Fencerows: Eyes in the Shadows
By John Luthens
Outside, the wilds of the day had an alluring draw. It was the threshold of summer and autumn, the September air still alive with the hum of bees and grasshoppers, but a crisp breeze swaying the leaves and showing a hint of changing color around their edges.
Inside, I sifted through the wilds of my house. By wilds, I mean a pile of accumulated junk. I haunted the corners of my basement, sorting rods and reels and packs in a semblance of fall cleaning. A summer that had wrought so many fine trips had also wrought massive carnage.
An autumn view from outside the tree-line shadows.
The sun crept through my basement window like an impatient eye as I organized my affairs in the gloom. I knew the goldenrod and purple aster were breaking out along the hillsides. I heard the leaves rustling and the acorns dropping. I pictured adventurous sights and felt the first winds of autumn on my cheeks.
I could tell you that it came to me all at once – that I’d had enough of cleaning and creeping in the shadows. In actuality, it had been weighing on my mind since the get- go. I have selective Attention Deficit Disorder, able to wait for focused hours on the banks of a river or inside a hunting blind, but not able to wrap my mind around what I deem to be the less-important aspects of life. I held myself together just long enough to retrieve a camera from a bed of mounded brush on my desk and haul a forgotten bicycle from the hidden mountains of my garage.
The camera was a little rough around the edges, splattered with mud and dirt memories of a fading summer. The bike only had one pedal and the front tire was as spongy as a mushroom. There was no way to stuff it back in the garage without risking a landslide, so it would have to do. I squinted towards the shimmering horizon like a newly-woken vampire. Then I lopsidedly pedaled from my basement coffin to see what the day might offer.
A trip with no set destination in mind, often seem to turn out the best. I don’t know why. I suppose it could be looked at as a self-fulfilling prophecy, not expecting to find a hidden treasure, and so any small nugget looks as big as a pot of gold beneath the rainbow. I didn’t realize how small of a nugget I’d end up looking for on this day, or how ominous the rainbow was to become.
I found myself at the end of a country road. A field of autumn flowers and prairie grass stretched deep alongside a shadowed woodlot. To my eyes, it was a picture waiting to happen. There was a house nearby and I crashed my bike to a stop to go and ask permission to enter. Not only was it missing a pedal, but the bike’s brakes functioned as well as my brain cells when it comes to working. It may be a freak of genetics that I always remember to ask a landowner’s permission.
A bowling ball of fungi.
A fine and friendly couple were pruning a tree in the yard. I told them my photographic intentions. We talked of nothing in particular, and particularly of the fine day. The greatest part of deciding to go nowhere and taking all day to do it is the wonderful people you meet and the wonderfully random conversations that come of it. “There is doll’s eye back in that woodlot,” they said. “Our grandson pointed it out to us, and we looked it up. Sure enough, it was doll’s eye.”
I am quite well versed in the ways of nature. I know an oak from a maple and a deer from a squirrel. I’ve never had much interest in playing with dolls. “Enlighten me,” I said. And that’s how I found myself thrown from the brightness of the outside world, back in the shadows, not in a basement, but beneath the trees, crawling on my hands and knees, looking for the poisonous eyes of a doll.
Doll’s eye, also known as white baneberry, is a small plant that grows best in shadowed soil of upland forest. It produces white berries with a black scar that resembles a small eye. It is also one of the most toxic plants in North America, with ingestion of the berries causing cardiac arrest.
I did not know these things until I met my new friends. They guided me back in the forest, giving me general description of the plant and a general direction in which the plant might be found. I was enthralled. I was on a morbidly absurd quest. I believe that I actually live for these types of things. Call me a head case, but I submit it is far more exciting than cleaning a basement.
Life existed that I never would have noticed by simply strolling through. I found small, black seeds upon plants that were only inches high. I don’t yet know what they were, but I have my research assistants working on it. I’ll even have them skip a day of school, if that’s what it takes.
There were toadstools with translucent red stems and tops no bigger than a silver dollar. I found a single, round piece of white fungi that glowed white in the shadows and was big around as a bowling ball. There were only hooks and pieces of fishing line on my basement floor. I felt that I was living high on the hog.
Berries of the doll’s eye.
The doll’s eyes proved to be elusive. But, like I said, my attention span becomes honed to a razor’s edge when it comes to the important matters in life. After nearly two hours in the prone position, I was muddy and covered with moss when I peeked around a leaning maple tree and found them.
There was a single plant with white berries branching from the stalk. I lay in the shadow of the changing seasons watching, the eyes of the doll staring back at me. There were still spots of green on the trees above, but the autumn wind was steadily pecking away at the edges.
The shadows of the outside world have dangerous eyes, and about all I can do is leave you with a single moral: I had not been this close to cardiac arrest since the Packers lost to the Seahawks in last year’s NFC Championship. So I simply snapped a picture and moved on to the next season.
John Luthens is a freelance writer from Grafton, Wisconsin. His first novel, Taconite Creek, is available on Amazon or at www.cablepublishing.com or by contacting the author at Luthens@hotmail.com