Breath

This so-called weed, this lamb's-quarter, took root in a two foot high pile of crushed stone. Like the crab-grass growing behind it, this is a terribly tenacious plant. It will not be denied footing, life, even on the barest of possible landscapes. And it can sprout, offer up a colorful set of leaves, and probably even flower and seed right here. This barren landscape of stone dust. This is where it begins, pioneers on rock, converting minerals to flesh and cell, dropping organic matter. Over eons, soils and diversity. Even asphalt cannot keep it back for long. Life persists with a certainty beyond all else on this planet. Not human beings, necessarily, or even mammals, but life is the true constant here. But what is life? Is it in the arrangement of matter, or is it something transcendent? From where comes this impulse, this craving, these magical combinations of processes. Is life this growing thing? This weed? Or is life the thing that grows this thing? What presses on, exactly?

We are learning some lessons these days. 850 are trampled or drown in Iraq because of uncertainty. Thousands are dead and more than half a million are homeless in our our own home-grown refuge crisis, Hurricane Katrina's landfall at the mouth of the Mississippi. The images on the news are of African Americans and poor white people huddled in stadiums and bused hundreds of miles to other stadiums. Houses filled to their soffits with water. There is a 30% unemployment rate in New Orleans. There was. Now it is 100%. There are levels of inequality that derive from the general distribution patterns of ecosystems, systems of life. And there are levels of inequality that exceed our natural right, that perpetrate a terrible injustice. Our culture seems to specialize in the latter, which, in turn, seem only to compound the former.

In Argentina, world forgotten, they pray for peace every night in quiet studios, in small groups. In Japan, the same mantras are chanted, and in India and Iran. A silent majority, humanity-minded, waiting their turn. May all people be peaceful, may they have hope and enrichment. May the future bring us better days.

Glory

The white trumpet-like flowers cleary identify this vine as of the morning glory family (Convolvulceae). But this is not the common morning glory (Ipomoea purpurea) that we all know so well. It is a different flower altogether. This is hedge bindwind (Calystegia sepium), which gets its name from its binding winding characteristics. It has climbed two large-stalked weeds here. It would do the same with ornamentals. It also likes to bind its way up these leaning twigs. It will wind and bind anything. Even the weed book, which usually speaks favorably of weeds, suggests to keep this species in check. It is native to North America, but invasive to cultivated ornamental gardens. Here its arrow-shaped leaves cluster and fill an otherwise non-green wooden fence and these leaning twigs. It behaves like an invasive species in its native landscape. Vines are like that, often. They hold out a pretty leave or an attractive flower and before you know it they have choked out your favorite bush or sapling tree. They grow fast, but not faster than my eyes. I will watch them carefully.

Everyone turns their eyes to the tragedy of Katrina in New Orleans and Mississippi. Even the wayward prince rose from his usual mid-summer torpor to return to the capitol and ask his army to do other work for him. And this is a terrible tragedy, especially the hubris of building cities against the sea below its level, and crowding poor into its path. We mustn't see this as nature's wrath, but our own creation. Perhaps the result of our own wrath. These are certainly the terrible results of our foolishness and lack of foresight. But the deepest tragedy today comes again from Iraq, where almost 700 Shi'ite pilgrims were killed in a panic during a procession. Someone shouted that a suicide bomber was about to blow himself up on a crowded bridge and people were thrown and jumped from the bridge to their death, while other were crushed to death by the retreating throng. This is American security at work. We are like the hedge bindwind, with less benvolence.

Feet

From the ant plain. It's an oil rich world that makes this much plastic. Everything is plastic. The forms can be infinite. It wasn't always this way, but piece by piece they have replaced the hand-touched, hand-woven, hand-carved, hand-hammered, world of everyday objects with the pour-molded forms, now usually made in China. I have notihing against the Chinese, although bad labor practices anywhere are bad labor practices everywhere, but I do not like the flow of plastic. I do not like that it has grown and permeated everything, covers our houses, stores our food. Petroleum. Oil. Cancer alley. There is no good to come of it, no matter how carefully you look.

An anti-war sentiment is gaining momentum. Iraq is our now our generation's Vietnam. The next Democrat, like Nixon in the early 1970s, inherets a handgrenade with its pin pulled. George Bush has wrought havok. This is a shameful time for our country. And we will be years recovering.

