5:55 a.m. (sunrise four minutes later than last Friday, August 13.) 48 degrees, wind ENE 2 mph. Sky: hemmed in fog, pulsating visibility; like a tungsten filament inside a frosted bulb, a lean sun glows. Then, vanishes. Intermittent streams have stopped flowing. Mosquitoes have stopped biting (for the moment). Moisture condenses on the dogs, which sit in the road, facing north, heads erect. Four-legged buddhas—sentiently, obediently, patiently—wait as I attend to disembodied birds calling from the murk.
Goldfinches chatter, catering to chicks recently out of the nest, voices rising and falling in flight. Everyone else fattens for departure, the warbler, the wren, the vireo snacking on tiny green caterpillars high in an oak. A catbird kvetches in the tangle . . . an agitated proclamation. Blue jay gathers green acorns.
Long-excursion: broad-winged hawk in the firmament, a fog-piercing call, one pitch, two notes, the first shorter than the second; somewhere overhead, unseen. Brief-excursion: pewee on a maple limb, launches for moths.
I stand on the northeast shoulder of Hurricane Hill, patron of dawn, facing into a somber earlier morning. Soon, southbound nighthawks and kestrels and speck-brained butterflies the color of October will pass by as leaves convert the White River valley into the land of Oz.
I'll wait as summer ages.
And then, I’ll wait for tomorrow, for progression . . . ad infinitum.
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A lifelong naturalist and Yankee fan, Ted Levin follows a trail blazed by John Burroughs and John Muir, neither of who paid baseball much attention. His work has appeared in Audubon, Sports Illustrated, National Geographic Traveler, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Guardian, and The Daily Telegraph, among many other publications. His nonfiction works include Backtracking: The Way of Naturalist, Blood Brook: A Naturalist’s Home Ground, and Liquid Land: A Journey Through the Florida Everglades, which won the Burroughs Medal in 2004, the highest literary honor awarded to an American nature writer. E. O. Wilson called America’s Snake, Ted’s most recent book, beautifully written [demonstrating] just how good nature literature can be. He divides his time between the deck and the road.