Another Morning in Paradise
26 February 2025: Hurricane Hill (1,100 feet), White River Junction, Vermont
6:28 a.m. (two minutes before sunrise). Thirty-one degrees, wind West-northwest three miles per hour, gusting to ten. Before the sun appears over New Hampshire, the sky is primarily blue-gray, hot and lemony above Hurricane Hill; a line of lavender runs northeast, squeezed out of the lackluster. Progressively, the sky transforms into a fleet of silver-edged clouds in an ocean of blue.
River fog above the Connecticut River. Patchy above the White River. The road is still locked—pebbled patches of black ice—just enough for traction. Shortly after sunlight spills down roadside trees, the frost crystals transform into dew drops—each a capsized image of my neighborhood. Across the White River, hilltops brushed with sunlight, glow.
Maple buds swell, and the sap rises. Offroad, snow fleas appear in footsteps like pepper flakes, refugees from saturated ground. Winter stoneflies crawl over ice cakes and snow packs, offering robins something to eat besides withered fruit. Skunks awakened, plumes of odor lingering behind them.
Careless gray squirrels drop their guard. Males chase females (or competing males) over the road and hardened snow, up trunks and across limbs, leaping from maple to hemlock like the Flying Wallendas.
Pileated broadcasts jungle laughter, fractures sunrise. Then, the gargle of a red-bellied woodpecker. Hairy and downy woodpeckers drum. Everywhere and joyfully, chickadees and titmice sing. Golden-crowned kinglets whisper in a hemlock. Crows bark. Jays perform an array of vocalizations, some on-the-spot inventive—jazz musicians on a promising morning. Both species of nuthatches call and sing. Even juncos moved to music, jamming in the meadow, their intentions announced for the first time in months.
Two crows scream ballistically above the hemlocks, circling and darting through the larger limbs. I suspect the barred owl is inside the weft of branches, trying to catch a few winks, biding its time in the half-frozen world. Owl hunts night and day, burning the candle at both ends.
I love the glimpse of spring—knowing it's around the corner, warm air stirring in the south, restless warblers gathering in tropical trees. In my personal life, I thrive on stability and have learned to function with obsessive-compulsive disorder. (Beginning three months before my Bar Mitzvah, in notebook columns, I recorded the minutes and seconds left before my ordeal ended, and I was free from Saturday mornings in the synagogue. Routinely, I straighten wallhangings in other people’s houses. Cans face the same direction at the local food shelf where I volunteer.) Yet, evolution is my canon, and watching the seasons, I embrace change, Earth's only fundamental constant. Reconciling OCD on a revolving planet makes it hard to plan the day.
Spring may be in the air, but I've lived in Vermont long enough to know seasons are like fingerprints and eye scans. No two are quite the same.
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.
Beginning on 14 March 2020, at the onset of the pandemic lockdown, the day after I returned home from Costa Rica, I started writing a daily journal—part natural history, part memoir, and part commentary—which appeared on Substack. Since the 25 August 2021 post, I edited the 526 entries (deleting, combining, modifying) into a forthcoming book, The Promise of Sunrise: Finding Solace in a Broken World, to be published by Green Writers Press on the vernal equinox (20 March 2025).
Jennette Fournier's illustrations, many originals (otter, bobcat, chickadee, chickadee, chickadee, black bear among them), a playful Winnie-the-Poohesque map, and a commissioned watercolor cover grace the book.
Promise is about how I spent my unplanned, unbargained Covid vacation wandering through a small Vermont valley, living alone in the house where I raised my boys and my wife, Linny, died.
From the pre-publicity PR: Rich with keen observation and vivid emotion, this chronicle is a tale of the fundamental human experience as part of a larger ecosystem during a tumultuous time. Levin reminds us of the importance of slowing down, looking around, and accessing nature even in the most unexpected places. All that’s left to do is lean in.
For those so inclined, here is a link to preorder:
How I love imagining your neighborhood hanging upside down in the dew! I do not have OCD, but Adhd is my super power and, yes, it is hard to plan a day or an hour. Today's post held the promise of really early spring and I smiled. Thank you.