Outdoors

Horripilation

~ Howard Freeman ~ Leave a comment
Alberto Merati
ART: Alberto Merati

The sound of a fox barking is not what you might expect. Not, at least, what a city kid might expect. It wasn’t the sound of a deer snorting a warning to its tribe of my predation when I was out back yesterday at 3:00 AM under the stars. I well know that muffled staccato of an alert that serves both to make its kind aware of me and gives notice to me of it. It’s what my middle son when quite young sounded like when trying to smell Karen’s coffee, only he did it in reverse. Or a deer stomping. I’ve heard that sound over the years more times than I can count, going back to our childhood at Fire Island, where there were so many deer and so few rifles and cars that my father, tending to his vegetable garden, would see them often within arm’s length and, as he phrased it, “I could have reached out and strangled them. And I wish I had.” During this same childhood and to ward off those deer, he’d request that we ask our barber for hair trimmings from the barber shop floor. He said that the smell of humans repelled deer. (Yeah. No.) So he’d tie up some hair trimmings in old pantyhose — yes, we obliged our father’s request — and, like heads on pikes, place them on top of wood stakes along the garden’s perimeter.

Yet the deer were more fearless than Goths.

You can imagine that in the stillness of 3:00 AM, a moment more like a photograph than a video and under stars that were brighter-than-usual pinpricks in the celestial blanket that covered all those still asleep, when I heard a noise that was unfamiliar — a sharp shriek that punctured the silence — my little hairs stood up. And they really do — my little hairs: on the back of my neck and on my forearms. I can feel them pressing against whatever sweater or hoodie I’m wearing. There’s an interesting and sadly ineffective reason for this. When we’re afraid, adrenaline stimulates the body to pull on the roots of our hairs, making them stand up. The purpose of that is to make us look bigger to the enemy we feel threatened by.

Not me, follicly speaking. (And otherwise.)
A little more like me, follicly speaking. (And only follicly speaking.)

I gave you the interesting part. Now let me tell you the “sadly ineffective reason” part.

The sound I heard was not a deer warning its young or mate. Believe me, as soon as I came inside, which was not long after I heard the noise — defining “not long after” as being the time it takes to Google “What the fuck was that” — I searched for what a deer sounds like when threatened. I got videos of the snort and the stomp and even, when I scrolled down, deer stags with mating calls. I knew then that I’d scrolled past a possible answer. I didn’t find online anything like what I’d heard until last night, when Karen played for me the sound of a fox barking.

I swear to you that yesterday morning, my hair follicles were trying to make me look bigger and more threatening than a small canine that would have been no match for me. (Most likely.)

Sadly, adrenaline didn’t help me stand my ground. It made me want a cup of coffee in front of my laptop.

Let your nose smell the roses and your eyes see the sky

~ Howard Freeman ~ Leave a comment
The Supergiant star Betelgeuse and a “titanic convulsion” in 2019, as recorded by Hubble observers.

Twice a day and both times in the dark, once at night before bed and again in the morning just after waking up, I walk out back to the 6th tee box on the golf course where we live and I admire the heavens in all their created glory. The temperature dropped to 30 degrees overnight, making the well-trimmed ryegrass feel like walking on a frozen crewcut.

At night I have my ritual of looking in particular for the constellation Orion and the surrounding stars and also for “nearby” Mars. (So odd that I would refer to these celestial bodies as if they sat on the circumference of a spherical boundary rather than existing on billions of concentric hyperbolic planes that constitute no barrier to travel.) Last night I found Betelgeuse and then, down and to the West, Sirius.

This morning I found the Big Dipper, and I remembered that it’s handle pointed toward some significant body. And indeed it did, to the quite bright Arcturus, which I looked up on Stellarium. That iPhone app also showed me that a Starlink satellite was passing overhead. Fricking cool.

This post might be boring to some, and now it constitutes a meta statement, which is also boring, even to me, but the experience itself is ineffable.

Smell the roses overhead.

“For a moment of night”

~ Howard Freeman ~ Leave a comment

I think I’ve found a way to spot Mars in the night sky using Orion’s belt and then two stars.

We live on the fringe of a golf course, and the 6th tee is about thirty yards from our back door. Twice a day I walk out onto the tee box. At night, I stand there and take in the majesty — and I do mean majesty: a word we rarely use other than referring to Charles or Elizabeth and which we ought never use when speaking about individual humans in a hierarchical way but, instead, use universally about the majesty of our humanity and the Created Order around us — I take in the majesty of creation. When the stars are out, not only is it more pretty of course than on a cloudy night. It also is more humbling to me by far than standing in daylight. In daylight, I often feel massaged by Sun as that star lovingly warms what is around me. It lulls me to think that somehow I’m at the center. Night reminds me I’m not. And a starry night is a fearsome thing indeed.

Then in the morning — before coffee, before writing in my journal, before any sacred text reading, and certainly before social media and email — I walk out onto that same tee box and again I take in the majesty and also face my irrational fear of being alone outside at night.

Finding Mars is relatively easy now compared with remembering some of the star names.

In “Orion’s Belt” are, from “east to west” (for lack of a better way to describe their positions), Alnitak Alnilam and Mintaka. I just checked that link and, sure enough, NASA describes their relative position the same way (“east to west”). They are “blue supergiant” suns, more massive and powerful than ours. (That kind of makes one feel almost quaint, yes? To talk about “our sun” when so many other suns out there aren’t possessed at all. Most likely.) All three names are derived from Arabic words, and this makes me think of the three wise men and Zoroastrianism, which was an association bandied about when I was growing up in the 1960s and ’70s and before anyone speaking Arabic was considered a terrorist. It was also a time when much of popular Christianity could tolerate a non-Jewish “-ism” to be included in the Nativity story.

