Summer Swansong

Monday

Planned to lead with a picture of a swan, but no shorebirds around this morning except a few crows and a solitary cormorant. Perhaps all on vacation, perhaps scared off by frantic vibes of impossibly numerous shell-shocked humans rushing about in panic. “Where did the summer go?” “Oh, crap, its back to school/work/daily grind.” Even retired people, who have seeming escaped that seasonal wheel of sorrow, are mostly planning how to get through the coming winter or (more philosophically) how to engage in meaningful projects to add purpose to their self-perceived irrelevant lives.
I’ve always like the romantic concept of a swansong _ a brief glorious act immediately before death. A curious term _ and I won’t spoil it by looking up the origin. Etymology is much more easily determined on the internet than political “truth” or historic fact. I think it well fits this last week of freedom, as everyone tries to cram a last bit of relaxed happiness which becomes impossible knowing what will immediately follow.

Tuesday

Summer going, sun drifts south,

Through days of humid hot

All this green, hard to believe,

Soon turns to brown and rot.

Cycles come and cycles go,

Cycles flow again.

Massive change, except that I,

Alone remain the same

And yet I know, remembering back,

I’m not as in my past.

A larger cycle, once ignored,

Now looms to close at last.

Wednesday

If summer end is a tragic opera, goldenrod is the messenger bearing irrefutable proof in its long solo that the final act is nearing. A few other flowers dot the woods and fields, but none so overwhelmingly turning entire hillsides and shorelines yellow. No matter what it may feel like outside, goldenrod’s sign is September.
I rush seasons as much as anyone. There are still many fine times, spells of heat, lovely sunsets, relatively long days, and a hoped-for final Indian summer. But worse weather is immanent, not infinitely far off as it seemed in June. Nature has adapted to all this, and so should I, but sometimes there remains a hint of sadness not simply at this summer gone, but at all summers I so well remember.

Thursday

Old people nursing beers at Finley’s, late afternoon, grumbling as usual.
“Too bad old King Canute is dead,” says Dan. “He could run for president. Holding back the tides would save billions or trillions, and it’s no more impossible than what the other candidates are promising.”
“When did kids get so stupid?” asks Jean.
“Magic,” mutters Bill. Everyone looks at him in expectation. “We boomers are the last generation to understand the world. Everything now is magic _ nobody knows how technology, global trade, society, anything really works.”
“Yeah, I think you’re right,” Allen agrees. “Politicians are all shamans _ do the right spell and poof.”
“Right,” replies Bill. “The republicans think all the problems are caused by little devils that can be exorcised with the right slogans or talismans like a four thousand mile long fence. The democrats claim they can tame Lady Fortuna and force her to distribute her fickle favors more equitably.”
“I blame the schools,” states Flora. “They teach anything is possible. We all know anything is not possible. You can’t turn lead into gold. When people think anything is possible, nothing is possible, and nothing gets done.”
Jean responds “So the kids aren’t stupid?”
“Sure they are,” Dan looks around. “The masses are stupid and willfully ignorant. The educated elite have them wrapped around their little fingers.”
“I wonder,” Bill continues darkly as he finishes his beer, “I wonder what will happen when the magic goes away?”

Friday

This is the first extended hot and very dry period this year, although rain has been below average. Some vegetation is beginning to show effects, although the trees remain relatively untouched since there is abundant ground water. But all the plants are now being triggered into survival and shut-down mode as the days grow shorter. There will be no compensating new growth on these branches as there would be in the spring.
I bask in the late summer glow, going swimming, enjoying sweaty walks in nothing but tee shirt and shorts, marveling at nature. But there is a small part of me like the trees, getting ready to slow down and hibernate, concentrate on indoor and internal mental activities, develop my own resources and projects. It’s silly to worry about the coming winter, which after all lasts two months at most. Right now I look forward to rain, and brilliant foliage, and the first snowfall. By then, of course, I will much lament the loss of these final weeks of the season.

Saturday

We pride ourselves on being reasonable and scientific, always believing in cause and effect, unlike primitive peoples. But cause and effect in itself is not scientific _ any human who ever lived knows that eating will ease hunger and getting cut will bleed. It’s just that before science, it was easier to take shortcuts and assign most causes to spirits or gods. As far as I can tell, there are many primitive thinkers among us now, many running for president. I propose a few causes (and solutions) that I expect to hear any time soon:
Climate change is not caused by human activity. God intervened to create modern man using the highly unusual ice ages. Now that the God of humans has died, the planet is reverting to its natural paradise-for-dinosaurs equilibrium.
The Mideast is populated by crazy fanatics. Obviously living in a desert drives anyone mad. We should remove everyone from deserts, possibly by seeding the sand with radioactive waste from nuclear power plants (thus solving two problems at once.)
Our government is a mess, all branches, all levels, from top to bottom. Our government is 99% composed of lawyers. Thus lawyers, in addition to being naturally sleazy and evil, are totally incapable of ruling a country. There should be a constitutional amendment banning anyone holding a law degree from ever running for elective office.

Sunday

Ragweed rules triumphantly, pollinated and seeding for next year. As far as it is concerned, everywhere is as fertile as Indiana, each climate as welcoming as the Amazon basin. Perfectly adapted for the modern world, which humans colonize and disturb and ignore each year. Some say it is an ugly and ungainly plant, but it fills all the peripherally noticed borders of our views in solid green, contributing subtly but strongly to what seems natural and right.
If the meek are to inherit the Earth, ragweed will no doubt be among them. If I am a weed, I could do worse than to emulate this survivor. Were I such, I would not complain of destiny, or poor soil, or adverse growing conditions, or lack of rain, nor envy the cushy situations of other plants and prettier flowers, all well-tended in gardens. I would just accept my space and flourish. My meditations are unexpectedly enriched.

Home Bound

Monday

The High Falls of the Genesee river furnished the power to mill much of the western grain traveling along the early Erie Canal. Rochester was known as “Flour City,” but since then the area has hardly lived up to potential, rusting and industrial. The city keeps trying to make this into a hip new area, but the recession broke the first efforts.

Meanwhile, the Genesee Brewery (a real big affair over a hundred years old) realized what a prime location they occupied on a cliff opposite the falls, and has recently built a large beer museum, tasting room, and restaurant.

