Maine Woods

On the 31st of August 1846, Thoreau left Concord for Bangor and the backwoods of Maine, in what would become the first of his three famous journeys. His three essays talk about the natural almost primeval beauty of Maine's backwoods and its glorious Mount Ktaadn. He wrote

It is a country full of evergreen trees, of mossy silver birches and watery maples, the ground dotted with insipid small, red berries, and strewn with damp and moss-grown rocks,—a country diversified with innumerable lakes and rapid streams, peopled with trout and various species of leucisci, with salmon, shad, and pickerel, and other fishes; the forest resounding at rare intervals with the note of the chickadee, the blue jay, and the woodpecker, the scream of the fish hawk and the eagle, the laugh of the loon, and the whistle of ducks along the solitary streams; at night, with the hooting of owls and howling of wolves; in summer, swarming with myriads of black flies and mosquitoes, more formidable than wolves to the white man. Such is the home of the moose, the bear, the caribou, the wolf, the beaver, and the Indian. Who shall describe the inexpressible tenderness and immortal life of the grim forest, where Nature, though it be midwinter, is ever in her spring, where the moss-grown and decaying trees are not old, but seem to enjoy a perpetual youth; and blissful, innocent Nature, like a serene infant, is too happy to make a noise, except by a few tinkling, lisping birds and trickling rills? What a place to live, what a place to die and be buried in.

These  essays inspired the Hudson school painters to travel, see their country and capture the beauty for posterity.

Edwin Church's Ktaadn and Maine Woods (1853)

I have been reading and re-reading Thoreau for more than a decade now and seeing this painting last thanksgiving gave me a gentle nudge to plan a trip to Maine, although I knew fully well that a lot has changed in the 150 years since Thoreau's trips. However, I didn't follow his footsteps and retrace his journey - I will not put myself in a canoe of my own volition! (Watch this video from the Penobscot Indians who retraced this journey and set the record straight). Instead, I decided Acadia National Park could give me a taste of Maine's beauty, so that's where we went.

Acadia is famous for a lot of things:

• Only national park in New England
• Has the tallest mountain on the Atlantic Coast (Cadillac Mountain)
• Is the first place in the US to see sunrise
• The park was created entirely from private donations of land and it is still the case - all land that comes under the park has to be donated
• The lighthouses 
• Puffins!

The place was packed and so we made full use of the shuttle system. We didn't do the two popular hikes - the precipice and beehive, both famous for their ladders. One was closed for the peregrine falcon nesting season and even if it was open we decided not to do it because of my crippling fear of heights and my daughter is also not too crazy about heights.

We spent 4 days in Acadia and couldn't get a reservation for the sunrise drive to Cadillac mountain for any of these days. These are so popular and are sold out faster than tickets to a Radiohead concert! Instead we did a drive up to Cadillac Mountain the first afternoon and the vistas were breathtaking. Reminded us of Torrey Pines/ Ocean Beach except this was the Atlantic and not the Pacific.

View from Cadillac Mountain

We did the Great Head trail from Sand Beach which is probably the most popular spot in the park because of the access to the beach. The hike hugged the coastline giving us more views of the ocean and brought us back to the beach. We heard nuthatches, green-throated black warblers and saw downy woodpeckers on the way down.

 

We wrapped up the day with a walk along the coast but it was not very pleasant as it was packed with people and we saw more cars than the coast.

The next day our plan was to hike to Bubble Rock and connect to Jordan pond, but a mix up led us to be dropped off by the shuttle at the Pemetic Mountain trail head. But this turned out to be the best thing that happened to us! Until we did this hike we didn't feel like we were in a national park as the crowds were a bit much. As we hiked up the Pemetic mountain from Bubble pond we did not meet any other hiker until we reached the summit. Apparently this route was not a popular one as it involved a lot of scrambling in the woods, a steady ascent with not many views. Perfect for us! We didn't really know where we were going or have a specific plan other than - let's reach the summit and see if it connects us to another trail.

