Nature

Horsetails and Snake Grass: Relics Before the Dinosaurs

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fidler-snakegrassforest
A veritable forest of snake grass, or horsetails.

We have all seen them, on the beach or in ditches, but we walk on past them without a thought.  If we know them at all, we call them “snake grass” for their banded stems lacking apparent leaves.  As kids, we  pulled them apart at the joints, noting the empty, hollow canal that runs up the center.  Hollow stems suggest many uses to children—whistles, building materials for sand castles, girls’ hair ties, toothpicks, and more.  Not having lost the capacity for play, they find much to do with the things we have come to ignore.

Not that all adults ignore them.  Campers recognize one species as a choice pot scrubber out in the woods, the scouring rush, Equisetum hyemale.  Its stiff ridged stems take grease and dirt of pans without shredding.  Players of instruments like the bassoon and oboe prepare their reeds with strokes of the scouring rush and craftsmen in Japan use it for a fine sandpaper.

Snake grass, or horsetails as they are known by many, get their roughness and strength from silica in their stems—you can see the tubercles with a ten-power lens.  Some species have more than others: one, the Smooth Horsetail, scarcely has any at all.

The Dutch find value in horsetails, mostly in maintaining the dikes that keep their land dry.  The plant has deeply rooted rhizomes (horizontal underground stems) which bind the soil, a helpful aid in reinforcing walls that keep the sea out.  A weed anywhere else, it is an asset in Holland.

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The roots of a horsetail plant the author carefully revealed from the swampy depths.

The common name “horsetail” requires explanation since the above-ground parts of the plant in no way resembles any part of the horse’s anatomy.  If you have the patience to dig down into the mud out of which the horsetail species known as “pipes” grows (and, I confess, I did just that at some sacrifice of blood to mosquitoes), you can discover how they came to take on the “horsetail” name.  The rhizome is jointed just like the stem, and out of each joint a tuft of roots grows–which, in aggregate, look pretty much like a horse’s tail.  Perhaps “snake grass” is the more reasonable name given the difficulty with exposing the “tail.”

A less common species of snake grass, or horsetails, Equisetum sylvaticum has a lacy appearance.
A less common species of snake grass, or horsetails, Equisetum sylvaticum has a lacy appearance.

Horsetails are not particularly successful as green plants go: they consist of one family with one genus and only a scant 15 species.  Michigan has eight and all of them be found in the Grand Traverse area.  Always they seem to prefer wet places—ditches, beaches, swamps, and marshes.

Horsetails were not always the weak sisters of the plant world.  Giant members of the horsetail family that reached heights of 45 feet are preserved in the coal beds of Pennsylvania and elsewhere.  Before the dinosaurs, before the flowering plants, they dominated the land in variety, abundance, and sheer size.  Alas for them, they now grow in neglected places separated from the great ecosystems of hard and softwood forests, plains and desert, tundra and bog.

Seed-producing plants won out in the long run, the conifers, hardwoods, and grasses occupying the greatest stretches of land.  Horsetails make spores, those produced in small cones that lie at the tips of the shoots.  They drift about in the wind, the luckiest ones arriving at a moist warm place to grow.  There they grow into miniscule green bodies that produce eggs in one place and sperms in another.  The sperms swim to fertilize the egg—and a new horsetail is born.  However, horsetails can avoid the whole process by having a piece of the rhizome break off and root elsewhere.

A common version of horsetail in the Grand Traverse region, E. Ferissii, the bane of beach owners.
A common hybrid of horsetail in the Grand Traverse region, E. Ferissii, the bane of beach owners.

Horsetails—snake grass–are not esteemed by those who wish to keep their beaches well-groomed.  Their roots are hard to tear out—remember the Dutch and their dikes?—causing them to reappear after great effort has been exerted to remove them.  Still, we should appreciate their good qualities: they scour, they sandpaper, they can be tied.  Not only that, they provide a glimpse into a different world 350 million years ago.   If you see a millipede hanging out among the stems of horsetails, you might be looking out on a scene enacted 380 million years ago.  Horsetails deserve our respect for their venerable age.

Richard Fidler, when not elbow-deep in swamp mud,  can be found editing “Grand Traverse Journal”.