It’s a pleasant place to spend afternoon August hours, plastic cups of Genesee beer in hand, on the roof deck, listening to a live band playing Rolling Stones classics. A pedestrian footbridge over the gorge carries tour groups, couples wanting pictures, and on this particular Sunday, a person marching with a Puerto Rican flag from the nearby festival.

Tuesday

Lake Ontario extends to the horizon North, has wide sandy beaches and surprisingly large waves, capable of wrecking sailing ships in the old days. A huge metropolitan park with carousel occupies one corner of the intersection with the Genesee, where the seemingly inactive “Port of Rochester” welcomes shipping to the United States. Small restaurants line the docks along the river, and a half-mile walkable breakwater extends to a lighthouse.
New York never fear running out of drinking water _ half its border is on this lake, and almost all the water and snow that falls on lower Canada passes through here on the way to the St. Lawrence. For those that prefer a less civilized experience, a few miles up the shore there is a large park with undeveloped beaches _ still sandy _ beneath high bluffs almost as wild as when they were first encountered by Europeans.

Wednesday

The Strathallan has the best location in Rochester and knows it. Taken over by Hilton a few years ago it has renovated upscale (sadly in my opinion) to become a prime destination for weddings and corporate events. One of its new amenities is a rooftop café to overlook sunset on the skyline with a beverage of choice.
I was a little shocked to discover that we had traveled far enough west that the sun goes down a half hour later in this time zone than it does in Huntington. I tend to think of the world as discontinuously greater. When places like this were founded, every local time was different. Nobody cared. Only the coming of the fast railroads forced the issue by making our standard time zones so that train timetables would make sense to anyone. We watched the later sun go down, looking exactly like the earlier sun does back home, if we only take the time to go out and experience it.

Thursday

Newly opened rows of sunflowers greet my return to the usual haunts. Surprising changes can occur to the environment in less than a week. Even more surprising changes to my outlook. A good vacation helps me reorient and establish new perspectives.
The ride up was an adventure: heavy dead stop traffic jams all through New York, then just when we thought we could relax, the nasty sound of something under the car detaching and dragging along pavement. With that eventually cleared up, driving through a Niagara from the skies outside of Syracuse. On the other hand, it made us appreciate a country where cars can be repaired in the middle of nowhere in half an hour, automobiles and roads don’t care about rain, and a comfortable lodging and adequate food await at day’s end. The trip back, by contrast, was like a car commercial _ well above the speed limit, no delays under clear skies, only light traffic the whole way until within a few miles of home, where one of the local roads was being torn up by the water utility.

Friday

Rochester’s Seneca Park Zoo is smaller than Huntington’s (18 acre) Hecksher, but manages to contain _ in addition to the usual suspects (monkeys, sea lions, snakes, fish, birds) _ a snow leopard, an Asian tiger, a white rhino, two polar bears, four elephants, and three lions. Here the king of beasts surveys the fat luscious snacks parading below him. In another area a bald eagle, probably injured with flight feathers clipped, preens alongside a pond.
I bring this up because sometimes I feel caged and clipped in what I do here. Any artisanship requires limits to allow mastery, and in this day and age most limits are self-imposed and completely arbitrary. This current blog format has served me well, but I want to experiment a bit over the next month, and maybe
settle into something different. The pictures will remain similar, but the thoughts they trigger may veer in different directions. Nature is inexhaustible, my commentary on it far less so.

Saturday

Nights are cool and dry, days delightfully warm with heat in full sun. Adequate rainfall has kept most foliage lush. Yet, for the observant, summer is winding down. Nights come on more quickly, the sun is moving south. Some trees are showing hints of fall color.
I claim to love all seasons, but like everyone around here I sometimes wonder in the depths of winter if it is worth the trouble. Tuned to the culture of my youth, when September marked a time of returning to school or beginning the push to end-of-year at companies I worked for, I find this is the time for resolutions and plans and projects. The challenge is always to find the best ways to use enforced indoor activities. And so, more than New Year’s, I start into thinking about the next year and what I want to accomplish.

Sunday

Spartina dispersing seeds into late summer wind and wave. More miracles, that beds of grass can come from such tiny dry kernels. Contemplating the spread and continuation of life _ positive impossibility rather than evolutionary competition _ can be far more rewarding than studying the entire remainder of the cosmos, stars and all.
I can be religious in the sense that I believe there is an awful lot of the reality of our universe that nobody is capable of understanding. I’m no neo-Platonist _ our reality is far more substantial than shadows in a cave _ but our reality is only part of much more. I am not religious in that I think worrying about it, trying to figure it out, or submitting to my own or other’s ideas of what metaphysical reality (or purpose or meaning) may be is completely futile, silly, and almost a blasphemy on merely accepting and appreciating existence.

Openscapes

Monday

Huntington is blessed with many landscapes, seascapes, townscapes, and harborscapes. Language mavens were obsolete before anyone got around to naming mallscapes, ballparkscapes, and parkinglotscapes, among others, but those are here as well. A photograph from a cheap camera in such a place never really captures the view nor invokes the actual experience, but it can give an idea.
I try to come up with a theme each week that unifies my daily entries somewhat, and in this case I am trying to be more general than usual. We’re driving up to see our son in Rochester on Thursday, where there are farmscapes quite different from the few remaining on Long Island, and vineyardscapes much more vast. So, for a while, I will concentrate on the large rather than the small.

Tuesday

Skyscapes, of course, are available to anyone anywhere who is not locked in a cell. Some are more dramatic than others, but all bestow a sense of freedom.
It takes a professional photographer, with an artist sensibility, to truly record a sense of such things. I see well enough, but do not have the technical skills to convey much. On the other hand, the purpose of this blog, if it has any beyond keeping me occupied, is to encourage people to open their eyes and hearts to all the fantastic opportunities that surround us all the time. Suggestions, then, are all I can offer.

Wednesday

Few hillscapes exist in Huntington (or even Long Island.) This area is just a big pile of sand left by the glaciers. Still, there are bluffs along the North Shore and long ridges (called moraines) further inland. Huntington exists where it does because three passes through such obstacles allowed easier access to the interior by horse-drawn wagons. Even small hills can be steep, and for draft animals (or people of a certain age) any hill is too long.
I probably picture this hill too much. On the other hand, there is something to be said for knowing a locale intimately through years, seasons, and changes. Utrillo painted Montmartre as if he had caressed each wall (and possibly had, returning from the bars.) Corot treated Fontainebleau forest as his own private garden. I find an awful lot of professionals these days concentrate too much on the same famous feature and put all their effort into effects.

