Hereford mountain is at the top to the right of the vista. The view then moves to the left with each subsequent picture, ending with Mount Monadnock in New Hampshire just above. The view is southerly.
You probably already know that if you click on a photo, it will expand to full screen.
(And yes, I can spell. It’s just that I follow a different tradition. Stubbornly, it seems.)
The dreaded weekend has come. The end of summer. A cacophony (strictly speaking a ‘murder’) of crows announced it this morning.
Oh, sure, we can assure ourselves that September can be the best of summer still, but that’s bravado, positive thinking gone rogue. Realistically, we know the light is failing. Vegetable gardens started telling us that weeks ago. Here at least, at 43.7° N. where the squash and cucumber vines have died back and the tomatoes are refusing to ripen. I can no longer count on light at 6 a.m. and the evening moves faster into night.
There were more swallows than ever sweeping across the sky two evenings ago, as they fatten up to cross the big lake and leave these shores. This evening, they may be gone. And it doesn’t help that I know they will come back to Capistrano on March 19th next year. It’s at 33° N and the swallows take another 40 days to get here.
Autumnal, that’s the word. ‘An early autumn walks the land/ And chills the breeze/And touches with her hand/The summer trees….’ etc. ( Courtesy Johnny Mercer) I would say it is all the more affecting because I am in the autumn of my life, but that would be false. The autumn of my life, I glimpse only in the rear view mirror. While I sometimes question how many more springs there are left, I never ask how many falls.
This weekend, the skies above are rent by low flying fighter jets, as the annual air show gets underway. While there are those who love the thrill of a group of jets roaring just above rooftop, I am not one of them, although I admit there is no need for coffee and the pumping adrenaline more than offsets the weary wintery-ness of age.
In the spirit of the occasion, let us consider Labour Day weekends past. Here in at 43.7° N., school begins on the Tuesday after Labour Day now as it did over 70 years ago when I started. My mother and I had planned that I would wear my sailor dress, light blue with a navy blue sailor’s collar and a narrow red stripe, and she would walk with me, holding my hand and teach me how to cross the street in our little town. The best laid plans and all that. Turned out my mother was far away in a maternity ward of the hospital that morning when I woke up. I was outraged. How could she? I was fed breakfast by my cousin next door and towed unwillingly to school by the grade 3-er across the street. Very early indeed, in case her friends saw her with my lowly grade 1-self, sailor dress or not.
The upside of this was that every Labour Day thereafter I got to celebrate my sister’s birthday. In addition, my mother’s betrayal led me to bond with Miss Graham, my teacher, to such an extent that I continued returning to school for the next 50 years, as student and teacher.
The year that I gave that up going back to school the day after Labour Day was so traumatic that I could deal with it only by setting out to drive across the continent to Los Angeles. Crossing the border in my heavy laden Tercel I was knocked sideways by the American border guard. (Metaphorically that is.) He was worried about whether I had green apples and where my ex-husband was at the moment. No and don’t know. He successfully banished all first-day-of-school nostalgia quite out of my head.
Driving across the continent by yourself takes a while, the sun streaming in through the driver’s side window, day after day. Mind boggled by the wide rivers and the deep canyons and the endless oppressive desert. Terrified of falling asleep at the wheel, of taking a wrong turn on a freeway. My expensive car phone without service most of the time. Then just so tired, I had to hole up and sleep in a well air-conditioned ‘better’ motel where the furniture wasn’t bolted to the floor. When I finally emerged and drove down off the Santa Monica Freeway to glimpse the Pacific, I had left my school self behind. But what did I discover in my daughter’s house? No not green apples! My ex-husband! Just what the border guard feared. A reconstitution of a family separated for 15 years for the purpose of defrauding the U.S. government. Somehow.
This year, I have other plans. My sister and I are going to return to the mountains of Quebec’s Eastern Townships where we were born. Her birthday treat. Not that there is family there any more. Well, maybe one. Eighty eight he’d be, if still extant. And the old house we loved isn’t tidy and white any more. The barn is just a heap, a mound of earth where the ramp to the haymow was. My grandfather’s fields, cleared with such killing effort, have been put back to trees. Unbelievably, actually planted with trees! You can barely see our slope-shouldered mountain for the woods. Nevertheless, we will drive the gravel roads and breathe the spruce air and feel our native earth beneath our feet.
