The Woods are Lovely, Dark and Deep

But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Had a very green and rainy last walk in the woods today. Tomorrow I awake very early to catch a flight to Washington, DC, where I meet my Peace Corps group. Then Thursday we are away. With promises to keep.

Family

I felt like a concerned parent when I gingerly cleaned the big clump of crusty poo off the backside of one of our new chicks. Evidently when it gets like this, the little chick can actually cease to excrete and die. He/she is doing fine, one of about 50 chicks that arrived in Dad's mail a week ago. Good practice if I get to have chickens in Romania.

But more to the point of human family, I've enjoyed really great last hurrah adventures with family recently. First up was attending Steam-Up with my dad at his club's track. With bad weather looming, we were the only ones to actually steam, and he probably wouldn't have but I wanted to see it. Pretty impressive, and a nice group of club-mates. Yes, that is a fully functional steam locomotive. It uses kerosene to heat the water.
Next up Mom and I drove out west to Letchworth Park, on the Genesee River. It's called the Grand Canyon of the east, and certainly the downcut shale and sedimentary rock make a great show. But I'm thinking more the Black Canyon of the Gunnison of the east or the San Juan of east or the Virgin of the east. Hey, it's impressive anyway and a great day trip with Mom. We had lunch at the grand old hotel overlooking the middle falls.
Finally I've had a Memorial Day weekend full of family. Started out Friday evening with a delightful dinner with cousin Becky who saw me last when I was three or something. Then all day Sunday with more cousins and their kids and playing in the creek like old times. Except now we're the adults who sit around all day just talking.

Oh, and one more thing. My grandmother, Ruth Harlow Enck, wrote a column for decades for a monthly farm magazine. She commented once how much the children liked to see their name in writing. So the other night when my dad asked me when the locomotive picture would be appearing in the blog, I guessed that things haven't really changed much.

Mornings are Hard...

...when you're a teenager.

Storm King Art Center

Last Sunday I took a little drive down to the Hudson River where I fetched Chiemi and Jared from Metro-North and we all went on an artventure. After getting slightly lost and having a mediocre brunch (their menu looked so good on line...), we got to spend the whole afternoon rambling around the 500+ acres of rolling fields, woods, and world class sculpture -- oh, and the mansion/museum that Chiemi and Jared are currently plotting ways to move into. Highlights include a new Maya Lin work entitled Storm King Wave Field which mimics ocean waves in vegetated soil, like little hills but with human-designed purpose. We also saw an Isamu Noguchi, some Richard Serra, Nam June Paik, Alexander Calder, and Mark di Suvero (one of his pieces encouraged us to beat on it with a mallet). We were entranced by two rotating columns of shiny metal, quite thin, that looked like romantic synchronous snakes.

The highlight for me, however, was Andy Goldsworthy's stone wall. He's a Scottish artist who specializes in integrating humanity and nature. He takes delight in rearranging nature slightly to leave a small human fingerprint. Please check out a beautiful documentary about him, Rivers and Tides. Having recently seen this movie again, I was in touch with his motivation for the Storm King stone wall which winds around trees, as if a stream through a pasture. Having watched him among his stone walls in Scotland and now having done my own walking in the woods here among the ubiquitous old stone walls of New York state, I felt such a sense of place associated with this wall. More than beautiful, more than useful, this wall felt personal: the personal history of a natural landscape, or the natural history of a personal landscape. I loved the wall and couldn't touch it enough - got yelled at by an overactive docent. Bravo, Andy.

Oh, and if good friends and great art weren't enough, the dogwoods were in bloom.

Chiemi and I surf the Maya Lin wave.

Two Week Countdown

Two weeks tonight I am scheduled on a red-eye east with thirty-five of my soon-to-be closest friends. We will spend the first ten weeks of our Romanian adventure together in training in a small city outside the capital. At some point during our ten weeks, we will receive our permanent assignments. My job title is Environmental Organization Development Advisor. Sounds important, but I don't really know what that means, as I think it could mean many things. I've been oddly uncurious about the details. Really, the details of the whole thing. I've made a lackluster attempt to learn a few phrases. Partly this is because of my disappointing Madisaster experience, partly because I will embrace whatever it is and feel no need to build false expectations. Anyway, the bottom line is that I am ridiculously excited in an overly calm way about my upcoming assignment. And in the meantime, I've really tried to enjoy this latest chapter.