Thursday

Temporary farewell to tidal vistas. Rochester is four hundred miles away, through cities, forests, mountains, plains, fields and at least one huge swamp, crossing once nearly impossible barriers like the Sound, Hudson river, deep ravines, high bluffs, following the only early (water) path connecting the East Coast to the center of the country. Seven-odd hours, taking it all for granted. Hundreds of years ago, most people in Western Europe hardly traveled more than five or ten miles from their village; until very recently almost everyone else in the world did the same. Today such a person is considered a sheltered recluse.
By such standards, I am almost a habitual hermit. I try to appreciate the daily miracles _ even the man-made ones of abundant food and water, electricity, medicine, entertainment. But once in a while, we break out a bit, and at such times I strive to view such things as wide clear highways and fast cars not as ordinary conveniences, but as magical passages to places that are different enough to refresh my sense of perspective.

Friday

Didn’t take pictures of farmland, although much of western New York was flush with crops, having received adequate rainfall this year. Hard to remember that New York is a major agricultural state, fortunately situated in the event of global warming, since it is unaffected by sea level rise, is not within any models of severe systemic drought, and would only benefit from a few additional degrees of temperature especially in the winter. Of course, tourism, as the main (only) street of Canandaigua demonstrates, remains a strong element everywhere.
I’ve told my son to purchase land up there, only half jokingly. Unfortunately, because of the time scales involved, only governments and corporations (and wealthy aristocratic land-holding families) gain much from long term trends. The rest of us must get by in our mayfly lives with whatever short term events are going on.

Saturday

Lake Canandaigua, one of the Finger Lakes, demonstrates why folks upstate do not feel deprived of water activities even without an ocean, sound, or salt-water bays. Unaffected by tides, the docks are a little unsettling to someone used to high pilings.
I had hoped to take lots of pictures of farms and fields, which were qui
te plentifully in evidence while on the thruway. But as it turned out this was a complete family vacation, and our son is an urban professional no more into spending time looking at cows and corn than any of his peers in Manhattan or any other city. So I’m making do with whatever pictures I did take. Trust me, however, we passed lots of farms just getting here and back to Rochester.

Sunday

Gritty Monroe street, a block from Wayne’s apartment, resembles in some ways the old Greenwich village, the only difference being that there are back yards and tree lined side streets behind it. But the ambience of all kinds of odd people _ bikers, transvestites, near-hippies, young professionals and college students provides an interesting mix, which he claims is mostly kept in check and is a lot less frightening than it was ten years ago.
The south side of Rochester is the good side, not the one with crime and murders and urban poverty. It is slowly gentrifying, but never sank particularly low, and has a wonderful housing stock. Hopeful government redevelopment and infrastructure improvement is in evidence all over. In the meantime, rents and houses are affordable. It’s lovely on a hot August afternoon, in its own way. We have been assured it is far less so in the middle of February, although even with snow piled high a vast assortment of restaurants and bars of all types stay open.

Late Bloomers

Monday

Late blooming wildflowers like this thistle are now in full stride. Their strategy is to avoid the mad dash of the early spring and summer when everything else competes for resources like mad; bide their time to bloom when insects and sunlight are guaranteed to be plentiful, the temperature is warm, and the ferocious pace of the earlier plants has eased up or ended. The downsides, of course, are that rain can be infrequent, solar energy each day diminishes, and the growing season becomes very limited.
I also love cultivated species which add color where there would normally be little. Their particular strategy is to completely throw in their lot with humans. If the people disappear, so do they. And, yes, I know that is anthropomorphic drivel, but isn’t it fun? Doesn’t that give us a better perspective? Fairy tales exist to help shape our world view.

Tuesday

Admittedly, this time of August has few spectacular wildflowers or weeds. Nothing equivalent to a Lady’s Slipper or Crabapple smothered in pink will be in view. This sea lavender, with many lovely but extremely tiny flowers, is a good example. As if more mature plants tend to have more somber displays.
At any age I thought I had it all figured out. Ongoing circumstances always forced changes in attitude. Now, like other older folks, I often claim to be mature, experienced and wise. When I break out of such reveries, the only appropriate response is uncontrollable laughter.

Wednesday

Domestic and cultivated flowers now take up the slack in unusual outside colors. Gardens are in full bloom with annuals and perennials and exotics, such as this hibiscus which somehow survived the harsh winter and is doing marvelously.
I do tend to concentrate on the wilder side of harbor sights, but the fact is Huntington is cultivated and mostly tame suburbs. It’s silly to pretend that these man-made and beautiful landscapes are not just as much a part of the world as any roadside weed or springtime woodland wildflower.

Thursday

Queen Anne’s Lace has been opening its wide white heads for a while now. Soon each will curl into a basket and brown up as it dies. It’s one of the reliable signs that summer is well past midpoint and autumnal equinox is not far away.
As I have grown older, particularly since I turned sixty, it seems I have more time in each day to enjoy the outdoors. Yet unfortunately my memories are less capacious than they once were, and no matter how much I pack in on each walk it seems to dribble away far faster then, for example, certain recollections of long ago and far away.

Friday

One of the few thistles along the harbor this year. It’s amazing how the same apparently barren spot of cracked roadside can support an entirely different set of plants from one year to another, probably depending on rainfall, temperature, and the randomized dropping of birds and breeze.
Almost everything I find now is non-native, even “invasive”. We feel sorry for the crowded-out original and less-hardy original inhabitants. Of course, it is necessary to remember that this works both ways _ in Europe American ragweed is a tremendous problem _ we probably made out better on this particular exchange.

Saturday

Not sure what these are springing up in the narrow sands at a tiny beach at head of harbor. Certainly showier than a lot of the other species which tend to be more tucked away than showy.
I used to know all the names, or rush to references if I did not. But as Gertrude Stein said, what’s in a name after all? Someone who first classified it christened it in some Latin nouns and adjectives, which almost nobody uses anyway. And the “common folk name” changes from locale to locale. Better to just accept it as the miracle all such things are.

