– In which Dorn describes a vision that few have experienced.
Here is the second promised story of a magical nature experience I’m grateful for, which I never would have had if we didn’t live where we do on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay. (My first story is here.)
2. Many years ago (May 6-7, 2003 to be precise), when we hadn’t been living here long, there was a news blurb that a transit of Mercury across the sun was to take place that would be visible from the east coast of the US at about 6 AM. At that time I was working in Silver Spring, a 75-mile commute, and I got up before dawn to get ready to catch the bus into DC.
Because the Bay is to the east of us, we get to see some wonderful sunrises. That morning started out cloudless but hazy, and before I left for work I could watch the sun come up. Looking closely (which I could safely do for at least a few minutes as the sun came over the horizon), I was able to see a little tiny black dot on the surface of the red sun, slightly off center at about 4:00. I really don’t know for sure if it was Mercury that I was seeing, or maybe just a sunspot, but I told myself (and still tell myself to this day) that I was privileged to see something almost no one had seen since the beginning of time: the planet Mercury, backdropped by the sun, unaided with my naked eyes!
(This is just what it looked like back then, but it’s actually an “artist’s conception”. It’s a picture I took at sunrise yesterday, onto which I placed a small black dot with Photoshop.)
My family wasn’t a religious one, so my Mother kind of substituted the Girl Scout Laws for the ten commandments. One was “a Girl Scout is thrifty”. When I first ran into this, I didn’t even know what ‘thrifty’ was.” It’s when you don’t waste your money on frivolous things”, said Mom. “What’s ‘frivolous’, I wondered…but I eventually figured out the thrifty thing. It was actually easy to be very thrifty on 10 cents a week allowance! This has carried over into adulthood and a few years ago my daughter introduced me to saving a bundle by making my own laundry detergent for just pennies, which I have done ever since. The site I found the recipe on had actually tested it against major brands and found the homemade version is a winner. See the tests at https://cornerstoneconfessions.com/2013/11/laundry-detergent-comparision.html. This laundry detergent is not hard to make and I’m happy to include it as the first Third Age Thoughts money-saving tip:
By the way, the old Girl Scout laws that I grew up with seem to be retired. Modern Girl Scouts don’t have to be ‘thrifty’, per se, but they do need to ‘use resources wisely’.
In my quest to get visiting grandkids to do something other
than screen time I located a sunflower maze at Goldpetal Farms in St. Mary’s
County. “We should do this,” I suggested, and luckily, they seemed willing
enough. Later, I was rewarded by GD #1 saying, “Mazes are FUN!” when we were
actually there walking the path under the towering flowers. Three was a good
number to do the maze thing because every time we got to a branch of the maze,
there was someone to break the tie if we couldn’t get consensus on which way to
go. Yes, it was fun, but we sure were running into a lot of dead ends! And we
drank up all the iced tea I had prepared! And it was HOT! We prided ourselves
on not using the map, but it seemed to me we kept stumbling on places that we
had been before. I spotted three teenagers clutching a crumpled bit of paper.
Could they be using the map? I couldn’t tell, but the next time I had to break
the tie about what direction to go I pointed to the way I had seen the teens
go. Soon after, we made it out! At the exit they had a painting station so you
could do a watercolor after your sunflower immersion experience. Later, back
home, I was able to also complete a sunflower oil painting of GD #3.
THE SCENE: In the Environmental Office of a nearly-abandoned Navy base, NCIS agents have just confronted the protagonist with what appears to be evidence of his guilt.
(You really should read part 1 and part 2 of this story first.)
I was a fugitive from the NCIS (conclusion)
Like all Navy bases, we had done a thorough environmental survey of the base property, and we had identified a small number of spill and dump sites that we were in the process of cleaning up. We gave each site a name. Some were just descriptive, like “maintenance garage parking lot” or “building 13”, and some were a bit more fanciful, like “the blackberry patch”. I reported on our progress cleaning these sites regularly to EPA, and we had press releases about them and regular well-attended public meetings for the neighboring community.
The accusation they were following up on, the NCIS agents said, was that in addition to the list of six or eight contaminated sites that the public knew about, I was keeping a secret second list of other sites, that were never mentioned to EPA or the public.
