Author Archives: Sandy Stott

Fog

This post is joined to Henry Thoreau’s world only by his and my affinity for experience of water from a boat. As summer promises itself, floating seems a good choice. And when floating, fog will come.

“On the pond [Fairhaven] played a long [time] with the bubbles which we made with our paddles on the smooth, perhaps unctuous surface, in which little hemispherical cases we saw ourselves and boat, small, black and distinct, with a fainter reflection on the opposite side of the bubble (head to head). These lasted sometimes a minute before they burst. The reminded me more of Italy than of New England.” Thoreau, Journal, June 3, 1854

“Why does the fog go off always toward the sun – is seen in the east when it has disappeared in the west? The waves of the foggy ocean divide and flow back for us Israelites of a day to march through.” Thoreau, Journal, June 17, 1854

The fog, wispy, seeming to burn off, gathers itself, rides the south wind back in. I’m 10 minutes off Flag Island, aiming for Ragged, which puts me somewhere around 3 miles offshore here in midcoast Maine. First, Mark Island disappears; over my left shoulder Wood Island vanishes. A few minutes ago, I had considered both places. The light’s been fog-filtered all morning, and Ragged Island begins to shift toward phantasm, its back arched like a frightened cat, floating now, its darkness indistinct; now it’s gone. I pause.

I’ve left my deck compass home. Often in warm-water summer, there’s little need of it, and you could spin me three times rapidly, and I’d still recognize every island out here. The wind’s from the south-southeast and the tide’s flowing in, pulling on the lobster buoys at about half a knot. I know the way in. On the other hand, aiming across at Ragged, out without a bearing, even though I think the fog will burn up and off, feels foolhardy; I turn to follow the tide. Visibility’s about 100 yards, plenty of time to see one of the boats muttering now out of sight.

It doesn’t burn in any way. Now I can see only 100 feet in my round, gauzy room, and I feel a clench of anxiety. The two-foot swells are lifting me and I’m paddling easily, angling slightly west of the tide’s flow to get to the ledges off Yarmouth Island (and therefore out of the flow of boat traffic on the New Meadows River). To my left and behind, muttering comes closer; then I hear the wash of water being split by a boat’s bow. The lobster boat just materializes before me: nothing’s there; then there’s 30 feet of boat 50 feet away. But he’s going very slowly, perhaps 3 knots, and I watch him glide by and then disappear; 15 seconds later his small wake reminds me he was here.

I relax. No truly big boat will be in here near this strew of ledges and out of the channels; no one here will be revving his engines and seeing kayaks as speed bumps. As if to prove my point a cabin cruiser appears from my left — quieter engine, it is even more ghostly. Its course is wobbly. Whoever’s got the helm seems nervous at the way the world has disappeared. I doubt they see me hanging here in the fog’s edge.

And so I am left to myself for long minutes. When I check my watch and find that only 20 have passed since I turned in, I’m puzzled — that seems so wrong; I should be getting somewhere. The swell raises me, lowers me; the few buoys I can see point the way; still, I begin to doubt them.

And yet it’s also pleasant here in my little room of fog. I feel drifty and need to remind myself to pay attention. A steeper swell that lifts and skews my boat to the left, forcing me to a mixed high brace and sweep, helps. So too does the sound of breaking water. In front of me I see a slice of white sea. “It’s far enough away,” I say aloud. I ease left and only as I’m level with the ledge do I realize that I didn’t miss being lifted on to it by more than 10 yards. Good thing the swell stayed at today’s two feet; a four-footer might have broken early enough to take me for a rocky ride. The streak of adrenaline this shoots through me wakens me to the fog’s lull. I know there are more ledges out at this half-tide because I am aiming for them.

I have been in the fog long enough to stop straining to see. A form of acceptance has spread through me. Already it’s been longer than I thought it would be, and no bulk of island has darkened the steady gray in front of me. “I will get there when I do,” I say aloud again.

When land appears, it’s unrecognizable. Where am I? I wonder, and yet I know I can’t be far from Yarmouth Island, though it’s also clear that I’ve been far from Yarmouth Island. I finally rotate the map in my mind to admit little Raspberry Island and see I’m just to the east of the Quahog Bay boat channel, along which I see three sailboats creeping in under motor-power. I land and watch the boats ease by, nearing safe harbor. A lot of people have been surprised by this fog, it seems.

The fog pulls out with astonishing speed, like a dream breaking up; the Elm Islands, more than a mile out from me are suddenly there, sharp-edged. Then, just as quickly, they’re gone and the light has become indistinct again.

Summer’s here, but who can track time in the fog? Has the whole season passed in this morning of it? What have you found in fog?

Run (or Walk) Like Water

It’s raining. Once you accept that each day’s hours hold varying measures of wetness, naming the many rains becomes the only dilemma — is it hanging rain, horizontal, a floating mist that gathers along each tendril of hair or fiber of cloth? Is it sluice of sky, straight rain, the sort of water with no space in between drops? Is it murmuring water, the steady whisper of it fallingfallingfallling on leaves? Is it the spatter of secondary rain, fat wind-shaken drops that suggest John Cage or one of his disciples may be at work on the tin or tent roof above? I have been wet with all of these rains and their composite cousins.

6/5: I go north in town to these woodlands that drew Thoreau. On one of the many maps that I read and reread, it’s easy to see the two wild poles of Thoreau’s world. Take out the USGS Maynard quadrangle – below the dense markings of Concord town, there are the waters of Walden and Fairhaven, with the railroad track famously grazing the west shore of Walden, and Route 126 nosing by the pond’s east side. Now, hanging like a scimitar above the area is Route 2. These southern woods are shot with wheeled passage.

