Author Archives: Sandy Stott

Seeing in the Dark

Posted on September 12, 2015 | Comments Off

…I frequently had to look up at the opening between the trees above the path in order to learn my route, and, where there was no cart-path, to feel with my feet the faint track which I had worn or steer by the known relation of particular trees which I felt with my hands, passing between two pines for instance, not more than eighteen inches apart, in the midst of the woods, invariably, in the darkest night. Thoreau, Walden

It’s evening, and we’ve gone inside. The day’s colors are damped down; the visual world shows in soft tones tending toward gray. I sit in a pool of lamplight and open a book, reach over and crank the window once to admit a trickle of coolish air and the woods-smell from the pines. The scented air slips in, and with it comes night’s announcement from our resident tree frogs: “TTHHRRRRIILLING,” they seem to trill. “TTHHRRRIILLING!”

The frogs’ call doesn’t exactly invite you out, but it wonders; so now do I. I tend to tuck my days in at dusk, favoring the armchair to the evening amble, favoring, as do many, the light to the dark. There are, of course, reasons for this, among them, post-dinner torpor, accumulated fatigue, and, at times, the bright, visual fire of the screen.

Recently, in high daylight, a fox ran through the yard; it appeared from beneath the rhododendrons and made a linear track across the grass, disappearing by the corner of the garage. I got a good look: this fox was a scruffy affair, with clots of fur hanging off a too-thin body in this season of plenty. His appearance, physical and temporal, suggested some sickness. Foxes are crepuscular in habit, night creatures really, when they are suggestions of motion bearing teeth amid shadows. What was night doing out in the light?

Neighbors immediately thought, disease, and they were probably right; I began to think about daytime visits from visions of the night, and then about my own visits with the night, times when the usual became strange and new, and I was awake to it.

As companion in this wondering, I had also my visits to a local exhibition at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. Night Visions (ongoing until October 18th) is an inspired idea and collection that looks at American paintings at and of night from the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries, the time of transition from old-style darkness to our illuminated contest with night.

Frederic Remington painting. Note the way the wolf’s eyes are kin to the stars.

A walk through the exhibition is a walk back into another kind of darkness and then back into our own attempts to light the night. Both are, as the tree frogs remind me, “TTHHRRRRIILLING”; they reminded me also of Thoreau’s meditation on walking at night, which deepens to praise of getting lost, as a way awakening and being, finally, found in his Walden chapter, The Village (see passage at this post’s outset). Notably, I think, this meditation also immediately precedes his story of being jailed for nonpayment of taxes – another awakening venture into a form of darkness.

When you adopt a mind of night as you read, you may find that there’s also a fair amount of night-wandering and night-musing in and at Walden. In pursuit of being awake, Thoreau did not confine himself to the day.

And even now, Walden night-swimmers walk in from the west side woods to the little coves near the railroad tracks…not that I have ever done so…to make their acquaintance with the night.

Here’s a link to the Bowdoin College Museum of Art’s exhibition:http://www.bowdoin.edu/art-museum/exhibitions/2015/nv/

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Posted in Arts, Environment, General, Henry David Thoreau, Literature, Living Deliberately, Nature, News and Events, The Roost, Thoreau Quote, Walden

Mountain Wandering – Paean

Posted on September 8, 2015 | Comments Off

Thoreau’s Journal, September 8th, 1846:

Hard bread—& pork getting short—go up—Mount
Cranberries and blue berries clouds—wind—-rain rocks

September 5th, 2015: A day on Moosilauke.

Cool morning trail, slanting sun, temperature about 50 – Asquam Ridge Trail

I begin along the Baker River, which flows out from Jobildunc Ravine, for an early mile; then, the trail slants away above itself, above the river, whose sound fades as if the dry end of summer has toweled up its last flow. And I am climbing across the slope’s grain, rising easily toward the next angled switch; and so I trace giant Zs into the ridge until I reach its crest, where the trees are smaller and the moss lies thick on the old stones. In one rare mud patch, the gouge of a moose-print, the grains of dirt still moist and fine, the moose just there, no longer here.

