Cocktail Hour
Getting Outside Saturday: For the Birds
categories: Getting Outside
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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 →
Some Stuff I Cut: Two Parties
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More sentences from the cutting room floor of my new book about Abbey and Stegner:
Maybe another way to sum up the differences between Ed Abbey and Wallace Stegner is not by looking at their different books, but at two individual parties each man threw. Stegner was no teetotaler and would let his hair somewhat down at times; he boozed plenty at Bread Loaf and was known in his younger days, according to his biographer Jackson Benson to entertain by singing and “dancing a little soft shoe.” In 1937 he threw a party when he learned he had won a first novel contest sponsored by Little Brown and was awarded $2,500 and the publication of his first book. In Stegner’s fictional version of the party that followed, recreated in his last novel, Crossing to Safety, Larry Morgan, the Stegner character buys more bottles of booze than he ever has before in his life, and his friends pop champagne and make toasts to his glorious future. But the party—“quite a party”—has an unexpected end when his wife goes into labor. Two days later their son Page is born.
Stegner’s party, then, began with the start of his career and ended with the birth of his first child. Or as he put it in his unpublished autobiography: “My new family responsibilities and my new literary life began together.” The fledgling novelist and father was twenty-eight years old.
Some Stuff I Cut: I Apologize To Nevada
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Driving up to Wallace Stegner’s old house
Over the last week the editing axe fell hard (see my thought bubble above), particularly on the sections where I was travelling from place to place. Like this one:
Outside of Salt Lake I pass through the otherworldly landscape where Wallace Stegner spent his teenage summers, the lakeside resorts of Saltair and Magna. Sucking in the salty sulfur egg smell, I know there is an ocean-like lake somewhere out there through the cattails and the mist. Suddenly from out of the fog a sharp-shinned hawk materializes, shooting across my line of sight ten feet in front of my windshield. When the lake ends I leave one strange world and enter another: up into a looming red moonscape topped with alpine peaks.
In short order I pass a hundred sandhill cranes dipping their bills into a field of grass, then the iced-up flats of Bonneville where the speed records fall. Range after range of mountains rise ahead, and soon I am feeling like I should write a letter of apology to the state of Nevada. I always thought you were a dry strange state with a gambling problem, it would begin. Perhaps you are, but you are also varied and beautiful. O Nevada, I am sorry. I stare out at crazy mountains with their long shaded legs stretching down to valleys. Sunlight fills those valleys to the brim like tea in teacups. Denuded hills that roll on and on, and crevices of shadow and shade that run down those hills like creeks. I see snow and icy passes and salt flats and a sky as big as any sky I’ve ever seen.
Bad Advice Wednesday: Be an Elf to Yourself
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Elf Week continues at Bill and Dave’s. Here’s Nina:
My dear friend Abby Jones has owned this card for years, since the early eighties. It was given to her by Mabel Gray, the grandmother of one of her best friends. Mabel lived in Putney, Vermont, the town where Abby grew up and we both went to high school. It was well-known that if you knocked on Mabel’s door, she would likely give you a homemade chocolate chip cookie. But Mabel knew Abby better than she knew the rest of us, so she gave her something infinitely more valuable.
I’ve never visited Abby anywhere that she hasn’t had this card tacked up somewhere, on a wall or on her refrigerator. Abby has also been known to remind people of its wisdom when the card is not handy. Thanks to all these years of friendship, the phrase sometimes pops into my head when I need it most. “Be an elf to yourself!” What could be more cheerful?
Our Elves, Ourselves (or, Game of Thorns)
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In the last week I have been a traveler to mystical lands. Elves, trolls, dragons, pixies, you name it I’ve seen it.
It started when I brought my daughter to the Great Wolf Lodge outside of Charlotte. She liked the water park but loved Magi Quest, a game that required that she wander around the hotel and point her magic wand at various dragons and trolls and fulfill quests that garnered her runes and gold. When they gave her her wand (thirty bucks even before I bought her the 17 dollar wolf “topper” for the wand handle) they asked her what she wanted her magic name to be. She replied, with little hesitation, “Whisper Claw.” (That’s my girl.)
My nephew Noah, who is 16, came too and once, while he was chaperoning Whisper Claw from the Twisted Forest to the Pixie’s Perch, I tried to wander off to find a quiet place to call my editor. There is noise everywhere in Great Wolf Lodge—from the din of screaming excited children to the wolf howls that are the place’s theme song to the singing of the animatronic “forest” show where the lost boy pops out of the log to the periodic roar of the enchanted bear on one of the Magi Quest video screens. When I asked at the front desk if there was any place I could find to make a business call (we had no cell service in our room), they suggested the conference center at the hotel’s far end. I trudged the eight miles or so down to the center and opened the double doors to find that this week the center was home to the Universal Cheerleader Association, a thousand jumping and screaming and flipping and cartwheeling teenage girls. Continue reading →
Serial Sunday: Crash Barry’s “Tough Island: True Stories from Matinicus Island” (Episode 13)
categories: Cocktail Hour
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“You’d better tough it out.”
“My hand is killing me,” I told Donald on Halloween. “Something is wrong with my middle finger.”
“Well, you better tough it out, ‘cuz we can’t stop now,” he replied. “Not with this weather coming.”
We had less than 24 hours’ warning before the awful weather that would be immortalized in Sebastian Junger’s book, The Perfect Storm. All the islanders were in a twitter because Matinicus still bore scars from the winter storm that wreaked havoc in 1978. Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: Art in the Grain Shed (a photo haiku)
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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It’s already been ten years, or more.
A Couple of Writers who Teach Talk About the Common Core and the Fate of the Essay
categories: Cocktail Hour / Don't Talk About Politics / Reading Under the Influence
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Sonya Huber
Ioanna Opidee
Sonya Huber and Ioanna Opidee have been meeting for over a year to plot and draft b\ook chapters and essays about teaching the essay—to little kids! to teenagers! to everyone!–and we sat down to try to sum up what we’re doing and how you can help. Our conversations themselves often feel like meandering, experimental essays, so we decided to record ourselves talking, to try to capture the chaos and share it with you today . . . Continue reading →
Lundgren’s Book Lounge: “Drinking with Men,” by Rosie Schaap
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Rosie Schaap
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Rosie Schaap’s memoir, Drinking With Men, turns a number of social conventions topsy turvy, the most prominent being the reassuring (for some) perception that people who spend time in bars are social degenerates and quite possibly, alcoholics. Schaap is unabashed in her praise for the unique sense of community that can be found in the neighborhood tavern and unapologetic for the role that a pint and the warming effects of Irish whiskey can play in fostering that elusive sense of conviviality. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: A Life Stored in Clutter (Celebrate)
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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What else is a dresser for?
I am a pack rat, a scrounger, a dumpster diva. A Sanford and Daughter. An Esty-a-holic. I hide it well, as many functional addicts do. If you walked into my kitchen for a glass of water, you’d find an empty sink. You could open the cabinet and select from an orderly, kitschy assortment of airport “state/city” mugs, odd goblets, snifters and tumblers. Continue reading →
