This November’s midterm elections pit us against each other in ways that seem to have precious little to do with realities grounded in our local and national geographies or their histories.
Those rivers, those woods, those creatures, that country: The Way Life Is.
By 1900, the following animals were extinct or nearly extinct in Maine and everywhere else east of the Mississippi: 1) any wild canid larger than a fox, 2) wild turkeys, 3) beavers. Now they act like they own the place.
Seems like yesterday: everything sharply detailed and in focus, more vivid now in memory than it was then in fact.
While it lasts, the fishing is — a window into the world that may open for a moment, grant you a glimpse.
An acorn bonks you on the head, you think the sky is falling and race around telling everyone. But nothing bad happens. What version of Chicken Little were you told?
Early last April, a pair of ospreys — newlyweds, so to speak — built themselves a nest there. Every so often, we’d see one or the other of them...
"Rare birds, high-value birds, please us. But no more than the cliff swallows that once arrived in abundance every spring."
Up North, in the true canoe country, early May is to canoe-tripping what Thanksgiving to Christmas is to retailing. The whole year quickens toward those two weeks.
The house you sit in and the ground you stand on are liquid assets. We hold a lease on life itself and on every other thing we think we own.
The loon call so hauntingly transcends its purpose. The sound is full of eerie seeking, as of a lost soul for a lost world.
I need, and refuse to own, a navigational system with a robotic voice saying turn left here, go 200 yards, bear right, etc., etc. I am under the stars, benighted in the shallows, churning up mud, with time and tide running out.