Update            By: Claudia Corona            10/20/09

Naked. If I had to describe the forestry surrounding Ford Glen Brook today, naked is the word I would use to describe it. It’s been a week since I last came to observe my site, and already I feel as if I’ve missed out on big changes. It feels as if everything has gone away.

I’m not walking into the trail, I am tramping all over it. The ground floor is covered in about 2 inches of leaf litter and as I go down the path, my boots can’t help but make noise, “Crunch, crunch”. It’s incredible noisy for such a calm environment, so I stop. I crouch down and pick up a leaf on the ground. It feels rough, brittle and dry. I look ahead, farther into the Ford Glen Brook trail, and notice that the leaves no longer form a carpet of red and gold, but of pale brown cover, which, according to my boots, are cantankerous.

I kick off the leaves in one spot of the trail, and dig with my fingers into the dirt. I rummage and rummage until I feel I’ve gotten about 3 inches deep, and then take that chunk of soil out. The soil is a very dark brown, almost black in color. It’s definitely moist, but not damp enough to stain my fingers with mud or grime. I never noticed before that soil contained more than dirt. This soil had small twigs, leaves, and rocks the size of very small pebbles. It was bumpy and soft, and smelled of pine sap. Briefly, I wondered what the soil by the brook might feel like, and I decided to go and find out.

On my way to the brook, I look around and notice lots of Christmas ferns and Lady ferns, more than usual. But then I also notice that most of the other plants that were around last week, like the Jack in the pulpit and Dame’s rocket, are not there. The death of many plants that can’t handle the 30 degree weather amplifies the presence of all the plants that are still alive, and can trick one into believing that those still alive are reproducing quickly, when really, they are just the only plants still alive. I can easily discern many of the red maples have begun to turn, or turned fully, The Japanese Barberry on the Ford Glen Brook trail is no longer its dark green color, but now an orange-yellowish color and it still has its red, oval-shaped berries.

As I was jumping over fallen logs and rotten trees, I saw something I had never seen before, a pine cone! But it wasn’t an ordinary sight, all of the pine cones I saw had blotches of what looked like white paint on them. I really couldn’t believe that there were so many pine cones here, so I picked one up. It was about 6 inches high, an inch in diameter,  with all that “paint”. I touched the white “paint” and it was very sticky and smelled strongly of something minty. I finally recognized it as pine sap oozing from the pine cone when I broke the pine cone in half, but I don’t know what tree the pine cones were falling from.

I finally made it down to the brook and dug deep into a steep slope that had some soil exposed. The soil a few feet from the brook was significantly smoother and wetter. It was muddy, and when I rubbed the soil in my hand, it stained my fingers. There were very few twigs in the soil, and almost no rocks. It was much softer and squishier, vaguely reminding me of clay. But this wasn’t surprising, being so close to the brook meant the soil here is more exposed to the water, and whenever the brook gets lots of rain, it probably gets high enough to drown the soil in water, which would explain its constant muddy-like state.

Streaks of light penetrated the top of the trees while I was walking back on the trail. I’d never seen sunlight penetrate the tree tops in my site before. That’s when I looked up and realized that there WERE no tree tops! All of the leaves that had once soaked up the sunlight had fallen onto the path and enabled the sun to brighten up the forest. Everything looked so bare, and yet so full; of leaves, sunlight, and in a few weeks, of snow.