In Heat

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Sunday

• Fat city for scavengers, wading birds, and others.  Egrets pluck abundant minnows from the shallows, cormorants dive for minutes at time seeking slightly larger prey, this seagull feasts on a fish carcass thrown overboard after filleting (which is much better than sending it to the town dump.)  The size of the head indicates it was taken in the open Sound, just a short trip past the inlet.  Amazing that such remain relatively abundant.
• We’ve lost lobsters, dolphins, seals, and oysters from the harbor proper, although oysters may be making a comeback.  It’s hard to imagine how bountiful this area was four hundred years ago, for the natives and first colonists.  But I admit I am surprised that dolphins and seals still roam the open waters,  and that huge fish can be caught frequently from a large party boat that departs Halesite every day.  I hope that means the world is not in quite so desperate shape as I often fear. 

Saturday

• Fiddler crabs menacing each other at muddy low tide.  So many of the smaller and stranger life forms have even odder sexual and survival patterns.  Happening all around are some form of procreation and development of new moon shells, whelks, horseshoe crabs, periwinkles, seaweed, diatoms, protozoa, bacteria, and who knows what else in the countless variety of a summer briny soup.  All that can be seen are often the tragedies _ empty oyster and clam shells picked clean by gulls, carapaces of dead horseshoe crabs.  And yet, even in these polluted and crowded shores, life is throbbing to the seasonal rhythm.
• I know nothing of, for example, the mating habits if any of fiddler crabs, nor anything of their life cycle.  Yes, I know all that could be quickly gleaned from an internet search.  But if I cannot know everything, of what value to me is knowing such details?  I find it more important to take the time to notice that the crabs are crawling around, dashing for cover at every shadow, and filling their days incomprehensibly in the hot sun.  Sweating here beside them I am a part of the dance in a way I can never be in front of a computer screen or book, no matter what I think I am learning.

Friday

• Beehive in a shrub.  Seems to be real bees, not wasps, hornets, or yellow-jackets.  With all the flowers around the yards, bees are welcome sights.  Industrious and important parts of any ecology, and severely threatened by pesticides, parasites, and other dangers in recent years.  When there are lots of bees, it is easy to feel that things are right with the world.
• But, like a shepherd confronting a wolf kill, I am conflicted.  Part of me considers it a privilege to be hosting a beehive on our front yard.  But another part loudly claims “it’s our yard!”  Bees sting _ trimming, weeding, and general work in this corner will be all but impossible.  Can’t move them without destroying them.  Maybe the winter will get rid of them naturally, but if not?  Ah well, for now procrastination seems the best policy, especially since they didn’t sting me when I disturbed them by pulling out a grape vine.  

Thursday

• Cold front moved through last night with splatter of rain and subdued thunder.  Today thermometers read the same, but air is crisp and clear, far seems near, colors sparkle.  Sweat dries immediately instead of running in rivulets and drips.  Heat is not just heat.
• Time for cultivated species to shine.  Most roses and all crops would not survive without cultivation and care, but they are still beautiful and necessary.  Arguments rage as to what is natural and what is “secrets with which we dare not meddle,” but humans take every genetic accident they consider useful and cause it to triumph over other, better suited, species and varieties.  No real value judgements here, just pointing out logical inconsistencies. 

Wednesday

• No cotton around here, but the phragmites are high.   A day may be hot even with constant cloud cover, the world slowly braised and wilted together.  If the sun breaks through, frantic admonitions will be issued on media for everyone to stay inside and drink approved liquids.  Adding to hysteria, alerts and warnings of smoggy air quality as if mustard gas were arriving on the Western Front.
• (Some disconnected neurons contend the pink flowers are Joe Pye Weed, but I wouldn’t put money on it.)  When I was young, before much TV weather or air conditioning, I never remember my parents telling me that I didn’t have to mow the lawn because it was too hot (and July was always too hot in Philadelphia.)  My track coach would issue us a salt pill before sending us on a ten mile training run _ it was thought water would give us cramps.  Like all older generations, we think the next ones are less and less rugged, more unable to handle the simplest problems, and it increasingly annoys us that they seem to muddle through just fine.  

