Flying Through Autumn

           Two great white egrets came gliding across the flat of the salt marsh just as I cam around the bend of the park's so-called 'nature walk' -- as if there were any other sort of walk you could take there -- and the larger one, flying backup in the two-bird formation, looked at me and groaned.

            I don't pretend to any special knowledge of the vocalizations of great white egrets, but I know when I'm being unwelcomed. Oh god, the egret said to himself, 'there's a guy down there.' Maybe he said, 'that guy.' Or, 'that guy again? I saw enough of him last year.'

            His call was a kind of scold, a honk of despair, a sort of dull warning. As if he knew the biped below posed no real danger, but as a great egret of principle -- and from the need to train the smaller (possibly younger) not so great egret flying before of the protocols for taking evasive action when encountering even a predictable large biped within bowshot -- he reluctantly gave the warning call, or grunt, groan or growl. And bent his flight in a long graceful curve away from my position, adding sufficient distance on this new tack within a few seconds.

            It was a perfect day, a perfect hour in a perfect afternoon, in the midst of a superior week of cool, dry September weather. It was the second time in three days I had gone to the marsh. This day you could smell the salt from the seashore. The sun was warm on your head and shoulders, but the wind that blew the sea smell ashore keep the air cool around your legs.

            Since I'd seen no birds to speak of the previous visit, I brought my small, lightweight binoculars on the chance of seeing them this day. Reverse logic. Now with the two egrets wheeling away but not, as I feared, out of sight, I fumbled with the binoculars case, slowed by removing the lens guards (since I was totally unprepared to actually use them), and by the time I had the glasses ready the egrets were flying S-curves from one end of the horizon to the other and turning back toward my direct line of sight. Since using field glasses takes practice, I had to keep putting the glasses down to find the birds with the naked eye, and then trying to guess where they'd be when I lifted the glasses to my eyes. After several long moments of not-seeing, the larger of the pair flew into my 'ken' just as he was framing himself against the line of trees that separates the salt marsh from the shoreline drive. He disappeared in an instant. 

            So, I thought, concluding that the big birds had apparently changed course and direction, I hope I haven't ruined your plans for the afternoon. I continued walking, hoping to see them come back to the marsh.

            I saw a different water bird fly rather low overhead. A cormorant, I decided. And a few minutes later, a large broad-winged bird flew against the trees in another park just beyond the marsh. With the glasses I caught the white tips of the wings before it settled among the trees. Hawk?

            Then a couple of large birds flew closer to me across the marsh, and even with the glasses, and even with finally getting the glass locked on them and working the focus, I could not identify them. And only then did I finally register the large man-made structure far enough off  the path in the marsh that no one on foot could walk to it (that was the point) and which I had somehow failed to pay attention to before. My brain apparently assimilating it into the category of human junk that sometimes shows up in city parks. But the two intersecting metal bars of the frame were meant to hold something, and that something was pretty clearly an osprey house, a kind of wooden box on a platform.

            A few minutes later I saw a small signpost announcing the construction of a new osprey nest in Quincy and the assertion that ospreys have been observed flying in the salt marsh. Did they just built this thing the day before? Or have I been suffering from some inexplicable blind spot. No matter, it's here now.  

            My apologies to egrets I bothered that afternoon, to he herons and hawks I have spied on for years. But the prospect of annoying some local osprey by peering relentlessly upward on my marshland excursions cheers me no end. 

(Note: top photo, a great egret flying above the salt marsh in Quincy.
Second photo, an osprey, taken earlier this year in St. Augustine, Florida.) 

Glorious, Various, Mysterious

  

          I sat in the backyard watching the September light darken as it passed through the trees. It rallied, finding gaps in the branches, the crowns, and my perspective from the Adirondack chair perched under a big shade tree grew lighter. Then another decline, and the light shadowed once more.

