Author: Peter Freilinger

Late November in the northern temperate zone is always a crapshoot, and today, it came up craps. 2 or 3 C at best, a dark overcast, and on and off rain, showers, and clumpy snow that immediately melted on contact with one’s coat or the forest floor or the beach sands. Windy enough to make the damp cold bite, but not enough to stir the wet leaves and clean up the ground before the inevitable snow soon to come, it was a day that normally I would have said “I’m going to catch a cold” but this being 2021, I’m almost certainly not going to have enough human contact today to acquire a cold virus, this despite it being the day after Thanksgiving and thus, in theory, I should be shopping somewhere, boy in tow, to affirm my belief in American consumerism.

Instead, the boy is at home, reading a new stack of books from his mom, and the dog and I are out on a trail. She’s in her bright orange vest on this, the second to last day of hunting season, and I’m in an ill-chosen dark grey jacket, which will enable any erstwhile hunter who accidentally shotguns me in the back to say “hey, I couldn’t see him, and his movement made me think it was a deer.” I’ll deserve whatever I get as we walk through state wildlife reserve land.

I love this trail when it’s not hunting season. It winds through scrublands about a mile from the ocean, flat, sandy soils with occasional semi-permanent puddles where the drainage isn’t good. On this soil and in this town, the puddles mean the granite that lies beneath everything here gets close enough to the surface that it prevents the water from washing through the sand, and after awhile the leaves accumulate and forms rotting peaty mud, and then the puddle – which could be six inches deep, and could suck your leg down to your hip if you step in an unfortunate bit as I have done before – acquires a life of its own. In a month, once it’s below freezing for a few days in a row, despite weak sunlight, the puddles will freeze over and we’ll be able to walk across them with confidence, but for now, walking this path requires extended bushwhacking through the surrounding forest. A month ago, the dog would have just tramped through the water, but it’s cold now, and despite her fur and her desire to take the shortest path, even she is skirting into the woods.

It should be snowing today, but hey, global warming, and we’re probably two to three weeks late for our first decent snow of the season here in Scarborough. It’s been a good year for us here in town to assess what that means – global warming, I mean – and it seems to settle in on a few items beyond the obvious. “The obvious”, to be clear, is sea levels rising for us here on the coast. Normal monthly high tides now regularly put the Audobon Society marsh recreation centre, the place that rents out kayaks and canoes, under a foot to a foot and a half of water, and even a mid-lunar tide has the high tide water lapping onto the edge of its parking lot; when I was a kid thirty years ago, that only happened in the spring for the yearly neap tides, and my guess is the spring tides next year may require sandbags. The houses on the back side of Pine Point are probably five years away from the same yearly or monthly flooding; there are a couple up for sale and I’m sort of stunned they are trying to command seaside prices when they will be underwater within a decade or two.

That’s the obvious; we joke (badly) about it in the town’s Long Range Planning Committee – “you don’t buy houses on the beach these days, you rent them from the Atlantic” – but the non-obvious is the subtle changes through the year. The mosquitoes, for example, are now intolerable from mid June until roughly the first week of October. Maine is well-known for its mosquitoes, but on the coast, the foggy chill that used to be June kept them down until July 4th, traditionally, and the first decent cold nights, the ones where it wasn’t really below freezing but you’d get some white bits on the low grass in the fields which got shady earlier in the afternoon as the sun starts to get low, the first cold nights which would finally kill the larvae in the puddles in the forest, those nights would come around typically in mid September. So you’d only have July, August, and a little bit of September where being in the woods, or anywhere at all at dusk or dawn, required a hearty dose of barely-legal DDT bug repellent to be at all tolerable.

Not anymore: it’s an extra 30 days of warmth and summer and biting insects now. It’s not like Maine is suddenly Costa Rica, mind you; the high temperatures in the summer are still decidedly moderate. We just barely made it to the waterpark for five days this summer, not because we were so busy but because only on five days was it so hot that the boy and I both agreed it was necessary, we had to be submerged in a pool – which in Maine meant it was maybe 30C and a bit humid. The water at the beach was a smidge warmer than I remembered it, but still not comfortably warm. And while I’m glad to have had air conditioning – well, a heat pump that cools as well as warms – we really only needed it for a couple handful of days, and a handful of nights.

