Onion Cap

I love books, and I have a lot of them.  In the past few years, an increasing number of my books reside in The Cloud and appear when I ask for them on an electronic device connected to The Cloud.  The rest of my books are in boxes in storage or on shelves in my study.  I read more from The Cloud than from the printed page because I can read in the middle of the night without turning on a light, and I can carry an entire library with me on an airplane.  I spend a lot of time on airplanes.

A few years back when digital readers were becoming more common, I had a lengthy discussion with a group of very smart friends, who read as much or more than I do, about digital readers.  We were divided on the future of digital text.  Some of us thought it would become the dominant form, and others thought it would never really replace ink and paper.  I won’t say what side I was on, but digital text has almost completely taken over my world since that day some six or seven years ago.  I read on my computer screen, on my phone, and on my handheld digital reader.  I do still read every day, with great local interest, a newspaper that arrives on my lawn at about 5:30 each morning.  I feel like the newspaper connects me with my place and time and physicality in a way that digital reading cannot.  And besides, no one is commenting on the stories except my wife.

But mostly, my reading is shaped like a cloud.  Today I bought a more advanced digital reader that is charging and connecting with The Cloud as I write this.  It has a better lighting system, so I think, that provides a more even backlighting for middle of the night reading.  I look forward to waking at 1:30 am when I will pick it up from the bed stand and see if what was promised is delivered.

Now here’s a choice our forefathers never faced:  to drink water from a bottle or from the tap.

It would have seemed to them an absurd choice since buying water in a bottle would have been an absurd idea.  I recall longing for and finally purchasing a military canteen.  The canteen was a metal container shaped like a saucer, covered with heavy canvass.

The legislature in Maine is set to consider whether plastic water bottles will be allowed in state offices, buildings, and schools.  Green concerns make up the most of the anti-bottle beliefs, while concession revenues, water safety, and convenience inform the pro-bottle forces.

Such a choice – to bottle or not to bottle.

The loggers are here at the Winthrop place.

First came a pickup truck that plowed out a big part of the meadow next to the forest.  A skidder arrived a week later with some logging maw attached to the front of it and chains on the big-lugged tractor tires.  Then the plowed yard suddenly filled with all manner of machinery for cutting, skinning, and stacking logs.  Now there is a big mess of branches, stacks of logs, several parked machines, and the pervasive smell of cut trees.

It is a veritable massacre of trees back there behind the house,  One day soon I shall walk up there to see what has happened and breathe in the sharp smell of sap and wood and sawdust, where I sat in the woods and waited for deer just a few months ago.

I am reading an astounding book right now called On the Origin of Teepees, which involves the Darwinian notion that just as genetic material is really in charge of evolution, ideas are the drivers of human evolution since we’ve become, as brains sitting atop bodies, but receptacles for ideas.  Our physical evolution has been frozen now for several tens of millennia, but as a vehicle for ideas (or rather, memes), our brains have a long ways to go.  We are idea machines, and human evolution now has more to do with ideas and “cultural” evolution rather than physical adaptations.

This is interesting, particularly in light of recent political events, when people seemed hyper-possessed by political ideology.  It turns out, Tea Party politics is a mind virus.

More on this later.

Kilauea Iki

This looks like a pretty big crater.  The lava lake in the bottom of it is hard and relatively cool, so much so that you can hike down across it and out the other side.  You might be able to see some people down inside if you look close.  I didn’t hike down into it.

If you look across it to the other side you can see the steaming crater inside the even bigger Kilauea crater, which is huge.

So the picture is of a small crater, and in the background you can see an even bigger smoking crater, which is inside the really big crater of Kilauea Volcano.  Iki means small, which is why the crater in this picture is called Kilauea Iki.

This morning we went to the eastern coast of the Big Island, where we’ve been staying this week.  More on that later.

We arrived about 5 am because we’d heard the night before that the lava flow from Kilauea had once again come close to the old, ruined highway where it could be approached on foot with a reasonable walk.  The best time for viewing is just before sunrise.

And sure enough, there it was, once again covering the already covered roadway with yet another layer of lava.  Little ferns had begun popping up in the older, cooled lava flow.  As this molten rock oozed and crackled across the previous layer, the little ferns burned quickly with tiny sparks shooting.

I didn’t poke it with a stick, but I could have.  You could get within a few feet of the lava pouring out from under the crusty layer that formed atop the fiery red earth blood, but any closer and you risk your hair bursting into flames or your flesh cooking.

The whole island is made of this stuff, maybe the whole world.  Looking at it, it made me aware that we live on a flaming ball covered with a cool crust – just cool enough for us to live here.  This is the stuff of the solar system, of space, of stars, boiling up from the not so deep.  What’s a couple miles when we are talking about planet sized ball of lava? We ourselves and all life on this planet, came from this hot earth life, and eventually, we’ll dissolve back into it.

Pele's fingers at work

We all live in a narrow shell of atmosphere squeezed between the vacuum of space and the magma just beneath the cooled crust.

Dust to dust, ashes to ashes?  I think not.  Lava runs in our veins, and to lava we shall return.

Pele’s art is us.

Lake Wissota Freeze Up

The lake froze yesterday, and this morning a light snow dusted the new ice.  If you look close in the photo you can see cracks running out into the lake.

Ice is almost alive.  Stand by the lake for even just a few minutes on a quiet morning, and you hear whoops, snaps, and long, weird moans as the ice shifts under the sunrise.

It’s not thick enough to walk on, but it will be with a few more cold nights.  I’m looking forward to some thickness so I can put out a tip-up or two.  Maybe this weekend?

The first thing John said when I saw him last weekend was “Can we go ice skating?”  Then there was little more than chunky slush clinking among icy rocks along the shore.  Good skating ice may be coming soon, as it looks like it froze clean.  Maybe I’ll try to scrape off a rink this year and find out if old guys can skate with little kids without serious injury.

Ice forms on Lake Wissota

The ponds across the road have a dangerously thin layer of ice, but the big lake is not yet frozen.  This morning the temperature is down in the teens again, as it has been for a few days.  Thin ice flows develop overnight and then break apart when the wind comes up to create waves; crusty new ice crackles and chinkles along the rocky shore.