Professor Herb Wagner

My time at University of Michigan’s biological station near Pellston, MI exposed me up close to the culture of academia. Billed as the opportunity for undergraduates to get to know professors one to one in a rustic setting, I found them to be often arrogant, disdainful of undergraduates and eager to turn graduate students into uncredited slaves. An important exception to this was Warren “Herb” Wagner, a name which brings thousands of his former UMich students around the world to a moment of gentle remembrance. Dr. Wagner taught the popular Woody Plants course and did what all great teachers did, get people excited. He died at 80, January 8, 2000 after only a week of absence from his research laboratory.

Sam Ristich from http://www.ruthieristich.com/blog/

But this is not about Herb Wagner, it’s about his Maine mycologist equivalent, Sam Ristich. Since becoming involved with mushrooming in Maine and joining the Maine Mycological Association, I have heard quite a bit about Sam and how he single handedly formed the club and exported his considerable enthusiasm about fungi for many years. Always available for one-on-one and delightfully oblivious to fashion or other social conventions, he stayed active into his 90s, devoting his last 2-1/2 decades to educating Mainers about nature.

Born in Pittsburgh in 1915 to Serbian immigrants, Sam served as a navigator for the US Army Air Force’s Air Transport Command in WWII, starting his working life risking it to deliver planes to dangerous places like Greenland, Burma and the Sahara desert. A marker-filled map of the world chronicles his many achievements at www.samristich.com. After the war he earned his PhD in entomology at Cornell (1950). During 15 years of teaching at the New York Botanical Gardens he founded the Connecticut-Westchester Mycological Association (COMA) and the New Jersey Mycological Association. He and wife Ruth worked for civil rights and were active from 1955 to 1975 with the NAACP and the Unitarian Social Action Committee.

In the early 1980s Ruth inherited her family’s farm in North Yarmouth, Maine and so they came to our neck of the woods. Many of the current members of MMA remember Sam, his bubbly enthusiasm and trademark expressions; his whoops of excitement and “wonderment” of the natural world.

Sam died during dinner on February 11, 2008 at the age of 92. I was not lucky enough to have known Sam Ristich, but I can tell he was an important figure in Maine history. You can’t get very far into fungi without encountering his name or photographs. There are annual forays named after him and a memorial nature trail in North Yarmouth. He even discovered a new mushroom in 1983, Amanita ristichii. His service for the Northern New England Poison Control Center in identifying mushrooms probably saved many lives. But to me his greatest mark was as a teacher. Like Herb Wagner and Richard Feynman, his legacy will continue forever in the lives of those he inspired. In his own words from http://www.samristich.com/about.html

I loved it! [Teaching] I had the good fortune of being at the right place at the right time and having the motivation to really tap the potential. Somebody said that the greatest of talents is to discover it and develop it in others. And there’re some people who are motivators and know where to find it and how to mine it.

His daughter is working on a film about her father’s life. See a clip below:

F__Microscope Drama from Ruthie Ristich on Vimeo.

Sam Ristich resources on the web used in this article:

• http://www.samristich.com
• “Sam’s Corner”, http://www.mushroomthejournal.com/mma/SCCentral.html
• http://www.ruthieristich.com
• http://www.mainelymushrooms.org/PagesPublic/Pub_Sam.html
• (obituary) http://nemfdata.org/samristich.htm

This is what you will see from the Crooked Road

While looking at a map of Acadia National Park I noticed a small elongated lake I had never heard of, the innocuously named Lake Wood. I don’t think any park literature mentions or directs visitors to this lake, making it a secret spot for avoiding the crowds. Hopefully this post will not reverse its status. The aforementioned map does not show the access road and parking lot serving this gem. In fact there is a well marked road named (amazingly) Lake Wood Pond Road which is on the south side of the Crooked road just about a mile west from Rt 3 in Hulls Cove.

A mention of Lake Wood to locals brings on many stories and memories. It is like it is “their” part of Acadia National Park; a fishing, sunbathing and swimming spot all their own. The skinny end which presents itself as the access trail ends is a passable beach, suitable for swimming or watching little fish and tadpoles among the water lilies. The southern  exposure makes for warm picnics. According to the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries, the lake is about 16 acres, has a maximum depth of 11 feet and an average depth of 7 feet. That’s 36.5 million gallons. The fish species are brook trout, white sucker, rainbow smelt, banded killifish, minnows, pumpkinseed sunfish and American eel.

