Our timelapse and landscape talent Eleanor is also a history buff. She made some observations about the stonewalls that we found in South Hope with the last timelapse we shot. Building stonewalls are experiences of Americana, of who we are and where we came from, in the big picture of the stone and wood we’ve literally held in our hands over the years. E.O. Wilson differentiates the living creation from the non-living creation. With this lead, my interests in this filmic inquiry are primarily with the living. But the American divorce from nature runs deeper than that.

FROM ELEANOR: “Rarely in need of replacement, constructing stone walls were massive undertakings. This is one reason why they are so familiar in the earliest settled regions of the country, like South Hope Maine, where the frontier mentality had yet to take hold: unlike their children and grandchildren, these farmers expected to spend their entire lives on a single plot of land. A worker could lay between twenty four and sixty four feet of wall per day, assuming that the stones, or “fieldstones,” as they were called, had already been transported to the building site.

Historian John Stilgoe notes that wooden fences, which became the popular barrier among farmers outside of the northeastern US, were replaced every fifteen to thirty years. When in the early nineteenth century, depleted woodlots triggered a timber shortage, it was the stone wall laying farmers that had enough wood to keep their fires burning. Of course, it was also these northernmost people who, hibernating from frigid temperatures, were most in need of firewood.”

For more information on the life and times of stonewalls, see: Robert Thorson, Stone by Stone: The Magnificent History in New England’s Stone Walls (Walker & Company, 2004).
John R. Stilgoe, Common Landscape of America, 1580-1845 (Yale University Press, 1983).

Just returned from a multi-day canoe trip with my son, exploring the North Woods of New England.

Here, on the shore of Lake Umbagog.

I watch him sitting at sunset and recall lyrics from a song that asks a question…”If you knew that you would die today, would you change? Would you change?”

My son, on the other hand, awakes the next morning and marvels at the movement of light and small fish within shallow water.

Today a letter arrived from a viewer of our series Sunrise Earth, written and sent by a young man age 7 from Greensboro NC. I wonder what motivated this note. A theory for Stonehenge? A spirit? Trapped by whom? The art critic Bernard Berenson might call this “the natural genius of childhood and ‘the spirit of place.’ … but probably not, since it was an experience mediated through a screen. Far better for this young viewer to be physically at a place. I wonder where he plays in Greensboro?

But the note did recall this unusual place and the morning we spent there. We had rented Stonehenge, so that we could record and convey these stones without the crowds… and only with the breaking sun and clouds and the small birds called jackdaws that live within the cracks of the stones. Maybe the young viewer -or his cat- noticed the birds?

Stone is an incredible medium. When I stop making movies, I’d like to carve letters into stone, then narrowcast them into the back woods.

I will be screening clips and speaking about this work-in-progress BEHOLD THE EARTH on Sunday at 2:45pm, at the Baird Auditorium of the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History. Please come if you are in the Washington area this weekend and curious to learn what the production is all about.

The talk and screening is part of the US Environmental Film Festival, in its 18th year. For those of you who are enthusiasts for films about the people/nature connection, there are 155 diverse films screening between March 16th and 28th. Special programs exist for children and are marked by a family-friendly symbol in the festival program.

Beholding the earth in November and early December has become a chilly task here on the Maine coast.

Especially for my son Will. He stuck his fingers deep into the soil of the garden and successfully dug out this spectacular parsnip for the Thanksgiving table.

Passed my local dragonfly consultant Bob Grobe on November 23rd in the market parking lot. He reported a sighting -on the previous day- of a male Autumn Meadowhawk (Sympetrum vicinum) dragonfly basking in the sun along the Megunticook River, despite the 48 degrees Fahrenheit temperature. It may be a record for the last living dragon in these parts!

November is a restless month. I often recall that this is the month that inspired Melville’s Ishmael to leave the farm in the late 1800′s and head to sea.