Getting Outside
Getting Outside Saturday: Na Pali Sea Cave Sojourn (a Hawaiian photo haiku)
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Bottom of a 1200 foot waterfall ending in a sea cave, wow.
Getting Outside Saturday: Where’s Bildo?
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Progress of Spring: New Arrivals
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Common Merganser pair
A wave of warm air from the south arrived yesterday, and with it a wave of birds. In the last weeks they’ve come one by one–Bluebird, Red-Winged Blackbird, Grackle, Cowbird, Hooded Merganser, Mallard, Wood Duck. But yesterday a whole crowd came at once: Belted Kingfisher, Common Merganser, White-Throated Sparrow, 1000 Robins, Ruby-Crowned Kinglet, Canada Goose and more. Also, we spotted a fold fleck or two on the wings of a male Goldfinch (likely in celebration of Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer). And enjoyed all the birds that stayed the winter, Chickadee chief among them. The sump pump is running, the stream has broken out, the drifts are very slowly melting.
I still need snowshoes for the morning circuit, but today it was all fresh–a hard, cold rain, the stream nearly out of its banks with snowmelt, a beaver swimming the banks against the current, examining the stream-side vegetation, the woods full of birdsong.
Getting Outside Saturday: Happy Anniversary to Bill and Dave’s
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Bill and Dave in the early days.
Tomorrow, April 6, marks four years since our first post on Bill and Dave’s. Four years! I can hardly believe it. Not that time passes so fast–in fact, it seems to crawl. But that we’ve kept it up this long. Post after post, image after image! And all with no commercial intent, no advertising. Except for ourselves, of course. I put today’s post under the Getting Outside category because Bill and Dave’s was and remains a conscious effort to get outside the confines of the book, the page, the mores of traditional publishing, the dreams we’d had of what our writing lives would be like, and to find our way in the new reality, which is at least in part digital. Well, we’re still lost, but it’s been a lot of work. I mean fun. We’ve attracted thousands of hits a week, sometimes thousands a day, and millions in four years. Those first weeks we were excited to get fifty, then a hundred. Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: Progress of Spring I (a photo haiku)
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Serial Sunday: Crash Barry’s illustrated TOUGH ISLAND, Complete!
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside / Guest Columns / Reading Under the Influence / Serial Sunday
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The Complete, Illustrated Tough Island
Chapter One
March 1991
I’d just finished a stint as a sailor in the Coast Guard, fighting the War on Drugs and the War on Haitian Refugees. No money. No job. No leads. A rudderless 23-year-old couch-surfer crossing back and forth over the state line between Portsmouth and Kittery. Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: The Garden Keeps on Giving (a photo haiku)
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Purple Peruvian Potatoes
Getting Outside Saturday: Flying in Alaska
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Michael McBride
The throttle moves smoothly forward with the pressure from my left hand, as my right hand pulls the control stick back between my legs as far as it will go. The engine roars like a startled lion as it advances to twenty-three hundred rpm, and the floatplane lunges forward across the still surface of the remote mountain lake. Continue reading →
