What a beautiful piece. Thanks so much for reposting it! I may have to subscribe to that publication. The idea of boundaries being human constructs of dubious application to non-human spaces is strong and long-lived in me. Even as a child wandering the flatwoods of North Florida I had a sense that any place not claimed by someone else was mine. Encountering old fencelines was a secret joy to me to realize that that particular boundary had been erased. I still feel as if a frontier is a special inviting place. The worst part of a boundary is that you know or can guess what is on the other side of it. With a frontier one's heart can fly into it even if one's feet remain earthbound.
I also love discovering old fences. There are some beautiful ones along the Columbia River Gorge, at homesteads that have long since been abandoned. Also at Bandelier in New Mexico, which I visited for the second time last Spring.
I know nothing of the flatwoods of North Florida--wouldn't, in fact, have known to call any region by such a name, nor do I have an image in my mind's eye. Is it terra firma, or is the land marshy? ...I have many questions...
(An aside: In the Amazon river basin, two distinct types of forests can be very close to one another, one actually called "terra firma," with jungle that is always fairly wet but with lands that is always traversable except for swollen creeks and rivers, the other "flooded forests" that, at some times of year, have 30+ feet of standing water, such that you can go through in a small boat and be eye level with the canopy, and all of its inhabitants).
Follow me long enough and you will discover that I use "flatwoods" and "riverswamp" to describe the same terrain. They are complementary. The flatwoods are high enough to not flood despite being interspersed with riverswamp marshiness. I believe the accepted name for this part of Florida is the Nature Coast. Even though the cypress trees were logged out soon after the beginning of the 20th century (by my great grandfather among others) much has remained relatively undeveloped. And I am as uncivilized as I can get away with😂
If you two have never read The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, you probably should since you appreciate fences and boundaries and what they can separate, and what they can convey. You can dislike Stephen King the man, and even Stephen King's novels and still appreciate this book's theme(s). Especially the ending; perfect for you two! :)
Trisha is 9 years old and has been lost for 9 days in the woods on and off the Appalachian Trail in northern New Hampshire towards the Maine border. She’s far beyond exhaustion and hunger, and now has pneumonia. All she had for those 9 days to accompany her -besides the wild things that lived in those woods- was her Walkman with which she could listen to the Boston Red Sox games. Until the reception faded, and the batteries died. All she was left with then was a voice in her head. (A tale as old as time; Abraham, for one, would agree. [So would Job to a degree]).
*** SPOILERS AHEAD ***
The thing in the woods, whatever it was, kept her company on her journey. Although she dismissed a great deal of what she felt and thought she saw, she never dismissed her sense of what the wasp-priest had called the God of the Lost; never chalked up the clawed trees (or the headless fox, for that matter) to mere hallucination. When she felt that thing (or heard it-several times she had heard breaking branches in the forest as it kept pace with her, and twice she heard its low inhuman grunt), she never questioned the fact of its actual presence. When the feeling left her, she never questioned the fact that the thing was really gone. She and it were tied together now; they would remain so until she died. Trisha didn't think that would be long now. "Right around the corner," her mother would have said, except there were no corners in the woods. Bugs and swamps and sudden drop-offs, but no corners. It wasn't fair that she should die after fighting so hard to stay alive, but the unfairness didn't make her so angry now. It took energy to be angry. It took vitality. Trisha was nearly shot of both.
Halfway across this new clearing, which was no different than a dozen others she had passed through, she began to cough. It hurt deep in her chest, made her feel as if there were a great big hook in there. Trisha doubled over, grabbed hold of a jutting stump, and coughed until tears popped out of her eyes and her vision doubled. When the coughing finally tapered off and stopped, she remained bent over at first, waiting for her heart to slow its fearful pounding. Also for those big black butterflies in front of her eyes to fold their wings and go back to wherever they came from. Good thing she'd had this stump to hold onto or she would have fallen over for sure.
Her eyes went to the stump and her thoughts abruptly ceased. The first to come back was I'm not seeing what I think I'm seeing. It's another Make-believe, another hallucination. She closed her eyes and counted to twenty.