Celebrate the People

Mud Turtle Jack: Riverman, Poet, Grandfather

by Valerie Himick, first-time contributor to GTJ

Seek channels deep,
Avoid the bars –
We’ll have more fun
Than them in cars

Mason Herbert (Jack) Wallis.
Mason Herbert (Jack) Wallis.

My Grandfather, Mason Herbert Wallis, who preferred to be called Mud Turtle Jack, knew rivers, loved rivers and all bodies of water, and passed that love to the children he left too soon, and the grandchildren he never knew.

The son of George Herbert Wallis and Ellen Marie Wilson Wallis, he was born at Point Betsie on Lake Michigan near Frankfort, Michigan, in 1889 while his father was in the Lifesaving Service there.

His mother, Ellen, was the daughter of Charles Henry Wilson, a noted vaudeville actor of the time whose family settled in the Herring Lakes area.  Sadly, Ellen died of tuberculosis at an early age.

"From my window", Lake Michigan.
“From my window”, Lake Michigan.

Jack attended High School in  Manistee where he had a view of Lake Michigan from the window of his room.  His early writings from that time reflect his love of the waters.

This is from his Gloria Lacui ; Written in Manistee High School April 13, 1909.

Be mine the spot
Wherein my boyhood days were spent and there
Aux Bescies pours its gently moving stream.
An Indian village once o’er looked the lake
That marked the outlet of the little stream.
Marquette, as told by records of the French,
Here drew his birch ashore and on the mound
Which then the river mouth o’erlooked, he lay
Surrounded by his voyagers, and cease
His wanderings.

Ah, Frankfort, nestling there
Beside the tossing lake, recall me to
Thy former home and let me listen in
The quiet eve, to songs the lake is sending o’er
The hills.  Didst ever listen to the roar
Of penned up ocean’s force, confined in shells
From Indian island brought?  Tis but a dream,
From which you would awake to real life
By listening to the roar on Frankfort’s coast.
Where ivy, long, five-fingered, green, its arm
Has spread, and there o’er hung a quiet porch.
Twas mine to sit beside my father’s knee
And learn to love the music of the sea.

himick-captainjackwallis

In September of 1906 he wrote this about Lake Michigan –

‘Tis there on your wild bounding surface,
Those grand old waters of ours,
That ships with music and laughter
Plunge on through your storms and your showers.

‘Tis there in your calm placid waters,
The fishes all bask in the sun,
Till ships rush madly upon them,
They wake before sleep is begun.

‘Tis there on your wild bounding surface,
That ships in agony strain
To reach some harbor of refuge,
‘Tis rest from the toils of your main.

‘Tis there in your cold deep oblivion
The forms of your sailors are laid;
Not all who dared brave your dangers
Returned to a welcoming glade.

‘Tis still on your calm gentle bosom
We float in a bark small and frail;
We wonder that calm will turn motion
And roar in a death-dealing gale.

Never content to be far from the water, he turned to canoeing the rivers with his friends in his beloved canoe.  He wrote long narrative poems describing the fun.

I knew the channel where the current ate
Away the muddy banks in deepest holes.
I knew where sandbars piled themselves in play
And caught at drifting stumps and such debris
As is picked up by the rivers in their course.
I knew the turtles by their given names
And they knew me, for when I’d pass them by,
‘Hey mister, where you goin’?’ they’d always say.

Jack Wallis serving as postman in Ann Arbor, ca. 1915.
Jack Wallis serving as postman in Ann Arbor, ca. 1915.

As a young man, Jack lived in Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor where he worked as a shoe salesman and a mail carrier.  There, with his good friend, pharmacist Stan Smith, he created Stage Stuff, “a series of vaudeville playlets, – each one complete in one act, – yet all closely related, – and each one staged for the mere benefit and enjoyment of the actors, themselves, before an empty house.”

Stan Smith, friend of Jack Wallis and fellow Stage Stuff performer.
Stan Smith, friend of Jack Wallis and fellow Stage Stuff performer.

“There is no description,
It’s our bunch of fun,-
Some set to music,
Some verse, and some slung
As random shot
Or analysis clear,-(clear as mud)
To explain some Big Time Stuff
That we hold most dear.”

However far removed, his early years in Frankfort were never far from his thoughts:

Then all the time I thought of my old dad
And how he’d spent his life on bigger boats,
For what he knew and taught to me of them
I modified and changed for my canoe.

