Another Morning in Paradise
25 October 2024: Hurricane Hill (1,100 feet), White River Junction, Vermont
7:05 a.m. 29 degrees, wind NW 4 mph (gusting to 9). Lean White River fog, a stripe below the north ridgeline. Connecticut River fog, leaner and lower, peels off and spreads across the valley—a riparian mist, tissue-thin. An isolated cloud below and between Mooselaukee and Mount Cube. Another below the summit of Smarts Mountain. Frost in the meadows and on the leaves that line the road. Above, the sky is clear and clean, a resonant sounding board for the last of fall foliage. After the Gold Rush sunrise ... hints of orange across the east. On a bluff above the mouth of the White River, a stand of aspens triggered by a sunbeam. Luminous yellow, a vivid speck of autumn amid rust-colored oaks—everything else pales by comparison. Sixteen species of birds, including two woodpeckers (pileated and downy), pine siskin, purple finch, American robin, song sparrow, white-throated sparrow, dark-eyed junco, and chickadee (always a chickadee).
Pileated in the woods, close to the river, laughs—a loud, ringing laugh opens the curtain on a new day. Then, blue jay screams, sharp and crisp. Impales my ears. I look for a hawk, as I always do when I hear an agitated jay, and find nothing but chickadees, nuthatches, and titmice plying their trade, one seed data time.
Over a frost-laden meadow, a crow and a jay fly in tandem. Then, diverge. Crow heads north, jay west.
Three golden-crowned kinglets in an aspen. Crowns erect the color of molten leaves. Kinglets forge at the end of twigs, wings flicking, almost a hover—tiny birds, barely bigger than a hummingbird. Weigh less than a paper clip. They remain all winter, huddled together after dark to stay warm.
Yesterday afternoon, two red-tailed hawks soared high above my driveway on a bubble of warm air. Both called, steam-whistle screams. Two hawks, concentric circles. Aerial figure eights. The western sun drew thin lines of light on the leading edges of their wings, and their copper tails glowed. Eventually, the red-tails stopped soaring and pulled their wings tight, squeezing into a teardrop. For a moment, I had hitched a ride on the altar of the season. Then, the rags of autumn, vanishing beyond the Hill, left me to face the November alone.
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 Guardian, and The Daily Telegraph. 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 by Green Writers Press in March 2025.
https://greenwriterspress.com/book/the-promise-of-sunrise-finding-solace-in-a-broken-world/