the cassandra pages

November 3: Lapis

The Indian shop
the smell of roasting chestnuts
these lapis earrings --
Your delight in the colors
that day on Great Russell Street.

(top photo, with my late mother-in-law, London, 1996)

Les Ruelles Vertes 2

Wild Fire

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.

 

On a clear windy day, a little over a week ago, a brush fire started in the tinder-dry pine-oak woods of Eastern Long Island, not far from the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, a nuclear physics machine designed to create and observe the hottest matter ever made on Earth, thousands of times hotter than the center of the sun.  The source of the fire remains under investigation.  More likely a careless cigarette butt than an escaped quark-gluon plasma, in my opinion.  

By late afternoon, smoke was visible for miles in all directions. Volunteer fire fighters from more than a hundred local departments across Long Island were working to keep the fire contained and away from the clusters of homes as the wind swept the front of the fire line eastward across sparsely populated woodlands.  First thoughts, of course, turn to friends who live downwind, with their organic garden in the woods and small flock of pastured, named chickens who supply us with eggs.  Then to their unknown neighbors, and to the countless volunteer fire fighters, who train and equip for just such occasions,  who enjoy a special camaraderie, the intermittent gratitude of their neighbors, a rare opportunity for heroism amid danger, plus a chance to dig in the sand with their expensive toys.

When it is over in the morning, I read that over 1100 woodland acres have been scorched, several homes and businesses destroyed, but mostly astonished relief at how much worse it could have been,  with only a few minor injuries among the fire fighters.  After catching up on  the "where were you when..." stories with friends and acquaintances, it is time to think about mourning for the woods that feel like my own, through which I often walk to work, solitary miles of sandy paths, through pitch pine and scarlet oak, blueberry and cat brier, more likely to encounter white-tailed deer and wild turkey than a fellow walker.

Here, a foggy morning walk through these woods only a few weeks before the fire.  The leaf-litter is decorated with the foiled camouflage of ground webs,  deadly-invisible to unsuspecting insects in dry weather, but now revealed to all in a cloudy dew.   Even the architect is too embarrassed to be seen next to her luminous creation, far too visible to be functional.

--

The disaster tourist's urge to gawk is restrained by closed roads, continuing fire danger and police investigations for a day or two, but eventually I am drawn to the smoky devastation, to see for myself.

Failed Firebreak

Unnamed sand roads cross in the woods.
Hidden by overgrown pitch pine saplings, stands a street sign
incongruous, once red, now charred and blistered,

East Firebreak and North Firebreak
dividing four quadrants of scorched earth.

What was once pine needles, leaf litter, early spring-dormant underbrush, and a generous tangle of new windfall from last autumn's tropical storm Irene, is now monochrome black and grey, stretching to a more distant horizon, a rolling carpet of lustrous charcoal in the shapes of needles, twigs, and logs.  The standing trees are in shock. Many will survive, but for now, the needles change from unhealthy yellow-green to brown, almost as I watch.  I tell myself, these woods are made for fire.  The pines and the oaks take one more step in their battle for sunlight. And a cleansing burn of the understory is something that in retrospect, we can wish had been done more proactively throughout the pine barrens, to reduce the danger of the truly rampaging wild fire that might one day follow the fuel and wind through an area 10 times or 100 times larger, making us wonder, whose land is this, anyway?    

Our western neighbors, toward "the city", have already cleared and paved their habitat,  leaving a few parks and many lawns, but little wild land or wild fire danger, just as thoroughly as we have exterminated wolves and bears. We need not pave and exterminate, indeed we depend on these wild acres not only for their wildness, but also to recharge our wells with rainwater better than what we drain through our cesspools.  But those of us who choose to intrude on the woods must expect to be part of nature's cycles, like tenants on the fault line, or in the flood plain.

A week later, and we've finally had a soaking rain. Roots beneath the char push out new growth and the race is on again.  The air is still heavy with damp smoke odors, but alive with territorial bird calls, pronouncing their intent to start over.

November Elegy

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.

"Tiptoe to the Portals of Geothermal Hell"

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.

New York I: Times Square

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.

 

First of July

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.

Tiny House Envy

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.

An Island Mini-Vacation

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!

Crossroads