Sunday

Another relatively tiny wonder, also now unknown to me. Probably in the compositae or astor family. Beautiful enough for its own needs of propagation, of course, or it would not be here. This desolate area has nothing planted purposely except a few straggling pines and skimpy beach roses added by the town when they rebuilt the park next door.
The bees are now extremely busy in our gardens, crawling around phlox and dahlias. I’m always amazed at the sheer number of different insects _ giant bumblebees, tiny honeybees, earwigs, and of course the unseen cicadas constantly singing from the trees above. I often have trouble realizing how much independent life our little area supports, and it is somehow a comfort given the dire stories we are fed each evening.

Hot Fun

Monday

A long spell with temperatures near ninety every day, some with breezes some calm, scorching sun. Kids and many adults on vacation. Water has heated up nicely: even on Monday beaches are crowded, various craft cram the waterways, and children play at catching crabs and chasing minnows with nets. Early in the day, on a low tide, there is still some solitude to be found.
Not long ago, I loved lonely beaches. I could not sit still and would walk miles along the sand as the rest of the family sat and absorbed sun. Now I’ve slowed down a lot, and enjoy places with lots of activity, where I also sit and, I suppose, add something to the ambience. Even on a brutal day, beaches this time of year are a far nicer place to hang out than the air conditioned prisons our TV doctors are always stridently telling elders to hide in.

Tuesday

Folks heading for their power boat permanently moored in deeper water. Small boats barely afloat serve to ferry them out and back, the mooring is swapped for the duration. Even in these civilized areas, theft of such small craft is not unknown. An even more difficult problem is some being left to decay and rot along the shore when owners move or die or become disinterested. On occasion the town clears out the whole roadside bank.
I never quite understood the buoys themselves, but they are lifted in early fall and distributed anew each spring. That must be done by professionals _ the spacing must be such that winds and tides will not cause collisions _ and each one requires payment to the town and is jealously guarded by its owner. In any case, this is the “poor man’s solution,” the rich far prefer marinas with docks, security, gas, food, and everything else including help if it’s needed.

Wednesday

Nowhere on Long Island is pristine _ perhaps not even primeval before the first Europeans arrived. Yet walking along dirt roads through the woodlands and coming upon a meadow of grasses and milkweed like some reminder of centuries ago can allow some contemplation of man and nature. More so, of course, when there are few other people around.
We live on one of the most crowded and developed areas of the planet, so even the parklands are frequently filled. Like many antisocial people, I have the gift or curse of being easily alone in a crowd, sensing others more as if they were flocks of geese (or passenger pigeons?) One almost sure way to have maximum room is to go against the grain _ wet cool weather along the beach, or as today inland in humid heat that sends everyone else to the shore.

Thursday

When Americans mostly lived along the Eastern Seaboard, and dreamed of being the next Rome (but exceptional!) Long Island Sound was dubbed “The American Mediterranean.” On a hot August day with sun sparkling on wind whipped waves as sailboats dart about, it almost seems true. Of course that effete European lake never experiences any winters like this body of water.
We have plentiful public beaches and open areas, grace of bygone wealth and ancestral pride. Some claim my boomer generation will bequeath nothing but ashes, but I think our record of environmental cleanup, social responsibility, heritage preservation, scientific research, economic growth, and knitting the world with commerce, culture, and electronic communication compares favorably with any others. This bay, for instance, is cleaner and more alive than it was when we came into adulthood.

Friday

The James Joseph goes out several times a day from the town dock, through the inlet and sets up just offshore on the Sound. Although it can be chartered, it’s mostly just families going out occasionally to fish for something a decent size. They must be successful, for the boat is usually followed by a huge flock of seagulls feasting on the thrown overboard remains of the cleaned fish.
I find it hopeful that there are such activities remaining. Fish populations must be relatively ok for this to pay well enough. And I do agree that most true sportsmen tend to be conservationists. More than that, this helps to protect the local environment more than donations to some remote wilderness, which is also necessary, but infrequently encountered by most of us.

Saturday

This scene from Northport looks like an impressionist painting of the Paris Tuilleries. People sitting, talking, eating, walking dogs, and mostly watching other people accented by brilliant harbor background. In times of incessant electronic immersion, it’s comforting that ancient human patterns and behaviors can sometimes prevail. Probably people have gathered thus in beautiful places forever.
I was amazed to see a couple playing serious chess on an inlaid concrete table. Once I would have thought doing any more than taking in the spectacle and moving on was a severe waste of my time. Now, slower and possibly wiser, I am just one of the crowd, letting a golden afternoon slowly drift from future
to past without any of my help at all.

Sunday

Small children need active play, no matter what time of year. Even in high heat of summer, park playgrounds like this one at Hecksher are wonderful spots. Sometimes in the overwhelming affluence of this culture, parents try to recreate everything in their backyard. That can be a losing proposition, since various parks offer variety of scenery, and ranges of equipment to keep kids from being quickly bored. Plus toddlers grow so fast that often back-yard construction is out of their age group within months.
For a while, it seemed playgrounds were being dumbed down to such rigid safety standards that all that was allowed was sliding down a short plastic tunnel. Happily, I see, swings and merry-go-rounds and jungle gyms are back in fashion. Total safety is always an illusion, since any of us can severely hurt ourselves stepping off a curb or getting into a bathtub.

Ripe

Sunday

Catalpa seed pods look like giant string beans. Most are higher in the tree. The sheer overabundance of everything has always amazed people, leading some like Malthus to gloomy thoughts and predictions, and eventually providing Darwin with the underpinnings to his theory.
I usually just walk by without noticing. Green on green takes a little effort to make out until they darken later in the year. Yet this tree is producing the next generation as vigorously as any hickory (whose nuts are becoming large enough to dent the hoods of cars carelessly parked under it.)

Saturday

Hard to even get close enough to photograph the small berries of poison ivy. That’s no real trouble, since it would be extremely nasty to eat them. Perhaps this was the original tree of knowledge of good and evil, and it was rewarded by making its leaves and fruits toxic to people. Animals do not, apparently, share the same allergic reaction.
As far as I know, there has never been an attempt to domesticate or even use poison ivy for food or medicine. It’s one plant that by luck or careful coevolution goes its merry way everywhere without folks doing much more than swearing as the itch later develops.

