Long Distance

Long Distance

Comments 2 comments

My vocation demands close work; I seldom have the
opportunity to look at the horizon. Here I’ve done little else. Whether it’s wondering
if it’s a ship I see on the last curve beyond the furthermost whitecap of the
Atlantic Ocean or looking for an egret across vast tracts of swamp, one way or the other I’m casting my eyes to the faintest, most faraway speck I can see.  
Surely this must be good for one’s eyes — to say nothing of one’s soul.
Long distance — what the eagle spots from his perch on the
highest dead tree in the refuge. 
Long distance — what the birder tries to obliterate
with his binoculars.  
Long-distance vision — what
the pilgrim hopes to bring back from the shore.
Beauty

Beauty

Comments 0 Comment

From childhood on, we are taught to distrust appearances. “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” “Beauty is only skin deep.”

But in my few days at the shore I’ve thought a lot about the role beauty plays in our attraction to a place. Ruling out the way we feel about our hometowns (in which case, perhaps, the reverse is true — the beauty flows from the inside-out knowledge of the city, town or patch of land we call home) — don’t we often choose to be somewhere because of the view out a bay window or the way the light colors the sky at sunset.

Something in these physical details speaks to us, calls our name, and we will spend the rest of our lives trying to figure out why.

Tenderness

Tenderness

Comments 0 Comment

To belong to a place means that you feel tender toward it.
You are concerned for its welfare. When you return to this place after an
absence short or great, you are surprised by the feelings it evokes in you. You
were not aware that you missed it, but you did.
The little things you
notice now, the parade of ducks that create a traffic jam because motorists
wait for them to pass (and this doesn’t irritate you), the sea grass
that waves in the breeze, the antics of the sandpipers, the lugubrious horseshoe
crabs (are they living or dead?), the egrets that look like an Egyptian
hieroglyphic, the section of the beach that is sealed off by ropes to allow sea turtle eggs
to mature in peace (and this doesn’t irritate you, either) — all of these
familiars are made precious by repetition and knowledge.
And that view from the bridge, it still brings a gasp of delight. But now you look forward to it — because you know it is there.
Island Time

Island Time

Comments 0 Comment

It’s after 11 and I feel like I should be somewhere. The beach, maybe? Turns out I’ve already been there — to watch the sunrise early this morning. For most of my almost two-hour walk (I always do this — walk so far to one end of the strand that it takes me forever to get back) it was just me and the shorebirds.

And when I returned, a book beckoned. I just now finished it, looked up and noticed the time.

Remember, you’re on “island time,” the inn brochure says. But isn’t “island time” absence of time? Or transcendence of time?

Today, I’ll take either one.

Refuge

Refuge

Comments 0 Comment

It was not an auspicious way to leave for a beach vacation, pelted by rain, a tornado watch blaring from the radio, wind buffeting the car — but it was what I could salvage of summer when my work was finally done, a few days at the rag-tag end of August.

But ah! It brought me here to the Refuge. Just me and a bag of books, a bike, a bathing suit and towels.

Refuge: a place of safety, a protected place, a sanctuary.

It is what we hope to find at the end of a weary year. Insects humming, surf pounding, gulls crying. But all of these sounds mingling somehow to a dull, peaceful background roar. A place of rest. Active rest, but rest just the same.

Dry Season

Dry Season

Comments 2 comments

We live in a part of Fairfax County laced with runs and rills. Last fall, torrential rains swelled these small streams into wide rivers that spilled across our narrow lanes, taking tree limbs and other debris with them.

You wouldn’t know that now. Most creek beds are bone dry; the deepest are only a trickle of their former selves. This is not good news for the water table, but it is a boon for the walker.

Routes without bridges, paths that lead to narrow log crossings (or none at all) are now open for business. For the last two weeks I’ve been walking trails I hadn’t walked since 2007, when, in an attempt to ford a stream, I pulled myself up with what turned out to be poison ivy vines. (I somehow grew up without knowing that the second half of the rhyme “leaves of three, let them be” is “only a dope would touch a hairy rope.”)