So trained was I in waterlore that if
A gay procession of the boats in the whole world
Could pass before a judges’s stand to view
Their skill,-my dad would rise up from his grave
On Frankfort’s hill, and point me out and say,
“That’s
my kid there; I know him by the way
He grips the haft, and how his paddle cleaves
The water at his every stroke.  There now’s
The Loafing Stroke; they say the Injuns found
It for their light birch bark canoes, but we
Deep Water men would say its best when used
For dress parades and idle hours.  But look!
The Man of War Stroke!  It’s the same we used
To drive our surfboat to a wreak, and now
My kid had found it best for his canoe.
Just note the forward reach, the sudden pull,
The throwing of his weight as balanced by
His braced feet and dipping blade, the craft
Most leaves the water in its leap.
But lad,-
There is,- Ah, there you are, The Cruising Stroke
And with that steady pull you’ll drive that shell
All day; Why, when you were a kid in arms,
I’d put you in your little chair lashed in
My skiff, and pull out miles into the lake
With that same stroke.
And all the thousand
Little touches of the blade, – the One Hand Stroke,
The Overhead, the Submarine, the Brakes,
Reverse, and Backward scull,- like spur to horse-
The shell obeys thy will.  Ah, that’s my kid!
You cannot fool an old man when he sees
His youth again, performed by his own blood!” 

In the fall of 1929, now married and the father of three children, Stan, Marce, and my mother Joy, Jack became seriously ill with the same disease that claimed his mother’s life, tuberculosis. Eventually, he was forced to leave his family and live with his stepmother, Ada Bagley, in Muskegon. Confined to his bed, he wrote and sold stories to magazines to support his family.

"Stage Stuff" scrapbook by the cast from Ann Arbor.
“Stage Stuff” scrapbook by the cast from Ann Arbor.

Sadly, we have not been able to locate any of his published writings from that time.  In fact, we had no idea any of his writings had survived until my Aunt, Marce Forton, of Traverse City, called me a few years ago and asked me to take a box of things to my mother.  There in the box, under an old tablecloth and some clothes, I found treasure, a leather journal and an old photograph album – The Libraria of M.H. Jack Wallis, marked private, and the Stage Stuff photos.  Marce had kept it safe all these years. 

Valerie Himick is the author of two novels, Life is a Cabernet and The Birds & The Bees, set in the wine country of Old Mission Peninsula in Grand Traverse County. Like her grandfather, she finds inspiration for her writing in the natural beauty of the rivers and lakes of northern Michigan.

History

The Tonic of Wildness

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by Annie Spence, first-time contributor to GTJ

“All change is a miracle to contemplate, but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant.”
–Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods

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Walden with his father Mike Spence at the Old Bathing Beach in Elk Rapids, Michigan.

My husband and I chose the name Walden for our expected son, a tribute to both nature and literature from Henry David Thoreau’s masterwork, Walden, or Life in the Woods. What better aspects of character could we hope to instill in our child than those of simplicity, self-reliance and reverence for the natural world? And for our boy with such a purposeful name we of course planned the most simple and natural of births and, of course, ended up with the exact opposite.

Our namesake of simplicity, self-reliance, and the natural world came to us by way of an emergency surgery, a team of doctors, and all the miracles of new science. Walden was born in early September and after a week tucked into a plastic pod in ICU with tubes attached to his chest, legs and perfectly round little head, we brought him home. By the time we’d bumbled through the haze of his first six weeks, winter had crept in. We’d only taken him on a handful of strolls through our hometown of Elk Rapids and now we’d be sentenced to Life in the House until spring. We stayed bundled inside and read The Fledgling by Jane Langton (another tribute to Thoreau) and when forced to go outdoors, baited by promises of holiday gifts or hot cocoa, our aim was to get our sweet fragile son from car to door and back again with the least amount of exposure to the elements. Not wind nor snow nor hail could penetrate the layers of Walden’s pilled hand-me-down snowsuit, topped with several layers of homemade blankets.

waldenbeach2 copyBy March, the whole family was more than ready to get outside and “blow the stink off”. We started small, with stroller walks on any day that poked up above 30 degrees. By May we had graduated to sitting on a blanket outside and by the time Walden learned to crawl and sit up, it was time to help Mom and Dad pull weeds in the raspberry patch. I worried that after so many months inside, our little one would have grown soft from the comforts of a temperature-controlled cozy home filled with toys and pillows and music. To my delight, though, Walden took to the outdoors like a true-blue naturalist. He could sit outside for hours (hours! a baby!) watching us do yardwork or mowing the lawn with our new self-propelled lawn mower. Seeing sunlight filtering through tree leaves put him into a trance.

