Tag Archives: nature

October 25, 2026 · 7:40 pm

Still Not Dead Today

“I woke up still not dead again today

The internet said I had passed away

If I died I wasn’t dead to stay

And I woke up still not dead again today.”  Willie Nelson, “Still Not Dead Today”

As most readers know, I am permanently self-assigned to New England on the Rhode Island coast. We have even bought our last tiny piece of land here about three miles away up a hill with a distant view of Narragansett Bay and the Newport Bridge. It features a small granite marker with our names already engraved on it. My brother Barry lives in a picture perfect New Hampshire small town in a century old classic home with woodwork anyone would be hard pressed to duplicate. He sent along a picture this week on our (one of our many) family text chains. Nothing I could say would make it more stunning, and it needs no explanation. The New England woods are dying again.

Every year they die like this, and it’s beautiful. Without this annual death, there would not follow the long cold meditative winter break of skeletal black branches against clear blue winter skies, branches frozen and still, occasionally decorated with glistening ice and snow decked. Spare, detailed, still, they sometimes gently stir in numbing breezes and creak. From large limbs to exquisite tiny twigs with dormant buds, they await a vernal signal as the days once more begin to lengthen and the warming sun ascends once again higher. Without this annual death, there could be no spring, no explosion of new life and fragile green and blooms of every size and color parading across the warm months from cherries to summer hydrangeas and late Montauk daisies.

Why dying is brilliant with gold, amber, rust, blood red sugar maples, and the burnished crimson of the late oaks is a mystery, as all things transcendent are beautiful and mysterious. Sugar maples are my favorite: a spectacle of color. Sugar maples are a singular miracle. Nicknamed “rock maple,” when they reach the end of their life cycles, they produce superior firewood; although hard like their nickname, they split easily for most cut pieces (although not all) along grain lines as if planned for the woodstove. Earlier, the boards cut from them have signature grain and were once considered fit for the finest of floors. Even their little samara fruit helicopter in the wind as they fall to seed. Kids and those aspiring to be kids call them ‘nose things’ because broken into both halves and spread open, they are sticky enough to decorate the most boring of noses.

When we lived in Maine, there were four such exquisite creatures along our driveway. Our neighbor Sonny was a fourth generation Mainer and had Maine skills. He would tap our maples with the old school buckets and spiles and cook down the sap in his woodfired sugar shack furnace in his backyard. For our donation, we would benefit with a quart of amber sweet syrup to perfect many breakfasts of blueberry pancakes.  Then there were maple syrup snow cones scooped from fresh fallen fluff with syrup poured on it just for pleasure. How the kids, and all of us loved that treasure in our mittens.

As a bonus I’ll add this picture of Olney Pond in Lincoln Woods our daughter Angela sent to us yesterday while visiting the park with her kids. About thirty miles north, we often visit the state park when we are blessed to help with runs to Heritage Ballet, a frequent occurrence as they prep for the upcoming Nutcracker performances. Ballet runs are an unearned fringe benefit of having granddaughters who dance so beautifully.

There is no easily explained reason why such things as New Hampshire villages, ponds in New England woods, and graceful ballerinas are beautiful, or why human beings are wired to respond so deeply to them. Grace seems closest to an explanation, but grace assumes a grace giver, and that may be too much of a leap for some. But it’s enough for me. Pure gratuitous gift beyond all expectations or deserves.

“I ain’t got no reason

Ain’t got no rhyme

Ain’t gettin’ no younger

And I’m runnin’ outta time

Runnin’ outta time

Ain’t gettin’ no younger

And I’m runnin’ outta time

Oh yes I am.

But I’m still climbing up the mountain side

Don’t count me out

Long as I got my heart and soul

I got everything

I got everything I need.” Keb’ Mo’, “Everything I Need”

Both the inevitability and annual resurrection are heralds of a new mystery for us to contemplate during pre-dawn awakenings to stoke the woodstove. Watching through the living room bay window past the roofs of my good neighbors and their sugar maples, the sky slowly pinkens and brightens through the dawn gloaming to expose the branches and dim the stars, Orion, and other early morning constellations. Even the brighter moon and planets eventually give way although they last a bit longer.

What does the autumn death to winter resting and spring revival teach me about my own mortality? Is spring beyond my resting? That is the only lasting unknown until it isn’t that we all must answer when we stop distracting ourselves with entertainments, welcome interruptions, and busyness from the question. Winter and the coming of it are the annual time of long thoughts.

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Blaise Pascal

Leave a comment

Filed under Faith and Reason, Personal and family life, Sachuest Point and other wonders

Tagged as , , , , ,

July 5, 2026 · 5:26 pm

Visitation

“But even old men have young memories.”  Allen Levi, “Theo of Golden”

Ralph Town, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons

Decades ago, the first time I watched a moose swimming on Webb Lake in Weld, Maine, I had no idea how to help the poor thing out in the middle of a near mile wide stretch of water. If it started to founder and go down, I’d never get it into my small canoe, and a moose may not understand I’m just trying to help. My panic built. My embarrassing ignorance was apparent about the power of a moose in the water. I tagged along parallel for the rest of the way, and the bull unintentionally demonstrated how foolish I was.

The trip started on the east side of the lake where the huge animal was leisurely browsing knee deep in the water lilies, pondweed, duckweed, and horsetails off the shore. When it reached the far shore, it stood up without a pause and began to leisurely browse in similar water weeds to those he left behind as far as I could tell, not even breathing hard. I failed to see the improvement in the deliciousness of pondweed that induced a moose to swim nearly a mile, but I was not privy to the moose’s unhurried unconcern with the effort required to get to a new patch of soggy fodder.

A second lesson in Webb Lake wildlife lore occurred a few years later when I paddled a couple of miles down lake toward the southern end of the lake and the outlet into Webb River. The river was the route more than a century ago for the winter harvest of thousands of pine, hemlock, fir, and spruce logs as they were sent down the spring high water seventeen miles to the Androscoggin River and the timber mills. The longest ones with straight grain were valued as masts; they went all the way down the river to the sea and the colonial shipyards in Bath. Now the Webb River is rarely navigable most of the year as it meanders down through Carthage and forms the border between Mexico and Dixfield before it empties into the big river.