View from the beach

Until recently, the eastern shore of the lake belonged to the Town of Bar Harbor. Here, just around the left side of the swimming beach, there are granite cliffs which offer a drop into the water popular with “skinny dippers”. Now the entire lake is surrounded by National Park property and as such, nude bathing and other former activities are discouraged, but not eliminated. The lake has a solid ranger presence and an outhouse, but there are no lifeguards or camping. The trail to the granite outcropping branches off left of the main road just before the parking lot.  This same trail leads to three acre Fawn Pond, an even more remote body of water. Both bodies of water drain the mountains to the south and have an elevation of about 130 feet (Lake Wood) to 200 feet (Fawn Pond). Downhill, their water drains to Hamilton Pond and the Northeast Creek, which is a big wild cranberry area.

Water lilies are getting ready to bloom as of late August.

So folks who come to Acadia National Park and find to their distress that there are just too many people, are not giving the park a chance. Try Lake Wood for a little more isolation. I covered other remote places here. There will be more to come!

Fawn Pond

These crocuses are still lookin' good

Like the rest of the country, Maine had a few freak days of summer-like heat. It was in the 80s for a few days in March. While in April this would normally induce a giddy euphoria, most Mainers were heard spouting End-Of-Days-like comments. We’re already used to being at the end of the earth, so the end of days is nothing unusual.

No sap from this red maple

Since then things have returned to normal. The heat shock brought a quick end to the maple sugar season, reason enough for some to reserve a condo in Oblivion, but unlike Wisconsin, our grapes at SeaCat’s Rest have not produced exploding buds (the horror!).  But still, there’s change afoot. On my daily trips to the mailbox, where I sometimes find checks from future guests, I have recently been meeting up with Br’er Fox, who was obviously upset by my mail quest. He (or she) slid ever-so-elegantly into the puckerbush before I so much as registered his (or her) presence. Not so subtle were the mating-crazed frogs in our culvert’s headwater. These creatures are vocally demonstrative, with variations not unlike the Vienna Boy’s Choir at puberty.

Elsewhere the odd flower or foliage is popping up. The crocuses have mostly come and gone. Tree buds are swelling despite the occasional dip into the 30s.  Two days ago it snowed. The annual road heavy load restrictions have been removed, a sure sign that the frost is losing to the forces of warmth. The Portland Press Herald reports that ticks are out early, a fact our cats can verify.

Green lawns are just starting. Not enough to satisfy the craving for green. For that we must visit the woods, where mosses are hogging all the chlorophyll. Just down the trail is a little pond where clumps of frog’s eggs are floating.

Not exactly a riot of color, sunlight and warmth, but these things take time in Maine. Even when it gets to 80 degrees in March, nature takes it’s time.

Frog's eggs

http://www.eregulations.com/maine/hunting

The daily (except Sunday) banging of firearms coming from the woods, is over for another year.  True, Acadia National Park is always closed to hunting. In fact, some park roads are closed in firearms season to discourage poaching. For the rest of us, we can now venture outside without wearing orange. This hunting season in Maine, during which deer, bear, and moose  can be shot, ended Saturday, November 26. Duck season is still on though. Sea ducks can be hunted with guns until January 31, 2012 and regular ducks until December 24.  Sea duck hunting goes on right off our shore, and it’s a little nerve-wracking. Admittedly, the boats are about a mile away, due north of Mount Desert Island, but the sound carries well over the water. The urge to duck (pardon the pun) is hard to resist. I have to remind myself that steel bird shot (lead is prohibited) will probably travel no further than 800 feet, about 1/7 of a mile. Bad for the duck but harmless to us.

http://www.eregulations.com/maine/hunting

So how does Maine do, safety wise, in hosting the primal hunting ritual? Actually not bad. This year was worse than the past few, with one fatality and two gunshot injuries but compared to 1970, when there were 52 incidents in the Pine Tree State we’re looking pretty good. Consider we’ve lost 4 hunters from fatal gunshots from 2000-2010 while Pennsylvania has lost 29 and Arkansas 36. That’s actual numbers, but in per-hunter statistics we don’t do bad either, averaging 42 incidents per 100,000 hunters in the ten year period. That’s 4.2 per year. Compare that to New Hampshire’s 5.6 per 100,000 per year and Vermont’s 5.5.

