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The Standing Stones  1 The Standing Stones  B arefoot, I’ve walked this path by night for nearly twenty years, most of my life it seems, the earth pressing up against the arch of my foot. More often than not, I leave my flashlight behind, to let the path carry me home through the Adirondack darkness. My feet touching the ground are like fingers on the piano, playing from memory an old sweet song, of pine needles and sand. Without thinking, I know to step down carefully over the big root, the one by the sugar maple, where the garter snakes bask every morning. I whacked my toe there once, so I remember. At the bottom of the hill, where the rain washes out the path, I detour into the ferns for a few steps, avoiding the sharp gravel. The path rises over a ridge of smooth granite, where I can feel the day’s warmth still lingering in the rock. The rest is easy, sand and grass, past the place where my daughter Larkin stepped into a nest of yellow jackets when she was six, past the thicket of striped maple where we once found a whole family of baby screech owls, lined up on a branch, sound asleep. I turn off toward my cabin, just at the spot where I can hear the spring dripping, smell its dampness, and feel its moisture rising up between my toes. I first came here as a student, to fulfill my undergraduate requirement for field biology at the Cranberry Lake Biological Station. This is where I was first introduced to mosses, following Dr. Ketchledge through the woods, discovering mosses with the aid of the standard-issue hand lens, the Wards Scientific Student Model borrowed from the stock room, that I wore around my neck on a dirty string. I knew I was committed when, at the end of the class, I spent a part of my sparse college savings to send off for a professional-grade Bausch and Lomb lens like his. I still have that lens, and wear it on a red cord, as I take my own students along the trails at Cranberry Lake, where I returned to join the faculty and to eventually become the Bio Station Director. In all those years, the mosses haven’t changed nearly as much as I have. That 2  Gathering Moss patch of Pogonatum that Ketch showed us along the Tower Trail is still there. Each summer I stop for a closer look and wonder at its longevity. These past few summers, I’ve been conducting research on rocks, trying to learn what I can about how communities form, by observing the way that moss species gather together on boulders. Each boulder stands apart like a desert island in a swelling sea of forest. Its only inhabitants are mosses. We’re trying to figure out why on one rock ten or more species of moss may comfortably coexist, while a nearby boulder, outwardly the same, is completely dominated by just a single moss, living alone. What are the conditions that foster diverse communities rather than isolated individuals? The question is very complex for mosses, let alone for humans. By summer’s end, we should have a tidy little publication, our scholarly contribution to the truth about rocks and mosses. Glacial boulders are scattered over the Adirondacks, the round tumbled granite left behind by the ice ten thousand years ago. Their mossy bulk makes the forests seem primeval and yet I know how much the scenery has changed around them, from the day they were stranded in a barren plain of glacial outwash, to the thick maple woods that surround them today. Most of the boulders reach only to my shoulders, but for some we need a ladder to survey them completely. My students and I wrap measuring tape around their girth. We record light and pH, collect data on the number of crevices and the depth of the thin skin of humus. We carefully catalog the positions of all the moss species, calling out their names. Dicranum scoparium. Plagiothecium denticulatum. The student struggling to record all this begs for shorter names. But mosses don’t usually have common names, for no one has bothered with them. They have only scientific names, conferred with legalistic formality according to protocol set up by Carolus Linnaeus, the great plant taxonomist. Even his own name, Carl Linne, the name his Swedish mother had given him, was Latinized...

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