N 39° 43.346 W 075° 43.969

from Local Treasures

N 39° 43.346 W 075° 43.969

We’d been traveling for more than a week, from Pennsylvania south to Tennessee, over to Florida, then up Interstate 95. On May Day, the last day of our trip, we looked for a cache that pays homage to some long-ago appreciators of land and maps, the surveyors who’d drawn the Mason-Dixon line. When we planned the trip, it seemed like a fitting culmination. During the trip, it became all the more so, as we were reminded how deeply divided America is, still scored by the rifts this line has long signified.

On our first hike, Janet mentioned she was keeping an eye out for Jack-in-the-pulpit, a plant she remembered from childhood walks. It’s a “spring ephemeral,” distinguished by a wide green leaf, gently folded over, and quite hardy. Individual plants survive, in part, by being able to change sex as conditions demand (an adaptability that impresses me). So it should be odd that Janet hadn’t seen any in years, that we didn’t see any all week.

But it’s not. Development in the eastern U.S. is transforming woodlands into suburbs. And while deer and fox can creep closer to backyards, looking for a home, jack-in-the-pulpit can’t as actively seek new terrain. Many woods do still harbor spring ephemerals, but they’re being depleted by thieves. Like the infamous “orchid thief” who inspired a novel, these bandits harvest wild jack-in-the-pulpit and trillium—selling them to unsuspecting or indifferent nurseries.

Mid-afternoon, we headed for the “post mark’d west” which starts the Mason-Dixon Line. We followed a thin trail from a Delaware State Park parking lot, through a meadow into the woods. Soon, we would find the cache nestled into the base of a tree that had split in two early in its life, become a pair of trunks diverging mere feet above the ground. Our bittersweet appreciation of that symbolism took a back-seat to a simpler delight. For scant steps past the first trees, Janet spotted a jack-in-the-pulpit. Then another and another. The plants were everywhere—so many that in some spots we had to tiptoe to avoid stepping on them. We were at least a mile from the post, seventy from Janet’s house, four hundred from my own. But crouching amid these emerald goblets, amazed by our surfeit of good fortune, we felt tranquilly at home.