Another Morning in Paradise

23 November 2024: Hurricane Hill (1,100 feet), White River Junction, Vermont

6:46 a.m. (eight minutes before sunrise). Thirty-nine degrees, wind Northwest 10 miles per hour, gusting to 27. Gray sky meets ground fog. Visibility constricted—New Hampshire's western flank erased—rain, sideways and cold. My gloved hands are numb; one, a knot in a pocket; the other steadies an umbrella, which, aided by the wind, becomes a meteorological Nautilus machine. Roaring with authority, the wind sets hemlocks in motion, an up-and-down dance. Crowns of hardwoods sway in rhythm. Beech leaves convulse. Rain puddles everywhere. Oblivious, the dog reads last night's news with an inquiring nose. 

I need help finding birds, but there are only five species. (No red-tailed hawk. No barred owl. No raven.) Eleven doves, two small flocks, out of the aspens, wings whining, cross over the dirt road and descend on a neighbor's bird feeder. A crow, a silent struggle into the wind, black against gray. As usual, chickadees and titmice are busy. They visit lilacs and maples and hide sunflower seeds. One seed at a time. Neither has much to say.

Red-breasted nuthatch, a speck of color on a colorless morning. Arthur Cleveland Bent (1866 - 1954), an American ornithologist and author of the 21-volume Life Histories of North American Birds, called the red-breasted nuthatch, a happy, jolly little bird, and a flock, a playful gathering of talkative, irrepressible, woodland gnomes. Today, however, the lone nuthatch—back, blue-gray; face, black and white striped—is all busyness and business. Feeder to maple, one seed at a time, wedged in bark and hammered open. Swallow. Repeat. Swallow. Repeat.

It feels like late November in Vermont on a morning that hasn't woken up.

Bipolar climate: Since the beginning of 2024, there have been thirty-two tornados in New York State and two hundred seventy brush fires in New York City, and the Northeast, despite the last two days of rain, has suffered the worst drought in twenty-two years. Here, on the shoulder of Hurricane Hill, I live in a world riven by climate change and in the shadow of a second fossil fuel revolution. Some say Mars is the answer to humanity's future. If we stay home more and socialize with chickadees and nuthatches, we might catch the genuine pace of our planet. Changeable but deliberate.

The late French author Andre Gide said Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.

Night comes quickly when we don't cherish the ground we walk.

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/