I always am the earliest riser in the camp and cherish those times when I can slip away in the canoe on the mirror surface of the early morning lake undisturbed by the winds that usually flow down from Tumbledown at the north end of the lake as the day progresses. The red predawn sky accompanies the silence broken only by the quiet splash of my paddle and the occasional plaintive loon cry, creating treasured memories. I’d get back in time to the camp to greet the sleepy ones and make breakfast.

The lake narrows considerably at the south end, and one time I came too close to a hidden loon nest I didn’t know was there along the darkened early morning east shore in a wooded area with no cabins. The male blasted out of the reeds and rose up out of the water in an impressive noisy display of aggression and wingspan spread intimidatingly wide to protect his mate and the small clutch of one or two eggs or the tiny brood of little loons (as distinct from the brood of our little loons back at camp). I detoured as fast as I could paddle to the opposite shore.  I regretted spooking the birds because too many encounters with too many people could cause them to abandon the old nesting grounds they return to every year and seek a remote lake not so infested with people like me. Webb Lake without loons would break my heart.

Today’s third lesson was what prompted me to remember these Webb Lake canoe stories.  I was on the lake in a large flatbottomed canoe by myself in the early afternoon and loaded no ballast rock in the front to keep the bow from lifting. I struggled to paddle without any counterweight in the front, and the wide beam made it awkward to move up in the tandem configuration.  Large lakes surrounded by mountains have their own weather, and unexpected wind can flow down suddenly over the hills down into the lake like a waterfall with considerable power. The wind came up along with whitecaps. With my unwieldy bow acting like a sail, I fought uselessly to resist it and paddle back to the camp. What I could manage was to guide the canoe to a nearby shore, drag the canoe up into the woods, and walk back on the camp road. Later when the wind subsided, it was easy enough to walk back and paddle home. In the early morning, the lake is often as calm and steady as the gaze of a wise old woman on a porch waiting for the sunrise. Fighting the wind is foolish, much better to go with it to safety.

“Telling a story is like reaching into a granary full of wheat and drawing out a handful. There is always more to tell than can be told.” Wendell Berry, “Jayber Crow”

Raphael, Deliverance of St. Peter, Vatican Museum, Public Domain

What provoked all these canoe memories to bubble up was reading about the deliverance of St. Peter from jail in Acts 12. But I expect you’ll need a connection.

Peter witnessed the bloody death of his lifelong friend James, the brother of John, at the order of King Herod. Herod then had Peter arrested to ready him for the same fate the next day. Trusting nothing to happenstance, Herod had him chained up behind bars with four guards on a rotating shift, two of them chained to Peter, one on each side. The text said the fledgling Church was praying earnestly to God for him. Peter did what anyone would do in such terrifying circumstances: he fell asleep.

The same Peter who denied Jesus in the courtyard out of fear and panic on the night of the Lord’s execution on the cross, the same impetuous, emotional Peter leaping from the boat to try and walk on water, the same Peter drawing his sword to cut off the ear of the servant in the Garden of Gethsemane, the same Peter terrified by the storm while Jesus slept in the boat. That guy once so easily riled up. Chained up awaiting a certain painful death, he nodded off now secure in the trust he had in God. Clearly something had happened to Peter.

But in my reflection on the reading, what struck me first was the angel, the messenger, the envoy on a mission from God to rescue Peter. There was no turmoil, hardly any effort, and like the wind on the lake in a flat bottomed canoe, no possibility of resistance. The jail doors fell open silently, the guards fell asleep, the chains fell off Peter like autumn leaves drift to the ground when it’s time for them to let go. The angel gently woke a drowsy Peter and led him out to the street and away. No drama and not a chance of another outcome. If God, ipsum esse, the ground of all existence from moment to moment, wills that an envoy leads Peter to safety, well, Bob’s your uncle, he’s as good as free.  

Angels are sent on missions which they always complete with the power of God. Our task is to listen and do what they tell us if ever we are asked. Resistance is as futile as fighting the wind on the lake in a flat bottomed canoe. We can grumble and struggle, but all that will accomplish is to make us anxious. Guide it where it’s taking you, be thankful, pull into the woods, walk home.

“When you are old and can look back and see yourself when you were young. It is almost like looking down from Heaven.” Wendell Berry, “Hannah Coulter”

Leave a comment

Filed under Faith and Reason, Maine Tales, Personal and family life

Tagged as , , , , , ,

June 28, 2026 · 5:55 pm

Fledging

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter.
Try again.
Fail again.
Fail better.”  Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho

I learned to climb trees competently and was taught by the foreman of the Northampton branch of an old and respected Massachusetts arborist company, Frost and Higgins. Century old tree companies in New England then tended to be associated with old Yankee names like Bartlett, Allen, Frost and Higgins. The foreman, however, was part of an eclectic crew. Bill was of Polish genes, as were a lot of people around Springfield. We could find kielbasa in the local market a lot easier than chouriço, linguica, or hot Italian sausage.

Bill was a natural athlete who once had a major league tryout as a pitcher. A year in minor league buses and Motel 8 convinced him he didn’t want to pay the dues to try the odds of making it to the Show. He was a veteran of the 101st Airborne.  On our first Saturday orientation he had the two new climbers learning to jump off a platform and roll when we hit. Safety training in the sixties. All of us learned quickly, if we didn’t already know, that gravity has no mercy and suffers no alternative. The second part of the lesson was Bill’s summary of his personal comprehensive safety program, “If you fall, three feet before you hit the ground, you’re fired.”

Climbing skills were tested more in pruning than in takedowns: no spurs, farther out on small limbs, balance, surefooted. We had to learn different criteria for the types of pruning, but the priorities were dead wood, diseased branches, crossing branches rubbed with bark abrasion, branches growing back into the tree, small suckers robbing the tree of nutrients. How fine we would have to cut (and how far out into the twigs we would have to climb) was determined by what was needed and purchased by the owner. Climb to the highest safe crotch into which we could climb, tie in, and work our way down, kicking cut branches and hangers to the ground as we went.