  • Alnitak — from an nitaq, “the girdle.”
  • Alnilam — from al Nitham or al Nathm, “the string of pearls.”
  • Mintaka — from al Mintakah, “the belt.”

If I follow these stars from east to west I plot a course further to the west and then north until I find Bellatrix. “Bellatrix” means “female warrior,” and is likely derived from one of two words, both male nouns. Webster’s Dictionary says that “-trix” is a suffix that, when added to words, “forms a feminine noun of agency.” One thinks of “executrix” of an estate (vs. an executor). (The reddit generation has taken “dominatrix” and shortened it to “dom.” Much of language amongst them is abbreviated or even acronym’ed, made easy for texting. In fact, you can turn this entire post into a 572-letter acronym and text it to a friend. They will thank you. Try it.)

Yet being an “executrix,” ladies, is your nom (de guerre…see how I did that?) in only some states. Other states will make the person who executes a Last Will and Testament the “executor” and, effectively, rob women of their agency in such matters. Gender-fluidity — a liquidation of gender from noun to adjective — also robs the identifying person of their definition in the literal sense. I would think their desire would be the opposite. Of course, fluidity does allow one the freedom to sit at the head of the Thanksgiving table one year and at the kids’ table the next.

On the contrary, I like to think of words as ice crystals, branching off from a center and forming a pattern that can be traced back when looking exceedingly closely and with care not to melt their ancestral paths.

For more on this increasingly dull (to some) topic, go HERE. I, for one, hold my breath when searching for the root. One never knows what one will find. It is often a root word meaning something not so much male-dominated as true to its actual meaning, one which we shy from today for fear of losing friends or social media followers, which is to say the same thing. “Gentleman” comes to mind. It used to mean an Englishman of noble birth who owned land. Then it meant a man who was not only polite but polite specifically to women who wanted men to be polite. Then it meant a man who was polite to women who wanted men to be polite to women but not let anyone else know that she wanted that. Today, of course, it refers to a man who walks into an building with no windows at lunchtime carrying a hundred dollars in singles.

From Bellatrix, I fly across the north and veer slightly south until I hit Aldebaran. Yet another word that might be derived through Arabic and originally from the Latin. For more: HERE.

Finally, to Mars, I simply float a little northeast (?). At this point I have lost my sense of direction, because we use direction on a horizontal plane that is not easily tilted. Let me describe it this way: if last night I stood on that tee box facing toward Medina, Texas — which is an ironic posture for an Episcopalian to take when working with Arabic names — and look up, I see Orion’s Belt in the southwest at about 11 o’clock. (Which means, as you now know, that when I tell you in Kerrville, “let’s meet tomorrow at 1 o’clock,” what I am really saying is “let’s have an early breakfast in San Antonio.”)

I follow Bellatrix and Aldebaran by leaning back, and by the time I hit Mars, I’m pretty much looking straight up. Lunchtime in Kerrville. In the end, what we think of as “north” (and south and east and west) is still a self-centered orientation of the universe. It is “around” us. We are not “in it.” Copernicus is rolling in his grave.

This, of course, is one of the main reasons I go outside under the stars — quite alone at night and very alone first thing in the morning. I want to feel “in it” rather than it being “around me,” as I do in daytime. Lulled. (Included in the many etymologies of “lull” and its offspring “lullaby” is the Dutch word “lullen,” which means “to talk nonsense.”)

Instead of being lulled to sleep, I want to feel that irrational fear of being in the dark.

Henry Beston (1888-1968) wrote:

Our fantastic civilization has fallen out of touch with many aspects of nature, and with none more completely than night. Primitive folk, gathered at a cave mouth round a fire, do not fear night; they fear, rather, the energies and creatures to whom night gives power; we of the age of the machines, having delivered ourselves of nocturnal enemies, now have a dislike of night itself. With lights and ever more lights, we drive the holiness and beauty of night back to the forests and the sea; the little villages, the crossroads even, will have none of it.

Henry Beston in The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod

Again, he writes:

For a moment of night we have a glimpse of ourselves and of our world islanded in its stream of stars — pilgrims of mortality, voyaging between horizons across eternal seas of space and time.

At night, or in early morning, I have nothing to fear except deer, a skunk, maybe a possum, or a stray cat. Yet the hairs on the back of my neck and on my arms actually do stand up. It is irrational. I am never in any danger. Ever. So I walk out there to the tee box to glory in the majesty of the deep navy blue sky and to face down that irrational fear, which is not a fear of anything external so much as it is a fear of what I might learn if I stand still for that one moment of night.

It’s not the wings themselves

~ Howard Freeman ~ Leave a comment

Monarch butterflies land on branches at Monarch Grove Sanctuary in Pacific Grove, Calif., Wednesday, Nov. 10, 2021. On Thursday, July 21, 2022, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature said migrating monarch butterflies have moved closer to extinction in the past decade – prompting scientists to officially designate them as “endangered.” (AP Photo/Nic Coury, File)

In the fall of 1972 or 1973, when I was 9 or 10, the monarch butterflies were making their way to Mexico. I was fortunate enough to see the daytime sky as densely dotted with them, it seems, as with the stars at night out at our beach house on Fire Island, New York.

