I woke up at three a.m., wide awake, caffeinated awake. I lay still for a moment deciding whether or not to get up when I realized I couldn’t get up. My limbs felt detached, and those that remained felt shredded, like some internal razor slowly ran against the muscular grain. I don’t know why, but my mind was wide awake, and my body was unresponsive. I’m not sure even if I had to use the bathroom if I’d have been able to gather the forces to get up. I sighed and thought, well, whatever, I can change the sheets in the morning.

Then it became a challenge. I felt like that roach in Kafka’s story, or an old college roommate from freshman year who would tell me at five a.m. when I was leaving to do a radio show, that he’d be up soon, and I’d come back at noon and he hadn’t moved. But Steve simply drank himself to paralysis; my dark-of-night stagnancy is psychological. My brain has finally figured out I’ve been stuck in neutral for three years or so and it has finally decided to metaphorically do me in so as to build up some appreciation for my normal ability to, you know, stand.

But I couldn’t. I looked through the skylight and noted enough light to know the moon must be out. I should be looking at the light from the sun, not the moon, I thought. I divined my head to turn toward the clock. 3:15, or as my generation likes to call it, “Amityville Horror Time,” when the sounds of ghosts woke James Brolin up, it was always, always 3:15, the time of the original murders in his house.

I thought of Neil Diamond. What’s that song? I wondered. I hummed it a while and realized, “Holly Holy.” “Call the sun in the dead of the night and that sun’s gonna rise in the sky,” I said quietly. Hmmm. Neil was an optimist, to be certain. But so was I once, and so I can be again. If I could just get out of neutral here, I’d be fine. “Call the sun in the dead of the night and that sun’s gonna rise in the sky!” I said again, quietly.

Hmmm.

“SUN!” I said, in a normal voice, peering out the skylight waiting for some stream of light, some miracle of nature to occur at that moment. Then with more vigor, the energy of an ex-Brooklyn cantor, I called “SUN!!” as I looked through the skylight.

Michael’s door swung open, and I heard him spring across the hallway (as I was once able to do) and careen into the wall, calling “Yes??? Dad??? You okay??”

“Oh, sorry! I’m sorry, I was…singing. Go back to bed. Sorry about that”

“Okay great,” he replied.

I remember his age, I thought. This was bedtime back then. Not halftime.

Used to be I could stay up or get up and do anything, often more than I could do in the day—coming to life in the dead of night has always energized me, make things feel possible, made bad decisions as irrelevant as the past in which they dwell. But, idle, I stared at the fan spinning above me; I envied its pace. Well, “used to be’s don’t count anymore they just lay on the floor til we sweep them away.” Sigh.

Once, a colleague and I lived in an apartment on the Gulf of Finland for three weeks while teaching in St Petersburg, Russia. Our first night there, at about three, probably 3:15 am, someone started banging on the door. We lived on the fourth floor, and he was screaming in Russian, which neither of us spoke. Both hands, banging away, yelling. I caught a few words: Cazule—asshole. Yeb Vas—fuck you. Suka—bitch. I asked Joe if the one who owned the apartment we were borrowing might have been this maniac’s ex-girlfriend. “How the hell should I know?” he said. Yes. Good point.

I called upon the few words I knew: “Kto ty? Kto ty????” Who are you? The man was quiet a moment and then screamed louder, banging louder.

Joe asked, “What did you say?”

“I asked who he is?”

“What did he say?”

“I DON’T KNOW!” I said.

“Oh Great! Now he thinks his girlfriend has some GUY in here!”

We called Russian colleagues—yes, at 3:20 am. I held the phone to the door as Georgina listened, then told me she couldn’t hear a thing. Apartment doors in the north along the gulf are notoriously thick, and double-lined, to keep out the cold.

After a while he left, and he never returned that I recall. But it woke me up. I need that; I need Michael to bang the crap out of my door while I’m asleep and then I’ll spring to life.

There was another time.

Same colleague. We were teaching in Bodo, Norway, at a graduate school and lived in a four bedroom two story cabin on a fjord about thirty minutes north of the town. There was nothing up there but a narrow, snow covered road running north further into the arctic and the fjord on the other side of that road. The cabin sat at the bottom of a hill accessed only by a snow covered path running straight up toward some peaks. To the north was another house owned by a fisherman named Magnus who rowed out at 4:30 every morning to catch cod, mostly for its liver.

