6:26 a.m. (sunrise two minutes earlier than yesterday). 28 degrees, wind NNW 3 mph. Sky: blue and hazy, yellow-pink in the east, the vanguard of the sun. A scattering of worn clouds, threadbare laundry on the skyline, white as the snow below. Permanent streams: a film of crusted snow, unmarked on either stream. Upper, a necklace of dark water strung between ice and snow, the connective tissue of the drainage; lower, too quiet to contemplate, meanders in silence all the way to the marsh. Wetlands: ground fog hugs the reeds, drifting, disappears and reappears like breath on a cold morning. Pond: I can walk the crusted, granulated surface. But what's the point? From the pines above the eastern bank, drum roll of two hairy woodpeckers. Tempo and volume differ. One faster, louder, more persistent. Crows, partying elsewhere, heard but not seen.
Just north of the driveway, seven turkeys cross the road, single file, determined workers off to a job-site in the oak grove. Everywhere, titmice whistling. Only one chickadee sings, halfheartedly, a soloist alone amid nervous, leathery oak leaves. Above the upper pasture, eleven blue jays fly south, honking and barking. Visible. Voluble. And so vulnerable to a peregrine of Cooper's hawk.
In the late fall of 1977, I moved to Vermont after two years in south-central New Hampshire, nine years split between Indiana, California, Texas, and New Jersey, and boyhood on Long Island, a short bike-ride (and later a run) from Jones Beach. In this thin, sandy excess, migratory shorebirds gathered by the thousands on trembling mudflats and every winter owls pitched into twisted pines, the last stop before an inhospitable ocean. Richie and I had the winter beach to ourselves. Every snowy owl was our owl. Sand dunes can give a young naturalist for whom birds are catnip a momentary link to imagined lands far beyond the edge of reality. One February night on Fire Island, as I lay in a swale, snug in my mummy bag, lulled by the ocean, owls passed over me. Saw-whet and short-eared, long, soft wings stroking damp air, rocking flights like oversized moths.
I could never afford to live by the ocean at Oak Beach or Gilgo or Point O' Woods or Kismet . . . so I moved north to pursue my dream. To help make a home, to help raise a family, to be a naturalist. Self-employed. To write and photograph, to teach and lead trips. To be a member of a rural, land-connected community, both local and professional. Coming north to live my life in east-central Vermont was, unquestionably, the best move I've ever made.