The week of cool and even cold nights warming to hot days with bright sun ended Saturday. The sky foretold change with high wispy clouds dimming the afternoon. Sunday brought gray sky and by mid-morning, rain. Rain was tentative at first, stopping to allow the forest to exhale smoky mist. I took a second look to make sure it was not the smoke of fire. Then rain settled in and for the day and night, and this morning, as I begin to write (Monday), light rain continues to fall and the mountains are a smoky, dull green. The sky above is a hard, irregular ceiling of white and shades of gray. The feeling of season continues to shift as we approach September.

It seems that I have time on my mind if not on my hands, though I do see time on my hands: scars. Just on my left hand: the time I cut my thumb at Camp Pemigewasset when I was nine; the time I nicked the base of my index finger with a chain saw when I was in my late teens (a lucky escape); a ragged scar coming downtime center of my palm from the hand surgery I had four years ago; a blackened middle fingernail from a hammer blow two weeks ago; a scabby line on my palm from the slip of a hand saw one week ago. This kind of memory written into the cells of my hand. The permanent scars are the oddity, for skin cells are replaced (rebuilt) every 16 months or so, and with the scars recalled: memory. Of course, that is just my left hand, and I could recount many tales of other scars and aches of which the lingering pain in my ribs and shoulder is most recent. From a molecular standpoint, my entire body rebuilds itself every some number of years (seven seems to be the popular number). After my death and the shedding of flesh, DNA memory will linger in my bones as well as scattered in my descendants. Eventually my bones will disappear, or, perhaps, turn into stone and last a while longer. These carry a sort of memory too, a morphology, a shape and structure that tells of my place among the forking paths of evolution.

It is at first disconcerting to think of our bodies as not being the same stuff, the same material, all our lives. Materially, we are successive copies of ourselves, though it is not neat as that. Like most other things in the natural world, the boundary between one self and another is fuzzy, occurring gradually, a gradient of change as cells copy themselves. At least between birth and death. And, of course, there is our growth, maturing and aging that presents us with change between these two thresholds. Again, like other things in nature, we are at once the same and different all along the line of our lives. It is memory that binds things, whether in our skin, muscles, brains, DNA code, or written words, paintings, music, photos.

What remains the same, if not the physical stuff? We have a sense of continuous being, a sense self, but how do we pin it down?

The philosopher Hegel, who has a reputation for incomprehensibility, outlines the problem in his discussion of consciousness and sense certainty from the Phenomenology of Mind: the world perceived through our senses appears to be the most immediate and certain  way of knowing things: we see something before us here and now. Our certainty disappears, however, as we try to lock onto particular here and now: now immediately fades into the past, and what I see here disappears the moment I turn around: seeing first a tree, then a house, different heres.

What brings continuity to our sense impressions? I do: consciousness brings order to the shifting sands of movement in time and space. For Hegel, this I also collapses into contradiction when we must choose between a plurality of possible Is.  This is enough of Hegel for most people, so let’s put him aside.

What is this thing myself? What does it mean to be conscious? The psychologist/philosopher Williams James (also a Tamworth, New Hampshire summer visitor) responds in a way that may be surprising to some. In  Does Consciousness Exist? from Essays in Radical Empiricism, he answers his titular question with an emphatic no — if what we mean by consciousness is that some entity stands apart from the outside world and represents objects in a separate inner space. This is the old problem of philosophy that Hegel tortures through, and one that I constantly evoke and skate (on thin ice) in my own discussions of ‘inner’ and ‘outer.’ For James, consciousness is not a entity, a thing. Instead its a “field” or “function” between  subject and object, between inner and outer. While subject and object seem to be two things, they are one reality formed in the intersection of two lines, one a “personal biography” of the subject,  the other, a “history” of the object at hand. James uses the example of an individual perceiving a room in a house. This temporal intersection, however, can’t really located precisely because, as Hegel showed us, when we point to it, it vanishes. If it is a field, however, perhaps we can find fuzzy edges, a diachronic ecotone of sorts.

More modern understanding of the brain and memory can help us out.  Neuroscience recognizes three types of memory: a. immediate or sensory memory, which is almost photographic, lasting 300-500 milliseconds; b. short-term memory, with less information, but lasting 10-15 minutes; c. long-term memory, lasting days, months, years or a lifetime.  If we bring these types of memory into the picture, we can see that any intersecting point along a personal biography will include two time horizons that encompass past and future formed by a radius in the present.  They have, respectively, a 300 millisecond fuzzy edge (sensory memory) and a five minute fuzzy edge (short-term memory).

