Canada is on fire. The smoke drifts south, and when it reaches the North Carolina Piedmont, I feel like I’m breathing with one lung. I check my right nostril, then my left, to see if one is clogged. Nope.

Bob and I took the threat of Global Warming seriously twenty years ago. We threw ourselves into the recycling movement, tried not to buy too much new stuff, did our best to use and reuse, started using biodiesel, and stopped eating meat. Yet we continued—with some guilt—to fill bags of household trash destined for the landfill.

We recently bought his and hers Teslas, complete with chargers, and discussed installing solar panels to offset our driving habit. We grow some of our food, seldom eat out, and rarely buy new clothes.

But it’s hard to feel complacent when the world’s on fire. All the predictions are coming true: the super tornadoes, monster storms, and now a heat wave sweeping across the lower United States.

I watch a young hummingbird—tiny and dark-headed—dip its beak into the center of the metal flower, its miniature toes curled around the perch. I count three this year: an adult male, a long-torsoed female, and this one youngster. They must be a family, yet they body slam each other all through the adjacent air space Star Wars style.

How long before our politicians agree to make good on their climate change promises? How much longer can I use our hummingbird feeders as a distraction?

Two maxims fight for attention in my brain:
“If you aren’t part of the solution, you’re part of the problem,” and
“Stay in the now.”

I was an activist in my forties and fifties. Now, pushing seventy, I’ve passed the baton. I realize that my “simple” life puts more strain on the planet than the average world citizen’s life does—as an American, I have more resources at my disposal—but I will try not to guilt myself over this. I’ve decided to let the little birds hypnotize me, and allow the summer heat to lull me into a torpor. I will slow my footfalls to match my lungs.

I hear the Wood thrush warble its lovely song from a few trees away, perhaps one of our majestic Willow Oaks. Our Evening primrose blossoms—creamy yellow—are still open. It’s only 66° and the sun has not yet cleared the trees to brush them closed with its hot breath. The air smells richly alive. I can feel its moisture on my tanned arms. I lean back and let summer take me.

The birds are out in droves, though, scoping out breakfast. A robin sits on a post while a wren sings, “Teakettle, teakettle.” Chickadees fly from branch to branch as the jays hop around the lawn. It’s a banquet out there.

Bob and I picked up our second Tesla yesterday. We named her Stella and parked her in the pole barn with Sophie. After we sell the Volt, we’ll be completely EV. At some point, we may even install solar panels to fuel our driving habits. How much greener can we get? I wonder, looking out across our spring lawn.

I think about who I was sixty Easter Sundays ago with my little aspirations and no awareness whatsoever of my impact on the world. Over the years, my ecological footprint grew—all that meat, those plane flights, the 8-cylinder cars, and even the cellophane easter grass—before shrinking back to reasonable, at least by American standards.

I try not to think about what our two new cars cost in environmental terms or how continuing to drive the old cars could have been the greener move. But, I prefer to live in my imagination, like that little girl with her Easter bonnet and her basket of treats, and so I choose to enjoy this new, sunny day with its promise of spring and greener days ahead.

The tide had come in and was tearing at the dunes with exhilarating fury. I turned my back against the wind and began to walk. Realizing I would have to face into it on my return, I turned to walk the other way. I opened my umbrella and felt it wrench from my grasp.

Yeah, no. This was not happening. I fought my way back through the stinging rain, umbrella useless at my side, the ocean boiling on my right—a colossal cursed cauldron. Tomorrow is another day.

Bob and I are drawn to the shore in search of restoration. Even folks who didn’t grow up on a coast or island seek solace from sand and surf. But beachside relaxation implies beaches, and beaches are built of sand.

It’s no secret that our shorelines are eroding. In some places, there are  only a few feet of sand between high tide and the real estate. Fortunately, engineers have stepped in to fix the problem using pipelines and dredgers.

When we stumbled upon the pipe yesterday, we had no idea what manner of material it might convey. Come to find out, it is a mover of sand and had been brought to Kitty Hawk in July to begin their renourishing project.

Aerial footage of the operation.