            It's a mystery. Everything, really. A mystery at the heart of things. We don't get any closer to understanding it, but we have to watch it sometimes. Simply stop and stare. How have we come to this point? How is it that in a few days more we will come to another point in time and forget all about the hour in the late afternoon that we sat and watched and found so impeccably beautiful. Words can add nothing to it. People have no role to play. Everything both very alive and perfectly still. Well, one mosquito paid a brief visit. It, presumably, has no capacity for remembering. But we are ultimately in the same boat. Neither of us knows how we got there, or how it -- 'there' -- got away. The plants do not appear to move. I do not see the flowers emerge. Or the foliage grow old. I never see anything "happen" on a plant. Only the wind, when there is wind, moves them. Only in the time lapse of our own movements, our forgetting and remembering, do things 'happen' to plants: flowers, mere buds yesterday, blossom today. I assume they "blossom," an active verb. What I see, and know, is: bud on one occasion, flower some other. Oh, sometimes, if they're big enough, you catch the blossoms half way out. But you see no movement from one stage to another; you simply don't. You see the morning glory gloriously open to the morning sun. Later that day the same blossom is closed. But the process is only inferred.

            I sat outdoors in an Adirondack chair watching all this happen, which is to say watching nothing 'happen,' until at some point in time I stood and went into the house and did something else. Since this 'happened' (my movements) only yesterday I may be able to recollect them with some accuracy; but the clarity of this recollection soon fades. Today in about half an hour I will try to reproduce the experiment -- or do I mean 'experience' -- of returning to the same chair, the same point of view, at the same time of day, and permitting the nothing that is the life of the natural world to happen again.

            Yesterday afternoon: no wind. Nothing moved, though obviously the sun -- by which I mean my position relative to the sun -- moved. That is: the earth moved. Because the earth moves, everything happens. I suppose there is my explanation, the only one I will get.

            But it will not be the same, no matter how much I control the observable conditions. If I am looking for the same conditions to reproduce the same thoughts, the same feelings, I will be disappointed. You can't step into the same river twice -- old Buddhist proverb.

            And (not a proverb, but my own), you can't account for what makes it different.

            We hope divinity has good eyesight, good sense organs, able to see the subtle changes, the "passage of time" -- i.e. able to see time pass -- because if the eye of god is not watching, nobody, absolutely nobody, is seeing the whole show. We see snatches and infer the rest. Causality; connection; story line. Ah yes, that little flash of pink on the edge of a particular branch of rose of sharon extending a casual reach a foot above the fence line; that wasn't there yesterday. Was it?

            Who the hell knows. 'God knows,' as the expression goes. Maybe.

            Maybe, at best.

            I don't know, but I rather doubt any such eye of god exists. That the divinity, or one of his bureaucracies maintains an uber-surveillance every moment on every dimension of space from every point of view on an infinitude of galaxies in a possibly infinite universe. And even if finite, unimaginably vast.          

            And if this eye of god does not exist, then we are god's senses, his physical senses, sense organs, powers of perception. We exist in order that the universe may know and regard itself. I admit it, as I admitted right at the start, it's a mystery to me.

            We live in a mystery, and the mystery is us.

Anemone, Pink Chablis Sedum, and the Startling White Iris

             A toast to September flowers. They're typically far fewer in number than those that bloom in the previous months and they come at a time when a lot of the late summer standards are wearing down: the tall phlox, the black-eyed susans. The echinacea, or purple cone flowers, are long gone. I leave their black heads out there supposedly for the birds, but don't see any birds on them, and the effect of all those withered black seed heads is looking increasingly funereal.

           But some plants do best in the autumn months of September and October. The morning glories; various other annuals. Some blue salvia in front of the house that have taken all year to make up their modest but stylish flowerheads. Some verbena keep putting out  blossoms.

            Among the perennials, my favorite September bloomer is the dark pink flowering anemone (top photo). A lighter pink anemone kept us company all of last month, a welcome late summer bloomer. Its first prolific round of flowers is gone now; I 'm trying to coax a second round out of it. All I know about the anemone flower is that it was imprinted on my memory after I heard its name spoken in a poem by the great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish recited shortly after his death.

            I'll plunder here what I wrote two years ago when I last tried to explain this connection. The poem is known by its first line, “The beloved hemorrhaged anemones.” The "beloved" here means the land. Darwish's poem reads:  

Oh people of Cannan… It’s your good luck that you chose agriculture as a profession

it’s your bad luck that you chose the gardens

near god’s borders…

And:

The first of our songs is the blood of love

that gods shed,

and the last is the blood shed by iron gods . . .

