A New Way of Seeing

Saturday, March 14, 2009

It was still in the mid-20’s when I left home for Moose Hill Saturday morning, but that was OK because the forecast was calling for clear skies and temperatures in the 50’s. It was a great day for walking, with bright sunshine and little wind.

As soon as I stepped out the back door, I was greeted by sounds of Spring: One of the neighborhood cardinals was tooting away. At the end of the driveway, I saw the first two robins of the year to be in the yard. Doves were cooing along Pleasant Street, and a pair of grackles flew over the train station. Along the road to the tennis club, I saw one of my first chipmunks of the year. On Lover’s Lane I saw that the lovers haven’t been waiting for Spring. (Note to lovers: It’s probably not a good idea to leave your latex evidence laying around, announcing to the world the location of your secret spot.) A pair of hooded mergansers took flight from Beaver Brook as I crossed the new bridge over the dam. In the cedar swamp, the redwings were calling chink-ker-ee! The new season was truly underway. Soon, I’ll be heading up in the evening to watch the flight of the woodcock.

I didn’t have any firm plans, but I thought I’d head to one of my favorite breakfast spots on the Boulders. Rather than hike up the road, I ducked back into the woods to take the Hobbs Hill trail. Away from the road and the brook, the woods were quiet. I walked along quietly and steadily, feeling my body warming and loosening. Thoughts were rolling through my mind without organizing themselves into any particular themes or patterns.

In time, the Hobbs trail took me back to the road, and I crossed it to take the Vernal Pool trail toward the Boulders. I tried not to hurry, but breakfast was calling from my pack. I had two big slabs of fresh homemade whole wheat bread slathered with peanut butter (the peanuts-only kind) and drizzled with pure maple syrup. I was going to use the usual jelly, or maybe the classic honey, but in honor of maple sugar season on Moose Hill, I tried something a little different. In the vacuum bottle, I had some shade-grown coffee. I knew these token efforts to eat as if food matters could make me seem like something of a Fauxhemian, but what the heck.

As I approached the Boulders, I paused to peer through the thin ice into the clear water of the vernal pool that is alongside the old road there. It seems it will be a few more weeks before the amphibians that depend on these ephemeral ponds for breeding will arrive.

I climbed up onto the Boulders and found a stony seat that afforded the warmth of the sunshine and a view back down on the trail passing below. I put my little foam pad on the cold rock and draped my fleece blanket over my shoulders. Before I could finish unpacking breakfast, I heard the yanking of a nuthatch behind me. This was followed by the tooting of a group of titmice and the tapping of a small woodpecker. This little guild stopped by just long enough to check out the new curiosity in the neighborhood before going back to the important business of finding something of their own to eat.

I sat enjoying my sandwich and coffee. A gentle southerly breeze reinforced my hopes for a warm afternoon. A couple of crows flew over, cawing loudly just over the treetops. A couple of hikers passed on the trail below, but they never glanced up to see the blanket-clad boulder troll peering down at them.

My thoughts mostly lingered on the state of the economy and, more particularly, what the current disarray might be telling us about our future. I remain convinced that, as Tom Friedman puts it, we may be at an inflection point where both our economy and environment are hitting the wall at the same moment.

On Friday afternoon, I was watching one of the major cable business networks as President Obama was telling us that it’s time to start building a new clean-energy economy and start laying the foundation for post-bubble economic growth, and that no longer can we drive our economy with an over-heated housing market and maxed-out credit cards. Those days are over, he said. A funny look came over the pretty high-def face of one of the program hosts. She just couldn’t grasp what that might mean. The concept of an economy that did not depend of constant growth and expansion with ever-increasing consumption and spending was beyond comprehension. I was struck how this crisis of imagination is typical of most people who have had it so good for so long. I was troubled by the on-going belief that all the bailout money we are throwing at the recession will prove to be a last-gasp futile attempt to prop up a system that is destined to failure no matter what we do and that all this new debt will only make things much worse for many years to come. What we need is a new way to look at things.

I was getting cold and these thoughts were not particularly fun or comforting, so I decided to get moving. I packed my bag and started looking for a way to walk around and down off this rocky outcropping. A ledge of granite, four or five feet tall, was in my way and, as always, I looked for a way to walk around it. Suddenly, an idea coalesced. For a while now, I’ve been entertaining rock climbing fantasies. This may have started a couple of years ago when we were in the Ansel Adams museum at Yosemite National Park. In the gift shop they were playing one of those New-Agey videos where an amazingly fit and graceful athlete was climbing on boulders to the accompaniment of soothing music. It struck me that it must be so wonderful to move through space like that with nothing more than skill, nerve and power.