Tuesday

• Although now is the beginning of fat time of year, when there is lots of food for everything, it is also the beginning of stress and attrition.  Voracious insects attack foliage, any long periods of missed thunderstorms and other rainfall lead to stressed leaves, curling brown on outer edges.  Accidents and other issues cut into newly born populations.  But it’s glory time for ragweed, ready to take over where anything else has failed.
• Ragweed almost requires people, because its main requirement is that we disturb the land frequently and render it completely unnatural compared to its “native state.”  Of course, that image is somewhat silly _ ragweed evolved long before people, taking advantage no doubt of natural disasters that also upset equilibrium.  When I think of things as dichotomies _ stable or disturbed, natural or man-made, even beautiful or ugly, useful or not _ I am deeply into a pattern that is true in my own mind, and perhaps shared by a few other similar humans, but in no way objective nor in a formal sense “correct.”  In my arrogance, it is easy to forget that is always so.

Monday

• “It’s too darn hot” goes the old song.  For much of the natural world _ birds, fish, many plants, some mammals _ sex has wrapped up for another year.  For those species, it’s all about the next generation, like ripe grasses along the roadside.  There are more animals, as ruthless nature begins the winnowing process.  Insects are probably still madly procreating, which spiders are quite happy about.
• In spite of the Kinsey report, humans seem to manage to “sport” in all but the most extreme conditions.  Lately, many of them refuse to be winnowed.  A growing problem _ yes, that’s a pun.  Anyway, the race is on as to whether we can control the urges of our species or let them run wild until inevitable catastrophe.  Hot bright sun on this hazy morning, lush scenery and even our toys ready for water play, should provide reasons enough for us to seek to preserve our miraculous heritage.

Tidal Rave

Sunday

• For a small harbor, Huntington has widely varied bottoms.  In addition to sand and clay deposits once used for pottery and brickmaking, there are mud flats, and rocks, and grasses and, for that matter, piers and deep water off the various bulkheads and docks.  Nobody goes into the water without some kind of footwear _ not only is the muck unpleasant but there are sharp broken shells, annoying edged rocks, and the detritus of centuries of sunken boats, industrial activity, and shoreline dumping.
• Being scoured twice a day, the intertidal area is hardly as forbidding as you might think.  Here there are almost pristine pebbles, exposed seaweed, and a closer look would reveal periwinkles, mussels, and clams, abundant even in these polluted times.  Seagulls make a nice living, once upon a time, people did also.

Saturday

• A careful observer can easily determine if tide is coming in or going out simply from observing the state of the sands and rivulets nearest the wave line.  Another indicator, under the right conditions, is the brown scum of bubbles caused by air pockets and dried dust floating up as the water rises.  In this case, the bubbles have detached to form little brown patches on the water. 
• I admit that in this, as in so many other things, I am hardly a careful observer.  Sometimes I see more in my pictures of a scene later than I did at the scene itself.  When I closely examine the rocks here, the stained dinghy, the corroded chain, each seems marvelous in its own way, and would not seem out of place in a modern art gallery somewhere _ especially, I suppose, inland where folks have never seen such things.  Beauty can come in many guises.

Friday

• Imagine an old gentleman wearing a long robe sitting in this gazeebo and then (if you had the proper temperament and training) you could create a fine Chinese brush painting of this scene.  Working it backwards, this helps you understand the models used for those lovely colored ink on silk works existing since antiquity.  A photograph is hardly better.
• Life without accomplishment is empty.  To accomplish we must have short and long term goals, plans, tasks and obsessions, which focus us and ignore irrelevancies.  But even artificial constraints, such as the theme I use each week, can blind us to a great deal.  This scene has nothing to do with tides, and has been available each morning, and I have not seen it.  Not a fault, just another contradiction, a zen realization that reality is never truly known.

Thursday

• The least interesting moments occur mid tide, when bleak sands are revealed and fascinating mudflats still lie hidden.  Full tide is lovely as a lake, low tide is filled with marvels revealed.   Mid tide _ well, this is the actual tidal zone, of course, within the borderlines of all that thrives here, and yet it seems stony and barren and boring. 
• I cast my moods and judgements like stains upon my experiences, coloring it almost beyond recognition.  I expect clams and crabs and shells and a shipwreck or two _ I find broken bleached ruins.  On another day the same umber sands and sea lavender glow with the brilliance of stained glass.  Mercurial irrelevant perceptions are surely one of the perverse glories of being exactly what I am.  

Wednesday

• Full flood tide at Gold Star Battalion Beach.  People prefer the ocean when it is low _ more beach to share, a greater water area to spread out in, and varied zones of wave intensity.  But at most Huntington beaches, low tide is shunned _ too much flotsam, jetsam, and organic detritus floating in the reduced volume.  Children are sternly warned not to get heads wet, any mishap induces moments of panic.  E. Coli is treated as if it were bubonic plague.
• Every day many fatal car accidents occur, but we ignore them.  Our ancestors coped with high childhood mortality, women dying frequently in childbirth, death from starvation or wild animals or exposure or incurable contagious diseases always threatening.  Yet today what we most fear are sore throats, upset stomachs, minor diarrhea, or earaches, maybe an infected scratch.  We’ve lost perspective.  I suppose we could learn to exist with such horrors once again, as the unfortunate refugees in the Mideast and elsewhere are doing at this very moment, but I hope it never happens.  Parents worrying about the possibility of earaches is a wonderful sign of civilization working. 

