Hawk on a Pole

When the sun’s out in the dark season – and we are now firmly in the dark season, with sunset at 4:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time – you just have to get outdoors.

            I see more people walking along the Quincy shore these days. I think they’re driven as I am to appreciate our opportunities to look at the world because the window of opportunity is narrowing. The day shutters down before we know it; another picture of our life gets snapped and goes to the darkroom (well, we bypass skip the darkroom these days, but it’s still a good a metaphor.)
When the sun’s out in the dark season – and we are now firmly in the dark season, with sunset at 4:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time officially – you just have to get outdoors.

            I get cold indoors even with the heat on when I’m sitting at my desk for hours. The blood slows. The way to warm up is to do something active. It’s colder out of doors but you feel warmer simply by moving.

Note to self: the way to get through winter is to get moving whenever you can. Second note: the way to get through the dark season is to go bask in the sun when you can see its smiling face. Don’t tell me it’s just a ball of fantastically overheated gases; it’s my smiling, energetic friend.

            Last week, with the sun shining in between storms, I went down to what the state calls a beach but is more accurately described as a shoreline with a good long sidewalk for walking, bordered by a four-lane roadway with too much traffic. As I often do, I chose to walk on the in-land side of the road, farther away from the pretty blue harbor. Like everybody else, I’m drawn to stare at open water and the geo-morphed shapes of various harbor islands and the works of man that connect some of them to land or to each other. But I’m even more drawn to scan the salt marshes on the other side of the road and look for birds.

            Birds take to the harbor, but these are generally gulls, winter ducks, occasional Canada geese and sometimes, but rarely, the waterbirds I look for the in the marshes: Great Blue heron and the pure white great egrets. A night heron visited over here one summer. The marsh also draws owls and hawks, especially in migratory seasons.

            I haven’t seen any of these big “charismatic” birds this fall. The closest I came was a stroll a couple of weeks ago when I noticed a crow whip across the marsh toward the walking path, land in a nearby tree, and begin jabbering. Crows jabber for lots of reasons, but these squawks drew other crows, and in half a minute a half dozen were hanging out in the same tree above my path.

            I had been watching the trees on the edge of a wood that rises slightly above the marsh. It’s a good place for raptors; they can scan the marsh and the treetops. I raised my gaze higher now and found what the crows were caucusing over. A raptor, most likely a hawk, circling high in the warm drafts over the marsh. After a minute it disappeared behind a cloud and I lost it. The crows, I expect, kept a more faithful vigil.

            During yesterday’s sunshine stroll, I scanned those same trees again and saw nothing. Turning back, I glanced toward the ocean and saw a creature – human – that got my attention. A woman, standing still, staring upward. I followed her gaze. On top of a tall sleek street lamp perched a very large bird, a thick-bodied red-tailed hawk. The woman peered a few moments longer, then kept walking. One or two other pedestrians walked past, but didn’t bother to look up.

            I had my camera out, snapping at the hawk from across the street. Not surprisingly, the big bird zeroed in on me right away (camera shy? Or doesn’t like people pointing things at him?) and did not take his eye off me as I crossed at the nearest intersection, hurrying against the traffic, trying to get closer to my – “prey”?

A good hawk-faced profile faced in my direction, but he’d had enough of the attention.

            The final blow was the seagull. The gull kept his distance, about 25 yards, but kept circling around the hawk, squawking in seagull to whoever needed to know that there was a hawk in the neighborhood.

            Between the two of us, the hawk had had enough. I raised my camera, he stepped neatly out to the edge of the lamp, opened his wings, and made that graceful sky-king departure available to lords of the blue.

            I couldn’t believe how quickly he lost himself among treetops without any particular effort or sense of urgency.

            The thing about flying is it’s – fast.

