Aliens on Our Shores
The river looks desolate on the cusp of spring, when the geese are gone and the ospreys are still few. The sky is faded blue and the water a rough slate under a hard west wind. Distant trees are dark sticks. The Chester’s most distinctive feature now and its only warm color — amber walls lining banks above Morgan Creek as far as I can see — is something that maybe doesn’t belong here and certainly wasn’t here like this a few decades ago.
Going Again to Big Sur
Excerpted from Vanishing America, in Pursuit of Our Elusive Landscapes
Just south of the Carmel River, a field of artichokes ran down to the beach where surfers risked cold waves heaving against black rocks. Beyond that point the land shed its California trappings, including Carmel’s pastel bungalows, and the continent seemed to tilt upward and to the right. The place was one perpetual edge, I thought, where ordinary concerns paled before the prospect of gravity and its effects. To live was to cling to the mountain and view things in a vertical perspective that surpassed what was commonly considered beautiful; it was to feel the heat of a persistent sun, to smell eucalyptus and red dust, and to hear – when the wind was right – the reverberation of waves in rocky crypts hundreds of feet below.
Urban Animals (Part 1) -or- The Rat and I
Winter breezes ruffled the printouts in my hands as I shifted position on the wooden bench. It was a late afternoon in New York City and I was in Union Square Park waiting for friends, planning to go on to a Village bar for happy hour, but waiting so long the sun had set over the metronome clock and I found myself reading by streetlamp. Tightening my jacket and straining eyes to read in dim light, I suddenly was hyper-aware of increasing activity around the bench. Glancing down at my feet, I saw the dark ground moving and couldn’t figure why. Then I felt something brushing over my Italian business shoes. I raised my feet and peered closer and suddenly understood: beneath the bench was alive with dusk’s rush hour of mice, commuting to their night jobs of hunting and gathering.
A year ago I would have been standing on my park bench in a shouting panic, drawing attention and scorn from longer-time New Yorkers enjoying the park after nightfall. Now, though, I was more concerned with how the article would end, so I just lifted my feet off the ground and continued reading:
In New York City, as in all great seaports, rats abound. One is occasionally in their presence without being aware of it. In the whole city relatively few blocks are entirely free of them. They have diminished greatly in the last twenty-five years, but there are still millions here; some authorities believe that in the five boroughs there is a rat for every human being.
– Joseph Mitchell, “The Rats on the Waterfront” (1944)
Where Wings Take Dream
Rarely is the question asked (at least that was the case until a president of the United States asked it): “Is our children learning?”
Well is them?
It’s a question that nags at me, editor of an online magazine devoted to such things as the beauties and the befoulings of bays and the oceans — especially in times like these when, as our president also says, “You’re working hard to put food on your family.” Really. What if, while I’m trying to make this project pay for the noodles with cream sauce and capers I’ll heap on my woman come Saturday night — what if the readers I want don’t even know where the Atlantic and the Pacific is. I mean are.
One Little River
Excerpted from Vanishing America, in Pursuit of Our Elusive Landscapes
I was for a time the only person I knew who traveled with a pair of hip waders in the trunk of his car, not for pursuing brook trout on the east slope of the Blue Ridge but for getting to the house in time of what Virginians call falling weather. Our low water bridge wasn’t much of one when it was raining, and none at all in the episodic monsoons that rolled over the mountains, when our little river rose like some liquid behemoth, transforming the landscape and making anybody on the wrong side of it extremely thoughtful.
At such times there was too much water over the bridge for a car, but it could sometimes be waded. Then it attested to its designation as wild and scenic. In good weather we rarely discussed the river. In falling weather the river bobbed in our conversation; with more rain, passage across the bridge became dicey, and the subject close to unavoidable.
Manifest Destination
Excerpted from Vanishing America, In Pursuit of Our Elusive Landscapes
Distant hills gold in the August sun, parched air, and shadows sharp as stilettos are familiar components of the valley of the Napa River, but this could as easily be Tuscany, or Provence. The guests at a poolside poetry reading, sipping Sauvignon Blanc, wearing jeans or chinos, all clearly belong, their lives at least tangential to one of the most valuable legal crops in America. Growing grapes and making and selling wine, or its downstream bounty—real estate, promotion, investment—produce income for most of these people, and they are happy to contribute to the local arts on a Sunday afternoon.
Mercury Rising
Nothing of the day or the place spoke danger to the two fishermen when they launched their canoe into the upper reaches of the Chester River watershed. A soft September sun shone through the afternoon haze and a fitful breeze riffled the surface, making sparkles. Birds sang. The men flicked spinning rods, casting bait to the shallows, and the strikes came quickly.
There are photos of them there that day, smiling, unshaven, holding their catches a little toward the camera, like fishermen do, to make them look larger. The men were plainly proud, as fishermen are, of a catch like that — largemouth bass, fat, green, shimmering in the light — hard-fighting and pretty good eating, buttered and battered and fried just right. They didn’t know, then, what they know now.
What they held in their hands could wreck their brains. A poison.
Remains of the Bay
The last American fishing fleet with sails is scudding westward across the Chesapeake Bay, one more time. It’s dark yet, autumn winds are blowing, the water is roughening. The crewmen huddled below in cramped cabins and and the captains topside at their helms realize this could be the final season they will go dredging for oysters — “drudgin’ arsters,” in the waterman’s vernacular.
Running under motor, not sail, this scattered fleet of four skipjacks no longer uses the wind to oyster. Sailing is too slow and doesn’t pay when so few shellfish remain on the bottom of the bay — for something is killing the oysters.
Welcome to the Buzzards’ Roost
The swallows that swarm to San Juan Capistrano are fabled, and that’s not fair. What about another winged wonder of another charming place just about as rich in history and architecture and seasonal blessings. Honor is overdue to the birds that gather at the crossroads here as darkness closes, like sentinels of the night, so comforting to the people in their homes.
Yes, the buzzards of Chestertown. How come nobody celebrates them, I don’t know.
Of Dogs and Men
As time goes by I keep missing my old dog Luke. And I killed him.
His fate was set the day my ex-girlfriend called and said we had to do something about him. At that point she and I couldn’t get along anymore, but we did share, amicably, custody of Luke. I’d keep him awhile until I had to take a trip, then I’d pass him to her. She’d do the same. He seemed happy enough to be with either of us and ran eagerly into whichever house he was revisiting.
