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Category: landscape

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.

Return

Return

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Back home in the early morning light, I wake automatically at my near-accustomed hour. Gone is the beach vibe and the beach pace. I think about how different it is to have nothing to do and nowhere to go, to live beyond schedules.

And how shocking it is to move from one world to another. From beach walks and languor to office and checklists.

Luckily I’ve had help in this endeavor. Flying home catapults the relaxed vacationer headlong into tightly parceled time. Only worse than that — it’s tightly parceled airline time. Hurry up and wait. A parody of real life, which makes the return of schedules a comfort in comparison.

Metro is in my future; the beach is in my heart.

After the Storm

After the Storm

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A dousing overnight, a sudden storm that flooded the street in front of my motel. This morning I dodged puddles on the beach, noticed the enlarged pools and lagoons that came in the wake of a large tide and persistent rain.

A beach is always the same and always different, shaping and reshaping itself from day to day, wave to wave.

Maybe that’s the source of its power. Maybe that’s what gives us stillness — the presence of constant change and motion in a form we can understand and enjoy.

Adopt a Spot

Adopt a Spot

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Walking home yesterday from Metro I noticed a sign. “Adopt a Spot,” it said. This is new to me. Adopt a highway, yes. But adopt a spot?

How good to know that spots have  clout, too. That a clump of trees, a curve of trail, a stand of meadow grass could be noticed, claimed, taken to heart.

I think about the spots I love, places I pass daily, corners worn smooth by passage, roads ridden and paths walked. A new boardwalk in the woods. A nubby stump in the forest. A block of sidewalk in the city, pavement stones ragged.

These are the textures that become dreams, that take hold of us and won’t let go.

Do we adopt the spot — or does the spot adopt us? 

7,800 Miles

7,800 Miles

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It is 7, 214 miles from Washington, D.C., to Kigali, Rwanda, where Tom has gone on a business trip. In less than an hour it will be 7,800 miles — just a few hundred more — from Nasa’s New Horizons probe to Pluto.

Earth meets space, the Kuiper Belt, that which lies beyond our solar system in what surely deserves to be called terra incognita (except that it isn’t terra!).

Early pictures show an orange globe with a crown of methane and nitrogen ice and craters the size of the Grand Canyon. By tonight we will have more photographs of this celestial body, photographs that may help scientists decide whether to call it a planet or a dwarf planet.

What we have right now is a tantalizing glimpse, a collectively held breath — and of course, the wonder. 

Water, Water Everywhere

Water, Water Everywhere

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A rainy Monday, so maybe not the best day for a post about thirst and the lack of public water fountains. But an article in yesterday’s Washington Post made me think about this endangered feature of communal life.

According to the International Plumbing Code, the number of public drinking fountains required in new buildings is down by half, the article says. There are a few causes. One is the consumption of bottled water, which has quadrupled in recent years. Another is fear of contamination, which ironically has grown since the Safe Drinking Water Act in 1974 began requiring municipalities to notify their residents immediately of any problems with their water.

But the lack of clean, safe public drinking water has actually hurt American’s health by driving young people to consume more sugary drinks, the article argues. And a preponderance of plastic water bottles is hurting the environment.

This article explains why I have to hunt longer to find a public water fountain. And it also makes me remember the water fountains of my youth. The one at Idle Hour Park, which made a deep whirring sound and produced a trickle of water that seemed to have been drawn up from the depths of a nearby swamp. And the one in the hall of my grammar school, which we would be allowed to stand in line and use on warm spring afternoons. Imagine 400 to 500 kids drinking out of the same fountain! Still, nothing has never tasted as good as the water that flowed from that cool — and I’m sure unsanitary — tap.