The Scent of Green

Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation... tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation.

~Jean Arp

"Green is the prime color of the world, and that from which its loveliness arises."

~Pedro Calderon de la Barca

I like to think of spring as being something subtle, a seasonal change that comes upon us silently and by degrees, not with a sudden flash that excites the retinas, welcome though it may very well be, but, when you venture into a temperate zone only once or twice a month, change can seem abrupt this time of year. A week or so ago, when I last ventured into the relative warmth of a lower elevation, the majority of trees and shrubs were leafless, only brown and grey stems in a landscape of native firs and pines with their limited green hues, but yesterday! I felt like Dorothy (OK, maybe Tin Man, Cowardly Lion, or Scarecrow) waking up in a field of glorious green. And what a diversity of greens! The light clear green of absinthe, a denser, sour-apple green, and piquant lime green, all making broad, painterly brush-strokes against the viridian, almost blue-green background. But it was the lighter shades that attracted and held my attention, and I marveled again/still at the process of photosynthesis and the gift of chlorophyll. I was suddenly back in college botany, and the 'Krebs Citric Acid Cycle' momentarily filled whatever brain cells were simply idling, though I could recall little of the process. Strange the things we retain in our fleshly filing cabinet. A few days of warmth and sunshine and we'll be floating in foliage of every shade of green, right here. Already Hostas are breaking ground. Is it any wonder we are awed by Spring?

Messing With One's Future

There is nothing - absolutely nothing -

half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.

Water Rat - The Wind in the Willows

It’s still very hard for me to believe that in 1960, when I was seventeen, and my best friend, David C. about the same, we could, and did wander down to Balboa, California and into a yacht broker’s office to be treated as if we were scions of Rockefeller or Carnegie. We mentioned we were interested in purchasing a sloop, ketch, or other sea-worthy vessel of around thirty feet and without hesitation the gentleman gave us the addresses, the slip numbers, of several boats he thought might interest us. And so we simply walked on board the boats on our list without the slightest interference. I'm sure this would be impossible today. We explored all the nooks and crannies of the various vessels at leisure, striking what we imaged were nautical poses for each other. One beautiful craft I remember reminded me of a scaled-down galleon, complete with poop deck, and most likely a pirate flag in one of the locked chests. I was in love and ready to cast off the hawsers immediately and sail for Treasure Island with Robert Newton, after all I was a Hawkins. One we were intrigued with was a large Chinese Junk. And another, had we followed our hearts and not our narrow socially obedient minds, might have changed the course of our lives forever. It was a sloop provisioned for several weeks at sea; the cabin table overflowing with sea charts held down by a cup half filled with cold coffee. It was evident someone lived aboard. A silver key was in the ignition. Though we didn't know the difference between a spinnaker and a jib we thought that if the boat were under mechanical power it would be the equivalent of driving a car, and once outside the harbor we could raise the mainsail and learn how to handle the rigging at our convenience. What did we know? Visions of Bora Bora, Tahiti, Fiji, even Catalina Island danced in our heads. I wonder sometimes, where would I be today if one of us had found the nerve to turn the key.