Journal of a Sabbatical

March 28, 2000

wings on the ankles

Today's Reading: Early Spring in Massachusetts: from the Journals of Henry David Thoreau edited by H. G. O. Blake, The Flight of the Condor by Michael Andrews, Thoreau's Country by David R. Foster

At long last, I compiled the bird lists from the Antarctica trip into one list in taxonomic order with the place and date of the first sighting. Bird lists were a reader suggestion for this journal some time ago, and I find I get a lot out of doing them. Anyway, the complete list in taxonomic order should match up with the daily lists in the individual entries except for a couple of species where the world bird database that Bird Brain uses disagrees with Clements and/or Sibley and whoever all else. It's mainly the cormorant (shag) names that are different. Also one of the giant petrels is different. If you're looking the birds up in Harrison as you go along, that could be confusing, but I figured it out without a secret decoder ring, so I think it's pretty clear.

One of Thoreau's journal entries for yesterday (1841 to be exact) is a long worried meditation on whether he would lose his freedom by owning a farm. I felt a sense of gloom and being trapped as I was reading it. Even the end of the last paragraph, where he seems to come to some resolution, seemed a little desperate. His extended metaphor about wings as opposed to the farmer's rigid muscles, is just plain weird. And it's not just bird's wing's he's talking about. I had to look up one of those words I probably learned in Sister Eudes' literature class in 11th grade to get the mythological reference.

"I will not feel that my wings are clipped when once I have settled on ground which the law calls my own, but find new pinions grown to the old, and talaria to my feet beside." - Henry David Thoreau, March 27, 1841

talaria

n.pl. winged sandals or wings on the ankles, represented as an attribute of Hermes, or Mercury, and other gods

The rest of the entries were about birds and trees and lichens, so I felt more at home.

Once I put down the journal for the night, I picked up Flight of the Condor for some light reading at bed time. It immediately plunged into a description of how the Andes Cordillera was formed. Fortunately I'm a little more current on geology that I am on mythology, but I did have occasion to look up the word batholith, which I could almost guess from its roots: bath- meaning depth and lith- meaning rock. That gives me "deep rock" or "depth rock" but the root doesn't quite get me to the process of uncovering it.

batholith

n. a large, deep-seated igneous rock intrusion, usually granite, often forming the base of a mountain range, and uncovered only by erosion

Secret decoder ring for Thoreau's journal:

whistler = goldeneye

sheldrake = common merganser

dipper = pied-billed grebe, except in yesterday's entry what he calls dippers sound an awful lot like hooded mergansers from the description

Fringilla hiemalis = dark-eyed junco

hylodes = Hyla crucifer = spring peeper -- I'm guessing from the description of the sound and the locations and dates. He also mentions a Hylodes Pickeringi, which I can't figure out from the description and can't find in any indices.

pigeon woodpecker = flicker