Brief, But Glamorous November Light: Nothing Weeps But the Cherry Tree

            It's November: it's too cold to spend hours out of doors. And the day's too short to waste daylight. A late afternoon flare-up in the back yard (of course late afternoon comes early). The weeping cherry burning brighter than other autumns. That's the year, 2014 -- the growing season at least -- going up in flames. It's a great color. (Top photo.)

            When the weather is nice I go to the salt marsh by the shoreline at Wollaston Beach. Despite the fact that I've been there probably a couple of hundred times now, the marsh still smells and feels like a new world. Just far enough away to make a contrast with a city, the world of people, my world: my own private world of home gardening and desk sitting as well. Last week somebody opened the flood gates, and the marsh filled with water. It wasn't an astronomical high tide, we weren't having one, and it certainly wasn't a rain storm of biblical dimensions because we hardly had any rain either.

            But we had plenty of water. I watched it flow, a long circuitous current from the Quincy Bay into another piece of salt marsh, then into a a permanent sort of lagoon called Black Creek; then turn about and flow seaward, perhaps under the influence of an outgoing tide from the estuarial Furnace Brook, and flow seaward toward the salt marsh where I walk. It won't reach the sea. It gets trapped by the marsh and fills it.

            High water, high enough for kayaks and canoes, possibly even for party boats,  means no wading birds. They have place to stand in low water, waiting for a fish to mistake their skinny legs for a stem. High water sometimes brings geese and ducks to the marsh. Not this time. A great elemental smell in the air -- water, fresh air, and wet, wet spartina grass -- but a no-bird week in the marsh .

            Best color on the local foliage front this week, with the possible exception of that weeping cherry, is the reddish turn on the hydrangea. I don't know what the other hydrangeas do in November, but this one is a lace-cap variety, meaning the flowers have a white lacy center with a kind of coppery-color larger blossom circlet encircling the "cap." 

            This week those blossoms turned reddish. I don't know any name for this color. (Fourth photo down)

            I kept trying to capture a red sunset sky behind the red-orange leaves of the young maple tree in front of our house without much success. What I got was either too light, or too dark, or with no clear discrimination between colors of nature (fifth down).

            Indoors, the best color came from some branches I scrounged off the big annual hibiscus that I kept alive for two years, but was too slow to save this year. The plant, spending a summer outdoors in a big plastic pot, is sensitive to the cold, and the a couple of chilly nights put the death in its leaves before I did anything about it except to try to rescue its neighbor, which promptly died from shock when I brought it indoors.

            I cut the stems on the old hibiscus where the buds were largest and brought them inside to sit in water. We were rewarded with a handful of short-lived but touchingly fragile blossoms. Short-lived but sublime. They shared a table with the mail (sixth down).

            Not wasting a moment of November light, I go back to my beginning. The sun lights up the the weeping Japanese cherry tree behind the house and I race outdoors to see it. The effect was far more ravishing that the photo.

            It was brief as the hands of November's clock. 
            The November sunset comes quickly. The moment is there and you drop everything and seize it. Or try. 

Walking All Over the River: The Neponset RiverWalk in Quincy

            A likely never finished vision: walking the length of the Quincy shore, its peninsulas and beaches and the altogether many miles of a shoreline continually interrupted by everything built on it by people and now in private ownership.

            The Neponset River Watershed Association is nevertheless pursuing its own vision. Opened just a month ago, the Quincy RiverWalk is a 2 mile-long walkway along the Neponset River on the Quincy side of the Neponset Bridge (home of the infamous Neponset traffic circle), starting from a familiar landmark, the gazebo of the Adams Inn. From there you walk underneath the bridge and continue on a stitched series of paths and paved sidewalk that runs along the edge of the Squantum Peninsula, connecting to Marina Bay and Squantum Point Park.

            Squantum Point is the end of the line; also the mouth of the Neponset River where it discharges in the Dorchester Bay. That's the name for the part of Massachusetts Bay (or Boston Harbor) where you can look across from Quincy and see the famous Sister Corita Gas Tank in Boston.

            I am also told, by the Watershed Association, that the Quincy RiverWalk is "part of" the Neponset River Reservation, a collection of open space preserves that includes the relatively new John Paul Park and the Neponset Greenway on "the other side of the river." We have walked both these places; they don't appear to connect to each other. The side of the river still keeps secrets from me. The Neponset Greenway is on the Boston/Dorchester side of the river. The little streetcar that runs through a cemetery and goes from Ashmont to Mattapan. As for the Pope's Park, someday the many little trees they planted there will grow big and make the place something more than good open dog-walking space.