Pilewort

Celandine (Chelidonium majus) flowers all summer long, although its peak flowering comes in late spring. It drops seeds and grows a second generation during the summer. These are late celandine, with fewer flowers. They are members of the poppy family and imported to North America from England. They have an unusual yellow or saffron colored sap that was once used to treat liver disease, warts, and freckles. They seem to favor edges, but I suspect this is because we mow the middles. All of my flowering weeds grow just beyond the reach of my mower blade. Even this hearty weed seems less vibrant in the draught. Fewer late season flowers, a palish tint to the leaves. This may be the usual response to an absence of water, the trees and plants and weeds must have been wilting before when the rains didn't come. But this is the first time I have noticed. Did maples begin turning this early always? Did crabgrass expand imperialistically? Can the metaphors sustain across culture and ecology? Did tradition flower? This celandine, this season, these deep lobed leaves. On a hot but dry Saturday in the last weekend of August, rhythms and routines begin anew.

More death and more war. Everyday the driving ambitions of wealth and status, acquired for unusual purposes and glances the other way. Each individual, one point, no light.

Trilogy

Trees everywhere look challenged by this summer's drought. Limp top leaves; the horse chestnut are browning at their tips. I see locust shriveling, not from the heat, but from the incessant absence of vital fluids. We are all dehydrated, filled with sugars and processed substances, caffeine and bad ideas. Will fall rains come or will the drought continue? This parched summer. And even without the rains, this queen anne's lace and poison ivy and virginia creeper hold court on roadsides. The trees may prove to have made too big an investment in favorable weather, but these vines and flowers move with much more adaptibility. They are flexible where they need to be, they pay for their individual fragility, with profligacy and variation and an uncanny ability to grow under the widest range of conditions. These pioneers of once-tended lands soak up last fall's moisture from the leaf cover and regulate themselves for optimal photsynthesis. You can see how the creeper disguises itself as a poison ivy plant. And you can see how the lace's delicate structure creates the illusion of a large flower, where there are dozens of smaller ones. This brother of the carrot has an edible root. Its seeds are nearly invisible.

All the other noise seems trite in comparison. Is there a shift afoot, or are we indeed barreling toward that netherville of absurdity. People like things easy; it's an odd impulse having been spawned from such a long and detailed past, but so it is.

Rain

The rain we've needed all summer sprinkled some this afternoon, as the first of my two remaining sunflowers burst open with bright yellow petals and began its final prayer to the day. This irony delighted me. There was a definite fall in the air, a chill in the morning and a general cool throughout the day. August has one more week and yet I saw colors in the swamp behind the Lincoln Conservation fields off route 126, and yellowing poison ivy is everywhere. All summer this thick stalked oversized flower has edged itself skyward. Its moment of triumph comes as the region's native dwellers begin a retreat for the season. Everywhere, juxtapositions. I no longer hear the orioles, but the goldfinch were loud yesterday. My cherry tomatoes are just about passed, but the beef-steak tomatoes still have a week or two to go. The sun skipped and jumped between low foreboding clouds all day and found an opening once again at the end. No hint of summer, though, the angles are all wrong. Transition, four weeks until solstice, in the glacier-scraped, hilly town of Maynard.

Pat Robertson called for the assassination of Hugo Chavez today on his 700 Club Christian Show. How charitable. More walls are going up in the West Bank. The outpost settlements, those furthest isolated from militarized Israel, have been evacuated completely. The larger ones will remain and are getting a wall. An enormous piece of defensive engineering. Donald Rumsfeld and George Bush keep saying the war is going well, despite the brewing Iraqi civil war and the commitment of more United States troops. The world has indeed gone mad.

Virginia

This creeper has made its way slowly up the back fence. It sprouted out of a tangle of pokeweed and crabgrass and cedar in the darkest corner of the yard. It is in search of sunshine. We are scraping away, seeking the authentic, and there, in the corner of my yard, one finds authenticity in action. This vine, Virginia creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia), grows all over the east, from Ontario to Texas. It survives, even thrives, despite being frequently mistaken for its non-relative neighbor, poison ivy (Rhus radicans). This one won't make you itch. It has five palmate leaves. It holds itself to the fence with adhesive discs growing on the ends of tendrils, branching out from the vine's stalk. Some people call it American ivy; like poison ivy, it is a native species. It grows with the patience of a tree, gathering, building in measured bursts, gathering again. Under beige and white and green and brown, I find bare pine boards, dried with age. Out of a tangle of shrubs and weeds, this vine.