I remember it was cold. Cold and rainy. This made each monarch’s air travel much like flying a 3-inch wet Kleenex. For, you see, the monarch butterfly itself is the small creature carried along on those wings, not the wings themselves. We see the latter, but it is the former that must make the long journey.

One morning I awoke and went to the beach. Wearing corduroy pants and a cable knit sweater Mom had made, with a matching one for my younger brother, Jim. I probably wore a white turtleneck. The shirt was probably clean, since Mom kept it that way despite young boys’ proclivities to soil them making forts or fighting off enemies with imaginary guns or tree branches for broad swords. Jim might have even been with me.

As the previous day’s sky had been speckled with these marvelous creatures, so now the beach on this drizzly morning was littered with those orange and brown wings. Some still attached, some detached or tattered.

I walked along and grew sad. I picked up four butterflies that were intact and seemed like maybe they were just knocked unconscious. I carefully transported them — I don’t recall how — and then placed them on the ledge of our second-floor balcony, facing the sun in the south and shielded from the stiff north wind. I monitored them. Waiting for their wings to dry so they could journey on.

The next day, I checked the ledge and three of the four were missing. “They must have dried and flown away,” I told myself.

Mom helped me identify and then write to the Fire Island National Seashore office and report to whichever man was in charge that I had successfully rescued three monarch butterflies from the recent storm, even though I’d lost one. I don’t recall if he wrote back. I do recall that I was still sad about that one.

I wrote up that story as an article for the first edition of a newsletter I’d launch the next spring. The publication had articles (news and also features), poetry and cartoons I had lifted from Highlights Magazine. I offered it to subscribers, and my grandmother became its sole patron. Not enough, I’m sorry to report, to keep it in the black, so I had to shutter it a month later.

The homeowners’ association where we live here in the Texas Hill Country has created a small monarch butterfly “layover station,” for lack of a better phrase. It’s a split-rail enclosed area of probably 75 feet by 35 feet not far from the main road leading into the development. Karen and I often remark that we wished it was a dog run.

Perhaps what little allure it holds for me is about potential, not actual.

The Beautiful Ima Hogg

~ Howard Freeman ~ Leave a comment

The temperature this morning was cool-your-coffee-quick degrees when I stepped outside to have those first precious sips. “First precious sips.” I feel that same routine first-ness when I finish reading in bed at night. I set my book down, get up, pull the bottom sheet up and over the top of the mattress — I absolutely hate sleeping on wrinkled sheets (“Ok, Mr. Princess And The Pea”) — and then crawl under the covers. I lie on my back — though I almost never sleep that way, or at least don’t sleep well that way — and let out a sigh. Really, it’s a sigh. Sigh. Such a beautiful word. Almost onomatopoeic. I notice that onomatopoeic has not only a lot of vowels, but it also has all the vowels except a “u.” (It also doesn’t have a “y,” but Y’s are like thumbs. They’re vowels but not vowels.) So I decided to do a little research — that decision was a moment ago; I’m a long way off from sighing in bed, and my coffee is fucking cold by now — and Googled “words with all of the vowels.” Here’s what I got:

Eunoia, at six letters long, is the shortest word in the English language that contains all five main vowels. Seven letter words with this property include adoulie, douleia, eucosia, eulogia, eunomia, eutopia, miaoued, moineau, sequoia, and suoidea.

Guinness World Records

“The Guinness Book of World Records” is now simply “Guinness World Records” online. It changed names in 1999. Heading toward Y2K, while most people feared the sudden collapse of technology, Guinness leaned in. Books became dinosaurs. Except that Caitlyn Jenner, nee Bruce Jenner, will write an actual book, it will be sold at Barnes & Noble, and people will come and have their physical copy signed and perhaps shake Caitlyn’s hand, which will crush the reader’s from having thrown so many shotputs and hurled so many discuses. It will be ok. Because if violence is threatened, Caitlyn can hide in either bathroom. Sorry: low blow. As it were.

But I do want to go back now to those words.

Eunoia. This is a beautiful word. First of all, it actually is beautiful. It comprises the Greek “eu” (beautiful) + “noia” (thought) and can refer to the goodwill between a speaker and her/his audience. (Again, Caitlyn has a distinct advantage here. OK; last time. Promise.) You pronounce it “yoo-NOY-uh.”

The only other real word in this list that we all use is sequoia. The rest of those words above are for professors who live celibate lives, and not by choice.

For example, if you Google “adoulie meaning,” you will get a list of sites that let you know what andouille sausage is. Seriously. If, at the end of this post you are not disgusted, click there and see for yourself.

“Miaoued” means meow’ed, like what a cat does. I am totally serious. Look it up. Its synonym apparently is “miaow.” We all know that both of those spellings for meow — which has fewer letters and is, after all, the choice of writers on a budget — have been created by professors at Ivy League schools to justify their Endowed Chair Of Stick-Up-The-Butt. And while “meow” is a cat sound and onomatopoeic, “miaou” is the sound of a professor teaching a class on cat sounds.

Moineau is French. Look it up. It doesn’t count. Why Google includes it shows that Silicon Valley is going socialist. Why Guinness includes it explains why it no longer has a spine.