My friend Al observed that New England is one of those places that’s probably benefiting from global warming, a lot like most of Canada (with apologies to my friend in British Columbia, who in one year has both recorded Canada’s highest temperature ever and floods which temporarily made Vancouver the city an island due to flooding). The winters, usually barely survivable and always too long, are now mild enough that I don’t even need to hire a neighbor kid to shovel the driveway – even as a portly 47 year old I can do it myself. Also, winter clears up promptly in early April, which means the summers, usually all too brief, have an extra three or four weeks padding to them. Fall lasted a full 10 weeks this year, and spring’s meltwaters and mud and grime and raw early southwesterly winds came and went almost without notice before it was warm enough to start thinking about backyard campfires. All in all, things are better here in Maine, which may help explain the steady rise in home prices.

All of this expansion of Maine weather perfection will only continue – that is, if in the almost fifty years of my life, we’ve seen an extra two weeks of Maine accrue, and an extra foot or so of ocean level rise, it’s not hard to realise we’ll see more before we’re through. “Before we’re through” recognises that humanity will eventually stop burning carbon at its current delirious rate, which I’m actually confident we’ll do, not because of the strident activism of boomer and millenial environmentalists but because of basic supply-demand pressures on what’s left of the carbon in the ground and the obvious economic benefit of shifting from mined energy to energy from zero-cost sources like sunlight and running water and wind. But having been on our carbon binge for nigh on a century or two, and coming off a longer term sectoral cooling and in the midst of an inter-ice age warming trend, we’re not going to see temperatures level out any time soon.

I’m not a human climate change denialist, mind you; I know a lot of those types, alas, and they are painful to listen to, their strident ignorance usually accompanied by some sort of conspiracy theory linked to Black Lives Matter or Al Gore’s involvement in private equity or the pope being some kind of Argentinian communist plant. Humanity has done its best to screw up the climate and it has succeeded. But the environmentalists I know are similarly tiresome. Bill McKibbon is my bete noire but I suppose I’d throw Greta Thunberg in the mix as well, as they pound the table – McKibbon now for forty years, Thunberg painfully for the last five or six, since her parents allowed her to have a Twitter account – about how humanity needs to stop burning carbon, now, or else the world as we know it will end.

Such complaining bothers me at a fundamental level because, despite the fact that thinking about the environment would seem to require a deep consideration of system complexity, thinking that going “carbon neutral” now, or in a decade, or by 2050 implies that “we can do something and make a difference now.” Let’s be honest with ourselves: we can do nothing to make a difference now. The warming we’re seeing – whether in Maine, or in British Columbia, or in chronic drought fire conditions in southern Europe, or in permanent smog clouds in China, or the expansion of the sahel in Africa, or monsoon disruption in south Asia, whatever – is because of the coal and oil burned in the first half of the 20th century, because of the insane destruction of forest lands during the same period. Climate change today is because of what people did to the planet decades or a century or two ago, and whatever changes we make on the margin today will do nothing to stop the long, slow, molasses like trend that will continue the process whereby Pine Point will be underwater in thirty years even if we all permanently park our cars and turn off the carbon generation stations tomorrow and rely solely on solar-powered intraday Wi-Fi to power the global information economy.

This is the fallacy at the heart of the global environmental movement: that we as individual human beings can make a difference today. That’s not how complex systems work – that’s the lesson of the failure of Soviet communism, of the collapse of Gosplan, and indeed of the failure of the US space program and of the laughable parody of governance that was Donald Trump. We as individuals are not heroes in a complex interconnected world: our capacity for heroism has been steadily eroded not by the world getting bigger, but by the world getting more interconnected. When our environments were small and disconnected, each of us meant a lot; when our environments merged and became interconnected, each of us individually matter not much, and we have to be content to acknowledge our importance only as ripples of influence, not as direct actors or causal agents of change.