And these two one-upon-a-time teachers will take solace in an excellent hotel on Lake Massawippi where the furniture is definitely not bolted to the floor.
Stewart Lake near Mactier is one of the countless lakes that dot the Muskoka Region of Ontario, Canada, about 2 hours from Toronto. It is, real estate agents will assure you, a lesser lake, the greater and pricier lakes being Muskoka, Joseph and Rousseau. But Beauty has no truck with such opinions. Beauty serves the light.
For the past week, I observed Stewart Lake from its southern end, Kilty Bay. At dawn, it was as smooth and clear as a mirror. By mid-morning it was beginning to darken and ruffle under a NW breeze, the bane of sun umbrellas. As the sun went down, the breeze fell and the water began to reflect the sky, fading gradually back to silver as the trees blackened in the background, a black on silver silhouette. Some evenings, sunset glowed pink at the other end of the lake, deepening and deepening into a narrow band of vivid colour on the western horizon. One spectacular night, the entire sky turned mauve and the deep purple.
True a lake is watery as well as light filled and the fragrance of eau du lac haunted me night and day. Just breathing it seemed to heal the urban soul, beset this summer by power outages and road closures. It smelled like water lilies and wet cedar and earth and wilderness. (Well pseudo wilderness at least.)
It was home to a sizable otter and its frolicksome offspring and largeish fish that came up to feed at dusk and made undulating patterns like lesser Lochness monsters. A large hare scampered down for a drink. The deer, however, kept to themselves in the woods.
Stewart Lake has a squishy muddy bottom, an acquired taste for toes. It had very few motor boats while we were there, so kayaks and canoes could drift along the shore silently, an especially pleasurable experience when someone else is paddling. The tariff I paid was comedy: I sat in the bow and attempted to push off from the dock. The canoe didn’t move but I glided gracefully and silently off the seat onto my bum, feet in the air.
“Wait,” cried my sister Georgia when I had righted myself. “You don’t have a life jacket.”
No problem, we all agreed. If we tipped, I could walk back on the lake bottom.
Muddy, shallow and entirely beautiful!
(Click on pictures to enlarge.)
I had to visit the woods down the street from my house twice before I figured out why the song birds had fallen silent.
Usually the cardinal is filling the place with his tuneful whistle, bright and loud enough to be heard no matter where I am. And robins announce their territories, one after the other as I pass them, less lyrical than the cardinals, but no less insistent. The red winged black birds not only sound out their squashed whistle, they are not above dive bombing me for extra emphasis. I know that their broods have hatched and fledged and left the nest, but their total silence baffled me.
On my first walk of the week, I did hear a mewling sort of call and looking up saw a brown bird perched on a high branch. I have since identified it as a catbird. I would have preferred to call it a mockingbird, a close relation, but the mockingbird that usually sings its rhapsodies here in the summer has not returned this year. If it had, I would know. I love the sound and I can hear it even in my sleep.
The louder and more puzzling cry came from high up and echoed across the woods. It was a long initial scream and then a drop or slur downward for a shorter sound.
As I began my homeward stretch on my second walk, I saw a red tailed hawk swoop to land in the tallest tree beside the trail. I had my answer. This hawk has taken up residence and the song birds have wisely fallen silent.
To hear the cry : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAXnk3w39Ow
A few minutes into the woods, I come upon a sunny glade where one robin is singing from a hidden perch. I go down the sloping path to the little stream bed, almost dry now but still muddy from last Monday’s torrential downpour. I come out of the woods onto mown grass and stop, confounded. I should be able to cross this open area and begin the climb up the path to the ridge, but the opening is completely surrounded by impenetrable bushes. I go back. No, this is definitely the way. I stand and consider.
Gradually, it dawns on me that the storm has brought down a young oak and what looks like a bush is the tree’s crown. Looking closer, I see that there is a barely discernible path around it. I brush through the foliage and come out onto the trail again. A few feet farther on, another small tree’s top forces me on another bushy detour.