Picture a pendulum, and you are the weight. Tied in at an angle, we would walk out to where we needed to be to reach what needed to be trimmed. The farther out I climbed, the greater the potential for centrifugal energy. For swings back into the center of the tree, gravity was just as effective an engine as in falling. Gaining speed as the restorative energy built headed towards an equilibrium, hopefully controlled, feet forward facing the target. Swing from branch to branch, from pruned branch or leader to the new one needing attention. A few crash landings in the learning curve were expected.

American elms, back when there were a lot of them, could easily reach 80 or 90 feet, were the most challenging for me to get up. And occasionally frightening. Spread out leaders like a vase meant a lot of rethrowing of my rope and shinnying to get to the top. Shinnying is a good term for what happens to your shins. Abrasion and pain are two others. They were also the most fun to swing unimpeded by intervening branches once I was tied in. I learned to fly.

“Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.” G.K. Chesterton

When an osprey (or most any bird) learns to fly, little elegance is involved in the beginning. We often see the chicks in the nests around the island. The parents sit patiently on the eggs then with diligence feed the chicks once they hatch.  Their little open mouths are a steady demand. The adults fish persistently in the always nearby water, riding updrafts, circling, searching, dropping like doom itself onto some small fish it spots. We’ll see one strike the water like a stone and emerge many times with the still struggling prey twisting and protesting its fate. Back to the nest to the ever ready open beaks of their offspring. At first just pieces, later whole small fish down the waiting gullets.

The time comes for the chicks to learn to hunt and fend for themselves before the autumn migration, otherwise, what’s the point of it all? A little like an arborist learning to climb before they fly, they are awkward, unsure, a bit clumsy, a bit underpowered. They perch on the outer rim of the large nest and flap their wings against the wind for days, building strength in their soon-to-be-powerful pinions that will keep them alive. “As awkward as a fledgling bird may look, this is a natural stage, and the parents are most likely nearby.” (Massachusetts Audubon Society).

The first flight is sometimes accidental, a short hop to a nearby branch. Or a slip to flutter to the ground. Gradually over several weeks, they lengthen the journey with perhaps a few barely controlled crash landings back in the nest. Their parents mostly watch unless there is a real disaster; if they are stunned on the ground and a predator comes near, it will learn the sharpness of osprey mama talons. The adults incrementally decrease feeding their fledglings until necessity drives the fledglings to the water to learn their craft. I’ve never seen a first plunge for an osprey into the water to grab their first fish, but there must be one. I expect it takes a few tries to hone their instincts, to see with their keen eyes the prey slightly offset by the distortion of light from the air to the ocean and waves. But eventually they will eat and find their own mate for life, build their own nest, raise their own chicks, and fulfill their calling.

“There are two lasting bequests we can give our children: one is roots, the other is wings.” Hodding Carter, Where Main Street Meets the River, (perhaps quoting an earlier source).

A first grandchild is unique and remains so. Each one is precious, but the memory of the birth of the first one is indelible. Her name is Gianna. Her mom, Angela, our next to youngest daughter, taught for a while after college and gained her master’s degree in education. Once her children started arriving (there are now five), Angela went all in for them, homeschooling them from kindergarten. She has laid down her life for her children for eighteen years every day. Gianna is her first graduate. Angela and her parents shed a few tears of gratitude. I expect a few more will follow later this year.

The G Unit will fledge this August and take her first extended flight to Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. She earned high honors almost every term in a challenging classical curriculum with a mixture of home and many online classes. She studied Latin and in depth works of a lot of Dead White Guys eschewed by most public curriculum. I remember well written papers on Plato’s Republic, Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets, C.S. Lewis, Homer, Eliot, Virgil, Aristotle, and many others: names that once helped define the social imagination and shared Western civilization that sustained a culture for a few thousand years until the deconstructionists convinced us that they could do better. And didn’t. She earned a very large share of her college costs in scholarships and grants, but she will help with an on campus job.

She danced ballet as her mom had done for a dozen years and her moments of glad graceful movement rival any osprey. She sings much better too, having performed as an alto through her high school years in the statewide Rhode Island Children’s Chorus (RICC) High School Honor Choir with Dr. Christine Noel. Her first audition for that was challenging during COVID and done by a submitted tape.  Dr. Noel recognized a gift she could help form and called within a day. She was right. They will miss her, and she will miss them. Dance three or four times a week with Heritage Ballet. Practice chorus once a week at the RI Philharmonic Carter Center. We will miss those too, although three of her sisters still dance at Heritage, so our blessed days of chauffeuring beautiful dancers to practice and attending their performances will thankfully continue.

I have written about G before several times in this forum, starting when she was three. Type her name in the search box on the home page, and you can follow her progress. She retains her sharp intelligence and sense of ironic humor. Adding to her repertoire, she developed a world class eye roll that someday may freeze the blood of some lucky suitor. She is in no rush for that, and neither are her parents and grandparents.

I expect if I am granted the time, I’ll be writing about her again. Rita and I pray for her each day along with our other six grandchildren. That will not change while we are able.  

This year she will fledge, trusting her young wings and heading south to the big city of Babylon. Such an odyssey is both wonderous and frightening for her grandparents. She has proven many times to be levelheaded in many situations with sound judgment. Her dorm and roommate are assigned. Her wings have developed strong flapping out there on the edge of the nest. Her persistence has gained vigor shinnying up vertical challenges. Her parents have done all that any parent could do to support, guide, and love her. They have been there for her, and remain so, but now it will be more remote.

But, dear Lord, she’s only eighteen. Watch over her. Keep her safe. And let her soar.

“Like an eagle that stirs up its nest,

that hovers over its young,

spreading out its wings, catching them,

bearing them on its pinions…” Deuteronomy 32:11

2 Comments

Filed under Personal and family life

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,

February 12, 2026 · 12:15 pm

Snowy

“When the white owl flies, winter has found its voice.”  Inuit saying

Sachuest Point Wildlife Refuge had another short visit from a snowy owl, the second such visit this winter. She had a two day layover in December at the refuge, was just passing through we think and has not been spotted since she was hanging around Island Rocks. She left before the paparazzi showed up. Snowy’s have a following, and when they grace us with an appearance the parking lot fills up.

