Love, Pure and Simple: Remembering Koa

Koa, the guiding star of our lives and frequently the star of this blog, loved Maine.  Florida’s extreme heat, profusion of venomous snakes, and beach regulations kept her life there fairly sedate.  In Maine, every chipmunk chirp was a call to arms.  She was free to plunge hurly burly through the pines and splash around in every brook.  What a joy to see that vitality unleashed.  She even took up paddle boarding.

One day, in the midst of this fun, she slowed down, found the shade of a red maple, and quietly passed away in my arms.  It was a stroke, and she was gone within minutes.  We have not yet ceased being shocked.  A family of two just doesn’t square in our hearts and minds.  It has been difficult to enjoy any of our usual outdoor pursuits without her, but we try anyway. 

Knowing that there will come a day when warm, happy memories will resume center stage, I am preparing a compendium of Koa’s many exploits.  For an emaciated, pregnant and near-to-death stray, she landed a glorious life.  We have expressed the true worth of this chapter in our lives in providing such a rich life for her.   

I will never forget the unclouded purity of love in her eyes as she gazed at me, or the way she would nuzzle my neck.  No one was immune to that look and she had many, many admirers.  Thank you to all of you who were kind to Koa.  Thank you, especially, to those who cared for her over these past seven years. Stacy, Donna and Tracy, Jan and David, Amy and Cess: thank you. 

Here are a few of the last photos we took of our “baby Moa”.  Safe travels to my best friend and constant companion.  Go get ‘em, Koa. 

New New Englanders

Summer in the other Portland:

one of its fine lighthouses, the miracles the sea works on ancient granite, 

a huzza of wildflowers, and a 1758 summer home on Swan Island (Aaron Burr slept here!).

Two days after returning from our western odyssey, it was time to drive 1900 miles north of Naples.  After a respite in North Carolina for some southern Appalachia mountain biking, we pushed on to Portland, Maine.  We call it “The Antidote”, in that it is a beautiful, coastal city devoid of traffic and rife with young people and good food.  It has also been a good base camp for weekend excursions to the Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts, the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and northern Maine’s Acadia National Park.  New England is unlike anyplace we’ve ever been, every corner of the bucolic country dotted with historic villages, whitewashed churches and family cemeteries.  Nothing about the preposterously rocky and rooted trails – or local tales of bitter winters and black flies with the thaw – suggest this is an easy place to live.  But we are certainly grateful to experience the best of what the northeast can offer in a single season.  Wishing these summer days lasted as long as they seem to for children…

Hiking with friends through Berkshire meadows, careful to not trample the odd five-lined skink. Plus, an abandoned factory complex turned art and music venue.  Thank you, MOMA and Wilco.

Looking out on the islands of Acadia; 

freeing a damselfly from the carnivorous snares of sundew.

 High in the Whites, and a trailside discovery.

Whistlestop West

Grand Junction: cruising with my biker gang and taking in the verticality of 

Colorado National Monument.

In May, Danielle and I embarked on an ambitious three-week tour of the West in which we reconnected with nearly everyone in our circle.  It felt good to revive our wanderlust, and even better to soak in the unfailing love of our nearest and dearest.  Thank you to cousin Abbey for graduating high school and providing the impetus for our return.  Piecing together planes, trains, and rental cars, we made stops in Colorado, California and Oregon.  Forgoing the innumerable photos of smiling people with arms around one another, here are a few glimpses of the grand tour.  

Relishing that cold Truckee air, and high altitude bocce with Danielle's dad, JD. 

 

Back in the City of Roses, enjoying a Forest Park walk with my Dad, Mike.  

One too-brief night on the coast, reconnecting with friends.

Spring Fed

Gulf shore, Naples 

Injury and an exacting, mercurial work schedule kept Danielle sidelined, recreationally speaking, this spring.  Nevertheless, cool weather in south Florida is short-lived and I rushed to get outside before the humidity and monsoons returned.  Paddle boarding with friends (and their kids), floating gin-colored freshwater springs, and "mountain" biking.  Granted, Florida is the flattest state in the union, but the tailings of rapacious phosphate miners and the ingenuity of trail builders makes for surprisingly fun riding.

Silver and Rainbow Springs

  Building new trail through a swamp curtained in poison ivy.  

My (very) youthful guide to the terrain parks at Santos.

Ten Thousand Islands

A still-water mirror en route to Lulu Key.  

At sunset, a sky pregnant with showers.

A nearly full moon made for a very low tide at dawn, and a chance to glimpse the temporarily-exposed domain of echinoderms and gastropods.

