The Wrack

Punkinfiddle is our last big event of The Busy Season and it always makes the fourth week of September feel like a the turning point  exit summer, enter fall. Frost threatens, jackets are located, the kids are ensconced once more in school.

The following was published in the Biddeford-Saco Journal Tribune Sunday edition, 9/8/13:

For the past 34 years, my mother has thrown a family reunion on Labor Day weekend. Thirty to fifty of us arrive from all over the Northeast and Canada for four days of feasting, toasting, singing, dancing, even a Geezers vs. Young Bucks softball game. Its an annual weekend devoted to celebrating, shoulder to shoulder, our lifelong ties and the continuity of our families and traditions.

Meanwhile, for those who devote themselves to the monarch butterfly, there has been no celebration yet. This month, on this side of the Rockies, monarch adults from Maine to Alberta should be flying 2,500 miles back to a few square acres within the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, a World Heritage Site sixty miles northwest of Mexico City, where they overwinter from October to March. They should be, but they arent.

A beautiful handmade decorative piece... or something more?

The following was published in the Biddeford-Saco?Journal Tribune Sunday edition, 9/1/13:

More than 100 artists will converge on the Wells Reserve at Laudholm next weekend for our 26^th annual Laudholm Nature Crafts Festival. Theyre all very talented, and if you attend, I promise youll find some unique, beautiful, and affordable Christmas gifts months ahead of schedule.

But exceptional as these local New England artists are, I think their finest work meets it match up against the other nature crafts show put on by the animal kingdom on a daily basis.

The following was originally published in the Biddeford-Saco?Journal Tribune Thursday edition, 8/22/13:

Wendell Berry said do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you. Situated at the mouths of three rivers, the Wells Reserve at Laudholm is downstream from most of York County. This summer, Ive been thinking a lot about whats upstream, particularly farms.

At first glance, Maine doesnt seem ideal for farming. Our colonial history is a litany of famines and failed harvests. We get some of the least sun of the Lower 48; our soils are the rock-filled remains of mile-high glaciers. Winters, though shorter than they used to be, still bookend a shockingly brief growing season. Why would anyone think of farming here?

The following was originally published in the Biddeford-Saco?Journal Tribune Sunday edition, 8/11/13:

You may have heard the story of the birth of the modern American environmental movement: Rachel Carson publishes Silent Spring in 1962, the Cuyahoga River catches fire in 1969, tens of thousands of Americans join together to celebrate the first Earth Day in 1970, and then, over the next three years, a Republican president saves the planet. Mr. Nixon creates the EPA; extends, with Maines Senator Muskie, the Clean Air Act; signs the Clean Water, Safe Drinking Water, and Endangered Species Acts; and even sets in motion the legislation that eventually establishes the local Wells National Estuarine Research Reserve.

Never mind that the Cuyahoga had been catching fire regularly since the mid-1800s, or that Mr. Nixon actually vetoed the Clean Water Act, or that Republican meant something different forty years ago. Whats important is the story: an empowering fable of scientists and the citizenry teaming up to overcome the odds and force government to turn around a country before it disappeared beneath smudge and sludge.

For the most part, its a true story. Its just not the whole story.

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The following was originally published in the Biddeford-Saco?Journal Tribune Sunday edition, 8/4/13:

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Music is in the ear of the beholder. Whether finch or frog, cricket or quartet, its all part of natures symphony.

Working at the Wells Reserve at Laudholm, I listen to recorded music in my farmhouse office most hours of the day. Because its such a natural fit here, Im bringing more live music to our barn this summer too. String quartets sound particularly fine in a hundred-year-old wooden barn. An acoustical engineer recently told me: Wood slats like your barns walls have ideal absorptive, reflective, and diffusive characteristics for live instrumentation. Sounds good to me.

Barns aside, Im constantly discovering new artists in our fields and marshes too.

A defenseless nest, an unleashed dog, and in twenty seconds, tragedy.

The following was originally published in the Biddeford-Saco?Journal Tribune Sunday edition, 7/21/13.

In Maine, were continually blessed with natures beauty and its bounty. Our forests, our Gulf, and our thousands of miles of rocky and sandy coast are major drivers of our economy and the envy of the Northeast. Our summer population quadruples because, yes, lifes good here, thanks in large part to our environment.

But science indisputably tells us that the Maine we know is not the Maine that has always been, or will be. Even our rich cultural history is but a millisecond in our environments life.

If our accustomed way of life was, climatologically-speaking, born on third base, should we be blamed for thinking wed hit a triple? What if instead of playing baseball, weve been surfing a wave that must, as all waves do, break?

Alas, dogs have been barred from the Wells Reserve trails since the early 90's. Why? The short answer is: to preserve nature. But here's my longer answer.

Let 2013 be a year marked not by continued division and hot air, but by common ground and cooler heads.