Bonding with Nature: Part 2—Montauk

I was walking my friend Sadie’s beautiful grey Bengal cat Nigil on his leash in her Montauk neighborhood, when we saw 4 rabbits in a yard. Nigil stopped and twitched, all muscular attention. The rabbits froze. I watched. We all waited. Then, after about 5 minutes, it occurred to me that there was no reason to scare the rabbits, that I should just move Nigil along and let the rabbits continue their fun in the grass, so I did, and to my surprise, Nigil came along peacefully. There are always more rabbits. Besides, he had a surfboard to ride.

One afternoon, Sadie and I were walking along the beach in Montauk right at the edge of the water, when we saw something move between the rocks. “A sea worm,” Sadie said. It was a long rusty red worm creature with lots of little legs. I said maybe it was a millipede. We didn’t know what to call it; we just liked the way it moved—undulating and curling in and out of the rocks in the cool, shallow water. It moved with a rhythm all its own.

Bonding with Nature: Part 1—New York City

I’ve had a lot of fun outside this summer, both in the city and travelling. Here is the first in my series of close encounters with other creatures:

I was sitting on a bench in Washington Square Park in New York City, reading a novel, when a squirrel jumped on top of the bench about 3 feet away and started running straight at me; then stopped a few inches from me and stared; then ran off; did it again; ran off; did it again; ran off; did it again.

Several women caught my eye, and one said, "I guess he wants your attention."  I agreed, and we all laughed, saying we’d never seen anything like it. It set the tone for the rest of the summer.

More Smells

Montauk smells open, salty, and sweet—wild beach roses, wild grasses and shrubs, pine trees, sand, big skies, and vast ocean—with hints of sunscreen.

The Berkshires smell clean and earthy—dark moist rocky dirt, thick woods, ferns, pine trees, wildflowers, gravel roads, blue lakes—luscious, so rich and deep and sweet I want to lap it up and bathe in it.

Ft. Collins, Colorado, smells fresh and clear—sandy desert plains, scattered shelters of grass and trees, rushing rivers and rippling lakes—spacious, with lots of room for the imagination.

The southern Rockies southwest of Denver smell like red dirt and Ponderosa pines—rich and heady and spiritual—almost like the piney woods of East Texas where my mother’s family comes from—but thinner and more dispersed with more room to breathe and to distinguish individual scents.

St. Louis, Missouri, smells like brown dirt, grass, trees, and flowers—the meeting of the mighty Missouri and Mississippi rivers, the Gateway to the West—earthy, watery, grassy, flood plains and high rocky bluffs—rich and full like southern and eastern smells, but more spacious like northern and western smells.

On a hot, humid summer night, in the woods, in the dark, with no streetlights or flashlights, just moonlight, Innsbruck, Missouri, about an hour west of St. Louis, smells like cinnamon—like a rich, heady stew of sweet wet dirt and grass and trees and berries and flowers and honeysuckle and lake water and horses, spiked with cinnamon. Without the eye to distinguish the sights, the nose takes over as the organ of discrimination, taste, and joy.

Wild Roses

New York smells neutral to me. Sure, there are garbage smells and gasoline and diesel smells and chemical smells and musty, moldy smells—even the occasional whiff of ocean air smells or Hudson River estuary smells, but they are all smeared over a backdrop of no smell. Most of the time, my nose can clearly differentiate the surface smell from the background smell. I know that whatever scent I happen to be smelling at the moment is only temporary, and underneath it all is nothing.

Louisiana is different. The air there is so rich, so dense, so sweet, so heady with rich, moist earth and flowering, fertile green and thick sea, swamp, creek, bayou, and river that my senses are overwhelmed. It’s a gumbo, a stew of so many flavors so thick that it becomes something completely its own creation. And the people who live there don’t even notice it.

I visited there in Spring, and as soon as I stepped out of the airport into the parking lot—even though I was surrounded by cars and still on ground covered by concrete—the air smelled sweet—completely, totally sweet—so sweet I could taste it—and I couldn’t smell anything else underneath it—no neutral undertone. I could smell the gasoline fumes and exhaust of cars on top of it, but the undertone was just sweet—sweet as far as the nose could smell.

I commented on the sweetness of the air over and over on my trip, and invariably every person who actually lived in Louisiana said something like, “Really? It does? I didn’t notice.” Or they just ignored me, which I charitably took as meaning the same thing.

When I returned to New York, I missed that sweetness. I couldn’t detect it anywhere. The nothingness was everywhere, with the overlay of pollution and occasional whiffs of ocean. A friend from Louisiana suggested I plant rosemary and carry some in my pocket. She sent me pressed flowers from Louisiana. It all helped, but where was that deep, overwhelming sweetness?