But our host had shut down the bathroom for environmental reasons and insisted we use the outhouse about fifty feet behind the back door. The first night after traveling about thirty-five hours, I woke at 1 a.m. and sat on the edge of the bed needing badly to use the facilities. I sat about thirty minutes wondering if I could hold it in until we got to the university the next day. It was as black out as night can get, and minus something below zero. After a while I realized that since we were there for three weeks I could not possibly avoid the outhouse in the middle of the night, so I went downstairs, painstakingly put on a dozen layers of clothes and socks and then finally boots, gloves, a hat, a parka, and churned through the knee-deep snow to the outhouse and pulled the handle.

Locked.

“I’ll be right out!” Joe called. So I went back inside and waited, and when he came in I went out, finished, and came out of the outhouse and returned to the back porch.

Joe laughed. “I sat upstairs for a half hour wondering if I could wait until we got to the college.” I told him the same. And then we both agreed that the negative Kelvin temperatures outside had woken us up. So we decided to go for a walk.

We trekked the path up the mountain for about a half hour until we reached a break in the trees and off to the north, past a lake just a stone throws away, green bands of aurora borealis bounced like cotton sheets blowing in the wind, bounced and painted the sky, making us want to duck, making us want to reach out and grab one and ride it to the water. We stood in awe, Kelley green bands of northern light made the present as clarified and immediate as I had ever experienced until then, since then.

They are silent of course, so we were startled by the sound of a cracking stick further up the path, and we looked to see a solitary moose, taller than both of us, meandering across the path, pausing to look at us, then look north as if to say, “Do you see that? Isn’t that the coolest?” and then he kept walking, gone.

We returned to the cabin, said goodnight and returned to our own rooms, warm, satisfied, and wide awake.

There were other times, of course. A reoccurring dream I used to have in the eighties, always woke me at two a.m. or so. In Tucson when my roommate and I would set the alarm and head to the mountains to look for javelinas and watch the sunrise.

But now, almost twice as old as that Sonoran summer, I’m staring at a ceiling fan wondering who took my skeleton. It isn’t strength—I’m probably stronger now and have much more endurance than during those lazy days of Mexican Kahlua and burritos. It isn’t purpose—I always have something to do, from working on the property to writing to reading papers to going for hikes to take pictures. Always something.

No.

So I thought about that and how the same voices insisting I should just go back to sleep, that this is part of aging, and that this is what happens when chemistry forgets to have a conversation with ambition, those voices need to be shouted down by the voices that know there’s more than one way of growing old. I took a deep breath to make sure I could take a deep breath and thought of the Russian dude banging the door and wondered what woke him up at 3 in the morning to head to his girlfriend’s house and wake the dead, assuming that scenario is accurate. Love? The inability to live without having said what he wanted to say? Something deep inside? Vodka? All of the above?

I thought of the moose. He was like a brother for a brief moment. “Oh hey. Bob. Joe. What’s up?” and gone. I want to be that moose. Metaphorically, of course. A metaphoric moose shall we say.

Neil came back. “Touch a man who can’t walk upright and that lame man he’s gonna fly.” I laid back, humming.

Sometimes I think about the fact that at every moment someone is living out every moment of a day. It’s someone’s sunrise, someone’s work time, someone’s lunchtime, someone’s happy hour, and with due respect to Alan Jackson and JB, it really is whatever o’clock somewhere. So it might be three am, but sometimes at that hour I think about London, and people having their tea and crumpets. Heading toward the lory. It motivates me. I think about those I know out west who at that hour might just be getting home, feeding the cats, headed to bed.    

The witching hours of night have brought out many demons, highlighting what’s gone wrong, underlying unresolved issues. And I laid here wondering if that reality is my own fault. I mean, if I just got up and ignored those lecherous voices, maybe I could steer the mental dialogue for a change.

Because, truly, this can’t be it. This horizontal fog. This can’t be

Where I am

What I am

What I believe in.

Good morning. If you’re reading this at 3:15 am, either give me a call or get the hell out of the house, now.

