5:34 a.m. 57 delightful degrees; wind SE 1 mph. Sky: who knows? Eclipsed by ground fog, thick enough to drip off leaves; fog spreads like the Tenth Plague on the House of Egypt; visibility a hundred yards or less. Permanent streams: upper creeps west toward the marsh, a shadow of itself; lower reduced to two puddles; water elsewhere a rumor; the striders, long gone, have given up. Wetlands: contours obscured in the density of the fog, more chowder than soup. Pond: tendrils of mist; a single painted turtle floating; sees me and sinks like a stone. The hum of crickets rises from the berm. No otter. No merganser. No bittern. Milkweed pods ripen. No sign of a monarch. Where is Very Hungry Caterpillar(s), which ought to be stripping down leaves? Webworm tents multiply and swell, mostly in black cherry; one in alder (a dietary mixup)—cuckoo silent or gone or waits in the murk for the fog to disperse.
In 1927, hermit thrush became State Bird of Vermont. There were more than a hundred other birds to choose from.
Hermit thrush, a virtuoso in the gloaming, distills the mist into scraps of song, hollow and haunting like a crippled flute. Half a dozen thrushes sing; half a dozen fragments as ephemeral as the summer sun. A maverick and solitary songbird returns to the stage for an encore performance after others fade away—scaps of a song in the morning fog. I pause spellbound. Thrushes sing mid-level in the woods, below the canopy, above the floor. Does the leafy ceiling direct and amplify sound? Ovenbirds, muted again, also sing at mid-level but their voice, loud and sharp, bludgeons. Thrushes soothe and quench; a trace of melancholy that rolls out of hidden crags and recesses. Ushers me into the moment, prisoner of the moment for a moment, which is all I really have . . . as summer beings to slide ineluctably toward autumn.