Now, I’m an overweight middle-aged man with a bad shoulder. Even in high school when I was in pretty good shape I could never do more than 10 pull-ups. I have what I euphemistically call a low center of gravity. So, I have no business even thinking about rock climbing. But suddenly I started looking at the boulders all around me differently. I started looking for routes, hand-holds and toe-holds in the stone. Starting with the small wall in front of me, I found a way down the rock face rather than around. It was fun, so I walked over to the base of the tallest outcrop. There is a big fissure in the rock, and I started to climb up. My binoculars were tangling from my neck so I went to slip my pack off my shoulders so I could put them away. The pack promptly slipped from my grip and tumbled to the ground about 10 feet below, teaching me an early - if unnecessary – lesson about the dangers of combining height and gravity.

I spent several minutes moving up and down the rock. I was quickly learning a few lessons about this sport: As in chess, every move - and a few beyond that - must be planned in advance. Attention and focus are critical because a careless move can quickly lead to a situation prompting a cold sweat. It’s important to make a plan and follow through with it. It’s very helpful to know where you’re going, or you might wind up in a place you’d really rather not be.

It felt good to be stretching, reaching, grabbing and pulling. I felt like I was using muscles that don’t get used often enough. I was also exercising the parts of the brain that provide focus, concentration and discipline that can always use a workout. More importantly, I was seeing these familiar rocks in a new way.

Feeling like I’d pushed my luck enough with these first baby-steps into the world of rock climbing, I made my final descent and retrieved my pack. I was in a happy mood as I headed down the trail back to the road. The sun was shining and the Spring air was getting warmer. I’d had a fun new experience. And while I won’t be free-climbing El Cap any time soon, I knew that from now on I would be seeing the world around me with new eyes.

What’s for Dinner?

We are entering a period of change, and it is with some curiosity that I look for signs of significant changes on the horizon. I can see that our world will likely change in fits and starts rather than suddenly and profoundly. For example, just as the bludgeon of four dollar gas get Americans thinking about more fuel-efficient cars and maybe even adopting lifestyles that involve less driving, gas prices plunge and we slip back into our old habits. As a nation, we have the attention span of a bunch of eight- (or eighty-) year-olds.

One of the things I’ve been thinking a lot about lately is how we will be eating in the future. There are predictions that we will be eating much more food from local sources. That makes so much sense in so many ways. In fact, today I finally signed up to participate in a local community farm at the Moose Hill Audubon sanctuary. I’ve had good intentions to do this since they opened a few years ago, but thanks to my normal procrastination (and never feeling like I had a few hundred bucks for the up-front payment lying around in January) I always got closed out of this popular project. I vowed this year would be different, and I dropped off my application on the very first day. I look forward to a summer of working cooperatively with my neighbors to coax sustenance from the soil of Moose Hill.

In my darker moments, I imagine a future where food will be scarce. Our economy is collapsing and the oil will soon run dry. We will squander dwindling resources in a pitiful attempt to preserve the old ways, unable to see the tidal wave of destiny bearing down on us. Too many of us will fall into a paralysis of despair instead of preparing for the new reality. The fossil fuel feeding frenzy will be over and fast food and cheap calories will be a fond fading memory. Too long will people cling to there pointless jobs as tanning salon attendants and life coaches. Not soon enough will Americans be working on their farmer’s tans and falling asleep at sundown after a hard day in the fields, too weary, hungry and broke to worry whether or not the feng shui of their vacation retreat is correct.

In these fatalistic fantasies I wonder if we will start harvesting the abundant living protein that is all around us, unused. My on-going war with the squirrels bent on chewing holes in my house has more than once had me wishing people would start craving savory squirrel stew. Not long ago, I counted seven fat gray squirrels on my small back lawn, and I’m not even feeding the birds this year because I don’t want to encourage the squirrels. As if reading my mind, friend Suzanne sent me an article from the New York Times about efforts in Great Britain to get the public to eat non-native (North American) gray squirrels that are displacing beloved native red squirrels. These English reds look a lot like the cute but annoying red squirrels that are trying to take up winter residence in my walls, but they have cute little tufts on their ears. Maybe in the not-too-distant future, squirrel will be on our menus as well. After all, how many war movies have we seen where the platoon sharpshooter was a good old boy squirrel hunter. Back to the future.