A third time horizon is more complex.  If we are centered on the present, the fuzzy edge must stretch between the indeterminacy of days to years.  If birth and death form the edge of an absolute diachronic horizon for brain memory, then we cannot draw a neat diagram of concentric circles because the present moves inexorably into the future:  the center of the circle shifts (the present), but the periphery is formed by a fixed diameter, our birth and death.  How do we track the present within this final horizon?

Imagine life as a pond.  On one shore, there is a portage where we slip in a canoe.  The leading edge of the canoe is the present, which from the moment it touches the water is moving forward with momentum from an initial push. We are headed towards a second portage at the far side of the pond.  Let’s assume that even without paddling, this initial momentum keeps us moving.  Friction from the canoe and the water slowing us down (an analogue for entropy), so we must paddle.  The bow ripples never overtake the bow of the canoe, and always dissipate or fade before reaching the stern of the canoe.

I am the paddler, sitting at the front of the canoe and paddling strongly enough to keep the canoe moving.  My vision, almost photographic, and lasting 200-500 milliseconds, takes in the scenery, and some of these images push forward into the full length of the canoe, a 10-15 minute time span of short term memory.  My repeated paddle strokes, and perhaps some outside storms or other events that affect the pond, also ripple out into the larger, full span of the pond, long term memory.  I reach the far shore, and as I pull out my canoe, I glance back for a glimpse of the final interference pattern, the past recaptured.

I am born, have lived fifty-one years. I find myself in a room, now. I call it the Curious Gourds Studio. It is located in a small building that I named the Welch House twenty years ago, both for the mountain that the house faces, and for my daughter’s middle name (or was it the other way round?). I can tell you many things about this room; I have intersected with its history many times. There are windows, and directly outside there is a plumb tree.

James makes no mention of a tree, but I can imagine one outside his imaginary house. For Hegel, there is no real distinction between house and tree, in the end they are just different instants of “here” at an indeterminate “now,”  props.  But I see this plumb tree, have seen it (will see it?); I have dwelled here, often on. Hegel would not approve, for I have confused a thing that is here for me in the impossible here and now, with the thing in itself. James would be more forgiving, I think.

The tree was planted by my wife, Jenny, after my son, Ben, was born. It has grown to be lovely, and one year, the second year after our return from Costa Rica, it supplied us with bushels of sweet plumbs. I first objected because it blocks my view of Welch Mountain, but it has become familiar and I am now fond of it. The tree and the house are almost the same age, along with my son. What is different about the tree and the house? What is the same?

Both tree and house are constructed and tended, using material which can be determined to be made up of such and such. Some may balk at the notion of “constructing” a tree, but that is what the in our cells do, build a living thing from amino acids using “code” (memory?) located in DNA. Cultivated plumb trees even have a human hand behind them as they are bred and selected. Both also confront entropy, as do we all. The house needs painting, a new roof. The front steps have begun to rot away. Mice make home in the walls (we need a cat). Too many years without care and the house will return to the forest leaving some memories behind in a cellar hole, the house’s equivalent of left over bones. That is what happened to most of the forty-odd houses that once populated the Sandwich Notch Road, along with the inn and Tavern, and three school houses. Now we are down to two of the original forty, and the many hundreds of acres of pasture are down to about ten acres, mostly here on the Sandwich Mountain Farm. Stone walls remain, another skeletal trace.

On the other hand, what the plumb tree needs is sun, water and nutrients from the soil. There is some human intervention with fertilizing, pruning and mowing around the tree, but largely it takes care of itself. One the great joys of exploring the land around Sandwich Notch is finding old apple trees and even whole orchards still surviving (sometimes barely) after more than 100 years and the return of the forest.

It’s a question of the type of constructing and tending. The plumb tree is mostly self-tending; the house requires someone to tend it. Without a human being around, the house will immediately start its decline. I don’t know how a cultivated plumb tree would fair competing against a forest, not as well as an apple, I think, but more successfully than a house. Perhaps the better example would be to point to one of the hemlocks on the hill. These are the giants the current forest around the farm, and they are definitely not here because of us. Right now I see these only in my memory. They are not present to me as the plumb tree is, though for you both are conjured in your imagination as you read these words.

In the end the Welch House, the plumb tree and hemlocks on the hill will all pass. There will things left behind, memories. For the hemlock, it is not only its DNA finding a place in a future forest — if it escapes disease and climate change. I have just mentioned it here, and writing is a sort of memory. Perhaps the hemlock will make its way into another essay or a story of mine, or perhaps someone will read this blog and think of their own hemlocks and write something themselves.

The plumb tree will have a shorter memory, I fear: like the apple, its not really meant to be here. It is by its lonesome, and it will someday succumb to the forest. It’s hard to say how long the house will be around, but certainly as long as there is a human tender. There is something strange about its continuity in comparison to living things: since it is not constantly rebuilding itself on a cellular and molecular level, it is always made up of the same stuff, more than any living thing is. That is, until we stop tending. Like the hemlock, the house has appeared in this writing, and their are other personal biographies that have intersected its historical line

The experience of self is constantly on the move. My life covers a territory, and that tended trail eventually loops back and no one else will walk it. Or will they?

