Here are two depictions of autumn as imagined by the brilliant Charles M. Schulz. Only he could have conceived of and drawn Snoopy dancing with a falling leaf.
In the second strip, Woodstock reviews various signs and finds the correct way to fly south.
Even though Schultz died in 2000, the wonderful characters he created are still available in myriad forms, including books, buttons, calendars, lunchboxes, magnets, pins, stuffed animals, memorable television specials (“A Charlie Brown Christmas” is a holiday tradition in our house) and even on spatulas from Williams-Sonoma.
There’s 355 million—the number of world-wide readers of “Peanuts” according to Schulz’s obituary in The New York Times–reasons “Peanuts” is still wildly popular. In addition, Schulz created about 18,250 strips in his almost 50 years of drawing the daily comic and his work has been translated into 20 languages.
“There are two kinds of hunting: ordinary hunting, and ruffed-grouse hunting.
“There are two places to hunt grouse: ordinary places, and Adams County.
“There are two times to hunt in Adams: ordinary times, and when the tamaracks are smoky gold.”
Thus opens the chapter titled “October” in A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There by Aldo Leopold. He ranks among the very best nature writers of all time. Not only did he deeply understand the true nature of nature but he simply, yet with eloquence and elegance, describes its splendor.
What grouse hunter doesn’t relish the month of October? Previous months can be taken up with various preparations—training and conditioning the dogs, gear preparation, travel plans—but, still, everything is focused on October. It is the perfect time to be walking along a tote road in the woods with dogs.
Leopold continues:
“The tamaracks change from green to yellow when the first frosts have brought woodcock, fox sparrows, and juncos out of the north. Troops of robins are stripping the last white berries from the dogwood thickets, leaving the empty stems as a pink haze against the hill. The creekside alders have shed their leaves, exposing here and there an eyeful of holly. Brambles are aglow, lighting your footsteps grouseward.”
Several paragraphs later, Leopold notes:
“The tamaracks grow not only in the swamp, but at the foot of the bordering upland, where springs break forth. Each spring has become choked with moss, which forms a boggy terrace. I call these terraces the hanging gardens, for out of their sodden muck the fringed gentians have lifted blue jewels. Such an October gentian, dusted with tamarack gold, is worth a full stop and a long look, even when the dog signals grouse ahead.”
Tamarack (Larix laricina) is a member of the Larix, or Larch, genus and Pinaceae, or Pine, family. Another name is the Eastern Larch. While the tree is a conifer (cone-bearing) and produces needles, it isn’t an evergreen. Instead, this genus is cool because its needles are deciduous and so are shed in the fall. Photo courtesy of Grand Traverse Regional Land Conservancy
Leopold finishes the first section:
“Lunch over, I regard a phalanx of young tamaracks, their golden lances thrusting skyward. Under each the needles of yesterday fall to earth building a blanket of smoky gold; at the tip of each the bud of tomorrow, preformed, poised, awaits another spring.”
Leopold’s final sentence of the chapter:
“I sometimes think the other months were constituted mainly as a fitting interlude between Octobers, and I suspect that dogs, and perhaps grouse, share the same view.”
Besides the obvious charm of this strip— Snoopy in his bathing suit, Lucy content in the pool—there is more.
Some clients already know the trick. (I’m thinking especially of Chris Bye.) For many years, Jerry and I filled up two pools with cold water. After a summer morning conditioning run, the dogs loved those pools. They drank, plopped down, and swirled and splashed around.
Pointers Northwoods Comet (CH Rock Acre Blackhawk x Northwoods Vixen, 2018) and Northwoods Vixen (CH Westfall’s Black Ice x Northwoods Prancer, 2011).
Poetry is an entirely different form of creative writing from fiction and nonfiction. There are fierce devotees and equally strong detractors.
Mary Oliver might make at least some of the latter group enjoy a poem or two.
Over Oliver’s lifetime (1935 – 2019), she wrote 20 books of poetry and six of prose. She won a Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for American Primitive, a collection of poetry. She won many other distinguished awards including the National Book Award in 1992 and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
She was an introverted, private person and also a lover of dogs. She devoted one collection, Dog Songs, to them. Here is a poem about Percy.
Little Dog’s Rhapsody in the Night
He puts his cheek against mine and makes small, expressive sounds. And when I’m awake, or awake enough
he turns upside down, his four paws in the air and his eyes dark and fervent.
“Tell me you love me,” he says.
“Tell me again.”
Could there be a sweeter arrangement? Over and over he gets to ask. I get to tell.
~ Mary Oliver Dog Songs
English-bred May, sired by CH Conneywarren Jason of British Labradors.