When I walked out of Wegman’s in Rochester, New York, last week, a man and his two sons walked in with four large garbage bags filled with cans and bottles; each bag had roughly eighty or so in them. Inside the store are large machines into which they were about to dump the bags and receive five cents for each can or bottle. That’s about $20. And I don’t know they didn’t have more in their truck. Everyone in the area saves them or finds them, hauls them to the local market and recycles them and has enough money to buy some groceries or gas. Perhaps this man brought the boys for ice cream since it was ninety degrees out and he had an extra twenty.

I love this. I am disappointed this wasn’t available when I was in college just to the southeast of there. Nowadays in that town, the local Topps Market has the same setup, but back when I was in school, on any given morning the garbage bins in my dorm were overflowing with beer bottles and cans. Since I was always awake hours before my dormmates and knowing well the intake capabilities of the others and the party-reputation of the university, I’m confident I could have funded my education. Why why why why why doesn’t every single state do this?

But this blog is about nature, so let’s get right to it:

Last year this country threw away 1 million tons—TONS—of aluminum cans and packaging, and about thirty-six billion cans landed in landfills. That’s enough to—this is insane—that’s enough to completely rebuild the entire commercial air fleet four times over. Let that hang there for a moment.

A can in the ocean has a longer life expectancy than a human, about eighty to one hundred years. And during that entire time it releases toxic agents into the water that kill fish and damage the environment enough to alter migration patterns, infect our food, and poison the larger sea animals that accidently ingest these cans tossed by lazy ass, howl at the moon stupid people who can’t simply drop them in a recycling bin. Or better yet if they live in such a state, collect the cans and make some money.

This is Coors fault.

They introduced the aluminum can in 1959. Tin cans date back to about 1810, patented by Peter Durand, and those also last a century in the ocean, and can quickly disease and kill sea life both through ingestion and physical disabling, which is common with sea turtles and sea bird life. Off of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, to the south of here, had Orville or Wilber celebrated that first flight with a tin can filled with Stillhouse Moonshine, and tossed that empty container into the waters off the Outer Banks, it could still be there.

And that’s just cans. Plastic bottles win for demonstrating to aliens who land here in 2525 that we are one selfish species. If I walk to the river tonight drinking a bottle of Dasani and when I get there, throw it as far as I can into the Rappahannock, if it first doesn’t get caught in the mouth of a dolphin or cut the fin of a stingray, it will still be there when those ET’s land on Parrot Island and wade to shore five hundred years from now.

Wade? Ha! They will be able to simply walk across the trash since our human race throws into the ocean every single year enough plastic to make 800 billion—EIGHT HUNDRED BILLION—bottles. Every year. And that’s just the ocean bound bottles; that doesn’t include the thirty-five billion bottles in landfills every year.

Okay—I did the math for you. If those were bottles and I got my son to put them all in bags and bring them to the machine at Wegman’s in Rochester, he’d walk out with $40 BILLION dollars.

Gone. Trashed. Forty Billion Dollars tossed into the surf every single year, just in plastic.

Stop it. Please, on behalf of all humans who think about posterity, about beauty, about the breaching of whales and the graceful rise of a dolphin or the glide of the osprey, cormorants and gulls; on behalf of those of us who understand the toxins being released which destroy the oxygen and compromise the very balance of nature, please, use a reusable bottle. How hard is it? You can even get one with your name on it, or a picture of your favorite Muppet.

When I was still in single digits, Earth Day started, and I remember walking with my class on the property at East Lake Elementary School picking up trash. And it was the sixties, so we already had peace and love and nature and all that on our minds from the songs and signs of the times, so honestly, we thought we were going to grow up and live in a trash-free world of peace.

Not so much.

This place is a toilet. People throw trash out of windows because it’s going to destroy their very soul to drop it in a can at the next gas station or when they get home. People can’t possibly carry canvas bags into Wegmans to shop! “I gotta carry stuff OUT of the store; you want me to carry stuff IN as well! Hell no!”

The planet is having a hard time breathing, and it is absolutely our fault, and karma being what it is, we’re going to pay the price for it. Now, we also can cure this pandemic. It doesn’t take a group effort; no one needs to subscribe to any agency or get a vaccine. Just stop throwing your crap out the window. Use a reusable bag to carry groceries and a reusable bottle to drink out of. That’s it.