I come around its bend and find myself staring into the face of a young stag. He is standing in the middle of the grassy trail and gazing at me. His antlers are about 5 inches long, he is very lean and completely unafraid. He seems to be trying to figure out what kind of creature I am. We stand gazing at each other. I don’t move.
But of course, I can’t maintain that stillness. I reach into my pocket to take out my phone and as I look down to put it on camera, he moves soundlessly away and vanishes into the woods.
Can you see him? Click on the picture to expand.
Everything is changed. The rhubarb has bolted. The choke cherries have ripened.
And a new species of flowering weed has attracted a host of tiny ants.
The path along the wire fence above the settling ponds is so overgrown I can hardly find it and there are more fallen obstacles.
When I come down onto what should be the meadow, the plants are as high as my shoulder and I feel completely disoriented again.
Nearer the river the milkweed flowers are about to open, to the delight, no doubt, of the monarch butterflies.
I can’t get to my usual river view because the willow is knee deep in water.
I can still make out the swan billing up reeds to mend her nest on the other side of the river, but only just. (Expand the picture and you will see her white dot below the apartment building.)
As I walk back up the paved path in the sunlight, a doe silently flies across in front of me and disappears into the copse on the other side.
Around the bend, I come upon a fallen silver maple, 50 feet long.
Why are the deer awake in mid-day? The answer shivers in the air. A few miles away, people are racing million dollar cars, very noisily around a closed circuit.
I don’t regret that anymore than I regret the fallen trees. The woods is an organism, a whole thing, that thrives and dies, decays and germinates. So is the city. The race fans and the deer and this Sunday walker, taking sylvan therapy, are all parts of that larger organism.
Anna’s cherry tree from the roof of her kitchen.
Western Tiger butterfly on screen door in Los Angeles.
Six years later, I finally get a look at my river from the high cliff on the other side and find it has an eastern branch that I have not been able to see from the west bank. A long island of rushes blocks the view.
Rush barrier seen from west bank.
The riotous fuchsia and pink of early May have faded and gone as has the purple lilac. The white spirea and mock orange and apple blossoms ditto. This week I saw only the Japanese tree lilac, which I managed to get a picture of. I knew it was a lilac because of the shape of its leaf, but it was not in my Trees of North America, so I had to find it on-line.
The other blossoms I saw were on two tall trees, one on Annette and the other on Davenport. I thought I remembered that the leaf was that of a catalpa (Northern Catalpa). I had long ago learned that on a nature walk in Rondeau Park. I stopped twice on my drive home to have a closer look at the two trees I had noted, but traffic and rain have so far prevented a picture.
The flowers are like tiny orchids with four petals and red stamens that stain the petals yellow and draw the eye into their heart. The leaves are about 4 inches across and smooth edged, plain as the palm of a hand and pointed. The trees are over 60 ft. high, I think. There are many beautiful pictures on-line, but none that are shareable here.
Once again they are an introduced species that not everyone cares for. The Ontario government calls catalpa ‘invasive’ and recommends that you plant a native species instead. Too late, too late, O bureaucrat! Because of someone’s ill-advised decision 50 year ago, I can have an exquisite moment just outside a traffic lane.
I mean ‘deadwood’ in the nicest possible way.
My local woods is part of an oak savannah that borders the river and once stood much closer to the shore of Lake Ontario. The trees are rooted in undulating sand hills, which are themselves the remnants of a prehistoric lake. Perhaps it is their loose footing that brings so many trees down. Once down, they lie where they fell. Even if they block a well-used path, the parks department let them be. Their decay is imperceptible but sure. The deadwood is host to insects and seedlings and whatever else thrives on it. Today is ideal decaying weather – very hot and humid. This is what I saw on my walk.
The tree above was undermined by a tiny trickle of a brook. The same trickle took down the next tree, a tall one. Its crown fell across the usual path and it took me several months to discover the detour around it.
Someone has ill-advisedly fashioned a rail of dead branches, certainly not a parks person.
There are, thank goodness, no “Use at Your Own Risk” signs nor should there be walking aids. Wood-walkers are made of hardier stuff.
Some oaks hang on valiantly in spite of past trauma.
Meanwhile new trees just planted near the river are loving this extremely wet June.
