News

Hi, my friend.

Well, I'm officially sick; I have a cold. I don't get sick very often. I think the last time I had a cold I was a first year grad student. I remember Chris was up visiting for the week, and I couldn't take time off schoolwork to be with him, so I organized my week so that while he was up all my homework involved being outside with him. I wasn't sick the whole time, but I remember one day I went out to the airport bog to look for maleberry for my twigboard assignment, and it was all snowy and drizzling and grey and I couldn't get a good look at anything and I think I was running a fever stumbling around in the snow. So Chris took me to the little Indian restaurant in the airport and fed me tea and hot, savory stuff whose name I cannot remember except that it was green, and then for dessert these little spherical cakes floating in rose-scented syrup. And we sat and ate together and looked out at the wet snow.

So that was a very lovely way to be sick.

This time both of us are sick. Chris is sicker than I am, and has been for several days. He's coughing and spitting and blowing his nose every hour or so. At least he doesn't seem to be running a fever anymore. I have a milder version of the same thing. I don't consider myself sick just because I cough a little, but only when I have to change my habits to take care of myself. Today I felt all fuzzy and distracted for a while and my lungs hurt, so I think that counts.

In what is likely more interesting news:

The silver maples are flowering here, and have been for weeks now, since right around the time of the Climate march on Washington. Elms, too, though I haven't seen one lately. The daffodils are up, though they're slower than they were two years ago, when Chris and I used daffodils upon daffodils to decorate our wedding. A neighbor says a group of bufflehead ducks on the tidal creek have declined to migrate so far. He doesn't know why. For a week or two on every walk I saw a great blue heron in exactly the same part of a short canal, along with a group of ducks, but since then the heron has gone elsewhere. The ducks haven't. They still fly off when they see me. Once I saw what looked like large whitish birds dancing as a pair in the water. I've seen documentaries where birds dance on water side by side like that, but I don't know which of our birds do that and I didn't get a good look. I'm not even sure what I saw, just white bodies, dancing.

I am sure that I saw a pileated woodpecker clicking low down on a loblolly pine tree near the house where Kayla, the chocolate lab, lives. I don't know the names of her people. Kayla was not out at the time, but my beagle spotted the bird and strained at her leash at the bird, who flew away. I know, too, that I saw a bird's nest, I'm not sure what kind and I don't think it's in use, tucked inside a mailbox in front of a house listed for sail. Some junk mail lays on the doorstep of this nest and the mailbox is half, just half, way open.

I want to spend more time outside, being physically active. I used to live and work in the woods. Now I mostly live and work online. And I like writing. I really like writing. I just don't like all the sitting it seems like the different necessary parts of my life won't all fit in the same life at the same time. Maybe I just have to swing from one partial objective to another slowly over time and find in constant change what cannot fit in stasis., but I don't know what my next objective should be. I am glad we humans often get such long lives to lead.

Long life to you, too, my friend.

-best, C.

Voices

Hi, my friend,

How are you? How is your daughter? I've never asked after her, and you rarely tell me what she is up to, but when you do your voice softens, a comforting, vocal gleam. I do not know if anyone's voice softens for me like that; my own father has a different expressive style than you do, I guess.

I'm thinking about fathers, about parents, especially at present because I've just come from the home of my sister and her family, including my newborn my niece. She is small and round and pink and blotchy, and when she cries she makes the most extraordinary shapes with her mouth, rounding it, squaring it, extending her lips forward, pulling them back into a grimace; it's like she doesn't yet know what to do with her mouth, other than make noise with it and suckle with it. Her face was immediately and unaccountably familiar to me. A trip to the family photo album to inspect old baby pictures reveals that she looks a great deal like my mother, so no wonder. My niece seems both more demanding and more affectionate than her brother did at that age.

Not that my nephew is not affectionate. My primary job these past few days has been to keep him occupied, and he spent much of this evening alternating between leaping into my arms for great big hugs and attempting to feed me pieces of his toast. But he is also fairly self-contained; he can occupy himself when need be, he is generally obedient and helpful, and he is at once entirely sure of what he wants and entirely confident that demands are unnecessary. He is an extraordinary little boy, and his affection seems more a generosity of spirit than any emotional neediness on his part.

I've been learning to play with him and learning also to answer his questions, most of which consist of asking the names of things. He is in that semi-verbal stage in which he can understand what is said to him and use a few words correctly to communicate, but a stranger would not understand any of his words because his pronunciation is terrible.