Jim is one of those mountains that isn’t. At least that’s true for “listers,” those who like to measure accomplishments one after the other. To make NH’s official 4000-footer list, a mountain must rise 200 or more feet from the col that links it to a higher, neighboring peak. Jim, despite a sizable drop on its west ridge, which joins it to the mass of Moosilauke, falls just short. And so Jim gets overlooked, but he is a fine mountain…or nice bump on the ridge…with a short boreal forest thick with moss and pronounced sense of summit.

Morning Light on Jim

From Jim I go to Blue, which truly is a ridgy knuckle and not a faux-peak. Though Blue too has its merits, chief of which is an outlook into the seldom traveled, marbles-in-mouth Jobildunc Ravine; there the Baker River wells from the ground before heading for its union with the Pemigewasset miles to the south.

Looking south over Jobildunc Ravine

The approach to Blue also brings me to the Appalachian Trail, or AT, and its iconic white paint blazes; whenever I step onto the AT, I feel the slight buzz of its long strand of connection. Some 1800 miles to the south is Springer Mountain; 300+ to the north is Henry Thoreau’s and Percival Baxter’s Ktaadn. The trail, called the Beaver Brook in this section, is battered as famous ways often are. Where the path on Jim was needle- and moss-softened, the Beaver Brook is hardened dirt and scuffed or pole-scarred stone. For a quarter-mile, where the trail skirts the upper edge of the ravine, it is slow going over great chunks of angled stone, the legos of the recent glacier. Then it is simply a foot-trench up a mild slope to the ice-worn roundness of Moosilauke itself.

Today, the unpeopled Asquam Ridge gives way to the little town that is Moosilauke. It is a warm, late summer day, and it is also first-year orientation for the college that owns this mountain; the top is busy with those who would stretch summer and those who have reached the first moments of this memorable four-year prominence. Dartmouth, for all the feet it brings to Moosilauke, has been a good steward, removing – over time – the shelters that once dotted the summit, lining the trails with scree walls to contain walkers, and providing clear signage to direct the many who would be disoriented. The sedgy grasses grow right up to the scree walls, as do the mountains cranberries in red profusion, and the crowds confine themselves largely to the summit rocks and foundation remnants from the old Victorian summit hotel.

I reach the summit and then walk back north, counting as always cairns. If I ignore the superfluous first cairn right next to the top, it’s five cairns to visit my dad. Eight years ago, we scattered his ashes at this cairn; now whenever I visit, I seat myself on a flat rock facing west, lean back against its cone and talk quietly about whatever life-thoughts I’ve carried up here with me. Today, it’s a usual – the years I’ve walked through and my hope to keep walking toward his 80th and 85th birthdays, both of which we celebrated on this summit. After an irksome, summer run of minor leg injuries, I’ve reached his cairn in 2 1/2 hours, and my legs feel live. “It’s all good,” I murmur, repeating his last words.

The 5th cairn

The day pivots on this meditative half hour at the cairn; rising to walk again, I breeze by the jumble of rocks and people at the top and on along the old Carriage Road, across a mile of ridge to the South Peak, which is usually less peopled, though today it holds a group of eight 30-somethings, led – it soon becomes apparent – by a linear-talking, earnest hiker who likes the word “scheduled.” They natter on about work; two of them flirt exclusively; their leader gestures at far peaks in a proprietary way. As they rise to leave, a falcon appears, riding a thermal, climbing quickly. I watch the bird, and a few of the group stop and wonder aloud about it. “A falcon, I think,” I say. “They nest over to the west in Oliverian Notch.” Their leader’s “not sure.” And then they leave and quiet washes over this minor summit like a topping tide.