This is painful to humanity because all of our folkways rebel against the idea of the individual being meaningless. Chinese and south Asian cultures probably are best armed to remind us that as individuals we are essentially meaningless, even though our actions and our choices ripple in ways we will never understand and cannot predict, but even those cultures retain traditional stories and mythologies which hold up the individual actor as being somehow important: the peasant who rises up to become emperor; the poet who changes the language; the Buddha. In the context of the global climate system, though, we are truly irrelevant as individuals, and even as a generation, we have no real impact in changing the direction of what has already been laid down by the centuries of uncomprehending humanity that came before us. We might make a meaningful difference to the future, but just as all of the people who have created the climate of 2021 are already dead, so we none of us – including Greta, including my son – will be around to experience the “difference” we make from altering human carbon consumptions decisions in the next few decades.

Does this mean we should lay down arms and say screw it, “burn baby burn” as Sarah Palin once famously chanted to her ignorant followers in the 2008 election cycle? No, of course not. But it means that we should stop lying to children and adults about why it is that we should be enviromentally conscious. We should stop burning oil like it’s going out of style because it’s never a good thing to waste a limited resource, not because if we do so we’ll have better weather in ten years’ time. We should stop orienting ourselves towards a culture of endless consumption because it will never lead to any real psychological or moral satisfaction, either individually or in aggregate, not because it means we’ll save the planet.

Indeed, the planet isn’t depending on humanity to save itself. That, in fact, is the crowning conceit of the environmental movement: the notion that we, humanity, and in particular we humans alive today in 2021, are essential to the operation of life and sentience. We are not. Life in its diversity will continue whether we burn oil, whether we wear hairshirts and live in straw huts, whether we produce per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances in quantity or stop doing so, whether we allow the use of single-use plastic shopping bags or ban them, whether we vaccinate or not, whether we go vegan or double down on toe-to-tail carnivorism, whether we expand global air travel or ban it. Life does not require you or me as individuals – and, difficult or even unimaginable that it may seem, it doesn’t even require humanity. Life, and the beauty and tragedy that life implies, does not care.

Environmentalism depends on rejecting that basic fact – and I use the word “fact” with intention. Environmentalism is really a doubling down on the idea of human exceptionalism – it demands that humanity have a unique role in saving an environment which it has, consciously or unconsciously, started to damage and perhaps destroy. Indeed, it depends on privileging humanity’s ability to destroy “the environment” first, so as to grant humanity a privileged role in saving it. Both positions are false. We have, to be sure, impacted the environment; and our actions in the future will continue to impact it. In a very real way, our actions to date have had an outsized impact versus other, non-human directed long term trend changes; they may have even had an outsized impact versus non-human directed short term changes that we don’t have enough data to model or describe effectively. But we are not simple, linear, directing principals on a global scale; painful as it may be for our collective ego, we are one of an almost infinite series of interconnected agents acting in a system of collective complexity. None of us makes a meaningful difference, but all of us are essential for the system’s overall expression.

I do what I can at a local level to make Maine a better place. I serve on local town committees; I participate in public forums which debate things like a utility corridor to ship hydro power from Quebec south to New England, or to build rail-to-trail corridors for public recreation, or to develop public transit. I also drive a car, and have a job which flies me across the country (it used to be around the world, but Covid, blah blah, no more), and in those jobs I also try to do things which won’t reinforce dumb overconsumption but in which I also understand that my influence globally is limited. I pay attention to the news about environmental consequences and discussions in Glasgow but ultimately I’m more interested in how my town and region are making their local decisions, because after all, that’s the level at which development and building and consumption and waste disposal actually takes place, not at the level of the globe, or even of the continent-spanning country in which I live.