Under the guise of false premises created to scare us into poor decision-making, the President engaged us in war in Iraq. Under equally false pretences he seems perched to escalate the war. Is there an echo in here? Was everybody at the fridge the last time this happened? They turn our objections into opportunity, they are the shrewdest of men. It is time for new vocabularies and syntax. A language steady like the Virginia creeper making its way toward certain sunshine from the back corner of my cultivated lot.

Biloba

This sprout of a gingko came to this place in a plastic bag. It looked like a dead twig with a curly root. We put it in the ground and gave it water. This season, these leaves sprouted and began building up energy for next year's growth. The gingko is considered sacred by Chinese in its native south east China. The tree is considered a living fossil in my native north east America. It is part of a family, for which it is the last known survivor, that eventually gave rise to conifers. It survives because it is hardy and can withstand all the burdens of modern urban living. Smoke doesn't bother it, nor does pollution. We planted this one in a pile of fill and it has sprouted all of these leaves. We like resilient things. There is an Argentinean saying, Yerba mala nunca muere. It translates, 'the bad weed never dies.' There is something overwhelmingly noble about resiliency, something hopeful. The gingko is a hopeful tree, and a reminder of the deep time in which life has had to adapt. We witness but a glimmer, a half-glance, at something unfathomable; we can ponder, we even try to see, and hope we are not blinded. And the gingko silently, nobly, sprouts a new edition. There is no family without the individual, and no individual without the family.

There is an anger on the land. A misplaced, unplaced, disrooted anger. Too many brothers and sons and sisters and daughters, too many who were really just after a college education, getting an education in 21st century bully diplomacy. Something. Maybe its the smug smile. It could be that we've forgotten other tones of voice and dispositions. Maybe private wealth really does create an inherent instability, an elegant negation. Maybe it's the chronic dehydration, and sugar overstimulation - carbohydrates are just beer before the alcohol. Whatever it is, it simmers. It's not old like the Gingko biloba, it is very new, not even blanched yet.

Sun

This flower was alive yesterday when I took this photograph. It had sprung up in the most unlikely of sandy poor soils, battled off automobile fume and oil slicks, and fought for root space with crabgrass and ragweed. Then, the real estate agent who cannot seem to sell the house and lot behind mine, pulled up in his truck and snapped it at the neck before his open house this afternoon, as if it was an eyesore. This plant had grown to five feet in height in the course of three and a half months. I saw this happen from my kitchen window and said out loud, "What the hell is the matter with people?" "What daddy?" my four year old asked from the kitchen table behind me. "Sometimes people don't pay attention to what they're doing," I grumbled. "A man just killed one of our sunflowers and I don't think he even knows what he did." "Because he didn't see it?" she asked. "Because he didn't see it." I marveled at her youthful wisdom. "He's interested in money," I said. "When you have money on the brain, it's difficult to see things." Later, after my daughter had followed me outside while I showed my oak sapling to the real estate agent (so he didn't put another footprint into it), she was at the kitchen table again, and I was looking out the window. "Did the man do what you asked him?" she asked. "He knows that the tree is there now, " I answered. "Maybe he couldn't see it because he had on dark glasses," she said.

In Ecuador protestors took over the state oil refinery and shut down oil production for several hours on Friday. As of noon today, oil production for Latin America's fifth largest oil producer is at 1/10th of its ordinary output. Protestors wanted more of the oil money spent on schools and roads. Instead, they got oil profit's current commodity of choice, a well-armed military. In Argentina workers have re-started closed factories.

Golden

This flower, scorn of everyone with hay fever, flowers late in the season. There is a small patch across the right of way from where this one originated. A new cycle of flowering is upon the landscape. Golden rods, other succulent purple-berried plants, asters, other plants that have waited a better part of the season, even the sunflowers at three of the four corners of the house lot are just about to flower. The summer runs with rhythms more like moons than the steady machine or the weekly cycles; there is much to do all summer long, mind you, but not everything at once. There will be a mad rush in another month and a half to gather everything left to harvest before the seasons take it back again. We will all be rushing then, piecing together the daily routine and tasks, trudging along. And then it will be Halloween and then Thanksgiving, Christmas, and another New Year.

It is exhausting to think about. We will slow down today and watch the weeds flower and grow. Stay away from the news for a while and see how things change. Slow Saturday.

