Reading & Writing

Spring?

There is still quite a bit of snow & ice back in the woods, but the mud is emerging, so the black flies can't be far behind. I saw four robins hopping around among last year's cattails across the road. Not much growing yet, the ground still frozen.

Roses

Weather Report

First day of spring: snow; second day of spring: snow. Best just go over to Burningbird & look at the flowers.

Update: More damn flowers here & here.

A Mind of Winter

This morning a flock of finches descended into the trees across the road & chattered hopefully at the fitful sun. But by this evening the sky had lowered & the wind picked up, driving scattered snowflakes against the windows. They make a light ticking sound at impact. I have been in a dark, irritable & scattered mood all day, my only moments of engagement those spent working with Jett & Angel on their obedience drills. Good dogs make the lingering winter bearable.
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Update / footnote: "The Snowman" (Wallace Stevens)

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Morning

Snow still falling through brightening sunlight. "Spring will come back I know it will / And it will do its best . . . " (Greg Brown)

Lazy Day

"Worked" at home today. Which means I looked at the pile of exams to be graded several times, even flipped through them. Rained hard all morning & into the early afternoon. Snow banks collapsing. Path to the driveway plated with ice--a winter's worth of compacted snow. Piles of dog shit emerging, well-preserved by the snow, & in need of clean up. Spent too much time reading randomly on the web. Sun broke through for a few minutes in late afternoon & tonight there is a full moon in & out of wind-driven clouds. Made waffles with walnuts for dinner, good with local maple syrup. It may be the first night of spring that the temperature does not drop below freezing. I'm going to go to bed early--I'm reading a book by E.P. Thompson about William Blake--& get up in the morning full of vim & vigor. (Carole is going to Lake Placid with a Buddhist monk, so I'll have the place to myself.)

Weather Report

Windy here tonight. About 30 degrees. This afternoon driving home the wind was blowing snow off the fields horizontally across Rt. 11, my road home. Even with the truck's big tires I got knocked around quite a bit. Carole has taken Angel, the Lab, on a trip to see friends in Vermont & Weezer is going to be part of a science demo for high school kids at Clarkson tomorrow, so he's staying overnight with our friend Angie in the Bio Department. That leaves me with the two terriers. Very quiet & peaceful. Big fire in the woodstove.

I gave my talk on Darwin to the Bio students today. It went pretty well, I think, though the second half was way too loosely held together--just a series of disjointed speculations I hope to be able to bring together regarding time, pattern & meaning. Reading one's work-in-progress in public is a harrowing, but useful, experience. I certainly have a sense now of how much more thinking & reading I need to do before I can make sense of my ideas. I'm going to keep posting things here on the subject. Some of the Darwin posts from the last few days--edited, revised, excerpted--made it into my talk. I kind of enjoyed the process of publicly drafting my ideas. For the next few weeks I'll probably be developing some reading notes & I'll put up interesting bits here.

Update: It's late & I was just taking the terriers out before bed, both on leads of course. We live at the end of a dead end dirt road so there is almost no traffic, except the occasional pot smoker or amorous teenagers. So I'm out there with the dogs & I'm wearing my ski goggles because my eyes have been really irritated lately & I'm protecting them from the wind & this kid drives down the road. The terriers are barking at the car & I'm standing there in my goggles. I'm an old guy & I don't give a shit. I'm way beyond any kind of embarrassment. The kid turned around, slowly, respectfully, but also trying to dig the scene & got the hell out of there. I would have too, in his place. Freaks live down that road, man.

Cold

The temperature got up to -5 here in South Colton today. The forecast is for colder weather tonight & tomorrow. We could hit -30 tonight. We've been pumping maximum BTUs out of the woodstove; even so, we'll be glad to have the furnace click on while we sleep. Tomorrow I don't have to teach any classes & only have to go into school in the afternoon for some administrative business, so I'll have the morning to read & figure out what I want to think about. Do others have to do this? I'm all over the place the last couple of weeks, have to focus & makes some plans. Part of this involves pulling the details of this semester's classes together, but I've also been turning over plans for a major writing project, as well as ongoing translation work from Vietnamese. Not to mention the personal history churned up by my recent trip to California. And about a thousand emails to answer. I'm hoping it's good to feel unsettled at the beginning of a new year, for I am deeply unsettled.

Update: As Larry Davis noted in a comment to the previous post, I must get off Buridan's Ass, or my own.

Home

I am home from my travels. Thought I would blog more from the MLA, but by the time I got back to my room in the evenings I was usually too tired to put anything together. I do have notes on the presentations I attended & will be putting them up in a day or so.

