Guest Editorial

Mark Sofield

A Shaker meetinghouse in New Lebanon, New York, constructed in 1824.
Photo source Historic American Buildings Survey, courtesy U.S. Library of Congress.

The essential meaning of craft in architecture lies in the nature of the connections a building or space creates—both internally, between its constituent parts, and externally, through its relationship to its place. These connections can be physical, temporal, or even spiritual. Ideally, all three are integrated into one effort.

Shinto shrines, Gothic cathedrals, and Shaker meetinghouses are touchstone works for so many architects because of the way, in each building type, these three realms of intent harmonize. Each structure combines a masterful command of the materials from which it is assembled, a profound understanding of its relationship to both time and space, and a transparent embrace of its role in connecting the worshipers it shelters with the ineffable worlds it evokes.

Due to the lack of historical perspective, there is less consensus among architects and urbanists regarding contemporary examples of buildings, especially secular ones, that successfully establish similar connections. Two admirable recent examples, though, are Renzo Piano Building Workshop’s Modern Wing at the Art Institute of Chicago, and Amateur Architecture Studio’s Ningbo History Museum. Both buildings, which share similar functions but are located in vastly differing urban settings, transcend their contextual and programmatic imperatives through their exquisite control of the corporeal, historical, and metaphysical connections they embody.

Modern Wing at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Photo by John Faier.

The Modern Wing gently but definitively asserts its connection to place through its link to Millennium Park across the Monroe Street bridge, and by means of its skyline views to the larger city. Its temporal link to Chicago’s built history is achieved through material and constructional choices: limestone cladding to match the existing Art Institute buildings and a glass and steel curtain wall echoing the seminal skyscrapers of the Loop, which are visible through that very window wall. The luminous association of the Wing’s contents—the Museum’s European Modernism collection displayed in the north light in which the art was originally produced, accomplished by means of its “flying carpet” daylighting roof—reinforces the transcendent power of the art.

In the absence of a meaningful urban context, and as an implicit critique of China’s infatuation with First World development, the Ningbo History Museum’s hulking, patchwork massing evokes a connection to the mountainous landforms so central to Chinese cosmology. The accretive, sedimentary arrangement of recycled bricks in its facades, some of which date back 1,200 years to the Tang Dynasty, register geologic as well as human time. Those walls, which enclose a thoroughly modern building, are assembled using pre-modern, indigenous methods for reconstruction after the region’s frequent typhoons. While its rough appearance presents a stark contrast to the Modern Wing’s exquisitely refined detailing, here again is a building whose constructional techniques, temporal references, and spiritual associations function in concert to imbue the structure with connective strengths that elevate it to the status of true craft.

The Ningbo History Musuem.
Photo by Iwan Baan.

Both buildings also display another attribute common to works of great craftsmanship, which is a certain self-awareness, a knowingness about their effect on their users. I will always remember the sensation I experienced, in visiting Aalto’s Villa Mairea and also Green and Greene’s Gamble House, of feeling as if I had entered the psyches of the architects—that the spaces themselves had assumed the intelligence of their creators. The ability of a well-crafted building to project the thought and effort of its architects and the craftsmen who constructed it is what lifts it above the commonplace. The elevation of spirit we all feel in the presence of true craft is a natural consequence of the quality of effort that created the work.

This phenomenon is as often the result of an accumulation of small decisions or acts as it is the result of a single, revelatory insight. There is a point of inflection at which we all recognize that what is inalterably right about an object, building, or place is proportionally so much greater than what might still be lacking, that we concede to it the status of craft. That tipping point—at which the prosaic becomes poetic—exists for work across many scales in the built environment.

There are, naturally, differing technical and logistical concerns between those scales. A construction detailer and a city planner‘s workdays are entirely dissimilar. However, each faces the same basic problem regarding craft: how to extract the maximum utility and meaning from the least amount of material, be it physical or sociological or both. Each is also remarkably dependent on the other for the success of their efforts, and both are utterly dependent on the trades that will execute their plans.

Modern Wing at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Photo by John Faier.

