From Mountains to Shore
Sunday
- Pine trees
on the beach were severely damaged by the horrific winter, and at least one is
dead. Those that remain are putting out
new needles and cones. Evergreens are
easily overlooked amidst the spectacular sparkle and pop of the deciduous
trees, shrubs, and flowers. Green as
always, chugging along, unnoticed, quietly taking their place in the background
scenery. As complex a miracle of nature
as anything else, the end result of as long a tale of survival and struggle and
adaptation as any sunbather down here.
- Chinese and
Japanese painters loved painting pines, sometimes just for the joy of
evocation, sometimes as moral lesson, often enduring snow or wind or rain. I have sometimes seen myself as more of a
lonely pine tree just getting through life adequately than as one of the more
spectacular vegetative specimens. There
are no “pine lovers shows,” no “best pine in its class” awards. But I do my job, I try to stay green, and I
endure as well as I can. There is beauty
in that approach to life as well, at least so I tell myself.
Saturday
- Some smaller
berries and fruits and many seeds are now in the midst of one of the basic
species survival strategies, what
Confederate General Forrest called “fustest with the mostest.” By making many edibles available early,
potential offspring have a chance to be eaten and scattered with excellent
chances of staking out the best ground before anything else. Not coincidentally, many of these are in
brilliant colors and attractive shapes.
- All nature
becomes an extravagant cornucopia now.
Yesterday I passed a linden tree that was humming loudly _ turned out to
be countless thousands of bees attracted by the strong sweet perfume from the
blossoms. Each day I take ten or so
pictures, and there are way too many to use.
Each one different, unique to this exact time of year, illustrating some
unusual perspective. A wonderful time to
be aware of nature.
Friday
- In the
Northeast, untended ground immediately reverts to scrub and woodland. Unfortunately, interesting forest ecologies
can take centuries to develop. Meadows,
on the other hand, provide an immediate paradise for an astonishing variety of
plants, insects, birds, small mammals and their predators. They are also human-friendly, providing open
views brushed by cooling breezes which keep the mosquitoes and other pests at
bay. However, maintaining a meadow takes
time and money.
- Caumsett
State Park provides expanses of meadows in all their mature glory. Migrating birds find respite, as does anyone
overwhelmed by the crowds, traffic and noise only minutes away. I often find more solitude here than I could
in the wilder areas to our north.
Thursday
- At first
glance after a trip to the mountains Huntington Harbor seems an example of
humans crowding out nature. Scenes that
only a Manhattan-dweller could consider natural _ boats and houses and roads
and cars and people without end, square mile after square mile. And yet _ the initial impressions are not of
houses, but of forested shores and reedy wetlands in the foreground.
- There are an
awful lot of trees right here _ as there even are in Brooklyn. Moreover, there is more diversity of trees,
shrubs, flowers, and landscapes than in the vast but somewhat monotonous
vegetative cover upstate. What I
continually forget is how complicated the world really is, how contradictory
its various tensions (for example between civilization and wilderness), how
impossible it is to have one true conception of its immensity. Traveling may broaden the mind, but it also
deepens understanding.
Wednesday
- At twilight,
mountains and lake seem deserted. Air
feels pure, water crystal, only sounds of natural wind and wave. But, of course, this air and the rainfall it
produces are tinged with residual pollution of an entire continent to the west
and the industrial machine of China across the vast Pacific. These forests were logged once, and at least
along the shore are heavily developed with vacation homes, hardly virgin. Isolation is not quite an illusion, but the
planet remains interconnected even here.
- Our generations
hold the future in balance. I am perhaps
less active than I should be, but I am not convinced that frantic activity,
even in a good cause, is the answer. I
truly believe Thoreau; I honestly feel we must learn to be content to save
ourselves and the Earth. Not to be poor
savages, of course, but to learn when better and more are wrong, when it is
time to be satiated and say “enough.”
The paradox is that to live such a life as an example is the only
effective way to prove the point, but to live such a life is by definition to
have almost no external impact.
Tuesday
- People live
in these mountains, although in relatively small clusters along highways
threaded through the Adirondack wilderness.
Lake George village is larger than most _ obviously because of its
lakeshore assets. The “last of the
Mohicans” was fighting here in the French and Indian War a century after the founding of Huntington. Fort
William Henry with its massive timberworks followed a year later, but has never
since been important except as a tourist attraction. Before air conditioning, a trip to the
mountains in the summer was something wealthy people could do for a week or a
month when they grew tired of the ocean, even building a hotel here on the peak
reached by cable railway.
- What I find
here is the past, hardly prettied up.
Farmers settled the bottomlands but the winters and rocks defeated them,
loggers tore down the remaining virgin forest and moved on. Scars and signs of ancient settlement are thick
in the dense second-growth forest, now a respectable hundred years old or
so. Towns continue to fall into decay,
abandoned buildings aging into picturesque ruins, in spite of attempts at
revitalization. And, in our own family,
we spent some summers up here in the eighties when our children were
small. Since that time, seemingly
everything away from the interstates has stayed in suspended animation.
Monday
- No, this is not Huntington.
A long drive upstate is refreshing in a way that a plane ride is not _
one begins to understand the immensity of distance. Our ancestors and
native Americans appreciated the vastness of the continent far more than we do.
- I try to limit myself
locally, and steep wisdom from long contemplation of small and usual things.
But as with any concentration, I tend to see the reality of the entire
world though its sharp specialized lens. It is refreshing to be forced to
recognize that my microcosm is only a microcosm. More than enough for me, infinitesimal compared
to the whole.
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