Friday

Renaissance Christian concepts of the tree of knowledge of good and evil depicted an apple, but even a cursory scan of internet information shows how complex and universal those concepts were in many times, places, and religions. The standard American understanding came from bible illustrations largely based on European painters. The common apple is very much a creation of humans, aptly illustrating knowledge and, if one is into good and evil, even the dangers of meddling in genetic s. Lately even more evils of pesticides and fungicides to create unmarked fruit, or the breeding of ever more prolific but tasteless abundance.
My life has been long, relatively happy, and filled with incidents I enjoy remembering. It is difficult to resist feeling there is some divine purpose, but easy to decide most other people’s conceptions of the same thing are ridiculous. So I enjoy bible stories as science fiction morality tales, but I prefer modern fables of the same general type. An apple, however, still recalls Durer and Michelangelo which provide beautiful images enriching my imagination.

Thursday

Like a long introductory oboe solo, ailanthus seeds deepening into burnt orange herald summer’s future demise. Since these invasive trees are easily controlled and their pollen apparently does not cause allergies, they are well tolerated and even beloved by city dwellers. Some marketing genius gave them the common name “tree of heaven,” which didn’t hurt their cause.
Much summer remains. Today is very hot, but who knows what may come. We take comfort in averages, but averages are made of heat waves, cold spells, tremendous storms, long droughts, and calm times. Those are what we actually experience, and even if the rest of the summer hews to average it may consist of strong contrasts. So also the portents of any change _ it will surely come, when and how are hardly certain.

Wednesday

Apparently in olden days a summer chore for frontier children was to go out daily with a bucket to pick the ripening wild berries. Lovely sunlit dewy mornings, clean air, birdcall all around, a pleasant fantasy. But any chore is work, especially daily, and although perhaps less brutal than some of the other things children back then had to do, it involves stultifying heat and humidity, vicious insects, thick brambles, and disappointment. Any ripe fruit, like these blackberries at Coindre Hall, are also rapidly harvested by wild creatures.
I can imagine perhaps one pleasant morning a year doing such a thing for fun. Then, being a child of my own age, I realize there are more interesting ways to spend my time, such as useless writing.

Tuesday

Rose hips can be made into a nice tea, but it would be hard to subsist on them. “Paleo diet” fans claim once people left the tropics, they had to eat nothing but meat, although game is also hard to procure every day in extreme cold or drought. Only the development of staple crops such as cereal grains, potatoes, and corn allowed seasonal famine in temperate zones to be (largely) overcome. That also led to domesti
cation with useful byproducts of eggs and milk. Without agriculture, life with winters or monsoons is chancy and difficult; with it, at least the elite (and the culture it transmits) can usually survive.
The “natural” fruits and berries around here are products of long human development. It is hard to find anything that could be used as a food source that has not been touched and “improved” for use by our species. Unlike some, I have never yearned for a return to the healthy diets of the past. For that matter, I am grateful for electricity, chemicals, fossil fuels, and all the other “horrors” of modern food supplies which allow me to eat my fill of anything anywhere at anytime of year.

Monday

Everything rushes towards maturation. Goslings, cygnets, fish, crabs, and infinite varieties of seeds and fruits grow rapidly. Farmers are overwhelmed with produce, which will continue a few more months until decreasing sunlight and eventual frost bring an end to this year’s production. Nature accelerates its annual increasing slope towards deepest winter.
People take a bit longer. My wife and I sat on a dock last night watching the sun set. It only takes three months to see almost a hundred sunsets, few of us will experience a hundred summers. Of those hundred, many are when we are helpless children, or increasingly declining adults. According to 1960’s biology, I am genetically useless; according to Spencerian Darwinianism I am harming the species by holding back the most fit. Human society _ especially civilization _ is supernatural in the sense that it upends almost all natural laws, including those that would have killed me off a long time ago.

In Heat

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Sunday

Fat city for scavengers, wading birds, and others. Egrets pluck abundant minnows from the shallows, cormorants dive for minutes at time seeking slightly larger prey, this seagull feasts on a fish carcass thrown overboard after filleting (which is much better than sending it to the town dump.) The size of the head indicates it was taken in the open Sound, just a short trip past the inlet. Amazing that such remain relatively abundant.
We’ve lost lobsters, dolphins, seals, and oysters from the harbor proper, although oysters may be making a comeback. It’s hard to imagine how bountiful this area was four hundred years ago, for the natives and first colonists. But I admit I am surprised that dolphins and seals still roam the open waters, and that huge fish can be caught frequently from a large party boat that departs Halesite every day. I hope that means the world is not in quite so desperate shape as I often fear.

Saturday

Fiddler crabs menacing each other at muddy low tide. So many of the smaller and stranger life forms have even odder sexual and survival patterns. Happening all around are some form of procreation and development of new moon shells, whelks, horseshoe crabs, periwinkles, seaweed, diatoms, protozoa, bacteria, and who knows what else in the countless variety of a summer briny soup. All that can be seen are often the tragedies _ empty oyster and clam shells picked clean by gulls, carapaces of dead horseshoe crabs. And yet, even in these polluted and crowded shores, life is throbbing to the seasonal rhythm.
I know nothing of, for example, the mating habits if any of fiddler crabs, nor anything of their life cycle. Yes, I know all that could be quickly gleaned from an internet search. But if I cannot know everything, of what value to me is knowing such details? I find it more important to take the time to notice that the crabs are crawling around, dashing for cover at every shadow, and filling their days incomprehensibly in the hot sun. Sweating here beside them I am a part of the dance in a way I can never be in front of a computer screen or book, no matter what I think I am learning.

Friday

Beehive in a shrub. Seems to be real bees, not wasps, hornets, or yellow-jackets. With all the flowers around the yards, bees are welcome sights. Industrious and important parts of any ecology, and severely threatened by pesticides, parasites, and other dangers in recent years. When there are lots of bees, it is easy to feel that things are right with the world.
But, like a shepherd confronting a wolf kill, I am conflicted. Part of me considers it a privilege to be hosting a beehive on our front yard. But another part loudly claims “it’s our yard!” Bees sting _ trimming, weeding, and general work in this corner will be all but impossible. Can’t move them without destroying them. Maybe the winter will get rid of them naturally, but if not? Ah well, for now procrastination seems the best policy, especially since they didn’t sting me when I disturbed them by pulling out a grape vine.

Thursday

Cold front moved through last night with splatter of rain and subdued thunder. Today thermometers read the same, but air is crisp and clear, far seems near, colors sparkle. Sweat dries immediately instead of running in rivulets and drips. Heat is not just heat.
Time for cultivated species to shine. Most roses and all crops would not survive without cultivation and care, but they are still beautiful and necessary. Arguments rage as to what is natural and what is “secrets with which we dare not meddle,” but humans take every genetic accident they consider useful and cause it to triumph over other, better suited, species and varieties. No real value judgements here, just pointing out logical inconsistencies.

