RipRap

Sauntering - wise words

Old HDT saw it coming. How difficult these days to find open land. And how open land is abhorred by the captains of industry. We must resort to being pirates. To trapse and tresspast against them. To have a land undrilled for oil, untilled, unfilled, unfurled, no flag flying over to claim it.

This is why snyder asks us to speak of The Genesee Watershed or the Great Lakes Basin rather than Rochester or Upstate NY etc. To remove the ownership.

The following is from Henry David Thoreau's  Walking .

At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys comparative freedom. But possibly the day will come when it will be partitioned off into so-called pleasure-grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and exclusive pleasure only--when fences shall be multiplied, and man-traps and other engines invented to confine men to the PUBLIC road, and walking over the surface of God's earth shall be construed to mean trespassing on some gentleman's grounds. To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it. Let us improve our opportunities, then, before the evil days come.

Sauntering

...if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man--then you are ready for a walk. .....

From Henry David Thoreau - Walking

Chronicles Of Ice

I spent part of this morning reading Gretel Ehrlich's Chronicles Of Ice at Orion Online.

" A glacier can give away more than it takes in. Is this compassion or self-loathing? What makes it act this way? For a glacier, the first law of impermanence is: Something has to give. Everything is always becoming something else. In Japan's snow country, people say that ice and water are yin, female, and that snow is yang, male; that a glacier starts out masculine, but quickly becomes a moving giant of femininity. "

The article gives you both science and spirit. What claciers actually do and how they work, yet in a most uplifiting voice.

The road leads away

Today is the last day before we all have to return to our lives beyond holiday. This means that our son Sam must leave to head back to school at Hampshire college. Our time with him is too short and for me too sparse. Yet it is exactly as I remember those years but from the other side. He has his friends and freedom now. He is eager to get back not for the study of course but for the friends, and new girlfriend.

We get up in the dark and he unravels down the stairs. He wears baggy pants, sandals, and a T-shirt. In one hand he carries his wooden walking stick with a burnt tip, and a flannel lined jacket and a beach bag with his socks and shoes and underwear. In the other he holds is i-book with the power cord dangling loosely.  Our high-tech hobo, dressed for the snow.

His ride arrives and he pours into the passenger seat, rumpled, crumpled, still half asleep. As the car pulls away he lifts one hand and waves like The Pope.

Them Apples

The morning is stunningly blue. I wake with sun in my eyes and drink coffee with sunbeams falling onto the hardwood floor. A small rainbow on the wall is thrown by the sun passing through a jewel case on the breakfront by the window.

I read and putter around for an hour but I know I am going to get some of this day in my face. Eventually I toss on my boots and grab the camera and head out in the car. Going east and north taking every broken road I can find, gets me to corn fields and Christmas tree farms. I head north on Furnace, a road that I have never been on. Just as I get to Lakeshore Rd. there is a corn field on the East side and a small over tired Orchard to the West. This is the boundary where corn farming blends into the fruit growing.

Snow in the trees along the shore of Ontario        golden apples

I turn east on to Lakeshore which runs along the southern shore of Lake Ontario. This takes me past the Pultneyville where the house become fewer and the Orchards plentiful. For several miles the road winds in and out giving me views of the lake and farm country. Everywhere small little gullies bringing water through the orchards. The crippled old apple trees are bent and haggard, their odd branches bred and pruned for easy picking over centuries.

Red and gleaming under a lump of snow          a rusting tractor

Farm country in snow looks serene from a distance, pastural. But when you get up close, everyone is just trying to hang on. The farmers, the trees, the equipment, even the land is bent and broken. It tumbles down into the streamlets and is carried into the lake.

Eventually I see a familiar row of poplars along a north-south ridge. Turning north onto a small dead-end road that dead ends at the lake, I pull over and walk a short path covered in snow that has fresh tracks from a large dog. The foot prints lead in both directions from where I am to the horizon so I figure the dog has run home. Small bracken line the path with red berries gleaming. The wind off the lake is strong and throws frozen mist into my face as I scramble down the hill. The path is quite slipery because the frozen ground is covered with water spray that has frozen in layers and then has been dusted by the morning snow. But I get there and stop for a moment to gather the lake into my eyes.

This whole shore
nothing but a pile of red clay rocks
all worn round and slimed green
individually encased in ice
water breaking on them green-gray
and foaming

morning after

Not opening my eyes. The minutes stretched on for at least half an hour. This is the morning after Thanksgiving but I am giving thanks at the minute for the sun on my face. Laying in bed until eight in the morning is a luxury that I rarely take part in. Not so much because of work to do or any of the standard reasons but because I can rarely sleep this much. Seven hours strait. It must have been the turkey and the twelve year old scotch.

This morning the sky is clear. At least the patch that I can see out my second story bedroom window is. Black branches staccato the bright blue above the long line of the snow covered roof across the street. The sun streaks through from behind the roof. It gleams on the top edge of the bottom half of our window. It flares in a mini-nova through my eyelashes onto the surface of my eye which is barely opened, but loosely, not in a squint.

This is the morning after friends and family gathered at our home. Turkey and potatoes and gravy laying beneath candles and chatter and steamed windows rattling in the wind. Beneath Van Morrison and red wine in tall glasses. And quiet conversations in the kitchen preparing or cleaning up after, placing leftovers in Tupperware, mingled more closely than normal. Until at last there is nothing separate about them.

morning heat
rises in pipes warming
the hardwood floor

Seeing light

I woke up at 4:30 this morning. Second night of snow. Not all that much but enough to know from looking at the car parked outside under a streetlight. At 5:30 I give up on trying to sleep and get up for some coffee. Looking out the window it is still dark. I stumble down the stairs of our 1863 farm house at the edge of the village. I start coffee and sit in my chair by the window as the heat kicks on.

I pick up my new book. I am re-reading Pilgrim At Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard. I look out the window and notice that  while it would still be considered dark out by many the black has turned to blue gray. At least enough that I can discern between the black of the trees, the white of the snow and the gray of the sky.

The pipes creak as hot water rises, the accordion radiator will be growing warm in a few minutes and Slippers the cat is crying to go outside. "It's a cold one" I tell her, opening the door a crack so she can go out to hunt. Black silk slides across the front porch, dotting the film of snow black behind her.

Inside, I return to my chair with a cup of coffee. Red glazed mug steaming with brown warmth. I look to the window now and see my old wooden Buddha looking down from the window sill, bare vines of the wisteria clinging to the side of the house. Four shriveled leaves flutter in the wind.

Slab

November slides down across lake Ontario as if it were a glacier. Creeping along all summer and fall while my back was turned. Now the full weight of the slate gray imposes it self and will not recede until late spring. Against this are the feathered twigs of barren trees. Because of the crack at the rim of the world, the sun skims across and flares their tips orange. In half an hour the sun will be gone for the day.

Berkshire Ride

Driving from Fairport NY to Amherst Mass, I find myself in the midst of the first snowfall of the season. I am in the Berkshires and huge wet globs of snow are falling everywhere. It started when I was in NY and has gotten heavier as I rose into the mountains. The roads are slick and it could be a nervous ride, but I cut the speed down to 50 and give myself plenty of distance from the other cars. These mountains are beautiful in general but in this white gauze they are stunning. Being a child of the sixties and seventies the first thing that comes to mind is James Taylor singing Sweet Baby James - "The Berkshires seemed dream like on account of that frostin'".

When I started out this morning to pick up my son from college I was not looking forward to the ride. Of course I can't wait to see him, but the ride there was not high on my list of things to enjoy. This gleaming moment transforms the mundane into the sublime.