—

It is Thursday and I am now on the other side of Sandwich Notch, in Tamworth.  Not even this writing can escape the tumbling along of different heres and nows.  Coincidentally, driving through the Notch I heard that the tree that figured so famously in Ann Franks diary had fallen.  A different tree, a different house, a different history, a different personal biography.  A journey across one pond that behind, on the far shore, someone left a dairy: memory.

This date also marks when H.A. Rey died, August 26, 1977.  And the day my parents were married, August 26, 1941.

Last night light it began to rain, lightly, steadily.  This morning the rain continues, diminishing to a light mist, increasing to steady rain, but never too heavy, not a thunderstorm nor tropical downpour.  Blue sky breaks through and the sky brightens, but to the north, to the mountains, all is cloud and mist.  Poplars sway broadly while their leaves tittle.  The new ducks enjoy the wet while the hens huddle inside on their roost.  Tomatoes in the greenhouse ripen and the maize maze is almost ready to deliver its load of corn.  Plants on the gourd house are now reaching towards birch-pole rafters, beckoning me to add more woven saplings for their tendrils to climb.

Yesterday I spent the afternoon looking for the spring and old reservoir up on the hill in back of Curious Gourds.  I found it, as well as the old iron pipe that once brought water to the farm.  Reviving this gravity-based water supply will help bring more water to the garden and to a small pond for the ducks — without using additional energy.  A small step towards a Hans Rey Energy Garden.  Our use of Our Town biodiesel in the tractor, and the solar powered electric fence, are two other examples of steps towards using local, sustainable energy.

Time is on my mind again as I see a red maple turning, a glimpse of vermilion in the otherwise deep green. I have been mostly residing in garden-time, which responds to the slow change of light and season.  With the forest all around my graceful clearing, and the Sandwich Range Wilderness just a mile through those woods, I have access to the even deeper mountain time.

Last week’s abstraction on the topology of what I playfully call time-space, gives way to more intimate reflection on the human relationship to time, a meeting of inner experience and the outside world.

The 2007 Summer/Fall issue of Appalachia featured three essays on time and the backcountry. The first, by Laura Waterman, Giving Ourselves Time to Track Time, states upfront, “The problem of time is not time itself, but how we fracture it and stuff it with distractions.” Putting aside the question of what “time itself” is for a moment, Laura’s view of “fracturing” and “stuffing with distractions” is the common experience of modern life. Laura describes how she and her husband Guy experienced time in their work lives in New York City:

In the office, you often just waited for time to pass.  The meeting drags on, the report you are working on is putting you to sleep, and you find you can’t keep your eyes off the clock whose hands haven’t appeared to budge in the last half-hour.  You wish time could just slip away… at the end of the day, you’re not sure where the time has gone, and you feel you haven’t accomplished anything… you’re plagued by a feeling that your whole life seems to be disintegrating in a way that’s tedious, unproductive, and, worst of all, totally unfulfilling.”

These were the days before the internet, cell phones and ipods.  This was just office time as it has been evolving for the last 300 hundred years.  While the above description may seem to be simply that of the wrong people in the wrong jobs, more fundamentally it represents a resistance to the appropriation, division and rationalization of time that occurs in the office, the factory and school (as well as other places).  Michel Foucault describes the emergence in the eighteenth century of

… a new technique for taking charge of time for individual existences; for regulating the relations of time, bodies and forces… for turning to ever increased profit….  How can one capitalize the time of individuals…? How can one organize profitable durations? (Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, page 157)

Ben Franklin provides a simpler way of saying it: “Time is money.”

In the same Appalachia issue,  Christine Woodside (a good forest time name) presents, Daylight Acceleration Time, an essay on the history, practice and impact of daylight saving time.  She notes a fact I most familiar with: as we approach the equator we come closer to a day and night of equal duration all year round. My years living in Costa Rica, where the days and nights only shifted by about 1/2 hour, accustomed me to this regularity.  We only need to “save” time when we feel were are short of it.  For northerners (and I presume people in the southern hemisphere as well), it’s that time of year when the days grow shorter and nights grow longer.

But is time really so linear for us?  Christine concludes, “Constant change: that’s the reality of time, no matter how we measure it… In civilized life the theme of our days is constant order, schedules that don’t alter from day to day or week to week.”