(You can read the rest of it on: batcityreview.la.utexas.edu/pdf/Darwish.pdf)

              I'm back in 2013 here, thinking that even those of us who don't live "near god's borders" in the sense meant by the poem can choose to grow anemones on our own beloved pieces of earth. These valiant, late-call flowers, blooming sublimely when so many other perennials have shut down for the season and sent their vitality to winter quarters awake certain ideas and feelings in me every year that I treasure. But that’s the way it is with flowers. They are nature’s poems.

            According to reference sources "Anemone is a genus of about 120 species of flowering plants in the family Ranunculaceae, native to the temperate zones."

            Then of course (since names get to me) there are the "Sea anemones," described as "a group of water-dwelling, predatory animals." Only now, as I look them up on line, do I learn the sea creatures are named for "the anemone, a terrestrial flower." If you look at pictures of these two life forms from very different realms you can see what name-giver had in mind -- that tightly gathered symmetry of brightly colored parts. The sea anemones do look gorgeously strange. But if you don't happen to have an aquarium in your back yard, you may find that the flowers are more than adequate substitution.

            Our Pink Chablis Sedum (second photo), described by an online reference as the "scrumptious white-edged [variety] with white-snow buds and vibrant pink flowers," seem to be getting better every year. Another source states: "Broad green succulent leaves have a clean white edge that is well displayed. Pink flowers appear in late summer from white buds."

            They said it. 

            Our plant stays the same size each year, but its blossom deepens its color. I don't know why. It's planted in a "part-shade" spot where some plants thrive and others don't. A couple of its original neighbors are long gone. As a sedum (those succulent leaves) it tolerates the mid-summer drought well. The sources agree this is a "sun plant," so I'll accept its willingness to thrive in our semi-sun neighborhood as a gift from the gods.

            The "startling white iris" (third photo) that began blooming in the middle of September is more like the laughter of the gods, hooting at my inability to do anything with irises. The traditional bearded iris is a sun flower that will not adjust to our low-sun diet no matter where I put it. I transplanted a few under-performing irises to a new site last year but didn't get around to it until October, so perhaps I've simply destroyed this valiant specimen's sense of time.

            Irises bloom early in the year and disappear quickly. They're heart breakers. Maybe we're being set for a fall here by this rare September favor. So be it; I'm still in love.

Roots Music -- and World Flowers

            I first heard the music of Ali Farka Toure on the public radio show "The World," an international news show with a perfect title. The show also had a perfect, though brief musical interlude to introduce its daily "Geo Quiz" feature with a theme song that sounded to me like something new in the world of sound. I couldn't have said with any confidence, 'Oh that's from Africa.' It was music produced on an electric guitar, but didn't sound like any of the multifarious productions of contemporary Western World guitar players, who if they have not exhausted all possible sounds that could be wrung from the electric guitar could not be faulted for not trying.

            The sound was lively, with bounce and drive, assured, not funky so much as redolent of the place funk was seeking to arrive at once it gave up the hurry and the noise. It was a sound that made the human brain feel knowing and comfortable, even happy with the notion of a challenge by something new. The song made the traffic relax and the driver gladden inside. It was the music to accompany the William Blake sunburst-figure etching titled "Glad Day."

            I couldn't put what I was hearing clearly into any tradition or style I had a name for, or guess at its origin. The context of hearing it on the "The World" gave me the only useful clue.

            OK, I thought. This is what they mean by 'world music.'

            Some time later I happened to hear this now instantly recognizable tune on another NPR show called "Sound & Spirit," unfortunately no longer on the air. The host identified the performer and I somehow kept the name in my memory until I looked through the library's collections of CDs and found one of his albums: Ali Farka Toure. The album, I'm pretty sure, was "Talking Timbuktu Blues," the album that includes a recording of the song that sounded to me like the voice of a new new millennium, the era of universal world culture -- which is where we're headed (if we're headed anywhere this side of the 'eve of destruction'). 
          The Ali Farka Toure song is called "Diaraby."

          In the short run (the new age not quite having arrived), listening to Farka Toure led me to other from his country, Mali, a country that for me had simply occupied a strangely contorted space on the map of West Africa. Now the home Ipod is filled with their musical productions.

            The album "Talking Timbuktu Blues" is a collaboration with American blues guitarist Ry Cooder, a name I was familiar with, though there is relatively little of him and rather a lot of Farka Toure on the record. The affinity between American musicians and the musicians from Mali and other African counties seeking a place on the world stage, and in the commercially profitable Western music market, has given rise to the world music umbrella genre of "African" or "Desert" Blues.

