It's "shed" time. The deer are butting their heads against the trees to knock their antlers off, and if you're in the woods often enough, you find pieces of them, usually half eaten by smaller animals whose dentists (the beavers) have told them to get more calcium in their diet. Oops! There I go mixing bizarre facts with corny jokes again -- beavers are not dentists…they are lumberjacks. Bad habit of mine. People can't tell the truth in my crazy life from my lunatic style of telling it. (The truth is the antlers grow back.)
Necessary things are like that. You can shed them, but if they are vital
to who you are, you will find a way to reinvent them. That's how I transitioned from
cross-country skis to snowshoes while my rotator cuff heals. I thought I had shed an essential part
of my life, but I found ways to preserve that part of it I needed. When I return to skiing I'll have the
snowshoeing to go with it, and the knowledge that you only lose something when
you surrender its core value.
Snowshoeing off-trail is liberating. My whole life is off-trail, and here again the metaphor of liberation holds true. It's been a glorious month of half-day hikes in the deep woods, many adventures and endless discoveries. My gloves get torn to shreds going through mile after mile of thorny underbrush, but my jacket does pretty well. Most astonishing are the ruins of something I'll come upon -- a stone trough, a dugout pit with a trap door, an old stone foundation, even the remnants of a windmill. You realize that someone fought the wilderness for a homestead there perhaps 100 years ago and lost… or gave up, which is the same thing. And then there is the cougar. Every few years there seem to be cougar sightings in this area, and there is supposedly one around here now. I didn't believe it until early March when I found enormous tracks in the snow less than a day old. Returning to the same dense woods the next evening I found fresh tracks. I've never found scat or the remnant of a clear cat kill, and presumably a cougar this far south would have plenty of finger snacks to keep it from getting desperate, but I keep a weather eye to upper branches as I trudge below. Sometimes I lie down on a log or even in the snow and stare at the sky and listen to the silence. You feel yourself sink into the earth that way and become anchored, and then the sky starts to move for you like a slowly scrolling IMAX. Hmmm. Got to remember to twitch a little when I lie down, else I’ll be coyote and cougar bait.
Must be more than a few closet romantics out there, judging from e-mail response to last month's column and newsletter. The white feather has a following. Dr. Foto even sent me his own styling of it (see below), along with a picture for this month's column over on StorytellersUnplugged, which picks up the tale with a second quest http://www.storytellersunplugged.com/thomas-sullivan-flamingo-frank-the-white-feather-finding-meaning-in-everyday-tales#respond . The actual celebrated pink flamingo now hidden deep in Elm Creek's woods is also below. And I've been expecting the sinister Dr. to come up with "Blue Man" stuff for some time, but what he capitalized on below requires a brief explanation. Long ago and far away we used to work out at a swimming pool whose outer walls were huge rolling metal doors, perhaps 100 feet long and 30 feet high. It was a signature of mine to always be beating out rhythms on them bongo style and to be singing Calypso songs (I would come flying out of the locker room singing “Day-O” and do a racing dive into the pool, reversing myself in midair) or La Bamba. So the clever Dr. has managed to reference this in his Blue Man spoof below. Mark is a folk singer and if you'd like to hear him in that gig, check this out: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=&search_query=manriq47&aq=f .
My rotator cuff recovery is way ahead of the curve, and I'm touched by so many well wishes. One week into a scheduled five weeks of passive rehab, the therapists are telling my surgeon I'm ready for the next level.
Finally, a few people have asked me to post at
Twitter. Somehow I've turned up on
a number of sites I didn't authorize with widely varying bios (of widely varying
accuracy). I try to keep track of
them at least superficially, but I'm really not into that so much. Yeah, I know it's a buzzkill when you
don't go along with all the little alerts and invitations, so I did set up on
Twitter, and I'll touch base there when I can. Here's the link: http://twitter.com/thomassullivan , and thank you
very much. Wishing you all a
glorious St. Patrick's Day and a grand month until we meet again...
Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
