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Knobbed Whelk

Knobbed Whelk

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I’ve been thinking about the impulse to label and categorize. Take this shell, for example. I picked it up today after promising myself I would collect no more. The big bag of shells yesterday should  have been enough. And since today’s walk was a much chillier one — stiff breeze blowing, long-sleeved shirt and sweatshirt — my hands would have been warmer stuffed in my pockets. Except they were too busy picking up whelk shells.

But the urge to acquire is often accompanied by the urge to name and arrange, so I stopped in at the Tom’s Cove Visitor’s Center and picked up a little handout on shells. There are two types of whelks, I learned: the knobbed whelk, which has little points on each whorl, and the channeled whelk, which has grooves instead of points.

Learning its name is a way to honor the shell and its former inhabitant. It helps me appreciate it, which isn’t hard given its beauty.

But there is much I still don’t know: how a snail created this shell, how its hue came to resemble a thousand sunsets; how the ocean buffeted and burnished it and the waves tossed it up on the shore for me to find — all of those things I’ll never understand.

Chincoteague!

Chincoteague!

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As soon as I carved out a week between jobs, I knew where I wanted to spend part of it.

I arrived at Chincoteague before noon and wasted no time pedaling to the beach.  The usual access trail was closed until three so I took the long way around.

No matter. It was a day for cycling — and shelling, sunning and walking on an almost-empty beach.

I strolled almost an hour north absorbing the sun, sand and sea, then turned south and made my back to the towel. The channeled whelks I collected filled a flimsy plastic bag and banged against my leg as I trudged along. I didn’t pick up this item, though I did take its picture.

It is, apparently, a channeled whelk egg case. Something I’ve never seen before.

The shells themselves are in the car, making it oh so aromatic for the drive home.

But that’s a couple days away. What I have now is a gift of time — and a place I love to spend it in.

Grand Landscapes

Grand Landscapes

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The drive home was through sun and shadow. The snow that was falling on Friday had stuck in the higher elevations and was still there on Sunday. It was a spring day with a feel of winter, a day to process what has happened and what lies ahead.

In this I was aided by landscape. What is it about a glimpse of long distances that airs out the brain?

There is one spot on the road we took yesterday, one that approaches the area from Maryland rather than Virginia, where the view must be 50 miles or more in either direction. From that vantage point, it’s easy to see how small we are, how busily self-important.

Spend enough time in the company of grand landscapes, and the trivial falls away.

Bird Cloud

Bird Cloud

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It was not the best idea to pick up Annie Proulx’s Bird Cloud last night when I couldn’t sleep. I thought it would lull me back to dreams, much as it had the evening before.

But not this time. Last night I was farther along in Proulx’s Wyoming house-building saga. I wanted to know what would happen to the concrete floor that was poorly poured — and the color of liver. I wanted to understand how she could have spent most of her (considerable) income on a place that turned out to be uninhabitable from October till May due to wind and snow-packed roads.

I still haven’t gotten a satisfying answer to the last question (though it made me feel good that someone so accomplished could also be so gulled.) As to the first — well, I know she found a floor fixer who gave up his Thanksgiving (for a mere $40,000!) to sand, polish and stain her floor to a dull, serviceable brown.

Along the way, I read lines like this:  “Bird Cloud was to be a type of poem if a house can be that. After Bird Cloud was finished I knew it was a poem of landscape, architecture and fine craftsmanship…”

Landscapes of Childhood

Landscapes of Childhood

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“We think it essential that a 5-year-old learn to read, but perhaps it is as important for a child to learn to read a landscape,” says Washington Post columnist Adrian Higgins in his article “The British Forest That Gave Life to Pooh.”

Higgins is the Post‘s gardening columnist, and he came to this topic after reading The Natural World of Winnie-the-Pooh, a new book by Kathryn Aalto. Aalto is a garden designer who spent time in the places where A.A. Milne lived with his wife and young son Christopher Robin. Milne drew on these landscapes to create his fictional world. There was the walnut tree that housed Pooh, and Owl’s aerie in an ancient beech. There was the real Five Hundred Acre Wood.