When she opened them the black butterflies were gone, but the rest was the same. The stump wasn't a stump. It was a post. On top, screwed into the gray and spongy old wood, was a rusty red ringbolt. Trisha grasped it, felt the old iron reality of it. She let go and looked at the flecks of rust on her fingers. She grasped it again, flicked it back and forth. That sense of deja vu swept her as it had when she had turned in a circle, only it was stronger now, and somehow associated with Tom Gordon. What ... ?
"You dreamed it," Tom said. He was standing about fifty feet away with his arms folded and his butt leaned up against a maple tree, dressed in his gray road uniform. "You dreamed we came to this place."
"I did?"
"Sure, don't you remember? It was the team's off night. The night you listened to Walt."
"Walt ... ?" The name was only vaguely familiar, the significance of it totally lost.
"Walt from Framingham. The El Dopo on the cell phone."
She started to remember. "And then the stars fell."
Tom nodded.
Trisha walked slowly around the post, never taking her hand off the ringbolt. She looked carefully at her surroundings and saw that she wasn't in a clearing at all, not really. There was too much grass-the high green grass you saw in fields or meadows. This was a meadow, or had been once, a long time ago. If you ignored the birches and the bushes and let your eye see the whole thing, you couldn't mistake it for anything else. It was a meadow. People made meadows, just as people planted posts in the ground, posts with ringbolts on them.
Trisha dropped to one knee and ran a hand up and down the post-lightly, mindful of splinters. Halfway around it she discovered a pair of holes and a twisted ring of old metal. She felt below it in the grass, found nothing at first, and dug deeper into the wiry undergrowth. Down there, caught in old hay and timothy, she found something else. Trisha had to use both hands to rip it free. It turned out to be an ancient rusty hinge. She held it up to the sun. A pencil-thin ray fell through one of the screwholes and put a brilliant pinhead of light on one cheek.
"Tom," she breathed. She looked toward where he had been, leaning back against the maple with his arms crossed, thinking he would be gone again. He wasn't, though, and although he wasn't smiling, she thought she saw a hint of a smile around his eyes and mouth. "Tom, look!" She held up the hinge.
"It was a gate," Tom said.
"A gate!" she repeated rapturously. 'A gate!" Something made by humans, in other words. Folk from the magic world of lights and appliances and 6-12 Insect Repellant.
"This is your last chance, you know."
"What?" She looked at him uneasily.
"It's the late innings now. Don't make a mistake, Trisha."
"Tom, you-"
But there was no one there. Tom was gone. Not that she had seen him disappear, exactly, because Tom had never been there in the first place. He was only in her imagination.
Really beautiful break today from the overcast and grey here, thank you!
On another note, WIAA is considering two amendments (7&8) to better define gender identity participation in middle school/high school sports in Washington state. Can we send out a clarion call for people to send in support for either or both of these?
Thank you, on both counts! I did not know about the WIAA proposed amendments. Will look at it and perhaps mention on DarkHorse tomorrow. I would need to know a bit more about what power and influence the WIAA actually has in Washington. Do you know more, or can you point me to some concise and accurate resources on how these things work here?
And to be honest I’m not sure of the sequence of voting/adopting amendments but Kruse recommends reaching out to WIAA director Matt Hoffman with comments and support: mhoffman@wiaa.com, these were triggered by the trans athlete who competed and won a girls track event last spring…
Oh my, these photos are perfect. I love it when the male part of my brain syncs with the mostly female part of my brain. The pictures and the text today do make me wonder where both parts begin and end.
"We set up boundaries of our own and are, sometimes, surprised when those boundaries fail us."
"Where does the sea stop, and the land begin?" Boundaries.
I offer a photo of before and one of after Superstorm Sandy of the beach in Stone Harbor NJ, situated on the Seven Mile Beach, a barrier island that the Army Corps of Engineers deemed 'an unstable shoal" 'that never should have been built on' (long after it was built on of course; people do what people do: they settle in nice places). BTW, there is much angst for beachfront owners in NJ as the state has decided owners have no right to a view of the ocean (in the mission to build up the dunes high above the sightline of the homes). Boundaries.
