south Tivoli Bay

Snow Goose

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Eagle, looking for lunchAs I approached the South Tivoli Bay, I heard a dramatic squawk. Two enormous birds looped and circled around each other. It took a moment for me to realize what I was looking at: an Immature Bald Eagle chasing a Great Blue Heron. It seemed like a case of teenaged miscalculation. The Heron dropped into the reeds and vanished. The eagle flew off.

Thrilled by the show, I continued snowshoeing south, following the path that meanders near the edge of the South Tivoli Bay. The Bay is wide and shallow, often freezing up before the rest of the river. Snow covered the ground and the temperatures hovered near freezing. I could see that the Bay had a thin coat of ice, gleaming in the high noon sun. There are three underpasses that lead to the Hudson River and near those underpasses stood open water. There had to be ducks nearby.

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Love at First Snap

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After the first day of my nature writing class at Bard College, a student came up to me and said, “I have twenty baby snapping turtles at home.”

My heart leapt. There is nothing cuter than a baby snapping turtle, not even a kitten. They look like miniature dragons with oversized heads, fragile little shells and spunk. They are all purpose and who doesn’t love a creature that is fully itself, confident in its turtleness. A baby turtle is not yet the belligerent, large snapping adult they will become—when I love them even more.

My student’s lively story unfolded. A friend was building a house in Rhode Island and dug up a snapper nest. He gave her the eggs, which she proceeded to keep in a box of soil in a warm room all summer long. Her mother-in-law arrived from time to time to tell her to just throw out the eggs. But she held on, and finally last week little limbs started to emerge from the ping-pong sized eggs. It took several days for the babies to emerge; every single egg hatched. The turtles had been in the world for three days, living off of their yolk sacks. They now needed to be released.

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Perfect Fall Days

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Perfect fall days are a particular torture.

            Perfect: Blue sky, cool, sun, a crisp snap to the air. Apple days. Cliched days.

            Torture: You know they won’t last. There’s nothing you can do to properly celebrate them, short of being outside all day. And even then a sense of desperation tugs at my skin.

When I was younger the only way to do justice to these days was to rock climb. Sitting on a ledge, looking down into a valley of yellow, orange and red tinged trees, while the turkey vultures soared below me was heaven. The pull and tug of climbing, the sore fingertips, the dusty smell of chalk on my hands all aligned with the wrestle with the day, which was the wrestle of my soul. The way I knew I had taken all the day had to offer was walking out at dusk or in the dark, the clank of climbing gear a sort of music. My climbing partner and I were always hungry and tired and satisfied.

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