This is the first year in many, perhaps since I was about to turn 30 and thought, "My God, it's the 80s - life as we know it is over," that year-end contemplation is the order of the day. Usually, life is a continuum and the marking of an hour or a day or a year or even Y2K doesn't really mean that much (although one increasingly looks forward to 12:00 and lunch). One certainly looks back, in ruing or rejoicing, but the significant events of life seldom correspond to something so manufactured as end of a quarter or birthdays or balls dropping in Times Square.Will I feel older/wiser/safer/gobsmacked at 12:01 am 1/1/14?
No.
But this year, as I say, is a bit different. For the last three weeks I've been quite focused, attuned to the passage of time and other things, waiting for enlightenment.
I would have thought that my ideations would be complex and magnificent. The successful completion of abdominal surgery should have made me think of the fickleness of life, its beauty and promise. Every moment going forward should be precious. With all this time sitting around, lying around, wakeful at 3:00 am, I should be planning great things, novels even, or at least visualize a new year's re-arrangement of the living room furniture.
Not a chance. My head is actually in my belly, in a couple of quarts of guts and organs.
"What's that twinge down there?"
"The catheter's going to pull out, I know it."
"Do I dare to eat a bean?"
"Rumble, rumble, soil and dribble."
"Gotta be infected by now."
"There's no way those steri-strips are going to hold."
"What if they left a sponge in there?"
"I hope to God the prune juice works."
But this new year there will be a dawning, there will be a change. I'm out of the peristaltic obsessions of the city, its sophisticated robots and outcomes research. I'm in Maine, back to simple cold and surf and snow and long-suffering balsam firs. Time to get my head back to everyday dreaming.
About Me
- Jim Krosschell
- Retired publishing executive ecstatic with the idea of spending most of his time on the coast of Maine
Tuesday, December 31, 2013
Sunday, October 27, 2013
Mountains
I know I'm close to this man's Maine when I first see the Camden Hills - that fleeting view from Route 1 in Warren. They actually look quite tall from that distance.
The pictures below, however, are not from Maine, but from the Adirondacks, where we spent Columbus Day weekend. These mountains are somewhat more real, to coin a phrase, than our coastal mountains, the reasons for which I'll explain shortly.
The picture below shows part of the Great Range - also a golf fairway of the Ausable Club, where we did not stay, having not been invited, having indeed no inclination for yellow pants and Ray Bans, but having been invited to stay at Putnam Camp across the road, having much inclination for rusticity, and conversation not related to investments or sports, and a history that included being founded by William James, among others, and visits by Freud and Jung.
Our hosts assured us semi-hikers used to 1500-foot "mountains" that the trails we would take that weekend were relatively easy. They were right on the relatively part. Our first day consumed only 7 miles round trip, but the last 0.7 miles we climbed at what seemed a 45-degree angle, and several times one of us boosted the other by the derriere, and the fallen leaves artfully hid roots and rocks such that coming down was way harder than going up. The result (below - the summit of Round Mountain) was worth it, even though it was only a 3000-footer. But we could see seven of the 46 4000-footers, and marveled again at the fortitude of those members of the Forty Sixers Club who have climbed them all, including some of our weekend party. These Adirondack trails are serious stuff.
The second day after heavy exercise, most of us know, is not the bad one. But we knew what aches were coming, and opted for an easy hike (without the "relatively:) on Sunday. Our hosts graciously accompanied us on the trail along Gill Brook, although perhaps they would have liked something more challenging.
There is nothing quite like a mountain river - every turn produces a new falls, pool, riffle, arrangement of rock.
But then we just had to see Lower Ausable Lake, a fjord-like cleft in the mountains (that too was worth it), and the miles piled up, ending up in a total of 10 for the day. Much of it was gentle, on a road no less, with SUVs occasionally crowding us to the side, but toes and calves still took a beating.
From the little we saw, Adirondack Park is a magnificent place - 6 million acres, a third of which is preserved forever wild. As you can see, the views are tremendous, the air and water is pure, and - once you get away from the masses of cars at the main trail heads (especially on Columbus Day weekend, which coincides with Canadian Thanksgiving, which brings many Quebecois from just a couple hours away) - the quiet serenity of mountains is hypnotic. In spite of this, and please forgive me O Great Wolfjaw and Gothics and Marcy and Giant, I'm happy to return to our little mountains next the sea, for the world divides into mountain people and ocean people, does it not?
Sunday, September 29, 2013
Selfies
The slang of social media has mostly escaped me, but I did run across the term 'selfie" recently and thought it a wonderful expression of the anxiety of the age. Smart phones have made it child's play to take your own picture (a button will reverse the camera lens so you don't even have to contort) and I imagine selfie-ness is exploding. I suppose to most people it's an expression of individuality, but for this somewhat crabby older person it recalls, among other things, the time I spent in Asia watching the portraiture of sameness: all the hikers, for example, dressed the same and posing for the same picture at the top of the mountain, or the family with a monk on the grounds of the Buddhist temple, or all the pretty girls smothered in cherry blossoms and gazing eternally upwards. In the West the astounding technology is producing a similar maddening sameness. We used to say "he's buried in the pages of a book" but now "he's addicted to the glow of a screen." Just ride the subway or walk downtown streets to see the mass appeal of individuality.