Suoidea. This will require my naked contempt. DON’T GOOGLE THIS YET. It is a word from vertebrate zoology — danger already — and means “A superfamily of artiodactyls of the suborder of Paleodonta which includes”…wait for it…

.

.

.

Pigs.

Yup.

And since Suoidea is a type of “superfamily” — “Look at me! I’m a pig, and I live in a superfamily! Whoopee!” — there’s no singular identity within the word. I can’t say I’m a “suoid.” I can say I am suoidean — piglike. I can even say I am from the land of Suoideania — a farm. I can say I like to eat Suoideanese food: trough scraps. Or that my art is suoideanesque.

Sometimes, beautiful words have ugly meanings. Other times, while rare, ugly words have beautiful meanings.

Ima Hogg, one of the most respected women in Texas during the 20th Century. This photo c. 1900.

But where is Vega?

~ Howard Freeman ~ Leave a comment

My morning routine, when done “right,” starts with a cup of coffee out back and under the stars if it’s the right time of year. Wrong time of year and it’s either too cold or the sunrise doesn’t align with the my-rise. I take a chair from the porch–one of those white plastic armchair jobs you might find at your local pool–and move it into the yard, far enough out from the house so it feels like the invisible roofline doesn’t extend over my head and far enough from the neighbor’s tree to the left to avoid feeling hemmed in. I feel exposed there underneath that what-is-it?-ness, and that feels good. And “good” not in terms of comfort; rather, quite the opposite. The moon is waning toward a new moon on Saturday, so its light at my back is still bright enough to cast a faint shadow from me onto the grass yet dim enough to allow that shadow to be whatever fear my mind might conjure it to be. We have a black cat, and typically all three cats are raring to get outside when I get up. The black one, Bucket, stations himself just outside our bedroom each morning, and when I crack the door and move my right foot forward, he wheels around without looking up and heads for the backdoor, just to the left in the living room. (Frankly, I think he’s reached a point of taking me for granted, which cats are wont to do.) So he’s the color of a shadow, but only darker. His midnight-purple fur absorbs the light, as might a black hole. Outside, and as I shift slightly with my coffee, seated in that white plastic porch chair, I notice out of the corner of my eye–don’t ask me whether its rods or cones that afford me night vision; I always have to Google it and have yet to assign a heuristic to distinguish them; please drop a comment if you have a good one–I notice a shape also moving slightly. I don’t catch on that the movements are synced. The shadow is dark, and so is my cat and so is a skunk because, frankly, at my age either an eye rod or cone may have decided to sleep in and not help me determine whether I’ll have my leg brushed up against by Bucket or spend the rest of the day in a tomato juice bath. (That simple solution wasn’t what was required, by the way, when our chocolate lab, Leo, was sprayed last year. It was a combination of Dawn dish detergent and like baking soda and something else, or some such concoction. I know it was three things mixed together. And who keeps even one jar of tomato juice in their fridge, after all, let alone a sink or bathtub full?! But back to having coffee under the stars.) I sit there and wonder if Bucket is a skunk or is even there at all. So I “pss-pss-pss” the way one does with cats–as if there’s some magic to that primitive call; but we all know that “pss” substitutes for a cat’s name regardless of its identity, because names are meaningless to them; in fact their name for each of us is as generic. It’s “piss off, yourself. I’ll come when I want affection. Not before, not after.”–I do that universal cat name sound, and then I take my leg and kind of swirl it gently around the area of the shadow to see if Bucket is there. I do that while telling myself that I’m trying to rub his back with my foot. But if he were there, which he isn’t, I’d actually be kicking him in his face. But I do that because it might be a skunk and I don’t want a skunk anywhere near me–half invisible because of the mediocre work of my rods and my cones. Yet that would have been an unwise thing to do with my foot anyway because of the whole day-spent-in-a-bathtub-of-tomato-juice-and-HEB’s-closed-now-anyway. But I do that to feel less exposed sitting in that chair as if before a firing squad–does one ever get to sit during executions, or is it always standing or lying?

I get up out of the chair and look up.

Navy blue with pin pricks.

The waning moon is to the southeast, and Orion is due south at almost eleven o’clock on an imaginary overhead arc. It requires me to tilt my head back at an angle at which I can’t drink coffee with enough confidence that I won’t pour it down the front of my hoodie. I hold my left hand, the one not holding my coffee cup–do you do that, too? Hold your coffee cup with the same hand because after a few decades of holding your coffee cup, it would almost be as unnatural as writing with your untrained hand?–I hold my left hand at arm’s length and, with one eye shut, I raise my forefinger up against Orion’s belt. It fits neatly within the outer two stars, obscuring only the middle star (planet? cluster? galaxy?). I start to wonder what cataclysmic event would have to happen that, at a distance these stars are from us, the left and right stars would travel even slightly toward or away from that middle star. I decide, standing there, that once inside and before writing to you I might Google–again with the free advertising–how far the left star is from us and how far the middle is and, using my A+ in 9th grade geometry, I’d determine how long it might take for the left star to travel to that middle star. I remind myself that the three stars constituting Orion’s belt are vastly different distances from us, and I’d spend the better part of the workday trying to solve this math problem, becoming more knowledgeable but also more unemployed. I remind myself that the whole purpose of coming out here first thing in the morning with coffee only, no phone, is to connect to the Maker of those pin pricks around me. I conduct this connection half mindlessly. I don’t really think about the Creator, to be honest. I simply enjoy where I’m standing. Standing there both mindlesssly and also incredibly aware. I figure that such mindless awareness is itself an acknowledgement that there is a God outside me.

