Free time is the gold in the golden years
About a decade ago, I walked blithely into a socalled semi-retirement during which, I was told reassuringly, I would no longer have to manage a staff, work on deadline, and commute 140 miles daily to the Yale Alumni Magazine office in New Haven. I’d only have to write when the spirit moved me, and with an abundance of free time, the blessing of blessings, I could devote myself fully to the pursuit of natural history, the passion that has defined my life for the past 70 or so birthdays.
Free time is, of course, the gold in the golden years, and while other folks may follow their own very different passions, a number of which the splendid writers in this section explore so well—fishing, reading, and music, among them—we’re all united in being thankful that we’ve earned the chance to abandon the daily grind and substitute a pursuit closer to our hearts.
Retirement, semi- or complete, is, to be sure, an entirely unnatural and almost com pletely human behavior, and a relatively modern one at that. In nature, when an animal or plant has finished the productive, which is to say, reproductive, portion of its life, the end is generally right around the corner. While there is some provision made among more advanced species, our own among them, for grandparenting, it was more or less true that once an organism has finished crafting the next generation, it is time for the scrap heap... the compost heap. That leisurely winding down period called senescence might have been common among trees and a select few primates, but for most critters, once the primary job of evolution is complete, the individual story comes to an abrupt finish.
That was certainly true for most of human history. The relatively small number of kids whose often difficult births didn’t kill their mothers and who somehow managed to run the gauntlet of diseases, not-enough-food, accidents, and predators to reach reproductive age, didn’t typically have a lot of time left after their punching-theproverbial- clock-days-andnights were over. The hallowed advice I received from the Wise—never trust anyone over the age of 30—never had much currency in our earlier lives, since there was almost no one that ever lived three decades. You’d pass on your genes not long after you became mature, bring down a mastodon or two, gather a bellyful of plant-based sustenance, then get ambushed by a microbe, a member of your own species, or a saber- toothed cat. Until very recently, retirement was more literal than figurative: a synonym for entering the food chain rather than the chain of self-fulfillment.
Those “good old days” were, I suspect we’d all agree, not so good, and while our current days may leave lots to be desired, we’ve somehow managed to create a system that enables some of us, when our work is finished, to continue living, even thriving and being productive. When last week’s visit from the Polar Express sent temperatures into the low single numbers—the official nadir on the ridge was three degrees F. with a gale-driven wind chill in the very minus range—I had inklings of taking that final long walk on the ice. Instead, I picked up the splitting axe and took a shorter trek to woodpile to turn last year’s logs into heat that would keep the cold at bay. Evolution had not granted me the freeze-avoiding ability to curl my leaves in a surface-minimizing movement known as thermonasty. I don’t have an abundance of anti-cold hair or, for that matter, down. The network of heat-conserving veins and arteries, the so-called rete mirabile (a term coined by the ancient physician and anatomist Galen that means “wonderful net”), is well-developed in
birds, fish, and aquatic mammals, but not, alas, in our species. And the only antifreeze I possess is found in the liquor cabinet; it is not something my body can make naturally to prevent frostbite. (Alas, given my medication regime, the antifreeze has to stay in the liquor cabinet.)
So I took advantage of the intense cold, which froze any moisture in the seasoning wood, to more easily split enough fuel to last through the cold snap until what I hoped would be the start of the fabled January Thaw, the relatively warm weather period that, in meteorological history, typically pays us a welcome visit around the third week of our coldest month. When I was done, I then did something more in keeping with the idea that lured me into a species of retirement in the first place. I put on layer after layer of winter-warding-off clothes, gathered up camera and lenses, and headed out into the bone-chilling breezes to document the cold snap.
I didn’t have to travel beyond my immediate neighborhood to find evidence of leaf curling. The rhododendrons and the evergreen ferns lining the driveway and the rural road were characteristically thermonastic, and a few days post-polar, it was easy to see how well the strategy had worked, since the leaves were now fully open, supple, and fully functional.
Nature ain’t dumb. Then, it was off to the coast to look for a trio of migratory “snowbirds” that regularly visit us in winter and apparently mistake beach parking lots for stretches of tundra. While we don’t have polar bears and Arctic foxes—yet— and, so far this winter, we haven’t hosted Snowy owls in such venues, there have been persistent reports such northern denizens as Lapland longspurs, Horned larks, and Snow buntings. As I pulled into the parking lot of the Misquamicut State Beach, the wind was blowing at least 30 knots, the temperature was a shade into double digits, and, when I got out of the car and tried to focus the camera on a congregation of likely birds, my eyes teared and nearly froze shut. I had reason to question the wisdom of retirement... well, my wisdom in retirement.
Maybe I should have picked another passion, like observing alligators in Florida.
Nah, I said, adjusting my clothes and warming up my eyes. This is the reward for working all those years... and, because of the way things worked out, continuing to work ever since I officially stopped working.
I never did find the longspurs on this visit, but the larks and the buntings were cooperative, along with groups of gulls and swans nearby. But I’d certainly be back soon enough to try my luck again. Heck, I’m retired… what else do I have to do?