Nature
This past weekend, I climbed Glacier Peak with a friend of mine. Glacier Peak is Washington’s fourth-highest mountain, and also one of the state’s five stratovolcanoes. (Perhaps you’ve heard of one of the others; I know I have.) What distinguishes Glacier Peak among its volcanic kin is its remoteness. It is at the eastern edge […]
My 16-year-old is leaving alone for a month of language school in Tokyo. Being born and raised outside of towns under population 700, closer to 300 in some cases, should put a dizzying spin on the experience. We’ve had epic urban adventures together, but not off this continent, certainly not in the vast compression of […]
It was a Wednesday morning, the last day in May. I’d been at the emergency room until the wee hours with a loved one and I needed to be asleep, but my brain had other plans. Me: how about sleep? Brain: Alternative proposal: how about obsessing over your problems, such as this loved one who […]
One enthralling aspect of writing a book about roads and nature is that the world suddenly blossoms with odd interactions and novel ecosystems. Once you’re attuned to how our transportation infrastructure alters landscapes, every walk or drive becomes an occasion to observe some strange geo/hydro/ecological dynamic. To wit: I’m fascinated by roads as concentrators of […]
I’ve been talking with other writers about AI. We huddle in our conversations like anarchists. Some have been using ChatGBT as a tool and are quite happy. Some fear for their careers and think recent, rapid advances in large language models are very, very bad. I’ve turned off autocorrect on my computer. Is that enough? […]
Brown Penguins are black and white—everyone knows this—except when they aren’t, like in April, at a place called Punta Tombo. Punta Tombo is a gnarled peninsula in southern Argentina that hosts a large colony of Magellanic penguins. Every September, more than two hundred thousand of them come here to breed. They pair up, lay a […]
The invasion is now in full swing. I am not sure if I’ll make it beyond tonight. You have no idea what I’ve seen out there. It began a few nights ago, though it was chilly then. The earth gleamed with moisture. There were fewer of them; the cold and the rain held them off, […]