            Back to the new RiverWalk (no space permitted between these two words in the official spelling; they must have preserved it). Since the up-river terminus at the gazebo is used for outdoor functions by the Adams Inn, it surprised us to find it open to the public from dawn to dusk. (Top photo shows the view from the gazebo: a pier with cormorants.) Heading downriver, the next feature is called Neponset Landing Park, a nice little spot almost directly under the Neponset Bridge; it includes a bench, some plantings and a fishing pier (second photo). You can park for the spot under the bridge.

            You can also climbs the stairs up to the bridge from this point and walk over to the other side. I'm not sure what you find when you get there.

            Then you walk along a bit of marsh -- we saw a heron there on our first foray a few weeks back -- with a view of the river. But then the sense of "path" runs out as the RiverWalk sends you across a lightly traveled roadway to a sidewalk on the other side of the street.

            This bit of tedium is broken by the Billings Creek salt marsh spur trail that leads you to the interesting discovery of a who-knew? development of naval housing off a road called Commander Shea Blvd. We saw some birds up ahead in this marsh, which eventually sidles up to Marina Bay.(Last photo gives a view of the salt marsh.)

            The spur includes a small canoe or kayak launch. Or, the Watershed Association tells us, we can find a fishing spot along the shore. The spur is supposed to become a loop, but it hasn't yet, as we found out.

            Back on the sidewalk, it's steady on to Squantum Point Park, a site with its own attractions. The open space here was an airfield a century ago, preserving it from development. The park is good for wildflowers and birding and people from Marina Park with dogs and, rarely, kids.

            Then of course you can congratulate yourself for taking a walk by wandering over to the Marina Bay Boardwalk for a snack or, in the right weather, a drink at an outdoor table looking over the bay.

            The great thing about the RiverWalk, or any of these other walks and trails and reservations along the waterfront in Quincy, Boston, or anyplace, especially any urban place, is that they're public. People need to live in cities, in densely populated areas, for a host of reasons including more efficient use of resources. But they need to live close to nature as well, to go on being "human beings" and not hi-functioning soulless machines. And they need to be able to get at it.

Spies in the Garden of American Liberty: 'CitizenFour'

"... if you think no one knows whom you’re calling, what you’re texting, or what websites you’re patronizing, you should think again." -- Ty Burr, Boston Globe, Oct. 30, 2014              

If you already feel strongly that government surveillance,  or spying into all you phone calls and Internet communications and credit card transactions violates your Constitutional rights; and outraged that a systematic government intrusion into the personal lives of Americans has been planned and pursued in total secrecy without any public scrutiny... then you probably don't need to see the new film "CitizenFour."

            The film documents the act of going public with the revelation of a massive government surveillance system by a civilian "senior advisor" to the NSA (National Security Administration) named Edward Snowden.

            And if you believe this spying into everybody's personal business in the name of national security is an abuse of power, you probably don't need to be confronted with the realization that while the government's systematic storing of your complete digital footprint began during the Bush administration, it received approval and came to full fruition under Barack Obama, who warned during his 2008 campaign about the risk  of infringment on First Amendment freedoms posed in the name keeping us safe. Or to watch the film of his reaction to the exposure of a secret surveillance system far more extensive than anybody outside the government surveillance apparatus guessed, as he says he welcomes a national discussion of issues raised by the need to protect freedom of speech while keeping us safe -- but that he didn't want it to happen "this way."... When, in fact, he had already approved a massive government spying operation in complete secrecy without any public discussion of "the issues" whatsoever... And when he and everybody else in his administration kept their mouths shut as a top security bosses blatantly lied to the American public, denying the systematic surveillance of American citizens' private communications in response to direct questions raised on the floor of Congress.

            Because you will likely find this hypocrisy galling. You may feel (as I did) when watching this part of the film that Obama's reputation will never escape this self-inflicted wound.

            If on the other hand, you don't see what all the fuss has been about, then you probably should see "CitizenFour.'

            The film-maker, Elizabeth Poitras, who was contacted by Snowden when he decided to make the public aware of the existence of the government's secret surveillance system because she had made films about related subjects in the post-911 era, simply filmed Snowden's encounters with the journalists who broke his story. It's a reporter's procedural. The film has also been termed a "political thriller" or even "spy thriller" because the parties' interactions are conducted in pre-emptive 'hiding,' because they are plainly worried about government security police breaking in on them at any moment to find out what they are talking about and shutting them up when they do. The tension is gripping. Snowden plainly expects to end up in jail.

            But the film is also a documentary. Though conducted in hiding -- an anonymous hotel room in Hong Kong -- the film preserves a record of what Snowden says about his intentions, his concerns, his fears, the price he might pay, his desire to shield others from undeserved consequences. The two reporters' own thoughts of what they are doing and why -- Glenn Greenwald in particularly is remarkably articulate and effective in explaining the significance of complex technical issues -- are also on record. A record debunks slander. What we see is whistle blowing, not conspiracy. Poitras is not "a provocateur," Snowden is not attention-seeker, Greenwald is not a camera-hound with a scoop.