Just this morning I was talking with a friend on the other side of town. Outside his family room window, we watched as four whitetail deer nibbled the shrubbery in his backyard. Deer are everywhere and I wonder if it won’t be long before many more of them wind up in freezers. I was jogging along our Main Street a few weeks ago and a fat doe, killed by a car, was lying in the woods just off the road. I wondered if in a few years the motorist would have stopped to claim his prize rather than letting it go to waste.

Massive flocks of Canada geese fill the farm fields adjacent to Moose Hill this time of year. At other times they become pests as they waddle and poop on our beaches, lawns and golf courses. I can imagine a day when a hungry hunter will sneak up on the flock with a small crossbow and put a goose in the oven for his happy family.

In my deepest nightmares, I visualize clean statues in city parks after all the pigeons were roasted on sticks over gutter-trash campfires. When the rock doves get too wary, maybe starlings and sparrows would be next.

Those are my nightmares. In my daydreams on a sunny morning I see healthy and peaceful neighbors working shoulder-to-shoulder to reclaim our land for the production of water, food and fuel. Again we will work with the soil and learn its ways. Honest labor and sweat of the brow will be respected. Those who make real things will be honored. We will trust and love our neighbors because we have worked side by side and helped each other through hard times. We will share and rejoice in the bounty and understand how close we came to losing it all.

Thanksgiving Traditions

It has been my tradition for the past several years to work on my firewood supply on Thanks- giving morning. I like to go out in the late November coolness and take stock of the wood pile. Depending on what needs doing, I might move some wood around, say from the outdoor rack under the tarp into the shed, or I might split some logs, or cut up some small stuff with the bow saw. Out of respect for the neighbors on a holiday morning, I wouldn’t fire up the chainsaw.

In the past I would run an extension cord from the garage and turn on the radio. A local station used to play Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant” ever year, but I didn’t find it this morning. It seems many good things are coming to an end these days. Anyway, my decrepit little woodshed was an old chicken coop that came with the house that I’ve remodeled into a shelter for my hoard. I take satisfaction in stacking wood in the shed, thinking of it as money in the bank, its interest compounding every week as the logs dry.

The bending, lifting and chopping is a workout more satisfying than a visit to the gym. I recently read In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan. In it, he comments on how much exercise by Americans is really so much pointless expenditure of time and energy and if we would spend more time doing things like gardening, we would get more exercise and have something to show for it. Now, as one who loves a good bike ride or the occasional run up Moose Hill, I’m inclined to think there is no such thing as totally pointless exercise, but I understand what he’s saying. I can still remember many years ago when my parents sold one of the houses my father built almost single-handedly to a family with a couple of young, strong weight-lifting sons. He watched in dismay as his carefully-tended lawn went wild. “Why don’t those guys try pushing a lawn mower instead of lifting those weights?”

When I first went out, I was greeted by Hobbes sunning himself on the ramp to the bike shed. This is the cat that killed a couple of young red squirrels in the yard a couple of weeks ago. He’s a friendly and pretty little guy and I find it difficult to stay mad at him, especially now that the squirrels are even more aggressively invading the house. They’ve actually found a way to get into the walls and ceilings. I’m happy to report that “Calvin,” at my request, outfitted Hobbes with a new and larger bell. Maybe now I can enjoy his company more and worry about the local wildlife less.

Much of my firewood is a random assortment of wind-fallen branches from here and there and lumber scraps from my carpentry projects. Recently, friends have been kind enough to let me clean up some big oak and beech branches that came crashing down in their yards during heavy storms. One of my favorite things about this Thanksgiving tradition is using the time to daydream. I like to think about a day when I have a woodlot of my own and can use my saws and axes to do a little timber stand improvement and cut some real firewood. Although I’m closing in on an age that used to qualify one for senior citizenship and my dream account has shriveled along with the rest of the stock market, some dreams die hard. I imagined myself walking through the woods, deciding which trees to cut and which to favor, and stoking the stove in my little tight cabin at the end of the day.

It was a fine, crisp New England November morning. I had about two season’s worth of wood stacked and ready to go, and I could look forward to many evenings of dozing by the woodstove. My arms and back had that comforting ache that is the reward for earnest effort. I went back into a house warmed by a fire in the living room and a turkey roasting in the kitchen. I was looking forward to the annual family feast and was thankful that, even in hard times, life can feel pretty good.