Asters

There are asters growing here in this little patch of wild across the right-of-way from my front door. But I don't believe these are them. I remember thinking they would be asters last year, because their leaves are somewhat purple. I cannot remember what flowers they ultimately grew. The aster family (Asteraceae) is one of the two largest families of plants, its members include the common sunflower (Helianthus annus), many of the loose-leaf lettuces (Lactuca sativa) found in the supermarket produce departments, and artichokes (Cynara Scolymus). I was after New England aster (Aster novae-angliae). I know it grows here in this cluster of green. But it was a challenging summer over here. I removed the leaf litter from the ground, and then it did not rain for weeks. A downpour for hours last week was a good start, but most seeds will wait for a more favorable next season; believing it will come. And it may. This plant will flower in a week or so and I will have an easier time with its identity. In the mean while, I will quietly watch the late summer set in.

Asters are among the newest member of the plant species. The ginkgo trees (Ginkgo biloba) we have planted on the other side of the house are among the oldest. The war is a daily reality for so many neighbors and friends and brothers and daughters and aunts and nephews and cousins and parents. We are all new, in a way. Modern humans, newer than asters. An ecology only a century old. War is embedded in our psyche. Brute force, as Mumford called it. Gunfighter nation, according to Slotkin. Not a pretty combination. The unfolding of actions taken, as some would see it, in my name is horrifying these days. That we would move with such impetuousness across every square mile when every record is written in slow motion is a shameful character trait. We need the variety and plasticity of the Aster family. We need a new paradigm.

Mariposa

This monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus) fluttered amongst the milkweed plants (Asclelias syriaca) when we just stood there and watched, but she decided to hide in the middle of this Russian-olive tree (Elaeagnus augutifolia) - which isn't an olive at all - when I decided to photograph her. She came back after I put the camera away. The sole food source for monarch butterflies are milkweed foliage. The milkweed's sap renders monarch larvae and adults poisonous to birds, which is why this one flutters about freely in a songbird environment. I don't know why she was so camera shy, however. In a few more weeks, she'll be on her way to Mexico, to meet up with a couple of her relatives and friends. These green leaves will begin to turn yellow and fall from the tree and the winds will pick up. It may become too cold to spend very much time at the beach, as we did these past days. Here in the gathering months of late summer, the monarch still feeds and the leaves still hold their green. Everything is about energy now, gathering it in roots and in stomachs and in fat and in wood.

On the Gaza Strip the Israeli military flushed out dissenting settlers from synagogues this morning, which, for all of my support of the Palestinian cause, seemed unnecessarily over the top. It is difficult not to sympathize with any minority subject to the overwhelming force of a modern military. In Iraq, more deaths too. It is a hard future we have been handed and it seems foolish to forget that we cannot control it, merely leave a record of actions. How much of your money is spent on the global war-machine? What if we spent as much on education? True, real, effective education? What if we could migrate within our own ecosystems with the same grace as the monarch butterfly?

Moraines

I can hear the buoyant salt water pounding against the resilient sands 200 yards to my south. A steady, rhythmic kush and roar. The Pleistocene droppings, stuck a touch too far out to sea for so many houses, are home to pitch pine and an overload of Russian olive trees, with dune grass sticking up from the sand showing in all of the open places in between. The paved road must need to be regraded often, there is nothing below us but sand for meters. I hear mockingbird and red wing blackbird and see small birds with black crowns on their heads. Seagulls loft through the air far above and plovers play tag with the lapping tides. This is valuable sand, sought-after. The oceanfront itself is gated and reserved only for community members. I am a member, temporarily, and I found my way to the edge of the continent this morning. Gulf Stream waters, more tolerable to the flesh than Gulf of Maine currents carry a heavy load of swells slowly up the steep incline of sands, rolling giants, compared to Cape Cod Bay beaches - the waves and the sand. We can excavate and wait, within minutes the sand has been leveled by roiling rising water. Small white crabs live just below the surface in the highest parts of the beach below the high tide line. The crabs are a thriving creature adapted to salty sand and able to avoid death by pounding by digging themselves deeper through the sand. And people, with dogs and children, boogey boards and books, slowly creep out onto the beach, during the hottest part of the day, this seemingly harmless overcast day now burning into a sunlit afternoon. We talk about relationships and celebrate the newly expected member of our extended family of fellow travelers. Out here on this spit of sand left by icy waters some ten millennia ago.