An emphatic "Da!" with a single nod of the head is "yes."

"Dis!" and "Da," without the emphasis or nod, are "this" and "that" respectively, and he uses them, with pointing, to ask for things to be named to him, or sometimes given to him.

"Go" or "do" is "goat," which means both "goat" and "animal." Any animal he does not know the name of is a go, although the animals he can now name more specifically include a "graf," or something similar-sounding,which means "giraffe." There is one in one of his picture-books.

"Da da da" also means "Daddy," but I have not yet heard him say "Mommy," or anything equivalent.

"Dis!" he says, pointing to a pile of books.

I pick up one. "This one?" I ask.

"Da!"

He sits in my lap and we open the book to the middle. It's a reference book on singing insects, written for grown-ups. He points at pictures.

"Dis!"

"Cricket! That's a cricket!"

"Dis!"

"That's another cricket!"

"Dis!"

"That's another kind of cricket--a MOLE cricket!"

"Dis!"

"ANOTHER mole cricket!"

"Dis!"

"Oo!, That's a TRIG. I didn't know about trigs. And look! According to the map, we're in its range! Maybe this summer you'll see a trig! Or hear it! It goes trr trr trr." I trill like a cricket as best as I can and he laughs. If this kid doesn't turn out to be a nature geek it won't be for lack of support from me.

"Dis!"

"Oo, that's a CICADA! They're very loud. They're just this big and they make a huge noise," which I imitate and he laughs, "they're only this big, but they make a noise THIS big, bigger! It just fills up whole trees, you wouldn't believe such a big noise could come out of such a little bug. And the earlier in the day they start making that noise, the hotter it's going to be. My Daddy taught me that."

He tires of the book and flops on his belly and looks at me and grins.

One of my favorite things has been explaining things to him. You'd think answering such simple questions as "dis!" over and over again would be boring, but it really isn't. I don't get bored because we are engaged in a process I fundamentally can relate to, the process of finding all sorts of things out. I like talking about live things and I like teaching, and I'm just as happy to do that with a toddler as with adults older and generally more experienced than I am.

We go for a walk and I name for him grass, sticks, other sticks, moss, a small piece of moss. I stop to investigate my own mysteries: a flattened and dehydrated stink bug; a fallen maple flower; a very cold and slow fly.... A turkey vulture drifts overhead, fairly low, and catches my nephew's attention. "That's a vulture," I tell him, "a vulture. Isn't it pretty? I think the way the sun comes through its wings is so pretty." My nephew watches the big, honey-dark bird intently until it soars out of sight. It astounds me that he probably doesn't remember the green of the growing season, when trees had leaves on them and the farm fields were full of vegetables and he was still too young to walk. Spring is coming, and it's going to be a truly amazing thing.

Back inside and the baby is crying. She does that a lot, while awake, for when she is neither eating nor bothered by something she mostly sleeps. Her father swaddles her tightly in a big square brown shawl and lifts her. She's hardly big enough to fill his hands. He puts on classical music and he dances with her. My brother-in-law is an accomplished dancer and his feet move through the complicated steps of some kind of waltz, back and forth across the dirty, toy-strewn floor, to an instrumental version of "Once Upon a Dream," from Sleeping Beauty, and the child quiets, calms, looks around, her eyes dark and star-filled as the ancient night.

I know you, I danced with you once upon a dream

I hadn't known I knew the words, but they spin themselves out from the spool of memory in my head,

I know you, the gleam in your eyes is so familiar a gleam

The little pink beauty in her father's arms begins to droop; her eyes shut. This kiss sends her to sleep, but my brother-in-law keeps dancing, mindful that she might wake if he stops, and he is enraptured by the music, too, perhaps, as his feet keep the intricate patten, back and forth and turn and step, gallant and tall upon the toy and blanket-strewn floor,

I know it's true that visions are seldom all that they seem,
but if I know you, I know what you'll do,
You'll love me at once, the way you did, once upon a dream.

