As I’ve mentioned, one of the great pleasures of my sabbatical is the opportunity to wander wherever my inclinations might lead me. By grace of academic tradition, the College at Brockport, and the delete button on my email server, I now have more time for thinking. I can pick up an enticing novel or book […]

Lately I have been thinking about the opening stanza from a poem by Emily Dickinson: ​Hope is the thing with feathersThat perches in the soul,And sings the tune without the words,And never stops at all. . . Dickinson was right. “Hope is the thing with feathers”—for who hasn’t been stirred out of darkness by a bright pulse […]

Recently, my son and I discovered a “new” population of Inyo Mountains salamanders, perhaps the twenty-first documented locality. It was in an unexpected situation—a seep just eighty yards long, which we reached after a long walk up an otherwise waterless drainage. A thin trickle of water slipped through a rank growth of grass and goldenrod, […]

At most colleges and universities, as at Brockport, tenured faculty are eligible for a sabbatical every seven years. It’s a wonderful privilege, with few analogs for most working Americans.  For me, a sabbatical offers the time to put aside my normal duties—which run mostly to administration, teaching, service, and supervision of other people’s research—and immerse […]

Recently, two friends and I hiked into the High Sierra and camped for two nights at a beautiful timberline lake, beneath granite cirques rimmed with last winter’s snow. Along the way we spent a long and delightful day rambling across the broad alpine expanse of Humphreys Basin and scrambling up Four Gables peak.  From the […]