7:12 a.m. (sunrise two minutes earlier than yesterday). 9 degrees, wind NW 12 mph (almost feels like January in Vermont). Perpetual motion: oak and beech leaves, a seasonal performance below swaying pines. Sky: swept clean and clear, pink wash along the southern and eastern perimeters, elsewhere blue. Winter sunlight spills down Robinson Hill, radiant and inspirited, an elixir of the Gods. Permanent streams: several small windows on otherwise hidden flows. Leaves twitter. Water mutters. Wetlands: the resting place of cold air. Unobstructed, brutal wind rips across the marsh, vibrates limbs, stirs trees, which chatter and creak like cold teeth. Keeps squirrels indoors, bundled in leaves, home swaying to the rhythm of the wind. Pond: red pines speaking, everything else quietly frozen. Surface visited by a snow machine.
Raven, born for mornings like this, courses high above the marsh. No flapping, just a partial inward squeeze of the wings. Then, full-extension, tilting and turning, gliding. Rides the northwind above the reeds. An occasional croak. Plays in cold air. Durable black feathers up to the task. Melanin, the dark pigment in bird feathers, does not direct absorbed heat toward the body, does little to warm a bird (several desert birds, including ravens, are jet black). Melanin, a tough protein, protects feathers from wear and tear. Think the tip of seabird wings—gulls, terns, albatrosses, puffins, and so forth.
Two ravens together, wingtip to wingtip. The tandem flight of lovers. Rocking and rolling. A courting couple. Their voices, deep echoing honks, louder than the wind, animates the valley on a frigid morning—a heartwarming display of affection, which, apparently, chickadees and jays ignore.
Female pileated standing in maple cavity, a closet of her own design. Tongue patroling ant tunnels. Chips everywhere.
Summer of 1997, baseball and brown bears: standing on the edge of a lake on Alaska's Katmai Peninsula, Henry Aaron, who's about to go salmon fishing, signs an autograph for ten-year-old Casey, an aspiring shortstop, who says, Thank you, Mr. Aaron. Says Aaron, Not everyone remembers to say 'thank you.' The next morning, still marveling at having watched Aaron speak to my boy, I stood on a wooden bridge over a stream and photographed airborne sockeyes jumping a small waterfall, past a gauntlet of tank-sized brown bears, my face buried in the viewfinder. Henry Aaron, who had arrived sometime later, inadvertently, brushed against my tripod. The memory outlasted the misaligned photograph. Thinking of you two days after your death, a spectacular ballplayer, a quiet humanitarian, humbled by Jackie Robinson, enamored by Martin Luther King, a star for whom every life mattered.
Thank you, Mr. Aaron.
Wow! So cool that you and Casey got to meet Henry Aaron. In Alaska! And sockeye! This is a great story and memory.
A wonderful epilogue to this journal entry, which also brought back fond memories of Casey.