Sometimes, watching him, I think of you, for you were once also the father of an infant, young and inexperienced and probably harried. You've told me nothing of those years, just as you've told me almost nothing of what your daughter is doing now, and little enough of your own life. What little I know of you is not fodder for my writing, not truly. If I am unavoidably a journalist even among my own family, I am not so with you. You are as inviolate, as camouflaged, as the heart of an old tree with its cargo of owlets, just hatched now, in the grey of early spring, and I shall not even search the somber trunks, though I heard the adult birds calling in the winter and I know they must be there. But I know you well enough to guess that you have been harried, long ago, by a newborn's squalling, sleep-deprived and frayed, and that once a newborn fell asleep in your arms, to the sound of your voice.

-best, as ever,
C.

Remembering Girls

Hi! I have news!

My first niece was born last night! So now I have a niece and a nephew. She was a large baby who debuted after a relatively short labor, and I know her name but I'm not going to use it here.

She doesn't know it, but she's been born into the family of a writer (technically, several writers) making her life the subject of public art from the beginning. I have mixed feelings about doing this, but obviously I'm going with the part of the mix that says to do it anyway. When she gets old enough to read her Aunt Caroline's writings, hopefully she'll feel warmed and welcomed by my attention. I always have by my father's writings. I don't know if he's written anything about his grandchildren. He doesn't have a blog.

She. A girl. The only thing I know about her, other than her name, is that she is a girl, and therefor a first for her immediate family, even if a somewhat less momentous first than her brother, who was the first grandchild on either side of his family. It's an odd thing, but although I am generally more socially comfortable with men than with women, and most of my friends are male, boys, male children, are something of a mystery to me. Perhaps it's because I had few male friends as a child, so I don't really know how male children work? But then, I had few female friends as a child, either. Part of it is certainly that when I think of maleness in the abstract, an exercise that must run to stereotype but might still have some validity, I think of things very much at odds with my idea of childhood. Largeness, for one; you people are nearly all bigger than me, and you have these big voices, and that does not fit very well with my idea of a baby. I do not personally look to males for protection or provisions, though neither do I generally fear male violence yet I am aware that boyish symbolism runs heavily to guns. I've seen the boy's sections of toy and clothing stores, and they are full of the symbols of violence. Guns, ninjas, superpowered red-caped fists, and the less obvious violence of fast cars, big machines, and bold, dark colors. So what is a boy, then? Abold, protective  warrior in training and yet at the same time this sweet little person who initially wanted to call all animals, even fish, "goat"? I realize that such stereotypes have little to do with actual people, and I do not fall prey to them in my dealings with adults, but with a boy whom I had just met a little over a year ago, what else had I to go on? I knew no more than "boy." And now there is a girl, of whom I, equally, know nothing.

One in and one out. Last week a woman I knew as a girl, when we were in high school together, died. She had fought hard and long against brain cancer, and she leaves behind a ten year old girl. She was younger than I am. Her funeral was yesterday, though I did not go. I hardly knew her, and I remember less than I once knew, but her death is unsettling nonetheless.

I do not take it personally that she was younger than I--I mean, that her death is not a creepy reminder of my own mortality. I already know that I am mortal, and that while I do not expect to die any time soon, and I make a point of trying not to do so, I am aware that people can die in their thirties. I mind only that she did not have very much time, and that she left behind such a young daughter. I'm going to try to do something for the girl, not like it sounds as though she needs anything we can give--clearly she mostly needs something we cannot give; she needs her mother back. But the gesture might be some small comfort, and anyway the people I went to boarding school with persist in being a sort of enduring club, something like, perhaps, the bond that forms among veterans. Ours was a weird school, and ours is a bond of shared experience that no one else shares, and so it persists across decades. And so I think it might be good to turn this bond and face it forward, not back, to try to begin a tradition of sticking up for each other. This little girl will not be the last child of our diaspora to need help.

I did not go to this woman's funeral, but I was pleased, even comforted, to have the option. It bothers me sometimes that when I do die, the people I went to grade school with will not likely hear of it. I had very few friends as a child, as I mentioned, and those few I had have all drifted away now. I contributed to that drifting, and for the most part I do not miss my old school mates, nor do I suspect they miss me. But I grew up with those people, they were the boys and girls I knew, the people I saw every day, except on weekends, most of the weeks of my childhood. And I do not now know for sure that any of them are alive. I assume that at least most of them are. It would be strange for a few dozen people from the same school to all die young. I do not miss them, but I feel...less substantial, knowing that so few people who knew me as a child know me now. But at least there are people who know me now who knew me as a teenager--not many of them liked me, either, and while I think somewhat more like me now, that's not really the point. I'm not worried about people liking me, because generally people do these days. The point is that I do not want to be dependent upon being liked to me known. So if someone thought to tell me that this woman I barely knew died, perhaps someone will think to tell other people when I do.

