tom m wilson

A few weeks ago before leaving Western Australia to start my journey eastwards I watched a film from the eighties called The Bounty, a reenactment of Captain William Bligh’s journey through the Pacific in the late eighteenth century. In one of the early scenes from the film, the well trimmed English vessel leaves the mouth of the Thames with its full compliment of square-rigged canvas sails billowing in a fresh breeze. The open, white sails signified ‘the journey out’ for me at this point in my life. After all I too was headed for the South Pacific. The crew of the ship mutiny upon arriving in the Cook Islands and being faced with the beauty of the place, the fecundity of the natural world and the swaying, gorgeous and semi-naked Polynesian women all around them.

Well, now I’m in the South Pacific, guess what? It isn’t all quite like that.

Now my opinion is that living in Samoa is a combination of the good, the bad and the ugly. I’ll start with the negatives: nobody is ever on time, shops provide, as the Lonely Planet accurately describes it, ‘a nutrition nightmare’, broadband internet isn’t available, potentially dengue fever carrying mosquitoes buzz around you (invading your space and making you feel ill at ease), the language has the abrasive abruptness of many Asian languages to my ears, the national sense of humour sometimes seems to me to have the simplicity I recall from some of the Japanese people I’ve known, and a coterie of frequently aggressive stray dogs wander the streets making every journey on foot potentially dangerous, especially after dark, nobody is on time, I don’t feel like getting any exercise because I’ll get a bit over-heated, and the culture is more religious than the bible belt of the USA. Now for the good stuff: the colours on this island are vivid, be they the greens of the plants, the blue of the sky and the white of the cumulus clouds, or they the red, yellow, or pink lava lavas of the women, and the aloha shirts of the men; nature is fecund; the air is gentle; the basalt rock creates really varied land; even in Apia the suburbs are a collection of brightly coloured houses, each situated on generously sized bits of land covered in the lush green leaves of mango, breadfruit, coconut, papaya trees, with hedges for fences; the water is always warm and full of coral and colourful fish; the people, with their broad faces, and big frames, are often very beautiful… In summary, this place is paradise, but it can also be considered purgatory from certain angles. I don’t want to mutiny and leave the boat.

Where do people live in Samoa? Not on the colonial verandahs of Robert Louis Stevenson, that’s for sure.

This is more like it. Fales traditionally had thatch, and many still do, although corrugated iron is more common. Cutting fresh coconut up and sitting, eating it, in a fale by the ocean seems to much of a tourism brochure cliche, but many rural people here would see such a lovely vantage point as normality.

I’m in the village (Apia has linked ‘villages’, not suburbs) of Vavasi Utu, staying with a couple of Australian Youth Ambassadors (people in their twenties or thirties I think, who come to the South Pacific or south-east Asia to work in voluntary positions for a small wage paid by the Australian government). Their house is provided for them, and nearly all the houses around here are surrounded by a good variety of tropical fruit trees.

Driving around the island you keep seeing people, and not just the old folks and solitary sheet farmers travelling past at 110kms/hour in white utes, familiar from the Australian bush. No, young people, middle-aged people, people in the prime of their life. It is strange for a person from a country where ninety per cent of the population is urban to come to one where seventy per cent of the population is rural, but perhaps many third world countries around the equator are like this.

Paradise? Put down that tourist brochure and swat that mossie!

After having navigated some snaking roads frequented by pigs, dogs and chickens (yep, second-gear terrain), I’ve seen a few of the shapes and the colours of life in the South Pacific.

This is how black basalt looks after it gets wet.

In the centre of Upolu this fall falls a hundred metres, surrounded by the original forest of the island.

Going to a beach around Samoa usually entails paying a couple of bucks to the locals. I have to say I’m not a big fan of the idea that a trip to the outdoors should cost money.

A breadfruit trees leaves on the right (and is that a mango on the left?).

