Ever been lichening? It’s like birding, but your subjects are much less likely to fly away when they hear you approaching. A few weekends ago, I was sent to help out at an event (Wildflowers and Songbirds of Ohio’s Deep South) and I decided to bring along my little ODNR lichen identification pamphlet that I’d gotten at Antioch last spring.
I had already helped move all of the stuff we would need for the weekend into the house; I had chopped a few tomatoes and some parsley along with the other volunteers for breakfast the next day; and I had hiked out into the field behind the manor house, to Tremper Mound, and down and around the creek. I still had a few hours to kill before anyone else would arrive, so I headed back into the house, picked up my lichen guide, and ambled out into the lawn, where there grew a short, squat dogwood. I flipped open my guide, entangled myself in the branches, and set about trying to identify what I saw.
That weekend, while others were focused on blossoms and birds, I found myself engrossed by lichen. I identified twenty-six species in two and a half days — not bad for an amateur! (Don’t worry, I wasn’t so taken by fungal symbioses that I neglected our vascular plants and vertebrates. I learned to identify large-flowered valerian and two-leaf dwarf dandelion, and redstart and kingbird; I spotted a courageous rust-orange spring peeper; and I appreciated plenty of mountain laurel and ladyslipper.)
At least a dozen of those twenty-six were present on that first dogwood. That’s another nice thing about looking for lichen: you don’t have to go very far. Instead, you go close, with the help of a hand lens or, without one like I was, by pressing your face right up against the cool, crumbling bark and squinting at the tiny, delicate fronds of lemon lichen or at the strange black hairs sprouting out of the pleated edges of powdered ruffle lichen. There was common greenshield and sunburst lichen and a great deal of what I’ve been calling the “little grey lichens”, a morphology of intricate seafoam-colored things that I haven’t quite been able to detangle into species quite yet. I spotted common button lichen, which you’ve seen too: small black dots, the size of a pinhead, peppering bark or rocks or concrete, and common script lichen, which you’ve likely also encountered and assumed was, in the words of one of the folks at the event, “just some schmutz.”
At the sandstone fields of Kamama Prairie, amongst the blushing phlox and the neon-orange Indian paintbrush, I, in a fit of excitement, gaped and pointed when I spotted bushy-beard lichen sprouting out of the side of a tree. Another of the event attendees, who I had been chatting with for a while, laughed at my silent show of enthusiasm.
“Well,” I told him, “I don’t want to scare it away.”
Lichens, if you don’t know, are those crusty greenish things that grow on the sides of trees and the backs of signs (although there are a great deal more types, some of which have some pretty outlandish appearances, including the turban lichen, the ramalinas, and the dixie reindeer lichen I would spot elsewhere in the coming weeks). They’re classified as fungi, but they aren’t really; they’re sort of not even an organism at all, depending on your perspective. They’re what happens when a fungus develops a symbiotic relationship with a photosynthetic microbe of some sort. The photosynthesizer, be it algae or cyanobacteria, lives within the safety of a structure that the fungus grows around it, and the fungus takes food from the photosynthesizer. Lichen have been described as “fungi that developed agriculture,” and that’s sort of true, but like if you could grow corn inside your skin, and if the corn was removed, you would die.
Lichens have long been a fascination of mine. As an aspiring microbiologist, little things are kind of my forte, and carrying a microscope isn’t practical for hiking: it’s nice when microbes congeal into a form I can see with even my bad eyesight.
But the point is: go outside and find something small and beautiful and look at it. It doesn’t have to be lichen. It could be a wet mat of feathery green moss, or dew on the edges of leaves, or the careful way an ant cleans her antennae. Tiny wonders are much more plentiful than huge ones.
Although, if there’s one place not lacking in vast wonders, it’s down here at the Arc of Appalachia preserves. Whether it be a pockmarked, fern-draped limestone cliff, or a towering, tangled sycamore, or the blue-tinged hills that roll over daisy-spotted fields, there are a wealth of sights down here that will make you tilt your head back in awe.