Closer to home, and apropos of very little, I miss you.

-best,
C.

Nature

Hi, there,

It has been a long time since I've written to you, here or otherwise. I've been busy, and I have not known what to say, but still you have been on my mind.

In the month or so so last wrote I have now and again thought of things I wanted to tell you. How the weather was unseasonably wrong in early January, how it chilled up and snowed then, and how the birds crouched on the lip of the feeders in the snow, female finches of some sort, a white streak on their faces near the eye, taking sunflower seeds one by one in their heavy bills. Each one chomped up and down on her seed, cracking the shell, till the shell fell in shards and she swallowed the seed, a uniquely bird method of chewing. How, more recently, the weather has been warming and I'm re-starting my practice of early morning walks, listening in my beginner's ignorance to the conversations of birds. What sounds a bit like the buzz of the teeth of a comb? Or maybe a single note on a kazoo? Bird or bug or something else, two or three of them call from the trees across the road in the evenings. Mornings are arguments among beings with complex, multi-note songs that I'm sure have some sort of mnemonic that I don't know. A great blue heron, and also a group of ducks, flush from the little canal almost every time I go by.

The other day I watched an Attenborough documentary on snakes. I know you are a fellow fan. He has become such an icon, so I'm hardly alone in my devotion, but something in me is always about seven years old again when I watch him.

On this occasion, the documentary began with him watching a small green snake slither along a fallen branch, a gentle, fond wonder shining on his face. Attenborough documentaries all have certain things in common. There's always a focus on species, not ecological patterns and not individual animals. There is usually no human context--you can't tell if he's filming in remote wilderness or seventy-five yards away from a car dealership. There is no narrative. You can't tell how Attenborough got somewhere, or what discovery process his team went through to set up a scene. No other humans appear on camera, but Attenborough himself is almost always there, and he brings the viewer there, too. The illusion of being just out for a walk with him, one on one, is almost total. And there is that fondness that lights him up, this contagious, beatific love for live things. For a snake, for a bird, for some rodent that uses a giant pitcher plants for a toilet, everything alive is just bathed in his fondness. I've seen you light up in a similar way, gesturing excitedly while some feathered live thing gets dizzy in your hand. I saw light first on his face.

What would have become of me if I'd never seen him?

I mean, I watched other documentaries as a kid, but few of them had a person I could identify with as its focus. There was Marty Stoufer, of course, and Jacques Cousteau, and to a lesser extent, George Page, but none of them served as a personal tour guide on camera. None of them role-modeled their relationship to the extra-human world on camera the way he did. I don't know whether I was always going to be an ecology geek, and recognized him as an example of what I could become, or if I became an ecology geek following the example of what I think was the first truly happy adult I'd gotten to know--because when he speaks directly to the camera like that, it's like you know him.

And all of this happened because in the early '80's my Dad decided he had a political problem with commercial television best solved by boycotting it. I'm not sure if he just found the big networks too irritating to watch anymore or if he actually thought his boycott would do anything, but the result was that we watched a lot more documentaries on public television. Including those by Sir David Attenborough.

It's an odd thing that on some level I seem to believe luck can be retroactive. As though one of these days that crucial decision of television won't have happened, and my life as I know it will vanish.

Aside from the flow of causality, the issue is nature vs. nurture. Who would I have been if the events I perceive as formative had happened differently? I used to be preoccupied with events that I thought had shaped me to be unhappy, identifying this or that place where I seemed to be scarred by history. Now I'm preoccupied with what worked, what I wouldn't trade, what I appreciate. This persistent judgment of events I can't now change either way is stupid. Yet I persist in it. A certain tolerance, a certain humor regarding ones' own irrationalities is a necessary form of humility, I think.

Nurture was on my mind not long ago specifically. I'm not sure if you noticed on Facebook, but my Dad has a new book out--not that my Dad is on Facebook, but his publisher is, so I've been treated to splashes of publicity and much-to-do about my Dad every few days. If you haven't noticed, I've been "liking" and "sharing" these things whenever I see them.

Chris and I went to a book signing my Dad did a while back. He read some, his publisher spoke glowingly about his talent and intelligence, people bought books and asked for his signature. My Dad signed each book dutifully with an air of mild surprise, as though he had been quietly minding his business when he was unaccountably accosted by his fans. He didn't seem to mind, he was just puzzled.

