Journal of a Sabbatical

June 2, 2000

thunder and lightning in june

Today's Reading: Summer: From the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau edited by H.G.O. Blake,
Uttermost Part of the Earth by E. Lucas Bridges

Today's Starting Pitcher:
Brian Rose

The power went off just as I started this entry. The thunderclap sounded like a cannon fired inside the dumpster. The storms rolled through, one after another, crashing and banging and causing Wilbur to hide under my desk. He does not like thunderstorms at all.

When my power comes back on I listen to the Red Sox game on the radio - they're playing in Philadelphia where it is evidently not thundering and lightninging but the power goes off there too so they have a "no lights " delay. I hesitate to turn the computer back on with the storms still rolling through , but I'm so far behind in journal entries it hardly matters whether I get today's done today anyway.

I read huge chunks of Uttermost Part of the Earth by the book light. I'm really enjoying this part of the book. Three hundred pages into it, the author is finally living his dream of leaving the land of the Yaghan and living among the Ona (a much fiercer tribe of hunters compared to the Yaghan who are coastal and live by fishing). This is a fascinating autobiography in that it starts well before its author and subject was born with the adventures of his missionary father, and it's full of really well observed anthropological, cultural, and linguistic information about both the Yaghans and the Ona people. He doesn't get to the flora and fauna much until the later chapters and I've had to discipline myself not to read ahead.

And I'm back into the H.G.O. Blake edition of Thoreau's journals now that June 1 has come along. For some reason, the spring volume ends April 11 and the summer volume begins June 1. I guess there was supposed to be a separate May volume or something. There is a kind of a May section in the Excursions volume of the Riverside Edition of the works of Thoreau. I discovered this after I'd already plowed through the online text for May 1855 - 1860 and extracted the interesting seasonal info myself. Call me old-fashioned, but I much prefer holding a hundred year old book in my hands to scrolling through screens of text online. Netscape is not the ideal reading tool. Maybe the new e-books are better. And I do wish the Thoreau Institute people would get at least 1854 of the journals up on their site. Some of his best seasonal journal stuff is from 1854 - good bird stuff.

Meanwhile, Brian Rose isn't sucking but the Red Sox are still losing... and tomorrow we get Tim Wakefield on 1 day's rest instead of Pedro Martinez who has a sore side and has lost weight after pitching in New York with a case of the flu.

And the thunder just rolls on and on...