The beauty of the English landscape — and Milne’s memories of his own childhood decades earlier — made its way into the stories, and as such stands as a testimony not only to the power of topography but also to how important it is in the life of the imagination.

“As important as the Pooh stories remain, they speak to something of greater value, the importance of landscapes to children, places they return to, places they own, places to stage their own dramas, and places that imprint themselves on the mind,” Higgins writes.

I found these landscapes in the broad bluegrass meadows of central Kentucky, my children found them in the yards and woods of suburban Virginia. It doesn’t take a 500-acre wood; sometimes just an empty lot will do.

New Hour, New World

New Hour, New World

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Yesterday I left the office, walked out the door and saw a sky lit from within, clouds shimmering with light and a flock of birds swooping in and out of sight.

It was a different hour, a different light, made possible by the time change. And while it means I leave and return home in darkness, it also means that my walk to Metro takes me by flaming trees, slanting sun and illuminated office windows that reveal what’s inside. Plants and posters, an American flag.

It was a new hour — and because of that — a new world.

Eclipse

Eclipse

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I missed the moon in its blood-red rising. By the time I caught up with the orb, it was higher in the sky. This is better than I anticipated. With cloud cover for most of the day, it was unlikely I’d see much of the moon at all.

But the clouds provided a soft-focus backdrop and the moon glowed brighter than I had seen it shine in a long time.

I think the eclipse had already begun when I took this shot. The moon was just starting to disappear — though behind clouds or earth’s shadow — or only in my own imagination — I could not tell.

Old House

Old House

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This house was built in 1740. It belongs to my friends Annie and Pete, who laugh when they lead a tour. “It takes about 30 seconds,” they said.

The house is small and beautiful, with original beams, slanting floors, and a spirit that comes from standing long upon this earth. It is the small of age and utility, the small of cozy evenings and dark afternoons. You duck your head to go from the front room into the back, to hike up the steep stairs to a loft that was once reached only by ladder.

Being in this place gave me a taste of what it must have been like to live in the 18th century, the quiet thoughts, the belief in soil and rainwater, the everyday glimpse of mountain and field. Poor in so many ways, to be sure — but rich in so many others.

Remembering the Beach

Remembering the Beach

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Thinking back to my beach walks, to the surf booming and lapping — to my right on the way out and to my left on the way back. The brightness of those mornings, the people I would see, some ambling along sipping coffee, others pounding the hard sand all decked out with pace-measuring equipment.

There was everywhere to look and everything to see. There was the sparkling gulf, the waves leaving foam on the shore. And then there were the shorebirds, the best show in town — gulls, terns, sanderlings, piping plovers, wheeling and swooping in tandem with an occasional loner breaking out of the crowd, soaring into a blue vastness.

I like to imagine the seaside now that I’ve been back three weeks, now that my nerves jingle-jangle as I walk and my head is full of commas, dashes and semi-colons. I like to remember the different life I had there, and the slow, steady purr of a great ocean.

New Scenery, New Eyes

New Scenery, New Eyes

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How do we perceive the vistas around us? With what eyes do we take in the forests, hills and plains of the natural world? When a new and radical form of scenery presents itself must we change our tastes and proclivities to appreciate it? Wallace Stegner raises these questions in Beyond the 100th Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West (Penguin, 1953) — and from what I can tell, he answers the last one with “yes.”

Stegner chronicles not only the physical exploration of the canyons, buttes and gorges of the “Plateau Province” (mid to southern Utah and northern Arizona), but also the artistic one.

The process that is triumphantly concluded in [Thomas] Moran’s “Yellowstone” was one that had begun forty years before in the water colors of Alfred Jacob Miller, when the painter’s eye first began to adjust to prairies that were not green meadows, mountains whose rocks were other than the Appalachian granite, scrub growth whose shades were those of gray and brown and yellow, earth which showed its oxidized bones, and air without the gray wool of humidity across its distances.

 It’s an interesting thought, that new types of places require new ways of seeing. Makes me ponder Pluto’s recent closeups and the fantastic images that the Hubble space telescope has sent back to earth. The strange beauty of the Grand Canyon must have been just as jarring and awe-inspiring to the mid-19th-century denizen as these cosmic vistas are to us.