Air Date: Week of May 30, 2025

Red sky at morning, sailors take warning. (Photo: © Mark Seth Lender)

Living on Earth’s Explorer-in-Residence Mark Seth Lender is keenly aware of the risks of living right on the Connecticut coast as sea levels rise and hurricanes strengthen. But being that close to Nature, in all her ferociousness, sure does inspire.

Transcript

BELTRAN: As sea levels rise and hurricanes strengthen Living on Earth’s Explorer-in-Residence Mark Seth Lender is keenly aware of the risks of living right on the Connecticut coast. But being that close to Nature, in all her ferociousness, sure does inspire.

After the Storm
Stewart B. McKinney National Wildlife Refuge
Long Island Sound
© 2024 Mark Seth Lender
All Rights Reserved

Child of the Weather is building castles made of sand scooped out, from beneath the bulkheads and all around the boulders of the groins and breakwaters until they reach, a toppling, geometry. Child takes and makes: A deep moat near shore; then a long linear battlement of sand bars. Another moat… Another bar... That’s as far as she got. This time. Because the Weather Herself climbed down from those seventy knot gusts in a fifty-knot blow to a normal small craft warning. And took the Child home.

Well, I tell you what. The house has stopped swaying on its tree-trunk wide, tree-top high pilings. They shake, but do not shatter. This small castle of wood, behind a sea wall. When Child is out to play and it is only, play. When the windows only chime like a baby rattle; when the highest storm-gathered tides wash, under.

And not away…

We will have the brief and pleasant privilege to watch, the sun come up and how for an instant the lowest edge of brilliance pools on the horizon like a kiss. And hazard a guess what will come this way by the clouds, if they are soft and round or thin long threads and what direction they are coming from and say, Tomorrow it will rain, Tomorrow it will snow; as temperature and time of year allow because, there will be one more day. Or inhale deeply of that certain late summer perfume, its tropical intoxication and say, Hurricane. Coming this way. And wonder will it be the next? And only one of many for the year? Or for us the last.

Only Child of the Weather knows and will not tell.

This time we only bend. Only the clouds break to reveal, a coruscation of Stars!

BELTRAN: That’s Living on Earth’s Explorer-in-Residence, Mark Seth Lender.

 

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