气候变暖的彩色

When it isn't one thing, it's another. Today it was both and then some. Real-feel temperatures in New York neared 100˚ (it felt the same in the shade as in the sun!), brought down only a little by a sudden torrent an hour ago. All the while, the air was unhealthy because of smoke from wildfires half a continent away. Still, we're not getting the worst of any of this. We haven't, like many western states (and European countries and Asian cities), had our highest recorded temperatures, aren't encountering fires exploding around us like in Canada, the American West or Spain, or, like many of the places we visited in China last month, are wading through streets flooded by slow-moving typhoon Bavi. But we do have a Congress with nothing better to do than try to make daylight savings time permanent, "saving daylight." Deckchairs!

From the Great Tree of Light

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I've been spending some more time with Skywoman. Robin Wall Kimmerer's exquisite telling of the story in Braiding Sweetgrass has introduced millions around the world to this wonderful cosmogonic story from the Haudenosaunee, including me: I'm pairing it with the first three chapters of Genesis in my second chapter.

I'd planned to include the way she updated it a few years later, but have been finding more surprises: a different updating a few months before, and quite different tellings in various sources, including Joanne Shenandoah and Doug George's Skywoman: Legends of the Iroquois, the one to which she directs her readers (from whence the image by John Kabionhes Fadden above). This fits what I'm saying about it - that living stories are told and retold in different ways, the difference a testimony to their vitality. But I hadn't realized how artfully outlierish the Braiding Sweetgrass telling is, abstracting from who Skywoman was or how she came to be falling, while still telling us she was holding some sprigs from the "Tree of Life." In this book, for instance, which gives Skywoman a full backstory and a name, the tree is called the Great Tree of Light - and she doesn't take seeds from it down to what will become Turtle Island.

How do I honor the particularity of her tellings without implicitly calling them into question?

River scenes

Visited the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers today - our first time. It's full of delightful discoveries, like Wade & Croome's 180-year-old Panorama of the Hudson River from New York to Waterford which shows steamboats going up and down the river and depicts what you might see if you were on them, though it also tries to capture the river's twists and turns. (This bit near West Point put me in mind a little

fancifully of the scroll paintings of the nine turns at Wuyishan.) To see what's on the other side of the river you turn the book upside down! At top above is the stretch from where we are (between Manhattanville and Bloomingdale at far right) to Yonkers, if you were taking the steamer up. Here's the view you might see to your right you went back down - though it really looks like the view from out our window today!

Work in progress

I've been back at school three times this week, for air conditioning and quiet as I wrestle with my squirrely "religion of trees" manuscript. 

But the place feels haunted. Who's still connected to this place? The details of our "total reorgani-zation" remain opaque, the energy of the community dispersed.

Summer doldrums

Sail 4th

A travesty, a waste and a shame. Now that we've made it past the prez's people's pathetic pass at honoring the nation's birthday - How small they are, as our mayor put it, how weak, how unoriginal - one starts to feel both anger at what was stolen from us and sadness at the thought of what might have been. I gather the dud of a national "state fair" displaced what would have been an astonishing gathering of folk musicians from across the country, for instance. 

Long before the dystopian midnight carnival on the National Mall (is this how you turn the Washington Monument into an unholy pillar to Baal?), I was reminded of the grandeur and dignity possible as tall ships from around the world passed up and down the Hudson... You could see them out our window (above) or at river level (below)! 

And all day I was buoyed by the words of our magical mayor the night before: What a privilege each of us has, to live in a nation that every one of its inhabitants can shape. What a responsibility each of us possesses, to prove ourselves worthy of all those who came before. What power each of us holds, to bring America ever-closer to the greatness so many have seen when they looked upon these shores — the greatness that, for 250 years, has been America. 

Adirondack blues

Another charmed stay in the Adirondacks, this one a little different. 