Nut Case

Saturday, September 20, 2008


Saturday dawned clear, cloudless, calm and cool. It was 45 degrees when I left home, so I layered on a few old shirts and wore wool gloves for the first time this season. I didn’t have a lot of time, so I planned a quick trip to Hobbs Hill for breakfast. I pedaled the single speed up to the Kettle Trail near the intersection of Moose Hill Parkway and Upland Road. This wide, inviting trail had been beckoning to me for the past few weeks every time I drove over the hill. As I would drive by, I’d think of the quiet times I’d spent sitting and thinking and I yearned to go back. I wanted to enjoy a few minutes of peaceful reflection away from the worries of the world.

I pushed the bike far enough down the trail to be invisible from the street and headed down the trail. I paused at the yellow birch that drops its golden leaves before all the other trees, scattering a golden throw-rug across the footpath and noticed it was already starting to change color.

Crossing the boardwalk across the swamp that is the source of one of the headwater streams of Beaver Brook, I looked at the tall, green ferns that carpet the muck. I’m still not sure if they’re cinnamon ferns or ostrich ferns and I thought about how much easier it is to learn how to identify things in the natural world from a knowledgeable companion than it is struggling alone with a field guide. The Audubon sanctuary offered a fern walk last year, but it was canceled for lack of interest. I know a few people had signed up, but I guess they have a rather rigorous way of gauging interest.

On the other side of the swamp I went right on the Hobbs Hill Loop, heading for my usual breakfast spot. There is a flat-topped granite erratic poised on the brink of the steep easterly slope of the hill that affords nice views of a flat area in the forest below and treetops of oaks and hickories that rise from there. I like to sit there and gaze down through the forest, waiting for the small dramas that Moose Hill so often provides. While waiting for the show to begin I try to open my mind to thoughts that drift up through the trees.

On this morning the woods were quiet and still. Sunshine hitting the hillside warmed the air just enough so that gently rising currents caused fine strands of spider silk suspended between the trees - and illuminated by the same clean light - to flex and wave. I thought about how this energy from the sun flows through our world and gives us everything, really, from the water cycle, to weather, to erosion and deposition, to life itself. I pondered how fossil fuel is also solar energy that has been stored away for eons. I started thinking about how the energy we release from this storehouse of power also flows through our world, bringing us many things as well, both good and bad. I told myself to stop thinking about that. Friends and family tell me I’ve become boring and depressing with all this talk of collapse and long emergencies. They’re right, of course. No one else wonders why NASCAR drivers race on in the name of Jesus Christ while the greatest transfer of wealth in history in the form of oil money flows from America to countries that hate us. Why should these things bother me?

Just as I was starting to consider how the sun is really a giant nuclear reactor and maybe nuclear energy was really a way to tap into the energy of the cosmos without the carbon middleman, a shadow flashed across the forest floor. Working upward and backward from shadow to sunshine, I found first one, and then a small flock of blue jays high in the oak trees. Never silent for long, these birds soon started squabbling over acorns. Chipmunks started up a rhythmic clucking, a red squirrel chattered in the distance, and gray squirrels did some squabbling of their own. This was becoming the morning of the acorn eaters.

Somewhere from the little flat at the base of the hill, I heard a steady clacking of large nuts hitting limbs as they fell to the ground, thudding on the forest floor. I could see gray squirrels working high in the branches and I wondered if they were smart enough to be cutting hickory nuts loose and picking them up from the ground later. Recent battles with these critters around the house taught me not to underestimate their capabilities. I started thinking think about what would happen if some clever squirrel invented sub-prime acorn mortgages that could be securitized, chopped up and sold so he wouldn’t have to deal with all this bothersome collecting and hoarding and leave all that to squirrel litters yet to be born, but I reminded myself to stop thinking that way.

It was time to get moving, anyway, so I packed my bag and took the trail around and down the back side of Hobbs Hill and started looking for that big hickory. I didn’t find it, but noticed a concentration of deer droppings and an area of disturbed forest floor under a white oak. Red and black oaks predominate on Moose Hill but we do have a smattering of white oaks. I imagine that deer and other mast eaters seek these out for the sweeter acorns they produce. I found one on the ground, peeled off the shell and ate it. It was nutty and entirely palatable. I recalled that natives collected white oak acorns, boiled them and ground them into flour. I thought about how hard life could be without the benefits of modern civilization and wondered why we couldn’t enjoy those benefits without the accompanying burdens until I reminded myself that there were more fun things to think about, like the up-coming fall TV schedule or the brand new NFL season. If someone would just invite me to an f-ing tailgate party, I too could be a care-free shit-faced Pats fan and stop thinking about all this depressing crap that’s making me crazy.

