6:48 a.m. 37 degrees, wind ENE 0 mph, another Mayday in the austerity of November. Sky: half-moon shining overhead, ground fog rises with the sun beneath bright, gauzy, peeling apart clouds, luminous in the east, pink rinse in the west. Here and there, I peer through a thin breach, into the vastness of blue, where comets roam, where hope and aspiration are born, where dreams go to die. Permanent streams: a relief of water, cold and clear; soothing music. Wetlands: languid fog wastes away. Pond: hazy and duckless, a morning without mergansers. A flotilla of waterlogged milkweed seeds float the surface, a genetic dead-end, for these seeds . . . nowhere to go but down (much like the 45th president). Aspens release yellow-brown leaves, drift and litter, a final foliar rain.
AOR: three slugs. One clogged by gravel, waits to wither; the other two, antennae out, on the move.
Chickadees liberal feeders, on the end of fir twigs, the seed head of asters, the crotch of beech branches, the drooping stem of goldenrods. Back and forth, all over the place, from one branch to another. Chickadee visits the forest floor, quickly, something of interest in the sodden leaves. Hopping, hopping, hopping. Spider eggs, pupae, aroused insects. Nothing's safe. Once, while wandering the rolling outback of eastern Long Island, I found a half-eaten chickadee impaled on a hawthorn. A northern shrike, I figured. As clouds of finches and nuthatches move south out of the boreal forest this winter, are shrikes far behind? I check my hawthorns regularly for an impaled mouse or chickadee. It's a jungle out there.
Wolves will return to Colorado. Proposition 114 passed; with ninety percent of the vote in, there were 1,495,523 votes for and 1,475,235 against. The remaining ten percent—much like the Presidential election—comes from heavily Democratic urban areas. In due time, from Alaska to Mexico, wolves will reclaim the Rocky Mountains. Elk and deer and bighorn sheep will be more alert, less crowded. Mountain shoulders and alpine meadows shall heal. Deep ecology shall prevail.
As a young man, in northern Mexico, Aldo Leopold shot and killed a gray wolf. In the essay "Thinking Like a Mountain," he told the story, a paean to the importance of predation, whether owls or wolves or shrikes. Earth needs ‘em all.
We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves means hunters' paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.
My agenda: a world where the green fire flickers, where the hair stands up on the back of my neck when a falcon stoops or a wolf sings beneath a diamond sky, all night, in the dark. Is that asking too much?
I taught Leopold's "Thinking Like a Mountain" in my English classes, and I've never forgotten that "green fire". The whole essay is very short and can be found here:
http://www.uky.edu/OtherOrgs/AppalFor/Readings/leopold.pdf
Leopold's A SAND COUNTY ALMANAC was also part of my essay curriculum; his "land ethic" philosophy is so needed today.
https://www.aldoleopold.org/about/aldo-leopold/sand-county-almanac/
Thanks so much for reminding me of that "green fire"--sometimes, in this retirement community life, I feel my spirit shrinking--and then I turn to Annie Dillard and Thoreau and Wendell Berry--and Aldo Leopold. Thoreau said "in wildness is preservation of the world", but today that wildness is an endangered species, trapped by technology. But it's still MY choice about where I will focus my mind and heart, even as the body dwindles.