That interdependence (another form of connection) is one of the most compelling aspects of the building arts. A well-ordered collaborative design process involving all of a project’s stakeholders will invariably result in a product that provides the maximum meaning and utility for its end users. The quality of the architect’s documentation is so critical to this process that it is best approached as a form of craft in itself, and should seek to establish the same sorts of connections that the architect hopes to instill in the final, constructed product.

Some of the most fulfilling moments of my career have come when an unforeseen constructional problem has been solved by a tradesman based on the parameters established by the drawings, models, or patterns I furnished him—because he has understood the larger intent which that documentation conveys. More satisfying still are those instances when that solution has strengthened the meaning of the building in a way that I could not have accomplished alone. The necessity of a building’s advance representation to legibly and directly connect intention to end result is even more critical now, in this age of digital representation and fabrication, when the potential for miscommunication is compounded by the remoteness of the mediums of communication and production.

The Ningbo History Musuem.
Photo by Iwan Baan.

A final point about the connective nature of craft in the context of urban design concerns the relationship between part and whole. As I noted above, every participant in the creation of an urban space carries the potential to ennoble the efforts of their fellow placemakers through the quality of their own product. The stronger the working relationship they establish, the better the chance they will create a place whose elements will continue speaking to each other long after their creators have quit the scene. The connections established by that dialogue occur across the spectrum of design scales. A building’s detailing syntax should support its larger conceptual language, but these individual constructional elements should also relate across a group of buildings defining an urban space, so that each part furthers the meaning of the whole, and vice versa. This is especially true when the functions of the public space’s buildings differ. While it is natural to privilege certain building types (civic, for example) it is important to modulate the spatial and syntactical associations between the buildings that form a place in such a way that the more prominent types do not overpower the relationship.

The objective of craft in placemaking, then, is to deepen the purpose of constructed environments through the type and quality of the connections those environments embody and enable. These connections can be either intrinsic or extrinsic to the place or its elements. Intrinsic connections might be literal, as in the way components are assembled; or symbolic, as when a contextual association is registered in the space. While intrinsic connections internalize those associations, extrinsic connections are characterized instead by their projection of an object, building, or place’s intent and meaning into the larger physical or cultural landscape beyond its physical boundaries. Great buildings and places, like the Art Institute of Chicago Modern Wing and Ningbo History Museum, manage to weave together most or all of these types of connections into a multivalent assembly of constructional, relational, and analogical references and functions. It is no coincidence that the Greene brothers and Aalto were—and Piano and Shu are—as intimately familiar with the process of construction, and the physical and climatic forces acting upon their buildings, as with the societal effects of their work.

Mark Sofield is an architect in Longmont, Colorado. His firm works across a range of specialties from furniture and exhibition design to institutional architecture and planning. Since 1998 he has also been the town architect for Prospect New Town, a new urbanist development in Longmont (and one of the case studies in the new Unsprawl book). His design work has been published in numerous books and periodicals, including Dwell Magazine and The New York Times, and has been widely exhibited, most notably in the Cooper Hewitt, National Design Museum, and Smithsonian Institution Design Triennial.

Header and home page photo of the Ningbo History Museum by Lv Hengzhong, courtesy the Pritzker Foundation.

NEXT: “Provenance” by Elizabeth Dodd >>

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Almanac

Elizabeth Dodd

I’m simmering Polish sausage, sliced into rounds like thick, old coins, in a mixture of wine and water, and as soon as the liquid has evaporated and the meat begun to brown, I’ll spoon them over a slurry of lentils, carrots, celery, and onions. It smells wonderful. Really wonderful. The vegetables were cooked in bacon drippings (which I’ve been hoarding in the refrigerator) and then added to the lentils to simmer, slowly, all afternoon in the crock pot. These pork products were raised, slaughtered, and butchered locally: I actually met the people who handled the animal and processed the meat. Earlier in the autumn, I could have recited even more provenance of an evening meal—onions and carrots from the couple who run Weiche’s farm, parsley and thyme from Elaine of Southside Gardens—but it’s too late in the season for those fresh items.

Enjoying a makeshift fountain at the Parks’ farm along the Kansas River bottomlands.
Photo by Elizabeth Dodd.