In the meantime, I'd just note that, for me, travel does not "broaden" so much as deepen. I always have vivid dreams in hotel rooms. The dominant theme of my dream-life the last week has been confession & coming clean. Literally, narratives of confessing misdeeds to the police & of cleaning up messes of various sorts. Yesterday I traveled from the Southern California desert to the woods of northern New York. I usually avoid appeals to what is "natural," but I feel as if I have been somehow taken outside of nature over the last 24 hours.

My grandparents are long-dead & most of my parents' generation has died in the last decade, most recently my uncle Joe, for whom I was named, my mother's younger brother. I had a strong sense that I needed to go back to the Imperial Valley on this trip, not to look up relatives, but to remember the landscape. So I spent two days driving around the Salton Sink, brilliantly renamed by a developer in the early 20th century the Imperial Valley.

I used to like traveling & staying in hotel rooms, but now I find it mostly tedious. I was glad to make a couple of professional connections & MLA & the sessions I attended gave me hope that literary critics are learning to cut through the haze of jargon to honest obscurity & mystification. (I know that this seems, initially, a distinction without a difference, but I agree with Daniel Erlich* that clarity is a highly problematic notion. Have you ever tried to explain**, say, an Emily Dickinson poem "clearly"? You read the words "My life stood still--A loaded gun" & you are immediately in a space both clear & mysterious, ordinary & obscure.

A case in point, which I will be following up in future notes here, would be my relationship to the history of my family, which is more of an ahistory than a history--appropriate, since I come from that most ahistorical of provinces, California. I took Joan Didion's recent book about California with me on my trip & dipped into it, usually just a few pages before sleep, while traveling. I've long admired Didion's intelligence, to say nothing of her prose, but in this book she produces a map of California that itself packs considerable seismic force. The map is not the territory, but the map can act as a potent symbol of the territory that transcends the vulgar epistemology of mere "mapping."

I intend to spend a good deal more time crawling around on this map in the coming days.

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*Who was, bless him, agreeing with something I'd noted earlier about the state of the language of criticism.

**I have worried this notion before, in a review essay published in the late 1980s. I would not necessarily stand by every claim I made then, but my approach to the problem has remained unchanged.

Lazy

Lots of snow this week. Four days ago we got nearly a foot, then a morning of rain knocked that down to a few inches of slush; then night before last it began to snow in earnest & has kept up, about a foot total. This morning the sun has come out, but the forcast is for more snow. Since school is out I've stayed home, only going up to the PO & general store a couple of times to check the mail & buy beer. This morning Carole & I took Angel & Jett on a long walk up the Morgan Road, but other than that I've been lazy. Recharging, to put a positive spin on long winter naps. Feeding the woodstove & reading Lolita a few pages at a time.

Right after Xmas I go on the road for a week, so the pace of life will change abruptly: Three days in San Diego at the Modern Language Association meeting, then three days over in the Imperial Valley*, my mother's birthplace. I haven't been to the valley in nearly twenty years & I want to see it before it is completely converted to industrial farmland, a process that had begun even when I was a boy visiting my grandfather's little truck farm. Anyway, I want to look around those little town in the Valley--Holtville & Calexico--& see if I can grab some kind of sense of why my family scattered out from there in the sixties in every direction.
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*I'll probably blog from MLA, but don't know what kind of connection I'll be able to get from Calexico & Holtville.

Big Snow

We're getting hammered by that nor'easter that's been rolling up the coast. We're supposed to have 18 inches by tomorrow midday. Fortunately, I can now turn my grades in electronically, which I just finished doing. PeopleSoft may have a clunky interface & weirdly-named menu choices, but it sure beats driving through the snow to drop off a mark-sense form. Before me stretches the glorious prospect of sleeping in tomorrow morning with a completely clear conscience.

Afterthought: I'm completely saturated with student writing, with all its surprises & disappointments. I have been working on a piece about the infamous 5-paragraph essay, but tonight I just want to listen to Leonard Cohen & read Nabokov's Lolita. Nabokov's prose sends me into fits of despair it is so perfect. If it were music, Nabokov's language would sound like Brahms' piano trios played on a honky-tonk piano by an anonymous black musician in New Orleans circa 1925 steeped in ragtime but moving toward jazz via the blues.

