Tom Stock

Poet, Essayist, Photographer, Naturalist

Author: Tom Stock Page 24 of 30

Tom Stock has been involved in the Long Island environmental and outdoor education community for decades.

He has published two books; THE NISSEQUOGUE RIVER: A JOURNEY and HIDDEN AGENDA; A POETRY JOURNEY. He has also published many essays and poems in such journals as the Long Island Forum and The Long Islander.

Review of a Simple Blues With a Few Intangibles

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On June 15, 2016

In Reviews

wpe80c5475_06George Wallace writes poems from the sweat lodge of experience. Within his poetry, he chants and serves up incantations. The Jack Kerouac beat/Bebop has infiltrated every neuron of his brain.

He chants in A SIMPLE BLUES WITH A FEW INTANGABLES with well-placed repetition as in “all night long and old chords and no chords.” His frequent repetition moves the poems along. They are fun to read and to listen to.

In OCTOBER RUNS LIKE A BE-BOP SHAKESPEARE more chants…”Let’s go spittle to mole, mole to molecule, man to man, cloud to toe and back again.” Here is a food web with words that feed on each other. Now George is on a vision quest leaving the city to go “upcountry.”

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How To Make a Fish Print

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On June 13, 2016

In How To

  • Obtain a whole fish from 6 – 10 inches
  • Either freeze the fish for later or make the print right away
  • Thaw the fish, lay it on newspaper, wipe the slime off with a paper towel
  • Newsprint pads come in small, medium and large. Decide on the size you need beforehand. Newsprint is very absorbent.
  • Buy a jar of soluble block printers ink from an art store
  • Using a one inch brush, take a small amount of ink and dilute it with just a few drops of water. Mix with the brush.
  • Spread the ink on the fish backwards to insure that it seeps under the scales. Make sure you prop up the dorsal fin using a crumpled piece of paper towel. Stuff crumpled paper town in the mouth
  • Apply a light coat of ink EXCEPT the eye. Fill in the eye later.
  • The first print is a test to see how to make adjustments in the ink solution. It may take several tries to learn the skill of inking
  • Do not put thick ink on the fish. It must be thinned.
  • Number each test print and keep making prints, and reapplying ink until you see that you’re getting the details of the fish. The head is bony and ink doesn’t seep in so less is better.
  • After the paper has been laid on the inked fish, gently touch the paper with one hand and with the other make sure the paper doesn’t move.
  • Eventually, using fingers and thumb, make sure the entire fish has been touched. Apply gentle pressure. Make sure you get the dorsal and tail fins.

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Indian Island County Park: A Walk Report

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On June 11, 2016

In Short Essays

Part 1:

Dead moss bunkers also called Menhaden on a small stony beach on the Peconic River Estuary. Three men, a truck and trailer, and a boat full to the brim. They arrived at 4:30AM from Eastport to catch Menhaden, thousands of bunker to sell them in Huntington.

They set a 150 long seine net using the boat. Huge schools of Menhaden had assembled there as they have done for thousands of years. The fishermen knew this. They have a very small window of opportunity.

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Some Of My Favorite Sounds

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On June 11, 2016

In Short Essays

Laughing gull calls / wind passing through poplar tree leaves / mourning doves in the early morning / song sparrows while I work in the garden ‘ spring peepers across the street from my Manorville home / crickets at dusk / Screech and great horned owls calling at 3AM / breaking waves lapping and crashing /wind clicking tall dry grass / wind passing through pitch pine needles /osprey overhead / gurgling water beneath the hull of a small sail boat / chickens clucking at egg laying time /spouting whales as they surface / frog calls – green and bull / a swan flying by /wing beats of the Ruby-Throated Hummingbird / wood thrush calls early morning deep in the pine barrens / herring gull calls / great blue heron taking flight / catbirds, veery’s, fish crows, American crows / the oven bird high in a tree canopy / house wren and northern oriole / honking Canada geese / piping plover peeps / screech of two touching tree trunks / the wining wind seeping through cracks in my man cave / the faint snap of a wisteria pod opening / sifting compost through a screen / crunch of gravel stones as I hike uphill on a well—worn trail in Manorville Hills / thump of large, green black walnut tree nut hitting the ground / in early spring, robins in early dawn / a rock avalanche on Lyell Canyon, Yosemite National Park /  crinkly of dry corn leaves / hairy woodpecker hitting a hollow tree branch