I’ve been on Manono for the last couple of days, an island off the western tip of Upolu. Manono has no roads and no dogs. I walked around the island on the one path that goes through banana plants and past coastal villages. Often little kids would see me coming down the path from the vantage point of their parent’s fale and start shouting out to their friends: ‘Palangi! Palangi! Palangi!’ Palangi means white man. I tried to imagine an African American walking down a street in Australia while my kids ran out onto the front porch crying ‘Black man! Black man! Black man!’ Couldn’t do it.

Anyway, here are some images to lodge in my memory…

The leaf of Samoa’s favourite fruit.

Looking up to my fale’s ceiling, beauty was in the eye of the beholder.

I talked to a bee keeper in Samoa and he told me that in the past the majority of flowering plants would bloom in September or two or three weeks on either side of then. Well for the past ten years or so he has noticed that the blooms can be two or three months on either side of September. He suspects global heating is the cause. Other impacts of climate change on Samoa include increased frequency and intensity of cyclones. The ocean in the tropics is like a pot on the stove full of hot water. Turn up the heat just a little and the activity at the surface can become pretty turbulent. When a cyclone does arrive this translates into onslaughts of wind and water that can knock everything on the island flat.

That’s the rim of former volcanoe on the left – Apolima.

Goodbye Samoa. After coming from the bare, tussock-covered hills of Central Otago in New Zealand, I’ve found my way to the azure waters and rioting rainforest of Samoa. Quite a transition. Tonight a red-eye special, and tomorrow evening the concrete towers of downtown San Francisco. This kind of fast forward travel is impressive visually, but it can’t be good for the planet.

I’ve been in the US for two days. I caught a cold on the plane thanks to a slump in my immunity because of sleep dep, but this morning I’m starting to feel better. This arrival in San Francisco has been bringing up some family related stuff which I won’t go into here, but I can say that I left this place over ten years ago and most of the major events of my adult life fit into the time space between leaving here and arriving back Tuesday night. Seeing downtown San Fran, and seeing Marin County (where I used to live) north of the city, is good after all these years.

Some first impressions of the US…

The cars really are big here – I thought they were big in Australia, but many people drive SUVs here which make Range Rovers look small. The money is paper and grey and green and looks like what you imagine ‘real’ money to look like. African American police officers rocket down the highway in Highway Patrol cars that look like they are out of the movies. Streets often are called ‘Fourth’ or ‘Van Ness’ or ‘Lombard’, without the ‘St.’ afterwards on the sign. The speed limit is 55 miles an hour on the highway and everybody sits at 70 because California voted to do away with speed cameras. Food is reasonably cheap. People pay tips.

After coming from Samoa there are a few things I’m really loving: I can drink water from the tap – what a luxury! There are no mosquitoes! The air is cool and not humid! There are no dogs barking at night or lurking on the street! Ahhh… I’m clearly not cut out for life outside the first world. It is so nice to have healthy, organic food easily available (the health food grocery shops in North California are the best I’ve found anywhere). And so nice to have a few books and paintings and fast internet around in the house where I’m staying. The summer is on here and it is somewhat disorientating and jarring to see young tomatoe plants in people’s gardens and dry grass on the Marin hills at this time of year (when Australia and New Zealand have been dipping into the colder months). Still, I’m adjusting. And even the summer here in this Mediterranean region is a cool relief after the constant warmth of the tropics. In the shadows or in the mornings and the evenings I need a jumper on, which I’m liking. I know much of the wealth of this country that I see around me is paid for by cheap oil and cheap Mexican labour, and I dislike the culture of consumerism here, but I’m happy to have arrived.

Marin County is the area north of the city, just over the Golden Gate Bridge. The few suburbs (towns), such as San Anselmo, Mill Valley, San Rafael and Novato, sit on the eastern side of an area of hills covered in a patchwork of dark leaved oak trees and dry, gold-coloured grass slopes. In many places you can look up from the shops or houses and see the hills – a nice compromise between the urban and the rural. It doesn’t look that opulent to me, but I hear that this is the second wealthiest county in the US. Despite this they all vote for the Democrats. From a British/Australian perspective the people are very American in an ‘irony-deficient’ kind of way, but at least Northern California has attracted a good number of non-conformists (like myself).

