Category Archives: Sense of place

Morning song

Ferry Beach, Saco, Maine

Sometime after first light this morning, I came partially awake when a Wood Thrush (Hylocichla mustelina) started singing not far from the campground: three or four or five flute-like notes followed by a sort of trill. Birds don’t have larynxes; instead they have syrinxes, which in some species can produce more than one note at a time. Wood Thrushes have an amazingly rich and complex song; the first flute-like notes change in pitch and duration and sometimes seem to include more than one note, and the final trill might incorporate a buzzy sound and flute-like tones and more. The basic structure of the song is always the same, but each iteration of the song is slightly different; I can listen to a Wood Thrush without boredom for a very long time.

I drifted off to sleep, but while sleeping kept listening to the song, which went on and on and on. I had a dream in which I was listening to a Wood Thrush. I kept coming partly awake and marveling at the song, and then telling myself that I had to get some sleep. At last I fell sound asleep, and the alarm awakened me right at 7:00. The Wood Thrush was still singing. I listened as I pulled on my socks and shoes. I kept listening as I walked over to the wash house. I took a quick shower, walked back to my tent, listening to the Wood Thrush, trying to figure out where it was. I thought I might walk over and try to see it. But by the time I got back to my tent, at about 7:15, it stopped singing.

Summer

At midday, my old friend W—— and I packed sandwiches and water, got into his canoe and paddled up the Concord River, and paddled upstream. It wasn’t as hot as yesterday, but it still was in the 90s. Sometimes we’d catch a light breeze, depending on where we were along the bends of the river. The hot sun was straight above us, and there was no shade except over water too shallow for us to paddle in. We saw Daniel Chester French’s statue of the Minuteman, passed under the Old North Bridge, passed the replica of the boat house where Nathaniel Hawthorne had tied up the rowboat he bought from Henry Thoreau,* and at last got to the confluence of the Assabet and Sudbury Rivers, which is the beginning of the Concord River.

“Which way do you want to go?” I asked Will. He didn’t have an opinion, so I suggested we got up the Assabet River because it was likely to be shadier. We passed some people fishing, and I asked them if they were catching anything. “Nothing,” they said, “just a few little sunfish. It’s too hot.” They were standing waist-deep in the water to keep cool.

The Assabet River is narrow, and just a little way up it we were in the shade. We went up stream just a short way before it got too shallow to go any further. We drifted downstream until we found a bend in the river that was in the shade, and which also caught the desultory breeze. Fish swam under us, and a Spotted Sandpiper bobbed on the opposite bank. It was the perfect place to beat the heat, and we talked about our families for a good hour until it was time to drift back downstream to where we put in.

* For my Unitarian Universalist readers, French, Hawthorne, and Thoreau were all raised as Unitarians, although Thoreau resigned from his church in his early twenties.

Summer

At about five o’clock, it had cooled off enough that I was willing to go out for a long walk. I walked out of my sister’s air-conditioned house in Acton, Mass., into the heat. At least it wasn’t unbearably humid; it was merely mildly humid and oppressively hot. When I got off the main road onto a side street, away from car exhaust fumes, I could smell the warm earth, the roadside plants and weeds, the occasional tang of pollen. I passed a hay field that had just been mowed, with all the cut hay raked into rows so the baler could scoop them up, and the sweet smell of fresh-cut hay overwhelmed all the other smells. Then I got back onto a main road again, and once again the hot summer smells were lost under the exhaust fumes. That evening, Dad said his digital thermometer had recorded a high temperature of 99.9 degrees Fahrenheit.

Preaching on July 4

This morning, I got to preach in First Parish of Concord, Massachusetts, the church of the Minutemen. Imagine preaching to that historic congregation on Independence Day! It was great fun, and I feel lucky to be invited to preach there on July 4th.

I wrote a kind of historical sermon on evolving notions of liberty, and since it’s Independence Day, I thought I’d share it with you — the sermon’s posted over on my sermon blog.

Road trip notebook: Massachusetts

We left the motel in Greenfield, crossed Interstate 91, and headed east on Route 2, the Mohawk Trail. Carol started playing the last bit of the Trollope novel we’ve been listening to on this trip. The road wound through some old paper mill towns along the river, and then up into the hills of central Massachusetts. Although I’m not usually sentimental, I did take a detour off the main highway into downtown Athol, past the little church where I was ordained; it looked neater and better-maintained than ever, and the signs out front had been renovated and repainted. The Trollope novel reached its inevitable conclusion, although it took forever for Will and Clara to finally get married, and we had to listen as Will crushed her passionately in his arms and kiss her brow, her cheeks, her lips; it was not a very satisfying novel, but it was good enough that we had to listen to the very end of it. At last the novel was done, and we wound down through the hills towards Concord, and met my dad at the house of Deacon Miller of First Parish of Concord. Deacon Miller is not a bit like the deacons they had 350 years ago at First Parish of Concord; first of all, she’s a woman (which would have been unthinkable in the 17th century); and she is a self-described Jewish atheist deacon (equally unthinkable in the 17th century). Carol and Deacon Miller and dad and I all sat down to a lovely dinner, and that was the official end of our cross-country trip.

Road trip notebook: New York and Massachusetts

After driving a couple of hours or so, we stopped at a rest area in upstate New York. A local farm had set up a table outside the rest area, and a young woman sold us locally-grown fruit: raspberries, cherries, and apricots. Carol said she liked the New York apricots better than the California apricots we had gotten on the first day of our trip. I contented myself with eating a generous half-pint of raspberries; to my way of thinking, there is no fruit quite so satisfying as freshly-picked raspberries.

We continued to listen to the audio recording of Anthony Trollope’s The Belton Estate. At about the time the old squire dies, the story loses energy. Carol said she guessed Trollope must have gotten paid by the word. Yet we kept on listening, even though the book grew almost dull in places, because we wanted to find out what happens to the characters.

We passed through the tail ends of the Adirondack Mountains, then dropped down to wind along the Mohawk River and the course of the old Erie Canal. We skirted around the horrible traffic jam headed north on Interstate 87, presumably people heading north to spend the long weekend in the Adirondacks, and kept going until we reached the Berkshires. We passed under the Appalachian Trail, and past a sign that told us we were at the highest point on Interstate 90 since South Dakota, at an elevation of 1,724 feet above sea level.

The woman who checked us into our motel here in Greenfield told us that there would be fireworks tonight at 9:30, and she told us how to get there. We had decided not to go. But we went out at 9:30, and walked up the hill from the motel to a nearby mall. There were half a dozen cars parked in the otherwise empty parking lot, with people sitting in them. We turned around, and there were the first fireworks shooting up into the night sky. A family got out of one of the cars to watch: two parents, and two children dressed in pajamas. It was a good vantage point from which to watch the fireworks.