Pollen

Our neighborhood in Houston is Oak Forest, and every lot in the subdivision is home to at least one oak, post or live. We have three. The fourth – a fat, 75-foot post oak -- we had cut down on Easter two years ago when it leaned against the side of the house, squashing the gutter and putting a 10-inch vertical crack in the wall of my youngest son’s bedroom. That was four months before Hurricane Katrina.

March is pollen season, and the oaks shed it like golden dandruff. The cars appear camouflaged for desert warfare. I’ve seen ponds in upstate New York so evenly covered with pollen they resembled large custards.Until I swept it Saturday afternoon, the driveway was stuccoed with an unsightly brown impasto of pollen, catkins, azalea blossoms, leafmeal and the general airborne filth of Houston, marinaded in last week’s rain and baked for two days in the sun. Even I was sneezing, though none of us is clinically allergic to the stuff.

Pollen produces the male gametes of seed plants, which have been around for more than 300 million years. Without them, no oxygen. Without oxygen, no you and me. Science can help us keep things in perspective. Thoreau gloried in pollen as a sign of nature’s profligacy – survival assured by overabundance. In the “Spring” chapter of Walden he noted:

“The sulphur-like pollen of the pitch pine soon covered the pond and the stones and rotten wood along the shore, so that you could have collected a barrelful. This is the `sulphur showers’ we bear of. Even in Calidas' drama of Sacontala, we read of `rills dyed yellow with the golden dust of the lotus.’ And so the seasons went rolling on into summer, as one rambles into higher and higher grass.”

Like nature’s auditor, Thoreau notes the pollen fall around Concord each year in his Journal. The entry for March 28, 1853, doesn’t get around to pollen until the final sentence, but it’s suggestive of the way his mind habitually worked:

“My Aunt Maria asked me to read the life of Dr. Chalmers, which however I did not promise to do. Yesterday, Sunday, she was heard through the partition shouting to my Aunt Jane, who is deaf, `Think of it! He stood half an hour to-day to hear the frogs croak, and he wouldn’t read the life of Chalmers.’”

“6 A.M—To Cliffs”

“Too cold for the birds to sing much. There appears to be more snow on the mountains. Many of our spring rains are snow-storms there. The woods ring with the cheerful jingle of the F. hyemalis. This is a very trig [Webster’s defines this archaic word as “spruce, smart”] and compact little bird, and appears to be in good condition. The straight edge of slate on their breasts contrasts remarkably with the white from beneath; the short light-colored bill is also very conspicuous amid the dark slate; and when they fly from you, the two white feathers in their tails are very distinct at a good distance. They are very lively, pursuing each other from bush to bush. Could that be the fox-colored sparrow I saw this morning,—that reddish-brown sparrow?

“I do not now think of a bird that hops so distinctly, rapidly, and commonly as the robin, with its head up.

“Why is the pollen of flowers commonly yellow?”

Thoreau’s eye was so fine and his taxonomic bent so pronounced, he could identify the sources of pollen. From the Journal for March, 25, 1855:

“Fever-root one foot high and more, say a fortnight or three weeks. Scared a screech owl out of an apple tree on hill; flew swiftly off at first like a pigeon woodpecker and lit near by facing me; was instantly visited and spied at by a brown thrasher; then flew into a hole high in a hickory near by, the thrasher following close to the tree. It was reddish or ferruginous. Choke-cherry pollen on island, apparently two or three days. Hemlock pollen, probably to-morrow; some in house to-day; say to-day; not yet leafing. Aralia nudicaulis, perhaps two days pollen. Cornus florida, no bloom. Was there year before last? Does it not flower every other year? Its leaf, say, just after C. sericea. Tupelo leaf before button-bush; maybe a week now. Red oak pollen, say a day or two before black. Swamp white oak pollen.”

In the beautiful essay he wrote after the death of Thoreau, Emerson marveled at the acuity of his best friend’s senses:

“One day, walking with a stranger, who inquired where Indian arrow-heads could be found, he replied, `Everywhere,’ and, stooping forward, picked one on the instant from the ground. At Mount Washington, in Tuckerman's Ravine, Thoreau had a bad fall, and sprained his foot. As he was in the act of getting up from his fall, he saw for the first time the leaves of the Arnica mollis.”