I walked through Fairfax yesterday. Comparing it with funky little towns in other parts of the Anglo-saxon, English-speaking realm such as Denmark in WA, Bellingen in NSW, Geraldine in south island New Zealand (well Geraldine isn’t funky)… I like Fairfax. It has the advantage over those other places that in one hour’s travel you can be in the downtown of a big city. Yet like those places it has beautiful nature not far from the high street. Of course the average price of a house here is a million American dollars, so that isn’t so attractive if you wanted to buy a house here I suppose.

Last night I went into City Lights Bookstore in San Fran’s Northbeach. I’ll put some photos up later, but I can say that I wish I always had access to this place! The best poetry section in the upstairs room of any bookshop I’ve been to. And some fast, pulsing jazz on the stereo downstairs.

Here are a few images of the city, taken in a hurry and without any art.

The good old Golden Gate Bridge. Still going after all those earthquakes.

Yep, the hills are as stupidly steep as ever, and the rows of white, wooden nineteenth century two story houses are still clinging to them.

The TransAmerica building still looks good as far as sky scrapers go.

Step inside City Lights Books Store, the literary capital of Northern California. This place is owned by Lawrence Ferlenghetti the great American poet, and since the fifties when this area was a Beat hang-out, it has been part of the city’s identity. And yes, I like the comment about ‘printer’s ink’ on the wall.

If you have time, read a couple of Lawrence’s poems on the following page.

In a minute I’m off to visit Muir Woods, a grove of giant redwood trees named after the great conservationist John Muir, and one of the few remaining pockets of redwoods in Marin Country. Hopefully I’ll also go up Mount Tamalpais, or Mt. Tam, the tallish hill that looks over Marin and often has its foothills clothed in the notorious San Franciscan fog. Tomorrow morning I’m off to Big Sur, three hours drive south along the coast, where I’ll briefly visit the retreat centre at one point frequented by Aldous Huxley, Esalen.

These next couple of posts are retrospective – I didn’t have time to go on the internet at the time. The photo above was taken from the top of Mount Tamalpais, or Mt. Tam, the biggest hill in Marin, north of San Fran. The Pacific Ocean is really cold in California – too cold to swim in – and the cold water combined with the hot air from the land combines to create regular fog. Here I’m looking west, over the fog.

Muir Woods is one of the last patches of old growth redwood near the city. Redwoods have seeds come out from beneath them when they are killed in a fire, and young redwoods, ‘daughter trees’, form in a circle around the old stump. In this way they grown in little circles here and there in the forest.

The embrace of sea, land and air.

Last weekend I went south along the Californian coast to Big Sur, an area of steep cliffs that drop into the sea, where giant kelp groves sway, feisty otters bob about, and the odd condor swings down out of the sky. Esalen is a retreat centre which offers week long courses in yoga, massage, meditation and the like. Aldous Huxley spent some time here many years ago. The place sits on the edge of the American continent, with steep hills behind it and the constant white crumbling waves sloshing over the rocks in the ocean in front. Hot springs come up through the rocks here, and Monterey cypress – that tree with the philosophical and wizened bend in its boughs – grow. I sat on a table outside of the dining area and watched the backs of the swells roll into the bay to my left. You can understand how this place is conducive to transformation of a kind, and why it would attract a utopian mind like Huxley’s.

Most of the food served – I had the best carrot cake of my life here – is grown on site.

The lawn rolls to the edge of the cliff and then…

This is the meditation room. The thermal baths are pretty great for the spirt as well.

