5:42 a.m. (sunrise five minutes later than last Saturday, July 31). 52 degrees, wind E 1 mph, more September than August. Sky: pink gossamers and the tarnishing of midnight silver. As the sun exerts itself, the moon's horns fade directly overhead behind a screen of mist. Enchanted reiteration, mountains rise like islands out of a sea of ground fog—Moose, Smarts, Cube, Moosilauke, and beyond. The echo of an Ice Age landscape when debris dammed the newly-minted Connecticut River, flooding adjacent valleys, converting a cold, turbulent river into a deep, dendritic trout-filled lake . . . one element of the episodic narrative called physiography, a story without an end. An unseen, noisy stream drains a spongy hillside, churns through a tunnel of green (whether intermittent or permanent, I have no idea; time will tell).
Between walking the dogs and spraying poison ivy, I'm slowly meeting my neighbors, all of whom lead quiet lives on the north slope of Hurricane Hill. Threads that bind us include (but are not limited to) fog, view, and proximity to a pharmacy. One neighbor, who has beehives, bird feeders, bluebirds, contemplative Buddha in front of a line of prayer flags, and regales the same bear I do, agreed to let me set a kestrel box in her meadow.
Female Blackburnian warbler, pastel-orange head and throat, white tail feathers flashing, forages in a roadside oak. Phoebe on a deer fence, tailing flicking. Pewee in the open, on a maple, a low, melancholy whistle, one long, slurred eponymous note uphill than down (phoebe without the nervous tail and guttural voice). Red-eyed vireos, everywhere and boisterous, free-for-all singing. Overhead crow. Cardinal in a cedar, chipping. House finch, female in the road, gathering grit. Chipping sparrow in gray birch strips seeds. Goldfinches in undulating flight, marionettes on strings, up and down above goldenrod, yellow above yellow, glazed in lemon-yellow sunlight.
On a mid-meadow maple, male indigo bunting sings, leans back on the highest branch, non-stop salutations to a new day, the glory of a sunrise accented with iridescent blue. Awkwardly, I stop and look, noses to the ground dogs stain, leashes taut and tugging, binoculars cockeyed. Bunting bouncing in and out of view. It’s like watching a bird from a boat. Voice rising into the morning. Enough to make me forget (for the moment) that I spent two months downsizing, discarding, uprooting, fretting, unpacking, searching for pie plates and stirring spoons and two tiny oil paintings, scheduling, arranging and rearranging furniture. And, then waiting, waiting, waiting for geography's connective tissues to fasten me to the Hill . . . to be home, again.
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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.
Ahhh...welcome home.
What a great find as a neighbor--and I hope you soon have a kestrel as a neighbor as well. I had to look up this fascinating bird, our smallest falcon:
https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/American_Kestrel/photo-gallery/302366931
I would think the sight of a kestrel would be a good step as a "connective tissue to fasten [you] to the Hill." This video showed me what was meant by saying they "kite" to hunt:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_03F49thJ6s
What a wonder!