Alexandersmap

    Author: nhcarmichael

    • Seeing the Elephant

      There’s an old expression that people used to ask when asking if someone had experienced something unique or special.  Have you seen the elephant?  Today seeing an elephant isn’t particularly hard to do – go to a zoo and there they are.  They used to be a big draw in circuses as well, until people realized how traumatic it was for the elephants.

      At any rate, seeing the elephant meant checking a box. Today people might talk about it as a bucket list item.  Have you seen Niagara Falls?  Have you seen the elephant?  Have you been to Paris in the springtime?  Have you seen the elephant?  According to Jon Sterngass, “seeing the elephant” also signified a quest for satisfactions in disreputable quarters.”  Wikipedia describes another meaning for seeing the elephant for soldiers – have you been to war?  Have you seen battle?  Wiki describes seeing the elephant in a negative connotation – yeah I saw it but wish I hadn’t.

      I confess to not really knowing the term.  I’d heard it before but it didn’t resonate with me.  Seeing the elephant?  Whatever.  Didn’t care.  I’d seen elephants since I was a kid.  But the term stuck for me when I read a Sports Illustrated article about the 18 inning World Series game 3, in which Tom Verducci compared watching that game to “I have seen the elephant”.

      I’ve seen a few metaphorical elephants in my lifetime.  I’m hunting many more.  Currently seeing the aurora borealis is by far tops on my bucket list of elephants.  Paris, Scotland, Hawaii, hiking the Appalachian Trail, hell, even seeing the last six episodes of Game of Thrones…  the elephant doesn’t have to be big to be meaningful.

      Life is very short, and as the expression goes, “Man Plans, and God Laughs”.  I keep aiming for the elephants, and hope that I might see all of them before I check out of here.  Without goals, what would life be?

    • Hardtack

      Hardtack

      In the world of refrigeration and preservatives that we live in today, we don’t think a lot about how long our food lasts.  Sure, canned food and beef jerky are still a part of our diets, but in general we aren’t thinking about enduring long periods of time without a source of food.  When I look at the diets of sailors, soldiers and explorers a few hundred years ago some items come up again and again.  A ration of rum was certainly expected.  But so too was hardtack.

      Hardtack is made from flour and water, with some salt to help preserve it and hopefully make it more palatable.  But taste wasn’t the priority with hardtack, it was to have something to sustain you when fresher food wasn’t available.  Dip it in water, tea or if you were lucky whiskey or rum to soften it up to save what was left of your teeth.

      Hardtack was called many things, depending on who was using it for food.  Army Bread, sailor’s bicuits, and a large assortment of derogatory names was used to describe this staple.  Ultimately it was often the only thing between carrying on and starvation.

      Thinking about traditional foods like hardtack help me appreciate being alive today.  Life is much easier now, and our food is so much more available and palatable than it was not that long ago.  I’m going to have a turkey wrap for lunch today, with avocado.  I’ll be sure to savor it.

    • World Series

      World Series

      Sleep deprivation is common when your team is in the World Series, and the 18 inning marathon that ended at 3:30 this morning set me up for a rough day today.  The Red Sox and Dodgers played an epic Game 3, and I was in awe of Nathan Eovaldi pitching in relief for 90+ pitches of shutout baseball until the Dodgers finally hit a walk-off home run.  I’ll save the hyperbole for others, but it was one of those games that you’ll remember.

      Watching sports is a time suck.  And there’s no greater time suck than baseball.  That game robbed me of over seven hours of my life, and taxed me of energy I might otherwise use for a productive Saturday morning.  But the tradeoff is the shared joy and agony of cheering for the same team.  Sports are a distraction from the darker stuff that happens in life, and offers some of the only unscripted moments you’ll find on television.  But at some point you have to get on with your own life.
      Being a Boston sports fan offers many opportunities for joy and agony.  For my own sanity I try to keep the regular season games to a minimum but double down during the playoffs.  We’ve been spoiled with the four professional sports teams in Boston, but the tradeoff is time.  We all have to ask what is the best use of my limited time on this planet?  For me the drama of sport is worth the exchange.  But it wouldn’t hurt my feelings if the Red Sox closed this out in two games instead of wringing me through four more.

    • Travel Bug

      Travel Bug

      I was watching a program on television where the host was exploring Bermuda and eating a fish sandwich at Woody’s.  I admit it choked me up a bit.  Not because I have a soft spot for fish sandwiches (though I do love a good fish sandwich), but because it’s a destination “out there” that I haven’t been to yet.  There’s a very long list of places like that.  More pressing, it’s an experience that I haven’t had that I desperately want to have.

