History, Natural History & the Arts
Stairway from Heaven
My nephew, now a noted astrophysicist,
toddled down steep, awkward cabin stairs
one extended-family Adirondack vacation,
to ask each of the adults: “Are I baby Jesus?”
Now, perhaps, his cosmic inwardness basks
amidst so-called heavens with an expansive
sense of reality suitably immense enough
to encompass whatever reality may proffer,
knowing that, despite dark matter and deaths
of stars, nothing but nothing that breathes air
is ever alone in this world.
Wrath
She’s contained her anger for eons now,
Stored it up and waited to see,
If man would grow wise, improve his ways,
And live together in harmony.
Opportunity was there, since time became time,
But still not the proper response,
So now her vengeance begins to come forth,
First a breeze, then a drop, then the storms.
The earth begins shaking, man cries out,
Fear foremost in his mind,
Tall buildings crumble, homes slip away,
Whole villages, up the middle, divide.
The winds, fiercely howling, push up the seas,
Their walls climbing fifty feet high,
In the heart of the land the ground is all cracked,
With riverbeds powdered and dried.
The sun’s numbers climb into the three figure range,
Thousands of acres on fire,
Northern lands all ice and snow,
Freezing man’s will and desires.
People in panic, hysterically crying,
Will do anything to come through alive,
Now becoming acutely aware,
Of the need for their partner to survive.
Self-Portrait in a Placid Beaver Pond
As reflection would have it, the air still,
the pond surface at certain angles like
woodlands opposite. Or at other angles
mirroring sky, and close-on to the angler,
like a woodlands studio reflection caught
of him or her as a portrait-taker might
be headless beneath their black cloth,
the angler at a loss, seeing only through
his or her camera lens, if at all, he or
she being one and the same against
a background of woodlands but not seen
by the camera, now focused far out onto
the grassy pond, more a meadow with
tall vegetation, broad-leaved, almost
up to your waist and a pond no longer,
but stream channel through tall grasses,
the water surface more of the sky, just
now a near-cloudless Adirondack blue.
It is the kind of sky you hope to wake to
back in your cabin, remembering when
all the children were young and could
be rambunctious all day, whether in
or out of the cabin—rain the disrupter
of mature human calm going back, all
the way back, to cave dwellers, no doubt,
despite how caves tend to be few here
and small, this being a function of our
bedrock’s granitic, not erosive, nature,
unlike limestone, say, and made more
vulnerable now by our acidic rains
as erosive agent belched into the skies,
then distributed by winds even far onto
those few now innocent of acidification.
Flat-out, the pond surface’s reflections
distort nothing, short of winds’ rippling
them, or insects’ slight surface stirrings
often stopped dead by a trout’s harvesting
perpetrators of such distortions from below,
one supposes like a vacuum cleaner, if we
could see the actual distorting of air, not
just its effects on whatever nearby may
succumb to its force, difficult to visualize
as the result of the breathing strength
implicit in those trout often caught here,
ten-inchers being trophies in this pond.
Following the mid-nineteenth century revolution in steamship building, transatlantic passenger transport became a profitable enterprise. Travel went global, giving rise to an intercontinental “travel industry.”
Commercial oceanic transportation boomed. Bremen-based NDL (Norddeutscher Lloyd) and Hamburg-based HAPAG (Hamburg Amerikanische Packetfahrt Aktiengesellschaft) became the largest shipping companies in the world. [Read more…] about Culture War, Transatlantic Migration & The Wreck of the SS Deutschland
A Chance
The world today is overwhelming,
Was it this way back in the past?
Things keep changing every second,
Is it too much to want them to last?
The very essence of man is being lost,
Do we want to be electronically controlled?
With our numbers increasing like colonies of ants,
Will individuality become stories untold?
The earth was so rich, magnificence was there,
Is it possible we just couldn’t see?
It seems there’s still a chance to turn things around,
But, sadly, doesn’t seem likely to be.
I think of Adirondack conservationist and forever wild advocate Paul Schaefer (1908-1996) during whitetail deer hunting season, actually in any season, but particularly in deer season at his Adirondack cabin. From 1921 on, over a century now, Paul Schaefer and his family, friends and hunting club comrades in the Cataract Club ventured into the wilderness from cabins in the Adirondack mountains. [Read more…] about The Sagacious Whitetail
The Big Apple as Solo Inferno
Bessie Hoopaw was a single lady
friend of our family. She told
our father her dream was to
drive herself through downtown
New York City. So, one summer,
as we were headed from our
Maryland suburb of Washington,
D.C. to Upstate New York for
vacation in the Adirondacks,
Dad, a fan of Dante’s Inferno,
told Ms. Hoopaw just to follow
our car and keep close! and he’d
lead her through the Big Apple.
And he did, somehow managing,
red lights and all, to keep her in
our rearview mirror, his Virgil
to Ms. Hoopaw’s trip through Hell.
‘Wir Haben Wegener Gefunden. Tod Im Eis.’
Alfred Wegener theorized continental drift
long before anyone had means to prove it.
Ships mapping the ocean floors with sonar
would later discover the tectonic plates.
You can visually slide the continent Africa
into the Americas like completing a puzzle,
not to mention ancestral plants and animals
common to the long-divorced continents.
Ever intrepid, Wegener was later found
frozen in the Greenland Ice Cap. His
discoverers would then write that—
“We have found Wegener dead in the ice.”
It had more punch in the original German:
“Wir haben Wegener gefunden. Tod im Eis.”
Fellow geologists got their come-uppance
for dissing Wegener. Now we live in fear his
plates might rub each other the wrong way.
Andaman
Islands rising from the sea, misty images in the night,
Palm leaves rustle in the breeze,
A sliver of moonlight tints the sky.
Grains of sand are sailing high, carried on the wind,
Time, as always, passes by,
With no recollection of where it’s been.
Ocean’s waters rise and fall,
Powdered clouds drift by above,
Mountain streams come trickling down,
Playing melancholy tunes on vibes of stone.
Sun shines down on fields of green,
Sweet scents permeate the humid air,
Wheat fields swaying, keeping time
To an ancient rhythm, Nature’s beat,
No words are needed……. this part’s divine.
Adirondack
It was autumn
and we climbed through colors dancing
in a sun-splashed wind.
It was autumn
and the promise died again
in one final trumpet,
where we stood together to hear
old dreams played
one more time in the wind.
It was autumn
and leaves fell beautifully dead,
bare trees forked skeletons to the sky,
no April lasts.
It was autumn
but we laughed that moment,
time and distance were undone
and we knew why we lived.