While I was in Big Sur I stayed with a family who live up a canyon called Palo Colorado (tall red colour in Spanish, reflecting the tall redwood trees which line the canyon’s floor). One evening we had buffalo for dinner. In the same way that eating kangaroo in Australia amounts to conservation through sustainable use, eating buffalo in the US is something which aids that species ultimate renewal. That night I slept in a large yurt amongst the live oaks of the hillside. Next to me sat the gaunt skull of a buffalo, complete with pointing horns. Buffalo’s famously are supposed to charge oncoming storms rather than run away from them. I could say that I awoke full of buffalo courage in my yurt on the hill, but that would be a lie. I didn’t. I did however find a drum lying in the yurt which turned out to have the skin of a buffalo on it. I hit it and put it up to my ear and easily imagined the hooves of the big bison thumping into the earth of the prairie.

‘Signpost‘ by Robinson Jeffers is a poem worth a look. Jeffers lived on the Californian coast south of San Francisco and wrote vitriolic verse in the 1920s to 194os. This is a picture of Tor House, the house he built in Carmel, a town I went through last Monday.

Jeffers attracts me for his sense of the greater glory of nature as something which gives needed magnitude and dignity to human experience. However most of the poems in the three very weighty volumes of The Collected Poetry of… (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989) betray or outright exhibit, an anger at all human society which becomes tiring and a cynicism for the human future which is somewhat depressing. For this reason I don’t return to his work with much enthusiasm – apart from his canonical poem ‘Hurt Hawks’, the poem most people vaguely familiar with his work know.  Thought I’d share the photo of Tor House though.

Ah travel! I’m currently sitting in a departure lounge of the airport at Washington D.C. Yesterday I made my way here after a stupidly early start (I accidentally set my alarm for 2.30am in the morning and couldn’t go back to sleep). The flights to Greenville – where I’m now going to attend the conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment – were cancelled due to severe thunderstorms in the south. After going and prodding the staff of United I discovered this – they were not forthcoming. This was three hours after I was supposed to leave. Then another three and a half hours elapsed as I stood in the line for customer service. Upon getting to talk to somebody I was told that I was rebooked on a flight at noon today and that there were no hotel vouchers. After ringing all the hotels it appeared that the hotels of D.C. were fully booked. I’d now been awake for nearly 24 hours, and the prospect of a hard airport floor was not attracting me. This low point was starting to remind me of the other low points I’ve had on this trip – such as having a red eyed Kiwi sheep farming lad slam into the front of my compact rental car on a road in New Zealand, or getting a cold from sleep dep. Travel sometimes doesn’t seem worth it.

Luckily a distant contact who I managed to phone booked me into the local Hilton somehow and the airport agreed to pay some of the price. So I have actually managed to get a few hours sleep – ah the joys of a hotel bed for a weary wanderer! – and I’m off to the second day of the ASLE conference.

If I have yet to respond to your emails, that is because I’ve only had twenty minutes on the internet to post these few blogs. I’ll do so asap.

Expect more from the ASLE conference soon. I will get there!

It is Thursday afternoon, and I’m sitting in the Roger Miliken Center, a meeting place for the conference goers. I’m feeling a little tired after an early start and loads of conference papers, and its nice to sit and not be spoken at for an hour or two.

So, I’m in the south. The southern drawl in some of the accents is charming and it is nice to have the regional identity of this place come through in people’s voices. I’m enjoying being amongst 500 people interested in literature and the environment, to have a little room to stay in of my own, good food available in the dining room, and a packed schedule of papers and plenary sessions to listen in on. One of the best thing about academic conferences is the sudden invigoration of being able to engage in high-octane intellectual conversations with lots of friendly people, all over the place.

A couple of months ago I said that I would create a podcast of some of the talks in this conference. However in the intervening time the conference organizers decided to do this themselves. Here it is.