How did we achieve this goal? Two laws. One is the mandatory wearing of a very specific color of orange on the body and head. Still, according to a post on thefirearmsforum.com:

Blaze orange will not protect you from being shot by a color-blind hunter, and there are a lot of us out there….The thing that others need to be aware of is that Blaze Orange is the same color as Grass Green to me – make all the arguments you want to on the basis of wavelengths and stuff, it’s perception that counts. And more specifically, it’s the perception of the color-blind guy with a .30-06 three hundred yards away that counts.

And the other law requires a mandatory hunter’s training course. The training course law had an immediate effect on fatalities when it went into effect in 1986. Another law, called the positive identification law, requires hunters to ID their targets before pulling the trigger. Sounds like a no-brainer, but I guess some people need to think about it.

The first full winter I spent in Maine there was a terrible fatality. A young mother of year-old twins stepped outside her house wearing white mittens. She was shot dead in her backyard. Some people actually criticized her for her choice of handwear, I was appalled. The hunter was initially charged with manslaughter but not indicted. He was a scout leader and well loved in the community. The surviving husband and twin girls moved away shortly after the grand jury decision. Fortunately, this was the worst incident of its kind as far as I know in recent memory, and I think of it every year around this time.

As the reader can probably infer, I’m not big on hunting. But hunting season does bring cash into Maine at a time of year when not many folks want to be here, and the vast majority of hunters are careful and respectful of private property, and human life.  Now deer season’s over and I can walk through the woods without fear, which I will do as soon as I’m finished typing this. I think I’ll still wear orange.

The morel, from wikipedia

This fall like most we attended the Common Ground Fair in Unity. While there, we listened to a talk by Greg Marley, our local (Rockland, ME) mycologist (mushroom expert), mycophile (mushroom lover) and mycophagist (mushroom eater). His talk was meant to put an end to mycophobia.

Marley sees the world as divided into the mycophobic (like here and England) and the mycophillic (just about everywhere else). He tells us our society has an irrational fear of fungus, but then points out how mushroom poisonings in the mycophillic world number into the hundreds per year. The one thing to remember, he says, is to focus on edible and medicinal species which are not at all similar to poisonous ones. This means avoiding LBMs (little brown mushrooms) which are notoriously difficult to key out. Also, keeping a checklist of the traits of the most toxic

The death cap from wikipedia

‘shrooms is a good practice. The most toxic genus (the last stop before individual species) is by far, Amanita. One typical cap of Amanita phalloides, the death cap, can kill 5 people and will do so slowly over a week or so. Saving the life of the victim often involves a liver transplant. Amanitas have a white spore print, white gills which are free from the stem, a ring around the stem (an annulus) and a swollen base (a volva), as if it came out of an egg. The death cap is rare in Maine but other Amanitas, including equally toxic ones, are plentiful.

Now, are we ready for the edibles? Feeling uncertain? Good! Identifying edible fungus is best first done with an old hand. Someone who not only knows how to identify them, but where they are likely to grow. When I was a kid that guy was Smitty, a retired mail carrier and big band musician who lived

Shaggy Mane, from Sisyphus. A little past its prime.

across the street. Every May he and his wife Louise would take me into the woods and we would look for morels. This was northern Michigan, where morel hunting is a favorite pastime. The big benefit of morels, besides their flavor, is the fact that they look like sponges on a stalk and so can’t be mistaken for anything poisonous (actually, there’s one, but it’s easy to tell apart and it’s not as deadly as a death cap).

When I moved to Maine I had to leave morels behind. They do grow here occasionally, but you can’t gather enough for a meal, just the odd one. So after years of feeling sorry for myself I ended up listening to Greg Marley and realizing all I had to do was to substitute local edible mushrooms for the ones I miss. Greg presented the “fool-proof four” mushrooms for Maine. They are the morel, puffball, hen-of-the-woods, and shaggy mane. But he said these four are from

Hen of the woods, from AMG

another mycologist and the morels here are scarce. He also pointed out that the puffballs, while an easy target, are not the most choice. He advocated three more which may be more appropriate for Maine, the chanterelle, the sulphur shelf and the king bolete. I am looking forward to finding all these gems. I already came across a nice stand of shaggy manes, and I had a great meal.