We've avoided the summer season in the past. But someone canceled and our usual host let us know of the possibility just at a moment we were thinking summer travel. Luckily it turns out this week is still pre-season: all the shops are open but the crowds aren't here yet. (We saw them streaming in as we drove out this morning, thankful still to be blessedly countercyclical.) The 'Dacks we know from the off-season are quiet, just us and whatever nature we happen to encounter - especially trees! Blue Mountain Lake, the felicitous site of our first Adirondacks stay and still our fave, seems to us barely to have been touched by tourist development. It rings no bells when we mention it to people.

This season's colors are blue and green, with a few pops of yellow and white and occasional purple flowers, but mainly in meadows and marshes and along the roads. Step into the woods and it's greens on greens (on brown). This was the view at one of our familiar haunts, the tip of Lake Durant just outside Blue Mountain Lake, seen from a bridge on the Cascade Pond Trail.

But the true discovery for us this time, which amounts to a sort of aspect shift, was being able for the first time to explore the blue world of the lakes! (There are more than three thousand here!) Far from being just beautiful barriers and borders to roads and trails, lakes and streams are the traditional transit network of the Adirondacks. The dinner cruise on the W. W. Durant and rental watercraft were now available to us - summer! So we came to know the lake we were staying on - Raquette Lake, a little to the west of Blue, but apparently not much more developed - for the first time as a thoroughfare!

These are some views from the cruise. Turns out Raquette Lake's nearly 100 mile shoreline is dotted with landings for some 250 dwellings of various sizes, nearly invisible through the trees, and most accessible only by boat - still!! What looks like just forest on a road map is in fact full of human activity. The first "Great Camp" was here, and there are many other camps still, including two prestigious camps for children.

And that's the W. W. Durant itself, a 1991 replica of the wooden steamships that made this a busy hub for visitors to the Great Camps and hotels a century ago, espied from the zippy Craig Cat we rented the next day. (This was the only watercraft available at the nearby marinas.) From this light vessel, which sits right on the water but can go up to 30 mph, we got to experience the lake surface as a space for movement in all directions, even as were able to observe up close the rippled waves in the big picture at the top of this post... 

A change of aspect indeed! Not just that blue background became foreground, as the green worlds receded into the background. I've known this was an anthropogenic landscape since finding out it was logged nearly to death by crazed white folks; way more deciduous trees now than then, I think. But my local knowledge had been vague. Now we learned that Blue Mountain and Raquette Lakes only came late to the motorable roads by which we know them, but when NY State Route 28 was opened in 1929, it spelled the end of a whole lost world of interconnected railroads, steamships and Gilded Age hotels.

This, for instance, is Prospect House on - yes! - Blue Mountain Lake, with 300 rooms and huge verandas, its own orchestra, and an army of African American waiters. It operated for decades starting in 1882 and was the first hotel in the world to have electricity in each room (arranged by Thomas Edison himself!). The largest hotel in the Adirondacks, it was supported initially by stage coaches coming from the rail terminus at North Creek on the Hudson, then by steamships (assisted at one point by the shortest railroad in the country) coming across Raquette Lake - which was reached by trains from Utica and NYC. (Most of these were projects of one W. W. Durant or his father, btw.) Along with the long-discontinued trains and steamships, there's nothing on the scale of Prospect House around here now - though still, as I learned, plenty of white people.

An Adirondacks education, more than I realized I needed. What a lot of history, and people, ruffling and wrinkling the surface of our mountain idyll. Unspoiled nature? It's something more complicated, while still a marvel. But the illusion of individualist innocence of car travel -exploded!

Old growth pride

Late afternoon in Pigeon Lake Wilderness, returning from Queer Lake.

Making the cut

The bicen-quinquagenary is coming, and I find I'm not as anxious about it any more. The regime's efforts are falling epically flat, duds all, while remarkably reflective things are appearing everywhere. Their pallid lack of imagination is inspiring a new birth of creativity, just the critical recommitment the American experiment needs at 250! This dizzying array of cookie cutters at the "Adirondacks' Most General Store" clinched it for me. Only in America, I thought! They can't contain this teeming multitude in their one narrow cookie cutter version of America. We're already making cookies in anarchic profusion.

Down but not defeated

Adirondack apparition

Calm between storms