This morning I listened to Astrid Bracke talk about environmental concerns in Graham Swift’s Waterland and Martin Amis’ London Fields. It seems Amis had been precient in writing a novel at the end of the eighties which pictured intimations of apocalypse in the violent and confused wheather on London streets at the turn of the millenium. I heard Andrew Hazucha talk about Jane Austen’s Emma as a character who tempers her class prejudices through the development of a landscape asthetic in the novel of the same name. Liam Campbell, from the University of Ulster (one of the very few people at this conference who isn’t North American), talked about ecological augury in the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, mentioning Treebeard’s anti-industrial critique – Saruman has a mind of metal and wheels – and the description of Mordor as mounds of rock standing ‘like an obscene graveyard in the endless rows, slowly revealed in the reluctant light.’ (Twin Towers HarperCollins 1993 p.617) He remarked that one might see humanity as the dark lord of the technosphere, owning one ring, the will to be master of all things. In the sense that elves were once in balance with nature, and that the orks come to be destructive of the natural world, Tolkien is reported as having written to a relative that we humans may in this way become elves in the future. Campbell mentioned a short story by Tolkien called ‘Leaf by Niggle’ in which the painter of a leaf ends up spontaneously drawing a whole tree and then can’t help but paint the whole landscape around the tree. In the same way Tolkien had written of the way in which the ecological concerns in his work were self-propelling energies.

I’ve met the editor of Orion magazine, as well of plenty of teachers and editors in the area of literature and the environment. Tomorrow I’m looking forward to a session on film and ecocriticism. More soon.

Until I arrived here to Wofford College a few days ago I was unfamiliar with the phenomenon of rich private colleges with small student numbers that are unique to the US. Walking around this campus is so relaxing. There are only around a thousand students here. The actual town of Spartanburg isn’t very charasmatic, but being here amongst the nineteenth-century red brick buildings and the massive oak trees in full leaf standing over their carpet of thick green grass… well it seems like these college environments constitute a pastoral idyll all of themselves, with gambling ecocritics on the sward. And I hate to sound like Prince Charles, but give me a moulded cornice any day over a sixties concrete bunker.

There are five hundred people here, but the Australian contingent is made up of only two people. Myself and the co-editor of The Littoral Zone: Australian Contexts and their Writers (CRANSTON, CA. and Robert ZELLER (Eds.) This book is in the same series as my own book on John Fowles, and is forthcoming. Conferences are always good places to learn of books to put on your ‘to read’ list, and I’ve added Terry Gifford’s Reconnecting with John Muir; Bill Mckibben’s Hope, Human and Wild: True Stories of Living Lightly on the Earth; and Coming Into Contact: Explorations in Ecocritical Theory and Practice (Ingram, et. al.) to my list. Hopefully I’ll be having a look around some of northern New England next week, and because of this I also want to read Bill Mckibben’s book about walking through this area: Wandering Home.

Last night I was out in a pavilion on campus where a bunch of the profs were playing guitar and singing and hanging out – I tried to picture this kind of scene going taking place at a British ASLE conference and couldn’t see it. The English would just be too self-conscious. While I was there I met a woman who will be talking about place-based blogs – like this one I suppose – tomorrow morning. In other conference news, I met a young guy here who has a tattoo on his arm of a maple leaf, as originally drawn by Henry David Thoreau.

After the talks tomorrow morning I’ll be heading off for the weekend to St. Helena Island, and the Penn Center, with around twenty other conference participants, to check out that heartland of Gullah (a kind of African-American slave) culture. Monday afternoon I fly to Montreal.

So long Wofford College…

Today is the close of my weekend-long trip with the ASLE conference participants to Helena Island, a large fragment of land just off the coast of South Carolina (south-east USA). I’ve enjoyed this trip to the south, but right now it will also be good to have a break from this country’s huge cars, huge portions of food, permissive gun laws, and America-centric view of the world.

There were 18 of us on this field trip, mainly academics, and apart from two of us, all North American. Here a few of us sit on the front ‘porch’ of our story house on St. Helena island, watching the light fade in the ubiquitous Spanish moss hanging from the tree branches. That’s David Ingram in the foreground, Londoner and author of Green Screen, a volume of ecocritical film theory and criticism.

