We’ve had good August days: days starting cool and warming up to hot with few clouds and little haze to block the sunshine during the day or radiational cooling after sundown, making for crisp nights full of stars. Last night in rained, not much, but it rained, and it is warmer. Morning haze blues the distant mountains, not enough to change the gradient of greens, from sun-glittered almost white to shadowed forest almost black. Chickens are out and in: out of their strongbox pen and within the electrified fence. We are surrounded by the forest here in Sandwich Notch, and so many animals pass through our oasis farm, including predators. The cute baby raccoon I discovered in the plum tree has a family of chicken marauders, I am sure. They come in raising bands to wreak havoc and sometimes kill just to kill, leaving behind a grisly story of a nocturnal visit. The many bears that pass by are mainly practice fructarianism, especially enjoying apples from the many domestic and wild apples around. However, they are not unknown to exercise their omnivorous side and snatch a hen or two. Despite their ability to use their strength to tear apart what one might think is a secure pen, bears seem to be gentler and more focused than the masked bandits: one hen will do. Fischer Cats (not a cat at all), are the true terrors of the farm, snatching anything and everything including small dogs and cats. Lest this seem too violent a place, I am speaking of the occasional, and the good farmer takes precautions and even is sometimes willing to share.
Sandwich Mountain Farm and Curious Gourds Gardens are an oasis, an island in the forest: meadows, pasture, orchard and a few homes. I am reminded of a stanza from Wendell Berry’s, The Country of Marriage:
Sometimes our life reminds me
of a forest in which there is a graceful clearing
and in that opening a house,
an orchard and garden,
comfortable shades, and flowers
red and yellow in the sun, a pattern
made in the light for the light to return to.
The forest is mostly dark, its ways
to be made anew day after day, the dark
richer than the light and more blessed,
provided we stay brave
enough to keep on going in.
23 ears ago today (August 9) my wife, Jenny and I, read the full text of this poem to each other in the orchard I can now see from the Curious Gourds Studio. The Studio itself is like Berry’s house in a “graceful clearing.” I can walk North, towards the gardens and orchards, or south into the forest. In the Studio I am at the threshold of forest and farm, and also, with the Sandwich Notch Road cutting through just on the other side of the garden, I am close to a magical corridor that can pull to many me other worlds. Away from the road, I am on farm-time, or, if I am “brave enough to keep going in,” forest-time.
***
Last week I wrote of time and space, imagining a reversal of the formal for velocity, distance over time (d/t), to create a formula time over distance (t/d) that would represent the experiential expansion and contraction of space that occurs when we travel at different speeds. I suggested that we could even map this, and this morning I am thinking, how?
With the help of *Curious George and his balloons I have an answer.
First, imagine a two dimensional circle that is bisected by a line.
Now think of the perimeter of the circle as a road that surounds a National Wilderness Area, and the line bisecting it to be a bushwhack through the forest. For the purposes of this thought experiment, ignore that this two-dimensional surface really exists on the sphere of the earth. In our usual mode of experiencing, the perimeter line (the road) is longer that the bisecting line (the trail). However, when we apply the time over distance formula, the perimeter shrinks and the bisecting line expands. How can we represent this? Using tools from mathematical discipline of topology, we need to add another dimension and turn our circle into a sphere: we need a balloon from Curious George.
Think of a sphere (or a balloon) as a collection of circles piled on top of each other, each separated by a small distance and starting from a single point at one pole (where the balloon string is attached). Each circle is a little larger than the last until we reach the middle (the equator), and then the circles start getting smaller again until you reach the opposite pole: we have a balloon or globe. Let’s imagine this as like our earth, having a north and south pole and an equator line. Now imagine that the road around the wilderness area is a circle close to 
the South Pole, one of the smaller circles. The trail through wilderness could be one of many bisecting lines running perpendicular to the road. For those familiar with maps, you will recognize I am describing are longitude and latitude lines. By pulling the road circle down towards what would be the Antarctic on our earth (remember, topology allows to stretch and shrink objects at will), we decrease the size of the perimeter of this circle. If we maintain our bushwhack route through the center of the circle, it will make a long journey over the North Pole and back towards the Antarctic — see George’s ballon above.
Now we have the problem that all map makers have: how do represent this two-dimensionally — how do we make a map of this? We need to project our sphere onto a flat surface. We started out with a two dimensional representation — the circle bisected by the line, but we have already done some topological stretching and shrinking that makes this drawing unsatisfactory. For the purposes of illustration, I will borrow August’s Conformal Projection of the Sphere on a Two-Cusped Epicycloid (below).
The above image is a partial representation of the projection that shows the antarctic in the center, where our shrunken circular road is. The illustration below shows the full projection.
We can see that the north pole appears towards the top of the map, which in our original drawing would have been at the halfway point of the bisecting line.
However our imaginary globe is not the earth, and the resulting map should not be confused with a map of the world. Rather, it is a small area in our world represented according to the time over space formula. It shows the vast territory of the walking world of the wilderness area, as well as the shrunken, frenetic world of a single circular road. Playing on the Einstein’s concept of space-time, I’ll call this a map of time-space.
***
A night has passed and another morning come. The evening was sweet with gentle rain. Distant thunder and lightning suggested something more, but the rain continue to fall gently and pushed cool, fragrant air into the Studio. In the night I heard violin strings plucked, once, twice, thrice. Emerging from sleep I was confused, but then saw a mouse scampering across the table where I’d left my fiddle. The morning is bright, the mountains clear. Time runs slowly for me here of the edge of forest and field. I know the nearby road can sweep me away from this time and place, this time-space. How long can I resist?
* Curious George is a registered trademark of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.