[forthcoming in the Lund Barnacle]

Louise Blight’s recently published book, Where the Earth Meets the Sky: A Story of Penguins, People, and Place in Antarctica https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Louise-K-Blight/243376424 is an enthralling read or audiobook listen.

It came to my attention via an unexpected email from its author two years ago recalling her summers’ attendance at Lund Farm Day Camp in 1973 and 1974. That led to an exchange revealing that Louise lived for a while in the first house on the boardwalk later replaced by Nancy’s Bakery. Afterwards she attended UVic, earned a PhD in wildlife and conservation biology and began a distinguished research scientist’s career that included a three months’residence in a hut on Ross Island in Antarctica.

The book about that residence is distinguished by the author’s accomplished writing style, ranging from lyrical descriptions of crystalline landscapes to graphic reports of pissing and shitting into containers that have to be stored and shipped off-continent to avoid contaminating the pristine environment. Another of its themes is coming to terms with grief attendant upon the untimely deaths of her father and sister. Framing her narrative is an impassioned commitment to the scientific effort to document, understand and reduce the ongoing catastrophe of human-caused climate change.

The book is notable for its detailed accounts of rigorous scientific practice, of the lives of Adelie penguins—at times cute and at others brutal– and their neighboring predators, the fierce leopard seals and skua gulls, of the other-worldly beauty, starkness and violence of its topography and weather, of the historical and present-day society of its human inhabitants, and of the ordeals and exaltations her sojourn provided.

I think those accounts can have special resonance with life at the other end of the road in Lund, which Louise reported she’d recently passed through on the way to a research expedition censusing gull and cormorant populations in Desolation Sound.

Many international reviews and appreciations of the book are available through the publisher’s website, but the Lund connection is further significant because of another personal encounter  converging on the seventies daycamp. During a brief visit in late August 2026 my wife Jan and I were introduced in the pub by Peter Uhlmann to his colleague and local resident Evan Adams, film star and Chief Medical Officer of the First Nations Health Authority. It took just a few moments to discover that he too attended the camp along with his sister Maureen and Elsie Paul’s daughter, Marlane, at ages 7 and 8. I found a scanned photo in my phone of them swimming in Sliammon Lake during a field trip. Further correspondence determined that Louise Blight and Marlane were part of the same extended social group during high school.

And here’s a reason to include all this local gossip.  Sandy Dunlop, the editor, said I could write a review of Louise’s book for The Barnacle of about 500 words. To get started, I thought I’d check out what Google’s Gemini would come up with, and in five seconds it produced an informative, accurate review that could have saved me time and effort and confirmed my fear that the human brain is becoming obsolete. But then I realized that AI could not yet replace the particulars of experience, memory and community.

I had Apple Music’s selection of Leonard Cohen songs on my earbuds during last night’s Physical Therapy exercises. Afterwards I was prompted to check out the Dharma talk on Cohen I’d given twelve years ago.  Rather than searching the blog index, I entered the title into Google.  On a whim, I clicked “AI Mode” and found:

Steven Marx is an English professor and scholar who has extensively written about and explored the Buddhist themes in the life and work of Leonard Cohen.

Marx highlights how Cohen’s spiritual journey mirrors those of other North American “renegade” writers like Henry David Thoreau and Jack Kerouac, who combined a longing for transcendence with “earthy iconoclasm”. Key insights from Marx’s analysis and Cohen’s Buddhist background include:

• Monastic Practice: Marx notes that like Thoreau at Walden or Kerouac at Desolation Peak, Cohen spent five years (1994–1999) in monastic isolation at the Mt. Baldy Zen Center.
• Ordination: Cohen was an ordained Rinzai Zen Buddhist monk, taking the Dharma name Jikan, which means “Silent One” or “The Ordinary Silence”.
• Relationship with Kyozan Joshu Sasaki Roshi: Cohen served as the personal cook and assistant to his Zen master, Sasaki Roshi, whom he viewed more as a deep, enigmatic friend than a strictly idealized master.
• Theological Synthesis: Marx emphasizes that Cohen did not abandon his Jewish roots for Buddhism; instead, he remained a “Jewish Buddhist monk,” using Zen practice to refine his creative inspiration and offer refuge from secular distractions.
• Literary Connections: In his “Dharma Talks,” Marx compares Cohen’s “cold and broken hallelujah” to traditional Buddhist reflections on suffering (Dukkha) and the “broken” nature of existence.

At the bottom of this summary, I was asked: “Would you like to explore Steven Marx’s specific essays on Leonard Cohen, or are you interested in Cohen’s other religious influences?” I typed in “specific essays,” producing this: (more…)

Out at the river this morning, I found a purple flowering plant I’d not seen before. I took out the phone, clicked Google Lens, placed it near the blooms and tapped. A mosaic of pictorial links popped up identifying it as dog’s tongue.

During her Friday Nature Journaling, Ann Marie demonstrated Merlin, the Cornell Ornithology Lab app I’ve had on my phone for over a year but never used.  Identifying real time bird calls with the tap of a finger, it confers powers of an experienced birder upon a complete neophyte.  Hear a bird call, even if faint or mixed with other ambient sounds, touch the button, the source with a name and a picture and a link to Wikipedia appears on the screen.

Yesterday morning, walking back from the river, my attention was arrested by a loud cheep originating in a blue spruce tree in the neighbor’s yard. I took the phone from my right pocket, opened Merlin, and tapped. When the next cheep came, there was American Robin. I showed it to the woman there watering her new sod, who’d never heard of the app. Out from the branches scampered the real robin, and cheeped again, both seen and heard. Next day the woman told me she’d downloaded Merlin and already shared it with several friends.

AI has been a topic of conversation among three generations during our visit. An essay in today’s NY Times by one of AI’s creators, acknowledging the ignorance about how it actually works and where it’s going, claims that AI will soon absorb most jobs in computer science. The author says that instead of learning coding and programming as has been recommended to young people for a generation, all students should return to an emphasis on liberal arts and math, since those fields develop capabilities that still are not available to this exploding new technology.

Counter to that, and also to my imagined literary conversations with Robert MacFarlane celebrating “The Old Ways,” I realized that the extension of senses created by Lens and Merlin heightening my physical and mental experience of nature demonstrates how far Artificial Intelligence has fused with its predecessor and taken up residence in my fingers and brain.

I’ve embarked on the effort to create a digital legacy with Jake Smallwood from Fertile Minds, a protege of Dusty who got this blog started.  If it can work it will cost about $400 to create a setup with wordpress that approximates the setup I had with Dreamweaver in the 20th century.  Back to the future.  Corresponding and speaking with them brings back memories of Dusty and grief for his loss.  But also emphasizes the relevance of the project.  Creating a digital legacy.  Moving forward on the effort initiated with this.

A life as a project, coming further into focus as the ratio of past to future increases, or alternately, the ratio of future to past decreases.

The project enhanced by current reading a biography of Leonard Bernstein. Fascinating information in immense detail, but all of it external from interviews with his acquaintances and public records–nothing about his own perspective and inner life, since sadly the authoritative author was denied access to the vast archive in his estate by the executors.

The blog form–a dynamic record, allowing for the additions of data created by an ongoing life and of changing of perspective provided by reconsideration of old snapshots, combining immediacy and distance.