If they are on the roof of the visitor center as one was four years ago, the small lawn area in front of the main entrance is overrun with photography equipment worth more than my car. On tripods – lots of tripods sprouting like a field full of oil rigs with large telescoping lenses.  A photographer and ornithologist told me one lens could cost fifteen thousand dollars.

We volunteer Friday afternoons in the Visitor Center. From December to February, at least a few visitors come to the hospitality desk each week to ask us where any snowy owls have been spotted with the excitement of a neighbor enthusing about the Pats back in the Super Bowl. Snowy owls are celebrities. Reports of a sighting on E Bird or Merlin are shared with online contagion as excitedly as if Taylor Swift was spotted at a Newport restaurant with her NFL star fiancé.

During the winter of 2022-23 a pair of snowy owls moved in for the season. The refuge had to close off the Price Neck Overlook Trail where they were nesting because too many hopeful observers were wandering off the trails to locate their nest, and they were stressing out the birds. Hard to get a parking spot, even with the overflow lot opened, so a snowy layover is a mixed blessing.

When they are hunting for lunch, it is major entertainment. A pair of barn owls were nesting on the refuge at the same time the snowys took up residence. Barn owls are not scarce globally but are considered rare and endangered in Rhode Island. Not as many barns for them as there once were.  They became rarer still on Aquidneck Island after the snowy owls killed them both at the refuge. Another volunteer saw a barn owl grab a vole just before the snowy owl snatched up both the barn owl and its prey. Lunch and dessert. I would have loved to have seen that encounter.

“The snowy owl belongs to the great white silence of the Arctic, and when it comes south it brings that silence with it.”  Bernd Heinrich, Winter World

Visits by snowy owls used to be more common before the water warmed up in Narraganset Bay.[i] Our visitors were not fully mature, so they had mixed gray, black, and white feathers and not the purer white that earned them their name. Farther up north in the tundra if food becomes scarce, the snowy parents make a pragmatic decision when their hatched owlets grow larger and fledge. Time to get booted out of the nest and make their way south to find food. Ducks and barn owls beware. Darwin had some things right. Failure to launch is not an option.

Because the bay waters are warmer and the winters are demonstrably less severe than in the days of my coming of age, the owls don’t have to come as far south to eat regularly. Thus, their visits are now less frequent.

It has not always been that way, not even counting the long era that lasted about eight millennia from twenty three to fourteen thousand years ago, when most of Rhode Island was under a mile deep glacier. That’s a long cold snap. Salty ocean water freezes when its temperature drops to 28 degrees, while freshwater freezes at 32. With billions of gallons of water Narragansett Bay takes a prolonged period of very cold weather to freeze over, especially as it is flushed twice every day with the tidal flows from the ocean.

We have enjoyed warming water for generations now, and especially so in the last fifty years. The winter surfers and the New Year’s Day polar plunge folks appreciate it. But this year is the exception to the trend and so far has been the coldest winter in thirty years. The ice we’re seeing now in some spots in the bay as shown in the satellite image is a rarity. Rhode Island needs to stay cold for a long while for Narragansett Bay to show ice.  If warmth is lacking for long enough the bay can freeze solidly as it has frozen in the past, although we are unlikely to experience that again in our lifetime.

Beginning around the edges as an advancing gray slurry with the waves still undulating softly under it, the surface becomes ever more languid as if the sea is nodding off. Light and oxygen diminish under it as it solidifies, and the small inlets succumb to the proliferating crystals of ice. Torpor descends slowly below the ice as light and warmth fade. The fish and crustaceans slow their hunting and eat less; the metabolism of cold blooded species slows as the temperature drops in the water.

At Weaver Cove on our western Narragansett Bay shore a few hundred yards offshore this week we watched a raft of brants (a type of smaller goose). There were at least two hundred of them swimming together in a small area with no chop or waves – clear open water as still as a woodland pond. As if by prearranged signal, they rose as one and flew very fast towards Prudence Island. They are a resolute sign of defiance to the winter and refuse to go gentle into that good night.

According to then Deputy Governor William Greene, the winter of 1740-41 was “the coldest known in New England since the memory of man.” Except for a few days of warmer, rainy weather in mid-December while the General Assembly met in Newport, the deep cold was unabated. Perhaps then, like now, when the state legislature is in session, there is plenty of hot air. “Soon after this,” said Greene, “the weather was again so exceedingly cold that the Narragansett Bay was soon frozen over, and people passed and repassed from Providence to Newport on the ice, and from Newport to Bristol.”[ii]

“As cold as the winter of 1740-41 had been, the winter of 1779-80 was worse. From mid-December through mid-March, frigid Arctic air – accompanied by three major nor’easters – kept the temperature below zero for 11 consecutive days. Not only did the bay freeze, but according to some sources, much of Block Island Sound and the ocean beyond almost to the Gulf Stream was solid.”[iii] That was the winter that followed the killing weather of 1777-78, when George Washington and the remnants of the Continental Army were struggling to survive at Valley Forge.

In those times, sleds brought firewood to Aquidneck Island from the mainland because the British Army occupying Newport had cut down nearly every tree on the island for their campfires and the fireplaces in the homes their officers had occupied. Many residents whose families had been here over a century left. Newport never fully recovered as a major east coast port after the troops pulled out, leaving salted wells and scuttled ships to block the harbor. Sleds traversed the bay and people walked from Providence to Newport.

Cold is not a distinctive attribute as much as a lack of one. Like darkness is not a discrete quality, but a lack of light, so cold is a scarcity of the comfort of warmth. Nature has other analogies in our human self-inflicted winters. Vice is a poverty of virtue, corruption is a failure of renewal, death is an abandonment of life, indifference is a refusal of love, contempt a dearth of humility. Evil is a privation of good, not a Manichean battle of the Force v the Dark Side. Unlike the cold heart of winter which we suffer but can do little to change, virtue, renewal, joy and gratitude for our lives, love for one another, choosing the good, and humility are choices that are ours to make and live. In those choices, the ‘winter of our discontent’ is held at bay.