Tuesday

• Coastal fishing, marine navigation, recreation, and infrastructure depend on tides _ not only high or low, but incoming or ebbing _ which are maddeningly exact.  Almost every six hours the state flips, almost every seven days a given hour will have the opposite tide, a few miles of shoreline severely impact timing, and of course the ocean is _ almost _ the opposite of the Sound.  And all the activities and tide levels themselves are also affected by temperature, local and distant weather, alignment of sun and moon, unpredictable waves, time of day, and season.  For anyone not a professional dealing with it daily, it might as well be completely random.
• Humans tend to grumble.  Rain on weekends, cold weather on summer vacation, low tide when we want high.  Only those privileged to live along a tidal shoreline for a while can understand how profoundly different it is from a river or lake.  I consider the harbor tides one of the finest attractions of living where I do, even when they upset my plans.

Monday

• Earth’s diameter is just about 8000 miles; the biozone from the top of breathable air to bottom of ocean depths is barely 8,  and for all practical purposes even smaller than that.  Comparisons of density are even worse, since life exists only around the lightest components.  The surface area is a vast 200 million square miles, but of course three quarters of that is water.  The rest is mountains, desert, fields, ice, and forest, with a few lakes thrown in.  The intertidal zone may be locally pervasive, but represents only a thin tiny ribbon along salt water coasts.  In that inconsequentially tiny environment exist immensely rich and diverse ecologies.
• I think about that when strolling the shoreline.  I too am inconsequential compared to everything, but inhabit what feels like a tremendously rich personal universe.  Life, they say, began in the oceans and had to get through this barrier to start inhabiting the land.  I am more of the fiddler crab type, never venturing into the depths on one side, nor testing the dryness on the other.  Waving a claw at neighbors and running from shadows constitutes quite enough excitement for me. 

Nifty Shades of Green

Sunday

• This green world is excessively noisy on Saturday mornings.  The din of chain saws, shrub trimmers, lawn mowers, and leaf blowers, intertwined with shouts of crews and rumblings of giant trucks carrying gear, begins at dawn and scarcely lets up until dusk, when the mosquitoes reclaim their territory.  Perhaps that is why there is no one ever sitting in the Adirondack chairs or on porches wrapped around immense houses.  More likely, people who can afford property around here lead busy busy lives with no time to just hang out and enjoy the fruits of their labors.
• I think the saying “youth is wasted on the young” could be extended to “wealth is wasted on the wealthy.”  A lifetime lived in sloth is wretched indeed.  But a lifetime without long moments of appreciation is a shadow of what we should be.

Saturday

• It was traditionally hard to paint a convincing mid-range picture of trees, although Ruisdael and Hobbema did so with limited palette.  Distant woods, as here, could be blurred and blued and blotted in with shadows,  close-up foliage could be treated carefully as still life, but capturing the actual experience of trees in-between required the out-of-the-box theories of the Impressionists.  They were able to replace the effect of constant motion and color changes of rustling leaves with dabs of exaggerated complementary colors.
• I find Pissarro the master for such landscapes.  His canvases scarcely match photographs of the same subjects, but you feel as if you have actually been there looking around.  I have frequently walked out of a museum after hours with the Impressionists to discover the world itself sparkling in ways I never imagined.  It’s strange to realize that plain old dull greens can be treated so garishly and suddenly burst into realistic scenery through the magic of our eyes and brain.    

Friday

• A trumpet vine hovers over the tidal inlet at West Neck Beach.  Most animals react to the unusual in their environment because that represents either danger or opportunity.  Something orange where all is green and blue, something moving where all is still, or still where all is in motion.  Humans encourage this perhaps to excess, risking overload of the senses.
• I am always surprised that even as nearsighted as I am, any strange movement attracts my attention.  Naturally, when trying to set up a picture, I am conscious of what might add interest to the landscape.  The obverse of this is how quickly we apply filters and can ignore and dismiss anything that we have already evaluated, which is why I am frequently oblivious to what I have just seen or heard.

