America = Cornucopia

And what does this topic have to do with NJ WILD ?- without serious change in our land, there would be no WILD left, not in New Jersey, not anywhere…

Never before had I seen the connection between the timing of the year’s final harvests and elections. 

This pivotal week, –remembering the cornucopia of faces at President-elect Barack Obama’s Victory Speech in 1968-beleaguered Chicago, I see our President-elect as a farmer.  In the months of his gruelling campaign, Barack Obama thoroughly ploughed and seeded, harrowed, weeded and tilled.  His harvest is the renewal of the American dream.  As on real farms in my lifetime, people of all ages and backgrounds conjoined to bring in this crop.  People of other nations rejoice that the process designed by our brilliant forefathers still works, because of Barack Obama’s husbandry. 

This year’s Thanksgiving Feast will be metaphorical as well as gastronomical.  Its basic man-in-the-street traditions will glow again.  We might even remember that the Indians suggested this ritual to honor the harvest.  They even brought large game to the feast; since the Pilgrims with their mismatched guns (think blunderbuss!) and fish hooks were hard pressed to secure food consistently for themselves. Read the rest of this entry »

First Leaves of Autumn Float Through Mapleton Aqueduct  cfe

 

[A glimpse of autumn, courtesy of John Muir:]

The winds will blow their own freshness into you,
and the storms their energy,
while cares will drop away from you
like the leaves of Autumn.

John Muir

Autumn Flaunts Coming Attractions - Lake Carnegie   cfe

John Muir is one of my all-time favorite writers, and autumn my Ur-Season.  Whenever I take didactic stands in NJ WILD, it’s to fling down a gauntlet toward you.  Who’s your favorite nature writer, and in what season do you feel most alive?

Remember, when we began NJ WILD, I promised to focus on nature’s beauty in our own back yard.  Very few communities are blessed, as are we, by the D&R Canal and Towpath.  All pictures were taken within a few inches of the Mapleton Fishing Bridge, where ‘our’ eagle will increasingly hang out, as winter replaces fall.

Rather than carry on in words, here is a a constellation of first glimpses of the season that is now making curtain calls.  Enjoy.  And go out there and capture autumn yourself, in image, with chalk, ink or paint, in words…

The Gold Standard - Dock, Lake Carnegie  cfe

Last November, a friend gave me a new digital camera for a very significant birthday.  A long-time Konica T3-user, single-lens reflex, slide producer, it took me awhile to feel comfortable with this splendid gift.  In fact, I felt unfaithful to T3.  But, as with my persistent/insistent first love, Johnny, when we were high school juniors back in Michigan, the new Canon has won my heart.  As with Johnny, I wonder how I ever lived without it.  And T3, faithful friend since the 1970’s, now languishes heavily in a dark leather case, deep in a closet.

Johnny found me, wrote me when I lived in New Hope in the 1980’s.  This was decades after the last time we had been together, when West Side Story opened, back when I lived (on the West Side) and worked in Manhattan.  His unexpected letter began, “You are my first love, and I love you still.  Everything I became in my adult life, I owe to you.”  Since Johnny has been everything from the first builder of a stereo in Royal Oak to the founder of a jazz combo, then head of a radiology group, and successful runner in the Boston Marathon, I found Johnny’s praise heady and thrilling, hard to credit but appreciated.  I need to write a letter like that to this new camera! 

Because we’ve become buddies, Canon and I - even chronicling indoor and outdoor beauties in our 1900’s barn where I at D&R Greenway Land Trust.  And one of the camera’s and my ‘first dates’ was this chronicling of first glimpses of autumn along our Canal.

Stars Fell on D&R Canal - Sweet Gum Spill cfe 

When my favorite seaston tiptoed onto our stage awhile ago, I dashed up one side and down the other of the D&R Canal and Towpath, chronicling the changes.  I don’t recall Muir’s wind that golden afternoon, but I do remember feeling freshened by the color and the light, as never in cold, damp spring. 

And go back to these cameos, as first sleet falls - which it already has for friends and neighbors and colleagues not so very far from Princeton.  When ice falls from the skies, it is good to remember Autumn.

 Lake Carnegie Autumn Masquerades as The Season to Come  cfe

 

                 Cool Woman Poet, Juditha Dowd,
celebrates the end of the garden for the season.
Putting It To Bed

The season has delivered more or less what was promised,
the air still sweet with expectations that must fade,

the excitement of digging, of putting away. Remember
the hail on planting day, how we stashed the seedlings in the car,

remember tomatoes, not as many as we wanted but enough?
The soil is unhappy, no news there-something we haven’t

quite figured out, though we’ve fed it with leaf-mold
and compost and sweat-some failure of appetite, maybe ours.

We pause to take stock. I lean on the shovel, you on the rake,
dreaming of next year’s green recruits, so small and naked,

impatient as a bright idea. But why not celebrate what is
and what may never be, as equal? Isn’t this the season

we must learn to practice grief, while the sun is sifting
through our own four hands, the stars in our possession-

remote and glittering, strangely tender, like the day
we’ve been given, the life we keep meaning to live?

-Juditha Dowd

 

 

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Brenda Jones blessed by eagle with nest materials, Lake Carnegie, October 2008

Once upon a time, there were no eagles of Princeton.  Yes, occasionally, we’d have a fly-by, or a sighting in transit.  But in all the years I’ve lived here (more or less since 1968) eagles were a factor of elsewhere.  One, I remember in the early 1980’s, circling a field just before Lambertville - and I look for him ever ever since.  Seven! - a kettle of eagles - swirling above Canyon de Chelly out west, in 1987, just before I moved to France. 

Discouraging words of a single mated pair in New Jersey’s Cumberland County - all through the dreary 1970’s, when DDT had thinned eggs.  The female would lay eggs each year, but their fragile shells could not bear her weight.  So the pair could not fledge young.  Frankly, eagle (and osprey) news was so grim for so many decades that it never occurred to me to look for either one in Princeton.  And then everything changed.  It was January, 2004. 

Let us never grow blase about these handsome birds, about the wonder of their arrival.  Let us remember to thank Rachel Carson, who literally fought to her dying breath to teach the world of the evils of chemicals, particularly their pernicious effect upon the eggs of our birds. 

‘Our’ eagle pair has successfully raised young ever since January 2004, first above the hem of the towpath, then along the selvedges of US1 and Harrison Street.  Perhaps they are restoring that nest, or seeking a new site.  Stay tuned… Read the rest of this entry »