There may be real things to worry about in this troubled world of ours. Just this week after speech by our President reassuring us that his administration was busily preventing the collapse of our entire economy, a TV commentator felt moved to refer to the leader of the free world as a “high-functioning moron.” (You can find that on YouTube.) But who am I to worry that our next Vice President seems reasonably well suited to be the leader of a community college pep squad? Clearly, there’s nothing I can do or say that would change anything, so why not accept my true role as happy idiot. Simpletons, after all, never get ulcers.

No, perhaps next time I go to Moose Hill, I should eat some mushrooms. After all, Timothy Leary wrote that the peace and wisdom of the universe can be found among those who look at sunsets, those who walk in the woods, and people who sit by the fire. That’s all I really want to do anyway. Maybe I’ll stick with things like that.

Missing the Target

Saturday, August 23, 2008

With a string of cool, dry, fall-like days recently, I overcame my lingering fear of deer ticks and gave in to my desire to get back to Moose Hill. I slept in a little in the wonderful sleeping weather so I didn’t leave home until nearly 9:00 AM. I made my usual PBJ and brewed a pot of Green Mountain coffee, a fresh souvenir from our recent trip to Vermont. I pulled the single speed out of the shed and headed to Moose Hill for the first time in many weeks.

Instead of my usual plunge down the hill toward the train station, I headed down South Main Street to South Walpole Street. I wanted to witness the destruction perpetrated in the name of our proposed so-called “lifestyle” mall. Maybe it’s me, but I just can’t quite grasp the idea that one can buy a lifestyle. Our town has given the green light to the developers to strip away scores of acres of forest in a desperate bid to buy a break from high residential property taxes. This town has little commercial tax base, so the ever-increasing burden of taxes for ever-decreasing services falls heavily on the homeowner. Like all good Americans, we can’t live within our means and we don’t mind throwing a little of our natural heritage into the furnace of greed in a futile attempt to make up the difference.

The future home of our mall butts up against South Walpole Street right across from some Audubon land and right near some brand new mini-mansions. Something tells me the owners of these houses feel differently about the destruction caused by the mall than they did about the carving of their own lots from the woods.

At this time, the construction site looked like a large clearcut with an orange plastic fence around the entire perimeter. Unlike a silvicultural clearcut, no forest trees will ever grow here again. Developers just love to hop on their machines and strip a site bare to create a self-fulfilling prophesy. Potential mall tenants will not sign up unless they can see progress on the future mall, and they can’t giddily visualize the flat-topped big-box stores and acres of hot black petroleum sludge asphalt parking lots with all those damn trees in the way. So, they denude a site as quickly as possible – stripping it absolutely bare - to attract tenants and to get it done as quickly as possible before the locals realize the magnitude of what they’ve done and raise a cry of protest.

I’m sure there are places - and I’m sure there will be many more – where the rape went ahead and no tenants signed on or they backed out, and a community was left with a vast, empty wasteland. I continue to believe this will happen here. The developers recently proudly announced the commitment by a major national big box retailer, but this same company already has a new store just a few miles to the south and will soon be opening another a few miles to the east. Not only is the local market already saturated, but the economy and the future of gasoline prices can’t bode well for retailing.

And for what? Do we really need more places to buy cheap, disposable plastic crap from China? How much are we willing to sacrifice in the name of more shopping? Will one teenager buying the latest sweat-shop fashions ever mourn the loss of yet another woodland? Did the heavy machinery operator say a prayer as he drove his behemoth over the spot where generations of oven birds made their nests? As they ripped the oaks and pines from the earth and pushed them into massive heaps, did anyone ponder how no trees would ever grow there again?

The loss of this forest is not the only thing that saddens me. Sure, as a homeowner, I’d like a break from taxes. Our governments take more and more of our wealth and squander it in so many wasteful and destructive ways. What depresses me is the unimaginative, formulaic ways that we develop places. When it’s built, this mall will look just like every other lifestyle mall that has popped up across America in the last few years. Another mall – lifestyle or otherwise – with its shoddy goods, tawdry entertainment and minimum-wage jobs will do little to enrich the quality of our lives. All we build anymore are places designed to suck the last bit of dwindling wealth from us by amusing us and distracting us and making us feel temporarily good by selling us more unneeded junk.

