ECOVIEW
No.3
D. C.
Not your usual neighborhood
art show!!
Carl Lahser
ECOVIEW
No.3
D. C.
Not your usual neighborhood
art show!!
Carl Lahser

Copyright © 2000 by Carl Lahser
All rights reserved. If you must copy any part of this work please give the author appropriate credit.
Published by: Pretense Press
6102 Royal Breeze
San Antonio, TX 78239
Other books by the author:
Teacher, Leaves Don’t Change Color
Forty Years of Fishing
Weather watching
Chasing the Enterprise
Searching for the Phantom Crown
Cross-section through a Rainbow
Backdoor to the Yukon
Ecoview 1 - Not Your Usual Neighborhood
Ecoview 2 - Texas
Ecoview 3 - D.C.
Ecoview 4 - St Louis to Minneapolis
Ecoview 5 - Southwest
Ecoview 6 - Green Things
Summers End
Hey Momma, When we Goin Again
Bigfooting Around
Under the Southern Cross (Under Clouds)
Alamo Road
Texas to Alaska
Mr. Cuul in Yucatan
Thinking of Flying
Do Bears do it in the Woods
Traffic Games
All titles are available from Pretense Press. Booksellers
are encouraged to write for seller’s information.
Printed in USA.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Bethesda Spring
Crows on Whiteflint Hill
View from a Washington High-rise
Old Town, Alexandria, VA
Forest Glen in Fall
A Maple Leaf in November Windsock at Bethesda Helopad D C Metro Columbus Circle at 4 AM in July
Downtown Lightning Bug
A Wooded Wetland Smoky Mountains from the Air
Tidewater Fall
Black Horizon - the Vietnam Memorial
Ecoview No. 3 is the third of a series of geographic portraits. It contains sensitive, mater-of-fact, and possibly controversial collection of verbal pictures of the Washington D.C. area and interactions with nature. Snow. Wild flowers. The homeless. Monuments. No politics or political associations. Neither for nor against anything in particular, these are observations, just the way I see things. Feel free to disagree. Even I sometimes change my mind rereading some of these insights.
Washington D.C.
The District of Columbia, Bethesda, Arlington. Summer and winter. Politicians and the homeless. High-rises and park benches. A myriad of sights and sounds for the observant. Here is a peek at a few.

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Bethesda Spring
Caw!
The call pierces the cold mist.
Caw!
A black shadow glides past
denuded oak and beech trees.
Caw!
A black omen circles and lands.
Ensconced, it surveys the gray mist
from a high, bare branch.
Caw! Caw!
The trees are ready to burst forth
in leaf and flower
the first warm day.
Caw! Spring! Caw! Caw!
+++++
CROWS ON WHITEFLINT HILL
It’s a cold, sinking sunset
as the crows come home
to the oaks and beech
on Whiteflint Hill.
The sky is dark with crows.
The trees are breaking with crows.
A cacophony of ten thousand crows
declaims like wives
coming home from work.
Home they come from a long day
down in the dump
feeding at the local landfill.
They settle in as darkness falls
and the street lights sputter and glow.
With occasional forays into the dark sky
when sleep is disturbed
they restlessly wait
for the faint glow of dawn
to leave this sylvan rookery
and return to the land fill.
+++++
View from a Washington
High-rise
A remarkable contrast is visible
from this Alexandria high-rise office.
Northwest is
the Washington Monument and
the Capitol building
lighted in the early morning mist,
symbols of personal freedom.
To the south
a freeway is backed up
over the hill and out of sight
barely moving,
a seething parking lot.
Everyone's freedom
impinging
on everyone's freedom.
+++++