I like to think of beach nourishment as basic hygiene, akin to toenail clipping and leaf raking. The process not only preserves our vacation playgrounds but it keeps roads and buildings from getting sucked into the Atlantic.

Alarming signs like these are a small price to pay for coastline conservation.

I’m glad someone wrote “Keep Off Pipe” on a structure that invites interaction. When I was growing up on City Island, someone—perhaps my father—brought home an old hot water tank. We kids and all our friends never tired of rolling around on that thing, barefoot, like circus seals.

The pipe is much larger than it appears, so I took this photo for scale.

Bob, testing out his new lens, was as intrigued as I was.

He was especially interested in the inner workings. He has, after all, quite a lot of experience moving large quantities of liquids around.

We both got a Pac-Man vibe from this view.

Bob and I look forward to better weather later this week. But despite the threat of hurricanes, we prefer off-season fall. The water is too cold in spring and the sand too crowded in summer.

Some friends are coming in this afternoon, and our Air BnB host has provided ample indoor game opportunities. We’ll eat, drink, and tell stories around the game’s table while the wind sandblasts the shore break. But not to worry, beach nourishment is coming soon.

The sign outside Chatham Marketplace says “Masks welcome” and in small print at the bottom “Unvaccinated must wear masks.” But of course, there is no way to tell who’s had the jab and who hasn’t.

I have my favorites: the black mask that hangs on a back-door coat hook, the red one that I keep in our Subaru, and the blue mask that lives in the door pocket of our blue Volt. I’ve tucked a green Chatham Marketplace mask into my purse and stocked the glove box with N-95’s and 94’s.

I never stopped wearing a mask in public, even when the pandemic was in recession — before the Delta variant began circulating in Chatham County. I wash them, hang them in the sun to dry, and carry them back to their posts. They are the smallest of insurance premiums, along with online shopping and socializing outdoors. I like to stack the deck in my favor.

I’m a little irked by the unvaccinated. This might be over, all this mask-wearing, were it not for the anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers. But now that Delta has arrived, it’s too late for that kind of thinking. The virus will continue replicating, bouncing from one under-immunized human to another, getting better at contagion, crippling economies, burning out health care professionals, many of whom, inexplicably are also unvaccinated.

In Vaxed, waxed, but definitely not relaxed: Welcome to the pandemic swerve, Maura Judkis of The Washington Post writes:

The best way to describe what we’re going through right now is the prisoner’s dilemma, says Gretchen Chapman, a professor of psychology who studies vaccination decision-making at Carnegie Mellon University. Vaccines, as with the classic game theory model, provide a collective reward when everyone cooperates, though individuals may have personal incentives not to cooperate. If not enough individuals cooperate, then the people who did the right thing suffer the consequences.

And the truth is, only wealthy countries can afford to vaccinate enough of their people to produce herd immunity and it was only a matter of time before the virus upped its game. Now, it’s every man for himself and I’m doing everything I can to stay out of the hospital.

My father says the virus is God’s (or Nature’s) way of addressing overpopulation. Like many, he wants to believe there is a plan, that someone out there has the blueprints, that there is a system with built-in checks and balances.

I’d like to believe we’re smart enough to stay ahead of nature, that we won’t replicate until we run out of food like the White-tailed deer, or unwittingly unleash a super-bug that changes life on earth forever.

You have to live it to know what it’s like to run out of water.

During our twenty years in Colorado, we savored every drop of moisture because we could only expect 17 inches. In Belize, the dry season brought interminable longing until one day the sky would erupt and dump as much as 15 inches in a day. Over the next six months we would receive our year’s supply of 60 inches. After the glory of those first crazy storms wore off, we’d pull on our boots and wade around in the mud, making sure to catch as much water as we could afford to store. Big tanks aren’t cheap.A small frog pond placed by former owners on the south-east side of our house supplies us with optimal Feng Shui.

The pond liner had gotten lopsided over the years, causing water to spill off one side before filling. So I got out the pickax, dug up the stones and pavers, and carted them off. After a little more digging the liner settled and I seeded the surrounding garden with butterfly weed.

