6:23 a.m. (sunrise two minutes earlier than yesterday). 3 degrees (33 degrees colder than yesterday), wind WNW 17 mph (last night: two-inches of powdery snow, gusts to 40 mph. Talking to a friend on the phone, I could hear the wind roar outside her window). Forest scraps litter the snow: needles, twigs; branches; strips of birch bark; fragile saplings snapped in half. A parade of beech leaves tumbles down the road. Sky: bright gray with a hint of lavender. Visibility is limited by haze. Permanent streams: upper, little shelves of ice over dark water, but still mostly open; lower, caught in seasonal limbo, sound-proof flow. Wetlands: snow devils curl across the marsh, pale, dwarf twisters. On the far shore, towering pines swept clean; shorter trees glazed. Pond: day after day, thaw, freeze, thaw, freeze, disconcerting stroll over the textured surface, like walking on icy bubble wrap.
Except for the bluster of the wind, the day has an altogether quiet start. One red-breasted nuthatch toots from a thin finger of aspen, high above the stone wall, where garter snakes assemble in May sunshine, and three-foot milk snakes ambush chipmunks in musty tunnels. Voice hijacked by the wind, chickadee singing in hemlock barely audible, needs an amplifier . . . or the whistling oomph of titmouse, alone in an apple tree, hushed for the moment. Jays silent, stick to the trees. Airborne, crows cautiously fly into the wind, buffeted and vulnerable—more flight simulation than northbound advancement, avian isometrics.
In the seventies, on mornings like today, when I returned from college, reuniting with my boyhood bedroom, I would drive the Causeway across the Great South Bay to Jones Inlet to see the beach. To feel sand whittled off the dunes, blowing over the ground like smoke. To see the crests stripped from breakers, launched. Beach air was always moist and salty, and jetty rocks, slick with algae. Purple sandpipers and the odd oystercatcher braved the waves, snipping snails off hand-hewn boulders. And sanderlings ran after retreating waves, stiff-legged, their batteries charged by the flesh and eggs of the unseen. The inlet itself filled with gannets plunging like Acapulco cliff-divers head-long into the gray, angry chop. Buntings and longspurs and horned larks foraged seeds in the dunes and swales and rode long wands of phragmites, bouncing seedheads. Or maybe they'd swirl as one, careening off the wind, a black and white attention-getting flight. I tried to photograph the action, pressing the shutter with my knuckles because of disobedient fingers. By mid-morning, I'd stand on the dance floor of the Oak Beach Inn, my hands, numb as stones and nearly as inflexible, clutching a cup of clam chowder (Manhattan, of course), absorbing heat directly into red, sore fingers. I wasn’t sure what to do with my life . . . I went to the beach to be soothed.
Now, sitting in my office, staring at the monitor, my hands fixed to a mug of hot coffee . . . I consider the next phase.
I've loved the beaches of La Jolla and of Cape Cod and even of Lake Michigan; the beach is a humility lesson, if humans only listen. One of my favorite naturalist/philosophers is Loren Eiseley, and his essay, "The Star Thrower" from his book THE UNEXPECTED UNIVERSE has always inspired me. The pdf of the full essay is here:
http://www.brontaylor.com/courses/pdf/Eiseley--StarThrower.pdf
This is the last paragraph of an essay written when Eiseley was in great despair, a feeling I've shared about humanity. But the idea of throwing a starfish back into the ocean, rather than letting people "collect" it or eat it, is an action Eiseley could understand, as do I.:
"Tomorrow I would walk in the storm. I would walk against the shell collectors and the flames. I would walk remembering Bacon's forgotten words "for the uses of life." I would walk with the knowledge of the discontinuities of the unexpected universe. I would walk knowing of the rift revealed by the thrower, a hint that there looms, inexplicably, in nature something above the role men give her. I knew it from the man at the foot of the rainbow, the starfish thrower on the beaches of Costabel."
Whatever your next phase becomes, you will offer it that same detailed attention that you're now giving Coyote Hollow. Thanks for sharing.