Diapause
Fifteen years ago I left journalism for nature. I swapped a necktie for binoculars, a reporter’s notepad for a naturalist’s field book. Although my income sank to levels of voluntary poverty, I inherited wealth in a new currency: a dawn chorus of warblers, an orchid’s purple glow, the ancient tenacity of dragonflies. This life outside I have been eager to share. Coded into my DNA is a drive to bring nature and people together. It is how I’ve made my living. It has given me purpose. I suppose it’s no different than journalism. If the free trade of facts and knowledge are essential to a functioning society, then so too is the discovery and enjoyment of nature critical to its future. And to our own.
If I couldn’t get you outside, your ears tuned to a mink frog, your nose tingling with balsam poplar, your mouth savoring serviceberries, or your feet wet in a spruce bog, then here at The Daily Wing I ventured to unite your senses with wildlife and wild places. For three years this blog, with all due humility, has been our intersection of nature and journalism.
Now it will rest.
My blend of the wild and the wired will enter diapause, nature’s state of dormancy. Not only will this blog rest, but so will my fling with Facebook, Twitter, digital photography, radio television broadcasts, PowerPointing and other electronic communications. I’m dimming the lights and heading for the woods with a notebook and pencil.
During the past 15 years a revolution has set upon journalism and nature: the digital epoch. Rare is it for any of us to witness the rise of a new mass medium. To my world, my blend of news and nature, the internet brings tremendous potential for the flow of ideas, the fundamental rights of people and the fate of the planet. But our mass migration online has run a dubious course. Never before have so many seen so much wild while seated indoors.
This essay is no polemic on technology. This metamorphosis of mine is no grand statement on nature in the digital epoch. This new medium of ours certainly offers absolute benefits. The Vermont Atlas of Life, eBird, Odonata Central, BugGuide and many others like them represent a potent blend of the internet, data and citizen naturalists working together toward conservation and biointegrity. As a naturalist and field guide, I myself have hoisted the web’s loudspeaker. Going digital, mostly for my guiding business (Vermont Bird Tours), has allowed me to reach neighbors in new ways and nature seekers from far away. Joining me on outings around the continent are wonderful people from as far as California, Missouri, Texas, Canada and beyond. For these gifts, this personal growth, I am grateful. Yet while riding these electrons I have come into a troubled country.
“Bryan Pfeiffer Enterprises Inc.” comprises The Daily Wing, Vermont Bird Tours, Wings Photography, Wings Environmental, For the Birds, Maple Corner Media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, 500px, Vermont Public Television, Vermont Public Radio and a few other electronic adventures I’ve tried and abandoned over the years. The Social Media Industrial Complex informs me that now, in this new landscape, to scrape together my income, to begin the sales of my next book, I must engage in relentless self-promotion. Blog regularly. Boost your page views. Optimize yourself in search engines. Make more Facebook friends. Amass Twitter followers. And this doesn’t include the daily sandstorm of emails and those worthy online projects I mentioned above. I devote more time to nature online than I do outside. This is frightening (and not very natural).
Also frightening is the ease and breadth of our migration to the new country of the glowing screen. For many of us, television was the easy target. John Prine advised us to “Blow up your TV; throw away your paper; Go to the country; build you a home.” I don’t own a TV. Haven’t for a while. (I watch my ice hockey at the local pub.) But the brain rotting has a new screen. Well, actually, many screens. To be sure, flowing toward me from around the globe and through this Macbook and my iPhone is brilliant prose, elegant imagery, nature’s serenades, and genuine human connection. But in my joining the flow, in sending and receiving, I find myself, an easily distracted soul, wandering too often a wasteland. Yes, on this path there are treasures; there is also fool’s gold. But more than anything, there is too much time online, even too much time with too much worthwhile information. When is there enough? My eyes have grown old before this screen.
Another musician, the inimitable John Hartford, in his plaintive song “In Tall Buildings,” warned us about conformity in career.
So it’s goodbye to the sunshine
goodbye to the dew
goodbye to the flowers
and goodbye to you
I’m off to the subway
I must not be late
I’m going to work in tall buildings
My necktie and the grind of daily journalism are still gone. I regret not a moment of journalism’s calling, not a second of my synthesis of nature and the electronic frontier. I am beyond grateful for this life in large part outdoors. Still, in this electronic epoch, we so easily find ourselves trapped in tall buildings. Mine are now digital. I am too often locked inside this computer.