You have to understand, my Dad does not toot his own horn. He does not generally acknowledge having a horn. But all those things his publisher said are true. I should know.

-best, C.

Lost in Space

Hi, my friend,

I've noticed on Twitter (yes, I'm on Twitter) that today is the anniversary of the Challenger explosion. I remember that...and I remember, shortly thereafter, becoming conscious of the fact that that I would always remember it, and that the memory would be in some sense analogous to older people's memory of JFK being shot--you always remember where you were when you heard about it. I thought it was the first such memory I would collect, but probably not my last. It felt like a very grown-up memory to have.

I was, at best, half-right, for I also remember where I was when I heard that John Lennon had been killed, and that was much earlier. That would be my first tragic cultural touchstone, but it is a very different kind of memory because I was very young and, despite already being a Beatles fan of sorts, I didn't know who John Lennon was. I just happened to remember that conversation for other reasons until I was old enough to look back and realize what it was I had heard. It is odd to think that even though I normally think of Lennon as before my time, a figure of history, I can remember the day that he died and that the day before I could have truthfully said, if anybody had prompted me to do so, "John Lennon is alive."

Anyway, it has been twenty-seven years now, since the Challenger blew up, since that day one of the teachers called an all-school meeting and said "I just turned on the TV to watch the space shuttle launch, and it lifted off the launchpad and it blew up." I don't remember what else he said. I remember feeling shocked and disoriented and oddly self-conscious, as though everyone might be looking at me and judging whatever it was I was thinking and feeling. What was I thinking and feeling? I didn't know at the time. I incorporated the theme of exploding spaceships briefly in the continual stories I was, even then, spinning, but I was so obviously a child attempting to process tragedy through play that I stopped. I did not want other people having thoughts about my feelings (especially not before I understood them!) and I did not know how to spin stories without sharing them.

And in the end I'm not sure how much difference that tragedy made, except of course to the people immediately involved and their families and colleagues. It changed the space program in some ways, but I don't think it changed America more broadly. I don't know if it really is a cultural touchstone, like 9/11 certainly is, a day that divides a people into before and after.

I am not generally much concerned with the space program, which may be one reason I don't think often of that tragedy I heard of so many years ago. I regard those people as the victims of an accident, certainly mourned by their friends and families, and worthy of respect, but I do not regard them as heroes, people who died in the course of doing something good and noble for all of us. They are not secular martyrs. Why not? I am of a minority opinion on this, I think.

I look up and I see the stars and the moon and I think they are pretty. They do not stir my curiosity much. I do not care whether there is microscopic life on Mars or how many light-years our galaxy is across. I did go through a very brief astronomy phase as a kid, and I have a good memory, so I am neither entirely ignorant of space nor ignorant of the impulse to explore it. In any case, just as I know your fondness for birds has its analogies in certain fondnesses of mine, I can appreciate that others might look at astronomy and astrophysics with the same fascination I have for ecology. To them I wish joy in the pursuit of a fascinating intellectual hobby. But I'm not sure it's more than that. I think the main use of the space program is to launch and maintain communications and GPS satellites and scientific satellites aimed mostly back at Earth.

I don't mean to be pig-headed about this; if you or anyone else who may read this wants to try to change my mind, then please, go ahead. I've been wrong before and I'll be wrong again, and I could well be in the act of being wrong right now. But we belong to the Earth. We aren't just living on the Earth, we are part of the Earth, just as the rocks and atmosphere are. Yes, of course there are the grave practical matters, too; global climate change, conservation science, these are things worth spending a hundred million dollars annually on, they are worth living for and dying over. Satisfying an upward-facing curiosity? Maybe not so much. And the desire to explore the stars, to leave Earth as people, as a species? What would we be without Earth? Would one of us without our planet mean any more than one of my fingers without its hand?

Context, context is key. I was just talking to you earlier today about the idea of a life as a book, a life with multiple chapters, and what that means. What it means is context. Stories are context, too. We need ideas to tell us who and what we are, just as we need our ecological place, we need to exist in an ecology of the mind. And I think that explains the disorientation I felt that day twenty-seven years ago. It was a small piece of the sense of being "a generation lost in space" describes so eloquently in the sing "American Pie," which I've always loved and which is about yet another nationally relevant tragedy, and which I heard today, by coincidence, while at physical therapy.

