Purple Sandpipers, Orange Lichen and Donald Trump

Little Moose Island is good place to start. About two miles around, and all of 54 acres, the island is community of bedrock and bog, salt marsh and shrubland, waves and white spruce. Cool in summer, windswept, foggy and rainy, Little Moose is an outpost for boreal plants reaching their southernmost limits here offshore in Maine. For how much longer, we do not know. The waters in the Gulf of Maine are warming faster than almost any ocean region on earth.

Following a narrow path or stepping only on exposed granite, I walked through stands of shrubby Jack Pine and creeping Juniper, past shag carpets of Black Crowberry and over orange lichens sprawling across pink granite. On this island rising to 54 feet above sea level, I probably (unwittingly) passed by withered, brown tufts of Marsh Feltwort or Mountain Sandwort — plants that grow much farther north or way higher in elevation.¹ No matter that I couldn’t identify everything growing or dormant or decaying around me on Little Moose.² At noon on Inauguration Day, I dwelled in the American Arctic, wide and flat with an Atlantic-sized horizon of promise.

Meanwhile, in Washington, President Trump was promising an end to the “American carnage,” even as he and his cabinet prepare to unleash a new era of carnage on the American Constitution, on civility and against the environment. Trump’s “America first” proclamation, will probably put the environment last. His is a declaration of war on clean air and water, on wildlife diversity and on some of our most sacred places.

That’s not to say that I can deny finding occasional odd satisfaction amid the uncertainty and fear. There is pleasure in watching entrenched Washington power — Democrat and Republican alike — squirm beneath the iron heel of Trump’s rhetoric. Like almost everyone, I harbor no sympathy for Congress. None. Nor, still, do I reserve any for Trump, even when he stumbles in the dark on the worthy messages: drain the swamp, health care for everyone, jobs for Americans. Right messages; wrong messenger.

So as I ponder all this on Little Moose Island, and think about a place for myself during the next four years, Purple Sandpipers, about 60 of them visiting from the Arctic, careen above the waves offshore. A Rough-legged Hawk, also an Arctic messenger, hunts for mice or voles over on Schoodic Island, another island retreat a mile out to sea. I wish I could walk there as well.

Purple Sandpipers / © Bryan Pfeiffer

Yet by 2PM Donald J. Trump is our new president. The tide, now incoming, will soon block me from the continent.³ So I wander back from this echo of the Arctic, back to a new America, back to a new world, back with a nascent, humble plan to join the resistance.

I suppose I could begin with the routine optimistic admonitions: a quote from Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark, for example, or faith that reason and love can prevail. Yeah, those are all good. Yet even before this ugly election, even if Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders had won, I had concluded that the fight against climate change was already lost (owing to our unending carbon addiction) and that millions of people will suffer horribly as a result. And no matter who’s running the world, extinction will continue apace under our watch, until we ourselves blink out like the Neanderthals and the earth, after the Anthropocene, gets back to its business. (Hey, a mere 10,000 years ago Little Moose Island sat beneath a mile of glacial ice; not much diversity there.)

By the way, I deny President Trump’s supporters neither his legitimacy nor their exuberance. Good for them, even as I believe he will be bad for the world. Instead, to be faithful to my oath, I’ll do what people tell me I do best: write about and share nature. And when that’s not enough —and it isn’t enough — I’ll do or suggest a few more things. For now, here are three:

• Read reason. We used to say that TV rots the brain. But the brain-rotting has new screens. So please wander away from social media and use your screen or the printed page to gain wisdom and find beauty in books. By way of an example, I’m now reading: The Lemon Tree by Sandy Tolan, non-fiction that reads like a novel, about the roots of the Arab and Jewish tragedies in the Middle East expressed in the lives of two families; and The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy by Michael McCarthy, about the wonder and awe of nature and the  visceral pain of its demise.
• Find perspective and hope from older and younger people around you. I found it during walks with my friend John Wires until he died at age 91, and during vibrant conversations (while drinking scotch whisky) with ninety-something farmer, author, conservationist and artist Jane Curtis, whom Ruth and I plan to visit soon in Woodstock, Vermont. I continue to draw inspiration as well from my students in the Field Naturalist and Ecological Planning programs at the University of Vermont (UVM). We’re sending them off to join us all on the mission to help make the world a better place; if they can’t do it, nobody can.
• Protest in the best way you are able. I’m a retired newspaper journalist who now teaches public communications skills to those students at UVM. In seminars starting this fall, I intend to bring those communications and media skills to people and non-profit groups working toward human and ecological justice, so that they can fight the good fight with greater tenacity and success.

Oh, one more thing, which almost goes without saying: Get outside — often. And try not to drive around so much, especially us birdwatchers (about whose role I shall write soon). I ride the bus to UVM and walk to my office in Montpelier. Yeah, of course, I drove to Maine for this working retreat. Guilty. But the truck stays parked as I walk the trails or tidal zones here at Schoodic Point every day. I recognize that you all can’t do that. But try to drive less so that you can see more, even the prosaic in your own home cities and villages.

On my way walking back from Little Moose Island, I stopped to photograph what might count as my orange tribute to President Trump, or to optimism, or even to both: a patch of what is most likely Maritime Sunburst Lichen (Xanthoria parietina).⁴ There it is below — a second sunrise on a dark Inauguration Day.

After that, as the tide came in, I stopped to dwell among the beauty and color in the diversity beneath the shallow, rising sea — and to share it with you here.

The tide rises. So what’s in your oath?

Notes, Credits and References

¹ Coffin, T.E., H. Tyler, L. Gregory. An Evaluation of Sites Representing Headlands and Islands with Plant Communities of Arctic-Alpine Affinity in the New England-Adirondack Region for their Eligibility as Natural Landmarks. Draft report. September 1989.
² If only I could have consulted on plants with local botanist Jill Weber, who was off in Washington at the demonstration (can’t blame her).
³ Yes, geologically, by way of tectonic plates, I did not leave the continent — just the shoreline. Close enough. You know … literary license.
⁴ Thanks to lichenologist and bryologist Mark Rahill for confirming my suspicion on this lichen.