… if we were created by God and granted wisdom, then perhaps we are still unfinished drafts. At times, one might even be tempted to say: If this is a divine creation, could God please stop joking around and take the blueprint a little more seriously?
—Hiroshi Sugimoto, Aperture 264 (Fall 2026), p. 76
Author: David Gorsline
Left or right?
A little follow-up on the Fairfax Stone: As Keith Frye writes, it was pretty much a matter of chance that 18th-century explorer/surveyors followed the Potomac River to the north rather than the south. If they had gone in the other direction, the borders of several states likely would be different from those today.
Some links: 115
- I’ll Give You Fifteen Thousand Dollars to Stop Asking Me to Go Hiking, by Anavel Mingke.
Last time you took me on an “easy walk,” we crossed three rivers, climbed a wall made entirely of roots, and celebrated reaching a place called False Summit.
- The story of Granby Rock.
Alexandria NABA Butterfly Count 2026
I returned to Huntley Meadows Park for the 2026 NABA count. After a slowish start, we found butterflies in pretty good numbers. About half a dozen Cloudless Sulphurs (Phoebis sennae). Even better were the lepidopteran larvae, including a dozen or so Common Buckeye (Junonia coenia), Smeared Dagger (Acronicta oblinita), and Spotted Apatelodes Moth (Apatelodes torrefacta)—a new one for me. Also, two lookalikes: Ancistrocerus campestris, a mason wasp, and Transverse-banded Flower Fly (Eristalis transversa).
But nary an Ocola Skipper to be found.
At the park: 159
It’s the off season for ducks in nest boxes at Huntley Meadows Park: a good time to write a little about the boxes themselves.
As P. and K. are demonstrating here, a typical box for us is made of nominal one-inch wood panels, about the height but not the width of a dorm refrigerator, with a slightly sloping roof, and entrance/exit hole, and a door on the side. Each box has a painted number: the numbering system is there is no system. Sometimes a box is numbered (randomly) by the carpenter who made it, sometimes a box retains its number when it’s moved to a completely different place in the park.
A box is mounted on a metal pole, usually in some depth of water. And usually we sheathe the pole in a PVC sleeve, as a predator deterrent. As a second deterrent, we’ve attached a metal cone to the PVC sleeve. As you can see from the detailed photo, there’s still a bit of a gap between the apex of the cone and the sleeve: I conjecture that black ratsnakes can slip through the gap, so we’ve recently filled in with foam crack filler.
If you’re mounting boxes on square wooden posts, you wouldn’t have this gaposis problem.
The box is attached to the pole in a couple of different ways. Typically, we drill two pairs of holes in the back of the box and pass through a pair of U-bolts, securing them with nuts on the inside. There’s not quite enough friction to hold the box in place, so it rests on the top of the PVC sleeve.
I’ve also recorded at least one box that uses carriage bolts that thread through the box and the pole.
And a box with metal straps.
The door must also be secured against predation. Whereas ratsnakes like to come in through the entrance hole, raccoons prefer finding a way to open the door. So we often close the door with a hasp and quick link, or with a hook and eye on a spring.
The inside of the box is fitted with a section of hardware cloth (wire mesh), which gives the ducklings more of a purchase when they’re ready to scramble out of the box. This element tends to be a point of failure as the box is used, so we might have to staple the mesh back in place.
A typical box lasts about five to seven years in the field before it falls apart. If a box develops a knot hole that pops open, we can keep the box going for another season or two with a bit of plywood and some (clumsy) nailing.
Big beautiful
Adam said, “Our great and secret fear is that America may turn out to be a phenomenon, rather than a civilization. Hence, in part, the scale, the insistence, the need to prove the great mysteries obsolete or serviceable. We want our lust to be loved and called beautiful. To receive the homage due to love.”
—Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus (1980), chap. 26
Letters of recommendation: 1
Whenever I check into a motel, one of the first things I seek out is the literature display rack. I’ve grabbed info on antique malls,1 directions to the Goo Goo Shop in Nashville, opening hours for the Tinkertown Museum in Albuquerque (I need to go back in season)—I don’t always find something interesting, but once in a while I find a peach, like the brochure for The Dennos Museum Center in Traverse City, Mich.
So how did those racks and all those brochures get there? Well, at least for here in the mid-Atlantic, I may have found the source. In a brilliantly meta moment, I picked up a rack card for TDS Brochure Distributors. (They’ve allowed their domain to lapse, so it’s possible that they’re no longer operating under that name.)