One day we went on a tour of the sounds. This photo was taken as our boat slid along through the waterways of South Carolina’s low country, the area being so named because of its low lying, tide inundated topography. The grasses grow up to the edge of the forest, and then pines and cabbage palms rise up. The climate here is subtropical, and the air is almost as warm and humid as in the tropics. This area was once inhabited by native Americans who made thatch for their shelters from the wide leaves of the cabbage palm. The Spaniards arrived in the early 1600s, but didn’t stay. Pirates used these bays and estuaries as jumping off points to take Incan and Mayan gold-laden ships as they bobbed up the Gulf Stream later in the century. I can’t imagine English pirates careening their galleon on this shore, while armed native Americans flit through the foliage in the background. While we cruised by the marsh grasses and green woods, John Barth’s novel The Sot Weed Factor kept springing to mind. I know it is set further north, in Virginia, but here I was really experiencing the fertility of the eastern seaboard of North America as it appeared to the adventurous and sometimes murderous European flotsam that came here during the 1600 and 1700s.

My sparse knwledge of American history will have to be excused here… The English got over here. Later the revolutionary war ended with the US shaking off the old country. Then there were Africans brought over by rich whites from West Africa and used as slaves. At one point in the early 1800s there were 800 plantations around these immediate islands (6000 whites and 30 thousand black slaves). With such fertile soil and long hours of sunshine the cotton crops shot up and this in combination with the slave labour made the planters so rich that they could fill their estates full of lavish European silver and crystal and extensive libraries. Knowledge and repression side by side… how vile. Then the abolutionist movement arose and the south wanted to be a separate nation… thus the Civil War. We walked through Beaufort, the town which where the cradle of insurgency was located.

When the Union guys (the north) arrived in town in 1862, three days before all the wealthy planter families had high tailed it down the road in their carriages, leaving the Corinthian columns of their white boarded mansions to the company of the Gullah people, the cultural group of African Americans that had formed in this region.

Notice the big windows in this photo. Climate change is causing sea level rise in the lowcountry – dead cabbage palms could be seen on the shore as a result. Also more intense hurricanes are coming to these parts. And still the air conditioned retirees inside houses like this don’t open the floor to ceiling windows on their ‘porches’ to let in the breeze, as they were designed to do a couple of hundred years ago.

We went to a church in which the gravestones had been dug up during the civil war and used as operating beds for soldiers (in the hospital temporarily located inside the church). I can’t think of a worse operating table, symbolically speaking. This gravestone has the cabbage palm on it, the state’s emblematic tree. It is a different species, but it looks like the cabbage palm found on Australia’s east coast.

The Spanish moss on the branches of the Live Oak is my abiding memory of the south. I hope the Gullah people keep ownership of as much of this land as they can, farming it for vegetables as their forefathers have for the last few generations.

Ironically living in a city is good for the environment. Dense population clusters facilitate the widespread use of public transport and bikes, and mean water and other things don’t require as much energy to be moved about. But some cities are better than others. I arrived in Montreal on Tuesday, and I think this place is one of the better ones.

I really like this city. It has the brownstones familiar from New York’s Greenwich Village, with iron stairs leading up to the second story, and old trees in full green leaf along the street. Unlike Greenwich Village it is affordable to live here. Odd turrets and elaborate gables top the terrace houses here and there. Black iron fire escapes climb down into the back alleys, where squirrels dodge cats and people stroll. The books have the minimalistic jacket designs of the French publishing industry. People switch backwards and forwards between French and English, both with a slight American slant. The windows of the apartment I’m staying in have the old, white sliding bolt design used in old French apartments. The air is warm and lots of people are on the street.

Bikes adorn the railings in front of nearly all the houses in this area, Mile End. Everywhere I go in Montreal the street is wide and full of cyclists. They have installed very wide, two-way cycle lanes – as big as another lane on the road – on a few one-way streets. I saw literally fleets of cyclists shooting down these lanes.