The Storm Blows Through the Centuries

The day after the election a northeaster struck the same piece of the globe that super-storm Sandy hit the week before. We were lucky with Sandy. We were lucky again.
But I don’t like feeling like a target for storm winds. The back of our house in Quincy, Mass., faces toward the shoreline, so we get pretty direct blows from winds coming off the ocean, and they came pretty good yesterday. Staring at this computer screen I got a face full of wind, rain, lashing trees, bending branches, premature darkness for hours yesterday (which is, of course, nothing like any creature human or otherwise would face out in the storm), and the final-phase autumn garden back there got blown around good.
All this wind and rain gave me a certain, no doubt exaggerated impression of a day so bad that I dreaded my late afternoon appointment in a shoreline town about three-quarters of an hour down the coast. Do I really have to go out and drive through this stuff? I asked myself. I kept checking my email, hoping somebody else had cancelled.
When I looked out the window faces north, the branches of the mulberry tree were bouncing in the wind but not so histrionically as those out back, and the storm didn’t look quite so bad. When I went to the kitchen and looked out front, the still orange-leaved young maple planted in the sidewalk strip was swaying rather delicately in the wind. Nothing much happening there. The house itself had blocked the winds, creating a zone of calm.
So it was hell in the back of the house, and just another day out front. It’s good to look at life from both sides now.
Nobody cancelled. Since it was my appointment, I had set it up, I could hardly cancel it without a really good reason. Except, as I now realized, by 4 p.m. on an overcast, stormy day it was going to be wicked dark. I had arranged for a photographer to be on hand to shoot the subject, and now he was going to be dealing with really terrible light.
I drove the three-quarters hour of rainy highway, everybody going about three-quarters speed, but traffic kept moving and I found the place with uncommon ease (I usually get lost going someplace new out of my wholly unfounded optimism that whatever location I’m looking for should announce itself in some conspicuous, hard-to-miss fashion: maybe a big flashing sign saying “Over Here, Bob!”)
I met my source in the parking lot and we trooped through the rain fifty yards or to the old, tired -looking shed enclosing a remarkable surprise inside, an 18th century workshop with an intact interior.
As I feared, though sunset is officially 4:30 p.m. EST, with a northeaster is squatting in your sky it’s pretty dark at four. Inside the 16x32-feet shed, light bulbs hang from the ceiling, but the power has has long been shut off. My source, and his friend, have flashlights and, happily, the photographer arrives and says, let’s go in while there’s still light. I am overjoyed with his optimistic, can-do attitude, because if it were me behind a camera I would be cursing the darkness rather than lighting a candle.
Inside we find a beautiful white-painted fireplace surround, a big wood frontispiece with carved moldings resembling the ornamental designs on Greek columns. In the workroom, among other 18th century joinery charms, we find a faded colored image of a man sketched on one of the walls; he stands, back leaning against a wall, one knee lifted, hand extended. The painting was never finished and the color has dulled, but much remains. Nearby, pencil drawings appear open on the old pineboard wall: a bird, a goose maybe, sketched for the design of a weather vane. Cross-hatchings over a door sill show the tallying of some quantity: bags of supply, boards, days of work?
In the store room, a date is written in big, blackish lettering on a ceiling joist: 1789. Do the workshop’s origins go back to that year?
My source tells us stories of this place, read from the physical evidence, and the photographer shoots a great many photographs, playing with the available light, at one point telling the man holding the flashing “point it at me,” and concluding that the darkness would give the results an old “historical” effect. And so all comes out well in the end.
It was good to keep our appointment and do our work, even though the storm made me want to cower at home. And, frankly, once I got back there I had no appetite for venturing out again.
The storm blows, but we walk through it. Though, in my case, only as far as the car.