I know the environment will continue to develop along its trend lines over the next 100 years; I know that decisions we make today might ameliorate the trend in 100 years time, but the environment will still be warmer, the summers longer and the winters milder here in Scarborough, in 100 years time, and still again in another 100 years, than it would have been had Watt never powered up his steam engine to leverage coal production 250 years ago. The environment’s future for the next 100 years is locked in, and anything we, or our children, do, will not effect that in the least. We need to teach them that the reason we should burn less carbon and produce less toxic chemicals and do less mindless destructive stuff in general is not because we matter – not because we causally impact anything at all – but because we should just be thoughtful, considered beings in a world that is precious with or without our presence.

At one point today, there was a particularly large puddle in the woods. It’s actually a kind of waypoint on the trail – roughly 10 minutes into the walk, there’s a big puddle, clearly a granite depression, the water dark and tannic from endless leaf decomposition, you could probably profitably install a hood with a copper pipe to harvest the methane from it all. Sometime awhile back, long before the dog and I started walking the trail, some idiot trashed a couple of refrigerators in the mud, and being constructed of plastics and intelligently forged aluminum alloys, they remain intact, a more or less permanent part of the landscape. Only this year, with time to waste due to Covid no doubt, and with a longer summer making it more worth it to do so, someone ripped the doors off the fridges and installed them off to the side of the puddle, as bridges between dry bits of earth, given the dog and I a dry path around the water. I noticed on the mud-smudged surface a weird combination of shoe prints, raccoon prints, some bird claws, some dog paws, some leaves, some smudges.

More impactful than anything in Glasgow in the last month, more effective than anything passed in Washington in the last week, and probably more lasting than anything I’ll decide to do in the future, the environment – including its human participants – changed along the trail and became more sustainable, for humans, dogs, creatures of the forest, for the world, courtesy of some doors fabricated by Whirlpool somewhere in the rust belt. And the dog and I walked on, skirting the muddy bits, she chasing squirrels, me marvelling at the lost leaves and quiet rain falling at the end of yet another season, ready for winter, excited to be alive in a world that views me at once as essential and, as an individual, as irrelevant.

Happy Thanksgiving.

I’ve played golf four times in the last month, for the first time in two years, and it’s made me realise how much has changed in the last two years. My body is pathetic – doughy, out of shape, but mostly just out of sync. I can putt the ball as well as I ever could – in fact a few times I found myself wondering where that touch came from – but every swing of the club felt like a quarter second delay in mental initiative to physical execution, and it even extended to basic things like picking up the ball from the cup or putting the bag of clubs onto my shoulder. I’ve lost rhythm, and it won’t come back quickly.

It’s not like I’ve been totally sedentary for the past two years, mind you. I’ve been taking the dog for her minimum of two hours of daily walks – she has energy and she needs it and she demands the effort – and I’ve been raising the son full time, with only rare breaks, since last March, including all cooking, cleaning, commuting, teaching, encouragement, discouragement, and all the rest. That burns calories. In the meantime, I’ve also realized that not going to the office at all means I can mix a gin and tonic at 11am and no one cares; indeed, sometimes having a gin and tonic in hand for an 11am conference call is the thing that preserves my sanity. Perspective is a challenge, and having perspective in the face of a pandemic, in the face of a multiple part-time startup enterprises, often requires a gin and tonic at 11am. I am making no apologies.

Hitting the course was strange because that weird disconnect – that tenth of a second between head and shoulders, brain and wrists – meant I was losing golf balls at a majestic rate. In fact on Tuesday this week, I had to give up after six holes because I had literally ran out of golf balls, despite the late fall bare ground allowing me to find at least one ball for every two I lost. It was a new course for me but I joined for a membership for the next year – I’m going to get out and play more, and the boy is really getting into the game, and it seems like a good idea to be able to have a place where I can just trot up and play. But not if I’m going to lose a dozen balls every six holes – I need to polish things up.

In Maine, one doesn’t polish one’s game up starting in November, however.