      I’ve made progress on my list, having gone to several faraway places over the last few years that were definitely highlights.  But there’s so many more to see, and so little bloody time to do it.  I’ve heard the calling again, and so I plot to explore while I still have time and health and sound mind enough to do it.

      This week I’m heading north to Maine.  This puts me close enough to exciting options that I may just take advantage of them.  I’m choosing a life of travel.  Perhaps not on the grande scale I envision just yet, but incremental, opportunistic travel nonetheless.  Chasing experiences wherever I may.

    • Burpees and Excuses

      Burpees and Excuses

      I’ve struggled with getting the appropriate amount of daily exercise for years.  I’ve tried P90X, sprint triathlons, swimming laps, walk-a-thons, and all manner of motivators to get myself going.  I rowed in college and like to row, but I travel a lot and don’t have regular access to an erg, let alone a river; I tell myself.

      I love to walk, and when Bodhi was younger I was powering through 10,000 steps daily with no trouble.  As Bodhi has slowed down, my steps have decreased significantly.  Walking 10K steps takes roughly 90 minutes at a steady pace, and I don’t always have time for 90 minutes of walking; I tell myself.

      I don’t run, I don’t lift weights all that often, and I my bike has gathered dust in the garage for three years since I tuned it up and promised myself I’d get out more.  Life is busy, and I just haven’t had the time for long rides; I tell myself.

      I love to hike, and watched with envy as friends subtracted themselves from the regular turns at drinking together on weekends and tackled the 48 4000 footers in New Hampshire.  I celebrated their completion of this goal after a year of getting out there almost every week for a year.  I could accomplish that goal too, but I travel and the weekends are the only time I have to get things done around the house I tell myself.

      Over the last couple of years, I’d read a story that burpees were the perfect exercise.  I then started following Joshua Spodek, who writes about his daily burpee routine and how that’s improved his overall quality of life.  Small daily habits make all the difference.  Discipline equals freedom, as Jocko Willink says.  I understand this, and I’d tried to introduce this daily habit before, starting with 20 burpees per day.  After day three one of my abs felt like it had torn and I quick.

      I’ve decided to start again, but more slowly.  I’ve been doing burpees for almost a month.  I began on September 20th with 10 burpees.  No more.  The next day I added one burpee, and the next another one burpee.  Eventually I got to 20 burpees per day and stopped at that for a while.  Then I increased it again, and again.  Yesterday I did 50 burpees with relative ease, so I added 20 decline pushups when I was done.

      I’m under no illusion that I’m fit yet.  I’ve lost a couple of pounds, but I have a long way to go still.  No, my goal is to establish a habit of daily exercise, and see where it takes me from there.  So far the habit has continued through a trade show in Vegas, two long trips to Upstate New York and 12 hour days of driving and meetings.  I missed one day during this, when I got up early and drove to Vermont for a service and got home late.  That was on day 10 of what has been 28 days of burpees.  I’m now trying to do a minimum of 30, and trying to hit 50 per day.  This increase in production isn’t costing me a lot in time as I’ve become more fit and I’m not out of breath after 7 or 8 burpees.

      Where this takes me I don’t know, but I like to do them, I can do them in my hotel room without waking up the hotel neighbors, and it gives me a minimum threshold to reach daily that I can then mark as success.  And success builds on itself.  I’m trying to do more of the other activities that I’ve put off now as well.  I’m 651 burpees into this, and look forward to reaching 1000, and then 10,000, and then 100,000 burpees.  It’s a small daily thing, but small daily things are everything.

    • The Ghosts That We Knew

      October is a magical month in New England.  The harvest is largely done, leaves are turning and falling off the trees, the days grow shorter and the air becomes crisper.  Winter is coming, but not just yet.

      Like most people who live here, I think of fall as the best time of year in New England.  It’s the sight of foggy ponds and pumpkins and chrysanthemums, the smell of leaves and hay and apple crisp, and the feel of layers of clothes pulled out of dormancy clinging to our skin to warm us from the new season’s chill.

      2018 has been a year of loss.  Some people who were full of life have moved on to whatever comes next.  Autumn is when I think about such things.  Really, it’s hard not to when nature demonstrates daily that this time is short and we’re all dancing on this earth for a short time.  Seeing the leaves turn or seeing Bodhi struggle to climb the stairs; really it’s the same thing.

