Leaping Lizards

I’m sorry I didn’t post last Sunday. I got my Covid booster and flu shot, and felt exhausted all week. It didn’t help that I went for a long ride on paved trails that detoured into exploring the nearby quarry the day before, and a “light” mountain bike ride the morning after, and one of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Pump Club full-body weightlifting circuits that Friday… but I’m not good at “taking it easy.” And your reward for listening to me blather about exercise, is that I took a lot of good photos on those bike trips.

Blueberry Hill sits next to a sand and stone quarry, which makes for an undisturbed barrier where migratory birds love to gather. It’s where I saw my first Blue Grosbeak and Orchard Oriole, both of which have eluded my camera lens. The unused sand flats of the quarry are used by dirt bikers and ATV operators, and I took my Trek mountain bike down a few of them to explore. I met a family of wild turkeys, and regretted not taking the fat tire Surly bike, because the sand got very loose. I heard a Red-Shouldered Hawk but saw none; it may have been a Blue Jay mimicking the call. I also heard the resident Raven, but only saw him from afar through my monocular.

On flat ground like Franklin Parker Preserve in the Pine Barrens, I’ll ride with my camera around my neck in its padded bag, but the quarry trails are too rough to risk that. I returned on foot a day later and managed to photograph Eastern Bluebirds, Ruby-Throated Hummingbirds, and an Eastern Fence Lizard. The fence is near the Community Garden, which has a “Pollinator Path” that attracts the hummingbirds.

Quarry, Lizard, Hummingbird, Bluebird, Mourning Dove, Cardinal.

At Franklin Parker, the water is low so the egrets are out in force, hunting the shallows. A shy Great Blue Heron evaded me, and a Bald Eagle watched from a tree across the reservoir, probably looking to steal from the egrets. I only had my phone this time, so my photos are all terrible. But it felt good to get out there and see a big raptor. The Fence Lizards are also out in force; you’d think I would see them sunning in high summer, but it wasn’t until the last week or two that any skittered across my trail. This one was at Black Run Preserve, and the turkeys were in the quarry.

By the time you read this, I will have joined my second Walk Around Philadelphia segment, from Fox Chase train station to the H Mart in Elkins Park, the titular food court of Michelle Zauner’s memoir Crying in H Mart. I’m looking forward to meeting more cool folks and lunching on Korean delicacies afterward.

Since I last wrote, I finished Louise Erdrich’s excellent The Night Watchman, which I highly recommend as an introduction to her work, and to the ‘50s attempt at Termination of U.S. treaties with American Indians. I figured out why I like her stories so much. She peoples them with a lot of characters, and they all work. They have jobs to do, to survive. As much as I enjoy P.G. Wodehouse’s Bertie and Wooster tales goofing on the idle rich, when I read a more realistic tale, I can’t make much empathy with the person unless the writer explains how they get by. They don’t need to have a good work ethic or applaud capitalism—in fact, the opposite can be much more entertaining—but if they exist in our society, and the writer can overlook how the characters fill their cupboards, I find it akin to a hard science fiction tale where Earthlings land on an alien planet and take their air masks off and breathe freely.

How do you even live? Erdrich doesn’t belabor their labor, but her characters farm, hustle, hunt, trap, and do what they need to survive, in an interesting way. My current read, which plays on a famous Charles Dickens novel, has its main character hustling since he was eleven years old in foster care: Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver. It’s a tough but fun read; I forgot how harrowing the lives of Dickensian characters can be. Which is why we call them Dickensian. Kingsolver wrote this as a big middle finger to a certain politician’s book about how every Appalachian is lazy except him (he’s also got a weird fixation on women who don’t turn their bodies into a 24-hour baby assembly line.)

Kingsolver gets it right, depicting drug addiction and poverty without the judgmental eye of the middle class morality police, but from the perspective of the child. She gives her character a great voice, and I’m about halfway through the large book. It has high and low points, and during a low, I took a detour to begin The Uninhabitable Earth—about what we should expect from climate change in the next century—to cheer me up.

Still reading Superman; Secret Identity by Kurt Busiek is my new favorite, a retelling of the tale that made for very interesting reading. What if a Superman came to life in our world, one that reads superhero stories for entertainment? Some of it follows famliar tropes, like the ‘70s thriller of the government going after psychic children as weapons, but this Clark Kent has read that story too, and is prepared.

I finished The Invisible Pyramid by Loren Eiseley, one of my favorite natural philosophers. I highly recommend his early collections The Unexpected Universe and The Immense Journey; Pyramid is also good, but is written by an older man thinking on the world where humanity has reached the Moon, and the counterculture is protesting in the streets. He had enormous empathy for animals, and our ancestors, bringing them to vibrant life in his work, and yet when he learned of the Kent State massacre, he declared that the students got what they deserved. I have a lot to say about that—our elders were being baited into hate with propaganda long before Fox News came around—but I want to read all of Eiseley, including his autobiography All the Strange Hours and the posthumous biography Fox at the Woods Edge by Gale E. Christianson, before I spend too much time on it. He rode the rails as a hobo in his teens, a counterculture of its own kind; but as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, he had become “the Man,” and seemingly took the side of the violent railroad bull over the ‘bo, in his later years. I’ll have more to say later.

But for now, it’s disconcerting that a writer who evoked wonder at the world—and like the Lorax, spoke for the Earth when space travel made humanity eager to leave its polluted and abused home planet—would be on the side who believes pets are being eaten and babies killed at birth, rather than the side who wants to steer the train off the track that ends in an uninhabitable Earth.