Bob took this stunning image of summer rain falling on a volunteer okra plant by slowing down the shutter speed.

Bob captured water sluicing from our back porch downspout onto the hummingbird feeder using (you guessed it) a slow shutter speed.

Using a fast shutter speed, Bob froze a drop of water falling from the downspout into the rain barrel.

Our well has never gone dry and we only dip into our rain barrel for household water when the power goes out and shuts down the well pump. Because rain is so consistently abundant here, our rain barrel only holds 55 gallons, a far cry from the enormous water storage tanks we had in Belize and the huge poly tank atop our roof in Ghana.

Water beads on our newly-varnished back porch steps.

Jordan Lake on a misty morning. The Army Corps of Engineers open the tailrace gates wide after a heavy rain, sending a torrent of water down the Haw River.

Ever-changing, yet always the same — three views of the spillway backwater at Jordan Lake.

Jordan Lake Dam flows over what used to be Clark Poe Road. When they flooded the Haw River, all kinds of infrastructure vanished to the bottom of the lake.

North Carolina’s 37,853 miles of river read like the begets in Genesis.

After roiling through the spillway trough, water continues lazily down the Haw until it meets the Deep River and together they beget the Cape Fear River.

Southeast of the dam, the Rocky River on its way towards destiny with the Deep.

The Rocky pours into the Deep which later merges with the Haw to become the Cape Fear which dumps into the Atlantic 191 meandering miles later. I wonder if I threw a twig into the water off the dam, would it ride out to sea.

Robeson creek pulls water from west of Pittsboro into Jordan Lake, after passing through Town Lake, which was once Pittsboro’s water supply.

When we moved to North Carolina in November of 2007, we joined Oilseed Community off the end of Bill Thomas Road about a mile’s hike through the woods and across the creek from The Plant in Pittsboro a.k.a Chatham Beverage District.

Sometimes the only way to add a bird to the list is to hop in the car and stalk it.Our marital avian list was stuck at 399 when Bob heard there were Rusty Blackbirds at Fletcher Park in Raleigh, so we drove up and bagged our 400th bird.

Each year we head to the coast for a nice getaway with one common denominator: water.

I took these in Columbia, North Carolina where we spent a few days investigating the swamp as part of our annual September getaway.

A lone tree from the boardwalk at Duck, North Carolina.

A cormorant at Southern Shores, NC.

The Atlantic, a vast ocean of many moods shows us her teeth and her dancing foam.

Sunset over the sound at Southern Shores.

Water: we yearn for it, thrive in it, drink it in, and take it for granted. Lucky for us, we have lived in places where water was scarce. Every time I dip water from our rain barrel to clean my garden clogs or water a dry plant, I am reminded of our good fortune. In the hierarchy of Things Not To Take For Granted, water ranks number one. 

Homo Sapiens built enormous homes and blew up mountains for minerals to heat them with. They covered their food in plastic, and the plastic ended up in landfills, waterways, and inside animals. The well-to-do relied on the disadvantaged to trim their toenails and cook their food. The planet was heating up, the ice caps were melting, and hundreds of thousands of animals were sailing over the extinction cliff with humans close behind them.

Yes, humans were a runaway train of obscene wastefulness in the pre-Covid days and it took a pandemic to wake them up. But that was eons ago.

After the virus killed millions and dismantled the global economy, people sobered up and let go of non-essential nonsense. They learned to garden, cook, and cut their nails, they began harnessing solar and wind for energy, built smaller homes, and stopped smothering everything in single-use plastic packaging. Meanwhile, the trees grew, unhindered, and, over time they turned the air breathable again.

The best part of this story? Covid-19 was a virus that attacked human lungs.

I take advantage of the pre-storm calm, washing and hanging the bed sheets and shower curtain. If Florence stays her course, we’ll get our moisture back with interest in feet, not inches, and her throaty winds will test trees and roofs. We could be without electricity for up to a week. So I vacuum, bake, and launder everything I can think of, including the shower curtain and the shear white curtains over the kitchen sink.