Wednesday

No cotton around here, but the phragmites are high. A day may be hot even with constant cloud cover, the world slowly braised and wilted together. If the sun breaks through, frantic admonitions will be issued on media for everyone to stay inside and drink approved liquids. Adding to hysteria, alerts and warnings of smoggy air quality as if mustard gas were arriving on the Western Front.
(Some disconnected neurons contend the pink flowers are Joe Pye Weed, but I wouldn’t put money on it.) When I was young, before much TV weather or air conditioning, I never remember my parents telling me that I didn’t have to mow the lawn because it was too hot (and July was always too hot in Philadelphia.) My track coach would issue us a salt pill before sending us on a ten mile training run _ it was thought water would give us cramps. Like all older generations, we think the next ones are less and less rugged, more unable to handle the simplest problems, and it increasingly annoys us that they seem to muddle through just fine.

Tuesday

Although now is the beginning of fat time of year, when there is lots of food for everything, it is also the beginning of stress and attrition. Voracious insects attack foliage, any long periods of missed thunderstorms and other rainfall lead to stressed leaves, curling brown on outer edges. Accidents and other issues cut into newly born populations. But it’s glory time for ragweed, ready to take over where anything else has failed.
Ragweed almost requires people, because its main requirement is that we disturb the land frequently and render it completely unnatural compared to its “native state.” Of course, that image is somewhat silly _ ragweed evolved long before people, taking advantage no doubt of natural disasters that also upset equilibrium. When I think of things as dichotomies _ stable or disturbed, natural or man-made, even beautiful or ugly, useful or not _ I am deeply into a pattern that is true in my own mind, and perhaps shared by a few other similar humans, but in no way objective nor in a formal sense “correct.” In my arrogance, it is easy to forget that is always so.

Monday

“It’s too darn hot” goes the old song. For much of the natural world _ birds, fish, many plants, some mammals _ sex has wrapped up for another year. For those species, it’s all about the next generation, like ripe grasses along the roadside. There are more animals, as ruthless nature begins the winnowing process. Insects are probably still madly procreating, which spiders are quite happy about.
In spite of the Kinsey report, humans seem to manage to “sport” in all but the most extreme conditions. Lately, many of them refuse to be winnowed. A growing problem _ yes, that’s a pun. Anyway, the race is on as to whether we can control the urges of our species or let them run wild until inevitable catastrophe. Hot bright sun on this hazy morning, lush scenery and even our toys ready for water play, should provide reasons enough for us to seek to preserve our miraculous heritage.

Tidal Rave

Sunday

For a small harbor, Huntington has widely varied bottoms. In addition to sand and clay deposits once used for pottery and brickmaking, there are mud flats, and rocks, and grasses and, for that matter, piers and deep water off the various bulkheads and docks. Nobody goes into the water without some kind of footwear _ not only is the muck unpleasant but there are sharp broken shells, annoying edged rocks, and the detritus of centuries of sunken boats, industrial activity, and shoreline dumping.
Being scoured twice a day, the intertidal area is hardly as forbidding as you might think. Here there are almost pristine pebbles, exposed seaweed, and a closer look would reveal periwinkles, mussels, and clams, abundant even in these polluted times. Seagulls make a nice living, once upon a time, people did also.

Saturday

A careful observer can easily determine if tide is coming in or going out simply from observing the state of the sands and rivulets nearest the wave line. Another indicator, under the right conditions, is the brown scum of bubbles caused by air pockets and dried dust floating up as the water rises. In this case, the bubbles have detached to form little brown patches on the water.
I admit that in this, as in so many other things, I am hardly a careful observer. Sometimes I see more in my pictures of a scene later than I did at the scene itself. When I closely examine the rocks here, the stained dinghy, the corroded chain, each seems marvelous in its own way, and would not seem out of place in a modern art gallery somewhere _ especially, I suppose, inland where folks have never seen such things. Beauty can come in many guises.

Friday

Imagine an old gentleman wearing a long robe sitting in this gazeebo and then (if you had the proper temperament and training) you could create a fine Chinese brush painting of this scene. Working it backwards, this helps you understand the models used for those lovely colored ink on silk works existing since antiquity. A photograph is hardly better.
Life without accomplishment is empty. To accomplish we must have short and long term goals, plans, tasks and obsessions, which focus us and ignore irrelevancies. But even artificial constraints, such as the theme I use each week, can blind us to a great deal. This scene has nothing to do with tides, and has been available each morning, and I have not seen it. Not a fault, just another contradiction, a zen realization that reality is never truly known.

Thursday

The least interesting moments occur mid tide, when bleak sands are revealed and fascinating mudflats still lie hidden. Full tide is lovely as a lake, low tide is filled with marvels revealed. Mid tide _ well, this is the actual tidal zone, of course, within the borderlines of all that thrives here, and yet it seems stony and barren and boring.
I cast my moods and judgements like stains upon my experiences, coloring it almost beyond recognition. I expect clams and crabs and shells and a shipwreck or two _ I find broken bleached ruins. On another day the same umber sands and sea lavender glow with the brilliance of stained glass. Mercurial irrelevant perceptions are surely one of the perverse glories of being exactly what I am.

Wednesday

Full flood tide at Gold Star Battalion Beach. People prefer the ocean when it is low _ more beach to share, a greater water area to spread out in, and varied zones of wave intensity. But at most Huntington beaches, low tide is shunned _ too much flotsam, jetsam, and organic detritus floating in the reduced volume. Children are sternly warned not to get heads wet, any mishap induces moments of panic. E. Coli is treated as if it were bubonic plague.
Every day many fatal car accidents occur, but we ignore them. Our ancestors coped with high childhood mortality, women dying frequently in childbirth, death from starvation or wild animals or exposure or incurable contagious diseases always threatening. Yet today what we most fear are sore throats, upset stomachs, minor diarrhea, or earaches, maybe an infected scratch. We’ve lost perspective. I suppose we could learn to exist with such horrors once again, as the unfortunate refugees in the Mideast and elsewhere are doing at this very moment, but I hope it never happens. Parents worrying about the possibility of earaches is a wonderful sign of civilization working.