Bubble Pond - start of Pemetic trail

One of the few views on the trail coming up from Bubble Pond

 When we reached the summit we were in for a treat as the view was just breathtaking! We've hiked up Mount San Jacinto three times and while the hike itself was the most challenging I've ever done I didn't care much for the views from the top. Pemetic Mountain was the opposite, the hike was not nearly as challenging but the views were spectacular.

Summit

Here we met other hikers who came up from Jordan pond. They told us that it was a gradual ascent with a lot of views of the coastline and no scrambling. So we decided we will go down that trail as we didn't want to scramble on the way down. This was a very rewarding hike down and the views exceeded expectations.

Going down from Pemetic Mt. summit to Jordan Pond

Jordan pond was popular with the crowds but we still managed to find peace and quiet thanks to our hike, except for frequent interruptions from the Bullfrog

Jordan Pond

Bullfrogs

I know they are pests everywhere else and harm many indigenous species, but here in the Eastern US they were a sight to behold. Until then we had only heard his booming voice, we finally caught sight of him in Jordan pond.

The Hudson school had revealed the beauty of Mount Desert Island (on which stands Acadia NP) that during the 1850s it became very popular with folks from New England and after the civil war many more started pouring into these locations to take in the natural beauty. Soon enough the wealthy built mansions along the coast of Maine and started throwing their famous parties which also included walking tours of the woods. Now most of the mansions are gone and many of the wealthy donated their land to form the basis of the national park. A lot of the original woods are gone except for one pocket of old growth forest, but since the creation of the park there are no longer any sheep on the islands and the forests are slowly recovering.

For our last day in Maine our daughter recommended we do a Pelagic birding tour and so that's what we did. We got on a boat and went looking for puffins, murres, and razorbills off the coast of Maine. This turned out to be a terrific idea! The guides on the boat were locals, born and raised near Bar Harbor and knew so much about the park - both the natural and cultural history. They also talked a lot about the lobster fisheries in Maine and how tightly regulated they were. The lobstermen took a lot of care to make sure the lobsters were not driven to extinction and managed the fishing quotas and regulations collectively to ensure the health of the ocean and its inhabitants. This was very heartening to hear.

We saw a lot of wildlife off the coast of Maine. The puffins were well known to us thanks to the Audubon webcam - Project Puffin so I was thrilled to see them in person.
 

Mola Mola or Sunfish

Atlantic Puffins

Lighthouse on Eggrock

Murre

That afternoon we drove out to Schoodic point to see the mainland side of Acadia and that wrapped up our trip to Maine! When I look back on the trip, the theme seems to be regeneration. As a family we needed this trip to rejuvenate our spirits after the pandemic. But I was also heartened to see how much progress has been made since the 1900s in terms of preserving nature through our national park system. Many of the islands that were once grazed down by sheep are now sporting hundred year old trees and hosting bald eagles and other creatures. Thoreau bemoaned the fact that our needs meant that the value of a pine was estimated by its "use." In The Maine Woods he says

There is a higher law affecting our relation to pines as well as to men. A pine cut down, a dead pine, is no more a pine than a dead human carcass is a man. Can he who has discovered only some of the values of whalebone and whale oil be said to have discovered the true use of the whale? Can he who slays the elephant for his ivory be said to have “seen the elephant”? These are petty and accidental uses; just as if a stronger race were to kill us in order to make buttons and flageolets of our bones; for everything may serve a lower as well as a higher use. Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.

I hope to walk away from the woods of Maine keeping in mind the "higher uses" of all forms of life even when walking in my own backyard.

NY State: Niagara, Ithaca/ Finger Lakes

Our trip to the East coast started off with a visit to the Niagara which surprisingly wasn't crowded. I was expecting to be standing in hour long lines but it looks like we missed the holiday crowd by a day and it was much more pleasant than I expected. I was eagerly waiting to see my daughter's reactions and she summed it up in one phrase "it doesn't feel real." A falls of this magnitude, according to her, should demand more from the visitor. She believes that one had to earn the falls by hiking through woods and mountains and not just walk into it by standing in line or riding a boat as though it was a ride in Disneyland. Niagara felt too commercial and left her wanting although she was glad to have seen it and experienced the force of the Cave of the Winds but we were all itching to hit the Finger lakes region of upstate NY.