            So my interest was considerable when my son Saul, who was studying classical guitar performance at the College Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati decided to write a musicology thesis examining the merits of a "roots" connection between American Blues and African music. Others, scholars, record producers, had made the claim that similarities exist between the blues and traditional African music, especially in West African counties like Mali and its neighbors. Some had journeyed to Africa to "discover" the roots of the blues in the music being played there.

            But it turns out -- as I learn from my recent reading of "'African Blues': The Sound and History of a Transatlantic Discourse" by Saul Meyerson-Knox -- the theory doesn't hold up to close examination. Even the genre of American blues, easily recognizable to us by ear, isn't easy to define in purely musical terms. And a lot of water had gone under the bridge since Africans were severed from their homes and condemned to slavery in the New World. Surely so-called traditional African music has evolved in the intervening centuries. What African musicians are playing today is not what their ancestors played three and four hundred years ago. And there were no doubt other influences on the African-Ameircan musicians who began playing and singing the blues in the American South, generally believed to have "rooted" (that word again) in the Mississippi Delta.

            We all believe roots. But flowers and fruits are just important.

            It may turn out that the connection between the blues and West African musicians such as Ali Farka Toure, Tinariwen, Toumani Diabate, Boubacar Traore, Amadou and Miriam, and others is more commercially useful than historically valid or demonstrable by musical theory. But if putting the "blues" label on contemporary African music helps it get a hearing in the West, that's to the good.

            Besides, contemporary collaborations and counter-influences, the synergy that springs up between between musicians here and musicians there have already proved astonishingly fruitful, at least to my ears. These cross-current creations may open our eyes to the realization that the world's artistic productions -- in music, writing, and visuals -- belong to all of us. 
They are the way we will all get together.

Blues in the Mornnig

Outside our bedroom window this morning large blue blossoms from the morning glory vine wave their friendly sky-tinted faces in a faint late summer breeze. If they are trying to attract our attention they’ve succeeded.
Or perhaps they are trying to get inside, wake us up and say, “Look out your window, we’re here.” They may also be saying, “For god’s sake don’t miss us today. We may never be this good again.”

I go out and count ten blossoms, all the big sky-blue variety, possibly from the same plant. We may have a September photo here.

Morning glories are an annual plant. Every year we plant them in a collection of pots. The vines climb up a series of improvised trellises we made a few years ago out of extra pieces of crisscrossed battens that enclose the lower part of the front porch. I have repressed the exact nature of the dodges I used to attach these slight assemblages of flimsy wood to our wall. Well, actually, I seem to recall it involved nailing (or tacking) the trellises to a couple of window boxes given us by a fiend, so they are not actually attached to the wall of the house. They just sort of stand next to it and manage (so far) not to fall over.

Every year since then we remember to buy the seedlings, though on occasion when I can find them I plant seeds in the pots and work with the emerging vines. Either way we have to dig up a collection of plastic pots, find enough dirt somewhere to fill them, transplant the seedlings (or thin the seeds), and remember to keep the pots watered. The plants grow thin vines and heart-shaped leaves. Then we wait. Some time around mid-summer a few flowers appear, low key, casual, off-handed flowers, not promising any great things, not telling us to get our hopes up. They tend to be small whites ones with red stripes, or some pastel monotone. We never know what colors to expect because the act of keeping the seed packs or the seedling tags falls off the back shelf of the mind; just too much plant information to keep track of this time of year. 

These flowers last a day, disappear, and are replaced by no-flowers. They are the outliers. Then another month goes by.

By September, if we’re lucky, we start getting a good run of blossoms. The vines never truly thicken to the extent you see elsewhere because ours grow on the back of the house, facing northerly. The front is the sunny side of the street. So we’re happy with what we get. But this year the bedroom window, the one place on the house's back wall that draws an hour or two of direct, unimpeded morning light — in between heavy tree cover to one side and the shadow of houses to the other -- has tempted the vines strongly upward. 

It’s the one place where morning glories, living up to their name, draw the energy to take off their hats and put on a big, blue morning show.

