I don’t know when I first saw Cisco, Utah. My early memory of it is imprecise, gathered from a series of impressions over years into one blurry composite. A crumbling edifice of corner store, covered in a mural of eagle and mountains that is in turn covered in black scrawls of graffiti. Dead cars. Piles […]
Earth
This is an image of a deluge, an absolute inundation, a drainage basin filled to the brim, a coast whose cup runneth over, total saturation, a scene that would make Noah cringe. This is, as my friend pointed out, a f*@kload of water. This image shows how the land changed after Hurricane Florence was done, […]
You know it’s bad when you have to dig a hole and crawl in to survive. That’s what is going on in a creek bed at the bottom of the canyon below where I live. The creek stopped running a little more than a week ago. I walked down the other day and lifted […]
My husband and I went to Scotland to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary. We walked on footpaths in the Highlands and noticed all the ways the landscape differed from our favorite hiking trails in New York. My naturalist skills extend to birds and plants. It was hard to ignore the rocks, but I did my best. I […]
Summer’s been long and hot. Usually, I’m still enjoying it by August, but this time, winter is looking sweeter than ever. This post originally ran in January 27, 2015, and is about being colder than I ever had before, and about a time North America was colder than it had been in thousands of […]
Two years ago, a poet named Maggie Smith wrote a poem called ‘Good Bones.’ I printed it out, and I find myself reading it over and over again. “The world is at least fifty percent terrible/and that’s a conservative estimate,” Smith writes. Really conservative. Right now, I’d put the number closer to ninety percent. Nearly […]
I am so angry, so sad. Today I drove my two children to the first day of a weeklong day-camp with a nature theme. They are learning about local species, pressing flowers, that kind of thing. The teachers expected that the kids would spend most of the day outside in nature. Instead, the kids will […]
This summer, I decided not to cut the grass in my backyard. I’ve long argued for letting a little more wildness into our gardens, but the cult of the lawn is a powerful cultural force and for years I, like most of us, have conformed and kept the back lawn mown. Ideally, I’d some day […]