They showed me the evidence that was provided with by the accuser: a note in my handwriting, describing half a dozen contaminated sites in the kind of language we regularly use, but with descriptions that not only didn’t match anything we had told the public about, but which I didn’t recognize at all.
It wasn’t hard for me to guess who had made the accusation–my document organizer. She had stumbled upon this note among the boxes and crates of reports, and convinced herself that she had found proof that we (or at least, I) were keeping deadly secrets about environmental contamination from the public. No wonder she had been acting so weird around me! She wasn’t lonesome, she saw herself as a crime-bustin’ reporter hot on a case! And I wasn’t a prospect, I was a SUSPECT!
I thought about this as I read through the list, trying to remember when I had written it and what it meant, when I saw a contamination site whose descriptive name I remembered, because it struck me as being so idyllic and picturesque, like a vacation destination. The name was “Hideaway Pond”, and it was one of the cleanup sites at a different Navy base. I took the investigators over to our Public Affairs office, where we dug up some of the public brochures about that base’s cleanup projects. All of the sites on the handwritten list were described there (phew!). I must have been taking notes at some meeting about their cleanup, and whoever had found those notes assumed I was writing about my own base.
This seemed to satisfy the agents that their work could be satisfactorily concluded, and they said they had one last question before they would be out of my hair forever: about four years earlier, one of my staff was writing up a report of a base inspection, in which they had said they found an old chemical drum out in a field, and I had edited that report, replacing the word “old” with “rusty”, and could I please tell them why I had made that change?
I sort of remembered the report, but I didn’t have to rely on my memory because of the copious notes I had always taken. I eventually tracked down the message where I had suggested to drafter of the report that he ought to call it a rusty drum, because it was true (I said that in the message), and because it gave a more accurate picture of the situation out in that field. All those years of taking reams of notes, vindicated in one easy question!
I asked them if they would now exonerate me, but they said that their rules forbade them to pronounce me innocent and unjustly accused. They would be saying in their report that they found no evidence that I had engaged in any criminal wrongdoing, and hopefully I would be content with that. Having no other option, I was.
AND I NEVER SAW THEM AGAIN.
The story has an epilog. I was told later that the document organizer had apparently decided that the Navy was colluding in my coverup of my secret contaminated sites, and had been stopped at our base’s gate trying to smuggle out boxes of my office’s documents, perhaps to break the story to the world. I don’t know what happened to her after that, but at the time I uncharitably felt that it served her right for suspecting me of being a criminal, instead of just hitting on me like a normal decent person would have done.
Y’all have probably seen news of that recent study that showed what everyone knew all along–being in touch with nature has real health benefits. After some recent surgery with a side of complications, I’m really grateful to live where we do on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay. I had already decided to post something about what it’s like living here in semi-rural semi-solitude communing with nature, but for now I’ll just share two extra-magical nature events that we’ve enjoyed here. (I’ll split my stories into two posts to strengthen my resolve not to make my posts too long.)
1. Ten summers ago or more, we had our grandsons with us for about a week, and it seemed that all of nature, especially the Chesapeake Bay, was cooperating to help keep them entertained. While they were here, we had extra-high winds that made it possible for teen/tweens to get a surfing experience on the beach out front, and still calm days just right for kayaking along the shore. We saw dolphins jumping in the air in front of our house, something I’ve probably seen less than five times in the 20 years we’ve been here. Eagles and hawks would swoop down and catch fish right in front of us and take them to their aeries down the street. We spent days stalking a manatee that had somehow strayed up north into St. Leonard harbor (we never caught a glimpse of it, but we saw its lair, and it was fun searching).
It was a great week of swimming, boating, and other playing, from before the time when our grandkids got too cool to wear their enthusiasm on the surface. By the final morning, we were spent and happy and out of ideas, and we were wondering if we could find a topper for their visit, or if we could just be tired and crabby until it was time to take them home (which still would have marked an overall successful vacation).
There was a commotion of people on the beach in front of our house, unusual for so early. The Bay was experiencing a red tide, and fish and shellfish were straying close to, and sometimes on, the shore to get enough oxygen. We saw flounders hiding in the sand, and scooped up a dozen crabs which we had for breakfast. What a perfect finale!
(This is what our catch looked like all those years ago, but it’s actually a picture of the crabs I caught for breakfast this morning, as we’ve had another red tide.)
