Sarah Gilman
Website
I studied studio art and biology in college and wasn't quite satisfied with either. The art world looked hermetic, sealed off in cities away from the landscapes that I loved. And the science world felt binding, too, with its sprint to publish clunky treatises for an audience of other scientists. Writing, though, stole the best from both fields -- the creativity, the exploring, the analysis and the always-and-forever-learning -- and, at its best, seemed like it could bring the same important topics explored by art and science to a much broader audience of people. So here I am, still at it. I write about the environment, energy, science and miscellany from Portland, Oregon. I'm also a current contributing editor and former staff editor for High Country News, an environmental magazine about the American West. You can find more of my writing at sarahmgilman.com. I tweet @Sarah_Gilman.

The search for thirsty blue

There’s a particular shade of blue that I’ve tried to replicate with pigment for much of my life. I think it’s blue, anyway. There’s gray in there, too. Indigo. Violet. Black. Flickers of gold. This blue is luminous, despite its darkness. This blue is heavy and satisfying as a thirst, slaked. I can’t point to […]

The trouble with abundance

There are several things you’re likely to notice if you fly over Southeast Alaska’s Alexander Archipelago on a clear day. If you’re an alpine junky like me, the first will be the snowcapped mountains that stretch seemingly without end from near the coast to the eastern horizon somewhere in Canada, their white-and-gray-tongued glaciers pouring all […]

Wind, the uninvited houseguest

Perhaps 500 yards from my door—up an icy, winding driveway, a short way down a gravel road, beyond barbed wire fences and snow-skirffed pastures and the wind-twisted trunks of piñon and juniper trees—is a barn that shelters two sailboats in the middle of the Colorado desert. I first spotted them on a walk and stopped […]

Bug love redux: The day I tried to love ticks

Has anyone mentioned that LWONers love weird things? As professional nerds, we wring our hands a lot over things normal people don’t give a damn about. Like: Gribbles. Like: Poohsticks. Like: Marine iguanas. If you’re late to this game, this week, we’re parading forth a few musings on some times that we spent loving bugs. Or, […]

River time, river tongue

It was a bird of confluences. Nameless, to us. Gray as cloud belly, large as raptor, with eyes streaked over black as if with a stick of charcoal. The first time I saw it, I stood shin deep in the narrow, clear Pitman River, steps away from the line of opaque jade water marking its […]

Snark Week: The Great Horny Owl

Owls. Little downy Ewoks. Fat and fusiform with big round eyes, legs feathered like miniature pilot pants in a stiff wind, perhaps a pair of droopy tuft ears. What is more trustworthy than droopy tuft ears? They appear as if they will take your deepest secrets to the grave. Perhaps this is why owls decorate […]

The Map Box

I keep a wooden box on my bedside table. It’s cheap – an old Yalumba Wine case that I found on a curb somewhere, with a hinged lid and a shred of price tag still attached. Usually, it’s stacked high with magazines half read, a thing seldom opened and often dusty. But in all of […]