Author Archives: Sandy Stott

“Feb 4. F. Brown showed me this afternoon his game killed day before yesterday — a gray hare, a gray squirrel and a red squirrel…The gray was a fine large fellow in good condition; weighed one pound and a quarter…and his tail still perfectly and beautifully curved over his back. It recovered its place when you stroked it, as if it were full of electricity.” Henry Thoreau, Journal, 1854

A number of years ago, when wolf-advocacy groups were first making their case for this canid’s return to our region, I went to a lecture (and showing) by Wild Sentry at the Thoreau Institute. The talk took place in a crowded central hall (there must have been around 100 people there), and it treated the audience to various arguments and facts for this topline predator’s recovery or restoration in the ungulate-heavy woods of the northeast. But most of us were already persuaded of this need, and so we were there for the star of the show, a wolf rescued and sheltered by the presenters. He would descend the central staircase after the talk; in an odd cultural inversion, it would be a “runway moment.”

For this evening, I was carrying a local press pass, and so I got a few moments behind the scenes. Outside, before the talk, I met Koani, a 100-pound, 6-year-old black wolf. By now an experienced “ambassador,” Koani still seemed a little uncertain about the hand I extended so she could sniff it. But then, after a long sniff, she raised and stretched out her right paw to ask for a pat. Long silly about dogs, I was delighted. And, as I ran my hand along Koani’s back, I was surprised – the fur beneath my palm was wiry and stiff; it was unlike any fur I’d patted before. There, in the dark, I had my hand on a wildness that had been absent from New England since the last wolf in Maine was killed in 1909. “Welcome back,” I said.

Koani

This moment came back to me while reading Thoreau’s journal and the entry excerpted in this posting. Thoreau is always reaching out with his hands, picking up this pinecone, examining that flower, and here, when presented with a squirrel’s tail “still perfectly and beautifully curved over his back,” Thoreau strokes it. And “it recovered its place…as if it were full of electricity.”

All of this reminds me what it is to be in touch with the world. Today, while I walked, it reminded me to run my hands over the rough, corrugated bark of a large white pine.

Odd Note about Touch: Once I’d written this posting, I did what I often do when I’ve referred to a group or a program – I googled them. At the top of a list of results, I found a movie, True Wolf…that Pat Tucker and Bruce Weide, the two people of what they called “their pack” – themselves, a wolf (Koani) and a dog – have made about their experiences teaching people about wolves for 16 years. Here’s the link: http://www.truewolfmovie.com/

Official Movie Poster – True Wolf

It’s a cloudy February day in the aftermath of another storm. A uniform gray bathes the campus where I work; pallor sets up in every face; the snow squeaks underfoot. “When is spring?” I hear a student wonder. Spring seems as distant as the summer past. Then the sun comes.

I’m walking, hunched against the cold, between classes when its light arrests me. I look up at the sun’s disc over our administration building, aware for a moment that this could be the beginning of some saccharine school story, and at the precise angle of our meeting, I feel warmth. I turn to face the sun more squarely, and, in the folds of my dark scarf, a tiny riot of heat spreads to my neck. I smile and walk back toward the building I’ve just left.

To the left of the doors, there’s a stone ledge stretching beneath the hallway windows, and where the Ceramics Studio juts left, there’s an oblique-angled corner. I go there, strip off and make pillow of my coat and sit down on its softness. Cupped by the corner, I lean back and resume relations with the sun; I close my eyes and feel the sun’s palm spread warmth across my face, along my scarf to my chest. Palmy dreams begin.

Not me, clearly, but surely a kindred sun-spirit

The school bell jars me; I look up to a few quizzical faces on the path ten yards away. Have I been talking in my sleep, ordering, perhaps, a tropical drink, humming softly a Jimmy Buffet tune? The students walk on, away from this momentary curiosity. I am sun addled, but to them I’m perhaps a small pocket of weirdness on the way to lunch. Reverie returns, bringing Henry Thoreau with it.

Thoreau, when confronted by the vital daily question of where he should walk, often paused at his door and waited for the needle of his heart’s compass to settle; more often than not, that needle pointed southwest. I take heart that this writer I’ve followed for years was drawn in the sun’s direction. But the secret to a winter sun-spot lies equally in the direction not faced, the northeast. Our most punishing winds originate there, and this corner puts a whole building between me and winter’s wind channel.

My spot is all sun, and, aside from our bell’s metal reminder of who I am and my schedule, here I can drift on the little raft of my mind. Here I can shift seasons, book passage, swim out of season.

I’m guessing that many of you have your February sun spots too.

“But the winter was not given to us for no purpose. We must thaw its cold with our genialness. We are tasked to find out and appropriate all the nutriment it yields. It is a cold, hard season, its fruit, no doubt is the more concentrated and nutty…The winter was made to concentrate and harden and mature the kernel of his [man’s] brain, to give tone and firmness and consistency to his thought. Then is the great harvest of the year, the harvest of thought…Now we burn with a purer flame like the stars; our oil is winter-strained.”  Henry Thoreau, Journal, 1/30/54

Late last evening, as the core of our big snow arrived, I sat by the window and watched the stream of white flow horizontally through an illuminated cone cast by a klieg light. It was mesmerizing. When the wind blew hard and steady from the northeast, the flakes became a river, boiling by, seeming even to curl over and around unseen stones in the air; but then, when the wind paused, spun sometimes on its heels, the snow whirled too, scattering like embers shot from a popping fire, or those running from some place of riot.

Minutes into this reverie, I saw a dark body shoot through the lit patch…and then another. Two birds, though what sort I couldn’t tell. And wasn’t it rather late, I wondered; shouldn’t they be puffed up and perched in some dense conifer, sheltering from this storm?

In the morning’s still-dense snow, I saw tentative answer. A flock of over-wintering robins was in a rank of wild cherry trees, whose concentrated berries clung still to the branches. The robins ate facing into the gale, sometimes floating back off their branches during gusts, seemingly at home in the wild air. And then, one, two, three streaked by that same window to a thick tangle of trees knit together by the invasive bittersweet. Perhaps bittersweet is an approved second course after cherries.

Robin and Wild Cherries

But the cherries, which often draw cedar waxwings in the fall, have been there untouched all through this open winter. Were they being banked for such a season-closing storm? Perhaps.

Later, I would go out for the ritual uncovering of path and cars, for the close sound of the snow-stirring wind and the tick and rattle of ice crystals on my parka. But for some minutes, I watched the birds moving between these two berries and thought back to the night’s pouring river of snow. I hadn’t harvested any great thoughts, but the way the roaring river of wind had carried the snow seemed akin to “a purer flame like the stars.” My mind seemed to draw upon an oil that felt “winter-strained,” and both these robins and I seemed intent on finding the nutty fruit of a “cold, hard season.”

And you, what appeared to you through the curtains of our big snow?