Category Archives: Nature

A(nother) Stamp for Henry

Posted on December 13, 2016 by Sandy Stott | 5 comments

By Corinne H. Smith

“For my part, I could easily do without the post-office. I think that there are very few important communications made through it. To speak critically, I never received more than one or two letters in my life — I wrote this some years ago — that were worth the postage.” ~ Henry Thoreau, “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” Walden

Just before Thanksgiving, the United States Postal Service unveiled the slate of new Forever stamps that will be released in 2017. Thoreau fans were delighted to discover that the post office had remembered to honor Henry’s upcoming 200th birthday. Sometime next year, we’ll be able to put his face on our envelopes once again.

The new stamp

This view of Henry was created by accomplished illustrator and artist Sam Weber. Weber was born in Alaska and grew up in rural Ontario. He holds an MFA from the School of Visual Arts and now works in New York City. Among his many past projects are cover illustrations for the books Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King and Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman, as well as several covers of National Geographic issues. How did he come to land the chance to create a new look for Henry Thoreau?

“That’s a good question, although to be honest, I’m not entirely sure how this opportunity came my way,” he admits. Weber suspects he was already on the USPS radar because of his previous work for the office: the painting for a special 93-cent stamp of American author Flannery O’Connor, released in June 2015. He got the Thoreau assignment sometime afterward.

When Weber looked for a photographic reference of Henry Thoreau, he decided to use the popular 1856 Maxham daguerreotype as a guide. He finished the painting this past spring.

Those of us of a certain age remember the last time Henry Thoreau was so honored. It was back in 1967, when he turned 150. The artwork was created by American multi-genre artist Leonard Baskin, who drew it in one of his familiar styles. A lot of Thoreauvians didn’t think the image did Henry any favors. Sam Weber disagrees. “I love the Leonard Baskin stamp,” he says. “It has so much personality and character. Baskin’s visual sensibilities are quite different from mine, but I am a big admirer of his work.”

1967’s controversial stamp

Weber had not been too familiar with Thoreau and his writings before he began work on this project. But he learned more about both as he went along. “I’ve come to truly admire his thoughts on the environment and on civil disobedience,” he says. Like this piece, many of the others in Weber’s portfolio are portraits. “Portraits have always interested me. I love that feeling of locking eyes with someone from the past through an image, painted or otherwise. In this way especially, I think this project resonated with my artistic voice.”

He continues, realizing how much Henry Thoreau means to a great number of people: “Historical portraits are always difficult, as my artistic abilities inevitably fall short in capturing the special quality individuals like this have on our hearts. I’m grateful for this unique opportunity, and I hope that I’ve done the man some justice.”

So far, we’ve heard only positive reactions to the new stamp. We can’t wait until we can see it and use it ourselves. USPS officials tell us that they have yet to solidify the date and location of the first-day-of-issue stamp dedication ceremony. Stay tuned for more details on this front, as we receive them. In the meantime: many thanks go out to them and to Sam Weber. This one will make letters truly worth the postage.

“There are two worlds — the post-office & Nature. I know them both.”
~ Henry Thoreau, Journal, January 3, 1853

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

Lion-eyes (a pun Thoreau might have liked)

Posted on December 11, 2016 by Sandy Stott | Comments Off

At my request, Google feeds a few alerts into my daily e-mail; one sniffs about for Henry Thoreau; another tracks news appearances by mountain lions, including California’s famous, and now notorious, P-45, who, a week or so ago, did in nearly a dozen alpacas on a farm. Lions living in proximity to us will still be lions.

But my point in keeping this alert doesn’t lie in tracking celebrity lions; instead it hopes to have a finger on the slow pulse of lion dispersal, or recovery – you choose your word – in the lower 48 states. Once one of two of our country’s top predators, and so, controller, many would argue, shaper of a number of populations, lions were shot, trapped and poisoned from existence in most states by the early 20th century; the killers were the other top predator, one who doesn’t brook competition easily, if at all – us.

Recent print, though the nail-marks say, Dog.

By the time Henry Thoreau was rambling a good deal in Concord, lions were long gone, as were many animals that we now take as usual or nearby – deer, bear, coyotes, even moose. But just as he tracked those with whom he shared woods, Thoreau also gathered stories of and imagined the missing, whose paths he only crossed on his ventures north, if at all.