The Day After

Nature is trying to get our attention.
One day after the new hybrid Super-Storm Sandy, which makes it sound like something that escaped from a genetic modification research laboratory, the New York metropolitan area is a disaster area and millions of people on the East Coast are without electricity.
New York City is completely without public transportation, all the subway tunnels between Manhattan and the Long Island boroughs are awash with salt water. The Battery, the name for the lower tip of Manhattan where you take a ferry to the Statue of Liberty got 12 feet of water above sea level. Lots of flooding yesterday, no lights on in lower Manhattan or Brooklyn last night, a condition widely regarded as one of the signs of the Apocalypse. No power still today in lower Manhattan all the way up to 40th St.
If storms like this had been more frequent in ye days of yore, they wouldn’t have built New York City where they did, on that wonderful “protected” harbor. Or it would have looked more like the Netherlands.
Mystical earth-magic interpretation: Mother Nature knows where the power lives. She aimed the hammer blow of her storm of perfect vengeance right at Wall Street.
In Massachusetts about half a million people lost power, most of them still without it today. A lot of schools stayed closed because of the power losses. Fortunately, we didn’t lose power or have tree limbs come down in our yard. The Boston area was lucky. My brother on Long Island lost power yesterday afternoon and is still without it today.
Earth to people: your planet is trying to get your attention. Because the so-called most powerful nation on earth is conducting an extensive money-poisoned Black Mass called an election campaign to choose its leaders, during which it has ignored all climate change and environmental issues.
Somebody cue “Eve of Destruction.”
Meanwhile, we little folk prepared in our usual way. I harvested a pailful of green tomatoes, cut the branches of the herb garden and brought them into dry, and stripped a small horde of pointy red peppers from a low plant I bought a couple of months ago already well fruited.
With the storm casting a shadow over the region lon Sunday, Anne and I took the scissors out and culled a few armfuls of flowers. Harvesting the flowers, bring the perennial garden inside the house, concentrating the colors of the earth in a few small vases.
The day after the storm, Nature renewed the garden’s colors. Leaves of a half dozen trees spread in a “fall colors” natural carpeting all over the earth.

Book Review: In Search of Sacco and Vanzetti

“In Search of Sacco and Vanzetti,” the new historical study by journalist Susan Tejada of one of the great watershed crises of the 20th century, succeeds better than anything else I have read in telling the human story of the two forever-paired principal figures while providing renewed insight into the case’s historical context. The two Italian immigrants, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, were arrested in 1920 for a payroll robbery and double murder in Massachusetts they almost certainly did not commit, tried and found guilty the following year, and executed in 1927 despite a worldwide clamor over the unfairness of the proceeding.
While the case has been the subject of scores of studies, Tejada’s book nails the enduring significance of an affair that divided American public opinion between sympathizers for the two immigrant working men who espoused radical political opinions and those who wanted to string them up – and anyone else who shared those opinions. As Tejada states on the very last page of her book in her rollcall of comparisons between America then and now, “In 1917… lawmakers wrestled with opposing concepts of civil liberties and homeland security. They still do.”
While US opinion was divided on the fairness of the trial, for the rest of the world the case was a clear example of scapegoating a couple of convenient victims to assuage a capitalist-dominated society’s fear of Communist revolution in Europe and union agitation at home. That view is also too simplistic, but then as now – and I would add this similarity to the book’s final summation of comparison points – American politics continues to suffer from big money domination and an irrational fear of “socialism.” The jury that convicted Sacco and Vanzetti of the crime did not consist of the wealthy, but after the Red Scare years of 1919-20 and a string of what we now call “terrorist” bombings, appeals to a reactionary and anti-foreigner patriotism combined with the longing for a simpler American day – when, for instance, nobody in town spoke with an accent – prejudiced the average citizen against foreigners with crazy ideas. Again, as Tejada’s book concludes, just like today. In 1908 [the year of both immigrants’ arrival in the US], she writes, “America was struggling with immigration reform. It still is.”
The book’s insight into the similarities between Sacco and Vanzetti’s America of 100 and our post-911 America whets our interest to know more about the case’s two principals. Both men immigrated from a relatively backward Italy in search of a better world, and both were appalled by the heartless exploitation of the workers in America’s fiercely competitive industrial economy that treated workers like disposable parts. They met when they joined a small Italian anarchist group in Boston, part of a network of followers of a charismatic theorist whose ideas may have led to terrorist-style bombings in the year after World War I. Sacco is the less likely revolutionary as a skilled worker and family man who made a good living in Massachusetts shoe factories, but whose sympathies were always drawn to the downtrodden. Vanzetti, a bachelor day laborer, is a true believer in the “beautiful idea” of the anarchist utopia in which people would replace the current exploitive institutions with cooperative practices.
It’s Vanzetti, the reading man and voluble spokesman for his utopian ideas, who flourishes intellectually after he’s thrown into prison for seven years and has time at last to improve his command of English and study the world’s great thinkers. The effect of Vanzetti’s personality on rallying support for the defendants’ cause has been noted elsewhere. But Tejada makes a singular contribution is in its frank discussion of Vanzetti’s romantic fixation on the married woman who visits him in Charleston State Prison to tutor him in English. His love for Virginia MacMechan inevitably goes nowhere, but it answers an enduring puzzle about the heart of a kind man who loved women and children, but apparently never had romantic feelings for particular women. In fact he did have them, he just didn’t want them on the record. And his devotion to his revolutionary cause came first.
“In Search of Sacco and Vanzetti” takes readers back to an American reality few people today know much about. It’s a world in which a highly polarized society – “we are two societies” was a judgement widely cited by intellectuals following the case – chose ultimately to paper over it divisions by scapegoating critics and demonizing as “left-wing radicals” the very voices the rest of the world recognizes as part of a healthy debate. The American mindset still suffers from this imbalance. Even right-wing ideas as radical and nutty as Ayn Rand’s apotheosis of selfishness now receive attention in mainstream politics. Readers would do well to read “In Search of Sacco and Vanzetti” for an insight into the early 20th century roots of this witches’ brew of xenophobia, radical-hunting and J. Edgar Hoover.
As an account of the fascinating case of the “a good shoemaker” and “a poor fish peddler” (to use Vanzetti’s formulation) who became the center of an international affair, “In Search of Sacco and Vanzetti” is equally valuable as a first-rate read.

