Posted at 03:09 PM in London, Place, Poetry | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)
Posted at 08:00 AM in Gardens, Montreal, Nature, Place | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)
My friend G. is a research scientist living on Long Island. He also loves to hike and kayak and explore natural places, and is keenly interested in (and writes about and photographs) the ecology of that part of the world. The recent wild fires on Long Island were nearby, and when he sent me these photographs as part of a letter, I asked if it would be OK to share them with my readers. G. expanded on the text a little, and this is the result. In his first paragraph he speculates, tongue-in-cheek, about the origin ofthe fire; in the past week, however, he wrote to tell me that ongoing investigations are increasingly suggesting arson.
Posted at 06:36 PM in Current Affairs, Friends, Nature, New York, Place | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
Early November. We’ve had a late fall, and the weather remains warm. The trees whose branches touch to form a golden tunnel each year over Ave. de Lorimier have dropped their leaves, but in the interior of Parc Lafontaine the autumn colors are still at their peak. Last Thursday evening I left my house at 5 pm and walked through the park, where the late afternoon light filtered through the yellow and red leaves as if through a silky, patterned umbrella. How can I describe the tenderness of this northern autumn light, as the day gently gives way to evening? Like a melancholy song heard from afar, it is blue, diffuse, and soft, but multiplies the intensity of all colors before gradually dying away.
In Iceland this light began much earlier in the afternoon. One day, when J. and I had taken off on bikes, we noticed the sun beginning to go down around 3 pm, and decided we should start thinking about heading back home. But we had judged the signs wrongly. There, so much closer to the Arctic Circle, sunset takes forever. We rode home, and several hours later, still in daylight, Elsa and Hörður suggested a walk to the top of the hill in back of their house, where we stood together, looking over Reykjavik toward the ocean. Even at seven pm the kind of low, glancing light we recognize here as day’s final signal still illuminated our faces, and turned the eroded slopes of Mt. Esja, in the distance, into folds of gold and blue.
Last night it was raining lightly, and the wet pavement reflected the sky and branches in the spaces between its pasted mosaic of leaves. I walked down the park’s long formal <em>allée</em> of trees toward the fountain, which was turned off for the winter a week or two ago, and then went left along the path above the first of the park’s two serpentine lakes, both drained now to reveal pebbled basins coated with green algae.
Just a few weeks ago, the park would have been full of people, on benches and blankets, catching the last warmth of summer, and the sounds of guitars and African drums would have mingled with children’s voices shrieking with pleasure as they threw bread to obligingly-eager flocks of ducks and gulls. Today, the paths were nearly empty, and the birds gone. I passed a handsome man with tousled grey hair and a brown leather jacket, riding home on his bicycle, and, at the northern end of the drained lake, a much younger man walked a small dog clad in a dog-coat so brilliantly yellow it mocked the trees.
I passed in front of the park’s new cafe-resto, shut tight, its oversize terracotta planters empty now, and stepped onto the path above the lower lake. Here, at last, were the ducks and gulls, splashing in the remaining pool of shallow water. A larger shape stood poised at the top of this pool, and, squinting now in the low light, I saw that it was a great blue heron, an opportunist no doubt drawn here by easy fishing for trapped minnows, or maybe goldfish. One night, returning home in the opposite direction, I’d seen a school of them in the light cast by a streetlamp, shimmering beneath the dark surface like shreds of copper foil. Now the heron presided over his domain: the lord of the manor calmly watching the squabbling peasants, his slate-blue coat turned up at the collar against a north wind.
At the end of the park, I waited for the stoplight and then crossed, keeping out of the way of the cyclists coming off the bike path on rue Cherrier. A young woman waited there for her bus. Tall and slender, with her black hair piled in an elegant knot atop her head, she wore a long black trenchcoat with a cinched waist, and black high-heeled boots. She held an oversized umbrella, the kind golfers use, with an outer border of black and an inner circle of alternating trapezoids of black, and a brown that matched the color of the face that it framed. Calmly, she waited, every now and then raising a cigarette that trailed across this background of black, like a lecturer’s piece of chalk.
