Leland Kinsey
Rainbow Trout
Today I chose to write about Leland Kinsey. I never knew of him when he was alive. He was my age and grew up in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. He was a country boy, a farmer, a carpenter, a logger and a teacher of birding and astronomy. He became a writer, not to be famous, but to share what he knew about the world around him. And that world is similar to mine.
He wrote about chimney swifts that appeared as he worked on a roof, and about trout streams and life in his rural countryside. He gave depth to his association with that natural world and drew vivid images of it. In a non-rhyming style you could walk down a wooded path as if you were there and visit with his neighbors, gaining their well-earned perspective from years of being close to the land. He did it all in a non-assuming way (with little self promotion) and in a compassionate simple form. And he did it while living a life as comfortable fixing a tractor as giving a lecture at Harvard.
I am not a reader and may suffer as a writer from a lack of sophistication because of it. But I am fascinated about what I consider to be the basics. Leland Kinsey probably had a similar obsession and I am grateful to him for sharing it. Inspired, after talking even this little about his work, I am left wanting to write—to write about what I see as important and about what keeps bubbling up inside my head. This is what Leland Kinsey gave to me.
In one of his poems he writes about a rock that he would sit beside on a hillside near his home. We all have rocks like this near us, if we look. They are the large glacial erratics dropped by melting ice sheets some 8 to 10 thousand years ago. They can be as large as a small cabin or as small as three to five feet in diameter. The one unifying feature is that they are heavy enough to probably never have been moved. There is one in our pasture and I keep a path mowed beside it, not wanting it to be lost in the brush. All it has seen over the years fascinates me. The lichen that now covers it is so recent, yet the Revolutionary soldiers that camped here were just yesterday in my perspective. I sit beside it as Leland Kinsey would have and I wonder. And I am glad that I have noticed it as well.