Category Archives: Literature

Floaters – Notes from Late Summer

Posted on September 16, 2015 by Sandy Stott | Comments Off

On September 13th in 1853, Thoreau set out from Boston Harbor on his second trip to Maine. “It was a warm and still night,” wrote Thoreau, “and the sea was as smooth as a small lake in summer, merely rippled.” A little later, he noted about the view from the sea, “We behold those features which the discoverers saw, apparently unchanged.”

This September’s early weeks seem also to be “merely rippled,” the sort of season that invites one out on the water. The summer crowds have dispersed, and as you float in solitude, or paddle languidly, “those features which the discoverers saw” are “apparently unchanged.”

Two Times to the Sea

September 8th: It is warm, and the day is suffused with a late summer, insect-hum; such days suggest pause, equipause, we might call it, in honor of the oncoming equinox.

I come in to Ragged Island from the west on mildly-ruffled water with a light north wind opposing the incoming tide, and I ride on today’s little sea-breathing, the swell that swells only to a few feet and then falls. The stubby rock arms of the coves reach a few meters into the sea, and, on a calm day – this one – they create little protected inlets, where the seaweed sways with the inflow and the tidal rocks draw breath with each outflow.

On either side of me, there’s the emerald backside to shoaling water with its inset of opal-white as swells arrive and lift themselves on the ledges’ backs.

Today’s tide – very high, an 11-foot one – lands me on the sea-grass fringe of the northwest side, where the small beach features a huge drift-log – say 20 inches in diameter – perfect for sitting. I notice that the long arm of rock that reaches west at beach’s edge has a 5-runged, wooden ladder perched atop a broken-off boulder; I don’t wade to it and climb, but perhaps I should have. Ladders have their lure; they go up, the direction of life. But on this day, I’m content with sea-level surveying.

Amid the sea rubble, the remains of a duck, its wingbone disappearing into the mass of feathers still intact, the meat all gone – fly until you’re food.

Sitting on my beach-log and looking over all the little, ground-down pieces of the beach, piled a little deeper at the tideline – wash and grind, wash and grind.

On all sides of this island, the rocks are water-battered and rubbed smooth up to heights of 20 feet; it is talk of towering waves.

Anomalous Island Stone

Later, I read that a California exercise physiologist (who among other projects, has measured the Vo2 Max of mountain lions) has measured big wave surfers’ heart rates (HRs) and found that they stayed at an astounding 180+ throughout a 3-hour stint of surfing (this at the legendary Mavericks break). Even sitting on the beach looking out at the break, their HRs soared. This makes me wonder what my HR is while paddling, even contemplatively. Probably there is some rising graph that tracks with the liveness of the water I’m riding (or watching). It makes me think back to the wave-battered stones on the island; I feel my pulse jump…a bit.

September 15th: a paddle to and from Little Whaleboat Island. Sightings: 4 loons, and they were either molting or first-year loons; clearly loons, but without the distinctive patterning of neck and breast; also, the water where they were hanging about was rife with little loon feathers. As in years past, they were in the indent of water between Lower and Upper Goose islands. I floated with them and “vocalized,” even getting single note answer from one, though “answer” is too strong a word.

Today, a pleasing mix of quiet and ruffled water: in the lee of the Gooses, and, later, out by Little Whaleboat, the water was nearly calm, with a light brush of west wind. On the way out, between Upper Goose and Mere Pt., the water was bumpy, with tide running out and wind amplifying it a bit from the west. Then, the early crossing to L. Whaleboat was choppy, again with wind running 90 degrees off of tide. A mix of waves from west and southwest, but at a foot+ simply enjoyable.

At all the usual pullouts, there’s empty sand and strand; the flattened grass at the “secret” campsite on the south end of Little Whaleboat is starting to rise; the Goslings have gone quiet, as has the anchorage in their shelter.

One butterfly making its way southwest across the reach of water, making perhaps a knot better than I am. Such stamina. A few seals, curious periscopes. Perhaps the last week for the ospreys, who still keen at my approach, even as their nests are long empty; they hang in the air facing the southwest – perhaps they too feel migration’s call.

Last note: The 60-year-old apple tree I’ve watched for years on my favorite islet is, as this spring announced, truly defunct; already, it is weathering to sea-grayed wood. I looked for shoots of offspring, but the miracle of apple islet doesn’t seem set to repeat itself. The islet reverts from eden to the primrose-lined usual, its “features which the discoverers saw, apparently unchanged.”

Evening Light, post-paddle, Casco Bay

Added note: what didn’t happen to me: video of a breaching whale and kayak-folk from the BBC: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-3399

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

Seeing in the Dark

Posted on September 12, 2015 by Sandy Stott | 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 by Sandy Stott | 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