Thursday

• Salt marsh stretches away at high tide in Lloyd Harbor, a haven for egrets and ospreys and lesser birds, fish, crustaceans, insects, grasses, and of course uncountable bacteria, protozoa and other lesser denizens of any open water.  All seems in perfect harmony, a quiet lagoon where everything lives deeply specialized in its own niche.  Moralists of various persuasions offer quaint proverbs and tales trying to show how cooperation, or struggle, or adaptation, or resistance are the cardinal rules of the natural world which society should adopt.  From the time of the earliest fables, however, people have recognized those lessons as entertaining, but false and often irrelevant.
• We know, as our ancestors did, as every human has ever known, that we are not the same as everything else.  Unique among the complex life forms on the planet, each of us is an expert in being unspecialized and flexible.  The true tale is that if necessary, we could figuratively take the place of anything in the landscape.  You and I might not like it, but we could, and often do, as when we settle into an awful job.  Gloriously alone, you and I are also miraculously able to know what we like, what we don’t, and what might make our experience better.

Wednesday

• Matisse’ famous painting Luxe Calme et Volupte is named after Baudelaire’s poem “There, all is beauty/ luxury, calm, and voluptuousness.”  Huntington is south of Saint-Tropez, more on the latitude of Naples, but Matisse might have recognized the humid light, if not the verdant overwhelming vegetation.  Certainly William Merritt Chase and his circle demonstrated that impressionism works on Long Island, although nobody would ever describe the LIE _ even during a dead-stop traffic jam _ as calm.
• I’ve always enjoyed fantasizing about people such as Matisse painting on this hill, or Caesar marching his troops along the shoreline, or some Gibbons of the future sadly musing on the ruins of underwater Huntington.  When technicians speak of artificial intelligence do they assume that means a capacity to experience voluptuousness, or to daydream impossibilities?  We are more than our experiences or logic,  more than pattern matching machines, more than dots on some statistical chart.  You and I are never merely what we accomplish, never simply defined by how others judge us.  I can also be, on good days, “luxe calme et volupte.”

Tuesday

• July weather has become classic summer _ hot, humid, storms possible anytime.  That seems completely normal and unremarkable _ what is usually remembered are extreme events of temperature, precipitation, or wind.  But normal is never guaranteed _ people may look back and sigh “recall that last glorious July of 2015, before the world went mad.” 
• We hardly ever evaluate what we live through properly _ minor events like an assassination can trigger a world war, a normal business panic can become a decade-long depression, a temporary lack of rain can dry into an epic drought.  Death, taxes, gravity, the sun, yes we can probably count on those, but everything else remains unknowable.  That is why I try to grab happiness as it comes by.  Sometimes that is hard or impossible, but when happiness is available even for moments, I should cherish that impermanent and never certain treasure.

Monday

• A wily old woodsman could determine a calendar date almost as well as someone with access to a cell phone.  A glance at the crowns of trees, for example, narrows the possible season considerably.  Closer examination of leaves would yield a pretty good guess simply with their state and color.  Tender young growth in the spring is mostly pale and yellowish, tinged with streaks of red, always delicate and clear-cut, often unfurling.  As the summer progresses, every hue darkens as if it becomes suntanned, insect infestation creates holes and ragged gaps, weather and drought turn whole branches brown, and nothing seems to grow at all.  Even without recourse to the state of flowers _ which are of course a dead giveaway for anyone _ trees and shrubs tell a remarkably complete story.
• What always surprises me is not that such variety of shades of green exist, for I see them easily when I try, but that I so often ignore them totally.  Even when trying to communicate exactly what I perceive, I remain at a loss.  Unless you work for a paint company coming up with luscious descriptions of your wares, or are a struggling writer trying for variety in prose, there is never much reason to go beyond “green.”  We have synonyms and modifiers, but I hardly ever use them in daily speech.  Just another of the grand, unnoticed, fractal wonders of my existence.

Flags & Firecrackers

Sunday

• Could be a historic old colonial home on the harbor _ well, not really, but it looks the part, and it is patriotically decked out.  What anyone considers history is always relative anyway.  In some places it is anything over fifty years old, in others a thousand.  At the rate of change in most of the world, something saved from last month or last year should get a historic marker and designation.  Modern civilization is perhaps too adapted to novelty.
• It’s been a hard acceptance that I myself have slid into historic status.  What I remember is as long gone for younger generations as the roads of Rome or the gardens of Babylon.  Was it really like that, they ask amazed, as I once did to my grandparents.  Sometimes that realization is sad, sometimes I’m just grateful I survived through it all, sometimes it seems irrelevant, sometimes it seems the most important element of my life.  One thing constant through it all, and I hope it remains so for a long time, has been fireworks and picnics on the Fourth of July.