But this summer I can easily cross that stream on a concrete spillway that is usually under several feet of water. And this opens up an entire network of trails through woods and along country lanes. 

 The dry season reveals worlds that are invisible under high water.

Capitol Hill Walk

Capitol Hill Walk

Comments 0 Comment

A lunchtime stroll up New Jersey Avenue to the Capitol, the grounds and plantings and pleasant vistas of which (I now realize) are thanks to Frederick Law Olmsted. Now that I’ve read his biography and learned this fact, I think of him often when I walk by. No wonder my eyes rest so easily on the west front, are led so capably to the dome. He planned it that way.

But the Capitol was not my destination. I walked around it to East Capitol Street, past the Folger and down the shady brick sidewalk to Lincoln Park.

If Mall walks are about the grandiose and the touristic (the grand edifices of the National Gallery, Natural History and American History Museums), Capitol Hill walks are about the domestic and the personal. Artful arrangements of zinnias and marigolds; the fluttering miracle of an overgrown butterfly bush; a fountain accessorized with a kitschy artificial deer (out here in the suburbs we have enough of the real thing, thank  you very much); and dry cleaners, markets and drug stores tucked away on inconspicuous corners (no tacky neon signs here).

My mind wanders: If we lived here, I could walk to work. We would mow our grass with a push mower, grow roses and herbs in large clay pots. And that balconied turret, that’s where I’d write.

The Capitol Hill walk is also about fantasy.

A photo of the Capitol that is old and out of season and that convinces me to bring my camera along the next time I take a lunchtime stroll in the city.

A Year Ago Today

A Year Ago Today

Comments 1 comment

It was an ordinary late summer afternoon, silky air, the sort of day you wished you didn’t have to spend inside. And, as it turned out, many of us didn’t have to.  Because at 1:50 p.m. we were turned from our homes and offices onto the street by a 5.8 magnitude earthquake.

Though we later learned we should have sheltered in place under our desks (ignoring every protective instinct we had), we headed outside.  And for the next few hours the streets of D.C. were filled with panicked and then (once we got used to the idea) bemused office dwellers.

I had leapt from my chair without purse or cell phone but (strangely) with the Diet Coke I was holding when the building began to shake. For the next hour I frantically tried to reach family members on borrowed phones. At home I found broken china and a closet ankle deep in photos, papers and clothes that had been shaken off their shelves.

The earthquake happened a year ago today. A year of record heat and drought — with the occasional hurricane and derecho thrown in.

The tremblor seemed strange at the time. But strange is becoming commonplace.



The “D.C. Earthquake Devastation” photo that made the rounds on the Internet last year.

Picture Postcard

Picture Postcard

Comments 0 Comment

I am a sucker for the post card shot. The off-center, the too-close, the out-of-kilter — these do nothing for me.

When it comes to landscapes, I have a middle-brow sense of composition. Give me blue skies, puffy clouds (see yesterday’s post), a road winding in the distance, fir trees in the foreground, and I’m happy. Even if there’s a bit of blurring (because, say, the picture was taken out of a car window at 50 miles an hour).

This is a photograph of Glacier National Park, snapped on a vacation there  a few years ago. It made me catch my breath then. It still does.

Cloud Post

Cloud Post

Comments 2 comments

Though I’m sitting at a desk staring at a screen, in my mind’s eye I’m surveying clouds. I’m lying on a deck chair, as I did on Saturday. My hands are laced behind my head, and I’m marveling at the puffy cumulus clouds that float across an impossibly blue sky.

Maybe I was just short on imagination that day, but I spied no particular shapes. No castles, dogs or sinister faces. I saw just the clouds themselves, and that was enough. I looked at them for what felt like hours but was only minutes. Still, it was long enough to get lost in their alabaster swirls, their tufted promises; to swim recklessly from one to the other across the fathomless blue.

The clouds were both companionable and regal. Looking at them long enough I wondered what it would be like to be a part of them. It would mean I’d be drenched, of course, but if by some miracle I could remain dry, and I could fly without fear to the outermost thin trails of cirrus, what would the green world look like underneath? How verdant? How insignificant? How much like home?

Photo: Weather report.com