Another Morning in Paradise

15 December 2024: Hurricane Hill (1,100 feet), White River Junction, Vermont

7:07 a.m. (nine minutes before sunrise). Minus one degree. Wind South 2 miles per hour, gusting to 8. Sky, cloudless and tinted; tangerine shifting to lavender, east to west. Gateway West, above the Green Mountains, full moon, a lavender orb in a lavender wash. Air brittle. Breath brittle. Footsteps loud. Connecticut River fog suspended between river and ridgeline. Mount Moosilaukee, snow-capped and radiant.

Department of Out-of-Season Fireflies: Overhead, hoarfrost outlines hardwood twigs. Sunlight on ice crystals, a glittering pre-holiday light show. Walking, I look straight up into an archway of glint ... on the threshold of the miraculous.

Three crows converse in flight, southeast to northwest, and discuss the morning's plan. Another, with a grievance, relentlessly litigates an issue I can't see. Camouflaged in plain sight but driven to distraction, a barred owl decamps an oak limb—a gray-brown bluntness. Rounded head. Rounded tail. Long, rounded wings, slightly bent, stir frigid air. Owl vanishes into hemlock twilight, a methodical departure. Case settled, the triumphant crow departs in silence.

Two turkeys in the narrow meadow scratch through crusted snow. Three ravens in single-file flight, a jumble of discordant calls. Clouds of chickadees (one singing), in the crabapple and lilacs, back and forth from the feeders to the woods, hiding what they can't consume. There are more blue jays than in summer, fewer juncos, and no goldfinches.

Pileated, laughing and hollering, a dark, verticle bird in a distant oak. On the topmost branch. A pointy bird. Pileated abandons the post and flies directly overhead. Crest blood red and swept back, the wind-blown look. Flies in silence. Pileated's counterpoint: A female hairy woodpecker, one-third the size, walks up a dead and barkless maple limb and diffidently drums—the faintest of vibrations.

Throughout the town forest, deer and coyote tracks stitch the crusted snow, footprints radiating in all directions. Last winter, white pine cones hung like clusters of grapes and attracted scores of red crossbills. This year, cones are scarce, and crossbills absent.

It is another cold morning walk for me when even squirrels stay home in dreys, swaying in the breeze above the cast-iron ground. For me, being housebound is not an option. I crave the turn of the day, from darkness to light, the chance of color blooming across a gray sky. River fog and mutable clouds. Birds in the company of morning.

Six days in front of the winter solstice. Six days. Light returns in increments noticed, at first, by chickadees and titmice. Then, eventually, by me ... luxuriating in the ease and grace of an earlier daybreak walk. We live on a bright planet in a dark universe made hospitable by gravity and chance.

As a lifelong naturalist and Yankee fan, I follow a trail blazed by John Burroughs and John Muir, neither of whom paid much attention to baseball. My work has appeared in Audubon, Sierra, Sports Illustrated, National Wildlife, National Geographic Traveler, National Geographic Books, The New York Times, Newsday, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Sun-Times, The Guardian, and The Daily Telegraph. I am the author of Backtracking: The Way of A Naturalist (1987), Blood Brook: A Naturalist's Home Ground (1992), and Liquid Land: A Journey Through the Florida Everglades (2003), among other works of nonfiction. I received the Burroughs Medal in 2004, the highest literary honor awarded to an American nature writer. E. O. Wilson called America's Snake: The Rise and Fall of the Timber Rattlesnake (2016) a beautifully written book [that] demonstrates just how good nature literature can be.

The Promise of Sunrise: Finding Solace in a Broken World, born during the pandemic here in Substack, will be published by Green Writers Press in March 2025.

https://greenwriterspress.com/book/the-promise-of-sunrise-finding-solace-in-a-broken-world/