 

 It took Odysseus ten years to return to Ithaca. It took me a little over twenty to get there.The names of the places takes you back in time and one cannot help but think about the Haudenosaunee who have lent their names to these lands and the lakes specifically the Cayugas and Seneca - the two lakes around which we spent most of our time. I don't want to sound like I am placing the Iroquois in the past, as they are a living breathing civilization very much alive amidst us and to whom we owe not just a land acknowledgement but also the concept of American liberty/ justice/ constitution. Reading books like Braiding Sweetgrass, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, Covered with Night, and the oldie Crucible of War gave me a bit of a background and I am still learning more. However, I am not remotely qualified to write about Native America other than saying that as I walked along these trails and gorges I was more mindful of where I was treading and tried to do it lightly with gratitude in my heart. 

Watkins Glen:

This is considered the most beautiful state park in all of NY. I don't dispute that. You hit 19 waterfalls in  1.5 miles and the gorges carved by water are just spectacular. July meant that the water flow was not at its peak, however for those coming from drought-stricken SoCal this was heaven! We parked in an upper parking lot and so took the Indian trail down and climbed back up the Gorge Trail so that we could always face the water on our way up.

 

Taughanock Falls:

The highest falls in the US (higher than even Niagara), the Taughanock was high on my list, but very low on water unfortunately. Still the hike was completely worth it and we did both the Gorge trail and the Rim trail (up the South, down the North). By doing the rim trail we beat the crowds and also got a terrific view of the upper falls which had a bit more water.

                                                                            

The Upper Falls

View from the North Rim Trail

 

I saw Turkey Vultures everywhere roosting at the top of the cliffs and even heard Peregrines but as I didn't trust my ears I didn't look for them. Later, my daughter who was birding around this area with the Cornell Lab told me that they saw Peregrines in this region! However, the bird that captured my heart in this entire trip was the Red-Eyed Vireo - did not see it once but the woods were ringing with its song and by the end of the trip this was the one bird song I learned to identify with confidence.

Buttermilk Falls:

Once again the water in the falls was just a trickle and therefore did not do justice to the name. However, the hike was still beautiful and walking in the woods with just bird song from the elusive vireo was enough to fill my cup.

That wrapped up the upstate NY leg of our trip. We made one stop at New Paltz to visit family and went on a walk along the historic Huguenot Street. We only got a glimpse of the Catskills from a distance.

 

There is so much beauty and history in NY state and I came away refreshed with all the time spent in the woods. I can only imagine how beautiful it would be during other seasons and I hope that unlike Odysseus I will be back someday real soon.

Cornell's Lab of Ornithology

 This July our daughter was picked for the Lab of Ornithology's Young Birder Event. She was first notified that she was selected as a young birder back in 2019 when she was still in Middle school, only to receive an email an hour later that it was an error and she was only on the wait list as an 'alternate'. Needless to say we were a bit disappointed. The next time around the pandemic intervened and the lab had to postpone its event for a couple of years. Third time was the charm and she finally attended the event this year and it was fabulous! This also gave me an opportunity to visit Sapsucker woods which I've only watched on feedercam for many years!

 

The lab is an amazing resource for anyone interested in birds and 8 years back my daughter and i got started on our birding by watching many of their educational videos. One thing led to another and we were doing feederwatch regularly, taking lessons from the lab, participating in Backyard Bird counts, and Merlin and eBird have become our favorite app on our smartphones.

As part of the event, parents were invited to attend the keynote by the lab's director Ian Owens. I hope the Lab actually recorded his keynote and will publish it widely as it was truly inspirational! I was so glad my daughter got to hear him and I wish more people will hear his message as it was filled with realism and optimism. There were two key messages that I heard that resonated with me and hopefully with my daughter

1) The problems of the world are too big that they cannot be solved by one person or even one type of person. At the lab they bring together people with a wide range of skills - birders of course, but more than that they needed biologists, conservationists, computer scientists, story tellers, educators, and communicators. There is a role for everyone and the best ideas come from working together across disciplines.