These things happen, and interrupt, jolt, or, in some cases, destroy entirely, the sense of psychological context. The book we live in vanishes, the plot broken, abandoned, and for a moment, short or long, we look around and see the world without its story, directly. And that's why we always remember those moments.

Anyway, that's what I think currently. What do you think?

-best, C. 

Dusk.

Hi,

It's been wet and rainy for a few days, now, a pattern that began with a thick nighttime fog. I went walking in that fog by myself. It was Sunday, the only day of the week we are sure there will be no hunters out in the fields and woods on the way to the little beach. Usually, Chris and I make the walk out with the dogs, but this week he decided to update our computers instead, so I went by myself. I'd have taken the dogs, but I'm under doctor's orders not to until that injury from over the summer completely heals.

It was late enough that I brought a flashlight, since I expected evening to fall while I was out. I also brought my guidebooks and notebooks and a magnifying lens and my binoculars, which I hardly ever use and could not use on Sunday, as it turned out, because of the fog. I couldn't use any of my equipment because everything was so drippy and dark. I used my ears and a combination of other senses that amounts to a sense in itself. I do this sometimes. It's part of the reason I often look down when I walk. I say it's so that I don't trip over anything, and this is partly true, but a more complete answer--and I've just thought of it--is that by not looking up and around my attention stays generalized and I can get a feel for things.

The vultures who roost at the end of the street flapped heavy and invisible above the fog. Small birds twittered or flew overhead, their wings whistling. Geese flew over and geese flew over and then more geese flew over in invisible skeins. As I came out of the trees and into the marshes, ducks took wing, their small, fast wing beats identifying them as they escaped from channels and pools not fifty feet away from me but lost in the gloom. I must have been frightening to the birds, as so many of them flew at my approach. As I got out towards the end of what was once a small, marshy island, before the causeway was constructed, the geese flew, lifting up out of the bay in a great, unseen, honking mass, wheeling and turning and crying and talking to each other in their wild goose way, honkhonkhonkhonk! The white cedars along the coast, clearly planted once, as they stand in distinct lines, but now being lost one by one to the sea, stood like dinosaurs crouching in the gloom. I got out to the beach and listened, but the geese had all gone.

Were they afraid of me because in the fog they could not see? I was a noise about whom they could know nothing else? I was jumpy myself, startling like an animal at shadows in the gloom, dropping into a half crouch, ready for anything and motionless, until I could be sure the shadow was just a stick or a clump of old grass.

The night finally descended as I returned, but I didn't use my flashlight. I wanted to challenge myself, see if I could get home all but blind. I've done it before, in other places; my feet can follow a trail by touch alone and if I do not try to look at anything my eyes can join my other senses and contribute what little information they have to my "feel" of the place. The shape of shadows and the feel of the farm road kept me oriented the whole way home.

What is this, my fondness for temporary blindness? I can see, and I enjoy what I see much of the time, so why do I not look, look, look? Somehow it feels important to know how to be blind. Maybe I worry about losing my sight? I'm conscious of no such worry, but maybe it is there. Maybe I just enjoy exploring the country of my other senses.

As I crossed the little bridge in the face of the alien glow of porch lights from the house where the Chessie dogs live I heard a wonder and I knew what it was. Under the trees of the forest, the pines where the vultures roost, it was, quite clearly, raining.  I could hear it, no mere occasional drip but a steady, strong patter. Yet out on the bridge under the sky, there was no rain. The water looked perfectly calm in the porch light. And I could even hear that it was not raining on the top of the canopy, only underneath it, like an umbrella that rains from its underside. Of course, the trees were straining moisture from the foggy air, making rain for themselves. Once again, life evokes a lecture I remember from graduate school.

With you, too, I have had to function without my normal senses, put together bits and pieces to form a picture whose truth I can't directly confirm. I know you like hearing from me, so I make sure you do. I know, too, that you are a private person....and from bits and pieces over the years I have gathered very little else. I have put together a picture of your personhood that may or may not be correct. I'm more confident of my blind hiking trails than I am of my understanding of you. You keep me humble. And that is alright. You are alright with me.

I step out of my door with my books and my tools and my plans and my knowledge and the weather immediately makes hash of all my plans, keeps me guessing, renders all my preparations inapplicable. And I keep walking.

best, as ever,
C.