Oliver lived for about four decades in Provincetown, Mass., where she developed her passion for the ocean, tides, birds and the Cape Cod seashore. She always carried a pad and pen on her solitary daily walks and, as inspiration came to her, she jotted down lines. Here is a poem about the Cape shore.
I Go Down To The Shore In The Morning
I go down to the shore in the morning and depending on the hour the waves are rolling in or moving out, and I say, oh, I am miserable, what shall— what should I do? And the sea says in its lovely voice: Excuse me, I have work to do.
A young Jim Harrison in the doorway of his cabin in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
The Search for the Genuine is a newly published collection of essays and magazine columns by Jim Harrison. Subtitled Nonfiction, 1970 – 2015, these pieces are reprinted from various sporting magazines—Field & Stream, Sports Illustrated, Outside—and prestigious publications such as Esquire and The New York Times.
Jim Harrison (1937 – 2016) was a best-selling New York Times author of 39 books of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and one children’s book. He is perhaps best known as a poet and for his Legends of the Fall and Dalva novels.
Harrison’s big draw for me is simply his writing. I can read anything he wrote. Beginning with his first paragraph and then his lyrical, eloquent, clear style, I became enthralled. Subject matter included dogs, hunting and fishing but also his big view of life and his big appetites. Along with his cool friends Jimmy Buffett, Tom McGuane and Guy de la Valdene, he shared a zest for life, food (much of which they had shot or caught) and drink.
A few favorite passages.
“Our greatest politician, Thomas Jefferson, said that ‘good wine is a necessity of life for me.’ I agree but he should have said, ‘Good wine and good dogs are necessities of life for me.’”
“Utterly docile and sweet in the cabin or house these are big-running setters suitable for the Southwest and Montana though they shorten up in the denser cover of northern Michigan. When cynics say that our dogs are ‘too far out’ we’ve learned to give a pat answer: ‘That must be where the birds are.’”
“One August morning in the Upper Peninsula Rose had twenty-nine woodcock points in less than two hours. I was slow to admit that I enjoyed this training run as much as hunting.”
This is a long passage with long sentences but, yikes, can he write. “I’ve begun to believe that some of us are not as evolved as we may think. Up in the country, in my prolonged childhood, I liked best to walk, fish, and hunt where there were few, if any, people. After a ten-year hiatus for college and trying to be Rimbaud, Dostoyevsky, and James Joyce, not to speak of William Faulkner, in New York, Boston, and San Francisco, I found myself back in northern Michigan walking, fishing, and hunting. There are a lot more people now, but there are still plenty of places where they aren’t. Tennis, golf, and drugs didn’t work for me, so for the past thirty years my abiding passions are still centered on upland game birds, fish, and idling around fields, mountains, and the woods on foot, studying habitat but mostly wandering and looking things over.”
“The death of hunting will come not from the largely imagined forces of anti-hunting but from the death of habitat, the continuing disregard for the land in the manner of a psychopath burning down a house and then wondering why he can’t still live there. The illusion of separateness is maddening. We are nature, too, surely as a chimp or trout.”
“Strangely, as you grow older, if you can’t hunt with any of two or three friends, you’d rather hunt alone. Newcomers make the grievous error of talking to your dogs—which are confused by such breaches in taste—or they whine about the weather.”
“I’m very poor at dates and numbers and what happened at what time in our life. But if my wife mentions the name of a dog we’ve owned and loved, I can re-create the dog’s life with us, and consequently my own.”
“Happiness Is a Warm Puppy” is a book written and illustrated by Charles M. Schulz. It was first published in 1962 and has since been re-published several times.
Anyone who has ever bought a puppy will agree with this simplest, but truest, of notions.
“He was watching a ruffed grouse that was poking along the forest floor, as grouse will do, foraging for seeds or fallen berries, perhaps some remaining leaves of clover.”
So Sam Cook wrote in the opening paragraphs of his piece in the November 30 edition of the Duluth News Tribune. Cook related a story about a friend of his who was deer hunting in the north woods.
“Most deer hunters would agree that it’s pleasant to have a grouse come mooching along during a morning on the stand. Grouse are enjoyable to watch—the way they seem to step carefully over the landscape or hop up to cross a deadfall. They cock their heads to the side often, presumably to get a better look above them, where most potential danger is likely to come from.
“Suddenly, he (the deer hunter) said, he caught the movement of a hawk on the wing. A goshawk, he said. A goshawk on a mission. A goshawk whose eyes were trained on the grouse feeding on the forest floor.
“Goshawks are among the primary predators of ruffed grouse. These raptors are designed to dart and weave through dense aspen forests where ruffed grouse live.
