AGAINST NATURE

vital phenomena, a constellation of

BEARS

 

A few days ago a bear crossed the road and ran across this field, almost hidden by the tall grass, and disappeared into the woods.  The woods comprise a large area that I like to think of as “the Buck Mountain massif” which is obviously a tremendous overstatement as the highest of the hills behind me–Buck Mountain–is a mere 925 feet. He was probably a young bear, I’d guess a year old.  But I could be wrong.  

Screenshot from the video, taken through screens

This upped my local bear count to three, two of them closer visits.  One conspicuous visit happened on the night of the very day I’d bought a ten pound bag of sunflower hearts–the fanciest bird food of all–and filled up my bird storage can. The next morning I’d found the lid off, the can completely empty, all ten pounds eaten, tracks leading to my compost, untouched but for a giant bear poop sitting directly in front. Or maybe it was bear vomit as it contained undigested sunflower seeds.  In the days that followed family members walking in the woods behind my house came upon at least two more bear scats, both peppered with sunflower hearts. The perpetrator! I had realized too late that the time for filling bird feeders was over. Had been over.  The second bear visit may have been word-of-mouth, bear to bear, a message that this was where sunflower seeds may be had.  But I wasn’t going to make that mistake again.  Skyler saw the bear before I did and barked him off.  No more bear visits have followed.                                                 

It would be nice if more of us could look at bears with a greater degree of empathy.  It was only one week ago that the board of Vermont Fish and Wildlife voted to prohibit the intentional hunting and killing of a mother bear accompanied by cubs.*  One might have expected better of Vermont hunters.  As it is, Vermont has no prohibition on killing hibernating bears.  Bears may be hunted by hounds from September through November 22nd, despite continual issues, some. Notorious, mostly caused by the lack of hunter control of hounds from a distance.

 

*The F&W board was neutral on this issue, so it was thanks to groups like Protect Our Wildllife that supporters of the change prevailed.

BIRDS

A few years ago, and many swallow nests ago, barn swallow couples made their mud-grass nests directly against the front porch wall near the roof.  I enjoyed watching the fledgling chicks, but paid for the pleasure by having to wipe down the walls (mud splashes and plenty of bird poops) when they were done.  After a few years of this, I found that hanging prayer flags under the rafters might be a solution.  The swallows didn’t like this at first, determined to nest where they had nested before.  But the flags moved with every breeze and the mud stuck haphazardly, so they were frustrated even though they kept on trying.  Eventually it worked.  On the porch, that is.  The next summer they made a nest in a twig wreath I’d hung on the front door.  The front door!  There was nothing to be done.  Until the checks fledged, the front door had to be out of service.  Not finding a twig wreath this season, they flung mud at that same door in hope of building a nest somewhere near it.  That was not going to work, not for me, not for them.  I had to employ an entire string of prayer flags else they would sweep under, over or around them.  The pair were not happy with me.  At last they settled on repurposing a grackle nest on a porch beam away from the wall.  But I think they hold a grudge.

This year's nest. It's not clear what's what in this photo,
but I know baby birds are in there somewhere

Two swallows just flew close by the window inches away from where I’m typing this.  Were they looking for me?

PLANTS

There has been rain watering everything on a near daily basis.  It's a jungle out there.  What else is there to say, really?

Overgrown shrubs do better when they forced to start over.
(A little chainsaw work needed first)

WHAT ABOUT FISH? OR OTHER LIFE?

 

I’ll let Ken describe all that, as he did in a piece called “The Nissitissit” from 2013.

Some years ago I was fly fishing the Nissitissitt River* at the border of Massachusetts and New Hampshire.  It was early summer, a soft and delicate day, the freshness of spring not yet lost, but a feeling of the languor of warmth to come.  The fishing was good by my standards.  Two small trout had been tricked by fur and feathers wrapped on a little hook to believe a small insect was careless enough to be their lunch. In the best fly fisher tradition I gently slipped the hook out of their jaws, an action made easier by having pinched down the barb on the hooks.  It has been years since I kept and ate a trout.  Indeed, I am not clear about why I fish.  I do know why I am in the water.  I love to wade streams through meadows and brushy places and the deep woods.  I like what I see. Very much.  Small sand bars where currents are slow, rocks and moving green grass in faster flow, and water roiling and boiling over stony rapids, around large rocks.  The stones show texture and color, and they glint when wet with the cold clear water  I have had dreams where I am a trout in this water enjoying the feel of the current as I hold station against the flow, looking at sand and rocks and gently waving long green grass underwater; sometimes with trees arching overhead.  Happy dreams these; I am pleased to be a fish in my next life.