While we complain a bit about the cold, former Mainers like us quickly adapt, burn a little more wood in the stove, put together a hearty beef stew or a mood brightening lasagna, gather for church suppers in our parish and patiently wait for the spring and cherry blossoms that will soon emerge.

Barry Lopez wrote in Arctic Dream, “The white owl moves across the tundra like a drifting thought, as silent as snowfall.”  New Englanders take what pleasure we can from the silence of the winter, persevere, bring in our wood from the shed, warm up some hot chocolate, take solace in reading by the stove, and wait. We wait. We’re good at it.

“Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life.” Rachel Carson, “Help Your Child to Wonder,” 1956 article in Women’s Home Companion

 

[i] The satellite image was posted by local TV station WJAR showing ice forming in Narragansett Bay in January of 2026. The upper bay section near Warwick shows a large frozen area. Floating ice fields can be seen floating just west of Prudence Island and a few other places. A prolonged cold snap has promulgated the ice, which we haven’t seen here for a while. Point of reference is the small foot like projection on the northeast end of Aquidneck Island. That is Sachuest Point where we have spent hundreds of happy hours.

The snowy owl photo was taken on the rocks at Sachuest Point in 2022 by me.

The chart showing the warming of Narragansett Bay was generated by a spreadsheet of five year increments from 1950 on from the University of Rhode Island Physical Data Master files showing the recorded temps and trend line.

[ii] From a 2014 article in the Jamestown Press, “When Narragansett Bay Freezes Over.”

[iii] Ibid

Leave a comment

Filed under Faith and Reason, Sachuest Point and other wonders

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , ,

August 3, 2025 · 5:57 pm

DOGE’d

“I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of “Admin.” The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern.” C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (preface)

A friend I greatly admire recently announced to us that he had been “DOGE’d.” A retired senior twenty year military officer with deployments to both Iraq and Afghanistan, he had been working in serious business at the highest level as a civilian for the Department of Defense on a war planning committee with others with three and four stars. He is smart, funny, unfailingly pleasant, and possesses the wisdom and experience necessary to be at the heart of strategic planning. But he was one of the newest members and fell on the vulnerable side of whatever line was drawn by the newly minted Elon Musk Department of Government Efficiency bureaucrats and their arbitrary algorithms.

Another young woman, who is a personal favorite of ours, is the fish and wildlife ranger who manages the national wildlife refuge where we volunteer. She works extraordinarily hard as a steward of our irreplaceable shared natural resources and helping to inculcate in the many families with kids that come her love and respect for natural ecosystems and all things wild. Friends of hers with less seniority were within the probationary year of their hiring. Recruited, vetted, hired, trained, doing important work, gone.

No notice, many had never received a performance review. They weren’t laid off in a way that acknowledged their humanity or individual contributions and talents but unceremoniously notified by a boilerplate email sent in a group memo on a Friday afternoon to clean out their desks. Fired for “performance” with no explanation or documentation or decency and with all the compassion exhibited by the big boss when he fired people on his “reality” TV series, “The Apprentice.”[i] Many were exemplary employees, the future of their agencies. No reduction of force notice was filed that would have been required by law had there been a properly administered layoff procedure. Brutal, final, and rushed harsh edicts of the worst of the technocrat bureaucratic impulse. They have since tried to rehire some after they realized the cuts were too deep and the mission was in jeopardy. Many are reluctant to submit to more abuse, and the most talented have moved on.

Her boss, a wildlife ranger with over a quarter of a century of experience took a lucrative early retirement buyout at least partially due to the fear, chaos, and uncertainty that ran rampant in Fish and Wildlife as well as with the Park Service, Forestry, and Bureau of Land Management, which received similar treatment. Collectively, they are the stewards of our most precious natural resources and irreplaceable lands. Her superior planned months of an orderly transition of leadership, passing on to her successors her experience and judgment. Her end of career hand-off, the notes that came to her mind as she reviewed what she most wanted the next generation of wildlife rangers to know and intuit while she trained her replacements, her love of it all, was cut short by the buyout deadline,  gone like a late summer leaf blown off too early.

“In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one can argue, to whom one can present grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless, we have a tyranny without a tyrant.” Hannah Arendt, On Violence

Have no doubt that the zealous DOGE young Turks with their AI tools and search algorithms imported from the mega Musk, Inc, are every bit as much bureaucrats as those found in some of the governmental departments to which they are taking a scythe. Bureaucrats marching to different orders from different managers handing out a different mission: not the usual plan to metastasize, entrench, and harden their silos as would be normal to bureaucracies, but radical deforestation. Are the right branches being whacked off? Or are only the unhealthy trees being culled? And are the skills of the cutters up to the job? Those are pertinent questions.

Stephan Covey’s perennial business best seller, “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” comes to mind. In one section he describes perfectly the difference between leadership and management that I have never forgotten. The manager given the marching orders to cut down a forest sets up productivity tracking indices, spreadsheets, daily plans and objectives, gathers sufficient tools and labor, assigns the tasks according to skills and experience, and daily monitors the progress of the project and state of his organization. Leaders climb the tallest tree, survey the land, and yell down to the managers, “Wrong forest!!”

The managers are not the primary problem, not that they are innocent of errors and clumsy implementation, but leadership barking out quotas with impatient, imprudent, and imperfect planning are clear cutting productive timberland and leaving other land choked with brambles and thorns and invasive species.

As a forty five year conservative, I am confident there is plenty of judicious pruning to be done in the Federal government, but choosing the right sections and selecting the right trees must be done with great care, wisdom, analysis, and judgment so as not to destroy the marvelous forest and drop the wrong trees.

 Democrats “are the party of government activism, the party that says government can make you richer, smarter, taller, and get the chickweed out of your lawn. Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work, and then they get elected and prove it.” P.J. O’Rourke, Parliament of Whores

One of our most loved nostalgic pleasures is to ride where we once took our kids on the back roads of Maine forty years ago, stopping along the way to remember. This week we took the long loop around Rangely Lake up Phillips Road from Weld, then Route 4 to the center of Rangely before turning back south towards Dixfield on Route 17. We meandered along the west side of the lake with splendid vistas around every corner of the four hundred million year old, glacier carved valleys and northern Appalachian Mountains. Ancient things, ever new.