The uglier cohorts of our current Presidential malady showed themselves last night, driving a truck dragging chains across the mock gravesites, white crosses, put up to symbolize the dead already counted in Iraq. Chains hanging off the back of pick up trucks evoke horrible memories; these thugs, the product, no doubt, of W's education system in Texas, want protestors to remember another era when violent torture was a weekend's fun in the racist, bigoted south. Not too long ago, a black man was killed again in this way - for the crime of lust. These thugs were not merely destroying the visible signs of the folly in Iraq, and desecrating the memories of our already dead soldiers, they intended to drive fear into the heart of the protestors, rallying around a mother, whose son paid with his life for W's war. A mother who simply wants an apology. They wanted her to be frightened, to believe they might haul her off as well, to force her to succumb to their cowardice. This is the subtext of W's United States, intolerance, violence, and impetuous anger. This is the response of a culture built on shifting sands too far out to sea to be safe. We live atop the terminal moraine of the Middle Ages, now manifest as a global cult.

Histories

The story of landscape and experience is written in the very structure of our language. Our language reflects the meaningful world we've inherited; we absorb and send back this meaning (it is in us too). The white spruce (Picea glauca) pictured here is also known as the Canadian spruce or skunk spruce. It is called the former, because it's native habitat is not here in Maynard, but in the peaceful nation to our north; this name tells us where it comes from. It is called the latter because, when snapped, its needles emit a skunk (Mepitidae)-like odor. It was named by a people familiar with that stinky cousin to the Asian badger. Its name tells us that skunk and skunk spruce lived in the same habitats with curious and naming people. It surely has other revealing names in the tongues of the indigenous. The formal name, white spruce, comes from the white stripes found on the needles; the tree's actual color is a bluish green fading into dark green towards its trunk. Its new growth points gently upward. This spruce grows at the back end of my backyard. My neighbor calls it a pine tree (Pinus strobus) but, while it is part of the Pine family (Pinacaea - resinous, whorled, straight-trunked, needle-bearing trees of the temperate north and high mountain south), it is not a pine tree. She doesn't want to learn its real identity because she wants to cut it down. "It's having a mast year," I told her. "Conifers don't reproduce every year, but when they do, they produce an enormous number of cones." "Great," she muttered. "More for me to clean up." I think its cones are not growing well with the drought. They seem smaller to me than they should be at this point in the season. A longer, hotter, dryer summer goes against the native tendencies of this species; this individual is adapted to flourish elsewhere. But even without cones this year, the tree itself is quite healthy and robust. Pushing ever skyward, it added a full ten inches to its height this season already, and next season's buds are forming steadily.

Out on the parched grassland of Crawford, a mother waits for her audience with the prince. I'm sure the right is cackling with contempt at her actions, walking lock-step with the party of spin, but she made the greatest sacrifice...and for nothing. Her complaint is not that her son died in warfare in Iraq, but that her President lied. She says that W told her last year - he promised her to her face as she looked him in the eye at a meeting in the White House - that he would not use the war and the visits with grieving parents for political purposes. Then, of course, he did. She wants to ask him why he lied to her, hold him to his own self-proclaimed standards. But he won't see her. Instead, he stands awkwardly in front of the gazing media, looking, I'll have to say, a little worried, a tad defensive, and says, this mother wants him to pull all the troops out of Iraq and that he cannot do that. In front of the world media, 24-hour cameras, enough information to last us into the next millenium, and he lies about this mother and her reason for camping out in a ditch at the farthest end of the security boundaries put up by Secret Service. At last, he can no longer smooth over his mean-spirited drive for power. Just watch, the rest of his corrupted party will jump ship from his agenda faster than you can say mid-term elections, and the other so-called party, sensing blood, will move in for the kill. They look worried in Crawford. It began as a mast term for this president, but political drought and hot weather seem to have stunted his cones as well.

Abundance

Choke cherry (Prunus virginiana) fruit ripens and is consumed just as quickly by the multitude of bird species living in and around the neighborhood. These tart little berries contain their next generation ensconced in the fleshy nutriment; each berry, another potential tree, and each winged eater, a cultivator as well. We, too, can eat these astringent and puckery berries, but must beware of the seed, whose hydrocyanic acid is poisonous to our systems. The very tree pictured here has recovered from an infestation of the tent catepillar in late spring. Every leaf consumed and only flower clusters hanging, waiting to be pollinated. The energy stored in this individual's roots propelled a new generation of leaves in early summer and the catepillars have moved on, now metamorphosed into the flickering moths around my evening porchlight, leaving these leaves in peace. The moths are also eaten by the winged visitors to this little enclave in Maynard. I've watched the process through months, from tree bud to infestation to bloom to fruit and I know why the thick song of birds can be heard every morning at daybreak; there is joy in abundance, celebration to be had from full bellies. This is not an Earth of brutal competition, it is one of slow and measured collectivity and change, exchange of energies and provisions for life. More than enough for everyone, each creature a negotiated place, chains of relationships, but no obvious beginning or end, no strict hierarchy.