 

6:50 PM, June 7, 2016; Maxwell C. Wheat Died

By

On June 9, 2016

In Medium Length Essays

Notes from a friend:

2016-06-09 13.02.50I met him in 1975 at Sunken Meadow State Park. We were conducting a teacher’s workshop on using the outdoors. Max was doing poetry, I was doing math. He heard me call “Look, there’s a cardinal.” Ever since then, he labeled me as the person who invented the “teachable moment.” “Thomas Allen Stock writes about nature and love of the outdoors, an educator who stops everything for the teachable moment.” Letter, September 1992

He was always a reporter, once told me “Everybody has a story.”

His father was a reporter. Max became a reporter in Geneva , New York

He attended Hobart College and met Virginia while sailing on Seneca Lake

He joined the Marines and received an accommodation for apprehending an intruder while he guarded a naval shop.

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Sore Thumb Walk

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On June 7, 2016

In Hike Reports, Short Essays

The sore thumb is an isthmus of sand and scrub on the north side of Fire Island Inlet. It is a favorite beach buggy spot where surf casters fish. On the north side of the thumb, a charming cove with flat water.

I started my walk from the Overlook, a Babylon Town Beach. My plan was a circular…east to the tip of the thumb, then along the sand road to Ocean Parkway, then west back to the Overlook.

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Robert Pinsky Poetry Workshop

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On June 7, 2016

In Short Essays

A three-time United States Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky visited the Walt Whitman Birthplace to perform duties as Poet in Residence…Poetry Master Class, Reading, and presiding at the awards ceremony for student poets.

It is one thing to read his biography on the flier, quite another to meet him, hear him teach, listen, comment, and recite and read. Almost 25 poets gathered to work with him. It was fabulous.

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Weed Notes #1 – Dames Rocket

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On June 2, 2016

In Short Essays

The author’s interest in botany extends to weeds. A weed isn’t a weed when I like it, grow it, study it, draw it, and write about it. My objective is to show that weeds can be interesting if one takes the time.

I plant escapes from a garden, it is called a weed. It has a seed dispersal system that allows it to spread. Dames Rocket is a native of Eurasia. How it reached America can only be explained in general terms. It may have been purposely carried here by migrants who wanted to have artifacts in their new home. They planted seeds; they grew, escaped, and spread widely. It can be found in roadside ditches, dumps, and open woodland settings.

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My First Annual June First Walk Around the Village of Babylon

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On June 1, 2016

In Short Essays

Summer is a knockin’ on the door, 21 days of spring left. What can I see on a walk around the village?

Behind the chain-link fence of the Babylon High School soccer field, a large turtle caught my attention. It was a red-eared slider. It had a pile of wet mud behind it whereas the rest of the soil was dry and hard. I investigated. The turtle was trying to lay eggs. I picked it up and I discovered a shallow hole confirming that this was a female, digging a nest to lay her eggs. I concluded that this was a futile undertaking and decided to take the turtle to the Carl’s River close by.

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Rabbit

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On May 25, 2016

In Short Essays

A visit to the Hempstead Plains reserve on the Nassau Community College campus gave me a chance to explore. While only 19 acres in size, smaller than most open space habitats, this place is special. It is a tiny left-over from the original 60,000 acre ecosystem. I put on my blinders and fastened my earplugs, stepped off the beaten path and began an aimless walk to see what I could see.

Since the seventeen hundreds, the habitat has shrunken, become infested with nonnative plants, and paved over. The Friends of the Hempstead Plains is trying to restore what is left, a major undertaking. It is slowly beginning to look like plains again. However, with every other step I took, I found a plant that wasn’t here three hundred years ago. Removing the invasive plants and encouraging the natives is the ongoing task.

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