Earlier this week I hauled our recycling and trash to town and searched for a gas station that wasn’t already out of fuel. There are six filling stations in town, and only one did not have bags over the pump handles. I changed my mind about fueling up in town when I saw the line of anxious motorists bleeding out into the courthouse circle.

I ran into a lot of people I knew at the grocery store. Nearly everyone had a few moments to exchange hugs and chat about the coming storm. The atmosphere was celebratory with a tinge of urgency. It felt a lot like the hours before a Super Bowl. I bought tomatoes and lettuce because Bob and I are in the middle of an epic BLT jag and helped myself to a bag of kettle chips.

Among strangers there was an edgy undercurrent. The gas station line was spooky, reminiscent of fuel shortage altercations of the 70’s and I’d had an unsavory interaction at the trash collection center. A friend pulled up to the trash hopper and she and I were getting caught up as the guy in the truck behind her walked by with his trash bags. He barked at us – something about holding up the line.

We continued talking as my friend emptied her car, and he came by with another round of bags and a menacing look. This time he loudly pointed out that there was a whole parking lot right over there if we wanted to chit chat. The attendants were shaking their heads, and they told me this wasn’t the first time that man had behaved uncharitably. “He’s a preacher, you know,” one of them confided. I’m pretty sure a lot of people around here carry hand guns.

Nineteen years ago Bob and I lived on Guam, thirteen degrees north of the equator, where hurricanes are known as typhoons. We lived in an air conditioned cinder block apartment, a chilled box as long as the electricity is on, but a suffocating hell when it fails.

During one of many short power outages, our neighbor confided that he liked typhoon season because the power stayed off for a long time. He chuckled at our surprise and explained how people gather at the old style houses, the ones that look like screen porches on stilts. Everyone pulls food from their deep freezer and takes it over to grill under the shade of the house and they drink and eat and party until the power comes back on. “It’s like the old days,” he says.

Bob and I have had a good time battening down the hatches. We’ve mined our deep freezer for casseroles and replaced them with buckets of water which have frozen into ice blocks. We have a gas range for cooking hamburgers and warming up soup, but when the power is out our oven won’t light. So we dine on Eggplant Parmesan and Macaroni and Cheez confident those ice blocks will hold food for a couple days, maybe three.

We filled two 5-gallon buckets with water for cooking and drinking because when the electric goes out, so does our well pump. We can flush with water from the big blue rain barrel. I drove Christine to the front yard where she is less likely to get smashed by a falling tree, and Bob is considering using a tie down on the back porch roof.

Home from my hurricane preparedness shopping trip, I begin receiving calls, texts, and emails from family and friends near and far. They send good wishes, tips, and invites should the shit really hit the fan. The next day Florence appears to be backing off, but I’m still savoring the sense of camaraderie, hoping under my breath she really does force us to hunker down amid friends. Thank you Florence for giving us a taste of the old days, and fingers crossed we don’t lose an automobile or a roof.

Inspired by my idol, I grab my copy of Sheri McGregor’s recently-published collection of essays, Nature’s Healing Spirit – Real Life Essays to Nurture the Soul and head outdoors. Written by an eclectic group of men and women, these essays celebrate the natural world while affirming our place in it. I am proud to be among the book’s authors, tickled pink that Sheri chose to include “My Friend Carl” in her beautiful book.

I soon find myself sitting in the tree house I named Sweetwater, a play place built at the edge of the woods behind our house before we arrived on the scene. Tacked between four sweet gum trees, this platform is perfect for creative introspection, something I need from time to time. A cardinal drowns out the swish of traffic out front and the drone of a propeller plane overhead. I am bathed in the jasmine scent of autumn olive, and can see the last of this season’s dogwood blooms. I settle into my lawn chair and pick a chapter.

Halfway through Kathleen Hayes Phillips’ Loving Stones, it occurs to me that Natures Healing Spirit is the perfect Mother’s Day gift, a lovely read for nature lovers of all ages, from active to house-bound. Each essay opens a portal between the man made world and mother earth, the equivalent of airing out the house on a spring day. Every story a reminder that, no matter what is going on inside, Mother Earth’s comforting arms are waiting just beyond the back door.