Feel free to recycle this blog post to those you know, I mean you absolutely know, are still carrying food to the car in plastic bags.

The osprey thank you.

I sat on the end of the pier on the top edge of the United States with my legs dangling above the calm waters as gulls dived and fed in the Great Lake Ontario. No wind, the lake like glass, a faint haze from the smoke of the western fires, and Canada the next landfall north about sixty miles.

Contemplation time.

Of all my travels only three times have I stood near one of the Great Five. Erie, at a friends’ wedding in Angola, New York, Michigan, at a reading in Chicago, and now, here, staring out at just before seven am as the sun rises and I instinctively look out for dolphin or pelicans, conditioned by life on the bay and the ocean. It takes me several walks to the water to remember I’m likely not to see any in a lake.

Such vastness! It seems “lake” can’t possibly be the right word; even Great Lake seems insufficient, though it does sum it up. “Is that a lake?” “No, no. It’s a Great Lake.” Yes.

I’ve stared across valleys in my life, distant mountain ranges from the Rockies to the Pyrenees, and their majesty has a humbling effect. But they still seem attainable; I can merely, as John Muir suggested, throw a loaf of bread in a backpack, hop the fence and head out. But the inconceivable crossing of such waters suggests limitations. Even crossing it by boat can be conceived as an act of madness when the weather shifts and the waves become mountains in their own right. Such waters have taken down vessels. Think Edmund Fitzgerald on Great Lake Superior (the double modifier here is nice—“great” and “superior” for extra measure).

There’s something about staring out across the reach and knowing we can only dream about the crossing.

And I have dreamed about it. From the Great South Bay to the Atlantic, I’ve dreamed of hearing the rigging against the mast, even longed for the boredom of the doldrums, leaning against the cabin, reading a book, waiting for a breeze. I like the juxtaposition of aloneness and vastness.

But this isn’t about water or sailing or the call of some distant reach.

I met a man who is a certified genius in electronics. I won’t here detail some of his accomplishments in the sports-technology world because I couldn’t even begin to comprehend them at the time, but it is downright astonishing. He has a significant track record, nearly one hundred people working for him, and is speaking in savant fashion about a subject matter which for me is an entirely different language, a completely different alphabet.

But I did recognize and was swept up by one element of this nice man that I’ve only experienced a few select times in my life: Passion.

I do not mean a love of his work or an obsessive dedication to his ideas, though those exist. I mean a complete absorption of his life, of what he is doing with his life, of how he has completely discovered his purpose for existence and is fulfilling that purpose. It was as close to witnessing some form of nirvana, albeit with something I didn’t understand and have no use for. The thing is, that passion clearly spilled over into his love of life itself. He is an inspiration to be around, to listen to.

He leaves. I sleep. I get up and walk to the end of the pier out back and dangle my legs above Lake Ontario, kicking my feet toward Canada and watch the sun join me; gulls dive, and the water is still, like glass, like a mirror.

Where’s your passion, Bob? I wonder, not in some inferior way or even a self-doubting way. Just in a sweeping wide-open perspective of the surface of my life kind of way. What part of my life moves me to such energy and dedication that I’m all in, body, heart, soul?

Family, of course, when time stands still and there is no need to remember or plan, but simply to be absorbed in the presence of love, and laughter, and being together while we can still be together, passion coming from knowing it won’t last. For me, nature, where something similar happens, and I know I’m where I am most comfortable. But even in those circumstances, that’s not what I’m talking about. I mean the engulfing awareness, the absolute presence of mind to know, to instinctively understand “yes, this is why I’m here, for this.”

Well, like I said, I’ve only experienced it a few times, even among most people I know who love what they do for a living and dedicate themselves to their craft. It is one of the elements we discuss in my Giants of the Arts course. It takes a slew of ingredients to reach such a level of awareness, let alone recognition, to be in the ranks of such greatness for whatever the genre. Talent, luck, internal motivation, timing, knowledge of the form, experience, sometimes money, sometimes connections, and on and on, and most often if you take one or two of the ingredients out, “greatness” becomes “good enough.” But one indisputable element which cannot be compromised is passion. Absolute passion. Van Gogh passion. Hemingway passion. This man I met is an artist. He works in technology instead of oils or octaves or words, but a true artist, nonetheless.