On the way north, we stopped at Small’s Falls, a state rest area adjacent to a four tier, fifty four foot drop on the Sandy River in Township E.  The Sandy River, lower on the river, is slower, wider and deeper with warm pools along its serpentine route from the Sandy River Ponds to the Kennebec River. The same river provided our most frequent swimming holes when we lived in Farmington forty years ago. Upstream, Small’s Falls was a geological accident along the Sandy River’s way.

The multiple drops each create deep pools surrounded by ten or fifteen or twenty foot cliffs, which we, our kids, and others visit during the few weeks of hot summer days each year. Picnic, swim, slide along some of the centuries smoothed rocks like a free Water Country slide, and gathering our resolve, jump with a quick adrenaline thrill from the highest cliff we could muster the courage to climb barefoot, leaping out to drop at thirty two feet per second per second acceleration into the shocking cold water.

While walking there this week, full of memories, we ran into fellow Rhode Islanders and struck up a conversation with a young couple in their late thirties with their first baby. He worked remotely out of his home as a virtual family psychologist. She had recently taken her generous buyout from the DOGE largesse after working for fifteen years for the Veteran’s Administration health group with the VA Hospital in Rhode Island. She left not because she no longer thought what she did was valuable and had lost her love for the work with the PTSD and disabled veterans (she hadn’t), but because she feared her job would be eliminated and leave her cut loose with no notice. She said many others were making similar decisions. Like the wildlife and park rangers, younger, newer employees were being summarily fired. Her level of experience was offered the buyout. Fear and uncertainty did the rest.[ii]

The VA had always been considered almost sacrosanct, a safe job as the nation did the best it could to honor IOUs it could never fully repay its wounded warriors. No longer. She told us the damage being done would have to be undone sooner rather than later because wait times were blowing up, veterans who desperately needed help would not get it, and an outraged public would demand quick restoration of services. The problem was that new hires would not have experienced staff to train them properly, the close to retirement folks with fewer options were getting burnt out and counting their days until retirement. Essential mid level competence that sustains any organization was being eviscerated. She thought the damage would not be an easy fix. Absolutely necessary to reconstruct, but not readily remedied. “Decades of damage,” she said.

She sighed sadly. Decades of damage.

“Bureaucracies force us to practice nonsense. And if you rehearse nonsense, you may one day find yourself the victim of it.” Laurence Gonzales, Everyday Survival: Why Smart People Do Stupid Things

  

[i] Fake, sensationalized entertainment, an occupation for which he is much better suited.

[ii] This is a disaster being visited upon many agencies: losing their most competent core of professionals. NASA is one. “Nearly one in five NASA staff (and scientists) opt for voluntary exit.” Another decimated critical group are those predicting, tracking, and warning us about devastating storms.” Hundreds of weather forecasters and other federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration employees on probationary status were fired Thursday, lawmakers and weather experts said.”

4 Comments

Filed under Politics and government

Tagged as , , , ,

February 2, 2025 · 3:09 pm

Scoters, Eiders, and other Wonders

An experiment with an audio narrative of the post. Not my voice. Yet.

“There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television,” Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

 

My waterfowl identification is woefully deficient. At a distance without mechanical aids, I have difficulty discerning white winged scoters from surf scoters from black scoters or at a distance even from scaups or goldeneyes or buffleheads. I guess I need to upgrade my glasses prescription. From a greater distance, the distinction blurs even with the larger common eiders. The winter ocean around this place is full of them, large flocks of various scoters, eiders, buffleheads, and some birder attracting harlequins. And Canadian geese. Many geese.

 Large flocks of waterfowl hang out along the Sakonnet River at McCorrie Point, Sandy Point, and Sachuest National Wildlife Refuge, feeding, chatting, floating gently regardless of the vigor or languor of the waves. Up and down, content and rhythmically riding the waves for five thousand years somehow just beyond the break of the surf – a curious reassurance that we can be confident our frantic preoccupations with the current titillation, election, controversy, sensation, or outrage is a momentary distraction.

 Suddenly, they will take wing for their own instinctual inexplicable reasons, first two or four or five, then scores on some signal not understood by me, beating furiously to the next feeding range, sometimes across the river to the North Tiverton side and the Seapowet marshes. The energy of their purposeful rapid flight with blurred-fast wings seems exhausting to watch, but they are undeterred.

 When they drift closer to the shoreline, it’s endlessly entertaining to see them hunt. Diving with quick graceful, rounded back plops, they vanish for what seems like a long time, only to pop up inevitably ten or fifteen feet away. Often their dives and re-emergences are synchronized. Plop. Plop. Plop. Six or eight or more at a time in family groups, disappearing and reappearing almost simultaneously or in sequence. Pop! Pop! Pop! Up they come like small balls released by the kid holding them under. Could watch them for an hour, guessing where they are going to surface.

Drama is inherent in their existence. Raptors, foxes, and other predators are on the prowl. And others. The wildlife ranger who supervises us volunteers leads a weekly bird walk on the trails of Sachuest Wildlife Refuge along the rocky shoreline. She told us a story from last week’s walk. Duck hunting season just ended on January 26th. Hunting is not permitted on the refuge, but hunters can fill their freezers from boats just offshore so long as they aim away from the land towards the open sea. She has no objection to hunters. That’s part of what wildlife managers manage. But it must be safe and lawful.

 Hunting is part of how the balance is managed. Many savor a good Sunday dinner of roasted duck after an overnight soak in rosemary or thyme brine and accompanied by garlic buttered mashed potatoes, sauteed carrots, tomato and cucumber salad, and a nice red cabbage slaw.

On Saturday, she was conducting one of her walks for a couple of dozen curious nature lovers. She took them out near the forty feet of Sachuest Point – the surf pounded cluster of large rocks where the harbor seals sometimes come to sun themselves in the summer.

 Two exquisite eiders exploded from the surface of the water, beating their wings frantically, attaining astonishing speed in a few yards. “There goes a pair of eiders,” she exclaimed and pointed. Two shotgun blasts boomed from one of the inflatable low boats. Splash. Splash. With laconic understatement to the shocked onlookers, she calmly concluded the eider lesson. “There were a pair of eiders.”