Partial Completion

Hi, there!

Well, it's begun; I have had my first dream that involved not finishing my thesis. Of course, I HAVE finished my thesis, as you know, but I still have dreams about not having finished high school, so these things don't have to be realistic. I'd rather not spend the rest of my life having thesis-anxiety dreams, but I wouldn't be surprised if it happens.

But that's not what I wanted to tell you about.

One of my fictional characters also gets a master's degree in conservation biology (complete with completed thesis) but does not anticipate making research a part of his career because he does not want to focus his curiosity on things nobody knows yet, he'd rather just focus on learning what he does not know yet. That sounds about right to me, though I don't want to rule out doing research. But today, for example, I think I solved a mystery that will likely surprise and interest the scholarly community not at all, but pleases me enormously.

I figured out what the vultures at the end of the street are doing.

A lot of turkey vultures, perhaps twenty of them, collect around the far end of our street in the afternoons. We've seen them on our afternoon walks several times now, flying low just over the pine trees. At first we thought something must have attracted them by dying, perhaps a deer shot by one of the farmers. That could have happened, but none of them seemed to be landing anywhere, and I do not remember such collections of vultures around the dead deer we did find some years ago (apparently the farmers here can shoot deer on their land regardless of hunting laws and often do so for population control. They leave the bodies to rot).

It was late in the day when we'd see the vultures, less than an hour before sunset, and I'd heard that turkey vultures use communal roosts, they don't just sleep wherever they happen to be at the end of the day. I didn't see how the birds had time to fly off to somewhere else to roost before they lost their light, so I'd guessed that they had established a new roost on our street. Now, I'm sure.

I went for a walk by myself right at sunset, and I saw the vultures, but I didn't just see them flying around. I heard groups of them taking off through the trees, as though they had been perching together but had flushed for some reason. They circled around and then vanished. I spotted another group sitting in a tree, four of them, and then saw them joined by a fifth. Another group flushed and flapped and vanished. Most of the trees there are loblolly pines, growing thickly together, and it is hard to see the big birds. They just blend in. I think dozens of them could be in there, collecting as the sun heads down and the light yellows, then getting ready to sleep as they sky turns pink and red above them.

Or will they sleep? Do vultures sleep all night? How much do they sleep? Maybe they just sit up and think about things? I think they are pretty, when they fly, the way the light shines through their feathers...the naked heads are a bit of a downer, but you can't see the heads from a distance. I admire vultures' bigness. And they are sleeping at the end of our street! The new neighbors!

I'd gone out walking with plants on my mind, and I had my bag full of field guides and magnifying lenses and everything, but I got rather distracted by animals. I passed the one cut-in from the creek, where a few dilapidated boats quietly rust, and startled a great blue heron into flight. When I passed the second cut-in I saw another great blue heron, likewise flying away from me to the west, exactly as the first one had done. A small group of ducks near the intersection with the main channel flew also. I couldn't see the ducks themselves, only the bright ripples of their wakes, and I could hear their winds and their cries.

After I finished watching the vultures for a bit, I continued on and walked out down the farm lane as far as the little bridge over the creek. It's the only really good place to see the sunset around here, and today was a good sunset, as though Jackson Pollack had gotten all enthusiastic with the reds and yellows. Skein after skein of geese, flying low, in messy, shifting, interlocking V's flew over, honking, flying east to west, from the pond in the old gravel pit out to Newport Bay, where a lot of them sleep. Small, chirpy birds, some kind of blackbird, maybe, flew over, too, much lower, heading upstream, I don't know why. They went very fast. The water was very calm, the tide high and slack.

I noticed tracks in the sand and spend a while drawing them and following them, but I couldn't figure out what gait the animal was using before I began to seriously lose the light. Reluctantly, I went home. As I was walking away down the farm lane I heard a complex moving whistle above me, low and pulsing, and moving overhead faster than I could have run.It only lasted a few seconds. More birds, perhaps? Otherwise the evening was so quiet I could hear the blood moving in my own ears.

My friend, I do not know what to say to you these days, this blog notwithstanding. There are many things I have in me to say, but I don't know which things you want to hear about. I think of you often. The new year begins on something of a melancholy note for me, though I cannot name the source of the feeling. A vague discomfort...perhaps it is only the short days and a bit of dehydration. I hope you are well.

The tracks belong to a large raccoon, I decided.

-best,
C.