 

In this life I am expensively protected from the wet cold by waterproof chest high waders.  I wear a vest with fishing gear and carry a long flexible rod balanced to a carefully tapered floating fly line attached to a nearly invisible leader, at whose yet further tapered end is a small creation of fur and feathers: an imitation insect designed to touch gently down on the moving stream and be carried to a waiting hungry fish. Deceived by such a perfectly cast creation the fish will strike, be hooked, and then expertly played by the angler, then he will tire until he is released from the barbless hook or quickly killed for later eating.  Unfortunately for me, the fish usually ignores my offering and may smack it with his tail to show what I take as contempt.

 

No matter.  I enjoy the day, the air, the water.  But on this day I would see something I had never seen before – the disconcerting sight of a large trout, the largest trout I had ever seen in this river.  In deep fast moving water it looked for all the world as if it was broken nearly in half, upright with its head facing downstream but with the center of the left side of its body missing.  The rear of the body and the tail were bent at right angles to the head and white flesh showed in the gap.  With no sign of blood or entrails, the fish seemed in control of itself for the brief time it took to sweep by.  I thought it must have been attacked by a predator not far upstream and would soon lose its apparent control and whatever life was left.  It was an unsettling experience, and I wondered a little uneasily about how big the predator might have been.  There was a sizable piece of fish to be accounted for.

 

It took an hour or more of very pleasant and tranquil downstream wading and casting for me to forget about the trout, and as noon approached, the increasing warmth of the day made me reflective and pleasantly fatigued.  This stretch of river was not deep and there was a low grassy bank at water’s edge with a few pleasantly spaced small bushes and trees.  I lay down on the bank, my booted feet nearly touching a shallow rapids, and I half dozed, half daydreamed in the long grass until some instinct alerted me to a presence.  I slowly rose on an elbow, and upstream, over the top of the grass, I saw movement in the water, something coming down towards me.  It disappeared behind the trunk of a tree, and then behind the streamside grass, but reaching the rapids it arose and I was surprised to see a slim creature at least three feet or more tall, apparently sitting on hind legs, in profile, with a keen gaze; staring not at me but directly downstream.  I did not move, nor did the animal, for what seemed a very long time.  I was struck by the intensity of the creature’s gaze and elegance of form.  Then it was back in the water, eyes and tip of nose showing briefly as it swam through the pool below.  It was an otter, the first and only wild otter I have ever seen.  I would never be sure of is mission but I choose to believe it was the predator who maimed the trout I saw earlier.

 

Looking at what I have written I see I have not captured what I felt about the experience.  I’m not surprised.  For the few seconds I spent in the company of the otter –oblivious of me so intently absorbed in its world – I saw it in a special way.  I felt I briefly shared that world, but I cannot articulate that sense, even though I can recall it.  After a few attempts I gave up, until I recently recalled reading Sally Carrighar, more years ago than I want to remember.  I’ve always enjoyed nature writing, and have some favorites.  There is a biology professor at the University of Vermont, Berndt Heinrich, that I particularly like to read.  One book especially, Winter World, has given me much pleasure.  He is probably the best example of what I normally choose, but he is no Sally Carrighar, nor is Sally a Berndt Heinrich, even though I believe they would each appreciate the other.  Heinrich is an excellent student of animal behavior, but Carrighar inhabits the world of her subjects in a unique manner.  She becomes the animal in a way no naturalist I’ve read can do.  The feelings of the creature appear as she describes behavior, and this is done seamlessly; observed behavior with imagined, intuited feeling, in a way that to me is intensely real.  There is not much more I can say than that, you’ll have to read her yourself if you want to know.  I will conclude with a small example, In her book One Day on Teton Marsh, Ms. Carrighar has a chapter on the activities of a scud, a kind of fresh water shrimp  She makes you appreciate what it feels like to be a scud.  Along the way you learn a lot about how the scud lives.  And then, after the scud, you can read her chapter about otters.

 

 

*The Nissitissit River is a 10.5-mile-long river in southern New Hampshire and northern Massachusetts. It is a tributary of the Nashua River, itself a tributary of the Merrimack River, which flows to the Gulf of Maine. This river is part of the Nashua River Watershed.

