Sniff

[rejectomorph]

There was actual sky today, sort of blue-gray, with faintly discernible clouds. It's still hazy near the ground,and visibility to the north was limited. The air smells less like smoke and more like an abandoned dump from the days before sanitary landfills— or like an old campfire pit, long disused. Most likely the smoke will return tonight when the breeze veers around and blows this way across the fire. The fire is still sitting there in the same area across the river. Click on the Paradise-Magalia Branch map on this page to see how close the fire is to the town (the nearest blazing point is about a mile and half east-northeast of my house.) The jasmine will be quite gone by the time this is over. Such a pathetic June. The Sierra Nevada has become the Sierra Humo.



Sunday Verse

On Rereading a Passage From John Muir

by Yvor Winters


Seeking in vain to find the heroic brow,
The subject fitting for a native ode,
I turn from thinking, for there haunts me now
A wrinkled figure on a dusty road:
Climbing from road to path, from path to rock,
From rock to live oak, thence to mountain bay,
Through unmoved twilight, where the rifle's shock
Was half absorbed by leaves and drawn away,
Through mountain lilac, where the brown deer lay.

This was my childhood's revery: to be
Not one who seeks in nature his release
But one forever by the dripping tree,
Paradisaic in his pristine peace.
I might have been this man: a knowing eye
Moving on leaf and bark, a quiet gauge
Of growing timber and of climbing fly,
A quiet hand to fix them on the page—
A gentle figure from a simpler age.