Another Morning in Paradise

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

6:57 a.m.: 47 degrees, wind S two mph (gusting to eight). The world wakes up—except for a pink tincture across the empty east and a purple haze in the cloud-crowded west, a lackluster sunrise—the cloud bank in the west fractures into a flotilla that scuds north on a warm breeze. Sunlight pours down the hillside, igniting the crowns of aspens and oak, which glow yellow and copper. Most other trees—adhering to a personal calendar—are gaunt and leafless, a Halloween primer. Seventeen species of birds, including three warblers (yellow-rumped—lots, American redstart, blackburnian), two woodpeckers (pileated, hairy), Carolina wren, eastern bluebird, and pine siskin. 

Quaking aspen leaves line the road in bright yellow stripes and splotches. Earlier in the month, I flew north from Dallas to Grand Junction. The Colorado Rockies sported aspens at peak color—bright yellow stripes and splotches in an ocean of aquamarine Englemann spruce. As much as I love aspen's buttery leaves, comparing the color of sugar maples to those of aspens is like comparing Mozart to Manilow. The genus of one maple: moody and unpredictable, colors changing by the hour, reflects the weather; and, like a Bob Dylan performance, the maple's color never repeats itself—each year is a once-in-a-lifetime achievement. The colors cannot be spoken. They're too varied, too rich, too unstable.

Inside the woods, pileated screams, the morning pierced, over and over, a soundtrack for a jungle movie. A mixed flock of warblers, fall attire, fly back and forth, naked maple to sickly spruce. Colors muted, subdued, both the warblers and the trees. 

Bluebirds are in the meadows, mixing with juncoes and white-throated sparrows. A blue jay shrieks; a male Cooper's hawk flies east, directly overhead. A small hawk disappears into the haze of sunrise. Birds on alert, and jay hushed and satisfied.

Red-tailed hawk above the driveway, perched on the limb of a leafless maple. Stares down gray squirrels that cross the yard every morning en route to bird feeders on my deck. Hawks flushes before I thank her.

Last night, I saw the Comet A3 in the west, higher up and in a darker, moonless sky than last Saturday, a smudge of light 50 million miles away. (Without binoculars, A3 is hard to find.) Watching the comet, I was accompanied by a feral thought: Are we the only species touched by the passage of a comet? The only species who marvels over deep time? Perhaps that’s our claim to Earthly fame—not tool-making, not language, not tribal warfare, not habitat obliteration, not monetary systems, or the wholesale destruction of other species. I’m touched by deep time.

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/