This is my last Sunday in Sewanee. I fell asleep to the deafening sound of cicadas, a thrumming from the upper branches of the trees that surround the house. In spite of stories of escaped convicts, I can’t help but keep the sliding doors open so I can hear the sound. The land is alive with the cacophony. Bring it on. The more there is, the merrier I am. It was the brilliance behind Rachel Carson’s book title. Two words. No rambling subtitle telling all. Just two words, three syllables, that spoke volumes: Silent Spring. Give me noise from the natural world. Remind me, unceasingly, that there is life. Keep the silence at bay.
I’ve just finished reading [Read more…]
I always try to deny dawn. She slips under my eyelids and I reach for my eye mask, craving one more hour of unconsciousness. But I hear birds. Knew the light was illuminating the unexplored forest behind the house I now find myself living in. Discovered myself pulled up and into clothes warm enough for the cool morning, lacing up my hiking shoes before I quite realized it. My eyes don’t read so well in the morning anymore, but before I walk out the door, I squint at the map for the Perimeter Trail that loops around Sewanee, hugging the edge of the Cumberland Plateau, and figure it should be due west of the house. Why walk along the lanes to find a proper entrance? I tuck my pants into my socks (the default fashion for us in Cape Cod’s tick-infested landscape. Are they here or am I liberated?) and cross the bit of backyard grass and enter the woods. Ten steps in, I flush a herd of white-tailed deer twenty strong, their cotton-burst butts bounding down the hill of the small valley, then up the other side. A hundred feet in and I find a brook I can step across with one stride. Twenty more paces and I’m on the trail. I take a right and go. It’s good to be back in church.
Just before I left Knight Science Journalism fellowship up in Cambridge, 
Here on the edge of the plateau, there is the added orientation ease of heading towards the almost horizon that appears between the boles of upright trees, that indicates the drop-off of slope and the potential payoff of views. It’s why I went right. But I am distracted. A russula mushroom there in the duff. A widow-maker tree defying gravity until her uprooted roots decide to give out completely. Rounding a bend and finding myself below a sandstone overhang like a chiseled layer cake of rock, seeps staining spots dark, the smell of iron in the air. Did I gasp? I think I gasped. At a fork I go left, each rock outcropping greater than the last. I scramble up a rock to pass through a tunnel of stone and then the sound of water pulls me forward until I’m below the spray of Bridal Veil Falls, oxygenated, awake. [update: that wasn’t Bridal Veil, I discover later. Just some unnamed cascade. Just as lovely, if not as spectacular.]
Home growing up and home now means inhabiting the edge dividing land and sea. We go there to eat sandwiches in the cab of the truck, sheltered from the icy wind that lifts the waters of Barnstable Harbor into whitecaps. Beyond the water, the dunes of Sandy Neck glisten white with snow, the Handy shack popping out in dark relief. Before the first bite is taken, a flash of fur to the right. A fox, tiny, on the hunt, nose to snow, a few steps, another sniff, more steps, her footprints left behind in the layer of snow.
Go with your love to the fields.