It was almost summer and finally (finally!) time for the beach.

Finally (finally!) time for the beach.

 

“A lake is a landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is Earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.”
–Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods

In the hottest days of August last year, at nine months pregnant, there were days my only solace was wading in the bay at The Old Bathing Beach on the north end of Elk Rapids. It was the only place I could feel both cool and weightless, big belly up and watching the sun set.

The Old Bathing Beach* is one of four public beaches in Elk Rapids, a public spot fitted snugly next to a private stretch reserved for condos. It’s either not known by many tourists or not preferred. This year especially, since the water levels have risen, there is sometimes only a blanket’s worth of smooth bare sand to stake claim to. The rest of the area is covered in slender and sinuous dune grass. Often we’re three of only four or five people nearby and we like it that way. The combination of wind and waves are sometimes loud enough that it won’t do you much good to try and hold a conversation. The three of us are prompted by natural forces to be still.

“I silently smiled at my incessant good fortune.”
“I silently smiled at my incessant good fortune.”

Taking Walden here has brought a sense of peace to our hectic lives. We daily feel the familiar tugs of conflicting work schedules, night wakings, late bills and last minute out-of-town visitors and often find ourselves living what feels like the opposite of Thoreau’s declaration, “Simplicity! Simplicity! Simplicity!” and “as long as possible, live free and uncommitted.” Still, at the end of the day we are a bike ride away from a quiet spot where baby and I can sit and make comb marks in the sand while my husband kayaks. On our way back, we hear locals and visitors laughing and enjoying the long warm days (getting shorter, minute by minute and so, that much sweeter). We come home and for at least a day after can feel the grit of strayed sand under our feet and are reminded of our remarkable luck.

As the weather turns cooler again and The Old Farmer’s Almanac predicts more snow and frigid temperatures, as we blow out Walden’s first birthday candle, and unpack our sweaters  and hats when it seems like we only just put them away, our small family will try and sometimes fail to remember Thoreau’s advice to “live in each season as it passes”.

*: I have inquired about the history of the Old Bathing Beach, but haven’t found any such information. If you have any knowledge this area, please consider submitting to Grand Traverse Journal about it!

Annie Spence, when not being mother and wife in her wonderful little family, serves as a reference librarian at the Traverse Area District Library, Woodmere Branch. She is a recent transplant to Elk Rapids, and finds “up north living” very appealing.

Forgotten Stories

To Traverse Point and Return, M.E.C. Bates

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Did you ever ride down to Traverse Point and back by way of Old Mission, all in one summer evening and night?  If not, one of the freshest, most charming pleasures awaits you that ever your life held.  Give your imagination the rein for a little space, and in fancy take the trip with us, to-day.

"The Old Wilson Road (V)," lithography by William S. Holdsworth, 1901.
“The Old Wilson Road (V),” watercolor by William S. Holdsworth, 1901.