Still, I know precisely where this pig came from. I could plot it on Googlemaps, with a little narrative of its life: born (farrowed, don’t we say of piglet-birth? or is that only a transitive verb applicable to the subject-mother, and not the object-offspring? I’m uncertain of the lexical complexities of animal husbandry) on the south side of Zeandale Road, then a few months later moved maybe half a mile north to finish among the broken stalks of the summer’s sweet corn in bottomland along the Kansas River—I have often ridden my bike along the road there, before turning off to pedal uphill on the dirt road gloriously named Swamp Angel. From there the pig was trucked north and west some 40 miles to Clay Center, where Dieck’s Meat Locker (“Whole Hogs Are Our Specialty”) processed the animal into a freezerful of chops and bacon, loin and ribs. My friend Angela and I bought this pig from Darrell Parks, proprietor of Parks Pasture Pork, and we brought the meat home from Clay Center in her little Civic hybrid—another 40-mile trip. She also took home some neck bones, from which her husband makes spaghetti sauce—this sounds a little weird to me, but Angela says it’s delicious. Did I mention the ham hocks? The Diecks smoked these, and I already transformed three into a huge vat of split pea soup.

The sausage is browned nicely. Time to eat.

For months I’ve insisted on reciting the provenance of our provender—stuff from the farmers’ market—whenever I can. The cherry tomatoes and mustard greens from Elaine Mohr. Sweet corn from Darrell Parks. The leeks and beets and sweet potatoes from the Weiches. Apples from Rhonda and Raad. One day I bought a quart jar of honey from a vendor whom I didn’t recognize and I asked him where the bees lived. “Right here,” he answered. No, really, exactly where, I wanted to know.

“I mean, right here,” he assured me. “The hives are about five blocks south of where we’re standing now.” And I instantly knew: the old neighborhood that abuts the levy, where a packed-gravel bike path curves between the river and the city. Six or seven blocks, I’d have guessed… But call it five. Call it good.

Parks Pasture Pork goes to the farmer’s market.
Photo by Elizabeth Dodd.

Once I watched bees swarming in a tree on campus—maybe 15 blocks away. A student had come into the classroom where I taught poetry writing bursting with the news—there were bees going crazy outside, he said—so we all trooped out to have a look. In a flowering crabapple hung a buzzing, jiggling, fat stalactite with bees dripping off the bottom like a winged suggestion of honey. Later I heard that a local beekeeper had come to collect the swarm. What if this very jar derived from the writhing knot of pollinators that, briefly, had intersected lives with a roomful of poets? I love the possibility.

The land grant university where I teach was the nation’s first college established under the Morrill Act of 1862; its original mission was to bring “a liberal and practical education” to the sons and daughters of working people—farmers, mostly—in the brand new state of Kansas. Our classroom was located one floor above the old dissection hall, where prospective veterinary students, more than a century ago, would watch their teacher cut up a horse, taking notes. One of my students took a picture of the swarm on her cell phone to take back inside, where a woman with an allergy to bee stings waited for our return.

This evening’s pork has less than a hundred miles of fossil fuel activity associated with its aromatic flesh. Even the animal’s feed is local—mostly local, anyway. The piglet was suckled with its mother’s milk, of course, and then weaned with a coarse mixture of ground soybeans and wheat. Darrell raises a fair amount of this hog feed himself, though he sometimes does need to supplement it with purchased organic feed. One day in late August I drove out to his farm—a 20-mile round trip—to deliver our payment check and take a look at his operation. “Sure,” he’d told me when I asked if I could visit. So I did.

The Parks family has farmed this part of Kansas for generations. They first homesteaded an area by the Kaw River known locally as Hunter’s Island. That place name dates to the 1903 flood which changed the river course and left a portion of low-lying land, owned then by the Hunter family, in an ox-bow of the former water channel. But in the 19th century the area was called Moehlman’s Bottoms, where a largely German-immigrant farming community sprang up. The current Parks property was purchased in the 1930s by Darrell’s father, and Darrell and his wife have worked it since the 1970s. After majoring in—I’m not making this up—parks management and conservation in college and a brief stint working out of state, Darrell and his wife Donna returned to farm.

