Wearing two sweatshirts on our third Snow Day it's hard to believe last Saturday families hiking at the Heard wore shorts, sleeveless tops, and sometimes flipflops. It was over seventy degrees and absolutely perfect except that my camera battery was dead.
A listening walk it must be. Animatronic dinosaurs roared robotically to kid shrieks of joy. Young parents bounced babies in strollers on the boardwalk trails. Dried grasses rustled and crows dominated the airwaves with some sort of complaint always just beyond the next turn in the trail.
What is a cedar brake? It's not a cedar break. Pulling out the old red dictionary I find definition fifteen for "brake"--An area overgrown with dense brushwood, briers, and undergrowth; a thicket. (Related to "bracken" ferns, and "canebrake").
Unable to sort through the various cedar types and junipers, I recognize that the center of the Heard's cedar brake is a monoculture--nothing else grows there. The ground under the trees is mostly mud. Animals and birds seem scarce.
Cedar choppers used to travel from brake to brake cutting down the rot-resistant trees for fence material, or converting it to charcoal. My Snow Day googling has turned up Murray Montgomery's enlightening story of his cedar-chopping family roots. What a hard way to make a living.
Time for "The Other One", an 18:05 track. There's time to reheat morning coffee in the microwave, stir in hot chocolate mix, and be back in time for "Me and My Uncle".
© 2011 Nancy L. Ruder
2 comments:
1) I grew up with cedars in the front yard.
2) Recent confusing conversation about "brake" and "break" connected to car repair. I am glad to say my brakes are fine, and the break in my exhaust pipe is fixed.
3) I do that, too, with my coffee: reheat, add cocoa or International Coffee mix, etc.
We used those little blue berries from bushes to make our mudpies. Now I don't know if those were cedars or junipers.
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