Due north, however, beyond the town, before the map vanishes on the edge of the Billerica quadrangle, there’s a green patch, shot only with the meandering hash-marks of trails and thin blue snakes of water courses. Here is our local north pole, Estabrook Woods, our edge-terra. I go here often to run and walk, to let the glad animal out of the cage of the day.

On this midday in Estabrook, as I followed the southern perimeter trail, I found myself noting the passage of recent heavy rains. A few days before in night’s midsection, we’d had some hours of “straight” rain, the sort that plummets through the windless air, seeming – there is so much water falling -to squeeze that air aside. On today’s path I could see whole mats of duff washed down any slope worthy of the name. Where the thick softness of leaves and pine needles was gone, bare dirt and stone formed a track within the path. Unconsciously, at first, then with intent, I began to follow the water’s course, giving up my linear stepping in favor of water’s way; I began to run like water.

Water-bared Trail

Some minutes later, I realized the easy rhythm I had found; also, my shoulders – sometimes hunched with intent when I run to “get there” – had dropped. This was not trancelike running, however; not the sort of running I sometimes fall into on the smoothness of roads. I was aware, alert, the remnant of fur on the back of my neck slightly raised, and I was reading the path’s jumbled text of roots and rocks closely. What distinguished this moment was the rightness of my footfalls – one after another, I simply was getting it right. And the water was showing me the way.

Like all stretches of human endeavor, this one was finite. But what interrupted it, as I took a walking water-break, tugging my bottle from my waistbelt and ambling-drinking along, was a different water-thought. A few days before, I’d read a New York Times piece about Auroville, a utopian, international farm cooperative in India that has made a small Eden out of once-ruined land, and near the end of the article, there was short description of one of the farmer’s practices. In mid-monsoon, when the straight-rain falls and falls, this farmer dons boots, picks up an umbrella and walks his land, noticing how the water flows and where it pools. Later he takes this water-knowledge and uses it to site small ponds and crops. In this way, he and other farmers in Auroville have stored water for dry stretches and restored the land’s water table.

Link to this story about Auroville: http://nyti.ms/13577Zk

Contrast this method with the linear plowings and greedy irrigation of much modern agribusiness, its straight lines disappearing over the horizon, its water tables and aquifers dwindling, and you can see a divergence, one that restores land versus one that drains it.

Water runs and so do I. When I follow the way of water, my running gains flow, the turns I take feel unlike deviations, but rather like good choices.

By Corinne H. Smith

“When you hear him, you have got to the end of the alphabet and may imagine the &.” (Thoreau, Journal September 1, 1856)

Word of the upcoming 17-year cicada siege recently hit the front page of our local newspaper. When my octogenarian father saw the headline that morning, he scoffed over the breakfast table.

“This is news?” he asked. “The cicadas?”

“Well, maybe some people don’t know about them,” I countered. “Especially with our growing immigrant population, or with people having lived all of their lives in cities.”

“I suppose,” he allowed, as he filled his bowl with cereal. But I could see that his internal wheels were turning, and that the past would soon be called upon.

“I remember back home, when I was playing outside, I used to find locust casings all the time,” he said.

I nodded. That was at my grandparents’ small farm outside of Allentown, Pennsylvania, where I myself often spent a week or two during summer vacations in the 1960s and early 1970s. And like most folks, my father and I both call cicadas “locusts,” even though entomologists see them as separate species.

“I used to find them in the side yard there too, on that little tree,” I said. I could still picture one of those paper-thin and lifeless shells grasping the bark with sharp but ghostly claws.

“Halfway up the trunk,” he said.

He’d read my mind. “Yup,” I agreed.

Locust Casing

In the moment of silence that followed, I considered it a pretty nifty fact that my father and I had shared similar experiences as solitary kids in that same spot, even though the instances themselves had come many decades apart. And this was a topic we’d certainly never talked about before.

“I used to watch them shed those skins, too,” he continued, as he crunched his shredded wheat.

“Wow, I never saw that. How long did that take?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe about an hour?”

“Wow. But they end up being much bigger than those shells are. I’ve seen photos. How does that work?”

“I don’t know, but yeah, they come out twice as big. One of Nature’s miracles, I guess.” He finished eating and walked over to put the bowl and the spoon in the sink.

This morning was turning out to be one of small revelation, both about the locusts and about my father. I was happy we’d finally had this conversation.

Curious about what Henry Thoreau may have written about locusts, I then did a little cruising through his journal. It wasn’t until the fall of the year that he addressed their appearance. And as he was often apt to do, Thoreau tried to figure out a way in words of describing that unique cicada sound:

It is an early September afternoon, melting warm and sunny; the thousands of grasshoppers leaping before you reflect gleams of light; a little distance off the field is yellowed with a Xerxean army of Solidago nemoralis [gray goldenrod] between me and the sun; the earth-song of the cricket comes up through all; and ever and anon the hot z-ing of the locust is heard. (September 7, 1858)

The shrilling of the alder locust is the solder that welds these autumn days together. All bushes (arbusta) resound with their song, and you wade up to your ears in it. Methinks the burden of their song is the countless harvests of the year, — berries, grains, and other fruits. (August 26, 1860)

I’m looking forward to hearing that buzzing again. It’s always the background soundtrack for late summer, when everything is hot and crisp, and when greens are well on their way to becoming browns.

Let the cicadas come! My father and I won’t mind. We’ve got some sizable trees in this backyard. Maybe this time, we’ll have a chance to witness the skin-shedding together. Halfway up the trunk.