I had been on my way to the Sherbrooke metro station to catch a train for a 6 pm choir rehearsal at the cathedral. But, after checking my watch, I walked on, mesmerized by the falling light, all the way to the center of the city.
Posted at 11:17 AM in Iceland, Montreal, Nature, Place | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)
Watching Strokkur erupt -- photo by J.
That was the apt subject line of a letter from my friend G, after reading my "Fire and Brimstone" account of the hot springs and geysers in Iceland. In his letter, he described a trip to Yellowstone National Park, and how different his experience of similar phenomenon had been. I've revised my previous post to include his comments, and have also added two photographs from J. showing Elsa and me watching Strokkur erupt (above)-- and an eruption itself. And I'm submitting the whole revised post for this month's anniversary issue of the Language/Place Blog Carnival, hosted by the incomparable Dorothee Lang, whose subject is "Streets, Signs, Directions." Please take a look, and visit the blog carnival when this issue is published at the end of the month -- I think it's one of the most interesting projects of its kind right now.
Posted at 11:53 AM in Another Country, Iceland, Language/Place, Place, Travel | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
We've just gotten back from several days in New York City, where we went to attend a reading by Teju Cole and a celebratory party for Open City, and to see other friends as well as some art. We also went to B&H Photo, where -- unexpectedly -- I got a new camera - a Canon S95. Over the next few days I'll be posting some photos and commentary from the trip but believe me, I am just scratching the diamond surface of knowledge about how to use this camera! It's a lot in a very small package. These first photos were all taken in or around Times Square.
Outside Starbucks, in the rain.
Newstand.
Tourists in the center of Times Square.
Our friend J. at Cafe Une Deux Trois.
At a breakfast joint inside Port Authority bus terminal
Hudson News kiosk, inside Port Authority.
Leaving Port Authority on the NJ Transit #158.
Posted at 09:14 PM in New York, Photography, Place, seen in America | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBack (0)
My morning porch is a terrace, open to the street but semi-hidden behind a hedge, shadowed but adorned with begonias, lantana, coleus. Out here early with my coffee and the baby spiders swaying on their strands of silk, I watch the sun struggling through clouds that split and rise from the St. Lawrence, casting the first bright rays of light through the trees. Morning comes with an effort, like our summer that's barely begun. The sounds of the city build slowly too: the traffic coming off Pont Jacques Cartier, the clank of bike locks against metal frames passing over bumps, the feet of a runner, crows shouting over the incessant chirps of sparrows. Three-quarters of an hour ago, when I first came out, the birds dominated but now it's wheels, and the occasional murmur of human voices.
J. rose early and went off to take photographs in the Old City and port. I stayed in bed a little while longer, and then got up, lit a candle, did a bit of meditation, took my calcium and vitamins, made my coffee and some oatmeal. I love the mornings when I can unfold slowly, like the day itself, and just watch, just listen.
It's Canada Day today, and also Moving Day, when leases are up and people change apartments. Just now a small local moving van has pulled up outside, and if I went down any of the nearby streets the scene would be repeated: men in white t-shirts rolling up the back doors of the vans, taking out blankets, standing together staring at large objects before the collective heft. Yesterday we watched three men wrestling a full-size refrigerator three flights up one of the city's outdoor, metal spiral staircases. Terrible, and typical. Before the light changed and we moved on, we saw the man carrying the most weight move to the outside of the railing, and three more men - strangers - gathering below, hands lifted helplessly into the air.
Last year at this time, we were moving too, and I find myself reluctant to think back over the experience. It's over, thank God, and here I am in Canada on Canada Day, wondering what that means, or if it even means anything. I've crossed a border, ever more fortified and regulated, so many times I can't count, and yet I've felt more and more free, less burdened by material things, and by concepts of myself that weighed even more. I used to know who I was, if you had asked me. Now I know both more and less. I can tell you that the leaves on the poplars, way up there, are dancing in the wind like sequins, each one sewn on by a thin green thread.