One shelter, three walls and a sloped roof, looked a lot like the Garth Williams illustration of Wilbur the pig’s home, only larger.
Image courtesy BibliOdyssey.

The day I chose to visit their place was hammeringly hot. Darrell drove up sweating in a decades-old John Deere tractor while I stood sniffing the dry breeze suspiciously. But dry cottonwood leaves and dust were what I smelled—not manure. Then, under those whispering cottonwoods, I was touring the premises. Darrell is what was once called bean-pole thin. Soft-spoken and seemingly a little shy at first, he warmed up quickly as we moved from shade to sun to shade again, as he described his operation. The pigs were housed in various little groups scattered across the landscape. One shelter, three walls and a sloped roof, looked a lot like the Garth Williams illustration of Wilbur the pig’s home, only larger. The piglets danced away on their delicate feet when I squatted down by their feed and spoke to them as if they were puppies. Two boars were housed nearby in a cinder-block shed, in separate rooms because of their aggression, but they, too, had open air—a fenced pen where they took turns lolling and snorting.

“You know, they do have tusks, and if they were together they might spend five hours or so staring at each other, then tussling, and you might have to go in with a two-by-four and separate them. It’s calmer this way,” Darrell grinned. And calmly, we walked out into the full sun where individual sheds housed pregnant or nursing sows. These were supremely simple structures, framed construction with a thick layer of insulation batting between the two-by-fours, roofed with an arc of corrugated tin. As we strolled through this pig village, some of the sows thundered and thudded from their sheds, wanting nothing to do with us. Some of the piglets trotted back inside. I liked that the animals had some choice in the matter—they could bolt or hide, whichever felt more comfortable.

In the 1990s, Darrell attended a sustainable agriculture workshop in Myrtle, Missouri and learned how to make these cheap, rough sheds. The host farmer finished his hogs on fescue—those were more accurately pasture pigs than the Parks porkers will be. At first, Darrell tried to plant enough fescue to finish his hogs but the animals rooted around and tore up the turf (no brass rings in their noses, I noticed). And, as he observed mildly, “They get more rain in Missouri.” That they do. But his new methods are serving him—and customers like me—quite well. Whereas he once had to vaccinate his pigs against various diseases and include antibiotics in their feed, with these new methods, he does neither. Now the old farrowing shed, where all the piglets were once massed together, stands empty, and the animals move more freely across their portion of his land. Of course, he does lose pigs occasionally. Recently coyotes snagged three shoats.

The cornfields where the Parks pigs put on their final weight before slaughter.
Photo by Elizabeth Dodd.

I can’t help thinking of the Story of the Three Little Pigs. Darrell’s shelters lack stout doors so his animals are vulnerable to a very old threat—the predator lurking around the periphery of the settlement, just waiting for a chance to strike. How old? Well, pigs were domesticated some 9,000 or 10,000 years ago, and not just once in that chalice of Holocene agriculture, the Fertile Crescent, but several times in different places, suggesting that it wasn’t the domestic stock itself which spread but the knowledge—the technology—of taming that traveled. DNA sequencing of porcine mitochondria reveals that one of these domestications took place somewhere near Germany, a region that is still devoted to pork in the cuisine. My friend Gina told me that when she visited family in Germany she was fed pork at every single meal, including cold cuts for breakfast, which she found pretty hard to take. A chemical engineer, she once spent weeks working in western Kansas on what’s called a digester system to deal with hog farm runoff, a project that soiled her car’s engine and put her off eating any pork, whatsoever, for quite a while.

Darrell and I hopped into his dusty pickup and drove to the cornfields where the Parks pigs put on their final weight before slaughter. A couple of shelter belts where trees still held their dry leaves; the standing stalks of the summer’s corn crop; big, sloppy mud holes where the hogs were making the best of the midday sun. We climbed down from the truck and he turned on a spigot; one of the pigs stepped into the stream of water, mouth open, eyes pinched shut. Water cascaded from the animal’s mouth, pooling in the mud hole at its feet. I could imagine the scene after we left, pigs lolling in the cooling mud while the afternoon sun slid toward the trees in the west.

