Distraction via exploration

“Scituate Beach, Massachusetts,’’ byThomas Doughty, 1837

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

When things in the world in general and/or in your own little world in particular  seem almost intolerably tense, you can’t beat wandering around in nature without an itinerary for relief.  I remember that fondly from my boyhood in a small, still partly rural, town on Massachusetts Bay. Alone, or with a pal or two, I’d go “exploring’’. And it was a good place to explore.

There were beaches, more pebbles than sand, with rocky headlands and innumerable sea birds, some of which would attack if you approached their nests. There were shark’s eggs to pick up, along with lovely sea glass (this was before the explosion of plastic pollution), and horseshoe crab shells amidst the seaweed dumped on the beach at the high-tide mark. (There were also tin cans to shoot at with BB guns.)

After northeast storms, we’d look for small boats that might have been tossed ashore.

Nearby were bullrush forests along the marshes, through which we’d make trails leading to little “rooms” we’d create. We’d use rowboats to explore the tidal rivers through the marshes, with their often sulfurous smells.

Sometimes in midwinter the more brackish and less salty marsh streams would freeze up and we’d do our exploring on skates.

Inland, small streams beckoned us to find their sources, and we’d check out  a nearby farm, fragrant in certain weather with the aroma of manure, where we would sometimes intentionally irritate the bulls. There were rock-topped mini-mountains and tall oak trees to climb and abandoned houses to trespass in.  (See poem fragment above.) And everywhere pleasing smells, such as  of cedar trees, of which we had a lot, and flowering trees in May, of wet, newly cut grass and  of rotting apples on the ground in the fall.

And the sights, smells and sounds could vary much from day to day, with the sharpest changes in early spring.  Every day’s light was different.

What a miraculous world!

— Photo by Stefan-Xp

While this winter has generally been milder than usual, it looks like we won’t be getting the “January Thaw” – that  sweet stretch of days with temps in the 50s that we often get at this time of year in New England, giving us a tempting taste of spring. A January Thaw would have been particularly appreciated by  COVID-desperate restaurant owners because they could more comfortably serve customers outdoors.

Meanwhile, while most (?) New Englanders like mild winters, that our winters are getting warmer and shorter is a bad sign for the world, showing that man-fueled global warming is speeding up.