What’s left after lunch on South Peak? The day’s descent, which for the first mile+ faces right into the southern sun. In a word, it’s hot. I opt for gravity-assisted quick-stepping and soon reach the shaded slanting traverse that comes finally to the river down. I reach my car some 5 hours after I set off, noting with a little satisfaction that a lithe twenty-something who set off just before me, and whom I’ve seen cantering along ridges a few times, has just gotten back too. I look back up to the broad ridge where a line of cairns show the way to which I will return.

Post-note: The finest mountain sauntering blog I know is Steve Smith’s – it’s called Mountain Wandering, named after his bookstore, The Mountain Wanderer, in Lincoln NH. Lots of fine photos; quiet, precise writing. Here’s its address:http://mountainwandering.blogspot.com/

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Posted in General, Henry David Thoreau, Literature, Living Deliberately, Nature, The Roost, Thoreau Quote

The Real Work – Labor (of love?) Day Nears

Posted on September 2, 2015 | Comments Off

Labor Day’s approach joins morning’s slanting light to make me think of work. Centerpiece of many days and visitor to all, work comes in various guises; still, what each of us identifies as her or his real work, what we embrace rather than what we are assigned, can be hard to suss out and even harder to explain.

As a seventeen-year-old, I recall wondering about this question as I wallowed in schoolwork’s many-disciplined demands after a summer of construction work. What would I do for work, eventually, when I left behind the aptly-named homework and summer’s temporary jobs? In the years that followed, I, like many, made my decisions somewhat randomly, and later fell into a form of teaching, which, in time, became my life’s work. It was a work with which I became smitten.

But, throughout a lifetime’s work, the phrase, “real work,” kept appearing with a question mark attached. What was my real work? What should it be? And, as also often happens for me, it took a poet to help this question take fuller shape. Such shape-taking precedes any answer.

Gary Snyder led me into a bar in Texas in pursuit of answer. Snyder, who emerged from the Beat movement and became his own Zen-inflected voice for the wild that Thoreau celebrates in Walking and throughout his other writings, wrote one of the greatest American poems I know, “I Went into the Maverick Bar.” In it a young Snyder, in Farmington, New Mexico to protest despoliation of land and abuse of Indian sovereignty by energy companies, enters a redneck bar, which depends on the very work he’s there to protest. In a quick few lines and images, Snyder limns the curious American admixture of despoiling work and exuberant innocence and remembers his own:

And with the next song,
a couple began to dance.
They held each other like in High School dances
in the fifties;
I recalled when I worked in the woods
and the bars of Madras, Oregon.
That short-haired joy and roughness—
America—your stupidity.
I could almost love you again.
(Note: Try as I might, I cannot get my program to allow proper formatting for this excerpt; apologies. Please follow the link at the end of this piece to read the full poem, properly formatted; it’s worth the click…and more.)

But Snyder resolves that instead of cutting (or mining) a life from the wilderness, he must commit himself to what he calls “the real work” of finding and understanding a home. To do so, he must learn his place (two meanings intended) and relations, or as he put it in an interview with Bill Moyers:

The real work is becoming native in your heart, coming to understand we really live here, that this is really the continent we’re on and that our loyalties are here, to these mountains and rivers, to these plant zones, to these creatures. The real work involves developing a loyalty that goes back before the formation of any nation state, back billions of years and thousands of years into the future. The real work is accepting citizenship in the continent itself.

Snyder’s writing prepared the ground for my later work with Henry Thoreau and the real work he recorded in his journals. Yes, I learned, if ever anyone became “native in [his] heart,” it was Henry Thoreau. His was a daily labor worth celebrating.

And here too, as Labor Day nears, is to your real work, wherever and however you find it.

Links: Here’s a link to Snyder’s poem, I Went into a Maverick Bar: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/177249; and here’s a link to his interview with Moyers: http://billmoyers.com/content/here-in-the-mind-daisy-zamora-and-gary-snyder/

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Posted in Arts, Environment, General, Henry David Thoreau, Literature, Living Deliberately, Nature, News and Events, The Roost