I have a book to write about evolution and nature expressed in the life of an extraordinary animal, Pantala flavescens, a golden, globe-trotting dragonfly that goes by the common name Wandering Glider. I shall follow this insect to other continents. My appointment to teach writing to gifted ecologists and conservationists at the University of Vermont is a new passion and mission. What’s left of my brain is bequeathed to an innovative conservation group, the Vermont Center for Ecostudies, for which I am now doing a bit of writing and editing. The rest of me will be outside somewhere, where I hope to find many of you.
I will not unplug. I will instead beat a path ever more determined toward nature. My blog posts and other online dispatches will become infrequent. Most days you will not find me online until after lunchtime, until after about six hours of walking, reading or writing. If you’re looking for wisdom online, I’ll recommend: Orion Magazine; the corps of writers at National Geographic’s Phenomena blog; my friends at the Vermont Center for Ecostudies and the North Branch Nature Center; the Natural History Network; and Carl Safina’s views on nature, including his remarkable book on the shared fate of humans and the planet, The View From Lazy Point. Safina is, at long last, our new Thoreau.
To find me in 2013, you must visit Vermont peaks at sunrise, untrailed sections of the Grand Canyon, remote peatlands in Saskatchewan, alpine meadows in Wyoming, or the diners and coffee shops of Montpelier, Vermont, where I live simply in an apartment measuring 15 feet by 23 feet, rent an “office” 6.5 feet by 6.5 feet, can walk to every merchant, and can even get myself into the woods in 10 minutes. I shall hasten my pace of giving away belongings and shrinking my footprint. At some point in the next couple of months, this blog, Vermont Bird Tours, and what remains of my digital life will coalesce into something sparse. From time to time, I’ll resurface to guide a few bird walks or teach digital photography. Mostly, I will write my book and write with my students.
I will most certainly miss all of you and our routine encounters here at The Daily Wing. I will post here occasionally, when I have something worthy to share. (Your best bet for staying informed is the “Subscribe” option over there to the right.) Thanks for visiting, for sharing, for caring. You need not leave the digital epoch. I won’t. But, now and then, do leave your tall buildings.
Congratulations, Bryan. Great decisions! Your teachings and sharings of which I’ve been fortunate to be the occasional recipient are lasting lessons to be cherished. May the spirits and gods be with you.
Bryan, your words continue to inspire. There are some very lucky writing students who will learn from you, as so many of us have learned a vast appreciation of our natural world. My prayers are with you as your road takes another turn, always heading in the right direction.
Jo
Thank you Bryan for sharing your wisdom with us and your sense of adventure. I understand the decoupling phase and am happy to think of you out in the world enjoying woods,trail and water. See you around!
Best-Roberta
I am inspired. Imagine – you deciding to leave the glow of the screen to the soft glow of the natural world – would be something to celebrate. Because, selfishly I have loved your reflections and contribution. And it makes perfect sense that you are unhooking from cyberworld. So real, so true. I’m heading that way too. So thanks so much.
In your comments, more than I’ve received for any blog post, is support and wisdom. I’m grateful. And I’ll return here to read again the encouragement you’re offering me. I’ll even add a blog post now and then. For the full moonset and sunrise tomorrow morning (27 Jan), I’ll be at the summit of Mt. Hunger.
Goodspeed to you, my friend. You’re heeding a call more need to hear. But I am still counting on seeing you out in the real.
Beautifully written, Bryan. Best wishes for success, peace and happiness.
Good work, my friend. At the least leave a snail-mail address so I can drop you a post card. See you around town or out in the woods.
John
I’m jealous. Enjoy your wanderings. I’ll look for you at the top of tall mountains.
I finally saw the Lazy Point Snowy Owl yesterday. Wind blown owl upon the dunes. Peace.
JOY!!!!
Your loss to the digital world is the gain of the real world. Please remember us at Wisconsin Dragonfly Society as friends who share your passion. Visit Wisconsin sometime — our door is open to see our little acre in the midst of many acres of marsh and bog, moraines and pot holes.