Obsession on our own faces is nothing new. But this seemingly desperate need to make them not only beautiful to mass standards, but also to promulgate them as widely as possible seems to me to betray a deep anxiety. It's an anxiety that defines parts of America, and that is fear of the Other. If we record every detail of our lives on Twitter, and cavil ceaselessly on the peccadilloes of our friends on Facebook, and post our faces on Instagram in every conceivable light and mood and grimace and smile, then we won't fear so much the unknown. By sheer repetition life will become safe, and the Other - the black, the violent, the liberal, the Muslim, the gay - will be rendered irrelevant, and invisible, and if they do arrive, they will be disarmed by the screen. The tools that promise us the world drive us behind walls. If we tweet hard enough, the whole world will become like us. The self bears investigation only in pictures, seldom in conversation, or a walk on the shore, or the pages of a book.
Obsession on our own faces is nothing new. But this seemingly desperate need to make them not only beautiful to mass standards, but also to promulgate them as widely as possible seems to me to betray a deep anxiety. It's an anxiety that defines parts of America, and that is fear of the Other. If we record every detail of our lives on Twitter, and cavil ceaselessly on the peccadilloes of our friends on Facebook, and post our faces on Instagram in every conceivable light and mood and grimace and smile, then we won't fear so much the unknown. By sheer repetition life will become safe, and the Other - the black, the violent, the liberal, the Muslim, the gay - will be rendered irrelevant, and invisible, and if they do arrive, they will be disarmed by the screen. The tools that promise us the world drive us behind walls. If we tweet hard enough, the whole world will become like us. The self bears investigation only in pictures, seldom in conversation, or a walk on the shore, or the pages of a book.
Saturday, September 21, 2013
"Wildlife"
One of the strange things about life in New England these days is that our neighborhood in suburban Boston has more wildlife than our neighborhood in semi-rural Maine.
Now the wildlife in Massachusetts shows a substantial variety of wildness. At the bottom of the scale, more or less pets, are the mice and chipmunks that inhabit our house. Also, squirrels, which were discovered this week nesting somewhere in the second-story walls and which have now been lured into traps (one mother, five babies) and escorted into A Better Place. (Apparently, they gained access by climbing three stories up a metal drainpipe, according to our neighbor, then chewing out a board.) Somewhat higher up the wildness scale are birds, lots and lots of birds, which are becoming slowly pet-ified by the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of feeders in our town. Dramatically, bird species include turkeys, a flock of which sauntered out of our backyard in the late afternoon, pecked around under the big oak for bits of broken acorns dropped by squirrels or wind, and wandered down the street, appearing not just once, but three days running, and not just a few turkeys, but twelve. Deer have been seen in the neighborhood (but not for a while now). At the top of the scale a red-tailed hawk vies with a coyote for prominence. I give the edge to the coyote; the hawk seems to have adopted this area, while the coyote roams widely, despised and lonely and inhuman.
In Maine, we have maybe one mouse, a couple of chipmunks, and one little red squirrel, and none of them seen very often. There's usually a family of deer, relatively tame. There are quite a few birds, of course (just not the quantity), notably a glorious little flock of goldfinches, the occasional hummingbird, an impertinent crowd of crows, and show-off seagulls, all of which appreciate humans' feeders and lawns and flower beds and trash, and - now we get into the species that really don't give a hoot about us - a family of ducks, a loon trying to decide on leaving or staying for the winter, blue herons every once in a while, and more and more frequently, at the top of the scale, fly-bying bald eagles, who seem truly disdainful. The foxes too are still quite wild, and would do just as well without us as with us.
One can predict, however, that some day foxes will beg for scraps, Walmart will sell eagle feeders, the bears and lynx and moose will be driven into Canada, the truly wild animals of Africa will be extirpated, and all the rest of our animal species will live in a peaceable kingdom, sharing shelters and food and diseases in the new world we are making but don't really want.
We won't mention insects.
Now the wildlife in Massachusetts shows a substantial variety of wildness. At the bottom of the scale, more or less pets, are the mice and chipmunks that inhabit our house. Also, squirrels, which were discovered this week nesting somewhere in the second-story walls and which have now been lured into traps (one mother, five babies) and escorted into A Better Place. (Apparently, they gained access by climbing three stories up a metal drainpipe, according to our neighbor, then chewing out a board.) Somewhat higher up the wildness scale are birds, lots and lots of birds, which are becoming slowly pet-ified by the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of feeders in our town. Dramatically, bird species include turkeys, a flock of which sauntered out of our backyard in the late afternoon, pecked around under the big oak for bits of broken acorns dropped by squirrels or wind, and wandered down the street, appearing not just once, but three days running, and not just a few turkeys, but twelve. Deer have been seen in the neighborhood (but not for a while now). At the top of the scale a red-tailed hawk vies with a coyote for prominence. I give the edge to the coyote; the hawk seems to have adopted this area, while the coyote roams widely, despised and lonely and inhuman.
In Maine, we have maybe one mouse, a couple of chipmunks, and one little red squirrel, and none of them seen very often. There's usually a family of deer, relatively tame. There are quite a few birds, of course (just not the quantity), notably a glorious little flock of goldfinches, the occasional hummingbird, an impertinent crowd of crows, and show-off seagulls, all of which appreciate humans' feeders and lawns and flower beds and trash, and - now we get into the species that really don't give a hoot about us - a family of ducks, a loon trying to decide on leaving or staying for the winter, blue herons every once in a while, and more and more frequently, at the top of the scale, fly-bying bald eagles, who seem truly disdainful. The foxes too are still quite wild, and would do just as well without us as with us.
One can predict, however, that some day foxes will beg for scraps, Walmart will sell eagle feeders, the bears and lynx and moose will be driven into Canada, the truly wild animals of Africa will be extirpated, and all the rest of our animal species will live in a peaceable kingdom, sharing shelters and food and diseases in the new world we are making but don't really want.
We won't mention insects.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)