There’s a song, a children’s song I believe, that goes: “Oh, we’ll all sing glory to the mountain, the mountain is so high, it reaches to the sky. And it’s one, two, three, follow me, etc. ….” I would change a few words: “Oh, we’ll all sing glory to the flowers. The flowers reach so high/ they’re bluer than the sky…” And it was one, two, three…. all the way up to ten this morning. That’s a pretty good way to start the day.

Boston Harbor Islands: First Explore the Schedule

            Why is it so much fun to look at the water? The great pleasure in taking a Boston Harbor Islands ferry from island to island is watching the world you're ordinarily part of it (and think you "know") go by from the point of view of the water. It looks different from out here.

            Then there's the lure of just watching the water. Does some part of us still long for those long-ago millennia of fins and gills and trying not to end up as Gollum's dinner?

            Departing from the Hingham Shipyard, the ferry sticks to the channel while we scan the horizon from a narrow bench on the sunny side of the deck. Checking out the shiny new commercial buildings on the redeveloped shipyard, the in and out rhythm of the shoreline as a headland retreats and reveals a few sunbathers on a driveway-sized beach; then a vertical extrusion of graying cement towers looking dated and tired. And then we started running into the shoreline profiles of lesser known lands that were islands or peninsulas and trying to figure which was which. 

           The high point came when I recognized that the long, skinny peninsula finger-pointing into the harbor while it snuck up on us from the other side of the ferry was Hull. This extremity is called Pemberton Point, where a wind turbine rises beside the high school. I've been there! And when you look across the water from there -- a historically important shipping channel, the 'south' route into Boston harbor, called the "Hull Gut" -- what you see is the landing pier at Peddock's Island. And that's where we are now! looking back at Hull. As I said, things look different from water.  

            Peddocks Island, however, is better in theory than in fact. None of the buildings surviving from its World War II military base are open. The so-called "fort" is missing some of the basic attributes of a fort, such as walls. And whoever is running the harbor islands these days (the National Park Service, actually) doesn't have a decent map of the place to offer visitors. What the Park Service insists on calling "Fort" Andrews was in fact a military base at the start of World War II. The military built what appear to be very decent quarters for NCOs, and there are signs pointing out where a few guns (mortars) intended to protect the harbor used to be, but aren't there any more.

            The base became a prison camp for Italian soldiers captured in North Africa, and everybody posted there ended up having a good time sharing spaghetti and tomato sauce dinners because the Italians knew how to grow a garden.

            Since there wasn't that much to explore on Peddocks, we started to look at the ferry schedule to figure out our options. We had already passed on the Quincy ferry service since the the departure/arrival times weren't convenient for our Sunday afternoon start schedule. That decision brought us to the Hingham Shipyard "blue" line.

            We had left Hingham a few minutes after 1 p.m. Now as hard as we studied the "multi-island adventure summer ferry schedule" presented us, we could find only two possible return times, 3:55 p.m.or 6:15 p.m. No middle way between these poles. To get back to Hingham at 3:55 p.m. we would have to board a 3 p.m. ferry at the Peddocks dock. That boat would then turn a two-stop "adventure" voyage that took 20 minutes on the way out into a 55-minute return trip. It's funny how time seems to disappear over water. Maybe it's because the weather was perfect for a boat ride -- sunny, dry, low 80s -- but disappear it did.

            Our other choice was to leave Peddocks at 4:35 and spend almost twice as much time, an hour and forty minutes, while touching the landing dock of every harbor island on the way back.

            I forced my sun-struck, spaced-out brain to try to make sense of this magical disappearing act of time. If you get on the 4:35 ferry -- omitting the question of how to spend another hour and a half on already-explored Peddocks -- the ferry would take you to Georges Island at 4:55 (where visitors can explore an actual Civil War era fort, but now there was no time), then to Lovells Island at 5:05; then -- looping back -- back to Georges Island again (so actually you could have a jolly 10 minutes there) at 5:15.Then onto Hull at 5:35 -- Hull? Hull's not even an island! -- then back again to Peddocks at 5:45 p.m. (rescuing the last few adventurers tearing their hair in tedium); then back at last to Hingham at 6:15 p.m., somehow having stretched that 20-minute direct cruise into a 1 hour and 40-minute circumnavigation of the wonders of a modest slice of Boston Harbor.

            But the thing is, just watching the water and the retreating landscape -- there goes Worlds End! Again! -- really was, well, the high point of the day. Or have I said that already?