Another Morning in Paradise

24 September 2024: Hurricane Hill (1,100 feet), White River Junction, Vermont

6:27 a.m. 45 degrees, wind NE 1 mph (glove weather). Diffuse valley fog constricts horizontal visibility; the eastern horizon is scrubbed bare and erased. The sun arrives unnoticed ... overhead, the half moon, a shiny disc in the bleached-blue sky, and the eastern clouds washed in rose fade by the moment. Engulfed in the rising mist. A profitable acquisition for hawks: echolocation. 

DOR (dead on the road): five-inch ring-necked snake, two years old, the sixth ringneck of the year, four more than I've seen in nearly fifty years in Vermont. Hurricane Hill—a bonanza for red-backed salamanders and the subterranean snakes that eat them. Case-in-point: the construction of my unfinished mudroom, a project that began in the summer of 2021—every scrap of construction waste that idled on the front lawn harbored red-backed salamanders. Someone should commission Ken Burns to film a PBS documentary on the trials and tribulations of the building of my mudroom; the Taj Mahal and the Pyramids of Giza took less time to complete. Neither construction site, I imagine, hosted red-back salamanders and their principal predators. 

Virginia creeper, bright red lines woven into a wilting meadow. Hay scent fern, done for the year, pale yellow. Brittle leaves gather along the road's edge, mainly ash, some maple, and gray birch. Dog and I scuffle through ... the sound of fall drowns out the tree crickets.

Twenty-three species of birds, including five warblers (black-throated green, Tennessee, yellow-rumped, magnolia, and Nashville), two vireos (blue-headed, singing, and yellow-throated), five sparrows (song, chipping, white-throated (more beige than white), white-crowned, and dark-eyed junco), golden-crowned kinglet (hovering at the end of aspen twigs), brown creeper (creeping), and eastern phoebe.

There is lots of activity in the meadow and on blackened lilac leaves: a white-throated sparrow sings a stuttering, halfhearted version of its song as though shivering. Last night, a pulse of warblers arrived on Hurricane Hill and moved south through treetops, feeding; a small crowd converges on aspen—the provisional tree—gathering chilled, green caterpillars, their vestigial relationship with the Northeast all but ended.

We live on a rotating, orbiting planet. Nothing stays the same for very long. Mountains wash away. Rivers change course. Oceans expand and shrink. Species come and go. Sand becomes rock; rock becomes sand. Is there anything more consistent than change? Forcing the political clock to turn back ... no more than a Pyrrhic.

And today, the bottom fell out of summer—out of tee shirts and sandals, the sweet songs of thrushes.

xoxoxo

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 January 2025.

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