Respectfully, Ellen and Dan Dettwiler
Brian, I can understand your desire to sign off and go “off line,” in this crazy digital era, but will certainly miss your blog and radio commentaries and VPTv appearances, much as I missed you discontinuing his weekly Times Argus articles.
We in Vermont have been fortunate to have you educating and connecting all of us to the beauties of nature in Vermont and the world. You is another one of Vermont’s great assets. You will be missed.
Hope to see you at future VT Philharmonic concerts.
Anne
Bryan, your digital wisdom will be much missed, but I am positive you will have no regrets. I have the luxury of being able to live the life you are about to enter — half of every day spent outside, observing and photographing, and the rest writing and a bit of teaching. It is a life like no other. I am envious of your UVM students, and look forward to what I hope are the many books you write.
Ditto to the many eloquent comment. Wishing you the best, wishing me a siting every so often, wishing us both another visit on the porch.
Ditto to the many eloquent comments. Wishing you the best and wishing me an occasional siting and us both a visit on the porch
Attaboy, Bryan. It’s all about balance, and here’s a fervent wish that you find yours. But PLEASE don’t stop writing and sharing and exploring, ever. Your eloquence inspires a lot of folks more than you may know. Without waxing too much, I hope you know that you’re a torch-bearer for the cause, a way-shower whose voice is meant to be shared, and you have been assigned the task of inspiring others. You help to fan the flames of curiosity that are simmering in every human heart, and you do it well-
It’s a crazy world we live in when the electronic boxes in our lives are the primary source of our learning while the rest of our senses go a bit numb. I’m glad that you’re choosing to re-plenish your batteries, and hope the surprises and fascinations abound as frequently as they are meant to. I’m sure I’m not alone in saying I can’t wait to hear about what you’re learning along the way-
Good luck, Bryan. Louise and I’ve enjoyed the posts and the occasional presentation.
May your ears be filled with bird song. – p.
Good post. I will be dealing with a few of these issues as well.
.
I await your book on the Wandering Glider, a dragonfly I love. Good luck and joy!
Bryan,
The best of wishes for your new and continuing endeavors! I think your decision is a wise one. We could all do with a little less time in front of screens and a little more time in nature. I think more and more we all need to discipline ourselves in terms of selecting the activities that are the most enriching and enlghtening among all the opportunities out there. It’s so easy to get distracted these days.
I very much enjoyed the couple of trips I did with Vermont Bird Tours. Your enthusiasm for the natural world is contagious!
Looking forward to your book and your occasional posts!
Ann Lewis
Poignant, yet very relevant post Bryan as many of us spend more time than we realize with all our devices. Your writing and speaking are wonderful and I hope we’ll be able to get our “fix” periodically. Hope to run into you soon downtown or on the trails. Safe journey – good birding. I think Wandering Glider is an apt project – and a great trail name.
I will miss your posts on here, Bryan, as for me they’ve been inspiration to get outside, but completely understand the impulse. I often find it very ironic that my job working for a conservation nonprofit has me spending so much time at a computer. Hope to see you birding this spring! Cheers!
I will certainly miss your posts. Hope we bump into each other on occasion.
Have really enjoyed all our time together.
I wish you well on your new path.
“May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.”
“Desert Solitaire”
Edward Abbey
I wish you well, Bryan, as I always have. The many VBT journeys that I’ve taken with you are forever in my memory bank, and I use them to lull myself to sleep when the world is too much with me. Good luck and happiness always. I hope we can see each other again sometime soon.
As ever, Marcia
The wailing and gnashing of teeth can be heard all the way to California! Thank you, Bryan, for so many thoughtful observations and beautifully written evocations of the natural world. Your logic here is flawless and easy to understand; but your frequent presence on the web is one I’ll greatly miss, even as I work my way through the lovely outdoor syllabus yiu’ve just handed us. And I’m going to hold out hope for the occasional weekend on Monhegan or at Pt. Pelee. Meanwhile, I wish you lots of strength, energy and pleasure in teaching, writing, observing, reading and hiking – and I hope your occasional dispatches in this space will be more frequent rather than less. Have fun; thanks for the ride; and keep in touch. I’ll be thinking about you when I’ scanning gulls out in the Baylands!
Dudley