Imagine what could be done if the same amount of money and energy went into revitalizing an existing downtown area with modern mixed-use development with restaurants, affordable housing, small shops for local merchants and craftspeople, offices for professionals, markets for local produce, banks, post offices and local schools. Nearby could be small factories where people actually make things and have real jobs. Much of it could be powered by renewable energy. After all, New England was largely built with water power. All of it could be connected by a network of walkways and bike paths.

But no, we get more of the same. Cheap, soulless buildings surrounded by impermeable parking lots, gluttonous energy consumption and car-only access. I guess what it comes down to is that we don’t produce anything anymore, we only consume. I looked out over the vast emptiness and wondered if this was the only future we can hope for. Are we destined to live our lives according to the vision of guys that see the world over the blade of a bulldozer?

I was ready for breakfast and some scenery that hadn’t been sculpted with a Caterpillar D-9, so I walked my bike down an unfamiliar dirt trace that disappeared into the woods across the street from the devastation. This soon opened onto a power line right-of-way that I followed to a familiar back road that I knew would lead me toward Moose Hill. I followed it to Walpole Street and I took this to the trail that leads to Allens ledge where I pushed my bike into the woods, out of sight from the street.

I walked up the path to Allens Ledge. This is a nice rock outcrop surrounded by oak-pine forest. A little further up the trail is the bigger and more popular Bluff Head, but I didn’t want to gaze out at Gillette Stadium and the surrounding new Patriot Place mall. This is another prime example of the sort of consumption/entertainment complex that passes for progress in early 21^st-century America, and I just didn’t want to look at any more of that.

From Allens Ledge in August, I can gaze out at the oaks, pines and sky and see no roads, no malls, not even houses. With all the hard rock around me with little bits of moss and grass growing from the cracks I could almost imagine I was back on Camel’s Hump in Vermont or even the Sierra of California. A few small bonsai-like pines cling to the rocks and blue stem grasses grow in small patches of thin soil. There are a few red-cedar trees that are typical of these rocky ledges and a small patch of scrub oak. The rocks themselves are scored with striations in many directions and I can’t help but think some of them must have been left by the continental ice sheets that once covered these hills. The old stone chimney reminded me that people have been enjoying this spot for a very long time.

I sat on the stone, enjoying my sandwich, cantaloupe and coffee. I gazed at the infinite blue sky with a white half moon overhead. There was barely a puff of breeze in the warm, dry air. I was so alone I felt it would be okay to pull off my tee shirt to feel the sun on my skin. No birds sang and the few that flew over seemed to have distant locales on their minds. Big dragonflies patrolled lazily in the soft air above the rock.

The September-like air reminded me that yet another summer season will be drawing to a close and the remainder of my life will be one season shorter. I hoped for a better world in the years ahead but I felt as if we faced years of desolation and darkness before we find the peaceful valleys of our dreams.

Please Note: Don't forget to check out the Moose Hill Notebook for shorter, more frequent posts.

Hedge Fund

As they say, nostalgia ain't what it used to be. Memories of things that once seemed important may fade while other seemingly trivial things can pop to the surface without warning. Sometimes, even something like a simple tree sighting can dust off old memories from the back of the mental bank vault.

Tagging along while my wife was at a conference in Burlington, Vermont this week, I was out on a solo bike ride, enjoying the Vermont countryside and searching for the University of Vermont's Jericho Research Forest. UVM was kind enough to let me live there for a few weeks back in 1976 while I was doing field work along the nearby Winooski River, but I haven't been back since. With the help of the web and a bike map I was able to locate the forest and the old house where I stayed. The house looked somewhat familiar, but I was amazed at how little I remembered about the area and the roads. I must have driven the approaching roads and up the dirt road to that house a few dozen times 32 years ago, and other than the house itself, nothing looked familiar. I reminded myself that a child born on the day I was last there could now be a fully-grown adult with kids of their own. I reflected on how pretty much all of my adult life has happened since those days.

But, wow, I was surprised about how little memory of the area I have. In fact, I have yet to see much of anything in the Burlington area that pops out as being familiar. I did locate the road I used to drive down to get to one of my research areas near St. Michaels College. I walked the bike down the steep gravel road toward the river. The mosquitoes were familiar enough, and reminded me how determined I was to get my work done to endure that misery, but I couldn't identify anything else from those days so long ago. That didn't surprise me as much as my Jericho visit, because 30+ years is a long time on a floodplain.

