trail makes it grandmother-friendly, whacking down all the weeds, chopping up loose sticks, and even flattening some of the humps in the ground. There are a lot of places here you just wouldn’t go if Dad or I hadn’t bush hogged it first. I especially enjoy mowing down multiflora rose, an especially annoying introduced species.

Kubotas are pretty handy, but they can’t do everything. Tractors tend to be tippy, so they don’t work laterally on hills. Ours has the front wheels mounted as far out as possible, and the back wheels were mounted in reverse, increasing the wheel base, but it still has a relatively high center of gravity, and you need to be careful to avoid an accident. Big stumps are a problem, and need to be avoided.

Big trees are down on trails in several places, and only a bulldozer would be able to flatten out those root balls and fill in the holes. Or time. If you wait long enough, whatever falls on the trail will decay to the point where the Kubota can break it up, push it out of the way, chop it up, or drive over it. I was able to get to the upper meadow last year for the first time since the ice storm 3-4 years ago, crunching through a tree that was downed over the trail. The trail makes a switchback and begins a steep ascent up to the end of the trail, which was the worst possible spot for a large tree to fall, filling the trail with a trunk too big to drive over, a large ball of dirt and root, and a Kubota-eating hole. Last year, I was very carefully able to detour by taking an even steeper route straight up, but this week, it was too wet, and I couldn’t get enough traction.

Today: singing milkweed beetles, scarlet tananger, ruby throated hummingbird

Before I was old enough to drive, my dad and I used to ride our dirt bikes through Amish country to Charm. There used to be a little restaurant over there where you could sit at a counter and get a great piece of pie. Today, sleepy little Holmes County is filled with semi-trailers and tourists. The cafe that used to be so popular with the local Amish is now a tourist trap. The walls are covered with kitschy little fabric wall hangings with pictures of a very Nordic-looking Jesus. Offered for sale, along with musical clocks and postcards of Amish school children, the fabric hangings are sort of the Mennonite equivalent of paint me on velvet.

The food, which isn’t memorable, is offered in ‘Amish style’. From my point of view, that’s all to the best, because the Amish tend to cook like any other midwestern farmers, concentrating on chicken, mashed potatoes, overcooked green beans, and jellow. We were right next to the kitchen, and you could watch the waitresses mixing up the ‘homemade lemonade’ (no live citrus fruit was in sight).

Once you’ve lived in Europe for a while, there are certain things about America that strike you as being…special. Until you’ve been gone, you just don’t notice all the unique things that makes Americans great. One such hugely obvious characteristic is the amount of gravitas that so many people bring with them. Sure, there are people of substance everywhere in the world, but this part of the world seems to have a special ice age gene for energy storage, and apparently, large amounts of meat & potatoes are especially appealing to the large crowd at the restaurant. The waitress was polite, and didn’t comment on the fact that we didn’t clear our plates.

After eating our pie, we sat outside and watched horse & buggies dodging the sport utes.