            As nonfiction cinema it breaks down the story and gives us information: pressured by the government Verizon agree to give up everything: all the calls that everybody makes. Google and Facebook and all the other Internet servers agree to give the government everything everybody does online; where you 'go' online, all your transactions. Your banks, your credit card company, your subway pass -- the same deal.

            What the NSA -- and the FBI -- do, will do, or might consider doing with all this information it has intercepted and continues to intercept is something we don't know. Hopefully very little. But is that a decision we feel secure about leaving up to appointed officials who will make it, and do what they decide to do, in the way they're most comfortable doing everything -- completely in the dark, with nobody watching?

            The bigger point has to be that this staggering level of a state's surveillance of so many of the routine, daily actions of all its citizens is a recipe for 1984.

            "CitizenFour" is filled with talk, short on action, often slow-moving. But it's also chilling.

November Early Darkness, Best Twilights, Celebrations in the Trees

           The most beautiful and stirring twilights of the year arrive in November. We say that to one another at the end of the first shortest day of the season, the surprising day after turning back of the clocks when the five o'clock close-of-day routine suddenly begins nearer to four. Even after a wild day such as this one, when for an hour or more this morning a driving snow fell sideways, product of a northeaster steeper in its plunge into low pressure than predicted locally and so arriving with a sort of unexpected hurricane punch this weekend. That freight-train scraping sound tearing through the house at one point in the late afternoon was made by the wind loosing a porch chair and dragging it across a wood floor to toss it down on the front garden. The wind thought that would be fun.

            Meanwhile the clouds parted for a golden sunset, offering a deeper pink in the western sky than we've seen since I can remember. It turned deeper still, minute by minute, painting a rose window in the quickening alchemy of November skies.

            The end of daylight savings time is the trumpet blast that begins the dark season in the northern hemisphere. 

            Savoring what we had, for as long as we still had it, we drank in the last of October foliage, picking a mild day last week to pay a visit to the Arnold Arboretum, Harvard's arboreal fantasy land in a rolling piece of baronial property on the edge of the Jamaica Plain neighborhood in Boston.

            All season we watch the perennials flower display in turn, the spring reveille of bulbs and the low spreading violet-tinted groundcovers, the quick burst azalea, rhododendron and peonies, June's burst of bloomers, the lush lilies of July, the somewhat more muted and yet wilder blossoms of late summer and September, and the last lunge of mum and aster and spotted purple toad lilies in the month just ended -- but, truly, October belongs to the trees.

            The perennials are all but finished, though sometimes our roses last into December, and I don't know what will remain of the potted annuals after the storm that greeted the first two days of this month. The prospect of freezing temperatures by early tomorrow morning drove me out in the night winds last night to rescue the house plants from the danger of overstaying their summer vacation out of doors.

            But, frankly, this time of year is about the trees. We usually visit the Arboretum on a weekend, so our weekday stroll reduced the number of fellow visitors and gave us a different view of this well-groomed playground. We saw the staff out, riding the foot paths in their vehicles, one man even using a leaf blower (destroyer of rural peace) to clear the ground under a shrubby little tree near the visitor center. Others gathered up brush or previously trimmed branches gathered into piles by the roadside. It was like visiting a mansion arriving in time for the vacuuming. People watching is always good there, even on light days. We saw fathers keeping watch over very small children. A woman walked six dogs at once, each on separate leads. Each groomed canine kept perfectly to his lane, but I had to wonder how much fun this was for the dogs.

           Yes, you can come for the people, but you will stay for the trees.

           We saw a giant maple (top photo) round outward in a perfect expression of its innate drive for space and air and sunlight. The tag named it a "painted maple," but the paint had yet to be applied to leaves that were still green.

            On the arboretum's "Evergreen Trail" we saw tall and stately spruces standing their ground, including a huge Canadian spruce (second photo down: a Mountie or two could hide behind it) and a grand Asian spruce (third photo) well over a hundred years old.

            Another evergreen, the golden larch (fourth photo), in fact lives up to its name, spinning its needles into gold each autumn. And the ginkgo tree (fifth photo down), a product of northern China, Korea and Japan, turns a pale yellow bright as any spring or summer flower.

            Then there is that shrub, or small tree, whose name I can never keep track of, that produces a full wardrobe of soft violet foliage (bottom photo) I cannot even describe. We've seen it in other well-tended properties, grown and maintained especially for its winter-long color.

            Back home with the calendar page changed, we know where else to find color this time of year, even when the last of the trees shed their leaves. In the sky.