“How well you see!” I think to myself. I can see nothing at my level but a tiny yellow caterpillar swinging through the air on a silken thread. But it is clear to me that the oven bird works the road with clear results. We keep going. We come to a stretch in full sunlight where the trees stand off to the side, and my companion keeps to the shadows with determination, pecking away at insects along the few inches of shaded bank to one side. A flicker bursts through, shouting: “Tawicka! Tawicka!” and the oven bird flies ahead a few feet and then goes on walking. We have now traveled about an eighth of a mile. Under a heavy weave of leaves the bird moves to left and right over the road, pecking for insects, working, progressing. Olive brown; capped with an orange stripe; with speckled breast and pale pink legs ... a shadow bird, a leaf litter bird; and now a fellow walker, that has made more use of this road than any of us and our omnivorous machines. At a sharp bend in the road where it leads up to the house, the oven bird finally flies off and disappears in the trees, in a southerly direction by coincidence. Our walk is over, but the flight of birds will leave all cars behind. _Toward the Sea_ There is “man” and there is “nature.” But do we really know where the climate of existence starts, where its storms are brewed? All weather is unexpected. Another variation in the known routine, another change in use, and we may move, reluctantly, into some new awareness while primal energy bowls on with infinite capacity. Among the oaks the leaves on the top branches sway and rustle, while those on the wood floor scarcely lift at all, but there is a constant sound of air among them, and it might be possible to hear a ferment in the ground. Small suns blaze through round leaf lobes. Standing on a slope toward the north from which the glaciers came, and the auroras crackle, shimmer, and flow, and the cold from Canada will have its way, I have a feeling of portentous motion, of being sledded out on a speeding globe. The hurricane veered off. There was rain, but no great winds. The mud puddle in the road dried up after several sunny days, and the green frogs left; but when it filled up again they had not returned. The frogs have a different motion in them and will not come back to suit my metronome. Many vacationers are going home. We can almost walk across the highway without fear. There is still the press, the fevered demands of summer in the air, but something else is going to have its way.