Posted at 08:14 AM in Another Country, Canada, My Life, Place, Spirit | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBack (0)
Longtime readers of this blog may remember that I've written before about the tiny house movement -- a proposition for radically downsizing and building houses with a very small footprint - no larger than, say, 300 square feet. A lot of them are much smaller than that - less than 100 square feet - usually with a loft for sleeping and clever solutions for bathrooms, kitchens, and power.
Most of these houses are owner-built; some are constructed from prefab components; some from recycled or free materials; some are even built on trailers so that, like a turtle, you can take your house with you when you decide to live someplace else! All are just waiting for handmade innovations and off-the-grid, and low- or no-tax living.
As for many people, these buildings appeal to me not so much as a primary dwelling but for their hobbit-house-like coziness, their energy efficiency and environmental sanity, and the privacy of having one's own minimal but comfortable shelter in the woods. They seem like the epitome of less-is-more.
Lately I've been looking at what people have done recently, and I've found there's a lot more on the web about this than when I first got interested. The guru of the tiny house movement is arguably Jay Shafer, who has been building and extolling the virtues of these little houses since the late 1990s. His company, Tumbleweed Tiny Houses, sells plans and already-built houses of less than 140 sq ft.
Michael Jantzen's blog Tiny House Design and associated newsletter, Tiny House Living, is the best place I've found to keep up with what's happening in this movement. For instance, here's a post on his design for a free house made from recycled pallets.
The New York Times even got into the act recently, with this feature on small houses including a gingerbread cottage makeover of a hunting cabin (left) which is way too twee for me.
I was most pleased, though, (and amused) to see the video embedded at the top of this post, about Vermont tiny house builder Peter King. Peter is soooo Vermont, and it makes me happy to see and hear him extol the best of what makes/made my former home state unique.
Posted at 04:34 PM in earth, Place, Vermont | Permalink | Comments (12) | TrackBack (0)
Yesterday was our anniversary, and as is our tradition, we spent a good part of it outdoors exploring someplace new. This time we put our bikes on our new car rack and went to the national park on the Iles de Boucherville in the middle of the St. Lawrence river, only a few miles from the city. (If you visit the link, be sure to watch the video, even if you don't speak French, for an introduction to typical Quebec emotive discourse, courtesy of the park service's Marie-Helene.)
There's a series of three islands that are part of the park, each one increasingly remote, and 20 km of cycling trails. The first island has a fairly conventional parking lot and under-the-trees picque-nique sites, but that's as far as cars are allowed. After a short bike ride or walk you come to a channel that divides this island from its next neighbor, and can only be crossed by a solar-powered ferry. So after a short wait, you and your bike-rising or pedestrian friends are taken across the water and can set off on a circuit around the second island (which contains a golf course, and an interior which is farmland), or head out to the last island, Ile Grosbois. As we were riding along a large cornfield on the second island, we passed the old city center of Boucherville on the southern shore, with its heavy stone river wall, tall church spire, and Hotel-de-Ville, all made of the same grey stone, when the church bells rang out at 4:00 pm, and it felt like something that has been happening every Saturday for at least three centuries, calling the faithful out of the fields.
The third island is reached by a narrow bridge. We went all the way out to the end, and then rode back along the northern shore, which is marshy and much quieter; the islands on the northern side of this one are protected wild sanctuaries with no public traffic at all, with a quiet channel and marshy areas inbetween, so this is the area where migratory birds and native waterfowl hang out. Once we figured all this out, we know the areas we want to go back to; there's a tower that functions as a blind and would be an excellent place to spend a fall midweek afternoon, when I'm quite sure we'd be nearly the only people on the island. As it was, we only saw three or four other people all the time we were on the third island.
We didn't see any exotic species yesterday: gulls, sandpipers, cormorants, and various songbirds from warblers and goldfinches to swallows. And we finally saw one of the small deer from the herds which are resident to the islands. The fields we rode along were bordered with goldenrod, purple asters, tansy, and thistles, and the birds and insects were very happy -- so was I. What a remarkable sanctuary - and so close to home!
Posted at 10:00 PM in Montreal, Nature, Place | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBack (0)