LISTEN TO MY COMPLAINTS

 

Aging. I’ve been noticing.  Teeth going yellow, legs a little wobbly, less muscle mass but more weight, hearing not what it was, eyes not as bright, moles popping up in places, still active, but sleeping more. He’s almost 13 now, Skyler, so it’s not surprising.  But still.  It’s a complaint I can do nothing about.

When winter starts to wind up it reminds me of time’s passing–what the winter has done.  You assess the damage.  You see how the front steps have worn, owed to shoveling maybe.  Back steps too. You see grass for the first time in nearly three months.  You see what was under the snow.  And you prepare for a different style of living, a reordering of things, as it were. 

As you survey the ground for the first time your eyes tend to rest on the poop.  Sans snow Skyler ordinarily does his thing in particular areas of the outdoors so I know where to look.  But with deep snow cover for nearly three solid months his bathroom plans fell apart and he did what he could wherever he could.  That, let me tell you, is a lot. A winter’s worth.

Broken branches need picking up.  Living branches need trimming, the raspberry patch and, especially, the four apple trees.  Of course that means more branches will need picking up.  It’s a circle.  Two of the four apple trees have been especially challenging to prune.  They had a different shape almost from their earliest days; no matter how I trimmed them they managed to reach upward instead of outward, so they’re almost always out of control, misshapen–for an apple tree anyway.  They also produce fewer apples than the other two trees, and had no apples at all for their first ten years. They’re definitely not working with me. 

Then there’s the gravel.  An unfortunate side effect of plowing. And apparently unavoidable.  The gravel litters both sides of the driveway, pebbles tossed left and right with the occasional pudding-like mix of mud, tiny stones and bits of turf in need of a shovel, not a rake.  There was a time years ago I actually brought my shop vac (on a 100 foot cord no less) to this chore, sucking up the stones from still dormant grass.  I fantasized I could actually keep the gravel where it belonged.  

I’ve compromised since then.

IN THE UPSIDE DOWN

Warning! This text is written in Calilbri font, recently considered DEI (a “diversity, equity, and inclusion” font.)  Thank you, Marco Rubio.

 

The Upside Down

 Are we great?  Or are we great! (or great!!!!!)

“There has never been a President that has worked as hard as me!  My hours are the longest, and my results are among the best.  I’ve stopped Eight Wars, saving many millions of lives in the process, created the Greatest Economy in the History of our Country, brought Business back into the United States at levels never seen before, rebuilt our Military, created the Largest Tax Cuts and Regulation Cuts, EVER, closed our open and very dangerous Southern Border when previous Administrations were unable to do so, and created an ‘aura’ around the United States of America that has led every country in the world to respect us more than ever before.”

 

––Recent Truth Social Post by Our Great Leader

Our 'aura' is great!

 

We are admitting refugees!  Contrary to what some are saying.  Poor oppressed white people from South Africa, for example, are finding refuge in our country.  We are making room for them by ridding ourselves of other people who are different from the poor oppressed white people from South Africa.  We are also welcoming immigrants who will be successful here because they have been successful elsewhere, proof of which will be their Golden Ticket of only $100K for admission. 

 

We are cleaning up our language so that people who look like the same sort of people who belong here (see above) will feel comfortable speaking and writing and reading.  We want everyone to feel comfortable.  This means eliminating the use of such upsetting or annoying words like the following: Equity, gender, racism, DEI–initials like LGBTQ count too– diversity, exclusion, marginalized, transgender, and more of that sort of thing that no one wants to hear about.  Terms like these make many people squirm, and squirming is uncomfortable.  There are 197 term listed by Forbes that “may trigger review of NIH, NSF grant proposals,” terribly helpful if you happen to be preparing one of those.

 

People are being safeguarded from the evils of drugs.  This is being accomplished by blowing up small boats carrying drugs (and their narcoterrorist occupants, obviously) headed from Venezuela to our mainland 1,200 or so miles away to corrupt our innocent citizens.  (One such blowing up of a small, obviously Venezuelan, boat occurred on the Pacific side, but the explanation for this must surely be that it went through the Panama Canal.)  Drugs, it appears do not have other sources, contrary to thoughts one might conjure up when looking at maps.