Snow

First significant snowfall of the year today, a bit later than usual. By evening the sky had cleared & a cold-looking half moon rose through the net of maple limbs. Kept feeding logs into the woodstove & began turning my attention from being away from school to going back to school. Not an unpleasant turn, but forcing me out of a certain lassitude that overtakes me at the beginning of winter. Carole, the active half of our yin-yang, has been out & about all day.

Happy Thanksgiving

High Water Everywhere

Reading Shelley Powers' note about her washed-out riverside hike reminded me of this photo I took last week from our front porch. The river was as high as it has been in fifteen years. And if it looks bare & cold outside, it is; but don't worry about us here in the upper reaches of the country, we have this to come inside to.

However comfortable one might be, however, the metaphor of high water, rising water, seems pervasively relevant these days. I've had Bob Dylan's lyric running through my mind & playing on my audio system lately. It's one of Dylan's best songs--deeply rooted in the American blues tradition--but it is also distinctively Dylan in his best poetic voice. As peaceful as things are for me, "things are tough out there."

Snow

Getting cold here. We've had a few flakes of snow off & on the last two days. Supposed to be warmer tomorrow. Lots of stuff to do in the yard, getting the new water line secured & the soil put back in the trench.

At school the bureaucracy has me in its grip: it's course selection time & all of my advisees are coming in to get their schedules approved. And we have a new computer system, so I'm filling in fields like what . . . ? Isn't filling in fields on a computer screen the opposite of poetry, despite the pastoral word fields? Strangely, though, I've been picking up the pieces of a sequence of poems I began several months ago. Every line of every poem is a question? Working title: "Politics of the
Broken Heart."

Fall (IV)

Last night as I was fixing dinner I heard what I thought was a gurgle from the refrigerator. It stopped & I went on with what I was doing. Then I heard it again. Glancing up, I noticed that the light fixture above my head was filling with water. It had been raining & blowing hard all afternoon: obviously we'd sprung a leak. I turned off the power & dropped the fixture so the box could drain. Our bedroom is over the kitchen, so I went up there fearing I'd see water running down the wall, but all was well upstairs. Went outside & saw that the wind had pulled some of the siding loose & that rain was being blown into the gap as it ran down the side of the house. Got the ladder out & pounded the siding back up. Just a temporary job. Over the next hour the leak slowed & stopped. In total maybe two cups of water.

In the old days, before we became full-fledged country mice, the leak would have freaked both of us out, but as we came back inside Carole & I were joking about it. Afraid the wind would blow it over, she'd wanted me to take the extension ladder down, but I wanted to leave it up because its weight was helping keep the loose siding secure. "I promise it won't blow over, " I told her. "Promise? That's really not the sort of thing you can promise, is it?" "Oh, but you don't know what sort of house mojo I have!" She seemed to accept my claim of possessing supernatural powers & we went in to dinner.

Fall (III)

This morning the weather began to change. We've had warm days & cool nights. A strong breeze had begun stripping the leaves from the maples. When I looked out my study window I could see deep enough into the woods across the road that I noticed two yearling white tailed deer making their way toward the pond. Earlier, the cover would have been too dense for me to see them, though Angel's nose would have picked them out.

By this afternoon the sky had gone low & gray & the wind had stiffened. There's a storm moving in from the Ohio Valley. It's going to start raining tonight & continue through the day tomorrow. Then a cold front. I love the way this time of year makes me hurry up around the yard, getting things snugged down. And next week we're finally getting our new well hooked up to the house, which means the six-foot deep trench can be filled in & the back yard leveled. Once that's done, we can let the snow fly & wait for spring when we're finally going to be able to put in an herb garden & etc. More on my landscaping fantasies as the weather worsens . . .

Fall (II)

This morning I took the dogs out while Carole stayed in bed. To be perfectly honest, the reverse is the far more normal situation. Ingrid, a friend's blind sheepdog, is bunking with us this weekend, so that made four dogs to deal with. And since it's hunting season here in the north woods, only Weezer, the geriatric French Bulldog who just toddles around the yard, goes out without a lead. So I put the water on for coffee & started going through the process of getting everyone outside & "emptied," our local euphemism for pissing & shitting. Standing in the road at seven-something in the morning, I was given the gift of a perfect sky, china blue, streaked with cirrus clouds.

The morning air was cool--the thermometer on the porch read 44F, but the sun was already warm. Poignant, though: we often get our first snow on Halloween. And cirrus usually precede a change of weather.