From the back of TDS’s card:
Embark on a journey of exploration in our captivating region! Pick up one of the brochures, rack cards, maps, or visitor guides displayed here, and let it whisk you away to an unexpected and thoroughly delightful experience. Consider extending your stay to uncover the full spectrum of exciting attractions in the area. Your getaway to unforgettable moments starts with a choice from this display!
1Since my house is full, I really need to stay out of these places.
DeLillo decoded: 2
One more from Ratner’s Star (1976):
On the way home they sat in the next-to-last car. A tripping device failed to work and their train, braking late, ran into the rear of a stalled work train. Billy found himself on the floor of the car. Ahead was stunned metal, a buckled frame for bodies intersecting in thick smoke. Then there was a moment of superlunar calm. In this interval, just before he started crying, he realized there is at least one prime between a given number and its double. (p. 5)
What seven-year-old Billy has rediscovered is a variant of Bertrand’s Postulate.
Outgoing
Word is that Metro’s venerable, perplexing farecard machines are soon to be replaced. So here’s maybe a last look at the old machines at my local station.
The farecard machines have been retrofitted more than a couple of times. Originally, they accepted only cash and dispensed a paper farecard.1 Now, credit/debit cards are accepted and what comes out is a laminated plastic stored value card.
Since there’s a rush hour premium added to the distance-based fare, it’s very easy to have insufficient funds on your card in order to exit (especially back in the old paper farecard days). (See the busy table of fares at the top of the machine.) Hence, the Exitfare machine, in original orange livery, which was designed to one purpose: top up your card so that you can exit. Fun fact: Exitfare was originally called Addfare, but riders would try to use it to add more than necessary to exit.
1If you want to sound like a tourist, call it a ticket.
Clifton Institute Bioblitz August 2026 (Rappahannock): addendum
The view of the Blue Ridge from our bioblitz site last month.
Some links: 114
A double shot of Some Links this month.
- And thus passes away the world’s only palindromic demonym: Nauru is now Naoero.
- To-do list management tips from T. Rex.
- The perspective of Reid Walker, a Native American, on land acknowledgements: too much and too little.
The practice has roots in Indigenous protocol, but the modern institutional version came through Australia and Canada. In Australia, a “Welcome to Country” can be delivered only by a member of the nation whose territory you’re on, usually an elder — a host’s gesture. An “Acknowledgment of Country” is what non-Indigenous people offer in return, as guests. The American version collapsed the two, so non-Native institutions now perform what was originally a host’s role.
- Anthony Conwright: Stop calling it the Civil War.
The linguistic whitewashing of the Confederacy is more than a manufactured myth of Southern redemption. It is a ritual of national forgetting, one in which American society participates every time we call the Slaveholders’ Rebellion against the United States the Civil War. “Civil War” is no name for a war waged by slaveholding traitors against the United States to hold Black Americans in human bondage. Now, 165 years since the war’s first shots, we should be honest about how we hold its memory.
- The usual crap from 47: Trump administration moves to block public from enforcing environmental protection laws; Donald Trump accuses The Washington Post of treason.
- Jerry Cayford on a framework for eliminating gerrymandering.
- A Letter from Mick Jagger to the Devil on the First Draft of “Sympathy for the Devil,” by John Moe.
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- James Harbeck continues fighting the good fight for epicenter.
- Chasing life goals is a recipe for disaster – so try these tiny experiments instead. Maybe my first experiment should be acting on some of the Personal Development links that I’ve posted, instead of just sharing them.
Birthday getaway 2026
A very short getaway, and a very short trip report to match.
I visited Hickory Hollow Natural Area Preserve in Lancaster County. I didn’t find evidence of the protected lady’s-slipper orchids, but then again, it was the wrong time of the year and I didn’t have any inside info. Crane-fly Orchids (Tipularia discolor) were blooming, however. It was a nice walk all the same. Finding Mutinus elegans was a nice surprise.
Chasing the next Virginia State Parks Trail Quest pin, I hit Caledon SP in King George County, and Culpeper Battlefields SP in Culpeper County, the latter visit “escrowed” until the park is built out and made part of the Trail Quest program. It would be nice to return to Caledon for a morning walk when I’m a little fresher and I can make it down the marsh trail to the river.