      Momento Mori.  This is the season of reflection.  The ghosts that we knew remind us that our time is short.  I must do more with that time.

    • Visitors from the Wild

      Visitors from the Wild

      I don’t ever think about salamanders, but fished one out of the pool last Sunday.  I believe it’s a Northern Redback, but what do I know about salamanders?  Next to nothing.  I spend as much time outdoors as I can, but I don’t poke around in streams or under logs and leaves looking for critters.  No, the only time I really see the creatures in the world adjacent to mine is when they come to visit.  Usually that means they’ve gotten into the pool and can’t get out.

      Many visitors from the wild are commonplace.  Birds are lured to the feeders.  Rabbit, chipmunk, squirrels, turkey, skunk, raccoon, turtles, frogs and deer are regular visitors.  And so are the creatures that hunt them.  Walking at night you’ll hear coyote or the strange cries of a fisher cat break the stillness.  Hunters, especially nocturnal hunters, are much harder to see, but you know they’re out there if you pay attention.

      The wild where I live is right on the other side of the fence.  We live adjacent to protected woodland that abuts horse fields on the opposite side from our yard, and runs uphill to form an unbroken necklace of wooded shelter for wildlife.  Within that necklace, Providence Hill Brook runs down that hill right behind our yard, flowing into Hog Hill Brook down the street, which eventually flows into the Spicket River to the Merrimack River and finally to the Atlantic Ocean.  This waterway is a highway for all kinds of creatures – from salmon to the first explorers to this land.

      We get a lot of toads and frogs visiting the yard.  Sadly I found a toad with my spade when I was digging in the garden.  It didn’t end well for that toad.  Generally I’m able to avoid harming more than I hurt.  I spend a lot of time fishing frogs out of the pool.  The relocation program for survivors begins with the pool net and ends at Hog Hill Brook, which should be a more attractive home than my pool.

      A few weeks before that I was looking for pole beans in the garden when I looked a garden snake in the eye.  It was sunning itself five feet high up on the trellis.  Outside of taking a picture I let her be.  Snakes are hunters doing a great service to the local ecosystem, and seeing this one confirms that overall that ecosystem is healthy.

      The ancestors of these visitors from the wild were living in this neighborhood long before we built here.  Hopefully their descendants will be here long after we’re gone.  Any illusion of permanence on my part is tempered by the old stone wall that runs between the woods and my backyard.  I like that the local ecosystem still supports visitors from the wild despite the encroaching development.  We’re surrounded by woods and streams on all sides that should never be developed.  But other forested areas are being razed nearby, disrupting the local ecosystem there.  Will that impact my own someday?  I think that’s likely.  We’re all connected aren’t we?

      The joy of visitors from the wild are in learning a little bit more about the place I call home.  I’ve lived here for almost 20 years, and that was the first salamander that I’ve seen.  Makes you wonder what else is out there, hidden from view.  I’m grateful for the visit, and look forward to seeing who stops by next.  The world is right in front of us, is we’d only pay attention to it.

    • Autumn in the Air

      Autumn in the Air

      One week after Labor Day Weekend and the air has changed.  The days have been getting shorter steadily for three months, but with the hot humid August it was very much summer.  The last few days have been more crisp and dryer.  Autumn is in the air.

      Summer still holds on stubbornly – and this week the temperatures will climb back to a level that warrants air conditioning.  But change is indeed in the air.  Sunrise is later, sunset is earlier as the northern hemisphere tilts towards the darkness.

      Yesterday, while pulling weeds and planting chrysanthemums I drove my spade into the garden soil and realized I’d caught hold of something more than soil.  Looking into the hole I realized that I’d caught a fat toad squarely in the middle.  An accident of wrong place at the wrong time.  The toad was burrowing deep into the soil to hibernate, and tragically picked the very spot I chose to plant a mum.  It looked intact – I removed it from the garden to the woods and despite the odds hopefully it survives.  I see a lot of frogs and toads in the garden and in the pool, but this was the first time I’ve dug one up.

      The garden has turned.  Most plants have gone to seed.  A few annuals like the dahlias are still cranking along.  Tomatoes and green beans are almost tapped out.  It’s harvest time for apples.  The garden knows what we all know – summer is almost over.