Saturday

• Little flags pop up like mushrooms now.  Maybe it’s a universal human trait. Switch the language on the sign, substitute the national colors of your choice, and this could be anywhere in Europe in the last two centuries.  The whole phenomenon is endearing until it suddenly turns virulent.  A difficult balance.
• Difficult balance is what life is all about.  Tension between overpopulation and extinction, tension between homeostatic systems like blood pressure and temperature, tension between social freedom and security.  Irresolvable contradictions somehow leading to temporary dynamic situations that manage to continue on.  At this time and place, from my viewpoint, little flags are terrific decoration and symbolic of a mostly good outlook on life.   

Friday

• Of course, just because the indigenous flowers are less on display does not prevent cultivated varieties from their own ostentatious celebration.  These lilies are in full glory right now, as are many exotic species which most people have added to tiny microenvironments around their house.  It’s amazing how people like to keep their grounds beautiful, even in a culture that rarely prizes beauty in and of itself.  Easier and more rewarding to simply accept that people like to decorate their homes than to worry about the evolutionary or cosmic reasons why that should be so.
• In some minds, this flower bed would be far better stripped and pulled back into climax forest.  I can’t help but think of those as Luddites,  futilely railing against change.  I would not like these flowers replaced by gloom, ferns, and mosquitoes _ there’s quite enough of that in the Adirondacks and Catskills.  I admire the intense joy emitted by these blooms and others like them, the feeling that others do care greatly about living things, the realization that even during the most rational of barren economic ideologies we engage in pure pointless showmanship because we enjoy it. 

Thursday

• As this drying dock weed illustrates, grand fireworks of native flowers are pretty much over.  Trees have bloomed, meadows are no long swathed in color.  There will be plenty of isolated flowers and fruits from here on, but everything is racing to grow as quickly as possible.  The world is engulfed in green, except where cultivated in gardens.  Insects have their own rhythms, last night for the first time numerous lightning bugs arose spontaneously from the lawn as twilight deepened.
• I’ve been privileged over the last few years to be fully engaged in local seasons.  Nature is completely enchanting and fulfilling when we can pay enough attention to it.  Fortunately, I can still be astonished at the perfection of a bee visiting a purple clover, or a dragonfly flitting over a pond, elements which now come into their own until fall once again dictates major change.

Wednesday

• Thermometer in the eighties,  fine firm wind, brilliant sky, schools empty, but only a few sails, one big, one small.  In fact, the harbor this late morning is surprisingly empty on the waters, although the sand has quite a crowd.  No matter, a fine, colorful and quiet activity out there, to celebrate being alive and aware.
• Perhaps everyone else is off worrying about far-away Greece or China,  or equally distant Christmas sales.  More likely, they have decided to wait for next week to declare summer holiday.  In the meantime, a wee bit desperate, I seize on anything I might fit into my definitions, a modern Humpty-Dumpty.   Stretching the definition of flag, perhaps, but colored cloth is colored cloth.  Of course, by that token bathing suits and other apparel should count as well.  

Tuesday

• Original Impressionists loved to show flags in their landscapes, seascapes, and townscapes.  It was an opportunity to add dashes of pure vibrant colors to their otherwise sparkling but pastel palette.  France was apparently chock full of flag displays at the end of the nineteenth century.  Every summer, Huntington harbor also brightens up with bits of cloth flying everywhere.
• Sometimes a theme doesn’t work out well.  For some reason, the usual pennants festooning the boats remain in storage this year _ for that matter I’ve only seen one or two sailboats.  Since I can’t very well photograph the firecrackers sounding each evening, and my camera will not capture fireflies or fireworks, finding something to say may tax my inventive powers.  On the other hand, my mouth often outpaces my brain, so all may be well.

Monday

• Continuing alliteration:  _ first Fourth festivals fizzle.  Watching California and the West in drought, living where the rain falls frequently and plentifully from the sky seems a pretty good deal.  It certainly hasn’t hampered the efforts of these young folks fishing.
• I welcome clouds, rain, mist, snow, fog as magical costumes on the normally clear and bright landscape.  Perhaps that is just a rationalization, an acceptance of the inevitable, but I honestly like such variation.  Even in this season, when every day is a fabulous holiday different from the one before in almost every way, I find special details such as the drops of rain hanging on the day lilies profoundly entertaining.  I also feel sorry for those who do not have the time, resources, inclination, or wisdom to do so.