 

Wars are ending!  (I have lost count of the number, but it is large.)  Except for skirmishes here and there the war in Gaza is over and everyone will soon be happy (perhaps not just yet, but soon), and, except for minor incididents between Congo and Rwanda, Cambodia and Thailand, et al, and Russia and Ukraine (that one soon to be ended the very moment stubborn Ukraine accepts the Russian plan!), all is going well.  Most of this is happening in second rate countries far away of course, so no skin off our backs.  Except maybe for Venezuela which is closer, but should it need doing, we know how to do leadership change.  (See Iraq.)

 

Our health is important, not just to ourselves (obviously!) but to those who serve our Great Leader, like RFK.  This is why it is suggested that we trust our own personal knowledge of science, regardless of whether or not we have our own personal expertise because we know where to search for that kind of information(the internet, obviously), and listening to other who share our concerns and/or our politics. This is crucial as vaccines ostensibly made to prevent diseases are of course untrustworthy. We are each of us our own temples of health.  Our Great Leader knows about health.  His own, for sure.

 

“I go out of my way to do long, thorough, and very boring Medical Examinations at the Great Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, seen and supervised by top doctors, all of whom have given me PERFECT Marks––Some have even said they have neer seen such Strong Results.  I do these Tests because I owe it to our Country.  In addition to the Medical, I have done something that no other President has done, on three separate occasions, the last one being recently, by taking what is knows as a Cognitive Examination, something which few people would be able to do very well, including those working at The New York Times, and I ACED all three of them in front of large numbers of doctors and experts, most of whom I do not know.  I have been told that few people have been able to ‘ace’ this Examination and, in fact, most do very poorly, which is why many other Presidents have decided not to take it at all.”

––Recent Truth Social Post by our Great Leader

 

Parenthetically I must say, his capitalization of individual words–mostly nouns although verbs and adverbs are occasionally thrown in as well–bring to mind the German language’s capitalization of nouns.  Perhaps he identifies with some German ways of doing things. 

 

Our “environment” (not a good word to use, but okay I think in this context) is doing perfectly well without our getting all upset about it, and it isn’t healthy to be upset.  “Climate change” (again, an okay phrase in this context) is clearly not going to ruin anything we care about.  We should feel comfortable.  There is plenty of oil, and who knows, we might even get more from Venezuela depending upon how all that goes.  Weather obviously changes all the time anyway. Places flood and then they dry up and we are left with drought.  It had been this way since the beginning of everything.  Noah experienced major flooding, after all. Life goes on.

 

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

WHAT THE ICE SAYS, AND OTHER NOTES FROM GREENLAND

WHAT THE ICE SAYS, AND OTHER NOTES FROM GREENLAND

        Where climate change is real—no, make that more real

How Did I Get Here, and Why?

Elizabeth Kolbert often writes about environmental issues.  In October 2024 she wrote an article in the New Yorker  magazine called "When the Ice Melts," What the fate of the arctic means for the rest of the Earth."  After spending some time at 10,000 feet at Summit, the National Science Foundation station at the center of the ice cap, she visited Ilulissat, the "iceberg capital of the world."   That, I decided, I had to see. 

No Parkering, the Long Way 'Round to Greenland

Yes, that's "No Parking" to you.  

Greenland is a territory of Denmark, albeit an autonomos one, the fact that the ship I was boarding a ship was owned by a Danish company meant that I first had to fly to Copenhagen.

Among the many pleasures of the Tivoli Gardens

If I had to rate cities by personalities, I'd say New York was "aggressive" (who would disagree, really?) and Copenhagen "unassuming, restrained."  That's because everyone–cars, bicycles, pedestrians– obeys the traffic lights even when there's no traffic.  And as for decor, I think many might agree "restrained" is the word.  My hotel room was so "restrained" vis a vis decor it could have been a luxe prison cell.  Still, Copenhagen was nice.

What I didn't know about Greenland

Greenland has only 57,000 people in the entire country, and everyone lives on the edges of the country. Occupying the vast middle, 80% of the space, the Greenland ice sheet rises like a dome to an altitude of 10,000 feet. The weight of all that ice has shaped the landscape into a bowl, the highest peaks at Greenland's edges.   In the middle of that huge central expanse of ice is the Summit station run by the National Science Foundation.  Summit is the source of the deepest ice core that reached bedrock nearly 10,000 feet below in the 90's.  That ice and is the source of most of what the world knows about ice and the world's climate many million years ago to the present.  It's not good news.