I have a dirty secret. I’m guilty of the ultimate substance abuse. Intimate knowledge of its destructive properties doesn’t stop me from acting as if my life depended on it. Although I whisper in horror about the Great Pacific Gyre – although I belong to a clan that considers itself green – I’ve surrounded myself with the substance I advocate against. I play with it. Eat off it. Brush my teeth with it. I love the way it feels in my hands, sturdy yet pliable. Reliable and cheap, it’s easy to ignore the long-term costs of my worst habit.

I remember refrigerators before Tupperware. Back then we rotted leftovers in Alcoa foil covered glass bowls. Now I add Gladware to my shopping cart, glancing furtively up the aisle to see if anyone’s looking. I smuggle it out in a reusable grocery bag underneath apples and kale.

Automobiles used to be made of plate steel. Not so much these days. I backed my ’95 Escort into a bollard the other day, got out and stared dolefully at the shattered plastic. “Who drives around in plastic cars?” I asked myself. “I do.”

Most of my childhood toys were made of natural materials. We played with Lincoln logs and rubber balls, and moved tiny metal pieces around the Monopoly board. My prized possessions were a slate chalkboard framed in wood and a cardboard palomino I wore around the neighborhood. But, the perfectly molded zebra, elephant, bear, horses and cows were made of plastic, and I loved them as much or more as everything else.

In adulthood I learned the truth: that plastic was made in a laboratory from a non-renewable resource and never completely broke down. How minute indigestible particles work their way up the sea food chain. I dampened my guilt by working for a recycling processor. We submerged ourselves in truckloads of the stuff, sorted out the contaminated pieces, the kitchen knives, and the occasional dead dog. We chipped it, melted it, and extruded it into planks. Deep inside I knew that turning laundry jugs into picnic tables wasn’t going to save the world.

These days I flaunt my aluminum water bottle. My eyebrows arch disapprovingly toward sippers of store-bought water. I look aside when tossing evidence of my addiction into the dumpster and recycling bin. I cannot conceal nor reconcile my hypocrisy. I’m a reef gawker in plastic fins, a farm market shopper in a plastic car. I’m a woman of the woods in plastic shoes.

I imagine this is what it feels like to freeze to death. You stop fighting to keep your insides at 98.6. You peacefully give in to the elements and become one with the world outside your body. You are reclaimed.

I poke around in the yard until self-preservation kicks in and the heat shepherds me inside. Back at my desk, I see that Amy Armantrout has shared an article about global warming on Facebook. She’s looking for feedback, so I dive into “The Uninhabitable Earth” by David Wallace-Wells from the July 10, 2017, issue of New York Magazine.

I’m surprised at what I learn. Apparently, there are ancient diseases trapped in Arctic ice, “an abridged history of devastating human sickness, left out like egg salad in the Arctic sun.” As the planet heats up, we’re only a few degrees away from another round of Bubonic Plague.

Meanwhile, right here in real time, the air is becoming increasingly more toxic. I learn that our cognitive abilities are negatively affected by high carbon dioxide-to-oxygen ratios. And that carbon dioxide just reached 400 parts per million and is estimated to reach “1,000 ppm by 2100,” Wallace-Wells writes, “At that concentration, compared to the air we breathe now, human cognitive ability declines by 21 percent.” Maybe that explains why we’re not all worked up over what’s coming down the pike. “Surely this blindness will not last,” the author pleads with his readers.

Perhaps it’s for best, this dumbing down. Natural selection may solve the problem the way Kurt Vonnegut Jr. proposed in his novel, “Galapagos.” In that story, the isolated human survivors of a world-wide disease outbreak evolved into furry, sea lion-like creatures without a care in the world. Turned out our big brains were the biggest threat to humanity ever invented.

I think back to my surrender on the back porch moments ago. I was as comfortable as a frog in a pot of water brought slowly to boil. As Daniel Quinn observed in “Ishmael,” put a frog into a pot of boiling water and it will hop out. But, put a frog in a pot of cool water and bring it slowly to a boil, and a frog will sit there and turn into stew. We are that frog, and our pot is boiling.