There’s much more to getting started in wild mushrooming that looking at a few pictures and

Sulphur shelf, from wikipedia

warming up the frying pan. An intermediate step is to start an excel spreadsheet of all the specimens you find. Each row corresponds to the found fungus with columns for date, location (GPS is good!), habitat, link to photo, spore color, best guess (genus, species, common name) and notes. This will get you practice in identification, a feel for the features of different families and genera, and will give you a chance for a return visit next year. You need an up-to-date field guide. Mine is old and fails to reflect all the name changes that have occurred in the last 30

Chanterelles, from wikipedia

years.

Mycology is very much an evolving field, with genetic data starting to turn the old classification system on its head. Two  on-line resources to use are mushroomexpert.com and Europe’s Roger’s Mushrooms. Don’t do a google search for a picture of a certain species without realizing you will get pictures of misidentified mushrooms–stick with the above sources or a good field guide. Stay in touch with other mushroom hunters like Ari Rockland-Miller and his blog themushroomforager.com to see what’s popping up in the area.

Greg Marley’s book, Chanterelle Dreams, Amanita Nightmares: The Love, Lore, and Mystique of Mushrooms is available in the usual places and is a great tour through the fungal world (did you know flying squirrels eat truffles?). Greg wrote in my copy, “Hope this gets you out into the mushrooms!” It did!

Latona was a goddess of Roman origin. Daughter of Caeus the Titan and Phoebe, or, according to Homer, of Saturn, and mother of Apollo and Diana. For our town, I assume one particular legend of Latona’s applies. She was banished to earth and earth people were forbidden from giving her comfort by the jealous goddess Juno. Latona and her two children asked the farmers around a lake if she and her children could drink from it. The farmers, fearing the wrath of Juno, denied her. After repeated entreaties she finally decided she had had enough, and turned them into frogs. Lamoine people, by naming our spring after the spurned goddess, are certain to provide her water, and therefore need not fear being changed into frogs.

Latona Spring is downhill from Blunt’s Pond, once used for a public water supply, and kept relatively pristine by laws against bathing, motorboats and swimming dogs. This water is filtered through the aquifer and emerges at Latona Spring, where it is captured in a brick enclosure. From here water emerges through a pipe where visitors or Roman goddesses can drink or capture as much as they wish.

Many locals use the water for drinking if their own well water is less than tasty. We have recently used it as we “break in” our new well. We know that the bottled water from the supermarket is no better than that from our Roman goddess. The spring has recently undergone renovations by the owners, Lamoine’s Whitcomb family. The roof has been temporarily moved and is in need of shingles. Plumbing has been replaced and the outlet pipe has been artfully enclosed in granite stonework. New gravel now improves parking.

Stone steps lead to easy access of cool, pure water

The entrance to Latona Spring is just opposite the sign for Latona Lane on State Route 184, Lamoine Beach Road, about 2 miles east of the school. If you visit, please remember this is private property shared with the public, and may not remain so if abused.

Photo courtesy of http://www.gardenpreserve.org

Paired up with Asticou Gardens, Thuya Gardens offers a beautiful formal English  garden set in a native Maine woodland. Asticou tends to the Japanese, so visiting both in close proximity is quite a world tour.

“Thuya” is a derivation of Thuja, which is the genus of the northern white cedar, Thuja occidentalis. While botanists know to pronounce the j like a y, I’m guessing garden founder and Boston landscape architect Joseph Henry Curtis (1841-1928) chose a name meant to avoid mispronunciation. His major contribution was Thuya Lodge, his home on the hillside, where visitors can find a broad selection of botanical and horticultural books. After his death the gardens were developed by Charles K. Savage in 1958, replacing the original orchard with a broad spectrum of colorful annuals and perennials arranged as borders to an expansive lawn. The lawn leads to a formal pavilion on the north side and a reflecting pool on the south end.  Mr. Savage designed the gardens in the style of English designer and author Gertrude Jekyll, as interpreted for the coast of Maine by island gardener Beatrix Farrand.

