drum

souvenir

It took me a while to land here after returning to Brooklyn. It has nothing to do with Brooklyn, it has to do with all my memories of dunes, marsh, sand, and tide pools being stirred up by our recent trip to the Delaware shore. I remembered being very small, along as my family dropped someone off at Ocean City, MD. For some insane reason, we weren't staying there, I guess we had somewhere else to get to but I don't remember where. Briefly I got to look in a gift store at the end of a pier. I remember becoming enchanted with an aquatic diorama modeled with sandy lyricism within a large scallop shell, feeling not only did I have to have that but I had to live in it. There must be a way to shrink oneself. I've never seen a souvenir I liked so much. Sadly, I didn't get it, that's life, it was too fragile for a child.

Traveling seemed to scatter my soul among numerous vignettes and forgotten memories of sea side vacations (and souvenirs). I think my father was especially happy at the beach, and me, never happier than toddling into a tide pool and melding with its topography, its shallows and tiny currents, in some way. It is the apotheosis of puddle allure. It feels as if there is a part of me that will always be there waiting at some welcoming shallow pool for my return.

Such fragmentation is a danger of tourism. I recently met a woman who seemed remote and distracted at a workshop with medicine man Vernon Foster. She volunteered to be a subject when he demonstrated a healing ceremony. The ritual went on for a while Vernon worked with astonishing generosity and tenderness, dancing with passion and compassion around her, sometimes cleaning the air around her with feathers or using them to unbind currents of energy. At the end of it the woman's face was full of color and her eyes sparkled. "I didn't realize I was gone", she said, full of shock and relief to have herself back. "I left my soul in the Amazon, I didn't want to leave there. My friends have been asking me, what's happened to you, you're not yourself...."

My little one whimpers to go back to Arizona sometimes- she was pretty keen on the red rocks. I doubt will get back there for a while. Wrongly, I took one or two river-smoothed hunks of sandstone. Perhaps to coax a soul home along with the luggage. Wholeness is constant work.

Great Falls, Maryland Side

This visit reminded me that Great Falls brings me closer to those loosely brushed rocky landscapes I've seen hanging in Chinese restaurants than any other places I visit ever will. It slaps me a little silly to think that any landscape could be that dramatic, even the Grand Canyon seems a little tedious in comparison to the sporadic rock towers that thrust through torrential downsurges.

There's several small islands in the Potomac between Va and Md sides including one that's been opened to the public, Olmsted Island (seems no matter where I go that man turns up,) which represents a biome called a bedrock terrace forest, so we had to keep to the boardwalk constructed to protect the ecosystem, and perhaps to keep visitors from taking an unexpected plunge. Great Falls is a really great place for falling, or trying not to fall.

florida trees

southern scenery

Innumerable vultures swooping over Space Mountain, does anyone know why? Water birds everywhere, I found an egg in some shrubbery by the pool. Spanish moss looks like rosemary close up, many large saddlebag-laden dragonflies, wild turkeys, grackles, crows, an egret cautious in the Walgreen parking lot, ibises eating popcorn off the pavement with surgically tapered orange beaks, swine flu, fairy dust, fog on the lens, gated subdivisions, a small gymnast with the face of a falcon, her small hands chalky from the uneven bars. Southern pines, olive trees, the basket-weave of palm trunks, cypress knees like stalagmites along the lakefront, fully deployed fiberglass triangular facades, acute and sometimes seductive artifice, garnets in the kitchen counter, fossils of large coiled shells and belemnite rostrums in the airport floor tiles. Departure delayed.

black bantam

More Shelburne Farms

Brown Swiss in Vermont

The calf, a bull just 2 weeks old, and the cow, Jamaica, live at the Childrens Farm at Shelburne Farms. Jamaica not only allows but cooperates in having several hundred unfamiliar small hands get the feel for milking courtesy of her udder. It's a strange barnyard intimacy.

father and son

At Shelburne Farms in Vermont this weekend for a wedding, we took in the country estate of William Seward Webb and his wife Lila Vanderbilt Webb, with grounds planned by Olmsted and buildings, which include barns larger than some villages, designed by Robert Robertson. Through the generosity and vision of their descendants the estate was opened to the public in recent years and has become a center devoted to teaching conservation practices and sustainable agriculture. Proceeds from the inn and restaurant on the shore of Lake Champlain, which serve products of the farm's vegetable gardens and Brown Swiss dairy herd, support the conservationist initiatives.

The man with the fetching eyebrows is William, a doctor who had to drop his medical practice and take up business to please his betrothed's grandfather, Cornelius Vanderbilt. He later became the region's premier Railroad magnate eventually providing easy access to the region of the Adirondacks. I believe the child is Vanderbilt Webb, the youngest of William and Lila's 4 children, appearing to embody the some curiously ideal childhood.

As an aside, I was surprised by the landscape of the lake, which is bound not by gentle shores as much as steeply eroded cliffs, causing the several islands we saw from the shore to have abrupt boundaries resembling the profiles of Sperm Whales.