Alexandersmap

    Blog

    • Breaking the Norm

      I’ve been skimming the surface with the French language for eleven months now. Eleven months of daily lessons on the Duolingo app, making sure I hit the bare minimum and some days a little bit more. And as you might expect I’ve learned the basic words that they repeat in their lessons, struggle a bit with the same hurdles, and plod along in language limbo.

      I’ve noticed a similarity with the writing, where I write the blog and a little bit more most days, but then switch off to my job or chores or some distraction like computer chess. As with learning French I know that the writing would benefit deeply from immersion, but when you stack up other things that draw your attention you remain in writing limbo.

      It seems to me that there’s never been a better year for deep work than 2020. We’re all stuck here in this strange, socially-distanced limbo. Home improvement projects have skyrocketed. Hiking and biking have become hugely popular, and pool and hot tub sales have broken records. Binge watching programs took over where going to the movies left off. There’s never been a shortage of distractions in 2020, the only shortage is focus.

      If immersive, visceral experience triggers deep learning, then wouldn’t it make sense to place yourself in an environment where this can be achieved? Well, sure. I’ve watched my nephew become deeply proficient in Spanish through immersion after years of studying it and now teaching it. There’s no doubt that immersion is better than independent study. But what if you don’t have the time and agility to pluck yourself out of your current life into another? Are you doomed to living in limbo with the thing you wish to master?

      I think the answer comes down to commitment level and grabbing the opportunities that come your way. Break the norm! Don’t skate through life. We let many opportunities slip away in a lifetime, don’t we? But when we really want something we find a way to get it. When the student is ready the teacher will appear. Being open to immersive and visceral experiences while investing more deeply in the experiential track we’re on seems the answer. Do the work necessary to get where you want to be. Make methodical progress with an eye towards diving in the deep end when the opportunity arises.

    • Scenes from a Wildlife Camera

      The young buck appears on the screen for a total of five sequenced pictures. He’s making his way through the woods. I count the points and it appears that’s he’s legal for hunters. I think about him when I hear the guns fire in the distance in the next few days. November is no time to be straying into open woods with a rack. I hope this guy makes it through to see another season, for I’d like to see what he looks like in a year.

      Nearly in the same spot a coyote nested a week before. I wondered if the buck smells the coyote when he walks by. But this time of year scent changes quickly as leaves stack up and the rain washes everything down. Strangely, there’s only the one coyote on the camera. I thought they were social animals, yet here he was alone in the woods. He took a quick nap under this tree on at least two occasions.

      Of course, not everything happens in the night. The wild turkey roam through the scene in large numbers during the day. This is so commonplace now that it hardly warrants a mention, but even now there’s something interesting about watching these large birds. There’s clearly a pecking order in this rafter, coordinating movement through the woods and spooking would-be predators like that coyote.

      I put up the wildlife camera after years of wondering what walked unseen through the woods behind us. I’ve seen plenty over the years from the yard or from an upstairs window, but hearing that bear crunch through the woods last month finally inspired me to get the camera up and running. To find what defies the eyes peering into the darkness. And it hasn’t disappointed. It’s a bit like Christmas morning walking out to see what it picked up every week or two. Isn’t it always interesting to see what the neighbors are up to?

      We had a fire again on Friday night. I could hear something crunching in the woods. Not as loud as the bear, not as stealthy as the deer. I wondered what it might be? This morning I may take a walk out to the camera to see who our visitor was. I’ve come to enjoy solving a good mystery.

    • Good Forever

      “There is no past and no future; no one has ever entered those two imaginary kingdoms. There is only the present. Do not worry about the future, because there is no future. Live in the present and for the present, and if your present is good, then it is good forever.” – Leo Tolstoy

      Here is the present, such that it is. On the whole you’d call it good (we woke up didn’t we?), yet more challenging than other days we might remember. But that’s the trap, isn’t it? Comparison to fond memories robs the present as much as dreams of the future does. There’s only today, buttercup. Dance to the song the band is playing now.

      I walked outside to a red dawn and a chorus of nuthatches noisily haw-hawing their way up and down the tree trunks. They know where the party is: it’s right here, right now! Nothing lives in the moment like a wild animal. It’s the humans who get all wound up in past moments, or stirred up about what may come to pass in the future. These are stories we tell ourselves. If I’ve learned anything balancing 5-6 books I’m reading at a time, it’s that you can’t read them all at once. So stick to the story of the present.

      The flip side of the present being good is that it isn’t very good at all. If that’s the case, then it seems we must accept what we’ve got and work on making something of this moment that is better than it might have been. Those nuthatches would probably prefer an endless summer of warm days and tasty bugs. They woke up to a leaf-less, cold November morning. But they were singing away in the trees this morning like it was Whoville on Christmas morning. You can learn a lot about living from a nuthatch.

    • Norumbega

      “Not on Penobscot’s wooded bank the spires
      Of the sought City rose, nor yet beside
      The winding Charles, nor where the daily tide
      Of Naumkeag’s haven rises and retires,
      The vision tarried; but somewhere we knew 5
      The beautiful gates must open to our quest,
      Somewhere that marvellous City of the West
      Would lift its towers and palace domes in view,
      And, lo! at last its mystery is made known—
      Its only dwellers maidens fair and young, 10
      Its Princess such as England’s Laureate sung;
      And safe from capture, save by love alone,
      It lends its beauty to the lake’s green shore,
      And Norumbega is a myth no more.”
      – John Greenleaf Whittier, Norumbega Hall

      Norumbega; the mythical city of gold in the northeast corner of North America. The name most people today have never heard of. But you see hints of it to this day if you look around enough. around the Wellesley and Newton, Massachusetts area. This poem above was from the dedication of the huge building that was College Hall at Wellesley College, which say on Norumbega Hill until it burned down in 1914. There never was a city of gold in the northeast, but the legend lives on anyway.

      The name became associated with this place we now call New England, but this place could easily still be Norumbega if the French had been more successful in their first interactions with the Native American population living in New England at the time. But the French Commander Jean de Poutrincourt was afraid of the Native Americans, and they in turn deeply distrusted him. Conflict and a hasty retreat north of the Penobscot River, and an opportunity lost. Instead they left an opening for the English. In 1620 Pilgrims arrived, found the local population decimated by disease likely from interactions with other Europeans, and settled into our familiar narrative about New England.

      The name preceded the French. Norumbega appeared on maps by a couple of Dutch cartographers, who situated this lost city of gold south of New France but north of Florida. Maps weren’t especially detailed back in the 1500’s. Abraham Ortelius published his famous Typus Orbis Terrarum in 1570, which shows far greater detail in the areas Spain had conquered than in the northern half of the Americas. But there’s Norumbega, tantalizingly real on a map, ready for the taking by some enterprising conquering nation (the Native American population apparently not a strong consideration).

      Norumbega, depicted in the 1570 Ortelius Map

      Cornelielius van Wetfliet seemingly had Norumbega situated where present-day Washington, DC in his 1597 atlas that, at the time, was the most detailed map of the northeastern coast of North America. But Norumbega was generally accepted to be far north of the Potomac, perhaps the Hudson River but most say it was either the Charles River or the Penobscot River. When you don’t really know the lay of the land you mush it all together into a general blob. Such were the early maps of North America.

      So, since the mythical city of gold in the northeast never really existed, Norumbega became the general place name for New England for a time. That time ended when the English put a stake in the ground at Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts and the eventual settlement of what would be called New England. By the time my old friend Alexander’s map was published in 1624 the place was firmly established as New England, and Norumbega faded into history like the people who lived and explored this place long before the Mayflower set sail. But pull back the covers of history and there it is: mythical, elusive, fascinating. Norumbega is a myth no more

    • Towards Remarkable

      “What is the purpose of writing? For me personally, it is really to explain the mystery of life, and the mystery of life includes, of course, the personal, the political, the forces that make us what we are while there’s another force from inside battling to make us something else.” – Nadine Gordimer

      I don’t know much about Nadine Gordimer that you can’t find in her obituary or on Wikipedia. She was a South African writer who helped expose the darkness of apartheid for the world to see. She won a Nobel Prize for her writing and was on the short list of people that Nelson Mandela wanted to see first when he was released from prison. By all accounts she was a pretty remarkable woman.

      “…with an understanding of Shakespeare there comes a release from the gullibility that makes you prey to the great shopkeeper who runs the world, and would sell you cheap to illusion.”

      You know remarkable when you see it. There’s a life force exuding out of certain people that pulses. It’s not celebrity, though some celebrities, athletes and leaders have it (certainly not all). You learn to spot the authentic energy from the great shopkeepers and cons. It’s an intangible force from inside that is magnetic but genuine. People are drawn to them, because they see something in them that they haven’t quite let out of themselves.

      “If I dreamt this, while walking, walking in the London streets, the subconscious of each and every other life, past and present, brushing me in passing, what makes it real? Writing it down.” 

      I understand Nadine Gordimer better through her words. And in her words she shows us the way. Learn from the great observers of the past. Write it down (Rolf Potts recommends a “commonplace book” where you can record the best ideas you find – blogging certainly helps achieve this too). Keep improving over time. With patience but earnest effort.

      “Your whole life you are really writing one book, which is an attempt to grasp the consciousness of your time and place – a single book written from different stages of your ability.” 

      I’ve come to focus on remarkable recently. Having come across a few people with that extraordinary life force exuding out of every pore, you begin to think about how you might reach some level of that yourself. Gordimer hints at the journey we’re all on with this last quote. We’re all climbing at different paces, at different stages of our ability, towards our own peak. Towards remarkable.

    • Bold Living

      “There is freedom waiting for you,
      On the breezes of the sky,
      And you ask ‘What if I fall?’
      Oh but my darling,
      What if you fly?”
      – Erin Hanson

      Salto mortale, means the dangerous or potentially lethal leap. Mortale is the potentially bad outcome. Salto is the tricky part: the leap. We humans tend to dwell so much on bad outcomes that we never get around to leaping. And then we regret the leaps we didn’t take more than we celebrate having not leaped. And that suggests another Latin phrase that stirs those quivering leaping muscles: Quam bene vivas refert non quam diu, or “It matters not how long but how well you live”.

      “I don’t believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.” – Joseph Campbell

      Alive time means being out there, taking chances, doing things that make you a little bit uncomfortable but thrill you just the same. Not frivolous risk-taking, but leaping into the calculated risk of bold living. The art of being alive while you’re here and vibrant enough to spring to action.

      Live boldly. Leap. Fly.

    • Beaver Paint and Population Growth

      You know right away when you see it. The trunk of a beech tree painted gray for the first four feet from the ground. But not every tree, just certain designated survivors. The rest are up to the whims of fancy. This is beaver country.

      The paint itself is latex paint, the color doesn’t matter to the beaver, but it does to us. Something that somewhat matches the tree is a nice touch, with enough contrast to recognize from afar that that’s the painted one. But paint alone doesn’t do enough to turn off the beaver, according to the Beaver Institute (!) you’ve got to mix in 20 ounces of mason sand per gallon of latex paint. That makes the bark an unpleasant sandpaper texture that even the hungriest beaver is going to turn their nose at. And in theory that saves the tree.

      Humans and beavers don’t always get along well. They were relentlessly hunted by Native Americans for trade with Europeans in the early 1600’s, and those Daniel Boone hats made a fashion statement even as they kept your head warm and dry. Beaver trappers and hunters wiped out the population in New England and New York over the next couple of centuries.

      According to an interview I read with Ben Goldfarb posted on NENC, there was a time in the early 1900’s when they tried to reintroduce the beaver to New England but simply couldn’t find any active colonies to build off of. They tried New York and they didn’t have enough either. So they acquired some Canadian beavers and some beaver from Yellowstone and relocated twenty of them to New York. Eleven years later they had 15,000 beaver and the population has skyrocketed since. Beavers can have 3-5 kits during the winter months, so that’s some serious beaver mating to achieve that kind of exponential growth.

      They don’t just gnaw them down to make nests; this is their food source. Beaver range in size from 30-100 pounds, and they need to eat to keep that beach body. The average beaver eats about 200 trees per year, from saplings to the bigger trees. They prefer aspen, alder, willow and other soft wood deciduous trees. That’s a whole lotta trees. So proactively painting a few with that paint/sand mix is a good way to preserve a few of them while offering up the rest as sacrificial lambs.

      I wondered at this as I walked amongst the trees along the Moss Glen Brook in Vermont over the weekend. The beaver were clearly busy stocking up their food supply for winter, with several downed trees scattered about near the brook. And here amongst them were the designated survivors with gray paint and sand mix. A wonderful curiosity that demonstrated the health of the beaver population in this area. Welcome back.

      Designated Survivor
      Beaver Food

    • A Weekend at The Trapp Family Lodge

      The cow outweighed me by more than 1200 pounds and had long horns protruding menacingly to her right and left, but I edged closer anyway. Bob, the Activities Director at The Trapp Family Lodge, insisted that it was safe to walk out amongst the Highland Cows. He gave us instructions on what to do if they approached us looking for apples (fold your hands into your body and turn slowly away to show you don’t have food). And he told us when one of the cows was annoyed with us. Otherwise, we were turned out to explore the field. Turning around, I realized I was one of the few who took him up on the offer. But risk has its rewards, and being close to the cattle was thrilling.

      Highland Cow

      I’ve been to Stowe, Vermont many times over the years. Mostly I’d drive up for Heady Topper beer, look around a bit and dream of lingering awhile. I’d even stopped to visit the Trapp Family Lodge, walking into the lobby to see what all the fuss was about. Like most Americans I’ve seen The Sound of Music a few dozen times. This wasn’t the Austrian Alps, but you can definitely see why they sank their roots here. The hills are alive in Stowe too.

      The Trapp Family Lodge is a lovely place, with fires roaring and pilsner flowing freely from taps and a quiet elegance without pretense. Pictures of the family decorate the walls throughout the lodge along with art derived from the story of the family’s escape from Nazi Austria. The mountains surround the property in all directions, and the von Trapp family owns much of the land and has donated many more acres to a land trust, ensuring this view would remain largely as it’s always been.

      We’d explored some of that land on our first day at the Lodge, walking the trails to find the Chapel at the top of the hill, and circling back to check out the Kaffeehouse for a snack. There are hiking and snowshoe trails criss-crossing the woods at the resort, and we had plenty of options for getting to know the lay of the land. Mountain bikers had their own single track trails that offered challenging terrain to explore. And wide cross-country skiing trails waited patiently for the snow to arrive. This was an outdoor enthusiast’s paradise. The outdoor hot tub and spa is a great reward for having done the work.

      After meeting the Highland Cows we walked back up the hill to the Lodge, with massive ravens flying about us speaking a sophisticated language of their own. I wondered at the banter, and wished we had more time to get to know them better. But we had other places to explore, and a long hill to walk back up. It seemed the cows were on the furthest pasture from the Lodge, and we had to earn our visit. It worked out to be about a mile each way, and a good way to work off breakfast with a different vantage point.

      We made a quick trip to downtown Stowe to explore the shops and made a stop at The Alchemist to pick up our Heady Topper beer order curbside before returning to the Bierhouse for lunch and a pint. We made a point of saving room in the cooler for some von Trapp beer as well. The Alchemist helped make Stowe the heart of New England IPA country, but the von Trapp’s make a great case for pilsners with their brews. This wasn’t some mass-produced American lager, this was beer with substance.

      Brewing at von Trapp is serious business

      As luck would have it, the woman who seated us was Kristina von Trapp, the granddaughter of Maria and a Director of the resort. She was a gracious host, with a striking presence about her borne of her family celebrity but honed on an active life outdoors and running a successful business. She wasn’t quietly sitting in the corner office looking at spreadsheets, she was hands-on and engaged with the public. And that made the von Trapp experience all the more impressive.

      We resolved to come back here again in the other seasons. Stowe is beautiful year-round, even on a cold November morning when the trees are bare and the snow is just hinting that it might return again. Staying here in all four seasons seems a worthy goal. And it will help keep the refrigerator well-stocked too.

    • Mountains and Waterfalls

      A weekend in Vermont stirs the imagination, and Stowe is famously rich in beauty, romance and adventure. As with so many other places, the magic crackles and sparks here on the edges of the day. Days are filled with adventure, nights a starry dome. The edges in between are when the light dancers march across the mountains and leap and twirl in the sky. In the morning the mountains are jagged black walls that holds the rising dawn back from our eager eyes. At dusk the mountains turn ember-red as they reach for the last rays of light. My iPhone screen mocks my attempts to capture it, but try I must.

      We stayed at the Trapp Family Lodge to get the full Stowe experience. The lodge is lovely and full of the amenities you’d expect at such a place. For me the abundance of hiking trails just outside the door were a nice incentive to stay here. The spa, Bierhall and Kaffeehaus all spoil the senses. But if you’re in Stowe get your ass outside.

      Hiking options are everywhere here, but we wanted waterfalls on this trip. Stowe has a couple of waterfalls nearby that are well worth the quick hike to see. Moss Glen Falls are a tumbling cascade framed by hemlocks. It’s an easy ten minute hike from the car to the best viewing point, and I smiled at how over-prepared we were for a much longer trek. The falls are postcard perfect, and worth a visit on quiet days when the tourists are elsewhere.

      Bingham Falls are near Smugglers Notch with a beautiful waterfall falling into a pristine pool worth the descent. What goes down must go up, and the walk up isn’t as bad as you think it will be after descending a couple of steep, muddy stretches. A few people have died falling into the gorge here, and it’s easy to see how. Nothing separates you from a plunge into the gorge but your own awareness. Not a place for little kids to run unattended.

      Mountains and waterfalls pair well together, and I greedily seek out each. I often wonder why there aren’t more visitors when I come across beautiful places, but usually it’s because I go when the crush of visitors ebbs. Like the mountains at sunrise, waterfalls whisper to you when there’s nobody else around. But only if you’re there to listen.

      Moss Glen Falls
      Bingham Falls

    • Life As You See It

      “Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music—the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.” – Henry Miller

      “The quality of life is in proportion, always, to the capacity for delight. The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention.” – Julia Cameron

      Paying attention is a gift, and writing about it sharpens the focus. I believe that blogging has done more to wake me up to the wonders of my immediate world than anything save the birth of my children. Having children developed my habit of capturing moments in pictures, but the years my kids were growing up were also years the writing quietly lay dormant, biding time. You don’t have much quiet time when the mad dash from diapers to packing school lunches to soccer and dance recitals to driving to away games to picking colleges is happening. And yet I wish I’d written it all down anyway.

      Now, after the mad dash, the writing stirred awake from its slumber. I look around at all there is to see in this world. All there is to learn about the world. All there is to read and taste and see and most importantly, to do. Faraway places will have to wait once again, but there’s so much to see right outside.

      Read a Mary Oliver poem and you see that you’ve been blind the entire time. Chastened yet challenged, you look more deeply at the world in front of you and deeper into the soul. And you write.