Grasshopper Symphony

And an Update on the Fire Tower Book

Today, some housekeeping and a sneak peek at the forever-delayed Fire Tower Book.

This week is Winter Break for Little Bean so I took most of this week off to hang with her, go exploring and work on our Memorial Stones field guide. So, in the couple hours she’s at her grandparents, I figured I’d at least give you all a tiny sneak peek at a passage from the Fire Tower Book.

What Fire Tower Book you might ask, and you’d be forgiven for doing so. Back in 2019, Little Bean and I earned our NH Fire Tower Quest patch and began the process of writing a history and field guide to the state’s fire towers.

Then came COVID. Then my publisher pushed the release date back. Then we set off to write a rocks and boulders field guide instead. Then I became a library director. Then my publisher decided retirement sounded nice.

So here we are - a book half finished, with a beautiful cover by photographer Jeremy Ward (see below) and lots of readers waiting for it, but… well, when will it actually be published? Don’t know.

I’m considering a drastically reduced book, maybe just a straight up Field Guide similar in length and style to our Rocks field guides. At least SOMETHING would be out there that way. Let me know if you’d like to crowd fund this book into existence! Stranger things have happened!

Until then, however, for all of you interested in this ghost book, here’s a short excerpt, taken from our hike up to Red Hill in Moultonborough, and one of my favorite hikes.

I hope you enjoy this small window and, as always, while I’m not ready to create any kind of subscription cost option for this little community, you can keep me caffeinated with a cup of joe at this link, should you find me worthy: Buy Dan a Cup of Coffee!

Meantime, let me know if you’ve ever hiked to a fire tower, or if you’d like to.

On we go!

Cover photo of Cardigan Fire Tower by Jeremy Ward. For more information on Jeremy’s work, let me know and I’ll PM you.

FROM '“WHERE THERE’S SMOKE”

Red Hill, Moultonborough

            There are not a few grasshoppers, or even many, at the hot, ledge-lined summit of Red Hill; there are legion.

            Uma steps up onto the rocks under the fire tower, gently, like walking in slow motion, and spreads her arms wide – a tiny Moses. And the creatures respond. Dozens of them, hundreds, lift up into the air, miniature, bristling helicopters, their collective wings clack, clacking, drowning out the distant cicadas.

            “Daddy-” she whispers, “daddy, daddy…” unable to put her joy into words.

            But I can. Watching her drift through this wave of clattering grasshoppers is an epiphany. I hold my breath, like I could fill my lungs with the air of this moment of grace and expel it into a sacred bottle later, magic air of a moment of connection between my daughter and the peculiar nature of a five-year-old conducting a symphony of grasshoppers under the steel beams of a nearly half century old fire tower

           My daughter stands on a 2,000-foot platform in the middle of time. She waves her arms and her orchestra of grasshoppers – one of the oldest living herbivorous insects, dating back 250 million years to the early Triassic – rise up and sing, their tiny yellow, brown and brilliant green wings giving voice to the mountain.

            Behind Uma, the glacial Lake Winnipesaukee, which the Abenaki called “Smile of the Great Spirit,” listens like an audience, her water seeming to ripple to the insect music. And before Uma, rising like a balcony, Mount Chocorua’s bald summit looks down on the performance, and I’m brought back to a hike I took up that mountain with my other daughter Janelle, a hike that illustrated Janelle’s strength of purpose and brought her own self into focus.

            And I wonder if this hike will be Uma’s power hike, the one that creates the future woman, the moment that sharpens her resolve. The one where she begins to be something more than my daughter. The one where she begins to be Uma.

            But now, she just turns to me, lowering her hands as the grasshoppers fall back to the stone and the concert subsides, and all that remains is her wide grin and the plaintive cry of a forgotten cicada.