The first people to study the ice from its approximate center were three German meteorologists in the early 1930's.  They survived by living and working under the ice.  So too did scientists from several countries and the US Army in the 1940's and 50's, building tunnels, laboratories and barracks–even a small nuclear reactor–under the ice.  Much material from those days is still there, buried by more ice and moving along with the rest of the ice, glacially, toward the sea. 

The ice sheet, seen in flight back to Copenhagen

Beauty of the Tundra

The plane from Copenhagen landed not far above the Arctic Circle in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland's furthest inland town (!).  It lies at the end of a hundred-mile-long fjord.  Until the 1990's it was a US military base. That shows.  Volkswagen built a gravel road there in the late 1990's presumably to test cars, but it was never used for that and was abandoned by VW.  It is kept up because it was way to see the foot of the glacier (now to view the foot of the glacier as it has retreated) and gained fame as the longest road in Greenland.  To see the foot of the glacier now a lengthy hike is needed. 

The longest road in Greenland. In constant repair. 

Fall foliage

It wasn't hard to spot numerous reindeer along the road and white rabbits, but harder to see the shy (so we heard) musk oxen.  All are hunted here and elsewhere, including ptarmigan.  Fine woolen neck warmers and the like are made of musk ox hair.  In settlements visited north of here you find hand made items made of musk ox hair and also mittens and slippers made from sealskin, sometimes framed with polar bear fur.  Sales must be limited: none of the seal or polar bear products can be brought back to the US or a number of other countries.

It was more beautiful than I'd expected. 

The airport and former military base at Kangerlussuaq. Not qualifying as beautiful, but interesting.

Towns and Settlements

The ship head north visiting Sisimuit, Qeqertarsuaq, Disko Island, Uummanaq, Ilulissat, Itileq, and Niaqornat.(Q's are easy to deal with when you realize they are pronouned like the letter k, and that parts of words means things like bay, island, iceberg, or the like.)

Qeqertarsuag, Disko Island

Houses are often set precariously on rock. 

Wooden staircases and walkways connect houses not on actual streets.

The largest building in the harbor is for fish processing.  Major catches are halibut, cod, and shrimp. Fish are Greenland's biggest, and pretty much only, export.

These colors are probably just playful.  But nobody has a white house as it would be lost in the snow.

House colors were originally meant to designate what or who was inside:  Yellow indicated a doctor or medical service, red a government building, church or shop, blue for anything marine or fish-related, black for police, and so on.  Since many people, especially in the larger settlements have changed homes over time, the colors are no longer very reliable indicators.

 

Remote villages like Itilleq pictured directly above, still exist by harvesting seals and fish and hunting.  But Itilleq has an internet connection. The ship I was on visits there once a year and this was the day. Village children and a few adults were invited aboard for the afternoon. Imagine having a fancy hotel suddenly dropped into the middle of nowhere. 

In towns large enough to have a supermarket, like Sisimuit or Ilulissat, we were told not to buy anything:  everything for sale had been imported by ship.  If an item of hardware or food didn't appear on the order, it wouldn't be delivered and the town would need to go without until the next ship delivery. Reportedly this happened once with toilet paper.

In Uummannaq, a peat house, now museum, shows how people lived before the present wooden houses. These were occupied only in winter at a time when people were still nomadic. 

Even though there are more cars in the towns than I expected, not everyone can have a car.  But nearly everyone needs to have a boat.

 Signs of the Past: Dogs and Kayaks

In the summer dogs have nothing to do. They are kept on short rations because of their low activity level. 

This local man (above)  talked to us about his sled dogs, hunting with sled dogs, and what this is like today.  He talked about how he selects and trains the alpha dog, the only one that will get training, and how seals are hunted with sleds. He uses the sled dogs now mostly for tourist trips.  One of the Danish guides on the ship has dogs and participates in sled dog races. The breed is several thousand years old, and like the ponies of Iceland, is a protected breed. Once a sled dog is brought below the Arctic Circle it cannot be brought back. Nor can another breed of dog be imported.  

There are far fewer dogs these days than there once were. There are perhaps some 1,500 now in this town, but the number was once many times that. Once nearly every family had dogs. (It takes 15 to pull a sled.)  There are many reasons for this.  Other kinds of transportation exist now, of course, but there is another more telling reason.  The climate has changed.  The season for hunting and using dogs on the ice used to run from the end of November and December until April.  Now it runs from January to March. Using dogs is no longer worthwhile for such a short season.

These days sled dogs are mostly kept at the edges of town in the summer because they make so much noise.   