So I realize that the left-hand star might be millions of light years closer than the middle star and that I might have no easy way to determine how long it would take for it to meet the middle star in this pre-dawn sky. And when I put my mind to determining such things, I realize that I’m aware and focused on placing myself within this reality around us. For a moment, I forget about Bucket and skunks and tomato juice. I forget about the lights from the houses behind me now as I look over ours; I forget about the dark smudges of live oak trees or the pickup truck that turns from its side street same time each day and drives deeper into the development (because I’ve already witnessed that somewhat foreign-to-the-dark-and-still-silence event). I forget about those things, and I start to wonder about where Lyra is. Where’s Vega; its anchor? It’s the second brightest star in the northern hemisphere. I can see that through the branches of the neighbor’s tree is Jupiter. Compared to my forefinger at arm’s length, it’s practically the size of a pinhead. “How many angels,” you ask, “can dance on the head of a pin?”

Tell me please, if you find out.

Mangoes, taxi drivers and God

~ Howard Freeman ~ Leave a comment

The bats were out again this morning. Around 6:15am. Until recently, I was a bit put out by them. Strike that: I was a bit repulsed by them. I didn’t like them. But then I learned that bats pollinate fruits like bananas and mangoes. I’m agnostic regarding their involvement with the latter, which are hard as hell to cut and make edible, but I am — as I’m sure most of us are — grateful for the banana side of its deployment. And I also learned that we and bats and whales might share a common ancestor from millions of years ago. Yep. Depending on your stance on evolution, we hang out at the same get-togethers on Thanksgiving Day.

In the same breath, I’ll add this: I am as comfortable believing I evolved from a billion years-old protoplasmic blob on Earth’s surface as I am that I came from a 59-year-old blob inside my mother’s womb. Both are miraculous; both are life; both are sacred to me. My and others’ lives and the health of Earth are mine to steward. That is what I believe. ‘Nuff said.

This reminds me of a story.

Shortly after moving to New York from Lubbock in 1995, Karen was riding in a cab with a driver whose name was Nufsed (pronounced NUFF-sedd). She knew what his name was because every yellow taxi in the city must display within view of the passenger an ID plaque with the driver’s name and Taxi and Limousine Commission license number. She being the friendly Texan, she starts talking with “Nufsed,” and because it seems Nufsed is struggling with something in his life, she steers the conversation toward spiritual matters. They reach her destination and she wishes him well and vice versa. A week or two later, she gets in a cab to go somewhere else. (She had not yet realized that real New Yorkers take the subway everywhere, not cabs, but then she hadn’t met me yet, nor had she benefited from my extensive knowledge of the subway system. In fact, she often joked with people while we lived there that the main reason she married me was for my knowledge of the subway system. Now living in Kerrville, Texas, which doesn’t enjoy the benefits of the New York City subway system nor my knowledge of same, I am rendered mostly useless except for my ability to make a decent chicken fettuccine alfredo.)

But back to the story.

As I said, a week or two later Karen took another cab ride — eschewing the subway — and lo and behold the driver was Nufsed! Now, you have to realize that as many yellow taxis that you already think you see in shows involving New York City, that apparent ubiquity is probably under-represented. There are more than 13,000 yellow cabs shuttling fake New Yorkers from one place to another at a cost of $0.50 for every ten feet. More recently, add to that number another 9,000 “Black Cars,” which is the term used for Uber and Lyft drivers and the like. So Karen got in the cab and greeted Nufsed, and he remembered her as well, even though riders are not required to display an ID tag. (Ba-dum-dum. “I’m here all week, folks.”)

You have probably already have guessed that this kind of thing “just doesn’t happen.” Until it does. It’s so unlikely to happen that as many years as I spent in New York, and as capable as I am of remembering faces and names — that’s what essentially I’ve been paid to do for more than a quarter century — what happened to Karen has never happened to me. (Yes, I did take the occasional cab or two.) All I can conclude is that whatever spiritual matters they discussed were matters that, if I know Karen as I do, they are things that Nufsed needed to hear and things that might well have given him new hope in life. New reason to believe he is loved. Their meeting again was no accident, but it can’t be explained.

So I don’t like bats. Or didn’t so much until I remembered their usefulness in consuming mosquitoes that otherwise might have been vexing me. Or until I learned that they cause bananas to be in my life or until I learned that whales and dogs are in my life because of our common ancestor. I like whales and dogs a lot.

So I don’t like bats that much today any more than I like the distant and pimple-covered cousin who, on that large family Thanksgiving Day, stations himself at the far end of the food table eating most of the guacamole and even double dips. (This is Texas. Use your appetizer of choice.) This distant cousin, however, is also the one who volunteers to clean the kitchen later that day, when the rest of us are falling asleep in front of the Cowboys-Giants game on TV.

But I’m big on miracles. I’m big on not knowing how it was that Nufsed and Karen crossed paths a second time in a way that “just doesn’t happen.” I’m big on not knowing how it is that, as my belief goes, all living creatures evolved from an ancient blob in the same way I myself grew from a more-recent blob. (I do also believe, however, that one human’s origin may have been only half-blobulous.) I’m big on mystery, because it is Mystery that breaths faith into my waking moments.

It is said, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” I believe that. But today I believe it in a new way, because of bats and because of Nufsed.

