Hebdomadals

Haywood Rankin’s weekly log of use and activities at the Spencer Mountain Conservation Area.

Below is a poem – co-written by M. Eppes and ChatGPT in honor of the 500th edition that sums up the spirit of this impressive body of work!

A more permanent link coming soon, but here are all 500+ in a Google Drive. Happy Reading.

For the Five Hundredth Hebdomadal
(after Frost)

There are some men who keep the week by clocks,
And some by sermons, markets, trains, or mail.
But he has kept it by the creek’s remarks,
By whether peepers rose, or frost, or hail.

He knew a path does not stay path for long.
The woods are always busy with repeal.
A beech comes down, a greenbrier does its wrong,
And privet waits in ranks no steel could seal.

So out he went with loppers, saw, and stick,
With dogs behind, or with some willing friend,
And cut a narrow human passage quick
Where tree and thorn had lately made an end.

He wrote of bloodroot biding out of sight,
As though it served a captain under ground;
Of mayapple and trillium at first light;
Of wild azaleas making Morris sound

As if a hidden sunrise had come near
And broken pink along the border trees;
Of bigleaf groves half lost from storm and year,
Yet budding still above the battered bees.

He kept the names that make a country true:
Old Lake and Cabin Creek and Lower Bottom,
The Cow Pasture under heaven’s open blue,
The Duncan bridge, and all that weather taught him.

He wrote of work as if it were a grace
A man may practice with a steady hand:
To mend a board, re-sign a little place,
To keep one crossing honest in the land.

And when the moon came up above Big Lake,
He was not one to let the bright thing pass.
He walked it out for moonlight’s proper sake,
Through pale tree-shadows laid across the grass.

The frogs tuned up before the world believed.
The horses waited in their stalls below.
The children came, and all the place received
Their voices as it had long years ago.

Five hundred times the week knocked at his door,
And five hundred times he answered what it said—
Not with a grand pronouncement, but with more
Of seeing, and of naming what had spread.

So let us mark no number merely round,
Though five hundred is a worthy bell to ring;
Let us give thanks a faithful man was found
To note the woods from thaw to withering.

For such reports are more than logs of rain.
They are a covenant with field and tree:
That someone watched, and walked, and came again,
And left the paths a little more set free.

And if, in years to come, these woods still keep
A way for hoof and child and moon to pass,
Some part of that will be the weekly sweep
Of one man’s eye across the bloom and grass.

Not all observatories rise in stone.
Some stand where creek and cane brake meet the sky.
And there a man, by faithful looking alone,
Has taught the passing week not to pass by.

So here’s to Haywood, and to five hundred
Clear reckonings of weather, work, and sky—
Who taught us that a place is also dearly tended
By those who look, and love, and testify.