Terrain.org essays in this issue:
 

How to Draw a Glass Mountain: Los Angeles and the Architecture of Segregation
A Hypertext Photo Essay by Aisha Sloan

In the City of Angels, you can live in a hillside house where the courtyard juts into the sky and spills out over a precipice. There are walls made out of glass, creating the illusion that what lies outside — trees, a thousand city lights, or the yellow desert hills — is a part of your living room. Houses manage to encapsulate a sense of spareness and solitude in the midst of a city with almost ten million inhabitants.

The Book of Water
by Joe Wilkins, with Audio

I was born in drought. For a quick moment my father held my red, wet body. Then he set me in my mother’s arms and drove through the star-cut spring dark the 90 miles back to our sheep and hay ranch out on the Big Dry of eastern Montana. There, my father pulled on his hip-boots, grabbed a shovel, and trudged north to open the irrigation headgate, to bring what water he could to our thirsty fields.

The Road to Crownpoint
Essay by Kurt Caswell
Illustration by Susan Leigh Tomlinson

Rain fell softly across the windshield of my truck as I crossed the cattle guard at the school entrance and drove out the empty dirt road northwest to Crownpoint. The sky was light over there, dark over here. Sun pulsed in and out of the truck windows. The rain lasted only a moment, but the air was wet and electric. A thunderstorm was brewing.

The Place and the Photograph
by Lex Runciman, with Stonehenge Photo Gallery

To anyone who has seen it and genuinely tried to take it in, Stonehenge remains a challenge and a puzzle. On a January morning, the site can easily absorb the few people likely to have arisen early enough and determined enough to brave the weather that can feature gale force winds and unpredictable rain. Rainy or not, some such mornings will find sheep cropping the grass in nearby pastures.

Four Dispatches from the Interface
by Charles Goodrich, with Audio

It’s hard to take a bumblebee seriously — the stubby wings, pudgy thorax, chandelier eyes. When he lifts his ponderous body in flight, he seems to be fudging the laws of physics. Weird, how evolution can flirt with absurdity. Still, I study his every move. My mother used to tell me, “Don’t be half a fool.” That’s why I bow to the master, who has just gotten stuck in a foxglove. Humming and shoving, he shimmies back out, combs his antennae with his forelegs and zooms away, my mentor, my implacable guru.