Another Morning in Paradise
08 September 2024: Hurricane Hill (1,100 feet), White River Junction, Vermont
5:22 a.m. 47 degrees, wind W 5 mph, gusting to 15. Raindrops fall from dancing leaves. Mars and Jupiter, brightly overhead, keep the owls’ company—while the moon, a sliver well below the horizon, presides over cod and halibut. The magic of sunrise: the dark line of clouds hugging New Hampshire’s eastern rim turns purple-rose and gray, luminously highlit below an overexposed lemon sky, 2-F stops brighter than the middle tone. But ... magic never lasts: what’s washed-out yellow gives way to washed-out blue; purple-rose gives way to off-white; and the cloud line dissolves into daylight. Owls give way to crows. The voice of the wind gives way to geese broadcasting above the White River, a musical wedge headed south. Nine species of birds in order of appearance: barred owl, kibbitzing American crow, northern cardinal, song sparrow, Canada goose, black-capped chickadee, dark-eyed junco, downy woodpecker (daylight comes later to cavity roosters), and busy blue jay, gathering acorns around the barn and sunflower seeds below the deck.
Across an unmowed meadow, a discharge of New England asters, goldenrod, and the orange fire of jewelweed. Milkweed pods droop like small, green bananas. Where are the monarchs?
Last night, a pair of owls conversed in the velvet, one lower on the hillside, the other higher. In bed, windows open, I lay midway between their discourse. Back and forth, the owls duetted—hollow, dog-like barks (rhythmic, repetitive, loud), asthmatic wheezes, caterwauls, and high-pitched, hair-raising screeches like a soundtrack from Night of the Living Dead. I lay in bed and listened intently as my sleep unraveled.
Three neighbors post political signs—two for Harris & Walz and one for Kennedy—while all others keep opinions to themselves, like the taciturn songbirds that roam the maples, feeding in silence and preparing for the unknown future. Heavy hangs the air.
__________________________________________________________________________
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, The New York Times, Newsday, The Boston Globe, The Guardian, and The Daily Telegraph, among many other publications. I am the author of Backtracking: The Way of 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 this coming January.
Just beautiful....
Thank you