Then the other day, I went to my favorite park on the East Side, Stuyvesant Cove Park, and there it was. As I walked along the East River, smelling the river smells, the automobile exhaust smells off the FDR, whiffs of body odor and garbage smells from the assortment of humans travelling through the space, and even the pleasant smells of earth and trees and plants, a rich, deep, bright sweetness seized my nose and stayed and filled me—it was the only smell. Some brilliant souls had planted beach roses in the park, and they had grown into big overflowing bushes of bright fuschia-red flowers whose scent had the power to fill the air and follow me and even become the undertone of the park.

Thank you to the creators, builders, and maintainers of Stuyvesant Cove Park—and of all the other parks in New York and their many spots of sensual richness and delight.

The thing about New York is that there are always possibilities for such moments. And Louisiana—well, as my friend said about the gardenia she sent me, “A tad overwhelming, like a lot of Southern things, eh?”

I will be travelling this summer. Look for more reports on the smells of the world!

A Tribute to Phoebe Snow

Phoebe Snow and I were born on the same date—July 17th—and her voice sang what my soul felt. She died April 26, 2011, and I have been listening to her music every day since, marvelling at the clarity, strength, beauty, and distinctiveness of her voice. Her songs were love songs, full of humor, passion, heartache, grace, devotion, loyalty, strength, and truth. Listening to her sing grounds me, confirms me, and gives me solace and comfort and joy. May she hear herself now the way all her fans hear her and feel the same deep recognition of a kindred spirit. Thank you, Phoebe. You are a shining star.
Listen here.

The Last Lions

Last night I saw the movie "The Last Lions."

I hope everyone can see it. You can read about it, watch a trailer, and register for a sweepstakes to go to Botswana at this link.

Wild lions are being driven to extinction by humans, at an alarming rate. 50 years ago there were about 450,000 lions, and now there are about 20,000.

The 2 filmmakers lived out in the field for 2 years--just the 2 of them, no other crew, in order to minimize their footprint--and filmed 3 different story lines, until 1 emerged as the story to tell. It is an amazing story of one mother's struggle to survive when she is forced to leave her home because other lions are forced to leave their homes when humans settle in their territory. The shots they were able to get are incredible, but what's most impressive is the story itself.

If lions can learn to adapt to new environments and overcome their fears and instinctual programming, we can too. Let's share our home and help one another.

When life gives you lemon bags…

Ever since I saw a bird caught in plastic netting on a show, maybe Winged Migration, I have made a point of not buying any produce in bags made of plastic netting, unless I felt a compelling reason. On the rare occasions when I have bought something in them, I have meticulously cut the bags up into teeny tiny shreds—as instructed by something I read somewhere—in the hopes that no bird would get caught in them.

Today, I wanted lemons, and I went to Whole Foods. I could buy 9 organic lemons for $4—if I bought them in a yellow plastic netting bag. Or I could buy them loose for $1 a piece organic or half a dollar a piece non-organic. I bought the bag.

But when I got home and started cutting it up, I noticed the shreds still occasionally had holes that could trap a bird’s leg, and I was still putting plastic into the trash, and then from there, where would it go? Probably into that big toxic plastic continent brewing in the ocean—at least eventually—or in a landfill where it would create toxins for a thousand years or so, and it could do a lot of damage along the way.

Maybe I shouldn’t have bought the lemons in the first place—they weren’t local, and they weren’t sustainably packaged or transported, and I couldn’t really defend it. I like cooking and eating with lemons, but I don’t have to—there are other ways to eat and eat well. Still I had bought them, and here I was stuck with this bag.

What was I going to do with it? Save it for an art project? Maybe a collage of trash? How much stuff like that can I save?

A quick web search, and I found out they are absolutely not recyclable, but they are reusable. They make excellent scrubbers if you’re handy with a crochet needle. Not having a crochet needle or any idea how to use one, but having parsnips, carrots, and potatoes I just bought from the farmers’ market and was preparing for a veggie stew, I started scrubbing.

They do make excellent scrubbers—the best I’ve ever found, in fact, and much better than that nice wooden bristle one from Germany via Williams-Sonoma.

For more info on how to make scrubbers out of plastic netting—or to have someone else do it for you for free—check out http://fatbottombags.com/id15.html.

Yes, my little plastic lemon bag is nothing compared to the hundreds of miles of plastic wrapped around pallets of food shipped to grocery stores every day—and where does all of that go? I doubt they are recycling it or doing anything worthwhile with it—just use it once and throw it somewhere to poison us forever after—but at least mine isn’t choking a bird or literally a drop in the ocean, and now I have a good scrubber.