2) Bending the curve - this was his most important message to the youth in attendance. There is still time to reverse the loss of biodiversity! Very often we hear in the news that it is already too late w.r.t climate change. While it is important to raise the alarm call it is also important to show that there is a path forward and not all is lost. If there is no hope for the future why do we bother telling our kids that they can make a difference! We need to get more people excited about the future and bring them into the fold so we can figure out solutions for the planet. Ian Owens and the Lab offered that vision. In a time when the world seems to be polarized between climate apathy and climate anxiety, even I needed to hear this talk to feel hopeful about the future.

 

 

As I walked through Sapsucker woods I thought of the past 8 years when my daughter's forays into birding got me hooked as her co-traveler. I know it is time for our paths to diverge and I don't know what lies ahead for her as she starts thinking about college this year, but coming here at this time was a timely boost of confidence and enthusiasm for her. She said that holding the snowy owl specimen in her hand was deeply moving and exhilarating at the same time. 

 

The famous woods around Ithaca were once leveled down completely as farmlands but have now become wild again in the past 100 years. It's not too late... yet and I hope she keeps this note of optimism and hope in her heart as she looks ahead to the future.

A Day at the Huntington

 The Huntington Library and Gardens recently traded their famous Gainsborough's Blue Boy for a painting by Joseph Wright of Derby called An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump and I had been meaning to go and see it. Time was running out for the bird (and me) as the painting was returning to UK end of May so I decided to get out there for the Memorial Day weekend. The painting didn't disappoint. 

 

I first heard about Wright when my daughter studied Art History in high school. His pictures combined Baroque techniques with enlightenment ideas and depicted science in action. In this one we see an eager audience around a lecturer demonstrating the importance of air to life as he slowly sucks out air from a glass jar housing a cockatoo. I would like to think he will not kill the bird and will actually revive it. It is a riveting scene and you can see the anguish on the little girl to the right although I don't know what the two lovers on the left are doing at a science demo gazing at each other!

I loved this painting much more than the Blue Boy and felt this was more fitting for the Huntington which also houses a number of rare manuscripts and books. When I see the Ellesmere Chaucer, the Gutenberg Bible, the Tyndale Bible, Newton's Principia a Shakespeare's First Folio, Thoreau's Walden drafts, Whitman's hospital notes, Audubon's unbelievable bird sketches all under one roof, I get goosebumps. In an era where we are seeing ridiculous book bans some of these books remind us of the revolutionary power of the printed (or handwritten) word.

Ellesmere Chaucer's Canterbury Tales

Newton's Principia

Gutenberg Bible -only 48 survive of which 12 were made from vellum including this one

Tyndale's Bible - god's words in your own language!

First Folio opened to Midsummer Night's Dream

 

Thoreau's Walden draft

Audubon's larger than life book of bird drawings

The great thing about the Huntington is that it houses samples of extraordinary writing by women too. All my heroes are here - Mary Shelley, Revolution printed by Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, works of Octavia Butler and Hilary Mantel. I don't know if it is simply a matter of coincidence or whether my interests drive me towards certain things, but each manuscript here held a special place in my heart.

Mary Shelley's cross-written letter to her friend Marianne Hunt

One of my favorite biographies was "Romantic Outlaws" which was about the mom/daughter pair of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley told in alternate chapters. So I am a bit familiar with what Mary Shelley is writing about in this letter - an account of her personal tragedies.

Butler's notes for Parable of Sower

Here is a writer I came to late - maybe about a decade ago when I first read Kindred. Following that I read both Parable of the Sower and Talent followed by Lilth's Brood. It is only fitting that all her papers are in the Huntington as she was a Pasadena native.

Mantel's research for her Wolf Hall trilogy

The books that marked the last decade for me are absolutely Mantel's trilogy about the rise and fall of Cromwell. I loved the books so much that I am now reading Diarmaid MacCulloch's biography of Cromwell. This was a nice surprise as I didn't recall seeing Mantel's manuscript at the Huntington before. This wasn't the only surprise for me. 