However, if it were only constant change, then the world would be unintelligible and *chaotic, whereas what we experience are things repeating themselves: night becomes day and then night again; winter passes to spring, passes to summer, passes to fall, and back to winter.  Even in the tropics, where night and day show little change and we do not see the extremes of steamy hot summers and bitterly cold winters, there are rainy seasons and dry seasons; times of wind and times of calm.  In tropical dry forests the leaves fall off the trees each year just as they do in New England.  Reading the geological landscape we can see patterns of glaciations and warm periods, with smaller neoglaciations and hypsithermals in between.

We appear to move in circles, but with each recurrance comes difference, change. Not only do we as individuals grow older, but we have arrived at this point in time (if there is such a marker) through the wondrous process of change we call evolution. Yes, time is change… and recurrence.

Laura and Guy Waterman lived a double life for many years, as many of us do, enduring their work-weeks so that they could journey to their beloved mountains on weekends.  The comparison is stark:

…in the mountains, you feel the opposite about time.  You want it neither to slip away nor to speed up, and keeping track of it becomes vital in a very different way than in the office.  Here you are aware of where you are in the passage of the day by the way the light changes.  You’re attuned to your environment, to the woods, the wind, to where you are in space, and where your are in time too… Contrary to what you’d thought: that because your not in the office you could forget the time, you find that time has not become less important; if anything, it’s more important, but you don’t need a clock to track the time… In the mountains, the clock no longer rules as it did in the office… In the mountains, you understand what poets mean when they say time flows, that time is a river.  Here time no longer feels split, and your life has stopped feeling broken up into little bits.

Mountain time.

Laura and Guy eventually brought their divided lives together by moving to Vermont, homesteading and writing (their “cash crop”) about the things knew and loved: the mountains.  The winter trek to the Waterman’s own graceful clearing, which they named Barra after the Isle of Barra in Scotland,  was a mile snowshoe, which I recall well.  The summer route was a less demanding third of a mile, but still a long way to bring supplies. They hauled water, cut firewood for cooking and heating, and used candles and kerosene lamps for light.  Laura writes of this life:

When you live like that, when you’ve set your life so that you haul your wood and water, your notion of time changes. Especially, you’ve changed your relationship to time when you can’t drive to your own front door.  In fact, something you didn’t expect has happened.  Instead of having less time you feel you have more.  You’ve planned in that extra half hour of walking time it takes to reach the car, and all your doing now is walking.  And thinking and observing and listening: that scratching of the leaves to the right is a white-throated sparrow; the ferns are unfurling (note to self: Pick fiddleheads).  You feel relaxed and very rich in time.  And you feel a close connection to the land because you’re experiencing time in a way that tunes you into the land itself and wild nature.

This is the other side of my idea of time-space — the perceived expansion or contraction of space as one takes more or less time to cover a distance: you give more or less time to a place, and if you give more time to the land, time itself (whatever that is) seems to expand.  Not passing faster nor more slowly; time becomes more expansive, even when it seems to pass quickly.

We must be careful not to idealize the life where you must “haul your wood and water.” Many people in the world desperately want to live without these chores and without the hunger that can come with subsistence farming.  I have often said that the homesteading life that some of us who live in wealthy countries choose rather than are born into is a rare privilege.  The question here is how we approach time and space, our lives and land.

When I moved to Costa Rica I soon learned the expression “Tico time.” Tico is shorthand for Costa Rican, and Tico time refers to a different approach to a variety of things in life.  People rarely arrive when they say they will, and when I was running an office in Costa Rica I learned that this applied even to this formal environment.  People often came to scheduled meetings late, and when they did, instead skulking in under a supervisors scowl and ignored by co-workers (as would happen in the United States), meetings stopped while everyone happily greeted the latecomer. This sense of time becomes more pronounced as one moved further into rural areas.  A farmer’s sense of time is even less specific, and holding a meeting of farmers required a very coarse-grained precision: finding time (as though time somehow existed as an object hidden in the landscape) required allowing for many hours if not most of a day. Church Masses were somewhat immune to this laxity, though ringing bells obscured the existence of any clock.  Visiting was a great way to pass the time — share time with another — and one always gave and accepted this time graciously.  This is to say,  in addition to the individual experience of space and time expanding, one can also experience an expansion of social time, our time with others.

During my years in Costa Rica the community I lived in went from dairy and coffee farming,  field biology, and the hosting the occasional birder to becoming one of the largest “eco” tourist destinations in the country.  And with this change came the gradual erosion of Tico time.  The virtues of profit-making began to take over the values of friendship and community.  While the new economy was based on breathtaking biodiversity, it paradoxically consumed critical habitat with development and distanced people from the land as a dense townscape emerged.  Time is money, after all. Wage-earning in hotels and restaurants replaced farming, and with it came the demand for a new sense of time.  The increasing population enjoyed the many benefits of cash, but also increasingly conformed to the time of North American and European visitors and a globalized economy.  World and local events and the seasonality of tourism created gaps in employment, and with it food insecurity.  The maladies of stress and depression increased along with sexually transmitted diseases and drug and alcohol use.  Time(s) had changed.