Fall

I woke just after six this morning to light pouring into the bedroom through the maples at the height of their fall color. Yesterday & today have been unseasonably warm--in the low seventies--but otherwise fall is well advanced. A couple of weeks ago an old maple by the river broke on a windy day, so after I had some coffee I went out & fired up the chainsaw. More firewood. If this winter is anything like last, we'll use it. After cutting up the fallen tree & running the trash to the transfer station, I treated myself to bacon & eggs for breakfast. There are some other snags & deadfall that still need clearing out. Weather is supposed to be good tomorrow. I love the sense of buttoning things down this time of year, getting ready for the hard weather.

Herbs

I brought the pots of Rosemary & Sage onto the porch tonight. Frost is predicted & though we're protected here by the river, I want to make sure I have herbs in mid-winter. Autumn has arrived this week, the leaves already turning though the sun is still warm.

Walking Angel a couple of days ago I noticed that the grasses along the trail beside the pond had begun turning brown. No cold nights yet, the days just a bit shorter, but the grasses knew what time of year it was & what's more they were telling the maples, just now beginning to turn red. Question: is my use of the word knew in the previous sentence merely an example of sentimental personification, aka, the pathetic fallacy? Or does it represent some actual quality of being in the world? As a teacher of writing I am ever on guard against the pathetic fallacy, so I think myself equipped to make distinctions here. What if mind is not a human attribute but a natural one? That is, what if the human mind & consciousness are a subset of a larger knowing? Is this nothing but a sentimental pantheism, or does it have explanatory power? Does it give us better knowledge of why the grass is changing color our along the path where I walk my dogs?

Cool Air

The sun was warm today & the sky a hard porcelain blue, but the humidity of the last weeks has broken & there's a breeze from the northeast. Carole is off riding Tim in a horse show & I've been futzing around the house & updating the syllabi for my courses, which start Monday. Feels like Autumn.

Summer Days

I didn't really intend to take a long weekend away from the blog, it just worked out that way. Classes begin next week at the university, so I've been soaking up as much sunshine & fresh air as possible before things get really busy. I have also simply felt rather pleasantly thick-headed the last few days.

Actually, I tried to write something coherent about the California recall on Saturday, but wound up deleting it as merely a rehash of what's been better-said elsewhere, especially at Daily Kos. Now, I'm a second-generation Californian (living in exile in northern New York) & if I can't get worked up enough to focus my intellect on the recall, it must really be the dog days. Or maybe it's just that the ragweed is blooming, an event that knocks me out for a few days every summer. My take on the recall? It is one more right-wing attack on the ordinary machinery of democracy; Schwarzenegger is a fool; either Davis will beat back the recall or Cruz Bustemonte will replace him; I like Ms. Huffington, but she should not allow herself to be a spoiler, peeling off anti-recall voters from the left.

So much for the political analysis. Meanwhile, I took Carole to play her first few holes of golf yesterday afternoon at a little course run by one guy with a tractor. She's been to the driving range a few times & decided she wanted to give golf a try. It's the one game I'm interested in, though I play it like a fifty year old who took it up in his thirties. Which is to say, not all that well. We had time to play five holes before it began to get dark & Carole had a lot of fun. I actually hit the ball really well, though I still don't have the distance keyed in on my new irons. Afterward, we met a couple of friends for beer & burgers.

This morning, I went & played a quick nine holes at another course. I lost five balls on the first two holes, but after that got in a pretty good grove & played pretty well. It was a clear, cool morning when I began, with dew still silvering the greens; by the time I finished it was beginning to get hot. Stopped & got some lemonade on my way to the office, where, I confess, I didn't stay all that long. Came home & worked in the yard a bit, took a nap. Ate a chicken sandwich for dinner (Carole is working late) & now I'm having a couple of beers & writing this. There must be some angst & torment somewhere, but for the moment it seems to have pulled back to a safe distance. Fall is our most moody & beautiful season here by the river, so I'm pretty sure there will be some poetry pretty soon.

Well Well Well

Yesterday was the big day. After several years of talking about it, we finally had a well drilled on our property. For a dozen years we have been getting by with the old dug well that was here when we moved in. It's about thirty feet deep & lined with stone--a work of art and engineering--but the water quality is marginal. It's drinkable, but you don't really want to drink it--mostly because it's full of iron. In summer when the water table drops we have had to watch our water consumption: though the well has never run dry, there have been times when a glass of water had sand grains at the bottom.