From a distance I saw this bird on the grounds and for a second thought it was a Phainopepla but as I took a closer look it was unlike anything I had seen before. Merlin to the rescue and with both photo and sound id the bird was identified as a Red-Whiskered Bulbul, a native of India that had first found it way to Florida. Along the way some birds escaped the aviary and seem to have established themselves in places with exotic fruit plants. Made my life-list! 

That wrapped up an amazing day for me! On the ride back home we overheard a Proust quote on the radio "The real voyage of discovery consists, not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes." These past few years travel has been impossible but books remain the cheapest way to transcend time and space. It breaks my heart that we are living in times when books are banned but guns are not.

Guns in America

 It has been a horrific couple of days - one more mass shooting in America and this time in an elementary school. This is an all time low even for the US and as a mother this was just heart breaking. When I picked up my daughter from school I couldn't even imagine what the moms of the 19 kids in Uvalde would be going through at that moment. After Parkland I was hoping something would change. Then we heard about the scandals associated with the NRA and their bankruptcy and I thought, if not now then when? And now Uvalde is here and will anything change at least now? 

How can we have a party that claims to be Pro-life also be Pro-guns? For them, life seems to begin at conception and ends the moment the head emerges and the umblical cord is cut. After that a child can be brought into a world without healthcare, with little to no food security, and be exposed to horrific violence in schools  - those don't seem to matter to those beholden to the NRA. 

How many times have we heard the phrase "guns don't kill people; people kill people." What kind of crazy argument is that? Yes at the end of the day a person wields the weapon, but the kind of weapon matters. Just look at history and how warfare has evolved - from the crossbow, to poison gas, to nuclear bombs, the number of fatalities has correlated strongly with the type of weapon. The solution is not arming schools! When has more weapons been a solution to anything? Is there any justification for any civilian to own a semi-automatic? Countries like Australia and NZ have shown the positive effects of banning such weapons. How many more kids should die before we start learning from these countries. But those countries don't have a right to bear arms enshrined in their constitution - another common retort. How about the right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness that 19 kids in Uvalde are never going to be able to enjoy? Does the right to bear arms trump the right to pursue life, liberty and happiness? I am sure the founding fathers would agree that semi-automatic assault-style weapons in the hands of any citizen with no background checks was not what they had in mind when they drafted the second amendment.

I have to concede i am not hopeful. I hear statistics like 90% of Americans want to have some kind of gun control, some form of universal background check - not this patchwork of state laws. I also know the NRA is hurting, but it looks like there are other lobbies that are powerful. It is also true that conspiracy theories are at a peak right now and that has driven more people to gun ownership. In the nearly 25 years i've lived here I've seen Columbine, Parkland and now Uvalde. At each point I thought a major change was coming and I have been disappointed. I know emotions are running high right now and I am sure the other side is going to say we cannot legislate anything right now. Can we at least repeal the Dickey Amendment and get some funding for research into gun control policies?

No parent should have to deal with a tragedy like what happened in Uvalde. If we cannot unite around this I don't know how we can deal with all the other challenges that we are up against.

Books (and/to) TV

 I've been catching up on books and TV shows these past few weeks. Normally I am nervous about TV adaptations of books that I've enjoyed but maybe it is the GoT effect, these days TV adaptations of books are turning out to be very good. So here are some of my reviews on things I've been watching and reading.

 The one that has topped my list is AMC+'s The North Water. I had picked up Ian McGuire's book back in 2016 when it came out on the basis of a blurb from Hilary Mantel and loved it! Slow burn, dark and moody, arctic atmosphere and great prose. It is a great story about the ending days of whaling, the misdeeds of the Raj in colonial India, fraud and murder, adventure and survival and a meditation on (toxic) masculinity.  So I was thrilled to find out that it was made into a TV series starring Collin Ferrel and Jack O'Connell (who was terrific in Godless which incidentally is one of my all time favorite series on Netflix). The show didn't disappoint. The acting was impeccable and the visuals were spectacular. The show is not a popular one as it is not available on the Big 3 streaming platforms and you need a subscription to AMC+ but it was totally worth it. If you don't believe me, here is a link to the BBC's review of the show.