Friends and Neighbors

What's a girl to do who has the luxury of time to walk in the woods and write essays? Go visit the bard of the Catskills, a writer who spent much of his life walking in the woods, writing about it, and persuading captains of industry to care about. Alas John Burroughs is near ninety years passed from this fragile earth. But his house, his grave, and his boyhood rock remain intact and preserved as a state historic site just outside, and up the mountain from, Roxbury, over in said Catskill Mountains.

Here's a snippet illustrative of Burroughs' appeal: "If I were to name the three most precious resources of life, I should say books, friends, and nature; and the greatest of these, at least the most constant and always at hand, is nature. Nature we have always with us, an in exhaustible store-house of that which moves the heart, appeals to the mind and fires the imagination -- health to the body, a stimulus to the intellect, and joy to the soul."

The house is Woodchuck Lodge, Burroughs' summer home later in life. I've included shots of some other neighbors of mine. We find it uncommon to go out these days and not see a snake.

The Whole World is Abloom

I have many adventures of which to update my little blogosphere. But for the moment, here are more photos of flowers, particularly exciting for me since I finally found the macro setting on my camera (hmm, perhaps I should have read the manual). These are followed by a remarkable collection of shots from the Owens Valley, specifically up the Bee Springs Trail to the Betty Jumbo Mine in the Inyos, kindly submitted to this homesick desert rat by Brian the Ranger (and former co-devourer of artichokes - also in season). B. writes, "Cactus flowers are ridiculously 'over the top'. The colors are a bizarre combination of subtle and tacky. When you look close, they are like a little world; that's why I like the picture with the beatles' rummaging around in the forest. The blooms reek of sex, with all of that pollen and the whorehouse colors (not that I've ever been to a whorehouse). The asters and mallow are much more subtle, delicate and ephemeral looking; like cherry blossoms." Indeed. What a lovely gift to receive in one's inbox.

A Run on Pileateds

As I said to my dad the other day, on yet another lovely woodland walk, I'm sure not every large black and white bird in the forest is a pileated woodpecker, but dang! if there doesn't go another one. Growing up in these mixed woods east coast forests, pileated weren't unheard of, but I do not remember them being common. Not like the Lord Gawds! of down south, of course, which we all believed extinct until recently. But certainly a rare treat to see. So I'm incredibly pleased to report that the pileateds are here. Even today, looking out the dining room window at my mom's, over to the grove where the turkeys usually come for the neighbor's handout, there is a pileated poking around in the evergreens. If we must endure the ever-present Canada geese, let's have a little of our own Lord Gawds!

Another Big Thank You

The results are unofficial, but I may yet again have been on the team that raised the most money. We had our successful MS walk yesterday. My team consisted of my mom, Mary, my Aunt Marjy, and myself. We walked three miles around Neahwa Park in Oneonta, site of great childhood memories. And we raised over $3000! Holy cow! OK, so we were greatly assisted in our fundraising by a substantial corporate donation (thank you, Donna). But let me tell you, that corporate donation was inspired by the ten and twenty dollar donations that arrived in the mail. This is an accomplishment that we all did together. Thank you so much. It makes a difference.

Finding Nemo

No, I don’t mean the animated fish; I mean Everett Ruess. He was a young depression-era vagabond, striking out from his home in California across the Colorado Plateau in search of truth and beauty. Along the way he managed to leave behind a trail of sublime words and artwork. He disappeared in 1934 at the age of 20, somewhere in southern Utah. His body was finally found a year ago and has been conclusively identified. The latest issue of National Geographic Adventure tells the story.

While the death of many young people can rightly be labeled a tragedy, I hesitate to do this with Ruess. Occasionally we come across someone who, from a very early age, seems to have things figured out. In Ruess’ case, he was a searcher full of questions—stunning, meaningful, deep questions. Although he felt he didn’t have the answers, to even identify the search is so far beyond many of us given the privilege of aging. Perhaps we are given that privilege so that we may stumble toward some approximation of that search and that knowledge; it takes us so long. Perhaps if Ruess had lived his star would have shined so brightly as to blind those left behind in civilization. Perhaps that is what happened to the Ute boys who may have killed him.

While visiting Zion, Ruess wrote (rough approximation since my text is in storage), “I have done what I’ve done alone chiefly because most people are not willing to suffer the attendant hardships; but a true companion halves the misery and doubles the joy.”

Now after 75 years, the mystery of the disappearance of Everett Ruess, vagabond for beauty, is solved. The speculation can end and we can get on with the business of celebrating that one of our own species could live so much and well.