I walked the last three holes without playing them – not having a ball is a significant impediment to playing golf – and threw my clubs in the back of my car, changed my shoes, and let my body feel itself. Nothing nasty, mind you – I just let my body talk to itself, describe its aches and annoyances and the like – and that’s where I heard it talk about the disconnect. Yes, it felt the impact of an up and down three mile walk on a chilly November morning; yes, it said “you really need to take an Advil before you play golf these days”. It also said yes, it’s now 1pm and you’ve earned the gin and tonic. But what I felt in my flesh and bones was a disconnect, a timing being off. My body as it has aged has gotten slightly slower than my mind, and my body is awfully annoyed about it.

So I got in my car and drove back to the house. The dog was in her day care so I didn’t need to pick her up, and the boy wouldn’t come home until much later in the afternoon. I grabbed some supplies for dinner and checked the mailbox; the New York Review of Books had arrived. I read the first essay, about a book written by an author whose family had a long history with the Ku Klux Klan, and fixed that gin and tonic.

And it occurred to me that I hadn’t written anything in a long time. I mean, I know I haven’t written anything for The Essence of Water in awhile – for those who follow it, you may be excused for thinking that this has become Mark Hannam’s personal essay site. Heck, Vero and Matt haven’t written anything in even longer, so that’s not a singular failing on my part. But even more than that, I haven’t written any letters in a long time. This is noteworthy because for most of my life, letters have been the way I’ve expressed myself. Letters to lovers, to friends, to coworkers, you name it – I write letters as my primary means of expression. These essays have, in a basic way, been extended letters to an audience of friends – old and new, current and long-forgotten – but also an extended letter to my son, to let him know how his father was as a human being while he was growing up. From 2017 to now – for over four years – this has been an extended letter to the universe, and yet for the past five months or so, I haven’t written back.

It’s not like the universe has stopped talking to me, or that any of you out there have stopped talking to me. I mean, some of you have – I got an entertaining email from someone asking to be dropped from the distribution list I occasionally send out to let people know of new postings, for example – and what with the pandemic and travel restrictions and the like, plenty of us have just sort of lost touch out of entropy. We may very well like to stay in touch but since the likelihood of physical contact has vanished, part of the incentive to keep the other elements of communication alive have also atrophied.

The art of speaking out, however – not speaking per se, but speaking out into the wind, into the public, regardless of whether anyone listens – is a practice, and when put aside, that practice gets stale. I can’t hit the ball straight anymore, and it feels the same way to put hands to keyboard as it does to grip the club. Typing this is easy; finding the words is a lot harder than it was a year ago, two years ago. There is a disconnect, a hesitancy in the act of bridging the thoughts in my mind to the fingers which press the keys and make the words appear on the screen.

It occurs to me as well: you have to start sometime all over again. It’s November here, and the air is crisp but also it gets damp and cold, the wind howling off the Atlantic. The house is more or less ready for winter, and it’s not the right time of year to be learning golf again. But I’m going to head out next week, on Tuesday, when the boy is in school and the dog is in day care, and I’m going to buy a dozen golf balls from the bargain bin, and I’m going to try to play again. I will be awful; with luck I will sink a few putts, or have that lovely pitch that gets within a few feet of the hole, before I drive it into the bushes on the next tee and curse and feel the disconnect in my nerves, my hips, my feet, my shoulders, my mind.

And today, I’ll hit publish, and start over again on writing. To my son: I’m sorry I forgot to write for a few months. To the rest of you: I hope you viewed the respite as a little break in a year where little breaks mattered a lot. To the ex-reader in San Antonio: screw you. It’s time to start over again.

Back in my college days, I had a job at a newsstand in the centre of Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The name of the place was Out of Town News, and it was well known for having newspapers and magazines from around the world. In fact part of my job – I worked two nights a week and usually both days on the weekends – was to drive the company truck out to Logan Airport and make the rounds at the cargo terminals to get the weekly drop of papers – Alitalia for the Italian papers, JAL for the Asian papers, Air France, British Airways, blah blah. I enjoyed the fact that I worked a “real job” (not some internship) while I was finishing up my undergrad at Harvard; I never really meshed with the regular Harvard house types, neither the rich legacy kids nor the overambitious strivers nor even – though I tried – with the artsy pseudo intellectual crowd. I was by no means of the proletariat – my family wore its bourgeois stripes proudly – but I felt more comfortable hanging out with the locals who worked the newsstand and complained about Sheldon, the owner of the place, and who introduced me to the cops and the semi-professional panhandlers and the rest of the locals who worked minimum wage plus tips to service the university crowd. It also meant I could walk into any local – not the ones catering to parents or students, but the proper locals – and drink without being ID’ed, which was good because I looked like I was twelve years old back then.

