Tim Muskat lecture, Wed., 10 Feb. 2010, Tamworth, NH

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Dr. Dasypodidae

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Here is something that came my way from a Tamworth local.

On Wednesday, February 10th, at 7:00 at the Cook Memorial Library in Tamworth, Tim Muskat will present *Excursion, Excursus: Six Years' Solo* *Rambling Through New Hampshire's Whites**.* Each winter over the past six years Tim has climbed solo to the sumits of all forty-eight of NH's highest peaks. This past winter, for emphasis, he tackled them all twice. Join us for an evening of photograph, poetry, questing and recollection.

Tinkerer, scholar, househusband, baseball player, mountaineer, and former marathon runner Timothy Muskat has worked over the course of his forty-eight mostly eventful years as a tree surgeon, college English professor (of the Victorian and Romantic periods), zookeeper (responsible primarily for five wayward and terribly long-necked emus), backwoods guide, all-sports coach, substitute teacher, shoe factory novice, stone wall builder and autodidactical designer of modest backyard landscapes with an emphasis on perennial berms. His latest poetic brainchild, now nine years old and well past the toddler stage, is the popular *Sandwich*lot Baseball Program, which he directs full-summer in quaint Sandwich, NH, where he lives in a semi-rustic simplicity in a house directly across the road from a semi-rural school with his lovely wife, their two fine sons, twenty-nine Zebra finches (and counting), and a newest-edition mountain-climbing Chocolate Labrador named, for a host of obscure reasons, Israel Buddha Canó.

A graduate of Cornell University, with advanced degrees from both Cornell and the University of Montana, Tim has spent the past seven winters hiking voraciously- so voraciously, in fact, that he is now referenced in the appendix of the just-released Second Edition of Steven D. Smith and Mike Dickerman's *The 4,000-Footers of the White Mountains *as the only climber to scale all 48 of New Hampshire's high peaks "solo in six consecutive [years]." (Tim's quasi-authoritative account of this hibernal foolishness can be found in the Winter/Spring 2006 issue of *Appalachia* under the pseudo-epigram, "They're Beautiful, They're Out There, and They're Calling Me.")

Tim is the author of *Murmurs from the Bogswamp's Gloaming *(1991), and the forthcoming *Completing the Century: A Poetic Journey in One-Hundred Cantos *and *Woods Outside the World: Poems 1994-2007.*

Constantly mulling his own epitaph, he has settled - for the time being *- on two: Horace's *Non sum qualis eram *("I am not what I once was") and Emily Dickinson's "Bereaved of all, I went abroad." Among his hobbies and pastimes are bird watching, small-stone gathering, and philosophy, which usually leaves him in a muddle.
 
Staying with friend in Tamworth after Passaconaway-Whiteface loop today and Tim's slide talk this evening, which was excellent. Great slides, but more important the most thoughtful and well-spoken words about the mountain experience that I have heard in a long time. Not to be missed if you have the chance to hear Tim's show. He also just completed another all-in-one-winter round of the NH48 for the seventh consecutive year.
 
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