Just as we must be careful not to idealize the simple life, we must equally take care not to overly demonize development that is lifting so many out of poverty. Again, I am primarily concerned with time here. Tico time was not and I think cannot be entirely erased from Costa Rica, and as you walk further from the centers that have adopted the new time, one can still have an unhurried cup of coffee and show up late for a meeting.

***

I have written the above over the course of the day.  And while it may seem continuous, I have stopped to watch the clouds hide and reveal the Acteon Ridge several times. I have opened doors for ducks and chickens, and closed them up again at the end of the day. Ducks are messy creatures who like fresh water not only to drink but to splash in a few times a day.  I was disappointed to find only one duck egg (there should have been three, though perhaps I am imposing my time on the fowl).  The light at the end of the day was lovely pastel: clouds white, gray and pink; pastures shimmering green; red stain on the barn trim, radiant.  Night comes, and sleep.  When I awake the sun burns through a shroud of mist rising from the Smarts Brook river valley.  The fields are heavy with glistening dew.  Which brings me to the last, luminous essay in that Fall/Summer 2007 Appalachia: Arctic Time by Jeff Fair.

If living close to the equator means that that light and dark approach a daily balance, living in the arctic circle provides a strangely parallel, but utterly different experience: on a yearly cycle we have a day that is a summer long, and a night that lasts the winter. Our circadian rhythm, a 25 hour inner, biological clock, bears no resemblance to this annual cycle.  In his journey to the top of the world, Jeff discovers “Arctic Time.”

“What does that mean,” he asks the trip leader, Dr. Joel Schmutz.

“It means you sleep in.” is the reply.

With only this to go on, Jeff looks to the internet for a more precise definition to no avail, and wonders that it does not appear in Barry Lopez’s, Arctic Dreams. He finds his answer by speaking to field biologists and arctic guides, where the term is common:

The phenomenon itself may be described as follows:  Take one flatlander (a good lower forty-eight term) out of Anchorage, Fairbanks, Seattle, Buzzards Bay, Winter Harbor, Peoria, etc., and place him or her into the Arctic summer of say, Alaska.  Immediately the traveler begins to lengthen her days, arising later, delaying his meal schedule walking or working well past quitting time, and crawling into a sleeping bag in the wee hours of the morning — if there were a morning up there in summer time.  Trouble is, there isn’t one — nor is there a night, afternoon, evening — except by the clock.  Those who struggle to follow their time pieces are fighting the allure of light and landscape in this part of the world.

It seems we now know where all that saved time goes: it accumulates in the Far North.

I struggle with the idea of time itself, an idea that treats time as though it were a thing dwelling outside of us. I have been speaking of inner and outer time, and this perpetuates the idea that there is such a hard and fast threshold and difference, a sort of Cartesian duality with time as the medium.  It doesn’t help that we have atomic clocks telling us the ‘real’ time up to the millisecond. Arctic Time, if its origin is outside of us in the circling sun, also penetrates our being, as well as other living things:

The constant sunlight during brief Arctic summers allows the cotton grass and sedges to grow 24 hours a day, and goslings that feed on it to fledge faster than their cousins to the south.  It also stimulates the human mind.

Arctic time gradually defragments our schedules, pushing us out of sink with the clock and in sink with the impossibility of an endless day.  We can imagine approaching the North Pole, seeking that that magical point where the sun stands still. Only it doesn’t.  The endless day of Arctic summer becomes the endless night of Arctic winter. Change.  As Christine tells us regarding daylight saving time, “We could turn the clocks ahead, or we could get up earlier, but neither one changes the fact that day’s sunlight is a little longer than the previous day’s, and the next day will be different, and the next.”

I take heart from Jeff Fair’s concluding remarks:

Up there in the silent Tundra, living under a freedom driven by the powerful light of latitude and granted by the landscape itself, where the real and natural world still has influence over our schedules and inspirations — even when you’re late, you’re right on time.

Arctic time is Tico time.

* I mean chaos in the classical sense rather than the modern reference to complex systems and sensitive dependency on initial conditions.

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.

Back at Curious Gourds. I awake to a damp, cool morning. I can see the Acteon Ridge though mist and haze rising from Smarts Brook, above the green foreground trees. Mist billows up from the Smarts Brook river valley, pouring into the Mad River where it billows even higher. The mist rises as I write, beginning to hide the lower slope of Acteon, making for a tricolored series: green forest, white mist, cobalt blue mountain (lightened by haze), white sky. The mist is now sinking, revealing more gauzy cobalt, but leaving a fin shaped wisp. Do phantom dolphins swim in a ghostly sea above Smarts Brook? The mist settles, rises again. I can’t keep up and must let my attempt at picturing this moment go.