A Great Deal Owed to Autumn

            There is very little I can do to make the perennial garden look any better or worse at this time of year. It’s liberating. 

            Maybe that’s why I always concentrate on the “mellow” in Keats’s great first line in his Ode to Autumn: “Season of mist and mellow fruitfulness.”

            This line is followed at once by “Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun.”

            More words to chew on. Once again he’s hit on something in the back of our minds and brought it to the front. (Poetry is all about finding the suitable particular.)    

            Why do the colors, especially autumn colors, seem to match up so well with the “maturing sun”? The sun rises earlier, sets sooner and sits less high in the sky throughout the day. And mature, as we know, is a nice way of saying “getting older.”

The earth’s day-night division reached the fifty-fifty point in the third week of September. Since then the “maturing” sun sets appreciably earlier all the time. We look one day and say, ‘the sun’s going down already? I just got home.’ How has this happened? Aren’t we still barefoot in the summer sun, looking forward to a beach day, walking the tide line, picking blueberries, watching the first tomatoes redden, hoping against hope that the baseball team will be good this year?

            We have done nothing and yet everything has changed.

            Thank goodness for the mellow time, the best possible of “close bosom-friend(s).” Thank goodness for the sweet deception of gentle days. Bosom-buddy Autumn tells us a few sweet fibs, a few sweet-nothings. Have no fear, I’ll be with you – some time yet. Don’t worry how much time, exactly. No need to panic. Be here now.

            And, why not (bosom buddy Autumn further urges) enjoy the colors while they last? Look up at the sweet lemon-yellow of the mulberry tree. The red sky of early sunset inflames the red and orange leaves of the maples. The low, wild shrub growth on the margins of the woodlands sends up red flares in the late afternoon. It fires the heart.

            Even the tall grasses of the salt marsh – the most “sublime” of landscapes, to use the Romantic poets’ favorite word; a word that  means solitary but also “not obvious” – turn a sun-loving bronze, inventing colors you cannot see at other seasons.

            And then we come to the season’s buoyant determination “to set budding more,/ And still more, later flowers for the bees,/ Until they think warm days will never cease.”

            Poor bees. If they buy this line, they’re in for a surprise. If they’ve been lulled into thinking warm days will never cease, they’ll have a shock when they get their oil bill. We all know how they feel.

