Getting Outside
Getting Outside Saturday: Booktopia, Petoskey Michigan (a photo decastich)
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An intermediate milkweed species, lakeside
Getting Outside Saturday: Morning Glory (a photo haiku)
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A Sunday Drive with Death in Cameroon
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Claire and I made a tree with banana leaves. It stood in the middle of our hot living room. We could have asked for air conditioning– French speaking teachers were in demand, and we could have asked anything. Except snow. Although it was Christmas Eve, it wasn’t even raining outside our adobe house, lost in the jungle of Southern Cameroon. Ubiquitous, impenetrable, the jungle was like an ocean. It covered half the country. We heard it ended two hundred miles north. The next morning, we loaded the car and headed toward Douala, a major city on the Atlantic coast. Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: High Summer Wildflowers (a photo haiku)
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Joe Pye weed in the wind
Getting Outside Saturday: Moss (A Photo Haiku)
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On Barred Island. Off the coast of Maine, but not by much.
Getting Outside Saturday: For the Birds
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My latest “Wild Blog” weaves together two topics: the fate of Atlantic puffins and a great biography of Roger Tory Peterson by Doug Carlson.
Last month, when I read that Atlantic puffins were threatened, I had an immediate and visceral reaction. It wasn’t to form a Pro-Puffin League, or to post something about saving the puffins on Facebook, or to organize a Puffin Power March on Washington. It was instead to remember the moment on that small boat off the rocky, wind-blown coast of Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton when I first saw these strange, spectacular, and, by human standards, silly-looking birds. It was a moment of surprise, intense and joyful as new sightings tend to be, and as I read about the puffins’ demise it came back to me as if it were happening again, right then and there. It had been an oddly personal encounter—though not for the birds of course: if I was anything to them it was an annoyance, some guy with binoculars staring them down. But to me they were something else entirely.
One thing they were was an invitation into a new world, and a new way of thinking about this one. I’m currently reading Roger Tory Peterson, a terrific biography by Douglas Carlson. Peterson, the founding father of modern birding and the creator of the first real birders’ field guides, grew up wandering the woods near Jamestown, New York, and from an early age took a kind of instinctive, wild joy in birds. Born in 1908, Peterson’s joy would become his profession, despite his immigrant father’s dismay that his son wasted all his time on a hobby that would never amount to everything. Enraptured, Peterson responded to the birds he saw by filling notebooks with observations, drawing and painting them, and photographing them with an ancient, unwieldy camera.
What is it about birds that captures so many of us? That moment of flight, maybe: a moment that combines the artistic and the athletic, as well as surprise. The discovery of worlds beyond the troubling human world. And the sheer vicarious pleasure of briefly getting outside of oneself. Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: Art in the Grain Shed (a photo haiku)
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It’s already been ten years, or more.