This idyllic image can be eclipsed by winter weather. A few years ago during a double-whammy ice storm and blizzard that hit in December, Darrell lost ten animals in the finishing pastures and sheds near the river, where there’s considerably less shelter from the wind. As we stood near the parching cornfield, he described how on Christmas day he spent hours trying to haul dry straw to the pigs huddling together in the sheds, their bedding sodden with melted snow. One vehicle stuck in a snow drift so he had difficulty reaching the animals. Since he keeps only about 35 sows through the year—finishing 400 to 500 sale animals—to lose ten at once wasn’t trivial.

Poolside pigs on the Parks’ farm.
Photo by Elizabeth Dodd.

“I work for a niche market,” Darrell explained. He sells meat locally through the farmers’ market, at the local co-op, called The People’s Grocery, and he supplies the national brand Organic Prairie. Much of his soybeans, milo, alfalfa, and corn are destined for the Kansas Organic Producers farmers’ cooperative—in the organic market, he might be able to get $17/bushel for corn, compared with $6 to $8 for nonorganic grain. It was clear he tries to keep overhead low. The pickup was the only vehicle I saw on the property that wasn’t old enough to legally drink or run for national office. For a while we tried to jump start a huge-wheeled elder, a truck with a covered bed that looked to me like it drove right out of the 1940s into the day’s sun. But the engine wouldn’t turn over and he gave up. Instead, he told me about his plans.

Next year he wants to move the pigs to another section of the flat, floodplain land and plant corn here where the pigs are mud wallowing and water swallowing. So the constant rotation will continue all over the farm: newly-weaned piglets into their own shed; sows in heat into the breeding pen with the boars; pregnant sows in the gestational huts; sows with nursing litters in the several huts scattered among weeds; and, across the road, fattening animals in the mud baths near the corn. None of the pigs were actually gamboling in the pasture, but they all had access to the outdoors, most were free to move around at least a little, and, as Darrell said, this whole approach is “kinder” to the animals than keeping them massed together on concrete or a in single, cramped building, or simply in a feedlot with hundreds of other hogs.

Of course there is the matter of killing them and eating them.

But since I believe meat really is an important part of a hominid diet, for me the question is how to meet my need more responsibly, with a sense of both the future and the past. And I consider Darrell a kind of craftsman—his sweet corn is reputed to be the tastiest one can buy in our town and each of these pigs represents hours of careful, deliberate, even individual care, as well as considerable knowledge—and, I think, wisdom, too.

First greens of spring from Southside Gardens at the farmers’ market.
Photo by Elizabeth Dodd.

Cooking is an ancient craft. Richard Wrangham argues that cooking—not hunting, per se—is what made us human: it’s how we domesticated ourselves, starting 1.8 million years ago, when Homo erectus first learned to keep and control fire. Even before that, the habiline branch of the primate family tree were butchers, cutting meat from animal carcasses, probably sometimes battering the meat to tenderize it and release its protein more readily and so reducing the energy costs of digestion. Today our remaining chimpanzee cousins use the simplest of tools, hammerstones, to process nutmeats, and archaeological remains show the kinds of cut marks and smashed bones that are like shadows cast by our ancestors at the very threshold of the kitchen. But hearths marked with burned stone and earth: that’s the indication that they—we—had crossed over. Our hominid forbears had begun the alchemy of cuisine.

Can we imagine them, long before the clustered company of villages, before any of our ancestors ventured beyond the shores of Africa? Wrangham suggests fire’s first role in our ancestors’ lives wasn’t primarily warmth; flames meant safety from predators, and in the circle of firelight a group of hominids might gather to share the day’s food, warmed by the presence of one another’s company and by the cooked meat in their bellies as much as by the fire itself. Under the vast scatter of starlight, they might groom one another in the flickering light, murmuring and crooning, fashioning invisible bonds of kinship and care while the load of fuel burned down to dull coals. The first cooks would not have tolerated disruption or aggression. “[W]ild-eyed and intemperate bullies who disturbed the peace,” he reasons, “…were ostracized by a coalition of the calm.” And while the emotional archetypes of comfort food and meal-sharing began changing the shape of the hominid psyche, our ancestors’ bodies also showed the changes that are hallmarks of domestication.