“One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw, is the spring.” Aldo Leopold

On Aquidneck Island, we don’t have to wait for March to observe the wonder of a flight of Canadian Geese. We do have some visiting migrating flocks passing through to be sure, but hundreds of them overwinter, powerfully cleaving the air with the V formation so easily identified while their unmistakable calls draw our attention overhead – twenty, fifty at a time, filling the sky like B-29s advancing towards the ball bearing factories in Dresden. Only the geese are benign as well as orderly and determined.

 We see them grazing in stubbled winter corn fields, in the marshes, scores of them cluster, feed, and socialize. We see them in any open water on both ocean and unfrozen freshwater ponds. They inhabit plowed fields, golf courses, and dormant winter farmland of which we have an abundance. Lingering and foraging for hours with a few sentinels, they guard their young, reconnoiter, and apparently confer with one another; their low distinctive murmuring conversation is incessant. Abruptly, as if by consensus, a group of them take flight.

 I always pause and look up when they are on the move in their signature V formation, squawking, changing their order of flight to share the load breaking the wind, heading to someplace of their noisy choosing to seek new food or shelter from the incessant wind or refuge for the night.

Compelling. A spectacle of grace, coherence, and power. A confirmation that somewhere, against all odds, all is right in the universe.

“Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.” Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There

1 Comment

Filed under Sachuest Point and other wonders

Tagged as , , , ,

September 29, 2024 · 5:37 pm

Late September on Old Orchard Beach

cropped-sunrise-at-old-orchard-beachCold. Penetrating deep cold, but exhilarating. On shore wind as the air rises over the still warmer land, and the ocean air rushes in to fill the vacuum. Cleansing. Lung filling. Soul filling. A sharp breeze comes over the water picking up moisture and is scrubbed as it comes. The air streams around and over Bluff and Stratton Islands in the harbor, loading up from beyond the horizon where the earth curves out of sight, past the Azores, past the edge of the world. Cold, clean, pure, merciless, but without bias or favor.

The sun begins the day’s work out of sight in the east over the rocks and low scrub and a few trees on the wooded point at the end of the beach curve just north of the open sea. Pink-orange and red gray, the clouds reflect the refracted light before the sun makes its morning arrival. Then it does, and we must stop staring at the blinding intensity.

Gulls – American and European herring gulls, ring-billed gulls and a few larger black back gulls join them. Gulls swoop and glide a foot above the beach looking for a landing spot even before full sunrise. Heartbreakingly graceful. One standout wheels back at a nearly impossible angle, pivoting almost on its wingtip, barely clearing the sand, rights itself in a perfect pirouette, glides effortlessly another twenty feet, finds its spot selected with no observable distinction from any other spot, and with a slight change of pitch of wings drops gently on the beach, settles with a brief flourish and straightening of feathers put away like a cloak, more compact than their full spread would suggest, a brief quivering like an elegant woman settling into her chair in a premium restaurant at a choice table. She doesn’t immediately pick up a crab or a clam. Just turns into the wind, stands and waits patiently a couple of feet from the tidal flow. Waits for something not apparent to anyone else. Stretches its neck, looks skyward, parts its bill, and cries out in the unmistakable gull call.

Four surfers and a paddleboarder work on their competences in predawn twilight three hundred yards north down the beach. The surfers take their turns following the wave break that they each ride not quite parallel to the shore. All are skilled. No one puts on a wetsuit when it’s forty five degrees and spends their precious time before work begins for the day by plunging into the surf with their long board tethered to their ankle if they are not serious. They call everyone dude and employ an esoteric vocabulary like a casually organized fraternity, united by a love for their frigid, perfect, wet, plunging and surging sanctuary. When you speak with them occasionally, they are unfailingly polite and friendly. Will talk with strangers about the quality of the waves like they have known each other all their lives. Maybe they have.

Another half dozen or so of us on the nearly empty two mile beach got up to catch the beginning of the day; two are in bathrobes and wrapped in blankets. Some stand or lean on a fence. Several in heavy sweaters, stocking hats, and high ankle hikers are dutifully walking their dogs. Another is meandering slowly, barefoot, but sweater clad, on the edge of the water where the waves finally peter out looking for shells or sand worn beach glass. A guy with a hoodie is running with his very large dog. Maybe a Newfie – hard to tell at distance and murky light. He’s quickly covering the ground south towards the long wooden pier with multiple single-story, now closed, gray shingled souvenir shops. The pier protrudes five hundred feet out into the open ocean. The runner is probably headed home to grab some more coffee and drive to the office. The rest of us are alone. An older woman, slightly portly with glasses and a kind face sits in a high backed beach chair with an expensive looking camera trying to catch the light. She’s barefoot too.  Maybe she’ll paint her photo later. Watercolors.

The laughing, drinking, partying summer throngs have abandoned the jostling crowded sidewalks and have gone home to New Jersey or Quebec or Hartford. Many come every summer for a week or two like a ritual. Expensive vacations, but not out of reach. Not the Hamptons, but not an inflatable pool in the backyard either. Most of the restaurants, pizza places, and French fry stands are already boarded up for the coming winter. But not all of them. The Beach Bagel breakfast counter stays open year round for the regulars and a few hearty bargain seeking tourists. Bacon, egg and cheddar on onion bagels and more; the conversations of townsfolks about the baseball playoffs, the depravations of the now ruined Patriots, the latest expensive embarrassments of town council mistakes, the planned wedding of a daughter in the spring, arthritis, the foolish boss where they work. The waitresses tease and are teased back in familiar ribald jesting.  Familiar faces, too. Relaxed and at ease with each other and the routine, although they may not know all the names; customers are comfortable with silence too, staring into their coffee.

The beach begins a slow recovery and gives itself back to the full time residents who love all its seasons and don’t mind its moods. A recent storm eroded some of the border beach grasses, pushed up flotsam far up on the sand towards the wind fence, a couple of large broken branches that look like white pine wash in and out on the waves, a bent unbuoyed lobster trap rests fifteen feet beyond the farthest breaking waves.