Today, June 21, 2013 is the Summer Solstice. Summer officially began at 1:03 EDT. It is the longest day of the year, here in the Northern Hemisphere. It was light at 5 a.m. where I live and although the sun will set just after 9 p.m., there will be light well after that. In Sweden it will never really get dark and in Edinburgh barely.
I like to hike up Solstice Canyon to the little waterfall on this day.
But this year I have had to send delegates instead. They assure me the falls is still there.
It is just above the ruins of the Roberts house that fell victim to wildfire years ago in spite of its deep, natural pool.
What a great place to perform Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream: Titania, Oberon and the fairies in the rocky grotto, the workmen, Quince, Bottom, et al rehearsing their play on the colorful tiles that were the kitchen’s, the erstwhile lovers who have run away from Athens on the gravel path, Puck flitting between, bewitching the wrong people into love, Bottom saddled with an ass’s head proving irresistible to the exquisite Titania. But they have to be quick, so quick, because it is the shortest night and this is a fleeting dream.
Failing this, do something unexpected to celebrate the light.
It rained heavily all morning while I read the weekend papers, all lights on to brighten the gloom. Then the rain grew lighter and at some imperceptible point, stopped altogether and the sun began to break through. By late afternoon, it was a real June day. I knew it would be too wet to go up through the woods to my favourite walk on the ridge trail, so I chose the paved bicycle path instead.
It turns out that I don’t need to go into the woods because it is breathing out on either side of the path, a moist, woody, green exhalation like a blessing. A stiff breeze draws my eyes upward. I have not realized how tall the trees are until now nor how many of them are poplars. The wind catches the tops, tossing them first one way and then another, moving wave-like across the height. The poplars sing as they stir. Poplars have always spoken to me. They stood close in by the first home I remember and danced in slight air currents when all else was still.
The path emerges from the shade of the woods to a crescent of mown lawn lying open to the sun. I go as far as the culvert that carries the little brook under the path. The brook edges the woods here, dividing it from the lawn, flowing under ferns and low branches. Today it is babbling busily with the runoff. I wish I could capture its bubbling music.
One cardinal has been singing as I walked and I catch a glimpse of his vivid red and his crested head as he leads me away from his nest. I cannot follow him. I do not fly.
The half hour’s walk has been quiet and contented, easy and relaxed.
Earlier in the day, I listened to author James Lasdun being interviewed mainly about his recent memoir Give Me Everything You Have, the story of his 5 year ordeal at the hands of a cyber stalker, a writer and former student whom he calls Nazrin. Initially Lasdun helped her by sending her novel of life in repressive Iran to his editor, but then Nazrin turns on him, accuses him of stealing her book and selling it to other Iranian writers who publish her stories. She goes on to accuse him on “Comments” of drugging and sexually assaulting women. She caps this by emailing him increasingly violent anti-Semitic threats. None of it is apparently bad enough to merit police action, particularly since Nazrin has left New York City for Los Angeles and is outside of Lasdun’s available police jurisdiction.
Lasdun’s mind is more and more taken up with the harassment. He becomes obsessed with it. He begins writing an account of what is happening as documentation and the account morphs into a book.
One of the central images he uses in the book is that of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The Green Knight rode into the dining hall and challenged the Knights of the Round Table to cut off his head, promising that in a year and a day, he would in turn, cut off his beheader’s head, a give-me-everything-you’ve-got challenge if ever there was one. Sir Gawain beheads him. The Green Knight takes his head under his arm and rides away. Now the real story begins.
Since Lasdun published his book, several other people have contacted him to say that Nazrin has also stalked them. Meanwhile she has stopped communicating. Now there are moments, Lasdun says,when he realizes that life can be inconsequential.
He means that life does not have to be full of high drama and desperate struggle. It does not have to be full of significance and fraught with conflict. Moments can be ordinary and forgettable. He did not have to explain what he meant. You could hear the relief in his voice
Having had an interesting life and having spent a good deal of it dodging and weaving in expectation of the Green Knight’s revenge, I was grateful to be reminded that life can be peacefull and I carried that comfort with me as I took a walk on a breezy late afternoon in mid June.
115 journals 