Helen M. Leach points to the way human physique changed from the upper Paleolithic age, reflecting the very sorts of change one would expect from domestication. Smaller body size, shortening of the skull’s facial region, reduction in sexual dimorphism, increasing variation in hair structure or color, increasing of subcutaneous fat storage, extended breeding seasons, retention of juvenile behaviors into adulthood, reduction in intraspecific aggression and increased docility…. These are some of the attributes that have changed among human beings as well as among deliberately domesticated species, suggesting that it is intellectually productive to reconsider how we may have domesticated ourselves. And it’s worth recalling, I think, that the roots of the verb lie beneath a roof: inside the domus, the domesticates are held together by the rhythms of sleeping and cooking and eating—and, in colder climates of course, by the heat of the hearth.

An unearthed subterranean house at Skara Brae.
Photo by Elizabeth Dodd.

I once visited Skara Brae, a tiny stone village of the Neolithic age, nestled into the earth on the largest of the Orkney Islands. The ten houses were mostly subterranean, connected by enclosed passages and outfitted with skeletal furniture: stone box-beds, stone hearths, stone shelving, even stone-lined basins carefully sealed with clay, in which a supply of fish bait could be kept handy or a live catch could be stored until meal preparation. Some of the main rooms had adjoining “cells,” smaller spaces that reminded me of closets. One even had a drainage system—indoor plumbing a lot like the shower in our cheap walkup hotel room in Kirkwall which was, quite literally, a closet slathered with waterproof paint and a drain in the floor.

At Skara Brae we strolled the turf-topped walls and gazed into the now-roofless rooms while, a few hundred yards away, the sea kept up its slow suspiration, and I thought a lot about time. Starting more than 5,000 years ago, that village on the North Sea was occupied for more than six centuries: generation after generation slept and woke and ate, reared within walls that were thickened by castoff household waste—shell and bone fragments, pottery shards, the detritus of simple, do-it-yourself technologies adding insulation against the high-latitude cold. The people were pastoralists and farmers as well as fisher-folk. Their middens trash, as well as high temperature gas chromatography analysis of the pottery, has revealed cattle, sheep, pig, and dogs as the primary livestock and barley as the principal grain. Since I don’t really understand gas chromatography, I imagine it as a patient hunt, back in the sterile air of the lab, for molecular shadow-prints, ghostly traces of long-vanished meals.

In the ancient houses, remnants of large clay pots were discovered, too big to move from room to room and sometimes submerged in the building’s floor—they are a kind of furniture, fixtures like the main rooms’ stone shelving called “dressers” in the archaeological literature. Andrew Jones discusses the conceptual importance of storage within Neolithic domestic space, mapping the various locations for food preparation and storage inside the houses at Skara Brae and elsewhere in the Orcadian world. Those peripheral cells provided initial storage space for unprocessed or partially transformed provender; grinding stones and cooking materials were located at the heart of the house, in the very center of the largest room. This organizational pattern, he argues, pertains to the keeping of the dead as well. In the multi-chambered tombs, the dead were placed in peripheral cysts similar to the storage cells in the houses. Later, disarticulated portions of the departed—such as the skull—were placed on stone shelves, analogous to the dressers so architecturally prominent in the houses. And in one house at Skara Brae, two women were buried beneath the stone frames of bed-boxes, stored away in the long sleep of death.

I visited Maeshowe and Skara Brae in high summer: in the long days of light the surrounding agricultural fields were busy with photosynthesis. But Maeshowe is famous for its winter solstice light show, when—if the weather permits—the setting sun casts a bright shaft through the narrow passageway to the back of the tomb, as if to kindle a hearth there. It’s an ephemeral event—by 4 p.m. local time the sun has set, and the long northern night has settled on the treeless land. Time then to head indoors to talk and eat and sleep.

Furniture and other domesticities at Skara Brae.
Photo by Elizabeth Dodd.