The 'sticks' you see in the post-erosion photo are the remnants of the bottom of the fencing placed under the dunes and their march grass to strengthen the dunes ability to withstand the waves and tide. The ocean wins in the end - but the dunes did hold back the ocean just enough to spare the homes on the beachfront. Boundaries.
Having seen robins go at far larger intruders; I'm not sure boundaries are all that unique to man, though. Robins are just as anal and aggressive as us about them, and I daresay other species are just as stroppy.
Interesting tidbit: Kaskaskia IL (50 miles south of St Louis), the original capitol of IL, is on the Missouri side of the Mississippi river. It's part of a parcel of land, approximately 5 x 5 miles, that was originally on the east side of the river. When the river shifted its course to the east in 1881, the land remained part of Illinois even though it's now on the Missouri side of the river.
I need a dark horse Substack to comment on because I deleted YouTube. So I am sorry but I have to mention it here. The "negativity" Musk wants to delete is the criticism of H1B, he's a businessman, he's a corpo oligarch and as much as I'm glad he's taking about the Muslim rape and torture gangs, its timing is suspect. I'm sorry but I've watched tech salaries deflate by half in two years. He wants to drown the last jobs that allowed families to live on a single income. Eric pointed this out years ago in the sciences, I think this answers his question on why String theory isn't dead-the true innovators didn't have an incentive to go into physics, instead the correlation with the first tech boom is mighty suspicious. There's nothing to go into now, and don't say ai, I love it, but it's running into its limitations quickly. If Musk wants to make money it's time for mini bee spaceX asteroid mining. Mmm yttrium.
What a beautiful piece. Thanks so much for reposting it! I may have to subscribe to that publication. The idea of boundaries being human constructs of dubious application to non-human spaces is strong and long-lived in me. Even as a child wandering the flatwoods of North Florida I had a sense that any place not claimed by someone else was mine. Encountering old fencelines was a secret joy to me to realize that that particular boundary had been erased. I still feel as if a frontier is a special inviting place. The worst part of a boundary is that you know or can guess what is on the other side of it. With a frontier one's heart can fly into it even if one's feet remain earthbound.
I also love discovering old fences. There are some beautiful ones along the Columbia River Gorge, at homesteads that have long since been abandoned. Also at Bandelier in New Mexico, which I visited for the second time last Spring.
I know nothing of the flatwoods of North Florida--wouldn't, in fact, have known to call any region by such a name, nor do I have an image in my mind's eye. Is it terra firma, or is the land marshy? ...I have many questions...
(An aside: In the Amazon river basin, two distinct types of forests can be very close to one another, one actually called "terra firma," with jungle that is always fairly wet but with lands that is always traversable except for swollen creeks and rivers, the other "flooded forests" that, at some times of year, have 30+ feet of standing water, such that you can go through in a small boat and be eye level with the canopy, and all of its inhabitants).
Follow me long enough and you will discover that I use "flatwoods" and "riverswamp" to describe the same terrain. They are complementary. The flatwoods are high enough to not flood despite being interspersed with riverswamp marshiness. I believe the accepted name for this part of Florida is the Nature Coast. Even though the cypress trees were logged out soon after the beginning of the 20th century (by my great grandfather among others) much has remained relatively undeveloped. And I am as uncivilized as I can get away with😂
I'm in the western panhandle and I'm reminded of the novel "A Land Remembered." https://www.tcpalm.com/story/entertainment/whattodoin772/2019/01/09/land-remembered-floridas-favorite-book-lauries-stories/2471182002/
If you two have never read The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, you probably should since you appreciate fences and boundaries and what they can separate, and what they can convey. You can dislike Stephen King the man, and even Stephen King's novels and still appreciate this book's theme(s). Especially the ending; perfect for you two! :)
Trisha is 9 years old and has been lost for 9 days in the woods on and off the Appalachian Trail in northern New Hampshire towards the Maine border. She’s far beyond exhaustion and hunger, and now has pneumonia. All she had for those 9 days to accompany her -besides the wild things that lived in those woods- was her Walkman with which she could listen to the Boston Red Sox games. Until the reception faded, and the batteries died. All she was left with then was a voice in her head. (A tale as old as time; Abraham, for one, would agree. [So would Job to a degree]).
