This commentary is by Walt Amses, who lives in North Calais.
The lilac blossoms exploded overnight, as have the trees, grasses and the profusion of weeds encroaching the garden boxes, seriously threatening the green, leafy, impervious-to-frost vegetables and my half-hearted commitment to have a salad every day.
I wonder how it got to be mid-June, expecting perhaps that since the rain and showers moved in weeks ago, those lost days wouldn’t count toward summer.
But here we are, days before Fourth of July weekend. Memorial Day, Mother’s and Father’s Days, Juneteenth and summer solstice all slipped by, stealthy as the wisps of wildfire smoke drifting over the Canadian border, clouding Vermont and major Northeast cities with impressionistic vistas and sunsets worthy of Arizona Highways magazine.
The acrid, near-impenetrable haze provides an ironic clarity of sorts: Our small, vulnerable world is threatened and we’re in it together, interdependent for better or worse, whether we like each other or not.
I’m a mile or so down the road. A light rain is intermittently reminding me that sunglasses are unnecessary, making a dank afternoon even danker, but immersed as I am in my daily unwind, I leave them on, deciding that listening to the rain makes as little sense as wearing Ray-Bans on a cloudy day. Anyway, I like the darkness. It infuses the surrounding vegetation, already lush as a Pacific Northwest rain forest, a layer of intriguing mystery, adding portent to even the most frivolous of thoughts.
The yellow, mottled butterfly, I imagine, is looking for a dry spot to wait out the damp. I wonder if his fluttering wings are causing typhoons off the coast of Myanmar, avalanches in Katmandu, or tornadoes in Alabama. The “butterfly effect” is part of what’s known as chaos theory, which suggests that a minor fluctuation — like the flap of a butterfly’s wings — has a major impact on how climate transpires thousands of miles away.
Often used metaphorically to indicate minute changes leading to large, unexpected results down the road, the hypothesis may have entered the pop culture lexicon via being somewhat trivialized by mathematician Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) in “Jurassic Park,” who famously theorized that populating the island with prehistoric animals would quickly lead to unpredictable consequences — “An accident waiting to happen.”
Both chaos theory and the butterfly effect, developed by MIT professor Edward Norton Lorenz over 50 years ago, are taken far more seriously by the scientific community than you might imagine, particularly meteorologists. In his 1990 book “The Essence of Chaos,” Lorenz explains that it isn’t as simple as A+B=C because “Nature’s interdependent chains of cause and effect are usually too complex to disentangle … so we cannot say precisely which butterfly, or any at all, created a given storm.”
In an earlier paper, Lorenz landed squarely on the same unpredictability Malcolm espoused in the 1993 movie, suggesting that “If the flap of a butterfly’s wings can be instrumental in generating a tornado, it can be equally instrumental in preventing a tornado.”
The rain picks up slightly as I quicken my pace. The single loon has returned to a small pond down the road he’s called home for the last five or six summers, apparently contentedly living as a bachelor. A pair of Canadian geese that share Cranberry Meadow cross the road in front of me with one remaining gosling, whose five siblings of mid-May likely got picked off by one or another of the predators so vital to the local ecosystem, regulating populations and keeping a balance in the community.
As the aloof-as-ever neighborhood ravens growl, caw and croak through their daily rounds hidden by the abundant early season foliage, I scan the shoreline for the Abrams battle tank of a snapping turtle I saw several days ago that left me far less enthusiastic about skinny-dipping, with its implications of either joining the castrato chorus or being left to harmlessly guard the harem.
When the precipitation picks up, I turn for home sooner than I want, glad I invested in a rain jacket that’s passing its initial test with flying colors, but wondering why I hadn’t bought moisture-shedding pants too, as my legs get squishy enough to feel as though they’re weighing me down. The rain is more an inconvenience, intruding on summer plans, but has me scrutinizing the huge weather/climate transformations the country has seen in just the last decade and wondering what’s in store the next 10 years.
Although Green Mountains have largely escaped the kind of catastrophes that seem to plague someplace in the U.S. nearly every day, our seasons are living up to a number of long-range predictions. The Northeast has been warming faster than the rest of the country due to climate change, including Vermont, which saw a whopping 5-degree jump in average winter temperatures over the last 50 years.
I know that summers are also expected to be warmer with an uptick in the humidity I hate with a fervor bordering on lunacy that makes me sweat just thinking about it, but I also realize that there are places that will become essentially unlivable as hotter temperatures combine with rising tides, ever stronger and more frequent hurricanes and tornadoes, growing wildfire threats and thousand-year floods occurring every few years.
When the rain becomes a deluge, I’m still glad to be walking, trying to balance the aerobics of fast walking with hiking poles while keeping in mind John Muir’s observation that “In every walk with nature, one receives far more than he seeks.” I slow down and refocus, absorbing as much as I can. I’m teasing out whether or not Muir’s perception qualifies as the butterfly effect when I notice Helene up ahead, pulling the car over. A reclamation project.
I seriously consider slogging the rest of the way home deep in thought, as though needing to complete an esoteric mission.
I almost don’t get in — almost.
