Getting Outside
Getting Outside Saturday: A Dog Day Photographic Crown of Sonnets
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Cheerful Rosy!
Getting Outside Saturday: Things I Noticed When I was Five, and This Morning, Too
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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smoothed brick, barred owl egg, medicine bottle
Getting Outside Saturday: Summer Swimming
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Ahh. Drew and Sarah’s dock at Staples Pond, with sky–photo by Elysia.
Ah. Last summer I couldn’t swim because of the neck operation. It just hurt too much to pull water with my hands, to roll my shoulders, to turn my neck from side-to-side. I could wade in and float, but. So. It’s a special pleasure this summer to drive the three miles to Drury or Staples and visit with the McNairs or Slartons and swim out to the center of whichever little pond and tread water with the loons. You might also be with dogs, you might also be with friends, but when the water is in your ears and you are stroking forward you are very much alone in your thoughts, Continue reading →
Dave at Doe Branch: A Photo Haiku
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Never to be seen again.
Getting Outside Saturday: Summer Pleasures, a Photo Haiku
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Poppies rock.
Bug Haiku: North Carolina Night Insects
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Luna Moth
Getting Outside Saturday: Fern Walk and Turtle Sign
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Sensitive Fern
Spring Freshet
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Beaver canal and ostrich ferns.
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We get ’em in Maine spring and fall, these days of hard rain and then the floods. The old timers called them freshets. A famous fall one was the pumpkin freshet of 1868, when high water took out all the Sandy River bridges (a tradition–quite a few have gone down over the years) and stripped the fields of pumpkins, which took off in the thousands and filled the ponds behind dams downstream. Consensus was to fish them out and divide them up among the farmers. I took the photo above the other day in high spirits and sunshine and low water, just a scruffy spot over a beaver canal, Temple Stream back behind and out of sight. t I took the photo below 24 hours ago after wading up to my thighs where the path used to be, Temple Stream ascendant. It has not stopped raining since. I could get a shot of even higher water, but I’d have to swim. Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: Puffins.
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Puffin, looking worried as usual, Machias Seal Island.
Last weekend we attended the Down East Birding Festival, which took place down in Lubec, Cutler, Baring, Eastport and many others spots at the farthest east point of the good ole’ USA. Highlights were a boat ride ten miles straight south to Machias Seal Island, which both Canada and the U.S. claim. There’s a light out there and a very serious birding fellow, a pirate of a man, a Canadian who watches the rookery and the amazing migratory fall outs of warblers and just about any other kind of bird you can think of. They put you into a bird blind, just a plywood booth full of little hatch-door windows, and you get an hour within a few feet of the birds. Razorbills, Arctic Terns, Common Murres, and Atlantic Puffins, also various seagulls. The puffins are comical, busy Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: Remembering a Couple of Fine Ol’ Dogs
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Prince Desmond and new puppy Wally, c. 1993
One of the great pleasures of writing is the way incidentals are captured. In my collection Into Woodsthere are glimpses throughout the essays of my late great dogs Desi and Wally, who were mutts, no better than that, though Desi had pretensions. We’d take them to the city and because they were both black and white people would ask the breed. We invented one: Muzzman Terriers. Because one of Desi’s thousand nicknames was Muzzman. One woman, hearing that, exclaimed, “Oh, I ADORE Muzzman Terriers!” Anyway, poking through Into Woods I found this Continue reading →
