Another Morning in Paradise
02 February 2025: Hurricane Hill (1,100 feet), White River Junction, Vermont
6:54 a.m. (ten minutes before sunrise). The outdoor thermometer says -16; the cell phone says -6; my face, chin tucked inside the collar of my coat, says the dark side of the moon. Oblivious to the temperature, the dog stuffs his nose deep into redolent snow drifts. Wind North one mile per hour, gusting to two. Sky: primarily clear and polished; a hint of a long, narrow cloud, northeast to southwest, vanishes as I watch; pastel yellow and orange east to west, slightly rosey in the north; sun like a bull's-eye rises above Hurricane Hill, lines of orange fractured by tree trunks. I face the sun, pretending it's warm.
On the far side of the hill, just below the summit, hairy woodpecker drums high in an oak. Singing: several chickadees and titmice, clear and sweet but well-spaced songs—resembles a small, disoriented choir. White-breasted nuthatch calls. Junco bolts from a tuft of broken perennials, white outer tail feathers flashing, and dives into another patch of beaten-down meadow plants.
Above the White River, eleven crows fly west. One hollers, a dispirited caw. No one responds.
Low over the treetops, two ravens in conversation head north.
From the Backyard: A red-tailed hawk, leisurely flying northwest, pauses and hovers a thousand feet above the hillside. (I can't imagine why.) A Passing crow veers off its flight line and pesters the redtail. In silence, a momentary, slow-motion confrontation. Then, both birds resume their original trajectory: hawk northwest, crow due north.
Chickadees, titmice, red-breasted nuthatches at the feeders, silent balls of fluff.
Barred owl in red maple, sixth morning in a row. Circumference is more circular than yesterday, bunched into its feathers like me into my coat. Stares at gray squirrels scurrying across the deck. Then, eyes close on the morning.
Two crows land in maple, the branch above the owl, and rain invectives. Both lean into each agitated caw. Owl looks up, a glance more than a stare. Crows riled ... one flies past the owl, screaming, a halfhearted dive. Owl unbunches, looks up, bill clapping. Crow rejoins companion, safely out of reach.
Eventually, board, crows leave. Owl goes to sleep, bathed in sunlight, and I heat a cup of coffee ... more for my hands than my vigilance.
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 the 14th of 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.
For those so inclined, here is a link to preorder: