The mail lady on a route on the other side of town knows mushrooms. You can leave a fungus in your mail box as a question for her, and along with your day's mail you'll get a note passing judgement on your find. Sometimes she'll deliver a mushroom that she's found to you as a special treat. Not long ago I found a wonderful, big, succulent mushroom and identified it in two books as being edible, choice. One of the books did warn that in some people the mushroom may produce some gastric symptoms. I fried some up in garlic and olive oil as a taste test. Joan did not partake. The first night went fine. I followed the same routine the second evening. Joan stil did not partake. So on the third day Joan took some of the fungus to leave in a friend's mailbox for the mail lady. The verdict: poisonous. OK, well not that poisonous, but I live, perhaps, because I learn. No more book mushrooms for me. Just these, a half-dozen chanterelles, and a big chicken of the woods. We feasted safely on this catch for three days.

Driving up today from Walpole, New Hampshire, along Rt. 12, just east of the Connecticut river, I turned off on a tiny dirt track. A deep mud hole gave me pause to drive any further, and I headed down to the river on foot. Just on the other side of the mud I found half of an old couch settled deep into the bank of a lily pad-strewn back eddy. The late summer afternoon sun was low in the sky, and warm on my back. I forgot my past, and my future. I sat by my hat and watched the dragon flies and a couple of turtles. I don't know how long I sat there, but I did rouse myself at last and drive home. I plugged my computer in and downloaded the day's email. Among that stuff was the usual spam, including a message to me, an assumed corporate head, with advice on how to motivate my employees:

"...Here is what you need to do to get change to happen:
You must create a sense of urgency inside your team. Urgency is the feeling that we can no longer keep doing things the way we have in the past or else something bad will happen. Why do you need to get this urgency? It's because people resist being pushed out of the familiar as familiar routine is their comfort zone. And people sure do resist leaving their comfort zones. 
Only two things will create urgency and make them leave this comfort mentality so that change can take place. 
One is fear. Which is the most effective. The fear of losing their job or some other real or imaginary loss that will be painful. The second is potential pleasure as in bonuses, promotion or compliments.

I don't have any problem with a female insect who eats her mate after copulation. I wouldn't be in favor of encouraging the practice to move its way much further up the food chain, but what's to argue with the idea in principle: there's not a whole lot of use for a male in the lower orders once its genes are in the right place. Still, it makes a dinner date among us humans seem like a pretty tame affair. If you've ever held a mantis, and watched as it slowly tilts its head, looking around for something that might strike its fancy, and then realized that with another slight movement it seems suddenly to be looking directly into your eyes, you've been beguiled by a bug. There's a thrilling sense of poised purpose about the creature's movements. Gentle, seductive, dangerous and beautiful. Shall we order just one more bottle of that delicious cabernet, my love?

photo: anna packard

Our friends, the insects, don't have much regard for appearances. But when they are on our side, we're usually content to live and let live. A tomato hornworm is a lovely creature, or would be if we could set aside all the unpleasant aspects it possesses. Like, it's a humongous, soft, disgusting, puke green, squirmy tube of high octane gastrointestinal biomechanics that can eat half a tomato plant in a single night. But where go the worms, go also the braconid wasps, quarter inch long nondescript little do-gooders who have gone beyond the idea of having children who are born with a silver spoon in their mouths. The children of the wasps are born in the best of all possible worlds--inside their own dinner. The wasp lays her eggs under the skin of the luckless worm. The hatchlings wake to life like hungry midwesterners teleported into a Bob Evans sausage restaurant.The worm quickly loses ambition and becomes a zombie, alive only to serve its little guests, stopped often almost in mid-bite at the end of a stem. The children of the wasp, when their time has come, burrow out of the skin and form white gauzy cocoons that remind me of the banderillas stuck in the necks of a bull in a bullfight. I can't help but feel a stab of sympathy for the worm, and I hope you, also, feel a bit of that. And know that if you lose the capacity to feel that, you are in peril. Now let me stop moralizing and go pick my tomatos.

My sleep has been troubled by disturbing dreams. I try to remember them in the morning, but am left only with the feeling of disturbance, and none of the story that caused it. Few people are interested in the dreams of others, and then only when the story is good and clear and compellingly strange. I have nothing to offer but the nearly desparate need to tell how I feel after such a dream. But perhaps I am not alone. Towards the end of August in New Hampshire, many of us feel a taint of anxiety where none should be. We tell each other that it is the light, that the angle and quality and length of the light is changing, and that each day slips more quickly over the horizon, and arrives more reluctantly in the morning. I make no apologies. It is an ancient fear, and I take what comfort I can in that. Winter is coming. We'll get through it. We always do.

We've been back to Deer Isle four or five summers now, and each time it seems that it's been harder and harder to leave. We learn more about the people who live and work there each time we stay, but it is what we learn about ourselves that is most important. What a teacher a week can be.

Little Mikie was working as the personal assistant for the CEO of a biotech company, and beginning to think that she'd hired him just so she could take him out of her purse at parties and show him off as her token inner city homunculus. During a weekend at her oceanside house on Nantucket she'd asked him to clean the loose pills out of the bottom of her purse, and he had a sore back from hauling Zoloft, Viagra and Midols. That evening he was walking on the table, watching the tide come in and feeling used, when he came around the side of a pot of clams and found himself face to face with a lobster. He could tell the lobster was mad because it was bright red and steaming. Little Mikie held absolutely still, and hoped the lobster's sight was not as good on land as it was in the water. A few moments passed, and the lobster didn't move. Neither did Little Mikie. He took a step towards it, thought he saw the feeler twitch, and froze. "We're both in the wrong place," whispered Little Mikie, but the lobster didn't say anything. It just sat there staring at him out of eyes that looked like gumballs on the ends of pencils. Little Mikie took a couple more steps. "I'm talking to you. What you got to say?" He was feeling braver. The lobster didn't move and didn't say a word. Little Mikie kicked the lobster's claw. He got close enough to feel the heat coming off the lobster. "What you looking at? You looking at me? You got a problem with that?" Little Mikie felt tough for the first time in his life. The lobster just sat there, saying nothing, doing nothing. Little Mikie got angry. "You dissin me, you fat sack of stew?" And he grabbed a feeler and twisted it. It broke off in his hands and juice ran out the end. Little Mikie suddenly realized that he had just had an argument with somebody's dinner, and instead of feeling tough, now all he felt was very, very small and foolish.

After two weeks of fog and rain, the forests on Deer Isle begin to sprout neon fungus. Cadmium yellows, blood reds, day-glo orange. But why the need for color, I wonder, when you can walk with your eyes closed and know when you come close to these wonders simply by their smell, a dank, rich, musty, skunky, funky, fungal odor so thick you could almost catch it in a jar, take it home and fry it with garlic and butter.

You need to buy a $2 licence to dig clams on Deer Isle. Then, with rubber boots and a clam rake, you go out on the flats at low tide. You can make your own clam rake by sawing most of the handle off an old pitchfork, and bending the tines down at a right angle. Clams leave holes in the mud through which they take in water when the tide is up, and sometimes when you step near a group of holes, some will squirt. Take the rake, and work it down 8 inches or so in front of a likely group of holes and pull the mud back to expose the clams. Sea worms are fellow travelers, and their sting is nasty, so as you work the clams out of the mud with your hands, be careful. In an hour, in a good location, you can dig into 20 groups of holes and find five to ten clams in each dig. And you can do this every day, eating the clams until you are sick of them. You could, if you choose, live on clams all summer long. We heard stories of summer life a decade or two ago, when it wasn't unusual to be able to dig enough clams every day to support yourself, gas for your car, your share of the rent, beer, and a minor coke habit. But there are always limitations to the hand to mouth existence, and eventually any party becomes more tedious than fun.

The tides along the upper coast of Maine rise and fall around ten feet a couple of times a day, every 12.5 hours or so, actually, so you know that if the water has reached the mark on the rock at six o'clock in the evening, it will be there again at 6:30 in the morning, and again that night around seven. Living at the ocean's edge is a good place to think about weight, about what gives things heaviness, and about how the water, rock, air and flesh all pull at each other. The more mass you've got, the heavier you can pull. Newton gave us this realization, that gravity is an attractive force, and that everything you can see and feel has it. Thus the moon is pulled against the earth, and when its time has run out will eventually fall into it, like any satellite. But for the time being (and that would be a lot of time) she simply tries to peel the water off the crust, and that bulge of water follows her revolutions, and we see it, and feel it, somehow, as the level rises each day and then falls. At high tide I feel a subtle sense of well-being, of, well, fullness. And it may be that is because I feel the moon trying to lift me as well as the water.

My grandfather taught me the names of the dinosaurs when I was a kid. He had a dozen or so tiny cast metal models no more than a couple of inches high, and I remember him holding the brontosaurus in the palm of his hand and trying to describe how big it was in real life. I understood. Bigger than the garage, heavier than a bus. Little Mikie knows that size matters, but even so, as he stood on the heel of a 105 million year old dinosaur track, both the size of the creature who made that track, and span of time that separated him from the wet mud that sucked at the three toes of the foot of the beast brought him up speechless. If this is possible, and true, what else can there be in this world as well? What would we be if we could not be struck speechless with wonder?

I went to the license bureau and told the young woman, "It's my birthday, I want something a little different in the way of a picture." "Well, duh," she said, in a nice way, "Of course it's your birthday or why else would you be here for a renewal. Besides that, actually your birthday is tomorrow." "So I'm early," I said. "Doesn't that count?" "Well, sure," she said. "The computers are strange today anyway, what did you have in mind?" "Oh, something a little more colorful than normal, something that might, well, show more of who I am inside." "You mean who you think you are?" "Whatever," I said. "You decide."

So she did.

If July 4 is the celebration of a U.S. government-sanctioned revolution, then it may be unseemly to remind ourselves of other revolutions in other places. Not all revolutions are as successful as was our own in both booting the scaliwags out and establishing a form of government that gives the people some protection from the depradations of new scaliwags.

Half of us in this country now are a little nervous about how hard it may be to get rid of the current regime by the vote, but we will give it a good fight, anyway. But not with machetes, though it's sobering to stand with one in your hand and consider how many desparate people have taken up a blade because they had no other way to cut themselves free.

So are we posers for appropriating the icon that Earnesto "Che" Guevara has become to give us some heart and hope? Yes and no. My t-shirt came from Cuba as a gift from my sister, where Castro has turned the worship of Che into a state religion. Hank bought his shirt in Florence, Italy, where Che has become a fashion statement. The real Che was smart, charismatic, idealistic, generous, obsessive and not above doing some of the things that the bad guys always do to nail down the power they think they need. He helped Fidel start the Cuban revolution in 1956, and later worked for the Bearded One to push various state economic reforms along. He was killed in Bolivia with the blessing of the CIA in 1967, a nearly point-perfect time and death to ensure that he would become the enduring image of revolutionary romanticism and fervor.

He would have been 75 this year, and the question that will remain unanswered is whether he would have yielded some of his certainty of the need for total, and necessarily violent, revolution. In the decades since he died, people have gotten better at getting freedom without blood-letting; the Stalinists and Maoists have been proved wrong, even if the world is still haunted by greed and injustice and an unprecedented litany of slaughter and vile leaders. I'd like to think that Che would have mellowed, but that's my fantasy. I wear his image on a t-shirt both because it reminds me to think about what I have that other people have fought for, and because it reminds me that none of us ever has the lock on the truth, and that the power of our convictions can lead us both to acts of goodness and evil, and we can lose track of where we began if we don't pay close attention. And that's why I pose both foolishly and seriously with the other icons of revolution...the sword and the pistol. I don't speak for Hank, and I can't take any responsibility for the cat.

Looking for newspaper to lay under the bunny's cage yesterday I found the October 8, 2002 Concord Monitor. The headline is "Bush: Saddam Poses Immediate Threat." Using the words that began as half-truths and eventually became as empty of meaning as clacking sticks, Bush on that date told a crowd in Cincinnati that Hussein is a murderous tyrant who poses an immediate threat to the United States and American lives. Saddam, said Bush, would be turning his weapons of mass destruction over the terrorists for use against this country.

We know that the particular genius of the demagogue is his ability to link the inarticulate fear and anger of masses of people to a clear target, and Bush is nothing if not a demagogue.

So be it. We had three great weeks in the early spring smashing up the place where civilization was born. We set free a lot of people as well as a lot of chaos. We weren't the first, and we probably won't be the last. It wasn't our fault. Saddam made us do it. We didn't choose this war, Bush has said countless times in the past several months, in what has to be on of the most breath-taking rhetorical reversals of cause and effect any American leader has had the hubris to offer us in years, even counting Clinton.

And I'm beginning to suspect that Bush, unlike Clinton, may have begun to believe his own words. If I were forced to choose, I'll take the cynical manipulator who recognizes his lies over the fool who believes what he says because other people seem to.

So the Americans, rallied by the lies and half-truths of their leaders, rousted a despot from Iraq, and now can congratulate ourselves for having accomplished something indisputably good in the world, but at the same time we must look at the price of that accomplishment. And wonder if one of the greatest costs of our action will come not in lives or dollars or in a debillitating, long-term civic disorder in Iraq, but in the growing complacency and inability of the American electorate to question the words and actions of their government.

I gotta go.

Our friend is a smart, strong, capable woman who seems to have more command than most of us over her life. So Little Mikie and I were surprised to hear the near-panic in her voice when she called this morning around 7:30. It seems she had discovered what she identified as a brown recluse spider (it wasn't) in her sink as she started to make her morning coffee, and the sight of the spider set off some ancient alarm deep in the part of her brain where terror still serves, or tries to serve, to protect us. I felt the alarm myself, just yesterday, when a stick in the garden next to my foot turned suddenly into a snake. "I'm hyperventalating," said our friend. "Please help me. I don't normally kill spiders, but do whatever you have to do." This spider had long, graceful legs, and a gentle demeanor, but it was large enough to scare the bejeesus out of you, particularly when it was not expected, particularly when you haven't had your coffee, and particularly when you find it energetically working every one of its eight legs in its own frantic attempt to scale the slippery stainless steel walls of the sink that it had the misfortune to blunder into during the night. Little Mikie calmed the spider by singing a lullaby that began, "There's an island way out in the sea, where the babies they all grow on trees..." while I coaxed it into a jar.

Celebrity is as elusive as silence and solitude, and becomes, if you choose, your work or your demon. Steve reminded me that a few years ago when we were in Maine we heard about the miraculous appearance of the image of Jesus in the sap flowing down the fresh cut face of a branch on somebody's tree. We thought about going to visit it, but never did. I would welcome a little spate of celebrity if I could use it to my advantage to line my pockets, and then turn it off. But it seems that celebrity is something that many people want only for its most obvious value, and that is to cast the light, however briefly (A.W. gave us 15 minutes) on our sorry-ass existence, and in the process validate or affirm that existence in a way that somehow we (some of us) feel incapable of doing by ourselves. We never thought that Little Mikie's bee hole would bring us celebrity, but it did, and we, and the bees, basked in it briefly. Little Mikie disappeared before the TV cameras arrived. We enjoyed the hubub. The bees seemed to enjoy the warmth of the TV lights. And then it was over.

OK, so I can show funny animal pictures if I want to. We don't know who this guy is, but we know that the reason the feeder is empty is that he already drained it, and now he's coming back, he hopes, for more. Springs eternal, doesn't it?

Just a few hours after Little Mikie visited the bee hole on Friday, the bees began bringing up dirt and pushing it out of the hole. By Saturday they had made one central cone, and two smaller cones on either side. Now, I'm not going to try to tell you that what the bees did had anything to do with the little plastic figure I call Little Mikie and the fact that I photographed him by the hole, but I am baffled. The bee hole has been in our front walk for at least five years, and although they've dug it out from time to time, I've never seen them do what they did yesterday. The little green bees, by the way, are quite real. Little Mikie, alas, is not. Word of the bee hole has spread rapidly. The Screech tomorrow deals with the perils of celebrity.

When Little Mikie was really little he fell into a bee hole. It wasn't a bad deal; after all, people fall into all sorts of things throughout their lives and often never find their way out. Little Mikie has nothing but wonderful memories of his time among the bees. What he doesn't know is how long he was there, because the bees took him as one of their own, even though he didn't have enough legs, to say nothing of wings. They were green bees, and because green bees all use the same name, they let Little Mikie use it also. When he was among the bees he was called Many-Me. Even now, he melts with longing when he says the name to himself. He still remembers how quiet it was in the bee hole. There was a sound that wasn't a sound, like a silent, high-pitched purr, which was the sound of all the bees steadily whispering their name over and over again. And there was the sweet, dry, moldy smell of the tunnels and rooms in the bee hole, and the feeling of the bodies of the bees brushing against him as they passed. If Little Mikie hadn't been growing, he might have stayed among the bees forever. But the bees watched him carefully, and just before he was too big to fit through the hole, they raised him up and gently pushed him out. That was the first time he knew what real loneliness was. So now, when he feels particularly lonely, he finds a bee hole, and stands on its edge, whispering Many-Me, Many-Me, until a bee comes out and whispers back.

Joan stopped on the trail, enraptured with the salmony pink wings of some seed pods scattered across the forest floor. But something drew her to make some order, an arrangement, like dipping a brush in raw paint and touching it with purpose to the canvas. "It's for the other hikers," she explained. We wouldn't know, of course, whether or not anybody else would ever see the little painting she made. But it was enough to imagine that some one might. Earlier in the morning I had been deleting a few of the 90 pictures on the digital camera to make way for a few more such as this one. It was hard to choose which to trash, because they were all pretty good. I got a little distracted and pushed the button when it said "Delete All" rather than "Delete Selected." There were pictures there that I would have wanted to have around me for a long time to come. And there is comfort in knowing that we all have that need to scoop up some remnant of the flow and hold on to it. But where there is greater comfort, for me, anyway, is knowing that it really all does drift away, and if anything holds fast longer than the rest, it is perhaps just stories and stones. You may remember this little tiny story much longer than you'll remember the photo. And the stone? It will be there. And be there. And be there. God willing and the gravel crusher don't come.

