Homeboy at Home Adjusting

August 13, 2021: Hurricane Hill, White River Junction, VT

5:51 a.m. (sunrise two minutes later than Wednesday, August 11.) 70 degrees, wind NE 0 mph. Wrinkled landscape defined by fog. The sun climbs above the horizon, lights the underbelly of nearby clouds; river fog unravels like spun sugar . . . rose trending lavender, a bright morning, fugitive as thought. A landscape fit for the Hudson River School. 

Grace along the road's edge: Jerusalem artichoke, yolk yellow, a hundred durable flowers, nearly as brilliant as a goldfinch, a thousand edible tubers, leaves like sandpaper; Jewelweed; Queen Anne's lace; last of the ox-eye daisies, petals tarnished. 

Cardinal emerges from a thicket, broadcasts sunlight. Goldfinches, rollercoaster flights above the meadow, call attention to themselves, nonstop chattering. Blue jay. Crow. Two mourning doves. Hairy woodpecker wandering a dead birch, dowses and then probes. Nashville warbler on a maple branch, olive-green back, washed-out yellow breast, bright white eye-ring, momentarily motionless, facing east, toward long, gentle, layered descent down Hurricane Hill, beyond the fields of flowers and nodding grasses, beyond tree-top buntings and electric-line bluebirds, beyond the tickets— cheerful with house finches, brooding with catbirds—into the realm of fog, still fraying, still luminous. 

Late yesterday afternoon, a black-throated green warbler landed on my refinished picnic table. Not as plump as feeder finches, not as ambitious as hummingbirds, those dart-faced drones maneuvering above the deck. I stood, immersed, looking down on serendipity, close enough to extend a hand, the warbler strolling across black Rust-Oleum. Incongruous but gorgeous. Right place, right time . . . once, in front of Casey and me, a wolverine appeared out of the density of Alaskan spruce, and, far off-shore, an exhausted Wilson's warbler settled on my knee. Lullabied by uncertainty, the seed of surprise . . . you never know what Earth might conjure.

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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.