Fascinating stories from the other end of Dana Wilde’s driveway.

The Other End of the Driveway by Dana WildeDana Wilde’s stories are cerebral, serene, and oftentimes fascinating. Most fascinating for me, in his book The Other End of the Driveway, are stories about wild creatures including Blue jays, Hummingbirds, Horseshoe crabs, and spiders. Yes, spiders can be fascinating!

Consider this from the spider story. This is not paranoia. I’m being watched… involuntarily I glance back… and for no reason my eyes fix on the eave above the door. Upside down there in her web is a huge garden spider… She’s not after me. But still. She looks huge and witchlike, with her eight eyes seeming to scope my every move and thought.

Eight eyes? Yikes!

I always learn a lot from Dana’s stories and newspaper columns. For example, in the spider story, I learned that about forty thousand species of spiders have been identified, and five times that many may exist. Fortunately, Maine spiders are not dangerous, he says. However, Black widow and brown recluse spiders, whose bites can make you very sick, seldom appear here. Well, I guess that’s good news!

You may want to skip quickly through the spider story to get to the one about rainbows. Lots of the stories in this book are about fascinating things in the sky. Given that we’re getting (Yes, I think – hope – so) to the end of this wicked winter, his story about winter trees will be of interest. I especially appreciated this in that story: The older you get, the more the cold takes the starch out of you. Every winter you have to work a little harder to get your mind right to survive. I was fascinated to learn how our trees survive these wicked winters. Wish we could do as well.

The Other End of the Driveway is divided into sections: Summer, Fall, Event Horizons, Winter, and Wake Up Calls. Many of Dana’s stories are particularly thoughtful, no more so than The Different Worlds of Science and the Bible in the Event Horizons section.

Dana wrote this book when he was writing his award-winning Amateur Naturalist columns in the Bangor Daily News. That column came to end in 2012 and was reincarnated in the Kennebec Journal and Sentinel as the Backyard Naturalist. He published another book Nebulae: A Backyard Cosmography, in 2012 about the stars and planets. He also taught college English for years in Maine and Eastern Europe. More info is available on his website, www.dwildepress.net.

In his final chapter in The Other End of the Driveway, Dana tells us the oldest living being on Earth is thought to be a bristlecone pine tree in California’s White Mountains… This tree, “Methuselah,” is about four thousand seven hundred and fifty years old, which means it had been alive for more than two thousand seven hundred years when Christ was walking to Jerusalem.”

Wow!

 

 

George Smith

About George Smith

George stepped down at the end of 2010 after 18 years as the executive director of the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine to write full time. He writes a weekly editorial page column in the Kennebec Journal and Waterville Morning Sentinel, a weekly travel column in those same newspapers (with his wife Linda), monthly columns in The Maine Sportsman magazine, two outdoor news blogs (one on his website, georgesmithmaine.com, and one on the website of the Bangor Daily News), and special columns for many publications and newsletters. Islandport Press published a book of George's favorite columns, "A Life Lived Outdoors" in 2014. In 2014, George also won a Maine Press Association award for writing the state's bet sports blog. In 2016, Down East Books published George's book, Maine Sporting Camps, and Islandport Press published George and his wife Linda's travel book, Take It From ME, about their favorite Maine inns and restaurants.