Exploring
One of the things that I have been meaning to do for nearly two weeks is to get out and get comfortable in the woods. After all, if I'm going to be spending a lot of time with my Native tribe, then I had better work to overcome the 'city kid' approach to the woods. I should learn to take note of my surroundings. To observe and identify plants and animals and stuff, right? So one of the things that I thought I would do is go for a walk in the woods every morning, and try to find a medicinal plant, or a certain kind of tree that is good for starting fires, or explore what this whole forest thing actually is.
Needless to say, it took me a while to get around to it. But, this morning i took an hour and went looking around for a certain medicinal plant that my herb-master friend told me about. I'll be honest- I didn't expect to find it at all, though I was given a detailed description of the plant, and then went and looked it up in an encyclopedia to try to find out even more. I was told that the plant grows in damp shady areas, and so I decided that my best bet was to look near the bog that I had found on my first jaunt through the woods. (The bog, it turns out, has a name- the old berry bog. I think I had better find out when berries come in season.) After biking around to the trailhead nearest the bog, I meandered in, trying to find a path that ran right along the edge or through the bog itself.
It turns out that nobody traverses bogs for good reason- the mud can be knee deep, and when your foot sinks in, it can form a vacuum around the shoe. It's a good thing I wore my old nasty shoes, and no sock! I ended up having to take my shoes off because they kept getting stuck in the muck and carry them till I got back on dry ground. It turns out that the plant doesn't grow in the bog anyway, but grows with pretty good frequency in the soggy, leaf-strewn underbrush on the side of the bog. I was pretty pleased with myself as I squelched along and identified between 15 and 20 small patches of the plant. I only picked three specimens, though, because I didn't feel like I actually needed the plant, and I'm not entirely sure what it does anyway. The three I picked looked dead, and i figured thats just as well because then they would be easier to try out, store, and show off.
I must have been a sight as I emerged from the bog- muddy, wet, with leaves in the hair, grinning broadly at my discovery of three tiny brown twigs. The people I passed on the trail must have thought that I lost my mind.
Needless to say, it took me a while to get around to it. But, this morning i took an hour and went looking around for a certain medicinal plant that my herb-master friend told me about. I'll be honest- I didn't expect to find it at all, though I was given a detailed description of the plant, and then went and looked it up in an encyclopedia to try to find out even more. I was told that the plant grows in damp shady areas, and so I decided that my best bet was to look near the bog that I had found on my first jaunt through the woods. (The bog, it turns out, has a name- the old berry bog. I think I had better find out when berries come in season.) After biking around to the trailhead nearest the bog, I meandered in, trying to find a path that ran right along the edge or through the bog itself.
It turns out that nobody traverses bogs for good reason- the mud can be knee deep, and when your foot sinks in, it can form a vacuum around the shoe. It's a good thing I wore my old nasty shoes, and no sock! I ended up having to take my shoes off because they kept getting stuck in the muck and carry them till I got back on dry ground. It turns out that the plant doesn't grow in the bog anyway, but grows with pretty good frequency in the soggy, leaf-strewn underbrush on the side of the bog. I was pretty pleased with myself as I squelched along and identified between 15 and 20 small patches of the plant. I only picked three specimens, though, because I didn't feel like I actually needed the plant, and I'm not entirely sure what it does anyway. The three I picked looked dead, and i figured thats just as well because then they would be easier to try out, store, and show off.
I must have been a sight as I emerged from the bog- muddy, wet, with leaves in the hair, grinning broadly at my discovery of three tiny brown twigs. The people I passed on the trail must have thought that I lost my mind.
posted by Me at 8:56 AM
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