A Walker in the Suburbs

For those of us who were engrossed in Ken Burns’ latest film, this is the “week without Roosevelts.” Last week I could come home from the workaday world of the 21st century and enter, for two hours, the 19th and 20th. The latter half of the show was recent history for me, times that my parents and grandparents lived through, and times, therefore, that I don’t always consider history.

But it is history, and well worth learning. The film left me with curiosity — wanting to read books about TR, FDR and ER — and with hard-to-forget images: a diagram of where the bullet struck Teddy Roosevelt as he was giving a campaign speech. (He spoke for another hour before going to the hospital.) Photographs of ordinary Americans, their heads inclined toward big boxy radios, listening to FDR’s fireside chats.

On those nights, apparently, you could leave your house, walk down the street and never stop listening to the president’s voice. FDR’s words, calm and comforting, were pouring out of every window, were soothing the jangled nerves of a troubled nation.

Would we ever again be so unified? Maybe on September 12, 2001. But then again, maybe not.

The beach steward approached me politely. “Do you see them?” he asked, pointing to what appeared to be a tiny clump of sand. “The snowy plover chicks, do you see them?”

And once my eyes figured out what to look for, I did. They were fluffy and small, puff balls on stick legs, running crazily around the sand. They were, I have to say, incredibly cute.

On earlier walks I’d noticed the roped-off sections of sand. Every beach has these areas now, for sea turtles or shore birds. But this was the first time I’d seen the animals a sanctuary aimed to protect.

“They’re an endangered bird,” the volunteer said, “And these chicks have just hatched.” Apparently, the tiny birds feed on insects only three to five hours after they hatch. They are independent little creatures, highly suited to survival, except that they camouflage themselves so successfully that beach walkers accidentally step on them. More beach walkers mean fewer adult snowy plovers.

“We’ve increased their  survival rate by 80 percent,” the volunteer said, explaining how he sits beside their nests for a few hours every week, keeping watch on the young birds.  “Sometimes the mama birds buzz me, or even peck at me.”

Not a problem
though, he shrugged, then gestured at the beach around us. “Not a
bad place to sit for a few hours. … And the babies only need about four weeks until they’re big enough to be safely on their own.”

“Here, read this,” he said, handing me a brochure. “You’ll become a snowy plover expert.”

I wouldn’t go that far. But I sure have become a snowy plover fan.


(BetterPhoto.com)

The forecast when I landed Friday was for “scattered clouds.” A pleasant forecast, one I seldom think about — until I’m in the air.

Scattered clouds from above are steppingstones across a stream of blue.

They are tufts of cotton, shredded and fine.

They are companions, markers to the landscape below. They shadow and define it.

They are harmless, these scattered clouds, because they are not above me but below. They don’t block the sun.

Sometimes I snap a shot because I can see it here in the blog one day. It is usually horizontal, for starters. And it is generic. And, in my own eyes at least, it is beautiful.

This is one of those pictures. I was walking through Annapolis with Ellen, talking about our work, our kids, what we’re reading now (we had just browsed in a bookstore) and there was the wall, the greenery and the stone.

Annapolis is a place I could photograph forever. The water and the land. The old and new. Church spires and weathered shutters. Flashy yachts and quiet gardens. Landscapes and close-ups. And horizontals, those especially, as many as possible.

For some reason blue spruce trees have been calling to me lately. I can’t quite understand what they’re saying — other than look at me.

Maybe it’s their bracing attitude, as if they have imbibed the winter air. They make me feel cooler just looking at them. Or their color, which stands out amidst the oranges and yellows and pinks of summer bloom.

They bring to mind trudging through a frost-hardened field to chop down the Christmas tree, even though when it’s time to choose, we always go for a fir.

For whatever reason, they are catching my eye these days. They’re not letting me forget them.

Photo: Fairylandscape.net

My companion for a good 120 miles of yesterday’s trip was a gray Ford Focus with Ohio plates. The driver was a young woman, about the age of my daughters, I think. She was careful. She allowed herself to go five miles over the speed limit, maybe seven or eight on a steep grade, but she never nudged up to 80.

I first became aware of the car when it passed me a minute or two after I passed it. Not good, I thought. We’re going to have a competition. But she didn’t venture far ahead of me, and I was content to follow her. So this early skirmish morphed into a steady companionship as we took the ups and downs of I-64 from Beckley to Lexington in tandem. When she passed, I passed. When she slowed, I slowed.

It’s a lovely stretch of road, high country with rows of blue mountains receding in the distance. But it’s also lonesome; I appreciated the vehicular companionship.

I often do this when I’m driving alone. Pick a car and stick with it. That automobile becomes my  personal pace car. I keep it in my sights, use it to measure my speed. And I make up stories for the driver. In my white-line-fever-addled brain, my car and the pace car become friends.

Personification makes the miles melt away, and we reached I-81 in no time. I pulled into the left lane to head north. Somehow I knew the Focus would travel south.

I drove three more hours to get home — but I never found another pace car. I missed the Focus.

I’m about to drive east, loading the car before dawn. The ten-minute span between one load and the other is the difference between darkness and light.

As morning comes, remnants of night stay behind. A stray star gleams in the lightening sky. Bats scour the air for one last feed before sleep.

For me, breakfast is down the road. For them, it’s dinner time.

Dad was in the 95th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force. He flew two tactical support missions on D Day. But it wasn’t until a 50th anniversary trip to the  beaches of Normandy that he realized what the ground troops had endured.

“I don’t think the American people appreciate what some of those men did,” Dad told a newspaper reporter interviewing him about the offensive. “Those guys, they deserve all the honors.”

Typical of Dad to say the other guy gets the glory. But he knew as well as anyone what it meant to climb into the cramped tail gunner’s compartment of a B-17 bomber and take off in darkness for the battlefield continent. He did it because it had to be done. They all did.

Now Dad is gone, and D Day has become less a personal war story and more a historical event. But it was a historical event Dad was part of — and he never forgot it. “You were part of this great, massive undertaking,” Dad said in that same newspaper interview. “You were part of history.”

(Photo: Lloyd Wilson Collection of the 95th Bomb Group Horham Memorial)

Back in the salad days of freelancing, I made routine trips to New York City to visit my editors. We would have expense-account lunches or just chat in their offices, and in between I would walk up and down the streets and avenues.

It was rejuvenation in more ways than one. I usually came back with a few assignments — and even more important, with a lot of creative energy.

I no longer make my living as a freelancer, though I still make my living from words, and today I’m attempting to rekindle a bit of that excitement. There will be a conference and editors — and more to the point, there are still those streets and avenues (to say nothing of Central Park).

So while I will listen and take notes and learn how others are weathering the changes in our profession, I will also pound the pavement. I’ll be a walker in the city instead of the suburbs.

That’s how it all began.

If greening is here, then mowing can’t be far behind. And indeed it is not. Where I live, the mowing season has definitely begun.

Mowing is one of the yard chores I like best — in part because I can zone out while doing it. But also because of the wonderful aromas it stirs up.

I’ve been conducting my own little fragrance test lately, and in a highly unscientific fashion I concluded that the cut bluegrass I inhaled deeply while in Kentucky last week smells better than the cut grass I know at home.

As it turns out, the explanation for this must lie in my head — not my nose. A few minutes online convinced me that the lawns in Virginia are as likely to be composed of bluegrass as the lawns in Kentucky.

So it’s not the grass type that’s making the difference. There is something else here. A whiff of nostalgia, perhaps?