Category: Nature

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Dirt, Sky, and Water

In recent months Peter and Veronique have both written compelling, thought provoking essays about nature and about wilderness. Ironically, or perhaps naturally, I too have been thinking about similar topics for the last many months.

One of the many ways Texas is unique among states in America is that 95% of its vast acreage is in private hands. Only 5% is owned by state or Federal agencies and even at that, public land is often geographically remote and almost always behind a gate. Texas, for all its size, doesn’t really have the open public land present in so much of the country.

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New Found Land

Happy anniversary ‘Essence of Water’,

Peter invited me to be a contributor a while back, and I didn’t write for a while as I was afraid of messing up.  In this little harbor of the Internet, the tone is both serious and light.  We don’t need to write about deep thoughts, but we do because we care.  We see the world change in front of our mind’s eye, and we see its people struggle (including ourselves) to find meaning and a satisfying way of life.  I love that we get to talk about it here; and so here I am with my first post.
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It’s so big

Last night I took the dog to Peaks Island for a nighttime walk.  The ferry was cold and I didn’t wear quite enough layers – perfect for the walk, but the wind coming across Casco Bay, combined with the perky pace of the Machigonne II car ferry, meant I was chilled to the bone when I got back to the mainland.  I put the dog in the back of the car – after a three hour walk he curled up and immediately fell asleep – and I popped into a bar for a quick whisky to warm up.   The woman next to me struck up a conversation when her husband excused himself to use the loo.  She was from northern Vermont, she and her husband owned a craft brewery, and they had engineered a few days holiday in Portland around a “business tour” of a couple of breweries in town.

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