Yesterday I arrived at Curious Gourds after being away a few days.  A trick of fate has made bicycle riding one of the exercises I can do without too much pain, so I have found myself revisiting the scene and circumstances of my accident. My challenge yesterday was to make the trip I had once intended to cycle twice a week (before my disastrous flight over the handlebars) between my home in Tamworth Village and the Curious Gourds Studio and Gardens at the Sandwich Mountain Farm. The trip is about twenty-two miles, but the last seven across the Sandwich Notch Road is a challenge, climbing 1000 feet in five miles.

I made it, a four-hour trip marked by stages: a quick stop at the Community School after 3 miles to get a sip of water; sitting under a tree on the side of the road in North Sandwich to answer a phone call (yes, I had my cell phone); a stop at Mocha Rizing Café in Center Sandwich for an energizing fruit smoothie; a water break at the intersection of the Beebe River Road and the Sandwich Notch Road; refilling my water bottle at the spring by the the old Mosses Hall House; and finally, after climbing the last hill, I coasted two miles very, very slowly down to the Farm and Curious Gourds.

If I had driven, the trip would have taken me an hour, walking, most of an entire day. With fewer stops and in better physical condition, perhaps I could have done the trip in under three hours, but not much less. (I’m sure there are are many who could do it much faster). Each mode of transportation effectively compresses or expands space and time. Without even considering the complexities of Einstein’s theory of relativity, we can easily see that time and space dilation is an everyday experience.

When I drive and look at the scenery, I notice many things, especially those faraway: I recognize the profile of a mountain range that shifts before my eyes almost film-like, the face shifting and transforming in minutes. I may see a beautiful house, admire a village that I drive through, or note that so-and-so has mowed their pasture. The same trip by bicycle not only triples the time it takes, but allows me to pay more attention to the landscape. Mountain ranges still change their appearance, but we have lost the effect of a time lapse animation. I can glimpse roadside wildflowers, a curiously shaped piece of granite in a stone wall, that lilac bush that I never saw before. Walking is yet another expansion of time and space, with its own set of changes. What was a quick trip is now an all-day journey. I am also free of the roads, and take to the woods occasionally on and off trail. I am increasing space in the time over distance formula and my ability to take in the details of the geography around me has improved considerably, and I can more easily interact with the landscape: no need to pull over the car or stop the bicycle. I pause, look around, bend down and pick up the gnawed bone from a moose leg, imagining a natural history story that features a weakened calf and entrepreneurial coyote. Details of wildflowers budding, blooming, and fruiting are there before me and waiting for me to scribble a note. I am more inclined to stop, freezing myself within a horizon of space, and perhaps even stopping time itself… almost.

I have been speaking of time and space as it relates to movement, a measurable geographic and time experience. We can calculate this just as we do with velocity by reversing the formula: Time/distance = a temporal-spatial experience.

Walking: 12 hours/22mile = .54 hours per mile

Biking: 4 hours/22 miles = .18 hours per mile

Driving: 1 hour/22miles = .05 hours per mile

The faster we go, the more territory we cover, which effectively shrinks the world for us. We have all heard the expression that the world is smaller now, and in terms of time over distance it really is. One could even map this, distorting space, making areas larger or smaller depending if they are traversed by foot, bicycle or car.

Perhaps you recall the 1976 “View of the World” New Yorker cover by Saul Steinberg that presents a New Yorker’s view of the world: a cityscape of buildings and streets centered on 10th Avenue dominates the foreground, bounded by the Hudson River and tiny strip of Jersey;  a band of middle-ground stretches beyond the city to the West Coast with a few cities named; the Pacific Ocean continues beyond the coast and appears smaller than both New York City itself and all that is between the coasts; at the horizon tiny mounds represent China, Japan and Russia; Canada and Mexico are given some due as the right and left boundaries of the drawing; the Atlantic and all of Europe is absent, as is Africa, reflecting the perspectival orientation of the map, looking east to west.

While this map largely represents a subjective mapping, it also contains an element  of the sort of time-space distortion described above: the walking city of New York is larger in size than the rest of the country that one can traverses by car, train, or plane.

While much of our landscape provides us with a choice — walk, bicycle, drive, fly, or use some other means of transportation — some doesn’t. The land between roads can be seen as disproportionally large in comparison to the land directly adjacent to the roads themselves — can you visualize an inverted bubble where the edge represents the smallest area and the center the largest? This seeming paradox is what we have when two very different transportation options are adjacent. In National Wilderness Areas, such as the Sandwich Range Wilderness that I can view from the window of the Studo, human movement is restricted to walking, snowshoeing and skiing, and this spatial-temporal bubble is very deliberately managed and maintained by the United States Forest Service. Since skiing is faster that walking or snowshoeing, winter effectively shrinks wilderness for the season.