      2018 has been a year of change in many ways.  Family and pets passing away, divorces and separation for friends, new jobs for my wife and for me, increasingly independent kids, some friends moving further away, others getting closer.  Physically this is the first year that I can remember where my metabolism didn’t kick naturally into another gear as we hit summer.

      As the season changes I’m reminded that the blog has suffered.  I’ve lost the consistent contribution I’d aimed for.  Likewise I’ve lost the consistent effort to walk 10,000 steps, row 5,000 meters, do 100 pushups… etc.  Some things go well, other things fall short.  Such is life.

      The political climate has been such a distraction this year, and efforts to filter it all out have proven unsuccessful.  I’ve taken to deleting apps like Twitter or Facebook only to return to them.  The addictive elements inherent in smart phones and social media work on me.  Compartmentalization becomes increasingly difficult when the noise penetrates from all sides.  Ryan Holiday calls this outrage porn; addictive outrage over the latest affront to our moral compass.  Best to turn it off…

      This post, while brief, serves to shake me out of my self-imposed writing break.  It’s Autumn; summer mental vacations have ended.  It’s time to make a contribution to the world again.  A return to long form contribution.

    • Northeastern Forests

      Northeastern Forests

      I recently finished reading The Hidden Life of Trees, a profoundly interesting book that taught me something new about the forests and the tress around me than I’d ever thought possible.  The relationship of trees to the fungal network they’re connected to, the way the support each other with sugar through that network.  How they migrate over the years.  Incredible book.

      Of course, it got me thinking about the forests around me.  I’ve long appreciated the forests of the Northeast United States and Eastern Canada.  Driving north through Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and Western Massachusetts you ride through miles and miles of forest.  Upstate New York, for all it’s farmland, is still, or rather once again heavily wooded.  Even Connecticut and Rhode Island have heavy percentages of their land wooded.

      Encroaching developments eat into this magnificent green blanket, and the trees that once stood where developments are going up end up as firewood, lumber, bark mulch or paper products.  A little piece of me dies when I see lots being cleared.  I’m not opposed to development, I just greatly prefer the woods.

      I was talking to a friend of mine about a place where we once camped on New Year’s Eve.  We drove deep into the woods as far as his car could go in the deep snow and hiked in to a favorite spot of his.  We lit a bonfire and drank beer and listened to the coyotes in the still night.  I woke up in the middle of the night to embers melting into the plastic outer shell of my sleeping bag as my buddy stoked the fire up and howled at the coyotes.  We still laugh about that night almost 30 years later.  He mentioned to me that it’s now a development with hundreds of houses.

      I imagine that’s how the Native Americans felt when they watched the deep forests that generations walked through were felled for ship masts and houses.  Roads were cut in, and the sprawl began, rapidly displacing those who came before.  Through it the trees survived to fight another day.  Where once a farmer’s field lay claim to the land a forest has reclaimed it.  Most of the forests I drive through as I travel New England are new growth – reclaiming the land over the last century or so.  There’s a measure of hope in that, balanced with caution.

    • Bloody Brook

      There’s a tiny brook that flows from Searles Pond near Holy Family Hospital and feeds into the Spicket River just before it in turn feeds the Merrimack River in Lawrence.  It’s name betrays a violent history, long before Lawrence and Methuen become heavily developed urban environments.  Google has led me a couple of times to a very useful site that details the history of Methuen and some of the surrounding area that once was part of Methuen.  You can Magenweb here.

      The name Bloody Brook was said by George Frederick, late town treasurer and authority on Indian lore, to come from a terrific battle between the Agawams and the Tarrantines in the days before the English settlement. As near as white men could tell after they came, about September 1615 the Tarrantine Indians of Maine had a poor harvest so they invaded the Merrimack Valley to raid the fields,and naturally the local Indians resisted as best they could. It is said that clubs and stone axes, rather than arrows, were found in this area, indicating the closeness of combat. 

      The Tarrantines were part of the larger Mi’kmaq tribe of coastal Native Americans who lived from Maine to Newfoundland.  For them to make the long trip down to what is now Methuen to raid the fields of the Agawam speaks to their desperation.  There is another famous Bloody Brook that points towards the better-known history of conflict between the white settlers and Native American population.We hear a lot about the encroachment of European settlers in the area and the conflicts that arose with the Native American population as a result.  The conflict between tribes is a lesser known, but no less violent history of the land we live on today.  Names like this dot the map, just waiting for someone to remember the ghosts who once inhabited this land.