Homeboy at Home During Coronavirus

October 2, 2020: Coyote Hollow, Thetford Center, VT

7:03 a.m. 46 degrees, wind W 0 mph; steady rain, good morning to stay in bed, but Shadowfax had diarrhea while the sun was somewhere above the western Atlantic. Sky: twin ribbons of ground fog above both branches of the Ompompanoosuc, fogless elsewhere; three black crows, silent, beneath a gray, leaky sky. Permanent streams: forty-eight hours out from the deluge; much-reduced flow. Wetlands: color saturation on the theme of brown, hints of green; red and orange across the marsh, last embers of autumn. Pond: concentric circles and coruscating sparkles; leaves and pine needles pile into the southeast cove. Thronged with expanding and interlocking ripples, the surface of the pond reminds me, one more time, Inclement weather bears unexpected gifts.

Color short-lived, more memory than substance, six weeks squeezed into two. Brown, the new orange. Some maples, a blend of both brown and orange, like a vestment of monarch butterflies, shed leaves, shed color, shed water, shed the condensation of a season.

In the alders, a fleeting glimpse of a Lincoln sparrow, a sulky bird with a finely streaked buffy breast, named for the president who preserved the union and abolished slavery. The name Lincoln sparrow is not likely to change, ever. In August, the American Ornithological Union (AOU) renamed McCown's longspur, a plain-colored, grassland relative of the cedar waxwing, thick-billed longspur. The AOU acknowledged that John P. McCown, a bird collector and amateur ornithologist, had also been a Confederate general. 

Publicly, the National Audubon Society, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Sierra Club grapple with the gloom of their respective heroes: John James Audubon, Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir. If they were alive today and behaved as they did in their own lifetimes, Audubon, Roosevelt, and Muir would unquestionably be labeled white supremacists. They were men of their times, not ours. We're products of our times, not theirs. 

Although I certainly don't condone their racist behavior and wretched beliefs . . . as a lifelong naturalist, whose boyhood was unburdened by things that hopped and crawled and flew and by waves that pounded the coast, I am sustained by their contributions to the understanding, the interpretation, the protection of the land that I love. In 1901, if Roosevelt had not acceded to the White House, we wouldn't be rallying against President Trump's endorsement of industrial tourism in the Grand Canyon . . . uranium mining would already have irreversibly damaged the Canyon.

It’s time we take care of our environment . . . as well as each other.