***

What I have discussed above looks at time over distance as a way of understanding how transportation affects our experience of space in a very measurable way, shrinking or enlarging our experience of the landscape. Of course, what is most significant is how this contributes to our inner experience. I’ll save more of that for next week.

Summer is progressing, and tending and mending continues. Chickens now have a new electric fence to ward off predators and encourage the hens to stay in their pen (don’t worry, the fence is off on Saturdays): lots of fresh grass and weeds to graze on, as well as a tasty worm or two.

The peas, so luxuriant a few weeks ago, have become grey and withered, leaving a few leathery pods that yield a surprising sweetness. Pull them out, plant a fall crop. The maize maze grows ever higher and more confusing; we are just training the vines up the gourd house. Cucumber and zucchini fruit hide themselves in a tangle and then appear unexpectedly in startling dimensions. Pumpkins look promising; melons hopeful.

Living with a garden is living with constant birth, life, death, and resurrection — a melodramatic statement, perhaps, but still true. Not just yearly with the circle of spring, summer, fall and winter, but also with many other cyles that recur within the summer season. One notorious cycle: blackfiles emerge from their watery wombs to wage heoric areal battles with creatures many times their size — at least the females do, the gentler males drink nectar. Females lay eggs, larva emerge and cling to rocks until transformed from water to sky creatures, rising in a tiny bubble of air and bursting into flight and the work of bringing forth another generation. Again and again.

The early meadow flowers have gone to seed, though a mowing or two returns them to youth temporarily and may bring another hay crop. Eventually even such intervention succumbs to what appears to be an envitable line of time. Fall and winter come, and no mater how many cycles of growing plants and flying insects, cold and snow return, a very little ice age. The line comes back on itself and becomes a circle. With multiple cycles within a summer, and the eventual return of spring, we have spheres upon spheres, an amalgest, like Ptolemy’s celestial geometry.

Anthropgenic global warming may be similar to a hot, dry spell in a New England summer, an interruption of what will some day return to a true ice age with its glaciers miles thick, pushing plants and animals south (in the Northern hemisphere). And like some hot spells and droughts, much may be lost in this extreme and accelarated change in the next years.

We appear to move in circles, but with each recurrance comes difference. Each summer the sun bakes the skin on my neck and I have become to notice lines and lost elasticity. My body will carry the memory of my broken ribs whenever I reach for a shovel. Evolution has transfomed this planet from a liquid stew of early life to its current array of animale and vegetabile. So many lives: lines and circles; spheres upon spheres.

Catastrophic species decline is occuring now, has occured before. What difference will we see in the next few spins of the rolling wheel of time?

I awake to sunshine,  heavy dew, crows calling.  I make myself a cup of coffee.

The last few weeks have seen the peak and passing of the hot spell, thunderstorms, hail and double rainbows. Two days ago I found a baby raccoon curled up around a branch on the plumb tree outside of the Curious Gourds Studio.

The thunderstorms also brought wind that knocked down a portion of Erin’s Amazing Maize Maze, which is coming into its own. At first I was dismayed, but then set forth to mending the corn, mounding or hilling each fallen stalk and packing it until it was again upright. My damaged ribs got sore after a few hours, but I rested and returned to the task, and eventually all was well with the maize — even a bit improved: I really should have hilled corn earlier, tended it better.

Drinking coffee and thinking of mending corn I recalled a recent email from one of our Whiteblack Correspondents, Eugenio, from San Luis, Costa Rica. I had recently restored his blog, Spider Web, and he was mentioning what next he might write about. He said:

Mi proximo articulo, pagina, o poema sera sobre ´remendando’….un zapato, una silla, una mano y una rodilla.  (he [my father] did get some wounds and bumps from hard work,  from playing soccer, etc)   Mi padre siempre estaba remendando-mending  cosas, herramientas, para dar mas utilidad y mas vida a cada cosa util. El nunca hablo de sostenibilidad, pero es lo que ha practicado toda la vida.

My next article, page, or poem will be about ‘mending’… a shoe, a chair, a hand and a knee. (he [my father] did get some wounds and bumps from hard work, playing soccer, etc) My father was always mending things, tools to add utility and life to each useful thing. He never spoke of sustainability, but that is what he practiced all his life.

Mending. I’ve always spoken of tending, tending trails, tending the garden, preferring this word to the more technical term “maintaining.” Maintenance is the engineer’s science, tending is an art each one of us practices day to day as we cook and clean, hoe the garden, or clean a waterbar on a trail.  It is the work of the New England Yankee, the French bricoler, building what is needed from what is at hand.