This Christmas being stuck inside with Covid I spent it with Deborah Harkness' All Souls Trilogy. I am normally not a fan of vampire stories, but I came to her books through an interview she did for the Folger's Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. I loved the premise about a lost manuscript and different creatures hunting for a book that held the key to their origins. I had also recently finished Janet Brown's two part biography of Darwin and this series, about the origin of species albeit of a different kind, came to me at the right time and I finished the first one during the two week Christmas quarantine and decided to complete the trilogy. I had no intention of watching the TV show but since i had gotten a month of AMC+ for the sake of North Water, and this one was also available I decided to give it a try and this too was a very successful adaptation. The books are definitely more satisfying but the show is still terrific for someone who doesn't have the patience to go through three door-stoppers.

Next one on my list is The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry. It was first published in 2016 and I remember buying the book in an international airport (not sure if it was Changi or Chennai or Heathrow) because at that time the book wasn't available in the US yet. Perry specializes in gothic fiction and Victorian literature and that genre appeals to me. This is a very slow read and at times it feels like nothing really happens, so I was not sure how the TV show would be. So far three episodes have come out on Apple TV and with a stellar cast and outstanding production values I am going to finish this one. Of all the Book-to-TV recos I have, this one was my least favorite book and by extension could become my least favorite show, but will reserve judgement until the series wraps up.

Pachinko is my last of the Book-to-TV recommendations. Loved the book when it came out a few years back and the TV adaptation on Apple TV is wonderful too. Korean cinema and TV is garnering worldwide audience these days thanks to Parasite and Squid Game. Pachinko is very different as it tells the fate of a family matriarch tracing her background from the colonial times when Korea was under Japanese rule through modern times. The book was a big hit when it came out and the tv show is amazing too with some terrific acting. However, only season 1 has been completed so the story leaves you hanging in the TV adaptation. Not sure when season 2 will arrive. But the book is already here and can satiate your curiosity.

That ends my Book-to-TV reviews. I will now switch gears to books I've been reading this month and here is a brief summary of those that have left an impression.

Klara and the Sun is by Kazugo Ishiguro who needs no introduction. Winner of the Nobel prize for literature Ishiguro is someone not bound by genre and his books bridge genre and literary fiction. This book is getting rave reviews for its portrayal of a dystopian world where AI has advanced to the level where a child can have an AF (artificial friend) and gene editing (with some risks) is available to elites who want to assure a great future for their kids. He raises a number of questions on the ethics not just of technologies like gene editing, surveillance, AI but also the disparity in the access to these tech and how humans treat their AF companions. The book was a quick read but at times it seemed too simplistic to me. Maybe that was intentional as he wants us to think about what is real and what is a simulacra and does it matter. However, I was waiting for something to happen and it was a bit disappointing. I've concluded that it is a matter of personal taste -  I just prefer his books like Remains of the Day, Artist of the Floating World to his dystopian fiction.

In Search of a Kingdom by Laurence Bergreen was a book that has been on my radar for a long time and i finally read it this past week. It tells the history of how Francis Drake transformed from a lowly pirate to a Knight  and helped transform the lowly island to an Empire and secured Elizabeth's position on the English throne. An ex-slaver who turned away from slavery seeing the cruelty of the Spanish, Drake was driven by just one thing - exacting revenge on the Spanish - which coincidentally suited his monarch who didn't want to wage an all out war on the Spanish. Instead Drake's targeted piracy weakened the Spanish so significantly that its effects were seen during the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Incidentally Drake also circumnavigated the globe and didn't meet with the same fate as Magellan. Drake's piracy was also relatively more humane than that of other conquistadors and explorers. He treated the indigenous people he encountered (like the Cimmarons of Panama or the Miwoks of the Pacific Northwest in America) with respect and reserved all his disdain and cruelty for the Spanish. Keynes (yes the famous economist) estimates that Drake's piracy helped Elizabeth pay off all of England's foreign debt and left her with 40,000 pounds in hand which she invested in the Levant company whose profits led to the East India company which in turn led to the looting of India's wealth and the establishment of the British empire. The book is fast-paced, easy read, full of interesting facts like how 007 came to be a thing based on a cryptic cipher by John Dee, Elizabeth's historian. 