It is verging on five o’clock p.m. when we leave Traverse City.  The sun is dropping towards the western hills, and sending long level golden beams into the eastern belt of pines and oaks as we leave the town behind, and sweep around the bight of the bay to the Peninsula.  The bay is a misty blue with long lines of sparkling waves rushing shoreward, for though the air is warm with a languid, luxurious August heat, there is a brisk breeze from the northwest that sweeps through it—cool, bracing, exhilarating.  In a few moments the town is dim behind us,–white houses, mill stacks with their plumes of smoke, church spires, and the castle-like walls of the asylum all melting together into the dim outlines.  With swift and steady stroke our horses’ hoofs fall upon the hard, level road, and the speed of our going, with the rush of the wind in our faces, makes us feel as if it were wings instead of feet that are bearing us onward.  The pines and cedars have closed in on both sides of the road.  The air is spicy with resin and balm.  All the little nooks are ablaze with goldenrod, blue with wild asters, or white with yarrow, that “dusty beggar, sitting by the wayside in the sun.”  Now and then, a pretty clearing opens on the right, with a cosy white farm house set down in its bit of orchard, or green meadows, with a bright bed of flowers by the door, and beyond, fields of corn standing stately and tall in serried ranks, like soldiers on parade.  Then the wood closes in again with its sweet, dark greenness.  To the right it is close and dense.  To the left is always the bay, so near we could toss a pebble in it through its fringe of birches and cedars.  The wind freshens and the white caps dance out beyond the pebbly shallows.  The crisp waves run up the beach and fall with a musical crash on the shore.  Marion Island begins to loom large and green ahead.  The little haunted island shows its fringe of bushes and stunted pines more clearly.  The bay shore begins to take a great curve.  The islands are abreast and then drop astern.  The sun is shorn of his beams, and, a great glowing ball of fire, drops below the purple hills.  A sudden, dewy breath as of twilight and the coming night sweeps out of the thickets.  Tall pines stand in stately colonnades along the beach.  There is a dock, ancient and wave-worn, running out into the water.  This must be Bower’s Harbor, and we look out towards the haunted island, half expecting to see the ghost of the old Sunnyside come steaming out from behind the bluffs as she speeds to her old landing place.  But no.  Her timbers strewed the beach of Lake Michigan long years ago, and bluff Captain Emory sleeps his last sleep somewhere under these northern pines, and for her there has never been given a ghostly resurrection.  On and on, the road sweeps around o the west and climbs a steep way cut on the side of the bluff, so near and so overhanging the water that the spray from the tips of the great green curling waves now coming in falls over us.  The stout horses tug and bend to their task, and presently we are out on the top of the highlands, and the world lies open and fair before us, and this is Traverse Point.

The "Old Fish Shanty" on the shore of the Holdsworth property, Old Mission Peninsula; lithograph by William S. Holdsworth, undated.
The “Old Fish Shanty” on the shore of the Holdsworth property, Old Mission Peninsula;  watercolor by William S. Holdsworth, undated.

What shall we say of it?  Here are the beginnings only as yet of the improvement of one of the loveliest spots for summer homes in all this beautiful Resort Region.  It is not fair to tell now of what is,–for that is changing so rapidly to the far different what-it-will-be.  These pretty cottages rising here and there are only the avant couriers of uncounted others to come.  Here is a children’s paradise, where all the summer through the little ones may gather roses for their cheeks, and strength and litheness to their supple limbs.  Here—but why foretell? The swift years are telling the story of them both,–beautiful Traverse Point and fair Ne-ah-ta-wan-ta, “placid waters.”  What will never change are rose of dawn and gold of sunset, silver glory of moonlight and purple of twilight, misty gray of summer rains and strength of wild waves when the winds send them sweeping in from the northwest in long lines of foam crested rollers, sparkle of blue under the noonday sun and glint of stars in fathomless depths of midnight in heaven above and water below,–a thousand variations of tint and form, of sound and motion, of shadow and light, and all beautiful beyond expression.

"Path to Shanty on the East Shore of West Bay," lithograph by William S. Holdsworth, 1900.
“Path to Shanty on the East Shore of West Bay,” watercolor by William S. Holdsworth, 1900.

But time flies; we must not stop for rhapsody.
Back to the eastward we go and are off across Peninsula.  The west is all aglow with gorgeous sunset hues of orange and crimson and dusky gold.  There is a strange sense of wide expanse and unwonted freedom.  We look to see why, and find it is because there are no fences in this township.

