I'm listening to AIR AMERICA, the "new progressive talk radio network". But I can't decide if this is an improvement over Rush Limbaugh and Boston's own WEEI, the mighty righty sports radio station. I think I've just about run out of interest in all talk radio, although I won't let go without a fight. With no cable or satellite TV, I am literally starving for news analysis and sports analysis here at the edge of the woods.

I started listening to Rush Limbaugh two years ago when I was in breakdown mode, and "watched" the progress of the war in Iraq this way. Then I got hooked and found the conservative ideologues disturbingly fascinating. This was all during a time when I found it impossible to read anything. I've relied on the radio, to say the least, for a great deal of news.

While listening to AIR AMERICA, I am also looking up the meaning of the moss-like plant I saw on this morning's walk along the Vernal Pool Loop at Moose Hill. It is of the family known as lycopodium, and looks like a miniature (under 4 inches) spruce tree. It's not moss, not fern, not succulent, not shrub. It's lycopodium, whatever the heck that means.

It was all along the side of the trail, bright green clusters sticking up through the layers of fallen oak leaves on the forest floor. Patti, our guide, said it was sometimes called "club moss" and was particularly cool because it had been around for over 250 million years. Well -- actually she said it'd been around since the dinosaurs. I'm the one thinking that means they go back to the Permian age... Shit. That's old.

She also tried to explain some pretty complex botanical information about how lycopodium reproduces by means of spores, but the only thing I grasped was that the spores were once captured and used as fireworks and as sulphur-substitute to make old flash cameras flash.

Trying to identify the moss (that was not-moss) sent me into the Permian age, picturing dinosaurs gallumphing around these nearby New England woods, on the one hand. And on the other hand, I was picturing a huge 8x10 portrait camera with a black hood, under which stands a photographer trying to cast light on his subject.

You see how vast lycopodium is?

Why do walks in our local wild places always make me imagine different pasts? There is nothing intrinsically "historical" about nature. But something about shedding the everyday built environment in order to walk the line between this modernity and the quiet woods, puts the imagination to work. That is and always has been a feature of frontier experiences. For me, a visit to the frontier space of Moose Hill's sanctuary is a trip to other places and other times. I think that trip is why I go there.

I have turned off the radio now. I am left with a field guide to the Eastern woodlands and the peculiar irony of using the computer to help me remember the sanctuary of quiet walking earlier today.