*** SPOILERS AHEAD ***
The thing in the woods, whatever it was, kept her company on her journey. Although she dismissed a great deal of what she felt and thought she saw, she never dismissed her sense of what the wasp-priest had called the God of the Lost; never chalked up the clawed trees (or the headless fox, for that matter) to mere hallucination. When she felt that thing (or heard it-several times she had heard breaking branches in the forest as it kept pace with her, and twice she heard its low inhuman grunt), she never questioned the fact of its actual presence. When the feeling left her, she never questioned the fact that the thing was really gone. She and it were tied together now; they would remain so until she died. Trisha didn't think that would be long now. "Right around the corner," her mother would have said, except there were no corners in the woods. Bugs and swamps and sudden drop-offs, but no corners. It wasn't fair that she should die after fighting so hard to stay alive, but the unfairness didn't make her so angry now. It took energy to be angry. It took vitality. Trisha was nearly shot of both.
Halfway across this new clearing, which was no different than a dozen others she had passed through, she began to cough. It hurt deep in her chest, made her feel as if there were a great big hook in there. Trisha doubled over, grabbed hold of a jutting stump, and coughed until tears popped out of her eyes and her vision doubled. When the coughing finally tapered off and stopped, she remained bent over at first, waiting for her heart to slow its fearful pounding. Also for those big black butterflies in front of her eyes to fold their wings and go back to wherever they came from. Good thing she'd had this stump to hold onto or she would have fallen over for sure.
Her eyes went to the stump and her thoughts abruptly ceased. The first to come back was I'm not seeing what I think I'm seeing. It's another Make-believe, another hallucination. She closed her eyes and counted to twenty.
When she opened them the black butterflies were gone, but the rest was the same. The stump wasn't a stump. It was a post. On top, screwed into the gray and spongy old wood, was a rusty red ringbolt. Trisha grasped it, felt the old iron reality of it. She let go and looked at the flecks of rust on her fingers. She grasped it again, flicked it back and forth. That sense of deja vu swept her as it had when she had turned in a circle, only it was stronger now, and somehow associated with Tom Gordon. What ... ?
"You dreamed it," Tom said. He was standing about fifty feet away with his arms folded and his butt leaned up against a maple tree, dressed in his gray road uniform. "You dreamed we came to this place."
"I did?"
"Sure, don't you remember? It was the team's off night. The night you listened to Walt."
"Walt ... ?" The name was only vaguely familiar, the significance of it totally lost.
"Walt from Framingham. The El Dopo on the cell phone."
She started to remember. "And then the stars fell."
Tom nodded.
Trisha walked slowly around the post, never taking her hand off the ringbolt. She looked carefully at her surroundings and saw that she wasn't in a clearing at all, not really. There was too much grass-the high green grass you saw in fields or meadows. This was a meadow, or had been once, a long time ago. If you ignored the birches and the bushes and let your eye see the whole thing, you couldn't mistake it for anything else. It was a meadow. People made meadows, just as people planted posts in the ground, posts with ringbolts on them.
Trisha dropped to one knee and ran a hand up and down the post-lightly, mindful of splinters. Halfway around it she discovered a pair of holes and a twisted ring of old metal. She felt below it in the grass, found nothing at first, and dug deeper into the wiry undergrowth. Down there, caught in old hay and timothy, she found something else. Trisha had to use both hands to rip it free. It turned out to be an ancient rusty hinge. She held it up to the sun. A pencil-thin ray fell through one of the screwholes and put a brilliant pinhead of light on one cheek.
"Tom," she breathed. She looked toward where he had been, leaning back against the maple with his arms crossed, thinking he would be gone again. He wasn't, though, and although he wasn't smiling, she thought she saw a hint of a smile around his eyes and mouth. "Tom, look!" She held up the hinge.
"It was a gate," Tom said.
"A gate!" she repeated rapturously. 'A gate!" Something made by humans, in other words. Folk from the magic world of lights and appliances and 6-12 Insect Repellant.
"This is your last chance, you know."
"What?" She looked at him uneasily.