Well drilling is expensive. The base rate is $19 / foot, but that doesn't count the liner that has to go down as far as the bedrock so groundwater doesn't seep in ($144), or the drive shoe & wellcap ($400), or the pump & feed line, which we haven't even installed yet ($1500). There are places around here where you go down 60 feet & hit a spring that delivers a hundred gallons a minute; our drillers first struck a seam in the bedrock with water in it at 132 feet, but that was only 2 1/2 gallons a minute; at around 170 feet they hit a bit more water & continued down to 182 just to make sure. The flow was now at an acceptable five gallons a minute--nice clear water. In order to get a bit more storage in the well, I told the drillers to take the hole down another 20 feet. All done in a single day. 202 feet, you do the math. Just watching them exhausted me, to say nothing of writing the check.

It all seems a little strange--there's a pond across the road that feeds a stream that runs across our property, the stream flowing into the river that we live beside. There's water everywhere. Across the river at the VFD there is a cistern fed by an artesian well that we have used for drinking water these dozen years because we don't like the taste of iron, along with many of our neighbors in the same situation. Compared to the majority of humans on the planet we are able to take our water supply for granted. The well was, in this sense, a "home improvement," a mark of our immense good fortune to have been born here & now rather than there & then.

The layers of granite & sandstone drilled through are obvious in the colors & textures of the tailings, which I'm going to use as bedding for a stone walkway to the front door. The tailings are mostly a coarse gray sand, shot through with streaks of pink limestone.

This morning the drillers came back to take a GPS reading on the location of the well--required by the NY Department of Environmental Conservation--& to check the well. Though the first water source is at 132 feet, the water level in the well is only down 25 feet, about the level of the water in the old well. I'm going to have to ask my colleague N, a civil engineer & ground water specialist how all this works.

Perhaps strangely, now that we have a new, reliable & sparkling source of water, I have developed a sense of responsibility to the old well. You should see it--it's a thing of beauty to marvel at considering it was constructed a hundred years ago without benefit of power tools. I think I'll put an old fashioned farmer's hand pump on the old well & use it for watering the garden. Someday I suppose it might be filled in, but not on my watch.

How to do Good Business

Last week the pressure tank that keeps our well-system pressurized--so we can have running water--went kaput. I've changed it once before & it's not much fun unless you have a thing for plumbing. So I went to the hardware store over in Canton, where they have a large inventory & guys who know what they're talking about. Bought the tank, put it in, but couldn't get the pump to prime. I'm a pessimist so I concluded the pump was shot & just not generating enough vacuum to pull the water out of the well. By this time it was five o'clock & I wasn't going to be replacing the pump before morning.

Next morning, drove back to Canton & the guys in the plumbing section tried to talk me out of spending $179 on a new pump. "Could be the jet is clogged--you sure you cleaned that out?" Yes, I was sure. Another guy comes up. "Maybe there's a leak in the system you can't see." Maybe. "What's the tank pressure?" "Did you check the cut out setting?" I'm still ready to buy the pump when an old guy ambles up & looks interested. I relate my story. "You're sucking air," he says. "Doesn't take much." I leave without a pump, but with a new pair of Channel Lock pliers

& a little propane torch for heating up the connections before I cinch them down. (I've always wanted one of those little torches.) So, sixty bucks instead of the price of a pump. Driving home, I'm still not fully convinced, but I replace the main fitting on the well-side & use my new tools to pull everything tight, fire up the pump & almost instantly have pressure.

So here's a tip of the cap to Coakley's Hardware in Canton, NY. I learned a bit about plumbing shallow-well pumps & saved more than a hundred dollars. The key to this transaction was conversation. Somebody ought to look at the economics of conversation, especially as a way of transmitting lore.

Update: At a party Saturday, Carole introduced me to someone as "poet & plumber . . . " That made up for my day & a half in the cellar struggling with the pipes. My wife's wit, by the way, is drier than the Santa Ana wind.

Blogging with Dogs

Rain

It has been pouring rain for the last hour. Two o'clock, but dark as late evening. The road over the culvert has given way & fallen into the stream. Yesterday was sunny & hot but the day before was like this. We are saturated. Dogs are bored.

Update, 6:00 pm: I'm sitting under this line of storms at the moment. Exciting. I live just about dead center in the big triangle-shaped county. The whole line is moving south at a good clip.

[image by Intellicast]

Minimalism

I've mostly moved back into the little upstairs room I use for writing. I plastered the walls, painted, refinished the old pine plank floors, moved in a cherry table to use as a desk; I'm trying to keep it simple, though. When we moved into the house more than ten years ago I just slapped some white paint on the walls, put some metal bookshelves together & went to work. Over the years, the room served, additionally, as a kennel for our crazy old bluetick hound Maude, dead these two years. By the time I cleared it out it was just chock full of crap. In this renovation, I plastered over spots of her blood from the time she freaked out & cut her paws up when she broke the inner pane of the double-glazed window. Looked like a murder scene. She gnawed three big holes in the wall. Her spirit is still here in this space, unsettled but not malevolent, her body buried in the clearing down by the river.