At Culpeper Battlefields, on the scraped out path to the top of Buford Knoll, I found a new-to-me robber fly, Triorla interrupta, and a new! to! me! tiger beetle, Cicindelidia punctulata. A few butterflies were flying, and some larger flying things were also in the air.
Still here
In about 1981, A. and I took a little trip to Garrett County, Maryland, the triangular bit at the western end of the state, wedged between West Virginia and Pennsylvania. We were hoping for cross-country skiing (we had recently moved from Minneapolis), but there was no snow, so we did a bit of unfocused hiking.
At the crossroads of U.S. 50 and U.S. 219, marked on the map as Red House, we found a roadside restaurant that served up buckwheat pancakes and this amazing link sausage—it was probably smoked, but then prepared like ordinary breakfast sausage. I don’t remember the name, but it was likely something like the Red House Inn.
A few years later, A. and I split up, and then somewhere in the mid 1980s I took a solo trip out U.S. 50 (I think I was driving Algernon) and stopped again at this roadside restaurant. Food still amazing.
And then time continued to pass, and the next time I was out that way I saw that the restaurant was closed. So it goes with mom and pop outfits. East-west traffic on U.S. 50 was perhaps beginning to decline with the opening of I-68 in the northern part of the county.
On my West Virginia trip with Mark Garland earlier this month, I passed by the place again. It has a new roof, but there are buttresses keeping the walls upright (not visible in the photo). Traffic on U.S. 50 was very sparse, again maybe due to the opening of four-lane U.S. 48 to the south.
The building is now a roadside church. It’s nice to remember my two visits from 40 years ago, and that wonderful sausage.
West Virginia highlands August 2026
We scuffled with lodging availability (nearby music festival), a road closure, pop-up thunderstorms, a park closed for an archery tournament, and limited opening hours for visitor centers, and still pulled off an enjoyable two days in the West Virginia highlands on a Nature Forward trip led by Mark Garland. The group visited sites in Blackwater Falls State Park and Canaan Valley National Wildlife Refuge. The refuge’s mascot is the Cheat Mountain Salamander (Plethodon nettingi).
The driving to this part of West Virginia follows the somewhat infamous Corridor H highway, signed as U.S. 48. The stretch between Wardensville (just over the Virginia line) and Davis is four lanes divided with intersections at grade, chopping through hills and bridging rivers and valleys.
Mark showed us two new butterflies for me, both in hand: Atlantis Fritillary (Argynnis atlantis) and Meadow Fritillary (Boloria bellona). Participant B. pointed out several nifty day-flying moths, among them Eusarca confusaria, Ctenucha virginica, and Common Ringlet (Coenonympha california). I found two lycophytes new to me, Hickey’s Tree-clubmoss (Dendrolycopodium hickeyi) and Staghorn Clubmoss (Lycopodium clavatum) (and). And we puzzled out the ID of a meadowhawk, at last landing on White-faced Meadowhawk (Symptetrum obtrusum).
Mark demonstrated attaching a BlūMorpho transmitter to a Monarch butterfly. Six hundredths of a gram with its own solar panel, and signals from nearby phones with Bluetooth active can be recorded. Wowee!
I hadn’t realized that the Blackwater River, flowing east to west across the region, is part of the Ohio River watershed. Traveling between the valley and my motel in Oakland, Md., I made a short side quest to visit the Fairfax Stone, marking the springs of the North Fork of the Potomac River, the Potomac of course flowing east to Chesapeake Bay.
I also passed through Thomas, W. Va., with a hippy-dippy line of shops along its riverfront. It would be cool to stop in the next time I’m in the area.
Clifton Institute Bioblitz August 2026 (Rappahannock)
Another successful bioblitz, this time to a new property in Rappahannock County. Someone spotted a (ordinarily nocturnal) Tetracha virginica in the parking lot just as we were getting organized, adding to my super-short list of tiger beetles observed. I got a lucky look at a Swarthy Skipper (Nastra lherminier), and the observation got a fave. I tried to focus on graminoids: perhaps my best showing was a Dichanthelium. Rush Skeletonweed (Chondrilla juncea) was a new non-native to me. I got a decent audio recording of Wood Thrush (Hylocichla musterlina).
And there’s always something interesting at the lights after dark. Red-bordered Emerald (Nemoria lixaria) was perhaps the fanciest moth of the night.