I dunno. It's been kind of a long day at the computer. The memories of last weekend in Acadia have continued to seep into my work day, unbidden. I'm tired. I smell the baked blueberry pie that Joan or Anna made. On the top of one of the Acadian mountains, we came upon a seagull standing on a cairn of pink granite. The gull looked at us, turning its head from one side to the other, as though the reading from just one eye was not enough. This gull had no fear of us, and was clearly expecting us to pull off our backpacks and share lunch. Instead, I stood next to the bird and shot 12 pictures, turning just so with each frame. I made a complete circle. The gull didn't move. Whatever the human wants to do before lunch is ok, as long as it leads to lunch. If you want to see a bigger version of this panorama, click here. I'm going to eat blueberry pie.

The coast of Maine was the scene of some geologic extravagance some 400 million years ago. At Acadia an ancient volcano erupted as magma upwelled, and now, all that's left, if all is the word, are massive islands of granite. In some area, like Acadia, that granite is pink. Sometimes there is not enough time to tell what we need to tell, and then if we are lucky we find some rocks that hold a mirror up to us.

You can't always get what you need, said the Stones, and if you needed that music you know the rest of the lyric. Silly old photos rise to the top sometimes like cream, and this one did, on the eve of me and the love of my life heading off to the coast of Maine for a few days in celebration of our 30-something anniversary. I was talking with a buyer this morning, named Song, at the Kripalu Center, selling her 15 of our yoga videos, and she said what's the secret of a long marriage. I laughed. Nothing romantic. Lucky chemistry. Accomodation. The kind of lust that persists in spite of age. A desire to see the story through to the end. What the heck. A mirage. Water. Happiness.

Joan's Bar: I asked the group to stand for a second on the patio of the Putney School arts building, a dangerous place strewn with odd-shaped scraps of metal and ideas. I turned my back for a moment to adjust the camera, and when I brought the viewfinder to my eye I decided that one picture would have to do given the surly attitude of the subjects.

The Screech Mistress at her bath. Even soaking wet she can still pierce the eardrums of the unworthy. O ye of of timorous ear, tremble and attend, for the screechers may not inherit the earth, but neither will they let other do it in silence. Or to borrow from the folk litany of long ago, "Where have all the liberals gone, long time passing?" And furthermore, "Do not go gentle into that pious (a.k.a. neoconservative) night. Screech, Screech against the dying of the light."

I saved this foto from last week because I knew I would want to look at it again. The lilacs are mostly gone by now, brown and sodden with last night's rain. It's easier to bring the memory of their scent to mind, than the color and shapes of the flowers. The scent, a cloud of vapor that trailed around the bushes, drawn by breezes. The various flowers lead me on a path through the summer, treacherously drawing me along to winter, and then abandoning me. The day lilies are next, coming in mid-June. Joan and I had Indiana day lilies at our mid-June wedding thirty something years ago.

Little Mikie stood on a round stone at the very edge of the water and wished that he could speak with a fish. He waited and waited and none came, and the longer he waited the more certain he became that if only he could talk witha fish for a minute he could learn something that would help him to feel safer. He didn't know much about fish, and so he didn't realize that they were all busy this morning eating creatures just about as big as Mikie was. But a large part of Mikie's luck is due to the fact that he has never really understood what he should be afraid of, and so he is often afraid of the wrong things. After a while a very large fish spotted him on the rock, and wriggled close in the shallow water through the grasses. The fish fixed its liquid eye on Mikie. "There is safety in numbers," said the fish. "But that is no comfort to the individual." Mikie said, "Thanks," and hurried away.

This is the way my van looks loaded up with other peoples' kayaks, about to depart for other peoples' adventures. And that's Arnie and Linda standing in front of my pleasure craft, smiling broadly because they have the keys and the reservation on an ocean-side campground in Maine for the weekend. Where am I in this picture? Behind the camera, luckless, house-bound, confined to yet one more weekend of drudge and toil while my friends head for the freedom of the wine-dark sea.

But come back to the Screech tomorrow for the Continuing Adventures of Little Mikie. At least he knows how to have fun.