“How beautiful it is!” we say to each other.  Here is a wide stretch of meadow land; just beyond it melts into a yellow stubble where the wheat was not long ago; then acres of silvery oats and then again the corn, rustling in the evening breeze, while again great patches of potatoes—green tufts, dotting the well-tilled brown soil, come down to the very wagon tracks.  It is a great Acadian garden.  The road winds and turns.  It seems further than we thought.  We must have come out of our way, for part of the time we are surely going back on our former direction.  Shall we stop and inquire?  No.  It is fun to be lost in Peninsula, for we can’t get far away without getting into the water, and we must come out somewhere.  So on we go in the fast gathering twilight.  We are in the midst of the great Peninsula fruit farms.  Far and wide on either side stretch the orchards.  Those—green and glossy in the dim light—are cherry trees; they lost their ruby fruitage long ago; these are pears—loaded down, and with their branches propped to keep from breaking, and already the air is getting spicy with their ripening; yonder are plum trees, more purple than the purple twilight shadows with the bloom on their masses of fruit,–and everywhere are apples,–trees gnarled and knotty with age and crimson with clustering fruit,–trees young and vigorous and heavy with golden treasure,–surely the fabled apples of the Hesperides were not so well worthy of fame as these.  There are handsome farm houses set down among these orchards.  The light is dim now, but we can see and feel evidences of thrift, of comfort, and of substantial competence.  Lights twinkle here and there through the trees.  The road is hilly now, and we go swiftly up one rise and down another, till soon the road bends again and we sweep out on the East Bay shore.  We are at Old Mission.

The Old Mission Inn, once known as Porter House, where Bates sat "under the great maples". Little has changed to the exterior of the Inn in the century since she rested there. Photograph courtesy of the History Center of Traverse City.
The Old Mission Inn, once known as Porter House, where Bates sat “under the great maples”. Little has changed to the exterior of the Inn in the century since she rested there. Photograph courtesy of the History Center of Traverse City.

Here we stop for a little rest before we fairly start on our homeward way.  We sit under the great maples at the Old Mission house, and watch the far off stars, and the distant lights across the bay at Elk Rapids, and listen to the whispering of the waves down on the beach and the moaning of the wind in the trees overhead, and dream.  By and by the moon rises large and fair over the eastward lying hills beyond the bay.  There is a path of silver across the water.  The shadows of the great trees lie heavy on the grass.  The lights in the cottages down at Old Mission Beach Resort begin to go out one by one.

It is time for home going.  The good horses are rested and ready for home.  Once more their hoof beats ring on the hard, level road.

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“Birches on the East Shore of West Bay,” watercolor by William S. Holdsworth, date obscured.

Down the center of Peninsula this time.  Right along the high ridge that is the “backbone,” in the old settlers’ dialect.  On either side are deep ravines, dark with shadows.  Overhead the trees shake shadowy hands with each other from either side of the way.  The farm houses are all dark.  The world is dead with silence but for the echoing hoof beats.  On and on.  At last we rush down a long winding hill road, and out on the level lowlands.  To the right, the country with its fields.  To the left the beautiful bay sparkling with silver in the moonlight.  We are tired of saying “How beautiful!” but are silent and drink in the still loveliness of the moonlit water, the quiet fields, and the shadowy woods.

Another hour, and we cross again to the other side.  The West Bay welcomes us with its wind-tossed waves.  The village with its white houses stands still and fair under the oaks in the moonlight.  It is its silent streets that echo with our horses’ hoof beats now.  Forty miles and more of riding between supper and sleep, and such a ride!

Home at last!

——————————————————————————-

Notes: M.E. C. (Martha E. Cram Bates) Bates was an important literary figure of the Traverse area, arriving here in 1862.  She married Thomas T. Bates, the editor of the Grand Traverse Herald, working in various capacities for that newspaper over the next thirty years.  She especially enjoyed keeping a column in the Herald called “The Sunshine Society”, which entertained children with poems and stories.  As an early woman journalist, she helped to found the Michigan Woman’s Press Association in the 1890’s.

Martha Bates was co-author (with Mary K. Buck) of two books, Along Traverse Shores (copies are available at Traverse Area District Library) and A Few Verses for a Few Friends.  The present article is taken from the first volume.  M.E.C. Bates died in 1905.

Mystery Photo

The Eagle Has Landed Solved!

Recognize this imposing figure? I am sure you have seen him looking down at you from his perch on a building! Hint: Know of any surviving Art Deco buildings in Traverse City?

Thanks to the Kiwanis Club of Traverse City, we have our answer! This imposing fellow is perched above the entrances to the US Post Office on Union Street in downtown Traverse City. Next time you’re walking past, remember to give him a friendly wave; it’s always lonely at the top!

 

History

Leading Ladies of Traverse City Exhibit Announced

The History Center of Traverse City is excited to announce Fall 2014 “Legends of the Grand Traverse Region”: “Leading Ladies of Traverse City.”  Exhibits will reveal the history of three 19th- and 20th-century womens’ organizations:  The Traverse City Woman’s Club, the Ladies Library Association and the Friendly Garden Club.

