Cocktail Hour
The Big Primal and the small primal
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 2 comments
Here my latest post from my Wild Life blog at OnEarth.com Please check out the OnEarth site for the best in environmental reporting.
Last Friday, as Tropical Storm Andrea bore down on the Carolina coast, I sat out in the writing shack I’ve built behind my house and watched as the storm moved in. The shack is sited on the edge of a salt marsh; soon after I entered, the marsh grasses started thrashing about wildly. Then the wind picked up even more, until it began shaking the red cedar outside my door as if it didn’t like that tree one bit. There was a sticky expectancy in the air: something you could probably say, in general, about this part of the country at this time of the year. It wasn’t just that Andrea was coming. It was that Andrea, the first major tropical storm of 2013, was effectively announcing the arrival of another hurricane season—which is always an anxious time for us here on the Carolina coast.
It’s an anxiousness that everyone in the mid-Atlantic and Northeast had probably better get used to feeling as well. At first, the National Weather Service had been predicting that Andrea could cause flooding as far north as Philadelphia. New York City activated its flash-flood plan, sending out alerts via cell phone. Though most of the damage Andrea caused was limited to Florida, where it had been at its strongest, it played hopscotch up the East Coast all the way to Maine as it tapered off into a mere major rainstorm.
Writing from Inside: “Best Friends,” by W. Wrighter
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
comments: 10 comments
[This piece arrived from the following prompt: “Write about a person, an object, or a place over a period of years, landing briefly to examine it, then fast-forwarding a few years to see it afresh.” W. Wrighter chose to look at her changing “best friends” over the course of her life. It’s the story of a downward spiral that ends on a hopeful note, despite the final landing spot–MW.]
Best Friends, by W. Wrighter
She was younger by four years, my only playmate, the one who was spared from beatings by my back, shared secrets and whispers, the one I would die to protect, at age seven
…my sister Continue reading →
Happy Aquatic Father’s Day: A Photo-Essay
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 4 comments
I’m posting this one as a Father’s Day gift to myself. These pictures must be almost nine years old now, but they are still some of my favorite of Hadley as a baby. They are from a visit to the house of a friend who lives on a lake in Massachusetts. They were taken by another friend, Mark Honerkamp (see his recent post here). Hadley, by the way, has given me her permission to post these.
Getting Outside Saturday: Why I Climb
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
comments: 1 comment
Rosie on the wall
I started dancing at age 4, first ballet, then tap and ballet, then just tap, then tap and climbing, and then just climbing. I know I stopped being a dancer and became a climber when I was 14. But I don’t know when I started feeling like a climber—that could’ve been earlier. My dad taught me how to climb (starting when I was seven) and his dad taught him how to navigate the mountains and in turn my grandfather’s dad taught him how to enjoy the outdoors, I suppose. My dad finds solace in the mountains along with his dad, hiking through the snow, ice and sometimes rock of the North Cascades in Washington. For me, well, I find solace there too, but prefer to be high up on the vertical spires of granite, sandstone, and limestone protruding from the spine of Mother Earth herself. We could be called the evolution of the vertical life, moving forever upward in our quest for freedom in nature. But this process hasn’t been generational in the sense that climbing on its own has been passed down to me over the years. Rather the need for adventure has been passed on to me, the unadulterated respect for the environment and the continued quest for freedom. Continue reading →
Edgerton on Fatherhood, Edgerton on Film
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 1 comment
A couple of days ago my colleague Clyde Edgerton charmed the world on the CBS morning show with his performance HERE.
The book Clyde was pimping for can be found here and still special ordered in time for Father’s Day (or maybe not at this point–but try).
What isn’t as well known is that Clyde’s television and film career has spanned decades. Some of his best work came in small, independent films like the one HERE in which he portrays Paris Review Founding Editor George Plimpton in an epic battle of one-on-one with Ecotone Founding Editor David Gessner.
Movie Night: Star Trek, Where Men Have Boldly Gone Before, Happily
categories: Cocktail Hour / Movies
comments: 5 comments
Both are bold, neither are men!
A tribble makes a brief but important appearance in the new Star Trek adventure, Star Trek Into Darkness. Part of the importance of the role of this small ball of fluff is that it indicates a plot point without which the movie would shriek to a halt. The other part of its importance is that it shows us precisely the tone that the new movie is aiming for, so we can all quit worrying.
There have been plenty of hints already, a lot of them in the previous movie, 2009’s Star Trek, where we first met the current cast, portraying the familiar starship crew as babies. A lot of audience time was spent studying the young actors, asking how close they came to the old guys; fortunately the answer was, pretty darned close, and they did it in a relaxed and warm-hearted way that avoided any charge of gimmickyness, if that’s a word. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Tend Your Garden
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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I’ve been in the garden a lot these last weeks, enjoying being able to, for one thing, but also getting beds ready and planting and even harvesting: greens galore, and asparagus, and spring garlic, and parsnips, Jerusalem artichokes, radishes, leaves of perennial herbs. The garlic I planted last October before book tour, the lettuce in late February: seeds on snow in a cold frame. The asparagus twenty years ago. Twenty years! I dug a ditch and filled it with composted cow manure from my generous neighbor, dropped the crowns in, buried them, covered the soil with straw. A year later, first shoots. I ate only one–you’ve got to let that plant develop. Second year, three or four spears. Third year a couple of meals. And as much as I could eat most years after that, a lot of it just sliced off below the soil line, brushed on my sleeve, and into my mouth, complex flavors you don’t taste after a day or two, or don’t get at all in less developed soil or with chemical as opposed to organic fertilizer (organic meaning decomposed plant matter, which is to say healthy soil). Continue reading →
Hollywood Hit List: A Few Things We Never Need to See in Any Movie Ever Again
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 10 comments
1. SLOW MOTION AVOIDANCE OF SLOW MOTION BULLETS
Writing from Inside: “Nail,” by Danielle R.
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
comments: 20 comments
This piece from Danielle is an exercise in empathy, in which she finds a subtle connection between herself and an inanimate object–in this case, a nail that showed up (another story) in a little pink bag. –MW
NAIL by Danielle R
I started off shiny and new, freshly crafted, sitting high above the hayloft in the Smiths’ barn. That is where my home was. For decades, I stayed sturdy and strong, while the wood around me slowly decayed. Finally, I fell from my post and landed on the barn floor. I lay there collecting dust and being kicked about by the farmers and cowhands, until one day my point penetrated the sole of a pair of work boots. Continue reading →
Serial Sunday: Crash Barry’s “Tough Island”: Episode Nine
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 4 comments
“Their job was saving lives, not personal property”
Aside from the tryst with the cougar, there was no romance for me until the end of the summer, when I met Alice, a 32-year-old school teacher from southern Maine. Her grandparents had moved off Matinicus to find work, decades ago, but had kept the family homestead as a camp. A pal introduced us, and we hit it off immediately, enjoying a dinner at the island’s version of a restaurant: Someone’s illegal, backyard picnic-table café. After dinner, she took me home to her grandparents’ sparsely furnished house where we really got to know each other. Continue reading →
