Another morning in Paradise
12 April 2025: Hurricane Hill (1,100 feet), White River Junction, Vermont
6:11 a.m. (sunrise two minutes earlier than yesterday). Twenty-nine degrees, wind North-northeast one mile per hour, gusting to seven. Sky: uniform blue-gray, no breaks of light. The sun is up, but you'd never know it. Snowing. An inch of small, wet, sticky flakes, straight down. A world glazed, every branch, every twig. Hemlock limbs sag. The warmest patches of the road are snowless, otherwise slushed and puddled. Everywhere else ... white. Hurricane Hill, an out-of-season greeting card.
Wood frogs and peepers are silent and patient below the water's surface ... waiting. Spotted and Jefferson's salamanders bide their time beneath the snow and leaf litter. Also, waiting for that miraculous warm, all-night rain that triggers their short spawning trek to the vernal pools, a journey two hundred million years in the making. And, for me, one entertaining night of watching and helping amphibians cross the street.
Yesterday's eastern towhee either moved to silence or absence. A flock of cedar waxwings (twenty-plus) passes high above the meadow heading east, a shapeless bunch of songbirds mute as marmalade. Flight vanishes into the density of April weather.
Robins look natty in a snowstorm, brick red bright against the white. Everywhere and cheerfully singing. Background vocals: chickadees (bedraggled and dripping), white-breasted nuthatches, red-breasted nuthatches, song sparrows (returned in abundance while I was in Colorado), phoebes also moved to silence. Crows, ravens, and jays keep to themselves. Turkey feeds in the meadow; no histrionics.
George, the neighborhood barred owl, has been busy with domestic chores and has relinquished his daily backyard vigil. Even the gathering snow hasn't lured him back to my steady procession of floundering red squirrels below the bird feeders ... yet.
Department of Percussionists: Yellow-bellied sapsucker (arrived sometime while I was in Colorado), a studdered pattering from the edge of the woods. An irregular cadence. Starts slow. Speeds up. Slows down—stops, a woodland Morse code easily identified by me, best understood by sapsuckers.
Crow-sized pileated takes apart a sugar maple—top of the tree excavations—five oblong holes, two more than a foot long and several inches deep—a carpet of wood chips under the rug of fresh snow. A feast of carpenter ants.
Hidden in the woods and falling snow, another pileated broadcast on a resonant bole of dead hardwood. Profound pounding. Faster in the beginning than fading. Fifteen beats per second (not that I can count them). Nearly three seconds of drumming. Pause for a minute or so. Then, pound. Pause. Pound. Follows me home.
Why don't woodpeckers concuss? Their tiny brains are light, and spongy bone behind the upper mandible cushions the impact (which inspired the development of our crash helmets.) The lower mandible is a bit longer than the upper and channels the impact of pounding through the lower jaw rather than the skull.
Our larger brains evolved to absorb impact from below, which may be why LeBron James shoots hoops and doesn't bang his face on dead trees.
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, the day after I returned home from Costa Rica, at the onset of the pandemic lockdown, I started writing a daily journal—part natural history, part memoir, and part commentary—which appeared here on Substack. Since the 25 August 2021 post, I edited the 526 entries (deleting, combining, modifying) into a new book, The Promise of Sunrise: Finding Solace in a Broken World, which Green Writers Press published 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.
The Promise is about how I spent my unplanned, unbargained Covid vacation wandering through a small Vermont valley, living alone in the house where I lived for twenty-four years, raised my boys, and my wife, Linny, died. In the end, I moved to Hurricane Hill.
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.