Well into the twentieth century many professional fields were closed to women.   Across the country, women of talent and expertise found other ways to influence their communities, and Traverse City was no different. Locally, women participated in  public service organizations, such as the groups featured as this fall’s “Legends.”

Legends’ “Leading Ladies of Traverse City”   will debut on Wednesday, Sept. 17th, and run through October 18th. Information on our Grand Opening Celebration,  Thursday, Sept. 25th, will be forthcoming.

Nature

Growing Your Own House: The Mites of Maple Bladder Galls

In early summer you may have noticed small pouches on red and silver maple leaves.  If you open one up, you will find—nothing at all.  Or so it seems.  In fact, the creatures that live there are swarming all around.

They are microscopic mites of the eriophyid family, so small you would need a 400X magnification to study them in detail.  Unlike most mites, they have but four legs—not eight—with two pairs clustered around the animal’s mouth.  Dwelling within such a small space, eriophyids hardly have need of legs at all: for most of their lives their universe is no bigger than the gall they inhabit.

The life cycle of the mite is simple.  They mate and reproduce within the secure enclosure of the gall, producing several generations within a summer.  Before leaves change color in autumn, obeying a signal we do not know, they migrate out of their chamber to the bud scales of next year’s leaves or to protected areas under loose bark.  Dormant, they wait there for the cold blast of winter.

In spring, before leaves expand, they enter young leaves on the underside, their presence initiating the balloon-growth of many pouches, the number ranging from a half dozen or so to an ugly multitude that deforms the leaf.  While the mites undoubtedly sap energy from trees, they cause little permanent damage.  Gardeners and foresters generally ignore their presence, not wasting effort or chemicals to discourage them.

Maple Bladder Galls on Silver Maple, Traverse City.
Maple Bladder Galls on Silver Maple, Traverse City.

I think leaves adorned with crimson maple bladder galls are attractive, resembling miniature Christmas decorations in the month farthest removed from that holiday.  They can be pointed or inflated depending upon the species of mite involved and colors vary, frequently starting off green and becoming red before fading to a dull brown.  Can they be thought of as a rash trees get?  Not exactly, since they do infect the surface tissues alone, unlike human dermatitis.

Another kind of eriophyid attacks plants in a different way.  Instead of making galls, it secretes a chemical that induces plants to grow a forest of slender hairs called an erineum.  An erineum—taken from the Greek word for fleece—can be found on the lower surface of leaves of many plants: oaks, maples, viburnum, and grapes are especially affected.  It may appear as a velvet fuzz, white or commonly red in color.

As with the gall-forming eriophyids, the erineum mites are exceedingly difficult to see even with a powerful magnifier.  A twenty-power lens might reveal their presence, though sharp eyes will be called for.  A microscope, of course, would work better.

Somehow I connect these animals with larger herbivores like bison..  I imagine them roaming over the fields of hairs they caused to grow, feeding upon them as the bison would, a prairie in a square inch.   Throughout early summer they graze, finally retiring to bud scales and bark for the winter.  Occasionally a stiff wind will blow them right out of the erineum, something bison do not have to worry about.  Of course, the advantage for the mite is that it might get blown to a new tree, fertile ground to establish a new miniature prairie ecosystem.

Nature performs its work at every scale: planet, ecosystem, organism, organs, tissues, and cells.  Isaac Asimov, the famous science fiction writer, once wrote about exploring the world extending from his backdoor.  After much study he had gotten as far as a few feet from his porch, so numerous were the species he encountered.  Most likely he did not get around to the mite-formed galls or erineums on his shade trees.

Richard Fidler is a retired teacher of biology, a Traverse City historian and an editor of the Grand Traverse Journal.

Mystery Photo

Where is it? What is it? When was it?

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Can you guess what this is and where it is located? You can see it from the street in downtown Traverse City, but you need to be looking down!

Did you figure it out? It’s the after-hours deposit box of the old Northwestern Savings Bank on Cass and Front Street, facing Cass. Although the building is no longer a bank, we appreciate that this relic was left intact! Thanks to reader Julie of Traverse City for providing the answer!