Another Morning in Paradise

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

7:02 a.m. 30 degrees, wind NW 2 mph (gusting to 6). Ideal for hawk migration—sharp-shinned, Cooper's, red-tailed, none of which I see. Meadows sag with frost, the first of the season. Bright and clear, the sky buffed by an Arctic breeze. Butterscotch sunlight glazes river fog, thick but dispersing uphill. Across the White River, the northern ridgeline is a line, the thin green tops of rolling hills barely peeking above the rising fog—like the back of a swimming serpent, stretched and buoyant. Fog, rolling up my riverside, scattered, thin as gauze. Maples along the road, silhouetted, faint images, highly polished on diffuse and silvery fog. Post-modern Dauggerro types. Gloved fingers are numb. Fifteen species of birds, including American pipit (visitors from the top of the world; a small flock in a meadow, close to the road, tails bobbing—metronomes for a cold morning), ruby-crowned and golden-crowned kinglets, red-breasted and white-breasted nuthatches, American robin (groups crisscross meadow in all directions), downy woodpecker, common raven, American crow, and blue jay (inconspicuous all summer, now everywhere and in a hurry—noisy over the treetops, across the meadows, back and forth to feeders commandeering my deck). 

Pipits look like sparrows (ground colored: brownish and buffy, lightly streaked breasts) and masquerade as thrushes (thin bills, long legs). In flight, white outer tail feathers flash. I last saw a pipit in the Alpine Gardens on Mount Washington (sometime in the middle '90s), the farthest south in eastern North America they're known to nest. But during winters of my youth, pipits fixated on the outer beaches of Long Island, mixing with it up snow buntings and Lapland longspurs.

Robins and yellow leaves released by frost. One heads southeast, the other straight down—lambent specs in slanted light.

This week's issue of The New Yorker features an article about the Greenland glacier, a 650,000-square-mile ice sheet roughly 11,000 feet high in the middle and the size of Alaska. A mountain of ice that depresses Earth's crust and governs the tides, a gravitational force shared with the moon. "If all Greenland's ice were cut into one-inch cubes and these were piled one on top of another," Elizabeth Kolbert writes, "the stack would reach Alpha Centauri." Alpha Centauri, the closest star to our sun, is 4.26 light years from Earth, a number so astronomically large that comparisons fail me. Kolbert continues, "If it melted—a rather more plausible scenario— global sea levels would rise by twenty feet."

Greenland's ice is noticeably melting. If I lived long enough to traverse Greenland on bare ground, what would that mean (besides the fact that I'd have reset the human longevity record)? Everglades restoration would no longer be necessary; today's glades would be underwater. So would Miami, New Orleans, Biloxi, St. Petersburg, Boston, Stockton and Huntington Beach, California. Also, Bangkok, Thailand; Osaka, Japan; Hong Kong; Mumbai, India; Tripoli, Libia; Karachi, Pakistan; and several Russian cities with too many letters to write. Shanghai, Singapore, and Seattle, if not underwater, would be very wet.

The last time Earth was warm enough for the sea level to be twenty feet higher was approximately 115,000 years ago when … humans were still confined to Africa.