Nature Experience

Autumn Opus



Two weeks ago Betsy and I went up to Saugerties to walk around Opus Forty, sculptor Harvey Fite's dry laid stone project at the base of the Catskills. We had been by before, but always too near closing time or on the wrong day so that we never had the opportunity to wander around. If you go, plan to spend about an hour or two, and by all means, go in the autumn.







The frog pond. See below.




























The museum has little to offer, but the video is worth it, if only for its ancient VHS quality.






















Til Den, Love, Til Den...


I went to Fort Tilden to take some measurements for a proposal I am putting together for a project that shifts slightly every time I visit, think, or resolve myself to finalizing. This past Sunday was such a lovely day, perfect for the beach, no wind, temps in the 50s, beautiful.



In the lawn.


The weedy jamble of dried browns. Tis a good season for the weeds.


Like bittersweet, probably oriental. See ESPs post at Garden Bytes.


Can't get enough of that late autumn sun and grass infructescence.

The glowing berries of the Northern Bayberry (thanks Marie!).

To the beach!

Ahhh.


Beach glass, always picked up, sometimes collected -I recall a beach north of S.F. with unheard of quantities of broken, sand washed glass in every color.

Jelly. This summer I went in and the water was filled with so many 'baby' jellyfish that I felt like I was swimming in an ocean of bubble tea.

There was a time when Long Island's bays were flush with oyster beds (consider the name Oyster Bay).







I think it's important for us to go to our NYC beaches. No, they are not as pristine as some beaches two, or three hours away. By visiting, touching the things that wash in, the sand and the water, we create a sense of ownership and concern to ensure that our garbage is no longer dumped just beyond the horizon, or that sewage overflow is not dumped raw into our harbor, or that those upstream do not leak hazardous wastes into the Hudson.

Deep in thought spurred by the liminal, the lapping waves of water over land, then -a bride and groom.







The Wheels On The Bus Go Round And Round...


We don’t really know, it’s not
easy to say
What happens tomorrow, what happens today
The wheel of fortune is a crazy thing
And it can make you cry and it can make you sing.


Recently finished Ordeal by Hunger by George Stewart, the harrowing tale of the fate of the Donner Party. I recently was speaking about it with NPS ranger Emily and another woman from San Francisco. All of us had read the book at some stage in our lives. The woman (excuse me as I do not remember her name, lets call her Ruth), Ruth, was in her late sixties and she said the story was all the rage when she was a kid. Emily is in her mid-twenties and she read it in high school. Having just finished the book, I began asking around, "have you heard of the Donner Party?" Every person I asked said in return, "Jeffery Dahmer?" Which is funny, because he is not it at all, yet Dahmer touches on the tabu at the heart of the story. Anyhow, Ruth says she thinks it's odd that there is a diner at Donner Pass and every year her family would eat there on their way to Idaho. It doesn't escape Ruth or I that our current Interstate 80 occupies much of the same route as the Donner Party trail. Interstate 80 cuts through the Wasatch Mountains, a path the Donner Party cut with brute force and determination. The exact same path that, one year later, Mormon pilgrims would follow to Salt Lake, Utah. Ranger Emily mentions that the artist Mahonri Young had included a depiction of the Donner Party in his most famous work, This Is The Place monument, in Salt Lake City, Utah. Young lived on Weir Farm here in Connecticut because he married Dorothy Weir, daughter of artist J.A. Weir -the namesake of this National Historic Site. Mahonri Young just happened to be the grandson of Brigham Young, the man who lead the Mormon pioneers to Salt Lake and proclaimed that this was the right place for their settlement in summer of 1847, just months after the close of the Donner Party tragedy.

So there the circles closes. One other thought about 1846-47: it was in this exact period of time that Henry David Thoreau was having his nature experience on the opposite coast, an experience of self-proclaimed self-sufficiency while under the spell of the morning star. Now there's a fictional work I'd like to see: Thoreau, aspiring Emersonian writer, journal-keeper, and member of the Donner Party.