Photo courtesy of http://www.gardenpreserve.org

Visitors have a choice of how to get to the lodge and gardens. They can park at the lot on Rt 3 and walk up the steep steps on the hillside, complete with rest stops and covered shelters, or simply drive to the top on Thuya Drive.  We chose the former. Both Thuya and Asticou Gardens are accessible using the Island Explorer bus, and while both gardens ask for donations, there is no admission charge per se.

from Google maps

There is still time and lots of color in our fall season for both gardens, but Thuya Lodge is now closed (open mid June to mid September from 10-4:30). The gardens remain open until Halloween, during daylight hours. Both gardens are owned and operated by the Mount Desert Land & Garden Preserve, a non profit, which would put your tax deductible contribution to good use.

A website called mentorseries.com pairs up professional photographers with paying guests for treks to different parts of the world, and in September they are coming  here.  Leading this trek will be Daniel J. Cox, a veteran nature photographer and frequent contributor to National Geographic, National Wildlife and Wildlife Conservation; and Layne Kennedy, whose work has appeared in over a hundred different magazines world-wide on subjects as diverse as wolves in the Northern Hemisphere to boat builders in the Caribbean.

Even amateurs can find photographic opportunities here

Naturally, I can’t paste cool professional photos here, just one of mine, but I can link to the mentorseries website where you can read about signing up for the two day trek.  Also check out their slideshow of  Acadia photos here. Need a place to stay for your Fall photo trek? Our bookings for Fall are still as wide open as a Cadillac Mountain vista.

Crossing the bridge into Maine

I came back from a working trip to northern Michigan to find that during my absence four tall spruce trees were threatening SeaCat’s Rest.  Apparently there had been a big storm. One had fallen on our deck, one hung at a sickening angle over our driveway, one had fallen on our power lines (this is #5 or #6 since we built the house) and a big one fell over onto some fire cherry trees and was barely suspended above our roof, 30 feet off the ground. Most of the spruce forest we started with is gone, mostly due to the affects of age. The center wood starts to rot and carpenter ants often invade. The next big blow and they’re down…or leaning. We’ve had trees fall on two boats, a wheelbarrow, the house, outbuildings, fences and the compost bin.

Another spruce gone

This time the biggest challenge was to figure out how to deal with the big tree leaning over the roof, held in place by the young cherry trees. Normally I cut sections out of a leaning tree so that it gradually falls into a vertical position, then tip it in the direction I want it to fall. But this time the tree was so tangled up with the cherry trees that removing a few sections only produced a shortened spruce, still leaning toward the house.

I plucked up my courage and climbed to the top of the roof with my fishing pole. The casting rod was fitted with a heavy nut and I cast that puppy halfway to the neighbors property. After finding the nut (not easy) I removed it and tied on the end of a braided cord, substantially stronger than the monofilament fishing line.

and another

Back onto the roof where I pulled the cord up as I reeled in the fishing line. Now I tied off the cord on the roof and headed back down where I tied a 3/8 inch three strand nylon line to the cord. Back up again and now I tied the nylon rope to the top of the leaning tree.  I was trusting the friction between my shoes and the asphalt shingles to keep me from plunging into oblivion as I was standing a few feet from the edge. Now it was a simple matter to tie the rope to my borrowed truck and yank the tree back the other way, away from the house. With little effort the tree was down and the boring task of chopping up the tree was all that remained.

The big winds happen in Spring and late Fall, so summer visitors don’t have to worry about falling trees. But life on the Atlantic shore can be a challenge sometimes, just like everywhere else I suppose…

A nice, fresh blanket of snow. It’s enough to make you….tear your hair out! Enough already! It’s April!

April 2, 2011. No April fooling

Lou McNally, now living in Florida!

I have often said that the coast of Maine does not fit into the image of Maine as a place of arctic whiteness, but with this winter’s six months of the stuff I have to eat my words. Lou McNally, longtime Maine weatherguy and former host of MPBN TV’s Made in Maine spoke recently on the subject. He  holds a PHD in meteorology and when asked what effect global warming will have in Maine, said that we will probably have more storms and abrupt season changes. No mention of higher temperatures or less precipitation. Maine is known for having the most winter sunshine, second on the East coast only to Florida, as moist clouds get wringed out by mountains or the coast further south.  We may end up with Boston winters, lots of wet show and little sun. Another few winters like this and I’ll be a believer. Lou is now a professor of meteorology at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University…..in Florida!

Crocuses in the snow, 4/2/11