Speaking of fast-reads, action adventures The Lost City of the Monkey God by Douglas Preston was another nonfiction that reads like a fictional tale. The book follows a group of US & Honduran archaeologists and documentary filmmaker Steve Elkins' attempt to discover the archaeological site referred to with numerous names - the White city, the City of the Jaguar, the City of the Monkey God- from the time of the early conquistadors in the Mosquitia region of Honduras. While numerous explorers from the 1930s at various times have claimed to have discovered the city, Preston debunks many myths and this team with the help of Lidar technology did the first proper aerial survey of the site. While there was a fair share of criticism about the effort from other experts who were not part of the exploration, the discovery of the site has been hailed as a source of national pride by the Honduran government and to the team's credit they did not stop with the Lidar survey but risked their lives in ground truthing the data with actual field work in the jungles with many of them contracting leishmaniasis due to their exposure to parasites in the jungle (Dr.Fauci plays a minor role in this regard). I haven't watched the documentary but I hope to at some point as both the story of the civilization and the story of the discovery are equally intriguing. It was also good to hear about something positive coming out of a US-Honduran relationship.

I am glad I read all these books and am double glad that I finally took the time to write about them. Sometimes when I read one book after an other they all get muddled in my brain and taking the time to even write a few sentences helps fixing some of these books in my memory for longer term. As summer is around the corner i am building up my reading pile in anticipation. I was reading a review of Emma Smith's upcoming book Portable Magic and the guardian review states "Her title, borrowed from an essay by Stephen King, emphasises the mobility of these apparently inert items and their occult powers. Like motorcars or metaphors, books transport us to destinations unknown, and that propulsion has something uncanny about it." Needless to say that book is on my reading pile as it echoes my sentiments completely.

Taking a Break

 After 25+ years in the corporate world, I decided to hit the brakes on my career this week. I am not part of the pandemic induced she-cession or the great retirement. This was something that I had always planned to do even before the pandemic hit us. I had tried to quit once before, early in my career, when my then infant daughter first went to day care and came home with multiple ear infections. Thanks to my mother and spouse who supported me through those tough days and a very understanding manager I was able to manage both home and career without quitting. This time around there is no such compelling need, other than the fact that my daughter will be a high school senior this fall and before I know it she will be out of the home and I will sitting on an empty nest. I decided if there was ever a time to take a break this was it. Some people called my decision "courageous," others lauded me for choosing family over career. I honestly don't think I deserve any of these comments. I recognize that I am lucky enough to be able to afford a break like this.

This is an experiment - my Walden - but unlike my hero, I am not isolating myself. I am just trying to be more available for my family and practice being present in the moment as opposed to running schedules in the back of my mind and flitting from one thing to another constantly. Reading, volunteering, and birding have always been part of my life. But I am hoping to do these more mindfully.  In the past when I wanted to learn something new I always did it alongside managing my home and career. I am hoping that with a bit more leisure i will have the opportunity to follow up on areas of interest in depth. Maybe I will finally finish Ulysses and I am hoping to call my mom more frequently. Beyond these I don't have specific goals. I am not calling this phase my retirement because I don't know what's in store for me and no one can predict the future. And I am not doing this to help my daughter's college application process. Sure, I hope to travel with her this summer to colleges that are on her list that I had never heard of until now. There is not much I can do other than listen to what she is / is not saying and follow her lead.

It's been a week and I am happy to report that I haven't experienced any withdrawal symptoms or regrets, yet. Sure, I miss the people I used to work with but I don't miss the daily grind. This Mother's Day didn't feel any different from the last one either. On our way to the local pond for some birding time (which has become our traditional Mother's Day thing to do) we didn't see any chicks which was quite different from our experience last year. Disappointing? Well, yes at first. But then I told myself maybe the chicks have all successfully fledged and we were just a bit late this year - which reminded me of my own fledgling standing next to me and the ephemerality (if that's a word) of life. If I had any second thoughts about taking a break, the pond with no chicks/fledglings removed the last vestiges of doubt. Now as Gandalf reminds me "all I have to decide is what to do with the time that is given me."