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Old Town, Alexandria , VA
Historically correct weather
with high humidity and pollen
enveloped us
that September evening,
as we treaded the brick sidewalk
up King Street
Old red brick and
painted wooden structures
house new ventures -
restaurants,
frozen yogurt parlors,
T-shirt shops,
an art gallery selling reproductions
of Yi-hsing tea pots.
Hundreds of people
sit eating the night away
or promenade in groups
as they have for 400 years.
The 16th century founders,
slavers, seamen,
and sellers of their souls
would be proud
of the buildings continued use
of their legacy to turn a profit,
their only regret being
that they did not live to see it.
+++++
FOREST GLEN IN FALL
Decay clothes the wood and stone facade of the old Forest Glen girls school
in early November.
A pair of gilded lions
guard steps leading down
from the fountain with flying chargers,
downwards to a blue windmill house.
Gilding tarnished, the lions,
waiting in the cool autumn shade,
await another winter's snow and cold.
Two dozen green species
soaking up the warm noon-time sun
under a clear, brilliant blue sky wait.
They wait for crisp red dogwood leaves,
golden duck-footed tulip poplar leaves,
red and green mottled sugar maple leaves,
large rust red white oak leaves
to fall,
to brown,
to cover the tender greenery,
to protect it from the coming cold,
loving it through the winter
and supporting it to the cool, wet spring.
Several lavender Lamium buds,
a single dandelion
and three yellow strawberry flowers
could not wait
and bloomed today to celebrate the sun.
+++++
A Maple Leaf in November
Three lobes with bright yellow veins,
the green becoming brownish
with an overlay of a red and orange wash
lying on the wet sidewalk.
+++++
Windsock at the
Bethesda Hospital Helopad
It hung straight down
barely moved by stray breezes
displayed against a backdrop
of willow oak trees
with orange-brown leaves
on a clear, cool October afternoon
+++++
DC Metro
Descend 300 feet down an escalator
into a large concrete cavern.
Between two mouth-like, dark tunnels stretch track like a piece of spaghetti
being sucked between two lovers.
Thousands of people
but no one interacts.
They are probably not enemies
but certainly not friends.
Lights in the platform deck
begin to flash
announcing the arrival of a train.
Headlights pierce mist in the tunnel.
Train doors flash open
discharging a crowd of strangers.
Their counterparts board
to begin
a rapid underground trip
to somewhere.
+++++
Columbus Circle at 4 AM in July
Its sticky and cool.
Every bench sleeps at least
one homeless body.
Almost no traffic
but the signals work religiously.
+++++
Downtown Lightning Bug
A lightning bug winking
its cool green light
flew down the sidewalk
in Bethesda, Maryland,
and landed
on the hand of an entomologist.
Lightning bugs and entomologist
are rare in the city.
+++++
A Wooded Wetland
A meandering creek divides
a sunlit, grassy meadow
and disappears
into a cool, moist woods.
The creek, with its Vaccinium, grape
and poison ivy vines,
is a sharp contrast
to the meadows' grass
speckled with yellow clover and ranunculus flowers.
The woods presents a sudden change.
A curtain of greenbriar, Solomon's Seal and muscadine grape vines
try to hide
Tulip Poplar, Holly, Sassafras and Willow Oak.
The damp shade causes
thin, young trees to stretch
towards the sun.
Moist air supports rotting wood, fungi and a hundred kinds insects.
Just inside the woods
the stream ceases its flow
and becomes a wooded wetland
with skunk cabbage and cinnamon fern and stinking anaerobic mud.
Birch, Beech and Willow Oak
are still live in the slowly rising water.
Black leaves and brown water rings mark at least a years standing water. A beaver pond ahead?
The trees show stress
from standing in water.
There is a flash in the gloom -
bare, beaver-gnawed birch,
a white beacon through the shadow.
Dead pointed stumps of trees
emerge from the water.
With the slap of its tail
a beaver disappears
its lodge in the distance.
A new beaver dam backing up
two feet of water
is killing trees
The wetland is filling with silt.
A redwing blackbird
lands on the beaver lodge
and a Blue-winged Teal
explodes from the beaver pond.
Strawberries bloom on the mud.
The constant is slow inevitable change.
+++++
SMOKY MOUNTAIN MORNING FROM THE AIR
0630
Black islands
floating
on a frothy white sea of mist
0700
Like a giant photographic negative
greenish gray irregularities
develop on a wispy white field.
Peaks floating over fog filled valleys.
0715
Foggy valleys through the hills
writhing like white dragons
in a primeval gray haze.
+++++
TIDEWATER FALL
November in Maryland.
Rockville in the fall with
Violets and wild strawberries,
crisp wild grapes,
colored leaves falling,
sunny afternoons.
The cold and election day is coming.
Last minute legislation is passed
so Congressmen can go home
looking like heroes.
Some things never change.
+++++
BLACK HORIZON-
the Vietnam Memorial
Walk across the Mall from the Smithsonian
to a T-shirt stand by the crosswalk.
Cross the street and climb the hill
to the Washington Monument encircled
with flags and hundreds of people
waiting in line.
Descend the hill to the Reflecting Pool.
The Lincoln Memorial
squats on the west end.
The Capitol and Washington Monument reflect erectly to the east.
A father is telling his sons about
an anti-war protest
when a million people filled the Mall
and one of the boys asks,
"Like in Forest Gump?"
A tent of a hunger striker.
He is lying in the grass
protesting.
Walk up and over a berm
and through some small trees.
Descending the berm a grove
of trees appears. The green of grass surrenders as, under the trees,
a black horizon dawns in the afternoon sun.
A memorial,
a black marble mass takes shape.
All those names and none were personal friends. This is a monument
to a young man's war.
Flowers,
a service jacket with ribbons,
a box with a medal.
People touching the wall, some weeping,
others making paper impressions
of special names.
We all owe God a death.
This death should have some value.
It’s a long, slow walk back
beside the Reflecting Pool
as joggers puff past and
resident squirrels
investigate half full garbage cans.
+++++
Lots of long, lonesome trips.
Hoping that I came for a good cause
And my labors were productive.
Seeing things to remember,
Things to take home and treasure.

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