I used to think that the “evidence” was certain prescribed beliefs that I grabbed onto like a life-preserver and that underscored the truth of what I could not see, which was the existence of God. The life-preserver was tangible, it floated and I could grab it and hold it under my chest and stay alive until rescued by a search team from Bora Bora. The life preserver didn’t work for the person next to me, mind you, but it worked for me and my minimum survival, thank-you-very-much-now-fuck-off.

Today I believe that the “evidence” is mystery itself — the “things not seen” — that provides me reason to have and live out faith. That I can’t explain why Nufsed and Karen met twice. That I find it completely compatible, philosophically, biologically and theologically, that I came from two different kinds of blobs, as did bats, whales and dogs. Each creature — except perhaps for the aforementioned Half-Blobulous One — came from an initial blob and a secondary blob as it started its journey toward waking consciousness. That’s what I believe, at least.

The more mystery I encounter, the more mystery that arises one day that science explains the next day and which is then supplanted by new mystery, new science, and is again supplanted the following day…the more that that dynamic repeats each day that I live, the more faith I have that the original blob I came from has blossomed into something so beautiful, so marvelous, so unbelievable — so increasingly Mysterious — that today I have indisputable evidence that I will never have an answer to it other than to declare: “God.”

[PHOTO: Phys.org]

Gambusia Affinis

~ Howard Freeman ~ Leave a comment

Gambusia Affinis. We need more Gambusia Affinises. If indeed that’s the plural. It’s Latin, so…affines. (Nominative plural for masculine and neuter nouns. And, yes, of course I had to look that up. In high school, I took Latin III with Mr. Smith, but he’d spit while he talked, so I’d get distracted and tune out somewhere after the singular dative. In fact, he’d point something out to the class and exclaim excitedly, “D’you see? D’you see?!” We chortled behind his back that he was saying “juicy.”) What we are talking about, in Latin or otherwise, is the mosquitofish—that is the famed mosquitofish that is both fish and mosquito-eater, a lovely combination indeed.

I was more than a little bothered. I’d taken my first cup of coffee outside to the back porch around 5:40 AM. I sat in my chaise lounge as I am wont to do. This is my routine most mornings if I rise before dawn: have my first cup outside without my phone next to me. It’s a slightly uncomfortable feeling as you well know, Dear Reader, if you have to do anything without the thing with which you are accustomed to doing everything. Yet it is sometimes desirable, occasionally even essential. For example, my personal opinion is that men who use this thing to conduct business conversations in airport bathroom stalls should immediately be stripped of their first class boarding status and placed in Group 9, where the fight for overhead space for carry-ons typically results in having one’s bags gate checked. Flight attendant upon my informing her of his men’s room transgression: “What. You don’t like having your bag gate-checked, Mr. First-Class Would-You-Like-A-Drink-Before-Takeoff-Person? Tough. Stop using your phone in the shitter.”

When I get up and prepare to go outside, I always wear a hoodie of some kind. Even on warm summer mornings when the air is in the low 70s. This way, if the gambusia affines haven’t done their job down at the Guadalupe River, I have back-up. I simply pull my hoodie over my head, blocking out most of the mosquitoes’ runway to my ears. Would you not agree that the buzzing in your ears is often a lot more annoying than a bite? But having to do so spoils the moment, and my coffee usually accompanies me back inside when it’s only half finished.

Today I asked myself, What besides the gambusia affinis eats mosquitoes? Because we all ask ourselves, don’t we, “Why on God’s green earth would He make mosquitoes?” I mean, that’s a really common question. If you’re honest, you’ve asked yourself that, especially if you’re not wearing a hoodie and even if you don’t believe in God. At that moment, drinking your coffee, especially if you’re not wearing a hoodie, you become a True Believer. You might then doubt God’s goodness or at least His wisdom. That’s ok. Don’t feel bad. Many of us have felt that way, except in places where gambusia affines are plentiful. Because where gambusia affines are plentiful, mosquitoes are few, and atheists are numerous. Mosquitofish are most often found in the southern parts of Illinois and Indiana, throughout the Mississippi River and its tributary waters, and as far south as the Gulf Coast in the northeastern parts of Mexico. (This is true; I looked it up.) If you don’t believe in God, you will find like-minded mosquito-less friends somewhere between Marion and Evansville. (And this is simple logic.)

So in lieu of gambusia affines, I wondered, What birds eat mosquitoes?

I knew purple martins did. And bats. All of a sudden I hear a lone bird singing in the tree to the left of the porch. It was the first birdsong of the morning, and it was so crisp and loud that I thought maybe it would wake Karen. (Our bedroom windows are directly next to that tree.) I wondered two things: what species was that bird I was hearing, and could it pass muster eating mosquitoes as contrasted against the gambusia affinis? After all, the mosquitofish is specifically named for its prowess at eating mosquitoes.

I didn’t know whether the bird I heard was a purple martin, a mockingbird, or some other species. (If I don’t know what bird it is that I’m hearing, which is usually, I assume it’s a mockingbird, because it obviously mocks other birds so much that it fools you and me, and if I say it’s a mockingbird, I sound knowledgeable, especially if you have less clue than I do. Once when we were on vacation in Ruidoso, New Mexico, I heard and saw what I thought was a raven. As you know, they can be easily mistaken for crows. But ravens have special spiritual significance when they appear in your life. They can be an omen. So I actually researched online the sounds and slight physical differences between the two species, like their beaks and tails, to determine if I was hearing a crow or a bird that might mean I am the long-awaited savior. The savior part is crass Tuesday humor. But I can assure you that I did indeed research ravens with the full expectation that seeing one meant something of grave importance. Those of you who know me will roll your eyes and be like, “Yeah he did.”)