Anyway, I was nearing the end of my long, leisurely ride when my cell phone rang. It was my buddy from back home, so I walked the bike as we talked. I was on the sidewalk in an older modest Burlington neighborhood on the slopes above the old mill buildings situated on the river. I imagined mill workers lived there until the mills closed in the 1950's or so.

As I ducked under a small street tree in front of one of the houses, I came to a stop. I recognized it as a maple, and it looked a little like the ubiquitous Norway maple (Acer platanoides), but in miniature. The leaves were smaller than those of a Norway maple and three-lobed rather than five. The wings of the seed-bearing samaras stuck out at a 180-degree angle from each other. The bark was distinctive with plates that break up in a way that makes it look corky.

This was a hedge maple (Acer campestre) and there were a few along the same street. It is a small European tree that is common in British hedgerows - hence the name. In America it has been planted as an ornamental, but like the Norway maple, it can escape and seed itself. I've only encountered this species in a few places, but I'll never forget it. Now, I'm not generally a big fan of escaped non-native species, but forgive me if I make an exception for this one case.

When I was a kid on Long Island in New York, there was an entire stand of these trees in our side yard. The soil and climate there must have been especially favorable for this species. Hedge maple is a small tree, growing to only 30 or so feet tall, so the scale of the tree and the forest it can create is just the right size for children. Growing in the open, it tends to be a shrubby, multi-stemmed tree, but growing close together in a stand it can grow reasonably straight. The trees cast a dense shade and little else grows in the understory so, to a small person, the woods seem dark, cool and mossy.

When I was very young, this was “the woods.” I spent hours there exploring and playing. I pitched my old canvas pup tent there. My father built a fish pond on the edge of this miniature forest and there I watched with glee as toads trilled in the springtime. It's where childhood friend David taught me an early lesson about violence by brazenly splitting my scalp open with a rock. My father built a tree house for me there and it's where, inspired by a similar event at the New York World's Fair in about 1965, friend Ricky and I buried a time capsule made from a coffee can. It's where I learned an early lesson about how trees grow. When very young, I stapled little pulleys to two trees and ran a string between them creating a miniature cable car, or something. Years later, I found the staples with the trees growing around them, still only a couple of feet off the ground where I had hammered them, teaching me that trees grew from the tips rather than the roots.

These trees were an every-day part of my life, but I didn't know what they were. I collected the leaves as part of my seventh grade biology project. My mother called them “swamp maples.” I couldn't find the species in any of the tree books I had, so that's what I called it. My teacher told me that was wrong, but didn't tell me what it was. It wasn't until the late 1970's as a graduate student visiting an arboretum in Connecticut that I was thrilled to see the tree and learn its identity as hedge maple. Other than a few visits back home over the past few decades, I'm not sure I've seen this tree anywhere else. It's a pretty nondescript little tree and easy to miss.

I’d like to go back to Cocks Lane in Locust Valley one more time to see my little trees, but I fear what I might find. The last time I drove by there, in about 2002, I was saddened to see how much the neighborhood had changed. A couple of small houses – including the fist house I had lived in, one my father had built in 1950 - had been bulldozed to cram in six mini-mansions. My trees were still there next to another house my father built behind the first and where I lived until I was about 13. I stopped to say hello. They were looking a little cramped and put-upon, but there were still there. I'd like to go back again one more time now that these deeper memories have been reawakened, but maybe some things are better kept as memories.



Please Note: Another post about my trip to Vermont can be found on the Moose Hill Notebook.

Dear Readers

In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.

- from “For the Children” by Gary Snyder

My mind is in a fog lately. Since I started reading books and web posts by James Howard Kunstler during the past few months, everywhere I look I see signs of impending doom. My senses are alert. I listen to the news on the radio. I read the Globe. I look around. Every tidbit about the war, the election, the global food crisis, the energy crisis and the credit crisis falls perfectly into the pattern of collapse that Kunstler predicts. I’ve pretty much always felt it would come to this, but the crisis took longer to get here than I imagined. I couldn’t articulate my concerns in an organized way, but Kunstler gives these issues a structure that shows the interconnectedness of our follies in a way that helps make things clear, and the vision is not a pretty one. Even though they were written a few years ago, his books, particularly The Geography of Nowhere and The Long Emergency, shed a bright light on the errors of our ways.

