Autumn

Three people I used to know fairly well at various times in my life have died this year. One was a childhood friend I hadn't seen since the Nixon adminstration (our lives diverged); the other two were midlife colleagues and friends from the book business I lost touch with when I retired. As far as I know, all three were active and healthy a year ago. Unsettlingly, all three were also more or less my age — but that's how it goes, you know. Once you reach a certain age, if your contemporaries aren't starting to predecease you it's only because you're the one to go first.

In the meantime, the political condition of the country is as bad as it's been in my lifetime, and there seems to be no prospect of improvement in the offing. The people holding the reins are not only corrupt and sociopathic but actually grotesque; that many of us are endorsing this or accommodating ourselves to it is the surest indication that the republic as a whole is politically and morally dead. We no longer seem able to discern right from wrong or true from false, but that's hardly surprising when our public and private lives are increasingly given over to fakery and superficiality. (End of screed.)

And suddenly the seasons have changed. In spite of some lovely mild October weather, I'm waking in the dark and in the cold now. Afternoons still linger a bit but that will change when we turn the clocks back. After a seemingly endless (and mostly rainless) summer it's hard to wrap my head around the idea that it will be half a year before I can start planting things outdoors again.

The corn and peaches are gone from the local farmstands and weekend markets, but there are pumpkins and winter squashes and beautiful apples in abundance. I've broken out the first Dickens for winter reading and the jigsaw puzzles await patiently in their cardboard boxes.

The wild turkeys above are from a group of twelve that overnighted in a local graveyard. Just down the road at our favorite local farm there's a small flock of their white domestic cousins enjoying their last weeks of life before Thanksgiving. The world turns, and the harvest goes on.

Notebook: James Boswell Imitates a Cow

John Brewer, describing a night at the Royal Drury Lane Theatre in 1769:

During the hour before the curtain rose the theatre was filled by what a bemused German visitor, von Archenholz, called ‘noise and bombardment’: the audience chatted, cheered and sang, threw fruit at one another, flirted and preened themselves. A few years earlier James Boswell, waiting with a Scottish friend for a Drury Lane performance to begin, ‘entertained the audience prodigiously by imitating the lowing of a cow.’ As he later proudly remarked, ‘I was so successful in this boyish frolic that the universal cry of the galleries was “Encore the cow! Encore the cow!”’

The Pleasures of the Imagination

Welcoming committee

We're in the process of completing our second relocation of the year, having most recently moved from temporary digs in Portsmouth NH to our new permanent address just over the Maine border. On one of our last mornings in New Hampshire I went for a morning hike and saw this bobcat crossing the trail just ahead of me. I quickened my pace a bit, figuring the cat would likely disappear into the brush before I could set up a shot, but it seemed to be in no great hurry and even turned around to look back at me for a moment. I've seen bobcats a few times before, but this is the first time I've had one pose. After a few seconds it moved off.

The mid-fall Maine weather has been far warmer than advertised, with temps grazing 80, and for several days the side of our house swarmed with ladybird beetles and assasssin bugs. The latter weren't living up to their name, perhaps because they know that the beetles are somewhat toxic; the two species crawled around each other, pursuing their separate interests.

Then last night, around 8:30, an owl started hooting outside and kept it up for roughly a half-hour. The noise kept setting off our dog, and finally I took him out for a look. The bird, probably a great horned owl, was clearly visible in the top of a tree just across the street and was undisturbed by our presence. It flew off eventually but made a brief return just after dawn.

August notebook

Here's a little object lesson in the compartmentalization of modern life. One afternoon we went out for a drive and as we headed to our car we looked back and saw our striped cat watching us from the window of our second-floor apartment, as she sometimes does. It took a moment before we realized that it wasn't our window at all, but the window of the adjacent apartment, whose occupants we haven't met, and that the striped cat wasn't our striped cat but an apparently identical one belonging to our neighbor or neighbors. Unlike the numerous dogs in the building, who see each other outside and hear each other barking from time to time, the two cats live parallel lives in cubicles a few feet apart, presumably in utter ignorance of each other's existence.

***

Mysteriously, we've been followed by dragonflies ever since we moved in. When we drive out of the parking lot we often see one hovering over our windshield, as if checking us out, and sometimes we find what we can only assume is a different dragonfly greeting us when we get out of our car at our destination. They're said to be an omen of good luck — and a symbol of Japan, whatever that might entail for us. Today a meadowhawk (many dragonflies have wonderful, vivid names) approached me while I was out walking, settled on my hand, and stayed there for some time. It chose my camera hand, but I managed to slip the other in my left pocket for my cell phone and take a picture.

Honest Things

Eleanor Clark, on the Oysterman's Cooperative building in Brittany, where "there is just about everything there you could ever need in oystering, from women's dark blue canvas pants and the beautiful fishermen's blouses up to the heaviest cable":

A lovely store, in which nothing has been advertised, nothing is packaged, no patronage is solicited, no brainwashing is done, no profit is to be made and therefore it is most unlikely that anything bought will break or otherwise go to pieces the first time it is used. Oh, the long-lost delight of this decency! For the general American public there is nothing left that begins to approach it but the small-town hardware store, where a nail is still a nail and had better be a good one, and there is apt to be a good deal of junk and vanity even there. Besides, in this place with its crude heavy counters and air of a warehouse, the aura of the single trade, of the beau métier with all its sea-depths and adventure, hangs around every item, for not a bolt or rope or pair of gloves there is meant for any other purpose, and it is remarkable what beauty it casts over everything. Beauty depends after all on what you come from, what you are being cleansed and relieved of, and in the pass we are in nowadays an American lady of the buying type might be tempted to come away from this place with a batch of pulleys, the way her grandmother acquired a little replica of the Venus de Milo.