The waves have been breaking endlessly on this beach for a million years or at least for ten thousand since the last Ice Age covered everything here under two hundred feet of glacier. The waves come in gray green, surrender to gravity, pick up the wind, foam white at the crest, cascade, slowly subside and recede. A nanosecond after they fall, I see them; a second later I hear them with a tiny delay. Sound follows light. For a million years the rhythmic breaking proceeds. Not silent, but not jarring. Restful. Sleep on the beach if it was warmer. The voice of the world.

The gulls gather in small groups facing the north Atlantic. No unguarded sandwiches or chip bags on blankets to pillage. Gone for the winter. Picked clean. The gulls too are comfortable in silence. Waiting.

So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living thing with which the water teems and that moves about in it, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. Genesis 1:21

Leave a comment

Filed under Maine Tales, Sachuest Point and other wonders

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

February 25, 2024 · 5:48 pm

February Doldrums

“The “doldrums” is a popular nautical term that refers to the belt around the Earth near the equator where sailing ships sometimes get stuck on windless waters.” From the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

Summer relinquishedFebruary is that sort of month. We’ve transited from the early bright lights and joy of the beginning of a New England deep winter in December to a grayer, resigned wait. The chores of winter are wearing and tiresome. The dust and mess on the floor from the woodstove are grinding me down; every evening ends with banking up a load of oak and maple for the night burn, and every morning starts around five with a few coals blown back to life with small wood and a hot start to keep the creosote buildup in the chimney to a minimum.

The snowblower is still covered with a tarp at the head of the driveway, gassed, and ready. New England Road salt is incrementally eating our car, slowly reducing it to rubble. Snow drifts quickly change from pristine white the morning after a night’s storm to grubby gray and randomly stained with occasional brown and yellow blots which we learn young not to use for snow cones. The shrubs and trees still await the greening, the winter snow load has broken them down a bit, and small branches stick up from the snow on the ground where the wind and freeze struck them off the Norway Maples, Eastern white pines, and our sole canoe birch tree. They await the spring clean-up and new mulch. The leaves that the fall raking missed linger under the snow, dark, wet, and growing mold.

February is a month of rumination, self-examination, and contemplating long thoughts. I remember Carl in Mount Vernon, Maine, where we lived for ten years before we moved to the tropics of Rhode Island. West central Maine in hill and lake country set our standard for long, cold winters. Carl was a skilled artist and a professional sign painter for local enterprises. He usually overwintered in Arizona after a long semi-annual migration in his old GMC pickup. One November he neglected his migration prep, got busy with work, and stayed. He had a large barn next to his house that doubled as his Maine studio. A wood burning furnace kept the old structure minimally functional all winter. I visited him one day in February when he was hard at work. A new ten-foot sign adorned the tall wall over the barn door. It was a spare winter scene with three-foot-high letters beautifully formed, that simply said, “It’s really bad!” When I stood admiring it, he told me that he painted it one miserable day with drifts piling up against his windows to remind him to never, ever neglect his fall migration prep again.

Some optimistic and courageous green shoots appear through last year’s mulch only to be covered by an icy, brittle white in a surprise Nor’easter. Cold nights in the twenties remind us, “not yet – not yet.”

“Gather gladness from the skies

Take a lesson from the ground

Flowers do ope’ their heavenward eyes

And a Spring-time joy have found

Earth throws Winter’s robes away,

Decks herself for Easter Day.”       Gerald Manley Hopkins, “Easter”

Signs of spring are here though: the more stalwart robins are returning, fat and feathered thickly; some redwing blackbirds have shown up. Buds are swelling a bit on the early bloomers. We heard doves cooing yesterday evening. No goldfinches or yellow warblers have yet joined the sparrows, wrens, and cardinals at the bird feeder, but they’ll soon be here. Canadian geese are flocking up. Hundreds of them here on the island are now overhead one flight at a time, some already headed north to their summer breeding grounds. Not many sights are as beautiful as a large flock of twenty or fifty or a hundred geese honking in graceful, coordinated movement with their powerful wings beating the air tip to tip or in a final swooping glide into a winter corn field.

The most promising February harbinger is the opening of spring training: first pitchers and catchers, and a week later the boys of summer all show up. The Red Sox of the wonder years of Pedro, Manny, and Big Poppi have faded, and fans have retreated to the losing days of my youth. My father lived for sixty-six years and never saw a World Series win. But we are Sox fans in all weather. Some call it a mental illness, but there you are. Every spring hope and the greening rise in us, maybe to be dashed once again in September, but in February, there is only the joy of new beginnings. A couple of pitchers would help.

February doldrumsLate winter skies are startling blue, and the clouds look like they were painted with a pallet knife, almost unnatural. The sun is two months warmer than December, and with the windows up in the car the glare feels hot against our face. Hope is upon us, the promise of March and April unmistakable. Soon and very soon, the cascade of blooming will begin. First the crocuses, then the yellow profusion of daffodils and forsythia, followed by everything, the pink cherry blossoms, the white of the Bradford pears, magnolias, dogwoods, flowering crabs, azaleas, later the lilacs and rhododendron. The island’s splendor is persistent for months almost into autumn with the Montauk daisies.

Long, cold January and dreary February are intrinsic to the spring explosion of color and light. For me, it has always been and will remain a tradeoff well worth the price. Except for one year in Colorado, we have chosen to live our lives here in Massachusetts, Maine, and now in Rhode Island.  We’ve travelled the country and always come home. The wonder of it is in the profound changes of the seasons, majestically sequencing like a liturgical procession year after year.

We talk sporadically about moving somewhere south where the winters are not so demanding, and the cold is not so penetrating when the wind blows hard off the North Atlantic. But the discussions are never long. The loss would be unbearable.

“Let the earth bless the Lord.

Praise and exalt him above all forever.

Mountains and hills, bless the Lord.

Everything growing from the earth, bless the Lord.

You springs, bless the Lord.

Seas and rivers, bless the Lord.

You dolphins and all water creatures, bless the Lord.

All you birds of the air, bless the Lord.

All you beasts, wild and tame, bless the Lord.

You sons of men, bless the Lord.”  Canticle of the Three Children from Daniel 3: 74-81

4 Comments

Filed under Personal and family life

Tagged as , , , , , ,