When I was young my father gave me a book about Robin Lee Graham, who at sixteen years old sailed around the world alone for five years. His passion extended beyond his knowledge of and dedication to the art of sailing; it bled into life itself, the way he talked to people, about people, his efforts to be immersed in the cultures he met along the way, the love of his life he also met along the way—in all things his passion extended, and I wonder if it wasn’t sailing that he was passionate about, but life, and sailing was simply the effect of his passion, the outlet, like must of Bach’s works, or sports technology for this gentleman. I’m confident if he knew vacuum cleaners instead of sports technology, he’d have explained the capabilities of that to us with equal enthusiasm.

I knew someone like that once when I was young and it rubbed off on me for a while, but eventually it ebbed; and when that happens it is easy to wonder if one gets caught up in someone else’s passion and that’s all, or if that energy pulls out of you something dormant, waiting for the spring of an idea, a direction, a material manifestation of such love and drive.

I can’t articulate my need at the end of the pier to be out on one of the sailboats, headed toward Ontario, or the Keys, or even the Chesapeake. It’s the same way I feel at airports looking for my gate, or in some foreign city where I am absolutely present, no thoughts of before or next, but present. I wonder, then, if my passion is to remain in the moment, to be present, without stress or anxiety, without regret or anticipation, but now. Like talking to a friend for hours about life; like listening to the excitement in your children’s voices when they talk about their lives.

Like the calm waters of a Great Lake on a warm morning.

Like a carpet of stars across the northern sky.

Or the sound of water lapping at the sand. As it always has. As it always will.

One of the common denominators among depressed artists in history is their love of nature. Perhaps it is the consistency, or the lack of mistakes made, the lack of letting people down, the absence of disappointing others–all feelings found among those who bend toward depression. It is often thought that those feelings lead to depression, but the opposite is exactly true.

So why nature?

Because…

There Will Come Soft Rains

by Sara Teasdale

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows calling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild-plum trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
if mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

The wilderness today is Facebook.

You’ve seen the questions:

Do you know someone who has had or died from Covid?

You forgot a gift for someone knocking at your door, so you give them the first thing to your left. What is it?

If I broke into your house and stole what is on top of your refrigerator, what would I get?

I bet you can’t think of a man’s name that doesn’t have an E in it.

Okay, first of all, that last one is so ridiculous it actually makes me angry and I’m not sure why; it’s not rational to be angry by stupid questions, but that’s the thing: it is a question I might have asked my son when he was three to test his spelling skills, but this is on Facebook, presumably by someone at least in their teens.

Then there are the people who actually answer these. I admit I’ve answered some because they are fun sometimes, and they don’t give away any information that could possibly hint toward my passwords, and I like to be sarcastic whenever possible, and this gives me a fine opportunity. Most of us are smart enough to avoid the questions which hint toward answers to the secret questions we answer for password recovery: I bet you can’t remember the first car you drove with a standard transmission (probably would be your first car). Or I bet you can’t remember the name of your third-grade teacher (just google the teacher’s name and elementary school teacher and you might find the school). This is “mining” for information. It is usually obvious which to answer and which not to.

More disturbing and the biggest hint that this is some bot-generated scam are the responses. Check closely: the people you know that answer have likes or other such emojis by only one or two people, and usually known by the person. But the rest of the comments are all liked, loved, laughed or cried at, wowed, and angered at by thousands! Come on! We are supposed to really believe that all those people who answered “Steve” or “Ben” to the name without an “e” comment had thousands and thousands of people at home online going “Oh Man! Yes! I gotta like that one!” and often these questions are shared tens of thousands of times. WHY? By WHOM?

So what’s the point?

First, they’re getting you to respond at all, and based upon your settings, this allows them to open your profile and read all about you, or it allows a computer to open your profile and generate ads based upon your likes, views, etc. Simply by responding to any of these for many people because of the privacy settings gives permission for others to surf around your page. Also, some of these questions are put out there by actual companies, such as radio stations or podcasts, and the bot-generator pushes it around the world with tens of thousands of computer generated likes and comments, all of which get thousand of likes, and these places have a “viewership” that pushes its homepage visibility through the roof.