Instead of dogsleds kayaks were (are?) used for hunting seals when the water is open.  A local champion kayaker demonstrated techniques that are needed to survive under all possible conditions that could occur when hunting. His kayak, not made of hide like early kayaks nonetheless has the shape and weight of those kayaks–thin and sleek.  His oar, interestingly, is much thinner and lighter than the ones we use and he rarely uses it on both sides although it is also double-tipped. Yet his speed was amazing.  He demonstrated doing 180 degree turns, one while holding the oar, other turns holding it in different sometimes awkward positions, holding only a small stick (assuming a broken oar), the oar stuck under the kayak (almost impossibly difficult), no oar at all, and  turning over and over non-stop to emulate surviving heavy oncoming waves. Whew!

I Have to Say Something About Whales

Humpback whale, spouting

I haven't had much luck in the past on whale watches (saw not a one, ever), but this time I managed to see half a dozen, all humpbacks.  None breached, but they spouted, showed their flukes and flapped their flippers. All quicker than the eye. My eye, anyway.  

In a little museum there was a description of how local whale hunters once hunted that is more unsettling than the description of hunting Moby Dick.  After harpooning, and when the whale was nearly exhausted, one of the hunters would prepare to deliver the killing blow. First, a harpooner cut the tendons of the whale's flukes so it couldn't dive again. Wearing a "dry suit" made of sealskin, another harpooner would then jump onto the whale's back and crawl along it to deliver the death stroke. And this, in the Arctic Ocean.

Sealskin dry suit

I couldn't help but notice guns on the front of many fishing boats in harbors. They are used for harpooning. (See the one in the picture below.)

Passing under arches made from the jawbone of a bowhead whale are seen as "good luck."

The Ice Fjord -  What I Came For

A boardwalk outside of Ilulissat eads to to a view of the ice fjord.

The jam-up of icebergs is outflow from the Sermeq Kujalleq (formerly called Jakobshavns) glacier, the largest glacier outside of Antarctica, some 45 miles to the east.

The icebergs may hang around for as long as ten years or more. Most of them are grounded, that is, the 80 or 90 percent that is below the water rests on the sea floor.

I could go on.  There were icebergs in all configurations–a sculpture garden of ice.  Speaking of sculpture gardens, there was even a sculpture garden of rocks, basalt as I've never seen it before, on Disko Island.

Lessons From the Ice

The country is vulnerable given its tiny population.  Even its relationship with Denmark may not protect it well enough from outside threats.

Greenland's economy is also vulnerable with little to export, relying totally on imports.  Fishing stocks are currently reasonably healthy, but harvested halibut, for example, are smaller than they used to be.

Traditional hunting and probably other practices are already being affected by warmer weather, like the shortening of the season of ice from December-April to January-March. This affects the wildlife and habitat too.

Growing tourism could be a boon and help revive some traditions but brings its own changes to the people and the landscape. (A woman I talked to who sang traditional songs said her community has no interest in them, not even at festive gatherings.)

JUST BOPPIN' ALONG

Here I am, boppin’ along––no, not boppin’ along, floating along––which is what is when you’re driving an EV, especially when you’re driving an EV on a smooth new road and don’t hear a thing except your Daily Mix made especially for you––as I was saying, listening to my Daily Mix of songs Spotify made just for me because I’m really old and they knew I’d want to hear all the best oldies.  Cat Stevens first singing “Where Do the Children Play” –– a very good question at this moment in time.  Indoors is the answer I guess.  Then comes Carol King singing about how “And it's too late, baby...something inside has died” and, wow, that brings me back to the 70’s too.  And then Paul Simon sang “April Come She Will” all about change – change having been the operant word in those days for our inside worlds and the outside world. At least for all of us who were on the cusp so to speak – just this side of thirty and then just over it.

 

So as I’m floating along the sun burst out of clouds and everything looks lovely and the wind is blowing all the green leaves and the tall yellow spiked grasses and I find it hard to believe that I’m driving along a road in Vermont in an electric car and I’m old, and I’m heading to my red barn of a house.  How in the world did I get here?  Naturally I know the answer but if you were to skip over those intervening years all this would be impossible to imagine.  And boppin’ along there I actually was flying over those years.  Music––like that Proustian nibble of madeleine––it does that.

 

Add to those kind of dreamy thoughts the outside world of the 70’s with the outside world of the 20’s––different century–– instead of my inside world.  Now that can really make you wonder how in the world we got there.  

 

Yikes.