the walker

The New York Times has been running an excellent series on their web page entitled One in 8 Million. One of their recent posts really spoke to me, suggesting a type of existence that I long for. It tells the story of a 30-year-old waitress named Maggie Nesciur, who walks  up to 90 miles per week around the neighborhoods of New York City. She has never owned a pair of sneakers, and instead does all her walking in either cowboy or motorcycle boots. She says, “I don’t walk fast; I don’t walk slow; I walk at my own speed. I have to keep moving. If I’m not moving, my mind isn’t moving much either.” Well said. You can watch and listen to her story here.

networks of affection

I wish I could write like Rebecca Solnit, but I can’t so I’m just going to quote a few lines from the opening pages of her new book, A Paradise Built in Hell. To me, this is what true citizenship is all about, not about shouting people down and threatening “we surround them.” Listen:

“When Cain asks God, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” he is raising one of the perennial social questions: are we beholden to each other, must we take care of each other, or is it every man for himself?…Most traditional societies have deeply entrenched commitments and connections between individuals, families, and groups. The very concept of society rests on the idea of networks of affinity and affection, and the freestanding individual exists largely as an outcast or exile. Mobile and individualistic modern societies shed some of these old ties and vacillate about taking on others, especially those expressed through economic arrangements-including provisions for the aged and vulnerable, the mitigation of poverty and desperation-the keeping of one’s brothers and sisters. The argument against such keeping is often framed as an argument about human nature: we are essentially selfish, and because you will not care for me, I cannot care for you. I will not feed you because I must hoard against starvation, since I too cannot count on others…but if I am not my brother’s keeper, then we have been expelled from paradise, a paradise of unbroken solidarities.”

When I see what happened yesterday in Maine, when equality was defeated by bigotry and intolerance, and when I see the talking heads on cable TV shouting at us and one another, I wonder: Where are the networks of affection and affinity that are supposed to bind us as a society?

Vinalheaven 2008

Impressions of Vinalhaven 2008…black slugs on the green grass of the playground…listening to WERU in the car (Beck, Aimee Mann, Death Cab For Cutie, Johnathan Richman… “Time Has Been Going By So Fast”…Quarry swimming, laying in the sun on the warm granite…Funyuns…The Onion Field…bike riding…pineapple mimosas…lots of beer in the afternoon makes you a better swimmer…mango tango…wiffle ball lost in the bushes again, and again…TB Rays in first place…Wild Wild West theme for 4th parade… “wanted for incessant scratchin’”…bumper sticker:the truly educated never graduate…

hiatus

I had some minor surgery last Friday, so I took this past weekend to recuperate. While I was flat on my back, gazing out the window at the sun-dappled leaves and listening to the birds singing, I was able to start and finish five books. They are: The Happiest Man in the World by Alec Wilkinson, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, Into the Wild by John Krakauer, Kon-Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick. All highly recommended. I can’t wait to fully recover so that I can get back on my mountain bike and resume my search for the perfect swimming hole. I’ve lived in Bath now for almost ten years and I’m just now really starting to appreciate the diversity of the landscape. The Kennebec can look foul one day, and as beautiful as the Seine the next. I might take a hiatus from this blog for awhile, too. It’s too beautiful outside to spend time at a computer. I hope you all can find your own private Eden this summer, too. Cheers! – henry