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I had the rare opportunity to ring in the New Year on a 3-day kayak camping trip through the Ten Thousand Islands -- a portion of which lies inside Everglades National Park.  Such an adventure requires acceptance, and tolerance, of biting insects, sticky air, the drone of passing boats, and the visual monotony of the countless mangrove islands.  But the rewards are many: the sound of forced exhales as sea turtles and otters surface, the escalating chatter of osprey overhead, the serenity of easy passage on a strong flood tide, a sky full of color at dawn and dusk, and the camaraderie of fellow paddlers.  

Over the next few decades, the sea will rise steadily. This, like Arctic sea ice, is an imperiled landscape.  To take it all in now -- at a quiet, leisurely pace -- was a privilege.  

Kissimmee Prairie

Koa is only a "bird dog" in the sense that she's very patient while we're birding.

Sunset with a strand of palms in the distance.

Sunrise and warm color on the Florida prairie.  

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Kissimmee Prairie.  Pronounced "ki-SIH-me".  As close to a wide-open, western landscape as you can find in Florida.  A former Air Force property, given over to equestrians, the odd hiker and the preservation of endangered grasshopper sparrows.  I had been feeling claustrophobic, hemmed in by commercial development, and lacking a sense of scale.  No vistas, no mountains in the distance to lift one's spirits.  So, the Florida prairie was a revelation.  To look out over miles and miles of untrammeled nature, to look up at a night sky ripe with stars, was like rising for a deep breath after a long underwater swim.  

Novelist and essayist Wallace Stegner wrote it is "not an unusual life-curve for Westerners -- to live in and be shaped by the bigness, sparseness, space, clarity, and hopefulness of the West, to go away for study and enlargement and the perspective that distance and dissatisfaction can give, and then to return to what pleases the sight and enlists the loyalty and demands the commitment".  

Stegner lived for a time in Iowa and New England to mature his writing, but he soon turned homeward to a region defined by aridity, expansiveness, and boundless (if sometimes short-sighted and ill conceived) dreams.  I am also a Westerner.  I'll never shake that enchantment.  A purpose and a calling brought me East, but I know it is not forever.  For now, I'm relieved to have found this prairie, and the feel of home.  

Making a Home in La Flowery Land

To everyone who has been checking here, again and again, only to find no news: my apologies and thank you for your patience.  For all of our friends, family, and well-wishers, I am hereby reviving this blog.

I had music professors in college who called me "The Wanderer", a less than complimentary nod to persistent tardiness and dissipative focus (and a reference to a Franz Schubert piece).  Now I feel proud to wear that badge, stitched to the center of my chest for all to see.  Looking back over nearly three years of posts, reflecting on all the cultures, the landscapes and the people we encountered, I am a lucky man to have learned so much so quickly.  Keep it coming.  There's more planet to see.

As for my silence this fall...  Danielle and I are forever optimists, not realists.  A change of career, a change of scene, some income stability to open a new chapter in our lives -- it sounded good!  In typical fashion, we underestimated everything about the transition: the epic cross-country drive, the not insignificant culture shock, the humidity, the loneliness of working and living apart the first few months, the demands of new workplaces, the difficulty finding reasonable housing, and on and on. Add to that Koa being badly wounded by an aggressive dog, and you'd forgive us for feeling unwelcome.

But all things ebb and flow, and on this balmy Christmas Eve I am happy to report, finally, that we are alive and well.  And I dig the new job.  I enjoy the students and have been busy crafting a number of ways to get them outside -- outside, literally, and way outside their work-a-day experiences.  I am also happy to return to this blog, for it has always been an exercise in gratitude.  Gratitude for this very unlikely life, for nature's terrifying diversity and dazzling splendor.  I seldom write, for the public, unless my heart is brimming with stories and affection.  Today I am feeling more muted, as this is normally a day for extended family, but I'm keen to see what awaits us in 2015.

It's that curiosity that continues to drive me and Danielle.  There are standup paddleboards in place of a couch in our new apartment, and Christmas Day will find us camping somewhere remote and unusual.  So, you can trust us to continue to amuse and surprise.  And I hope that your curiosity leads you to keep checking in, to stay in touch.

Micah

Enjoying the Gulf shore.

Exploring the water-logged mangroves.

Encountering the denizens of Florida's pine flatwoods and hardwood hammocks.

Harvesting the sun's bounty.  A warm retirement for Koa, and handfuls of oranges.

A subtropical Christmas; the tide's delicate ornaments.

  Happy New Year everyone!