But there’s something more interesting going on. For some reason we all have some deep-rooted need to answer questions, even if there is absolutely no point in doing so. We throw those answers out into the ether to simply be among others, to touch the wet paint next to the wet paint sign. It is as if subconsciously we feel the need to complete this task set before us, perhaps in some effort to participate in this harmless, funny game, giving each of us, depending upon the question, a chance to reminisce, join in, agree, prove our memory strength, or simply laugh for a few minutes.

Are they harmful? It’s probably better to assume that yes, they are. And we can’t blame the creators of these questions; it’s our own fault for answering. But since some of them aren’t problematic, and occasionally I’ve laughed out loud at some of the answers, including mine, I came up with my own. Feel free jump in and respond in the comment section below!

Here we go:

What’s your social security number?
What’s your mother’s maiden name?
What’s your address?

What’s the name of your first pet?

What’s the routing and account numbers of your last checking account?

See, that wasn’t so painful!

I would like a quiet day. Just one. One quiet day without the residue of yesterday or headwinds of tomorrow. A quiet one during which I could just let the river run past and feel the cool and heat of the sand and the sounds of gulls or osprey and, of course, waves; when I define quiet, I include birds and waves. I would like one of those days where I’m not waiting for someone or when I’m not anticipating appointments or deadlines. A day where the phone doesn’t ring, or when it does it is simply family, ready with a joke or an old story to get us all laughing and remembering and planning. Usually quiet days include laughter and stories.

A day to myself like I used to do when I lived in Pennsylvania and drove into Manhattan and walked from Herald Square all the way up and through part of the park, talking to the vendors or checking out the music along the way coming from the cafes and radios. When I explain “quiet day” I must include the sounds of the city as natural and as organic as the osprey and waves at home since they are expected.

My life is not unlike Thoreau’s in that my retreat is near the water in the woods where I am able to regroup, not to ignore civilization as much as be better prepared to face it. So I would like one day. One. One quiet day where I could live deliberately and be in absolute touch with the passing of time solely for the sake of the passing of time, to not watch the seconds, to not count the minutes. I could lean against a tree and hear the combine on the neighbor’s farm or the rigging on the boats on the river. There is a thin, very thin, line between quiet and the sound of rigging in the early morning hours. A good quiet day for me often includes the sound of rigging on a mast.

I was thinking the other day about the quiet days in college when a bunch of us would walk into town just to get something to drink and everyone would be talking at once and laughing at once at different things, and we were always like that and we were always going to be like that. I loved that sweet and passive activity during a time in life of seemingly permanent transience. If I am going to define “quiet days,” I can’t leave off my friends all talking and laughing at once.

I have had many days which I would “formally” call quiet by the Oxford definition. In Spain on the Camino silence was most welcome, and at home on the river when it is early, or late. When I was young and hiked through Heckscher State Park, my friend Eddie and I would either sing or be absolutely quiet, like we both knew nothing would last and we needed to absorb every moment. Sometimes when I am alone at home I fiddle around the house, working out on the property or on the porch, and can go from sunrise to sunset without a sound and it can be delightfully deafening. But those are literal, and I have come to understand that true peace is not the absence of noise but rather the presence of love. It can’t truly be a quiet day without the presence of love, not if we know that “quiet” is also a state of mind.

I want the peace that comes from sitting in an Italian restaurant in a run-down strip mall, eating bread and drinking a bottle of wine and talking for hours with an old friend, and we finished each other’s sentences and we finished the wine. I miss the quiet of a stroll through a busy mall with my dad, stopping to rest, talking about nothing at all. I look forward to the type of quiet that comes from sitting on a bench at the boardwalk and listening to the mixing of music and pounding surf and kids playing in the sand. What peace there is; what quiet is there. A fine, quiet day should include absolute mindfulness so that what was, no matter how long ago, and what will be, no matter how allusive, remain irrelevant to the laughter of a friend who understands.

That kind of quiet. Peace of mind quiet. Trust quiet. Understanding quiet.

I would like more quiet days like that.