creepy naked guy

I have been on a quest lately to find a swimming hole within biking distance of my house. Living in Maine, and with the multitudinous rivers, streams and ocean inlets in my general vicinity, this would seem to be an easy task. But not so. Of course there are various places to swim, but I’m looking for a place a little more secluded, if you know what I mean. Thoreau and Ben Franklin are on my side in this quest for a place where I can indulge in an “open-air bath.” But there’s always the chance that I might get caught and viewed as some kind of freak. I had an experience last summer where I drove out to a secluded pond near my home. I hiked about a mile into the woods, and jumped into the water. Not seeing anyone around, I took off my bathing suit and threw it onto the rocks onshore. It was dusk, and the chances of anyone happening along were slim. And yet, who should appear out of the woods but four women. I was floating about twenty yards offshore and they called out to me, asking if I would mind if they joined me. Of course I agreed. What else could I do? They didn’t notice my state of undress, and, clad in their various swim attire, they jumped in as well. So here we have a great moral dilemma. Does a man, floating naked in the middle of a pond, admit to his newly manifested female companions that he is in fact naked and that perhaps they would like to take their leisure elsewhere? Or does he pretend that everything’s fine, just fine, nothing to see here? Well, I opted for the latter choice. But when the sun started to go down and the water got chillier, I had to make a decision. I slowly paddled towards shore, and gingerly retrieved my suit from the rocks at the water’s edge. You probably don’t know how difficult it is to put on a swimsuit while you are trying to tread water, but let me tell you, it’s not easy. As I climbed out of the water, clothed, I heard giggles behind me. They knew what had happened. I distinctly heard one of them say, “That must have been a thrill for him.” As if I was some kind of pervert. As if it was my plan to go skinny-dipping in a remote pond and hope that some women came along. Please. And yet, they had come out of nowhere, intruded on my privacy, and here I was, feeling like the creep. I remember swearing to myself that I would never let this happen again. But here I am, one summer later, looking for some kind of swimming hole utopia. I’m a married father of two, not some weirdo hiding in the bushes. All I want is someplace where I can be alone and feel close to nature. People can legally go off into the woods, drink a few Buds, and fire shotguns at innocent animals, or tear across frozen lakes on loud, belching snowmobiles, or plow through the woods on ugly, dangerous ATV’s, and all this is legal. And yet I, with my low carbon footprint, am some kind of freak. A man who goes into the woods with a gun to kill animals is called a sportsman. But a man who goes into the woods to swim unencumbered in a secluded pond is just a creepy naked guy, apparently.

bicycle utopia

In the same way I wonder why small, inexpensive homes have to be so ugly, I wonder why we can’t create a bicycle utopia in this country. I’m not an economist or urban planner, but I can’t imagine it would cost that much. I know it might be difficult in a place like NYC for instance to widen the road a few feet on each side to make a bike lane possible, buy why can’t we mandate that all new road construction include bike lanes? Then, let’s give every adult in the country a $500 tax credit to buy a bike with. Third, let’s try and implement the two-mile rule. Since it’s been shown that most of our driving occurs within a two-mile radius of our home, let’s encourage people to ride their bikes to their destinations instead. Perhaps we could invest more in public transportation (remember Bill Clinton’s promise of high-speed rail?) and zip cars for people to use on longer journeys, and redevelop, or “undevelop”, parking and vacant lots into gardens and green spaces. Then let’s put American ingenuity into creating clean-burning and recyclable energy solutions by asking (nay, demanding) that Detroit to stop making gas-guzzlers and instead produce more hybrid and electric cars. (Isn’t it sickening that GM/Jeep/Chrylser is now trying to subsidize their customers’ fuel bills for driving their gas-guzzlers with their “$2.99 Gas Guarantee?”) I don’t want to eliminate cars completely (except when I’m on my bike and they blow past me going 50 with inches to spare), but it would be nice if in this country we could break our blind faith in the idea, created and foisted upon us by the car companies, that a personal vehicle is necessary for freedom. I can be just as free riding my mountain bike into the woods and jumping into a stream. Using bicycles and public transportation when we can just might allow us all to take a collective deep breath of fresh air, instead of the exhaust fumes of the guy stuck in traffic ahead of us.

simple needs

Here’s a nice piece of wisdom from one of my favorite blogs, How to Avoid the Bummer Life:

“You know, as I’ve said before, I’m a simple man with simple needs. By my own choice I have very little social life, I don’t eat much, I’m mostly house broken, and generally when I’m feeling in need of a break, instead of taking time off to go lay on a beach, go camping, or whatever regular people do when they go on vacation, I simply peel off on the bike for a few hours, drink some beer and maybe nap in the woods somewhere..”