Just imagine a family of four, five or six in a big new cul-de-sac out in the country. They took out a second mortgage to pay for the two SUV’s in the driveway and the power boat, ATV and jet skis in the three-car garage and the hot tub out back. That wasn’t a problem because the value of the house went up year after year. Mom drives the kids to school, dance class, Gymboree, baseball and soccer and then ferries them to the mall. Dad works in town for a big financial company and drives 50 miles each way because they could get so much more square footage a couple of towns further out.

Of course, no one is going anywhere if the parents can’t drag themselves out of the master bathroom. You see, it’s like a mini-spa in there with heat lamps, whirlpool bath and one of those showers with eight shower heads. The house is so elegant. There are bedrooms and bathrooms for everybody and a special room for every use. It has a grand entrance that is open to vaulted ceilings two stories up.

The kitchen is state-of-the-art with stainless steel appliances and granite countertops. There is a machine for every chore, but luckily there aren’t many chores to do because such a busy family eats out often or does take-out. When they do cook, it’s really easy because everything is pre-packaged, pre-cooked and heats up in the microwave. Cleanup is a snap because all the packaging simply goes in the trash compactor.

The house is always so comfortable with air conditioning in the summer and oil heat in the winter. They never have to bother with opening and closing windows; the thermostat takes care of everything automatically. The kids are too busy to mow the lawn, being so busy with their cell phones, iPods, and all, but Dad doesn’t have to worry either because the lawn guys come every week and keep the sweeping lawnscape perfect and green with their fleet of stand-up mowers and roaring hive of leaf blowers. The sprinklers are on a timer and come on automatically every morning and the latest chemicals prevent those embarrassing weeds.

Now, imagine gasoline at four, five, six dollars a gallon. It costs a hundred bucks just to fill up the Durango. Imagine the monthly payments on those two (or three) adjustable-rate mortgages after interest rates jump up a couple of points. Not only are the payments higher, but as society realizes the unsustainability of this lifestyle and more and more similar houses come on the market, the value of the property will drop and the family will be upside-down on the loans. That is, they will owe more than the house is worth and even if they are able sell, they will still be deep in debt.

Dad’s job at the finance company is looking less secure as the mortgage securities that made them so much money just a few years ago become worthless as more and more people default on loans. The oil truck pulls up to fill the tank with winter on the way, and that first bill of many comes to $1250.

But still, little Sis will simply have a total meltdown if Mom doesn’t score those Hannah Montana tickets, and Dad has plans to drive up to New Hampshire for the big NASCAR race. McCain wants to drill in Alaska. Obama wants to use more crop land to produce corn ethanol. Thanks to the Jimmy Carter implosion of the 1970’s, you can be absolutely certain that not one major candidate will ever don a sweater and sit in front of a wood stove and tell America that they need to wake up and start living like very hard times are just around the corner.

These are the kind of things I find myself thinking about lately. I’m constantly looking at my own life and the lives of those around me and I wonder how things will be in just a few years. I worry about our kids who are just now launching into their own lives. At least they haven’t screwed those lives up yet and I tell them to build lives where they don’t depend on cars and stay out of debt.

I’m not getting into the woods much these days. We are in peak deer tick season and I have zero interest in getting Lyme disease again. I’m doing more cycling this summer, so my weekend mornings are pretty busy anyway. But I think the main reason I’m not coming up with any posts for the Moose Hill Journal is that I’m so preoccupied with the events unfolding around me that my thoughts just aren’t going in that direction.

I feel that we are on the verge of a major turning point for America but the scale and scope of the forces bearing down on us are way more than a simple man like me can ever comprehend. I want to observe the changes and write about them, but it’s all beyond me. I do know that driving Priuses, screwing in compact fluorescent light bulbs, shopping at Whole Foods and putting recycling bins on the curb will not save us. That said, I don’t want to get all preachy and stuff. Glass houses and all that.

So, dear readers, I’m still here and still thinking about things to write about. I just haven’t figured out how I want to do that yet. Until I do, please check back here once in a while and check my Moose Hill Notebook where I post shorter, more scattered thoughts and observations. I would love to read your comments about where you see our world headed and how we can stay ahead of the crushing wheels of history. Until then, I leave you with the closing lines of the poem “For the Children” by Gary Snyder. This wonderfully prescient poem was passed along to me by Robin Andrea of the Dharma Bums and I find myself clinging to these words as a life ring of hope:

stay together
learn the flowers
go light