Often people have vegetable gardens in their narrow front yards. There is a funky, community orientated feeling, familiar to me from Brunswick St. in Melbourne.

I’m happy to be here. In some ways this city is the place I can most imagine myself living out of all the places I’ve been so far on this trip. That said, I’m looking at the place in late June when all the windows and doors – like our back door in the above photo – are open and heat is in the streets. In January minus ten celcius is merely average and more snow falls than in a Moscow winter. I don’t know how I’d cope with that. But right now I really like this place. It has a cool, urban feeling, and doesn’t have the cultural arrogance to think it is the centre of the world (I think us Australians and Canadians share this sense of cultural humility).

Sitting on the Metro, reading the program of the soon to come Montreal Jazz Festival. As part of the festival I’m going to see the Cinematic Orchestra on 5 July. If you don’t know them, have a listen. They are sounding quiet and romantic on their latest album Ma Fleur.

A few weeks ago I recorded and podcasted a chat I had with George Seddon on my back verandah in Fremantle, Western Australia. He lived six or seven houses away from me, in another old, limestone house in central Freo. Now and again he’d come over for a cup of tea, and a talk about our mutually shared bioregion, and matters to do with culture and the environment. More than any other person in Fremantle, perhaps even more than any other person in the whole of the country, George was a wealth of knowledge when it came to the geological and biological identity of south-western Australia, and Australia more broadly. He loved to talk, and had a cultured accent, and a measured, yet good humoured approach to conversation. He’d written a large number of books and articles, something he didn’t mind letting people know about.

A couple of days later I bumped into George on the street walking up the street next to the playing field around the corner from our houses (below John Curtin high school). George always seemed a bit frail and preoccupied. We exchanged a few words, and said goodbye – he touched me on the shoulder in a rare show of physical affection. Three or four days later George died.

There were things that irritated me about George. Mainly his seeming lack of interest in the doings of others – most of his conversation was about himself, and his lack of humility when it came to talking about his own academic achievments – he was always telling me about various articles and books he’d published. We had different interests as well: he was much more interested in the scientific details of the natural world than I am, and had less of a clear interest in fighting environmental destruction. However, despite this I feel sad that I will never be able to walk around the corner and talk to George again. The finality of death has served to emphasise all that I did admire about the man and his intelligence. Through his books he more than anybody else has taught me about my home place, the soils and plants of the Swan Plain around Perth. Being 80 years old he was a bridge for me with the past. I feel like I’ve thought, read and lived a fair amount, but when George was my age it was the late 1950s! He carried a lived knowledge of a lot of the twentieth century to our conversations in 2007.

Today I’m heading down over the Canadian border into the US, to New York State and Vermont, for a few days camping with a friend. All going well we will get down as far as Concord and pay our respects at Walden Pond, the location of Henry David Thoreau’s famous book.

I’m hoping that while camping beside a lake in the Adirondacks or in the farming country of Vermont I’ll hear the low, baleful call of a loon (a kind of bird) as did Thoreau over a hundred and fifty hears ago. Check this space in a week from now and you’ll find out about my trip.

I don’t have time to write this blog right now, but I’ll expand on the comments below when I get back to Montreal on Friday or Saturday.

I’ve just come down from Montreal, through the Adirondacks briefly, and into Vermont, the most rural state in the US. This place is pretty harsh in winter, but at the moment I have to say this is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been. I’m not going to make it to Walden Pond after all – too far – but this evening I’m heading to another pond in the wilderness – where loons are to be found. Finding one’s own ‘Walden Pond’ is much more in the spirit of the man anyway. And I’m in the right place to do so.

Standing on Mt. Joe in the north-east of the Adirondacks. The spruce, and white pine and hemlock blend with the birch trees, and carpet the mountains every which way you look.

One evening in southern Vermont I saw a fly fisherman cast his silvery line beneath one of Vermont’s famous covered bridges.

American beech… more soon.