"It's the late innings now. Don't make a mistake, Trisha."
"Tom, you-"
But there was no one there. Tom was gone. Not that she had seen him disappear, exactly, because Tom had never been there in the first place. He was only in her imagination.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
N.B.
This novel was made available for free, in pdf format for download, by the author some decades ago. It has not bee pirated.
Hello, fellow Floridian.
Really beautiful break today from the overcast and grey here, thank you!
On another note, WIAA is considering two amendments (7&8) to better define gender identity participation in middle school/high school sports in Washington state. Can we send out a clarion call for people to send in support for either or both of these?
Thank you, on both counts! I did not know about the WIAA proposed amendments. Will look at it and perhaps mention on DarkHorse tomorrow. I would need to know a bit more about what power and influence the WIAA actually has in Washington. Do you know more, or can you point me to some concise and accurate resources on how these things work here?
I heard of these amendments through Brandi Kruse podcast, Truth Seekers, proposed listed here: https://www.wiaa.com/proposed-amendments-2025/
And to be honest I’m not sure of the sequence of voting/adopting amendments but Kruse recommends reaching out to WIAA director Matt Hoffman with comments and support: mhoffman@wiaa.com, these were triggered by the trans athlete who competed and won a girls track event last spring…
Fun read, reminding me of college days with enjoyable forays into geology, and oceanography which were later super ceded by a career in aviation.
Dick Minnis removingthecataract.substack.com
Wow!
Oh my, these photos are perfect. I love it when the male part of my brain syncs with the mostly female part of my brain. The pictures and the text today do make me wonder where both parts begin and end.
"We set up boundaries of our own and are, sometimes, surprised when those boundaries fail us."
"Where does the sea stop, and the land begin?" Boundaries.
I offer a photo of before and one of after Superstorm Sandy of the beach in Stone Harbor NJ, situated on the Seven Mile Beach, a barrier island that the Army Corps of Engineers deemed 'an unstable shoal" 'that never should have been built on' (long after it was built on of course; people do what people do: they settle in nice places). BTW, there is much angst for beachfront owners in NJ as the state has decided owners have no right to a view of the ocean (in the mission to build up the dunes high above the sightline of the homes). Boundaries.
The 'sticks' you see in the post-erosion photo are the remnants of the bottom of the fencing placed under the dunes and their march grass to strengthen the dunes ability to withstand the waves and tide. The ocean wins in the end - but the dunes did hold back the ocean just enough to spare the homes on the beachfront. Boundaries.
Before: https://x.com/AEJ58/status/1876708377738219939/photo/1
After: https://x.com/AEJ58/status/1866987213034229795/photo/1
Beautiful article this week. Thanks so much!
Lyrical.
Having seen robins go at far larger intruders; I'm not sure boundaries are all that unique to man, though. Robins are just as anal and aggressive as us about them, and I daresay other species are just as stroppy.
Man is "speshul"; not special, to my mind.
The difference is setting one's own boundaries rather than accepting those of others. The state bird of Florida is the Mockingbird
Interesting tidbit: Kaskaskia IL (50 miles south of St Louis), the original capitol of IL, is on the Missouri side of the Mississippi river. It's part of a parcel of land, approximately 5 x 5 miles, that was originally on the east side of the river. When the river shifted its course to the east in 1881, the land remained part of Illinois even though it's now on the Missouri side of the river.
I need a dark horse Substack to comment on because I deleted YouTube. So I am sorry but I have to mention it here. The "negativity" Musk wants to delete is the criticism of H1B, he's a businessman, he's a corpo oligarch and as much as I'm glad he's taking about the Muslim rape and torture gangs, its timing is suspect. I'm sorry but I've watched tech salaries deflate by half in two years. He wants to drown the last jobs that allowed families to live on a single income. Eric pointed this out years ago in the sciences, I think this answers his question on why String theory isn't dead-the true innovators didn't have an incentive to go into physics, instead the correlation with the first tech boom is mighty suspicious. There's nothing to go into now, and don't say ai, I love it, but it's running into its limitations quickly. If Musk wants to make money it's time for mini bee spaceX asteroid mining. Mmm yttrium.