But no, that wouldn't do, would it? The beauty of all these honest things, aside from their fine conjunction of textures, is in their being together and being there, not somewhere else, in the above-mentioned association, in the simple appropriateness of it all. It is not to be bought; the poor lady will have to go back to the square, with its tasteless souvenirs.

Clark was writing in the early 1960s, and no doubt many things are different now. Except for The Oysters of Locmariaquer and Rome and a Villa, her books seem to have gone out of print. She moved in Trotskyite circles for a time and apparently knew the man himself, if briefly, in his Mexican years; later she married Robert Penn Warren. The Vassar Encyclopedia has what seems to be the best summary of her life and work.

Notebook: Home Fires

Sir James George Frazer:

Not only among the Celts but throughout Europe, Hallowe’en, the night which marks the transition from autumn to winter, seems to have been of old the time of year when the souls of the departed were supposed to revisit their old homes in order to warm themselves by the fire and to comfort themselves with the good cheer provided for them in the kitchen or the parlour by their affectionate kinsfolk. It was, perhaps, a natural thought that the approach of winter should drive the poor shivering hungry ghosts from the bare fields and the leafless woodlands to the shelter of the cottage with its familiar fireside. Did not the lowing kine then troop back from the summer pastures in the forests and on the hills to be fed and cared for in the stalls, while the bleak winds whistled among the swaying boughs and the snow-drifts deepened in the hollows? and could the good-man and the good-wife deny to the spirits of their dead the welcome which they gave to the cows?

The Golden Bough

Notebook: Stephens at Palenque

From 1839 to 1841 the American traveler John Lloyd Stephens and the British artist Frederick Catherwood traveled throughout Mexico and Central America exploring and meticulously describing Mayan antiquities, which were then barely known to the English-speaking world (and even to many living in the region). Here Stephens relates his thoughts as they leave the site in Mexico known by the Spanish name of Palenque.

There was no necessity for assigning to the ruined city an immense extent, or an antiquity coeval with that of the Egyptians or of any other ancient and known people. What we had before our eyes was grand, curious, and remarkable enough. Here were the remains of a cultivated, polished, and peculiar people, who had passed through all the stages incident to the rise and fall of nations; reached their golden age, and perished, entirely unknown. The links which connected them with the human family were severed and lost, and these were the only memorials of their footsteps upon earth. We lived in the ruined palace of their kings; we went up to their desolate temples and fallen altars; and wherever we moved we saw the evidences of their taste, their skill in arts, their wealth and power. In the midst of desolation and ruin we looked back to the past, cleared away the gloomy forest, and fancied every building perfect, with its terraces and pyramids, its sculptured and painted ornaments, grand, lofty, and imposing, and overlooking an immense inhabited plain; we called back into life the strange people who gazed at us in sadness from the walls; pictured them, in fanciful costumes and adorned with plumes of feathers, ascending the terraces of the palace and the steps leading to the temples; and often we imagined a scene of unique and gorgeous beauty and magnificence, realizing the creations of Oriental poets, the very spot which fancy would have selected for the "Happy Valley" of Rasselas. In the romance of the world's history nothing ever impressed me more forcibly than the spectacle of this once great and lovely city, overturned, desolate, and lost; discovered by accident overgrown with trees for miles around, and without even a name to distinguish it. Apart from everything else, it was a mourning witness to the world's mutations.

Unlike many early observers who attributed the ruins to a civilization originating in the Old World, Stephens ultimately concluded, correctly, that the builders were the ancestors of the same Maya people who still inhabited the region. I visited several of the sites, including Palenque, in 1980, by which time conditions for travelers, distinctly rough in 1840, were vastly improved. The fine Dover editions of the four volumes of Stephens's travels are still in print.

At the equinox

This ill-starred year grinds towards its end but still has ample time to accumulate additional misfortunes. My body remains on summer schedule, attuned to neither the clock nor the sun. I lie in the dark and wait for signs of daylight, then rise and perform the little rituals of waking up the house. I draw curtains open, put water on to boil, make breakfast. Outside I've already pulled up the tomatoes and summer squash, and the okra is bearing more slowly as the daylight dwindles and temperatures begin to drop. I wrap up the butternut squash fruits in pillow-cases at night to keep the deer from eating them before they're ready to cut off the vine. The resident hummingbirds still buzz around their feeder, but the swallowtail butterflies that feasted on our zinnias all summer have moved on.

Gardening plans, early morning walks, things not accomplished, will have to be deferred. There's a sense, in general, of being balanced on the cusp — but of what? Winter's grim days and long nights can't be avoided, and spring now seems very far away.

One late afternoon I came across a barred owl at the edge of a wood. I wasn't looking for it, nor it for me. It settled on a branch and looked me over, but not so intently that it couldn't be distracted by a hawk calling in the distance. Somehow it will probably make its way through the winter. I'll keep an eye out for it next year.