As I have moved back in I've been trying to keep things simple. I'm not an ascetic--I've got a little stereo system & a gray rug under my chair. A painting & two photographs on the walls, the mountain goddess figure I brought back from Vietnam a couple of years ago. I'm so easily distracted I'm trying to create a simple space in which to write. Since my last book came out eighteen months ago, I've been much more of a reader than a writer; I'm now beginning to feel the building pressure of new projects--& at least one old one. I admire those who can write anywhere, who make poems sitting in public libraries, who write novels in coffee shops. Almost always, though, I have needed a secluded room. A good deal of physical effort went into redoing the room; I hope for equal intellectual energy going forward.

Aside: I have also dispensed with my computer's mouse: I write on a Dell laptop with a touchpad; in the beginning I thought I'd never get used to it, but now the mouse just seems like clutter on the desk. There are already too many books, but that is inevitable--I have Reader Attention Deficit Disorder (RADD). Maybe I ought to start a foundation.

Breeze

After a couple of months of as-time-allows plastering, painting & putting up new trim & baseboards, I have moved back into my writing room. My window faces the woods, not the river & tonight there is a breeze stirring the trees that mask Ed's Pond across the road. Waves of cool air push through my open window, subside & return. Scent of maple leaves & pine, faint. Carole & Angie are out on the deck with the dogs. Every now & then I hear them laugh. Looking up just now from writing, I see bats flickering past my window in the gloaming.

I never thought I cared that much about place. I've always liked to travel. So it has been a surprise to come to feel at home here by the river. At different seasons, I know which patterns of stars to look for when I take the dogs out; I know in which month the Milkweed will bloom, same for the Joe Pye Weed, clovers & thistles. Maybe it's just deep in the genome to fall in love with places we feel secure. Well, so what? Mind surrounds body the way electrons form a haze of probabilities around a nucleus itself abuzz.

Ah, Summer: A Postcard

Weather here has been glorious. Hot days & cool nights. Most evenings I grill something for dinner, also lots of salads. I go in to campus every weekday morning to teach my three students, but am usually home by noon. I've been working on the little upstairs room I use for a study: refinishing the old pine plank floors, plastering the walls, putting in new baseboards & trim, painting. I'm after a quiet, meditative room so I'm using muted blue on the walls & a dusky green for the trim. Haven't been reading all that much, at least not with any seriousness. Our visiting dog pals Ingrid & Lucy have returned to their homes so we're down to our three. Basically, I'm in lazy mode. Anxieties at bay.

Animal Faith

For the last ten days or so Carole & I have been running an informal summer camp for dogs at our place. Cathy's Ingrid & Angie's Lucy have joined our three dogs while their masters travel. Ingrid is a ten-year-old sheepdog mix, tan & white & is about 90% blind; Lucy is a skinny beagle-border collie & god knows what package of energy. Both have visited for extended periods before--we go back & forth between calling this Camp Doghallah (Paradise of the Dogs) & The House of Bark--& everyone gets along pretty well. Occasionally our terrier Penny & Lucy will growl & snap over a place on the couch, but nothing serious. Here are mugshots of this week’s campers:

I love having dogs around even though it means sweeping up what seems like pounds of fur every day. I like getting included in their animal lives; that is, I like to live with them like an animal in the world. Santayana writes that all creatures, humans included, share a quality he calls "animal faith," which he defines as the expectation that one day will follow another & we will continue to live in the world as we ordinarily do. We humans have all kinds of intellectual apparatus on top of our animal faith & maybe the dogs do too; but that faith is something we can share as we eat, sleep, shit & organize our lives together.

Raquette River

The river flows out of the Adirondacks & into the St. Lawrence. Someone once told me it is the most-dammed (not damned) small river in North America--seventeen in all--but separated by stretches like this, which is near my house.

Couldn't find a photographer to credit on this site, put together by some of my neighbors.

Liminal

Summer. Last night at late dusk I took the dogs out. Many, many of my fellow-creatures here beside the river are most active during liminal periods & in liminal places: dawn & dusk (I'll have to tell you about the four a.m. robin) & along ditches & creek banks & in the atmosphere at the tops of trees. Bats, bullfrogs, treefrogs, lightning bugs. All of us like the edges of things.