Tuesday

Coastal fishing, marine navigation, recreation, and infrastructure depend on tides _ not only high or low, but incoming or ebbing _ which are maddeningly exact. Almost every six hours the state flips, almost every seven days a given hour will have the opposite tide, a few miles of shoreline severely impact timing, and of course the ocean is _ almost _ the opposite of the Sound. And all the activities and tide levels themselves are also affected by temperature, local and distant weather, alignment of sun and moon, unpredictable waves, time of day, and season. For anyone not a professional dealing with it daily, it might as well be completely random.
Humans tend to grumble. Rain on weekends, cold weather on summer vacation, low tide when we want high. Only those privileged to live along a tidal shoreline for a while can understand how profoundly different it is from a river or lake. I consider the harbor tides one of the finest attractions of living where I do, even when they upset my plans.

Monday

Earth’s diameter is just about 8000 miles; the biozone from the top of breathable air to bottom of ocean depths is barely 8, and for all practical purposes even smaller than that. Comparisons of density are even worse, since life exists only around the lightest components. The surface area is a vast 200 million square miles, but of course three quarters of that is water. The rest is mountains, desert, fields, ice, and forest, with a few lakes thrown in. The intertidal zone may be locally pervasive, but represents only a thin tiny ribbon along salt water coasts. In that inconsequentially tiny environment exist immensely rich and diverse ecologies.
I think about that when strolling the shoreline. I too am inconsequential compared to everything, but inhabit what feels like a tremendously rich personal universe. Life, they say, began in the oceans and had to get through this barrier to start inhabiting the land. I am more of the fiddler crab type, never venturing into the depths on one side, nor testing the dryness on the other. Waving a claw at neighbors and running from shadows constitutes quite enough excitement for me.

Nifty Shades of Green

Sunday

This green world is excessively noisy on Saturday mornings. The din of chain saws, shrub trimmers, lawn mowers, and leaf blowers, intertwined with shouts of crews and rumblings of giant trucks carrying gear, begins at dawn and scarcely lets up until dusk, when the mosquitoes reclaim their territory. Perhaps that is why there is no one ever sitting in the Adirondack chairs or on porches wrapped around immense houses. More likely, people who can afford property around here lead busy busy lives with no time to just hang out and enjoy the fruits of their labors.
I think the saying “youth is wasted on the young” could be extended to “wealth is wasted on the wealthy.” A lifetime lived in sloth is wretched indeed. But a lifetime without long moments of appreciation is a shadow of what we should be.

Saturday

It was traditionally hard to paint a convincing mid-range picture of trees, although Ruisdael and Hobbema did so with limited palette. Distant woods, as here, could be blurred and blued and blotted in with shadows, close-up foliage could be treated carefully as still life, but capturing the actual experience of trees in-between required the out-of-the-box theories of the Impressionists. They were able to replace the effect of constant motion and color changes of rustling leaves with dabs of exaggerated complementary colors.
I find Pissarro the master for such landscapes. His canvases scarcely match photographs of the same subjects, but you feel as if you have actually been there looking around. I have frequently walked out of a museum after hours with the Impressionists to discover the world itself sparkling in ways I never imagined. It’s strange to realize that plain old dull greens can be treated so garishly and suddenly burst into realistic scenery through the magic of our eyes and brain.

Friday

A trumpet vine hovers over the tidal inlet at West Neck Beach. Most animals react to the unusual in their environment because that represents either danger or opportunity. Something orange where all is green and blue, something moving where all is still, or still where all is in motion. Humans encourage this perhaps to excess, risking overload of the senses.
I am always surprised that even as nearsighted as I am, any strange movement attracts my attention. Naturally, when trying to set up a picture, I am conscious of what might add interest to the landscape. The obverse of this is how quickly we apply filters and can ignore and dismiss anything that we have already evaluated, which is why I am frequently oblivious to what I have just seen or heard.

Thursday

Salt marsh stretches away at high tide in Lloyd Harbor, a haven for egrets and ospreys and lesser birds, fish, crustaceans, insects, grasses, and of course uncountable bacteria, protozoa and other lesser denizens of any open water. All seems in perfect harmony, a quiet lagoon where everything lives deeply specialized in its own niche. Moralists of various persuasions offer quaint proverbs and tales trying to show how cooperation, or struggle, or adaptation, or resistance are the cardinal rules of the natural world which society should adopt. From the time of the earliest fables, however, people have recognized those lessons as entertaining, but false and often irrelevant.
We know, as our ancestors did, as every human has ever known, that we are not the same as everything else. Unique among the complex life forms on the planet, each of us is an expert in being unspecialized and flexible. The true tale is that if necessary, we could figuratively take the place of anything in the landscape. You and I might not like it, but we could, and often do, as when we settle into an awful job. Gloriously alone, you and I are also miraculously able to know what we like, what we don’t, and what might make our experience better.

Wednesday

Matisse’ famous painting Luxe Calme et Volupte is named after Baudelaire’s poem “There, all is beauty/ luxury, calm, and voluptuousness.” Huntington is south of Saint-Tropez, more on the latitude of Naples, but Matisse might have recognized the humid light, if not the verdant overwhelming vegetation. Certainly William Merritt Chase and his circle demonstrated that impressionism works on Long Island, although nobody would ever describe the LIE _ even during a dead-stop traffic jam _ as calm.
I’ve always enjoyed fantasizing about people such as Matisse painting on this hill, or Caesar marching his troops along the shoreline, or some Gibbons of the future sadly musing on the ruins of underwater Huntington. When technicians speak of artificial intelligence do they assume that means a capacity to experience voluptuousness, or to daydream impossibilities? We are more than our experiences or logic, more than pattern matching machines, more than dots on some statistical chart. You and I are never merely what we accomplish, never simply defined by how others judge us. I can also
be, on good days, “luxe calme et volupte.”

Tuesday

July weather has become classic summer _ hot, humid, storms possible anytime. That seems completely normal and unremarkable _ what is usually remembered are extreme events of temperature, precipitation, or wind. But normal is never guaranteed _ people may look back and sigh “recall that last glorious July of 2015, before the world went mad.”
We hardly ever evaluate what we live through properly _ minor events like an assassination can trigger a world war, a normal business panic can become a decade-long depression, a temporary lack of rain can dry into an epic drought. Death, taxes, gravity, the sun, yes we can probably count on those, but everything else remains unknowable. That is why I try to grab happiness as it comes by. Sometimes that is hard or impossible, but when happiness is available even for moments, I should cherish that impermanent and never certain treasure.

