Getting Outside
Getting Outside Saturday: Haiku with Wild Violets
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Johnny Jump-ups
Getting Outside Saturday: Clappers
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Do you guys know about the journal Ecotone? I’m hoping that if you visit Bill and Dave’s you do. It prints great work, occasionally by a guy named Bill. And it was started by a guy named Dave. I still write an essay for each issue in a feature called “Out of Place.” Here’s this issue’s essay:
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Getting Outside Saturday: Spring Goodies
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It's spring in Maine, and here come the ramps.
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Favorite things. A sunny spring morning, a walk in the woods, a few things to eat (nothing the settlers wouldn’t have had, and much that the Abenaki before them would have had, too). I bring a trowel, tease a handful of ramps from the rich soil near a basswood tree –these wild leeks smell sweetly of mild garlic, milder onion, leeks, sure, something of a shallot. Home, you chop them–the bulbs minced fine-ish, the leaves more course. A little butter in the crepe pan–no a lot butter, and throw the bulb bits in–quickly, they caramelize. The leaves go in next, light and full. Very quickly in the heat and butter they go limp, cooking down the way, say, spinach does–a handful shrinks to a big bite. You could eat Continue reading →
A Night at the Movies: “The Island President”
categories: Cocktail Hour / Don't Talk About Politics / Getting Outside / Movies
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President Mohamed "Anni" Nasheed
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Another trip over to Railroad Square Cinema in Waterville, Maine, to see Jon Shenk’s The Island President, a brand-new documentary featuring the incredibly charming and very courageous (and sadly now former, after threats of violence and a coup d’etat) president of the Maldives, a 400-mile chain of 2000 inexpressibly beautiful (as the film shows) islands off the southwestern tip of India. The movie, though, is sad: the Maldives are in imminent danger of sinking under rising sea levels as global warming proceeds unchecked. The happy part is that a man like Anni Continue reading →
“A Prize I Won By Not Doing Something”
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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The Hunger Game (And How to Win It)
With all due respect to resource depletion, global warming, and over-population, I have come to believe that the greatest environmental threat on the planet is our own minds. They are hungry little fuckers, these brains of ours. “We humans are an elsewhere,” wrote my friend Reg Saner, and boy are we ever. Walk across a college campus these days, as I do every day, and it’s a good bet you won’t make eye contact with a single one of the hundreds of students you pass. They are elsewhere, staring down into their machines, absorbed in urgent phone conversations, ears plugged and eyes glazed. “The hunger of the imagination,” Samuel Johnson called this insatiable desire for more, a desire that springs from a dissatisfaction with what is and from the hope that what comes next will fulfill us in ways it never has before. Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: Costa Rican Critters
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Nice murals, too.
Just a little more from a vacation in tropical nature. Part of the pleasure, of course, was being in the rain forest and on the beaches and in the farmlands with an eleven-year-old, and watching her begin to draw the connections between absolutely everything. Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: Osa Peninsula, Costa Rica
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Rain forest evening
Our trip was vacation. Nothing arduous, small glitches only, comfortable lodging, some of it expensive. Despite which all was exotic, beautiful, elemental, heartening. We started–Juliet, Elysia, and I–with a couple of orienting nights in Alajuela, not too far from the San Jose airport. First morning, Elysia breathed in the heat and light and all the greenery and said, “I love Costa Rica!” And that remained our theme. Second morning, not too early, we took an internal Sansa Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: “Scioto Blues”
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside / Our Best American Essays
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The Scioto and Downtown Columbus
[This essay is from my book Into Woods and originally appeared in The Missouri Review. Later, Harper’s picked up an excerpt for their “Readings” section. It was written in about 1998, and since then I’ve developed a much fonder feeling for Columbus.]
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Scioto Blues
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If you move to Columbus, Ohio, from Farmington, Maine, you will not be impressed by the landscape. It’s flat around Columbus and the pre-prairie rivers move sluggish and brown. In Maine you pick out the height of flood on, say, the Sandy River, by the damage to tree trunks and the spookily exact plane made by ice and roaring current tearing off the lowest branches of riverside trees. In Columbus you pick out the height of flood on the Olentangy or Scioto rivers Continue reading →
Vernal Equinox
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23.4 degrees
Here is the equal night again, so different from that of autumn, which comes dressed in summer. In fact, the first day of spring comes to Maine in high winter drag. Often it comes dressed in snow, thick and wet, mixed with rain.
For me in March most of the pleasure in watching snow accumulate has fled. I decline to shovel the driveway, thinking, Snow’ll be gone soon enough, and pay for that when the slush left over freezes in deep ridges that last weeks in a cold snap. I consider the skis—but the snow is so wet and heavy, and I’ve been thinking about my bicycle, my hiking boots. Soon enough.
But, of course, it’s not soon enough. It’s weeks, sometimes, in grinding cycles of melt and freeze, and melt and freeze again. And again. Time never moves so slowly as in the transition from winter to spring in Maine. By March the mind’s night has got very long, and I have gotten used to it, gotten cozy alone in there, in my thoughts. Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: Learning the Island
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LEARNING THEISLAND
Journal Entries from my first year in the South and My Daughter’s First Year
September 28
The swallow migration is coming through. These shield-like aerodynamic birds dip and shoot over the sea oats like hallucinogenic flecks. Meanwhile the sanderlings work the tideline with their sewing machine bills, searching for mole crabs, while Black Skimmers get active at dusk. The skimmers let loose a noise like the wahh-wahh-wahh. of adults talking on Charlie Brown.
On the way in to work this morning I saw a bumper sticker on the back of a pick-up. Other details hinted that the truck was owned by a hunter, but it was the sticker that really gave it away. It read:
“If it Flies, It Dies.” Continue reading →