Tending and mending are so close, but there is a difference.   The origin of tending is from Middle English and means “to be inclined to move in a certain direction.” Mend also has its roots in Middle English, and is a shortening of “amend,” which includes as one of its meanings, to “put right” something gone wrong.

So, tending is the chosen path, the way we are inclined to move in life. But, as we know, the force of entropy seems to work on all levels to get us off track — physically, most obviously, but also in relationships, communities, our emotional selves: things fall apart.

Of course, we all know those neighbors with the perfect lawns and freshly painted houses and happy children off to graduate school. We look down at our shaggy lawns and weedy flower beds, the missing shingles and places where the paint peels. We recall the recent argument over mowing the lawn with a child or spouse. Why does entropy, the second law of thermodynamics, that gradual tendency to disorder and decay, that requires us to sweep the house everyday, pull new weeds, feed ourselves, and restate our loves and renew our friendships — why does it seem to hit us harder?

It doesn’t. Somewhere behind the shimmering lawn and painted house and pride of achievement is the same tending, and there too sometimes things come part and there is need of mending.

We are all tenders in our lives, moving in a certain direction, cleaning the waterbars and clearing the blowdowns on our trail. And sometimes we get diverted and things break. Perhaps a storm comes and knocks down the corn, a bicycle accident breaks a few ribs, harsh words hurt a friend or family member.   Then its time for mending, something extra that returns us to our path.

Morning.  Sweat drips down my face and soaks my teeshirt from the short walk to the Curious Gourds garden.  Again,  heat blankets New England.

Two nights ago I awoke while it was still dark, enjoying the relative cool of  early morning.  Through the window I saw an orange-tinged crescent moon surrounded by a handful of stars.  The sky was ever so slightly touched by color, faintly purple.  I dozed and woke again to see morning light seeping into the darkness and listened to a lone bird greeting the morning.  Stars still freckled the sky, but they were fainter, and the line of the Acteon Ridge glowed pink.

Dusk drains the landscape of light and color. Dawn reverses this emptying, refilling the sky, mountains, forest and meadows with blues, grays and greens that are chased by orange and pink: green seeps into the foreground; blue-gray soaks through the blue-black mountains in the background; and the meadows combine green with a sprinkle of reflected pink and orange.

I doze again this time when I wake my eyes smart from a burning circle of sun that is accompanied by a cacophony of birdsong.

Another crisp, blue day, warming up to a hot July afternoon.  From my home in Tamworth, New Hampsire I look across the fields and gardens of the Behr farm, an array of vegetables gardens, silver and swaying mature winter rye (now being mown for straw), and at the forest edge, chicken tractors. The forest at the end of the field shows the deepening green of summer. Beyond, the Ossipee Mountains are an even deeper blue-green, mottled with the dark speckles of faraway spruce and fir.  On the other side of my home is Main Street, and just across the bridge, over the Swift River, is Tamworth Village.  Towards the end of Main Street the pastures and outbuildings of the Remick Museum stretch up the Great Hill Road toward the Hemenway State Forest. Mountains, forest, farm, and community, one next to the other.

In my imagination I rise above the village, forest and farms. I see the Bearcamp Valley spread out below, stretching between the Sandwich Mountain Range and the Ossipees. The Community School is a few miles from the Village, and the Bearcamp River winds from South Tamworth into the Town of Sandwich and Sandwich Notch. One can walk the Bearcamp Valley Trail from South Tamworth to Beede Falls. Then it’s just seven miles through the mountains along Sandwich Notch Road to the Curious Gourds Studio and Garden at the Sandwich Mountain Farm. From “the farm,” as we call it, one looks to the northeast to the Acteon Ridge and Sandwich and Black Mountains. Welch and Dickey Mountains are to the North. Between the Ridge and Welch and Dickey, the Mad River flows from Waterville to the Pemigewassett River and the towns of Thornton, Campton and Plymouth.

For may years I have made my way through the geographic wall of mountains, driving (summer/fall) and skiing (winter)  on the rough but passable road in Sandwich Notch, or hiking the obscure wilderness trek of Lost Pass. This travel and desire to see a connection between communities is mirrored on a larger scale by my traveling and living in  Costa Rica and New Hampshire over the last twenty years.  My effort to explore the world through the Whiteblack the Penguin story expands this vision to the globe.

I am left with questions. How do the isolated (and sometimes insular) cultures, societies and economies of localities connect to others while maintaining a sense of place and commitment to nearby community? How do we think and act regionally and globally while also staying focused on the local? How do we make a nexus from loci?

Because of a coding problem, I am starting anew with “Nat’s Blog.”

I should be able to recover past blog posts, but it may tale a while.