            Keats’s great Ode is set in the country. He invokes vines rounding the “thatch-eaves.” No thatch-eaves in Quincy. We read of autumn conspiring with that good-hearted “maturing sun” to “bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees.” In our single family homes rounded with a little patch of earth to call our own we have neither “cottages” nor for the most part “cottage-trees,” and not many apple trees that aren’t old and wormy.

            But we surely have shade trees planted along all our sheets, green yards, and vegetable and flower gardens. They’re all gorgeous this time of year, particularly in the mass. Don’t take them for granted, people. We need them. 

Late for the Party, Wearing a Smile

            October is turning into an “annual” event.

            Some annuals that seem to need all summer to work up their strength look better than ever, look finally like themselves in autumn sunshine.

            These red circles of Lantana. I bought them late (somebody must have started them late), planted them late, waited a little impatiently for those initial blossoms to pass away and the roots to produce sufficient energy to spring a new low field of flowers. But we finally got there.

            A handful of Portulaca, lying flat on the low dry ground between sidewalk and street take care of themselves at this point. Seeding, popping out of the ground when it’s already mid-summer, and slowly growing themselves big and happy by September. They’re still with us, though they’re no fans of the cold. Enjoy them, I remind myself, while they last.

            Some of the mums are uncommonly cheerful as well. The mums in the back garden are garden mums, perennials. You expect them to be back. Some are the “hardy mum” annual, which survive a winter or two if you dig them into the ground. I did that with the one (last year? not sure) that bloomed a thick golden yellow halo of flowers this year, brightening up the sidewalk.

            I added some blue-lavendar range annuals (that shall remain nameless because I don’t know it) grown for the late season by the nurseries to the back garden. They survived the local night-chomper plague we suffered this year, found their footing last month and put out lots of little blooms this month.

            A few blue salvia too.

            They all seem to fit in with the fall perennials and turning leaves of the autumn foliage of the mid to late October. Healthy plants take care of each other. They harmonize, naturally.

Sunny Days, Cool Air, Fall Colors

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Sunny, cool and colorful: it sounds like an advertisement for Autumn. If it’s a TV commercial, put George Winston’s “Colors,” the perfect autumn song, on the soundtrack and it’s hard to find a happier time and place to be on the planet than here and now.  

I go out this morning, temperatures in low fifties this week, different days, real autumn. The trees have turned. They turn earlier this year, the anonymous tree with orange leaves in the back, the maple in the front, the half-turned mulberry in between them. Only the oak, always the last, holds out. Its big green, dark-tinged leaves shine against the immeasurable depths of the true blue autumn sky.

            Plants like October. Those that are still going strong and those that only come into their own this month.

Not those that bloomed early, shot their bolt, and are fast fading. The May-blooming peonies are falling over, their stalks already sucked of life by the first few cold nights. Their still shapely leaves turns yellow and lie down flat on the brick walk, waiting for me to come by and cut them off.

            Some plants that flowered in summer stand tall, holding up their leaves, though the flowers have browned, or blacked, gone to seed, fallen off, or simply turned gray like old wood or old men. The veins of nutrients that colored them have lost all connection to the life force. The stems lose their color and dry up like the old brush and branches fallen in the forest. They’ll nourish the next generation.

The bi-colored leaves on a tall phlox maintain a presence, the stalks still standing straight. The other tall phlox have all fallen prey to the white mildew that catches up to their species in fall. Nothing to do but take them down to the roots.

The flowers of the black-eyed susans are nothing but black eyes now, glowering in the end times where they once smiled in the sunshine; their pointy green leaves darkening, turning leathery, the stems thin and cramped. They seem to shrink into themselves as you watch.

            But last-call October bloomers are going strong, some still arriving. The Montauk daisies, big round white heads around yellow centers beam up at us. And the “spotted toad lilies” endure all summer long to open their spotted, contorted, complicated blooms now. With dark “spots” on their light pink backgrounds, they have the intricate beauty of small, subtle things.

            In combination with the turning trees and the various shades and stages of declining shrubs and perennials, the October bloomers focus our eyes on the season’s special palette and the year’s late vigor. It’s our own little Renaissance.