But even in that north, lions were a cat too far. The few that might have been in deep woods, skirting, perhaps, the border were beyond Thoreau’s reach.

Lion.

Even the word is elusive. It may sit (or lie on) there in a sentence, sounding like some other word, lying to the ear, which would hear the snap of a paw-pressed twig, if it weren’t so soft-footed. That’s part of its presence: you never know it’s there, until it materializes before your eyes.

Or, if it has been lying in wait when you walk by, fully aligned in your own sentence, you may never see it at all. Then, it is lion’s choice – you, or some other ambler, maybe the deer you also didn’t see?

Here, little narrative tends toward confessional – when I go the woods each day, I imagine lions, even as I live in a state where they are, officially, not. But last year, a lion was found a mere 3 miles north of our border, and, as is true for many places ripe for lion’s return, sightings make their way in the papers and cloud wildlife officials’ pronouncements regularly: “There are no mountain lions in Maine.”

“But its tail was soooo long.”

We’ve had our first smattering of snow, an inch, followed by cold, and now as I run, I am layering prints on prints; it always surprises me how many beings have gone my way. To the side, the canid tribe has been doing the same. Dogs are known by their claws marks and the way their prints tend to be longer than they are fat. Lions leave opposite tracks – seemingly fatter than they are long, and without claw-marks. My ongoing survey as I run says, no lions…again.

Path of prints and leaves.

Still, I cultivate the periphery…that’s where they’d be; I try to see sideways, even as I attend to the roots and rippled ground I run. And, because my mind conjures animals in a way it can’t summon theorems (for example), I sometimes shiver with awareness. I haven’t seen this lion, but I am live with its possibility.

And?

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

Hearing a Voice

Posted on December 7, 2016 by Sandy Stott | 2 comments

As is often true with reading, I hear a voice I’m clearly meant to listen to well after that voice has sounded; I am, as they say, late to the party. That surely was true for me with Henry Thoreau, whose then tangled sentences and habit of calling into question almost everything rolled my eyes as a teenager…just before they shut down in favor of the cinema that plays on the inside of our eyelids. That he would become a signal voice to me would have surprised my teachers, who often had to call me from the other-lands of reverie and classroom-sleep. I remembered that when I taught and had to use the gentle goad of my voice to recall my cine-dreamers.

These years later, I am a picky reader, in part because I am a slow one. If I am to spend time in the architecture of someone’s writing, I need to admire even the hallways, and I have particular need of the sudden light from a well-placed window. I pick up books, stroll some sentences and put them down; I even enjoy the mild irony that I too write little rooms that I hope readers will visit.

A while ago, as practice that I hoped would disentangle me from the internet as the yard wakened during my coffee, I began reading a poem or poems as I also tracked the bird-scurry by the feeder. Poets and birds often move similarly, and their words seemed to set up my own later in the morning.

Just so, right now. As the sun scrolls down the first-snowy pines, I read Kate Barnes’ “Other Nations,” a poem written first for another favored poet, Maxine Kumin. And, as has happened now for a number of days in a row, I disappear into its pages and lines. Barnes is a narrative poet – no sky of abstraction at which you gaze trying to name the shapes of clouds – who, late in this poem, takes you along for a buggy ride. Yes, it is, at times, horse-drawn poetry. But it moves at the pace of real perception – mine, anyways – and, when each ride is done, I am often elsewhere. Alive to the light, alive to the day, I’ve slipped the tether of the clicked world. I am alive to words and a voice that carries across time.

“Other Nations” is also about talking to animals, and, as my dogs over time would tell you, my canid diction may be limited, but I use it whenever a dog is near. And, like the good dog I sometimes am, I hear like voices across time.

Reader’s-note: I ration myself to a poem per morning; I will be well into winter before I look up from last page.

Bio-note: Kate Barnes was Maine’s first poet laureate, serving from 1996 to 1999. The volume I’m reading is called Kneeling Orion, published by David R. Godine, and, graced also by Mary Czarina’s woodcuts, it is a handsome book.

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