While I didn’t have my phone with me on the porch today for the aforementioned reasons, I thought, “There must be an iPhone app that helps me identify birds by sound.” Sure enough there is. Apparently, the best one is Merlin Bird ID. (That is, if you consider a 4.8-star rating on the App Store from 44,000 users as opposed to Bird Genie, which has 2 stars with 93 users, the first of whom was smart and gave it a 1-star try and 92 others who were not so smart.)

I went inside to my office and downloaded Merlin Bird ID and waited for the 983 MB file to install—that file was only Texas’s birds, by the way—and quickly walked back to the porch, hoping that the bird was still singing. It was. I followed the instructions and found out that it was either a Carolina Wren or a Purple Martin. Most likely a Carolina Wren (so said the app).

I marveled at the app. And I also felt a deep satisfaction knowing that bird’s specific tribe. I found myself not caring whether it ate mosquitoes or not. There is something most satisfying about encountering something, having it enhance one’s appreciation of nature and the peace of the morning, and then finding out what its name is.

Gratitude comes much more easily when you know the name of the one you’re thankful for.

Ducks on lily pads

~ Howard Freeman ~ Leave a comment

Paddleboarding on the Guadalupe is my replacement for surfing on the East Coast. I’ll confess/complain: it’s a poor replacement. Yes, it has the satisfying feel of being on water, being in the sun, working the muscles, being completely analog without an iPhone within a half mile or more of my hand.

But it lacks the noticeable movement of water around me. Surfing is an invitation or even a dare to come and dance with it. To a large extent, so is canoeing a river that has rapids. Surfing, with its occasional waves that form “tubes” that one can get covered up under and inside, is a return to the salt-water womb — a metaphor that’s not much exaggerated.

Now, the advantage of paddleboarding on a lake-like river as the Guadalupe has formed in Kerrville, however, is that conditions are fairly uniform throughout the year. The variables of course are water and air temperature, which can largely be neutralized with my wetsuit. The variable I can’t avoid is when the river rages significantly above its normal level, which has happened a couple times since I moved here three and a half years ago. Otherwise, it’s placid and navigable. Always.

Yesterday afternoon, I put in at the southern end of Flat Rock Park, just prior to the one-lane bridge that leads to the large open field serving as a dog run. There’s a scored ramp for wheels or river shoes to get traction over the algae clinging to each inch. The rainbow oil slicks circle randomly and then form jewelry around my calves as I slowly shuffle deeper into the water.

Not long ago I showed up and two men were fishing. One was in a kayak about 20 feet off the shore. The other man was standing on the ramp, which was almost completely occupied by his black truck — this is a ramp for putting in and then driving back around the side of the big tree to park, not for using as a parking spot, I might add — holding his rod in his right hand and untangling his line in his left.

Without my glasses, it looked more like he had hauled in a fish, which seemed a happy moment for him and one that required only a slight shift to the right side of the eight-foot wide ramp, so I could make my way down the left.

I said, “Excuse me?” preparing to clarify that I wanted access on the left.

Apparently, the man affected by a tangled line and dying liver believed he had riparian rights, when he had not even littoral rights. (I thought I should flex my NY State real estate salesman license just this once, since it never got flexed before I moved.)

To express myself to you instead with the brevity that Twain or Hemingway encourage but with emotion more suited to Tarantino, the guy wouldn’t move out of the fucking way.

He didn’t acknowledge me, so I repeated my question, which to be fair I should have announced in the indicative case of the verb or even the imperative, since neither of us had rights to the shore or waterway of the Majestic Guadalupe. Admittedly, he could equally have responded using the imperative, “Fuck off.” That rejoinder of course would be the correct verb case for that purpose but would be factually incorrect, because it would assume said rights.

Upon the second question, he looked sideways at me and said, “Really, dude?” I hate it when people I don’t know call me “dude,” especially when they’re angry.

“I just need only about a foot here on the left to slide by.” He had seven feet. To his right was the cooler containing further Liver Death.

“Really, dude?! Can’t you see I’m untangling my line?”

“Oh, sorry; I don’t have my glasses on.” Why I was so accommodating, I had no idea. I had a paddle with a “blade” and metal shaft, like a medieval hatchet, and he had only a skinny bendy stick thing. Of course, he did have a hook. But his line was indeed tangled and the hook had a plastic worm on it, so I figured it would be a fair fight.

(You see how quickly men can devolve to fighting? One has a dying liver and tangled fishing line, and the other has an impatient desire to get on the river at 7:15am when there’s only sun and no wind and the surface is like glass. Selfishness creates a tarbaby.)

He turned back to his line and said, “There’s another ramp right over there.” He tilted his head left toward a break in the reeds and a concrete step leading to another broken step, submerged about 15 inches and surrounded by other rocks obscured by murky water. Not much of a put-in.

I grumbled, did as suggested and had a fantastic session on a beautiful morning.

And then there was coming back in.

He was still there, this time fishing (from the ramp). About thirty feet out, I asked where his line was because I was a stand-up guy and all and didn’t want to paddle over it. He burped its location.

When I started to guide myself toward the ramp, he said, “Just use that other one there.” The ankle-twister.