baking bread, naming trees

I baked two loaves of bread the other day. This might not seem like such a radical thing. People have been baking bread for centuries. I got the idea from the book I’ve been reading, The Freedom Manifesto by Tom Hodgkinson. In it, he says “if you can make bread, you can do anything. It’s amazing how much confidence baking bread gives you.” My family and I have been eating this bread, which is so much more substantial that supermarket bread, for three days now, enjoying it with our dinners or toasting it for breakfast. It’s a gratifying sight to see your three-year-old son eating the bread you baked. I’ve cooked many meals for my family but for some reason making bread has been the most fulfilling cooking I’ve ever done. And it’s thrifty. Another of Mr. Hodgkinson’s mantras is to “reject waste, embrace thrift.” He advises us to throw out the telly and stop buying magazines. These devices just entice us to buy things we don’t need. Ride a bicycle, the thriftiest invention ever! I just saw an ad on television for Lowe’s, a chain of home improvement stores. Spring is here, and so now we must start our “outdoor projects” Gene Hackman, their paid spokesperson tells us. We are forever working, even during our leisure time. “Let’s build something together” Mr. Hackman exhorts. More like “Spend a lot of money at Lowe’s, using your Lowe’s credit card, and then go home because now you’re on your own, friend.” Commercials never tells us that spring is here and now it’s time to lay in the grass, do nothing, and watch the clouds pass overhead. For the stores, there’s no money to be made in promoting idleness. But it feels so much better to be thrifty than to shop. Shopping will never gratify us. That’s why we keep doing it. If we were ever really gratified, we’d stop shopping tomorrow. But that’s not in the stores’ best interest. To always keep us wanting for more is their philosophy. But what a sweet victory thrift is over waste! For example, I found a free book in a donation bin a few days ago, a guide to identifying trees of North America. It’s one of these old fashioned Golden guides, with colorful drawings instead of photographs. I didn’t pay a cent for it, and yet my children and I have been enjoying looking at trees and trying to find them in the book so as to name them. We found out that the tree in our front yard is (probably) a Norway maple. We’ve lived in our house for almost ten years and never knew that. For the longest time the tree in our front yard was just named “tree.” But now it has a name. And just yesterday my son said that when he got out of preschool he wanted to “look for trees.” Now that’s much better than television.

naked haiku

I don’t have anything to say today, so I give you a journal entry of Zen master Soen Nakagawa Roshi, from his book of poetry and prose, Endless Vow:

Summer 1938
(Another trip to Manchuria)

Deep at night I had a dip in a hot spring, surrounded by the vast plains. I looked up at the constellations; the stars were dancing in the field of the sky. I was totally absorbed in “this Matter” and vowed to settle in a hut on Mount Dai Bosatsu.

Distant thunder
various races naked
in the stone tub

woodsmoke and snow

Even though it’s April, it’s still winter up here in Maine. There’s still snowpack in the forests, and large dirty banks by the side of the road, frost on my windshield when I go out to start my car. I don’t think you should be able to see your breath in April, but there it is. I went to the Richmond Sauna Saturday night and as I usually do, was able to glimpse a kind of perfect world there. The saunas are wood-fired, so no matter where you are you can smell the earthy scent of woodsmoke. I don’t think there is a finer smell anywhere. The people are companionable, everyone is relaxed and at ease, non-judging. The night air was cool and envigorating. Sitting in the hot tub, watching the steam rise up into the starry night sky, with a little jazz music coming from a speaker somewhere, the illumination like candlelight; this was heaven. The warmth, the woodsmoke, the steam, and the cool air all coalesced into something like eternal bliss. I lost myself a few times, closing my eyes and just being present and aware of all the sensations going on around me, just feeling, not thinking. I know I’m in the minority, and I know that perhaps like skydiving, some would never, ever consider an experience like this. And that’s fine. The phrase “at one with Nature” is probably overused, but these experiences are the closest I’ve ever come to that feeling. We all have our own pathways into wild nature, and I hope whatever way we take, we do so as often as possible.