Continue reading “Filthy”

I traveled down east last weekend to pick up the boy, but also to finish off two weeks of solitude. I went to a restaurant that midcoast Maine doesn’t deserve to have, a place called The Hichborn, located in a town unfortunately better known for some recent rural tragedies than for its cuisine, where I had a Michelin star worthy experience, then in the morning went across twenty miles of gravel and dirt roads to my son’s summer camp, where he was finishing off his first two weeks of sleep away camp. It was a big event for a nine year old, although he took it in stride, simply pointing out that the other kids in his cabin agreed that sleep away camp was a sextillion times better than day camp; for me, it was a milestone, the beginning of the long process whereby he lives on his own, away from father or mother or kin, and simply finds his own way. Two weeks is a lot for a nine year old, but clearly, he’s ready to start loosening the ropes which moor him to my dock.

His desires on returning from camp were simple but, as I thought about them, strange. He had had two weeks of YMCA institutional cooking – frozen waffles and bulk cereal for breakfast; frozen chicken patties and hot dogs for lunch; bulk made sheet pan pizza and macaroni and cheese and bowls of generic salad with off-brand ranch dressing for dinner – but what he wanted first and foremost for lunch as we motored south to Scarborough was generic American sandwich: Subway, a twelve inch bacon and salami sandwich with lettuce, pickles, onions, and mayo. He also went wild with the drinks dispenser; he made a toxic mishmash of Coca-Cola, lemonade, acai berry vitamin water, and rootbeer. I made the mistake of asking to try it and almost missed the onramp to get back on the turnpike. After 14 days of non-profit camp bland, though, all he wanted was corporate suburban bland, complete with extra high fructose corn syrup and all the sodium he could get.

When we arrived back at the house, he saw his room and melted down: I had taken down roughly half of his Lego town in an effort to vacuum his room properly for the first time since winter. Buildings had been torn down, roadways torn up. The only possible response was tears, anguish, despair. I didn’t mind. He’s nine years old, and two weeks in a sylvan retreat with other children, trapped away from screens, parents, well-made meals, and showers was bound to descend his soul into an Edenic state. Returning to where we live, in the Fall after we rediscover sin, where cleanliness matters as much as plate presentation, where one can play video games but only subject to daily parental limits – this was going to cause a system shock, no matter what. I let him cry it out, and let him relax in his bed – which he admitted felt really good – and convinced him that taking a long hot shower would be the best thing he could do. He took it, and my parental credibility upped a few notches: he admitted it was, in fact, the best thing he could do. Also he ended up smelling better and lost the sheen of two weeks of lake, sweat, bug spray, and dirt that had accumulated into a visible exoskin above his now dark tanned young body.

Yesterday he slept in and I brought him breakfast in bed and let him play an extra hour of screen time; I did laundry and walked the dog with her friend down to the shore, where they played and disrupted the stand-up paddleboarders trying to launch. In the afternoon, all three of us – father, son, dog – went to the grandparents’ house and I made supper and the grandson regaled his beaming grandparents with tales of camp. My father talked about his time in Boy Scout camp in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and the two compared notes on how bad the food was, how bad the showers were, and whether or not there was electricity in camp. I realised that my mom, growing up poor on the south side of Chicago, didn’t get to go to camp; she spent summers escaping the city and other things in downstate Illinois, with aunts and cousins, but not on a lake side with other kids her age. She and I cooked supper while the young and very old boy talked and watched the Red Sox game. We did not talk politics, national or state or local; we did not think beyond summer in Maine, in the woods, on the coast, all of us agreeing the mosquitoes were terrible, all of us agreeing the blueberry barrens down east had the best berries, and that the grandson was singularly lucky that his camp was close enough to have nature walks into them to pick and eat Maine’s best summer export, right off the bush.

