You've Dropped Your Mask

I stopped here and there yesterday but didn’t spy many new species with this Seek app.  Today, however there was a treasure trove on the ride north.  Can’t explain why.  I suppose I was more attentive.  Stopped more.  The sum total of new sightings, which I shamelessly add so that it reinforces these ridiculous new vocabulary words and adds obscure data to this data set, should anyone ever want to search for say, any of the following which includes:   Small-flowered Buttercup, Golden Ragwort, Hairy Bittercress, Kikuyu Grass, Purple Toadflax, Northern Spicebush, Eastern Teaberry, Greater Celadine, Christmas Fern, Wild Comfrey, Saucer Magnolia, Common Lilac, Goutweed. 

I don’t know what the American naturalist John Boroughs who died in 1921, would have made of Seek.  The great men could no doubt identify these plants all by themselves, as many (most?) naturalists today can certainly do.  But in as much as the natural world is a language, ultimately as complicated as ancient Greek, one suspects, having a way to cheat, to point and immediately discern what it is your looking at, obviates the need to study, memorize the classifications of the biologist giants we’re all standing on the shoulders of.

Biking today, towards the south, to Gardiner, I stopped as I set out, remembering I ought to put a mask on. I tried to be cool and pull mine from my pocket and jostle one band over my ear with my one hand then try to ring the other ear, only to have the whole mask fall.  A woman biked past me and said, “you’ve dropped your mask.”  Indeed. 

There are signs now at the entrances to our Wallkill Rail Trail:   "Please Wear Masks."  Keep your distance.   One imagines the majority of this neighborhood acknowledging the importance of protecting each other, in particular all the seniors we might meet.  And one sees these nonsense wahoos protesting for the right to die and imagines seeing them here on the trail, defiant about the need to not have to do anything for anyone else.   I see people with masks and people without.   I usually remember to put mine over my mouth as I approach people.  The feeling is wet and uncomfortable as I breathe and pedal. 

Friday, 4/24/20