Monday

A wily old woodsman could determine a calendar date almost as well as someone with access to a cell phone. A glance at the crowns of trees, for example, narrows the possible season considerably. Closer examination of leaves would yield a pretty good guess simply with their state and color. Tender young growth in the spring is mostly pale and yellowish, tinged with streaks of red, always delicate and clear-cut, often unfurling. As the summer progresses, every hue darkens as if it becomes suntanned, insect infestation creates holes and ragged gaps, weather and drought turn whole branches brown, and nothing seems to grow at all. Even without recourse to the state of flowers _ which are of course a dead giveaway for anyone _ trees and shrubs tell a remarkably complete story.
What always surprises me is not that such variety of shades of green exist, for I see them easily when I try, but that I so often ignore them totally. Even when trying to communicate exactly what I perceive, I remain at a loss. Unless you work for a paint company coming up with luscious descriptions of your wares, or are a struggling writer trying for variety in prose, there is never much reason to go beyond “green.” We have synonyms and modifiers, but I hardly ever use them in daily speech. Just another of the grand, unnoticed, fractal wonders of my existence.

Flags & Firecrackers

Sunday

Could be a historic old colonial home on the harbor _ well, not really, but it looks the part, and it is patriotically decked out. What anyone considers history is always relative anyway. In some places it is anything over fifty years old, in others a thousand. At the rate of change in most of the world, something saved from last month or last year should get a historic marker and designation. Modern civilization is perhaps too adapted to novelty.
It’s been a hard acceptance that I myself have slid into historic status. What I remember is as long gone for younger generations as the roads of Rome or the gardens of Babylon. Was it really like that, they ask amazed, as I once did to my grandparents. Sometimes that realization is sad, sometimes I’m just grateful I survived through it all, sometimes it seems irrelevant, sometimes it seems the most important element of my life. One thing constant through it all, and I hope it remains so for a long time, has been fireworks and picnics on the Fourth of July.

Saturday

Little flags pop up like mushrooms now. Maybe it’s a universal human trait. Switch the language on the sign, substitute the national colors of your choice, and this could be anywhere in Europe in the last two centuries. The whole phenomenon is endearing until it suddenly turns virulent. A difficult balance.
Difficult balance is what life is all about. Tension between overpopulation and extinction, tension between homeostatic systems like blood pressure and temperature, tension between social freedom and security. Irresolvable contradictions somehow leading to temporary dynamic situations that manage to continue on. At this time and place, from my viewpoint, little flags are terrific decoration and symbolic of a mostly good outlook on life.

Friday

Of course, just because the indigenous flowers are less on display does not prevent cultivated varieties from their own ostentatious celebration. These lilies are in full glory right now, as are many exotic species which most people have added to tiny microenvironments around their house. It’s amazing how people like to keep their grounds beautiful, even in a culture that rarely prizes beauty in and of itself. Easier and more rewarding to simply accept that people like to decorate their homes than to worry about the evolutionary or cosmic reasons why that should be so.
In some minds, this flower bed would be far better stripped and pulled back into climax forest. I can’t help but think of those as Luddites, futilely railing against change. I would not like these flowers replaced by gloom, ferns, and mosquitoes _ there’s quite enough of that in the Adirondacks and Catskills. I admire the intense joy emitted by these blooms and others like them, the feeling that others do care greatly about living things, the realization that even during the most rational of barren economic ideologies we engage in pure pointless showmanship because we enjoy it.

Thursday

As this drying dock weed illustrates, grand fireworks of native flowers are pretty much over. Trees have bloomed, meadows are no long swathed in color. There will be plenty of isolated flowers and fruits from here on, but everything is racing to grow as quickly as possible. The world is engulfed in green, except where cultivated in gardens. Insects have their own rhythms, last night for the first time numerous lightning bugs arose spontaneously from the lawn as twilight deepened.
I’ve been privileged over the last few years to be fully engaged in local seasons. Nature is completely enchanting and fulfilling when we can pay enough attention to it. Fortunately, I can still be astonished at the perfection of a bee visiting a purple clover, or a dragonfly flitting over a pond, elements which now come into their own until fall once again dictates major change.

Wednesday

Thermometer in the eighties, fine firm wind, brilliant sky, schools empty, but only a few sails, one big, one small. In fact, the harbor this late morning is surprisingly empty on the waters, although the sand has quite a crowd. No matter, a fine, colorful and quiet activity out there, to celebrate being alive and aware.
Perhaps everyone else is off worrying about far-away Greece or China, or equally distant Christmas sales. More likely, they have decided to wait for next week to declare summer holiday. In the meantime, a wee bit desperate, I seize on anything I might fit into my definitions, a modern Humpty-Dumpty. Stretching the definition of flag, perhaps, but colored cloth is colored cloth. Of course, by that token bathing suits and other apparel should count as well.

Tuesday

Original Impressionists loved to show flags in their landscapes, seascapes, and townscapes. It was an opportunity to add dashes of pure vibrant colors to their otherwise sparkling but pastel palette. France was apparently chock full of flag displays at the end of the nineteenth century. Every summer, Huntington harbor also brightens up with bits of cloth flying everywhere.
Sometimes a theme doesn’t work out well. For some reason, the usual pennants festooning the boats remain in storage this year _ for that matter I’ve only seen one or two sailboats. Since I can’t very well photograph the firecrackers sounding each evening, and my camera will not capture fireflies or fireworks, finding something to say may tax my inventive powers. On the other hand, my mouth often outpaces my brain, so all may be well.

Monday

Continuing alliteration: _ first Fourth festivals fizzle. Watching California and the West in drought, living where the rain falls frequently and plentifully from the sky seems a pretty good deal. It certainly hasn’t hampered the efforts of these young folks fishing.
I welcome clouds, rain, mist, snow, fog as magical costumes on the normally clear and bright landscape. Perhaps that is just a rationalization, an acceptance of the inevitable, but I honestly like such variation. Even in this season, when every day is a fabulous holiday different from the one before in almost every way, I find special details such as the drops of rain hanging on the day lilies profoundly entertaining. I also feel sorry for those who do not have the time, resources, inclination, or wisdom to do so.