This morning, I reset the screen time limits: two hours of free iPad time a day, two hours of television a day, and nothing more. More time outdoors, since after all he had spent nine or ten hours a day in the sun and fog and dark and campfire smoke for the past two weeks. This was an injustice, and the reiteration of the house rules was met with a stony glare and an impudent shutoff of the television. Mid morning, I told him we were going to go grocery shopping; I had more or less lived off of what was in the freezer for leftovers for the past two weeks, and all of the remaining fruits and vegetables, and drank all of the gin, and we needed to restock for both of us. First, though, we were going to take the dog for a walk, at a local land trust space, which was on top of and around a bog. He said okay – which was surprising; normally he’d reject going for a nature walk.

We parked at the rough lot, not much more than a graded glade with some felled pine logs to indicate where the cars should go, and out hopped the dog and the boy. The trail was muddy and in places, the rain of the past six weeks – rainiest July in over 100 years, they say – ran in tiny rivulets over the trail, soaking your sandals and your feet in cool water. I pointed out the blueberries and he looked down too, and started walking more slowly, watching the bushes, trying to figure out which ones were blueberries – yum – and which ones were the dark red berries that I didn’t know the name of but I knew they’d make us sick. It’s a popular trail, and a lot of the blueberry bushes had been stripped bare, but there were still a few, and we would stop, stoop, pick, and gulp them down. Delicious: the best berries are downeast, but the ones here in Scarborough are still quite good, certainly better than anything you get in a store, anywhere. Especially when you eat them from your hand.

As we walked, we looked down closer, and across the bogland were tiny blackberry bushes – not bushes, actually, just small plants with miniature blackberries, not much larger than a tiny blueberry but so different, small clusters of black-purple, the ripe ones disintegrating between your fingers no matter how delicately you picked them, others staying whole just long enough to gather the five or eight or ten required to justify popping your hand to your mouth to try them, as good as the blueberries but harder to find, all just off the trail, in your sandal clad toes, requiring you to look past the mosquitoes and the longer tendrils of grass to find them, nestled with the dark lichen and the green moss that covers the moist earth of a bog in Maine in August.

The dog trampled in and out of the woods, mud up to her haunches, happy to be alive and with her troop, reassembled after a two week separation. The boy crouched down, looking for berries, or looking at the mud, looking at the bog, trying to find the path. I’m taking another shower tonight, he said, as his sandal squished in the black mud and his feet felt the muck encase them. Sounds good, I said, as I gingerly found the grassy mounds and boulders to clamber over so that my feet would remain sort of dry.

We got back to the car, ready to go to the market for our shopping, and I realised that for an hour, I hadn’t looked up at all. I had paid attention to the ground, the dirt, the moss, the berries, the water. I had looked at my son and my dog, smaller than me, also exploring the earth beneath them. I looked up at the trees, towering over us in the parking area, at the grey sky diffusing the sunlight across the fog that had itself found the coast a congenial parking lot. I stood up fully but felt like it had been a gracious time, looking down, only looking down, to see the things from which we all grow.

Tonight he wants sushi for dinner. Fair enough. It’s wonderful to have him back.

Here in the states, there’s an insurance company called GEICO – the Government Employees Insurance Company – which is owned by Berkshire Hathaway (Warren Buffett’s investment vehicle). They’re known for their tongue in cheek advertisements, one of which currently involves a motivational speaker who teaches people to “not become their parents” when they become homeowners. The conceit is that once you buy a house, you’ll start wearing Members Only jackets, buy throw pillows with embroidered trite expressions, and stop knowing how to interact with wait staff at restaurants without speaking too loudly and asking embarrassing questions. It works, although how it relates to bundling auto and homeowners insurance does escape me. In any event – I’ve come to realise lately that I’ve descended into post-middle age crankiness: I’m writing on the local newspaper’s comment section.

Continue reading “Monopoly”