“But, in this scenario, the grouse my friend was watching had caught a glimpse of the goshawk at the last second. The grouse burst into flight and made its escape to heavier cover, just evading the predator’s dive.
Photo courtesy of Cornell Lab of Ornithology
“The goshawk, foiled this time, winged away to continue its hunt for a less wary grouse.”
On that day, there was a happy outcome for the grouse. But as Jerry and I frequently discuss and acknowledge, the natural world is at once beautiful and ruthless.
Sam Cook had been the outdoor writer for the Duluth News Tribune for 38 years. He retired in 2018 and now freelances for the paper. I first knew of Sam Cook in 1977 when we both lived in Ely, Minn. I worked for the original town newspaper, The Ely Miner, and he worked for the rival paper, The Ely Echo.
“A 15,000-year bond has yielded a much deeper understanding and affection between humans and dogs than between humans and any other animal.” ~ Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens
No wonder Jerry, me and all our clients form such strong bonds with our dogs. It’s in our DNA.
Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari, is not, as the subtitle suggests “a brief history of humankind.” Rather it is a sweeping history of the genus Sapiens and its impact on our planet. Harari is well qualified to write a book of this magnitude. He holds a PhD in History from Oxford University and teaches History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
One aspect that makes this such a good book is the clear, direct writing style of Harari. Another is simply the compelling subject. Where did we come from and how did we get where we are today?
About 50 pages into the book, this passage leapt off the page. From perhaps “15,000 years ago” to perhaps “thousands of years earlier,” dogs and humans began living together.
“The dog was the first animal domesticated by Homo sapiens, and this occurred before the Agricultural Revolution. Experts disagree about the exact date, but we have incontrovertible evidence of domesticated dogs from about 15,000 years ago. They may have joined the human pack thousands of years earlier.
“Dogs were used for hunting and fighting, and as an alarm system against wild beasts and human intruders. With the passing of generations, the two species co-evolved to communicate well with each other. Dogs that were most attentive to the needs and feelings of their human companions got extra care and food, and were more likely to survive. Simultaneously, dogs learned to manipulate people for their own needs. A 15,000-year bond has yielded a much deeper understanding and affection between humans and dogs than between humans and any other animal.”
* Readers of this post shouldn’t need visual proof of the deep bond, affection and love between dogs and people…but just in case, scroll through the photos in our posts and on our sidebar.
“The three great elemental sounds in nature are the sound of rain, the sound of wind in a primeval wood, and the sound of outer ocean on a beach.” ~ Henry Beston, The Outermost House, 1928
For one year, Henry Beston lived in a small—but not austere—cottage on Cape Cod. His original intent was a two-week visit but he was totally enraptured by all that surrounded him and so he stayed.
Comparisons to Henry David Thoreau’s year at Walden Pond have been made but, in my opinion, Beston out-Thoreau’s Thoreau. There is no ego, condescension or New England ascetism evident in Beston. More importantly, Beston is a superior writer; his prose is eloquent and strong. The ocean, beach, wind, storms, birds and animals of the Cape all inspire him.
In a passage that leapt off the page, Beston wrote poignantly about mankind’s relationship to animals.
All dog lovers will understand.
“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”
…owning a dog promotes the flow of oxytocin, a hormone that decreases our heart rate and fosters feelings of well-being and relaxation. ~ Dr. Lauren Powell, Wall Street Journal, January 9-10, 2021
The Wall Street Journal Weekend edition is outstanding and surely among top editions of any newspaper in the country. The paper’s strength is ordinarily focused on big topics like national and international business, finance, economics and politics. But in Weekend, it lets its hair down a bit with features on books, culture, design, fashion, food, wine, cars and sports.
The Review section is a favorite and often takes me several days before finishing. In the Mind & Matter column last weekend, Susan Pinker wrote about her experiences of being a new dog owner. She received a four-month-old puppy last summer as a birthday gift. Leary at first, she is now “besotted” with Otis, which led her, as a psychologist and author, to study dog ownership.
Pinker sites a 2019 study led by Dr. Lauren Powell that explored “whether getting a dog improved the owner’s activity level, cardiovascular health and psychological state.”
The psychological impact was the most amazing discovery for Dr. Powell. Besides the oxytocin flow, dogs ‘“encourage their owners to get out in nature, maintain a sense of routine, and stay in touch with their neighbors.’”
Perhaps all this is preaching to the choir. Just as Jerry and I have known for decades—and as our clients also know—dogs give us profound, immeasurable, never-ending “feelings of well-being.” But sometimes, it’s nice to have it recognized and corroborated.
