Homeboy at Home Adjusting

August 25, 2021: Hurricane Hill, white River Junction, VT

6:06 a.m. (sunrise three minutes later than Monday, August 23). 66 degrees, wind N 3 mph, humid. Inside a rising cloud, eye-level visibility less than two hundred yards. Sky: waning three-quarter moon low in the west, dulled by the catalytic nature of daybreak and river fog. 

Doe bounds across a meadow, tail up. Suddenly curious, the dogs gather themselves to full height, leashes tense, then relax as the deer disappears like the moon into an amalgam of mist and diffused sunlight.

Sheet webs glisten in the grass like bright doilies, and a long, sagging spider line runs across the road from oak to birch, waits to garrote an unsuspecting pedestrian . . . me. I imagine the spider floating on the directionless zipline of its own construct, riding a night current free (for the moment) of vireos and warblers, which gather at dawn to comb through the canopy, silent and hungry. 

All around me, late August (like the world) balances on a pinhead, teetering toward autumn. Inside the woods, chickadees whistle and call; outside, goldfinches, undulating low over the goldenrod, stammer. Blue jays honk. Hummingbirds pollinate jewelweed, blurred wings whisking the mist. Indigo buntings, conspicuous by their absence, appear to have left ahead of Henri. A silence of warblers. From inside a thicket, a cardinal whistles, a catbird purrs.

A stand of big-toothed aspens, leaves in motion, hosts in a mixed flock of southbound songbirds. Warblers flit by like the thoughts of a disorderly mind: black-throated green and black-throated blue work the underbelly of leaves, one after the other; redstarts chase moths; a trio of Tennessees, the color of fog; yellowthroats. Pewee idles on a branch. Yellow-throated vireo poses in the open, then, like an overly medicated warbler searches for caterpillars, a rather leisure pursuit. A nonchalant songbird in a contorted world facing a long flight home.

Linny would have turned seventy today. Although life plays no favorites, her unconquerable joy still rises in our boys and in the buoyant laugh of our granddaughter, gumming peaches and nectarines and moving on like the vireo, into the uncertain world.

Stiff-necked, I head down the road.

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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.