Redux: Remnant of Eden

This post first ran in the spring of 2015 and I’ve often wondered if this patch of earth in Iowa is still guarded. A summer not long ago I went for a grueling 3-day backpack through GMO cornfields in Iowa, camping among walls of waxy green leaves that sawed against each other in the breeze. […]

Grief As Ecotone and As Pantone

There is not a lot that keeps me online nowadays, but one thing is color. For like, walls, in a house. I am still in a grief-triggered painting phase, just like my grandmother was once in a grief-triggered drapery phase, because changing the appearance of one’s house is a thing to do that is at […]

Animal Love

I’ve been following a wild animal sightings page for a couple years and it started with useful game cam shots and pictures of tracks, a place a wildlife biologist might pause while scrolling. Lately I see more from hunters hoisting lifeless bags of fur in their arms, which is a form of sighting, though I […]

Escaping the Flames

I had tickets to fly to LA at the end of the week for mountain lion research where I’d meet with wildlife biologists, follow cats in the Santa Monica mountains by radio collar telemetry, and take a tour of the nearly complete Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing over the 101. That plan went out the window with […]

My Mom on the Bering Land Bridge

This is a picture of my mother sheltering from an Arctic wind from when this post first published in 2015. She’s nearing 80 now and I just connected with her last night in southern Utah where she’s joining me for a week on the San Juan River. She teeters more than she used to, not […]

Along the Urban Ecotone

The skirt of Las Vegas, Nevada, is a frictional zone scrubbed with busted tortoise shells and Joshua trees that lean toward the sun. High tension power lines intersect at substations and disperse from there into the desert. A buddy and I camped in this liminal space a couple months ago and all night long the […]

The Best Bugs

Cicadas are the best bugs. The 17-year cicadas emerged here in the D.C. area two years ago and I haven’t gotten over it yet. Everyone knows this, and that’s why Our Kate texted me on Monday with a link to a new paper in the journal Science about the effects of cicadas on the food […]