The Arc’s mission is to preserve Appalachia’s wildlands, and it’s a mission that I can fully get behind. I spent my childhood summers in the Appalachians of central Pennsylvania, and there were always two things that stuck out to me: the beauty and diversity of the nature, and the utter devastation being wreaked on the region by outsiders. There were ancient mountains wreathed in mist and massive grey scars of deforestation; the guttural croak of a raven and the rumble of machinery, bleeding fuel veins dry; the sweet scent of damp evergreens and the crumbling trailer parks, the lawns full of rusty cars, the burning trash piles and the people, too poor to stay and too poor to leave, exploited as surely as the land is for their labor and any free penny they have.
The work I’m doing (and Brace is doing, who I live and work with here at Highlands Nature Sanctuary) is similar to what I’ve done in the past. Trail maintenance, mowing, cleaning up trash, removing invasive plants, mowing, string trimming, helping with construction projects, mowing… (ah, lawns are a curse, aren’t they? but we need to keep the trails passable! I come home covered in a fine crust of dry grass more days than not.)
I’ve learned a lot, and am ever in the process of learning more. Outside of my own pursuits (crouching in my socks by a dogwood at Tremper Manor, chanting lichen names like some sort of fungal spell), I’ve gotten to drive a truck with a trailer (and spend thirty minutes trying to back it up), use a chop saw, mix concrete, and drive a tractor. I’m not a very handy person, and that’s half the fun of it. I firmly believe that, in order to be a good scientist, you have to love being wrong, and similarly, in order to acquire new skills, you have to love being bad at them. I’m working on it.
When I’m not hiking four miles through the hills with a chainsaw pack, trying to keep up with Brace, or shooing moths and grasshoppers out of the way of the Exmark, I face a different (and very twenty-first-century) challenge: there’s no Internet at the house. Instead, I’ve been writing, reading, and baking like a madman. A double recipe of flatbread every few days, vegan strawberry-lemon pie with coconut whipped cream, and shoo-fly cake for my twenty-first birthday. I’m re-reading Dracula. I recently finished The Tangled Tree, an excellent nonfiction epic about the development of science’s understanding of evolution, and my parent has been getting me into the Horus Heresy books, which are, bafflingly, pretty good.
And writing: at the end of March, I happened to finish two of my long-term projects, a book and a webcomic, at about the same time. Upon arriving at the Arc, I found myself flailing about for something to do. I can’t start drawing the next comic I’m planning until I have the script for the first part complete, and I haven’t worked on that hardly at all, because I’ve become possessed by the other new project I started: another prose book, this one an eco-horror sort of deal about decomposition and eating and lesbians. I wrote ten pages in one evening a few weeks ago. I’ve been working on it for two months and I’m at a hundred pages already. If I keep this up, I’ll have the whole first draft done in less than half a year. I think having no internet is good for me, even if it does mean that I have to drive twenty minutes to the library to do my classwork.
The house is nice, too. I saw a firefly from the porch a few nights ago, as well as a barred owl. The other weekend, after two days of nonstop rain, I wandered into the humid woods and saw a skunk (that’s a weird squirrel, I thought, upon seeing a bushy black tail waving amongst the leaf litter, and then I saw the stripes and thanked my lucky stars that I hadn’t gotten closer) and another barred owl, this one a fledgeling, perched on the ground at the base of a massive beech and glaring at me. It’s not exactly quiet out here, being right by the road: the roaring of trucks and the clattering of the Mennonite buggies is constant, but so is birdsong and bugsong, and there’s often a warm rain or a soft breeze.
It’s the diversity of everything that keeps me in awe. I’ve seen species of bird from the dining room window that I had never seen in my life before. The population of spiders in the house alone is enviable. Earlier, during wildflower season, I could tramp twenty feet into the woods behind my house and see more spring ephemerals than I would over a two-mile stretch at a preserve in my hometown. It’s exactly why this sort of work is so important: the wildlands, the truly wild lands, where human hand has not yet skewed population dynamics toward those lucky few organisms most tolerant of our presence, where life thrives whether or not we’re there to see it, where things grow and die and decompose even if they don’t serve a purpose to us, are diminishing rapidly. In Ohio, I would hazard, they are almost gone. We cannot let the wilderness be concreted over.
As the Arc of Appalachia began: if you could, would you save it?
Our answer has to be yes.