Sustenance for life is the rule of nature. Something else, it seems, rules our natures today. A psychology of domination. It expresses itself most fully in our major institutions, where brute force and unabashed exercise of raw power dig us into artifice unprecedented in the history of human habitation. We think we create comfort and habitat for oursleves, but these are merely fleeting expressions, without long term prospects. We are all miners now, excavating with frenzy, imposing measures and restrictions, undermining abundance, forcing human suffering so that a small elite may further the illusion - at least for themselves. The tart berries of modernization also contain poisonous seeds that may kill us, and have certainly changed the stakes for life everywhere. We do not follow the rules, which are simply laid out and easy for us to see, but instead trudge foolishly into degraded futures, unable or unwilling to head the signs.

Boundaries

The edges of things are often the places where we find the most ambiguity and least certain boundaries. And, yet, we are obsessed with identifying and demarcating edges in this culture. But where does the ocean end and the shoreline begin? Return in an hour and look again. What marks the boundaries of tree and soil and air? Each thing blends into the next at the same time it stands with its own identity. Life, it seems, consists of negotiating the vital connections, participation in the vitality of webs, and the maintenance of independent identities. Those are spruce and fir trees, poplar and pine. I am one being. But all of our one-nesses come from connection - what we eat and breathe and transpire and think and hear and say, who we love and care for, the product of our labors, the results of our energies. Everything matters in composing the individual and no individual exists without the web. Our culture does not appreciate this truth. We embrace the mania of the one, promote the mythology of singular accomplishments as if a person could live without food and air and love. We do not trouble ourselves with the true impossibility of separateness, we draw arbitrary lines in the sand and congratulate ourselves for a job well done. We ignore the nuance and ambiguity of edges and in doing so, lose something of ourselves. Our ignorance of the webs devalues our individuality.

The hot sun burned off a fog this morning only to lift the humidy into the thick air settling against my skin. Tomato plants are bursting forth with delightful sweetness, followed by zucchini and melon, carrots and lettuce. Our little cultivated section of ground will provide a number of meals in the weeks ahead. We are grateful to it and it is grateful to us. We cannot always easily sidestep the major trends of our misguided society, but we can take the moments of true connection and revel in them nonetheless. I will feast upon joy at lunchtime, I will dine upon vitality.

August Vacation

Days are wending down now as I return to my native state from a journey to the north. Here the deciduous trees are dominant. There, it is conifers, trees more adapted, so says Berndt Heinrich, to snow and ice and cold. Fir and spruce, pine and tamarack. These giants of the northern forest give the horizon a different feel, add smells to the ambient air not found in Maynard, and acidify the forest soils, changing the character of the understory. In Washington County, timber holding companies are liquidating acres, finding new uses for smaller trees as the green building supply industry ramps up its influence. There are some who look at these changes and see the dollars made and say, all is well. Others get lost on familiar roads as the landscape changes its appearance from forest to scrub. Selective harvest, a euphemism for leaving behind a mess of tangle and brush, is akin to a haircut where they just pulled out some of your hair and left the rest in its longer state. No more pretty than a bad dream or a hangover. Up in that most distant county, the east's West, where roads appear on maps few and far between and ownership maps show tiny land holdings surrounded by the baron timber company lands, there are a thousand miles of unmarked roads, engineering feats of equal might as these interstate highways that carried me right to the western edge of the county. Piles of stone and fill twenty feet deep through the middle of formidable swamp and wetland, piled with sand and crushed stone, and left as heaps across the landscape. They are known by timber cruisers and locals, mapped by the companies only and the lived memory of residents. They can get you somewhere faster than some of the public projects, but you must know the way. They also give continued access and allow the ongoing harvest of these mighty sentries of decades, now, not centuries.

No attention to the radio or newspaper or television for seven days was liberating. I learned rhythms of daily life not poisoned by the misdeeds of others or spoiled by the folly of the powerful. I reverted to a patience, the tide comes in, the tide flows out. I listened to wood thrush sing in the day, and falcon hunt their way up the shore line, and councils of crows recounting their busy days, and chipmunk chatter and squirrel visits and badger waddles. The week of a coming new moon whose crystal clear evenings brought shooting stars and the soft hazy curve of the Milkyway. Crackles of campfire and the sounds of forest in my ears as I fell into the deepest sleep gave me a nice sense of being as I return to the pace of everyday modern life and begin my complaining anew. There is so much to learn, so much we have forgotten.