“I can’t get up that way. I need the ramp.”

“You got in that way. Why can’t you get back up that way?” Made me wonder whether as a kid he had ever lied down on his back in gym class and then tried to do a sit-up. Gravity, asshole.

Now I was pissed. “This is a public ramp.”

“Yeah, but I’m here and you can use that one there.”

I wasn’t going to press it. Tarbaby.

I worked my way up the broken steps and then mouthed off: “You know, this is a public ramp, and you’re taking up all of it.”

He had some last word or another, and I walked back to my truck. It was still a great session. Nothing was going to diminish it.

The above was all a bad memory with a tarbaby at its center. Yesterday, which I digressed from, was delightful. I put in at the same ramp, nodding to a couple other fisherman who also nodded back, and after getting myself wet in the middle of the river I paddled downstream toward the dam. The sun and clear skies made for a mid-90s afternoon. There was a moderate wind against me, not as stiff as some days, but significant enough that it was a good workout. I hopped back and forth between right foot forward and left one, working each quadricep. I developed a blister along the base of my right thumb, which indicated that I hadn’t been on the river enough days and also that I was having a good workout. (It could also mean that I wasn’t holding the paddle correctly. But, no.)

I hugged the right (west) bank, where trees formed a pocket of calm from the wind. A great blue heron lifted off from my right and first flew south and then wheeled around to my left, disappearing behind me.

I reached the dam, touched my paddle to the edge just to say I had, and then turned around to head back upstream, with the wind. At first, there was a breeze against me, and I thought of the “walked five miles to school in the snow, uphill both ways” fib. Soon enough, I had a barely perceptible breeze at my back. The sun fell onto my chest and shoulders. I could watch my triceps flexing as I stroked and realized that in surfing one can’t stop to appreciate the way the body gets toned and challenged during exercise.

These malleable machines God allows us to travel in are certainly marvelous things.

Finally reaching the ramp, I figured I’d paddled about 8,000 feet, according to Google maps. One and a half miles.

I had passed a duck couple on the way back. They were standing on lily pads as far as I could tell.

PHOTO CREDIT: Surfer Magazine

Shells the size of pennies

~ Howard Freeman ~ Leave a comment

There was one there already — a Great Egret. As I looked south, down the Guadalupe, I saw three more of the elegant white birds. Their necks started to form question marks as they relaxed and settled in. And then the egret closer to me flew to its siblings. It was replaced by its cousin the Great Blue Heron, which landed on the light-colored rock you see in the center-left of the photo. The tranquility of this place is better told in gray-scale tones than in loud color.

I had heard about this river access from Karen, who heard about it from a neighbor where we live. Apparently, not many people from our housing development know about it. Residents can enter through a gate with a combination lock that gets hot quickly in this sun we all know well. I must confess, while I’d feel somewhat unneighborly if we lived in a gated community, for some inconsistent reason I have no problem having resident-only access to this part of our amazing river. I can list multiple reasons that would sound justified to me (e.g. not wanting to be around loud music), but truth be told I’m getting older — something I’m told happens quite often — and there’s no getting around my being kind of snobby and elitist about this aspect of Hill Country life. I’m going to lean into it.

The photo here was taken shortly after I entered the area, having been the only car there, and walked down onto the treacherous and unstable bleached limestone rock to take a closer look. I’d forgotten the water shoes that Karen had reminded me to take, and since I didn’t want to swim in my sandals, I ventured out in bare feet.

The water closest to the shoreline and maybe an inch deep, was probably close to the air temperature of 93 degrees and uncomfortably warm. I told myself it would be easier once I went a little deeper. Soon enough I found myself walking on hundreds of small shells, each the size of a penny, and I remembered it was one of these shells that my son Teak had landed on when jumping into a different and deeper area of the river. The shell ripped his heel open and ended his summertime swimming weeks ahead of the school year. Cuts take longer to heal for a 58-year-old, and I didn’t want to be dry-docked until I started taking out IRA contributions to pay for getting the stitches removed.

I told myself the river bottom would get better soon.

It didn’t.

Small shells gave way to sharp rock and then more sharp rock of a different kind before the water depth even hit six inches. Not only did I wish at this point to have my water shoes, but even my sandals would have sufficed, since the closer I got to the middle of the river, the more it appeared that the darker areas were not indicative of depth but rather of greater concentrations of river moss. [Note to readers, especially those who are from Kerrville: I Googled in vain a more exact or even correct description of what I call “moss.” If I am wrong and you blow up the Comments section below, I must warn you I will be tempted to cook up some egret tenders, and then we will be even-steven.] Therefore, I wouldn’t be able to swim and take the weight off my feet, the heels of which became more and more like cannon fodder to the penny-sized shells waiting for their victim. The underwater terrain was to my soles like free-solo climbing the limestone bluffs would be to my palms.

When I reached the point of turning back, I made a decision to go home and get my river shoes. I had been toying with the idea at almost each step.

In my mind were two paths: “This is so beautiful. I want to get the river shoes and come back.” Or, “This is so beautiful, but (I’m lazy) and I don’t want to make the effort to go get the shoes and come back.” I chose to get the shoes.

This was an uncharacteristic decision, since typically I would have called it a day — a short one — and told myself, “Note to self: next time bring river shoes.”

But yesterday was a “today” that flies as effortlessly as a heron, and one doesn’t know when one will next see a heron like yesterday.