Barley, Jones says, embodies the principle of temporality: it has a definite growing season which northern farmers must take care to plot against the calendar. However, “The act of storage allows barley to be utilized throughout the year,” Jones continues, “and what is more it recalls particular points in the year such as harvest when the barley was most plentiful. The reuse of stored produce during the year is then a repeated mnemonic act. In precisely the same way as barley is stored in side alcoves and utilized on a daily basis, ancestral remains are stored and utilized on a daily basis.” I think this last “utilization” sounds a little creepy—like a kind of necrophagia. But if we think of heritage as a living resource, something to be carefully maintained and passed on, “[w]e should think of storage as enabling a process of memorialization which allows the dead to be seen as signifiers of an ancestral past,” Jones concludes.

Well, that’s quite a heavy symbolic load to stow inside the basement freezer. Too much, I think, for most days. Still, it’s nice to pause occasionally, like in the moments of gathering dusk, and think about these things. My father tells me that his family often kept a pig in his rural Oklahoma childhood. I remember one winter morning from my own childhood, when he had cooked up a batch of bacon (it was the anonymous kind from the supermarket) and he stood looking at the leftover coffee. Suddenly he was making something called “streaky gravy” from the bacon drippings and the coffee. I remember the scene, but not the taste. At the time, I liked the sound of the words together, streaky gravy, though I didn’t know that side bacon—the stuff most of us simply call bacon—is also named streaky bacon. I like the sound of that, too. The provenance of words always pleases me: the way the aural flakes and shards of morphemes litter our vocabularies with an unconscious past.

Most mornings there’s a little coffee leftover in the pot. And we have that freezer stocked with pig. Probably I will have to try out streaky gravy and see whether the result is worth passing along.

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NEXT: “Walking Thoughts on a Frozen Pond” by Lauret Savoy >>

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A Stone’s Throw

Lauret Savoy

Now is the time to walk on water, supported above liquid depths by a frozen plain. This ice demands respect. I listen . . . again, look again; attentive to any k r a a ck or yielding to my weight.

Today Leverett Pond’s surface is more solid than a hardwood dance floor, and much thicker. Skaters glide along the distant southern shore or gather in spinning clusters. A lone ice-fishing hut sits to the north. Dark centers of drilled holes mark yesterday’s chosen spots.

Stand still with me. Listen. Ga-loop. A distant plo-o-rp. A muffled gal-oosh. Water undulates beneath ice and us.

It is another cloudless February day. At 3 p.m. sunlight seems to emanate from above and below, as if raying through the crystalline lattice underfoot. Kneeling with my eyes a few inches from the surface, I lose any sense of depth, of refracted distance, to a sense of motion arrested. Air bubbles halt in mid-ascent. One, two, three white oak leaves lie within the ice as if on invisible descending steps. They are suspended for a time above the lake bottom. Resembling fossils—though they’ll likely never make it that far.

The recent past lies beneath me; these marcescent leaves plucked and carried here by January’s heavy winds. Just inches away, they are out of reach. I kneel in the next stratum.

Ice’s edge, Leverett Pond, western Massachusetts.
Photo by Lauret Savoy.

I am thinking about time, not as an abstract idea but of how its passage, of how memory of any form, becomes inscribed upon the land. I was told at the age of five that even the smallest pebble contains the history of the world. Told this while I held a tiger-eye that glowed as if on fire. So this I believed, and my bedroom drawers quickly filled with stones.

I first unearthed fossils from outcrops in a college geology field course. My hammer edge split apart bedding planes of shale to reveal a burial ground of an ancient sea. Brachiopods, trilobites, crinoids, bryozoa—all invertebrates, all broken. The professor’s casual, over the shoulder, “That’s a death assemblage” did not diminish the magic. Mine were the first eyes to behold this scene formed perhaps 450 million years earlier. But I held only one small piece of the archive of life and death on Earth, not the entire history of the world.

It’s a fragmentary archive to be sure; not every species that lived is fossilized. And preserved bodily remains are only one part of what we call the fossil record. Trace fossils, for instance, are forms left by movement or activity. Trails crawled, burrows dug, tunnels excavated; in search of food, at rest, in hiding. The German word lebensspur, “life mark,” seems fitting.

Those in the fossil business often speak of “bias”: preservation bias, collector bias, bias due to incompleteness of the rock record. The paths that once-living organisms—whether clams or dinosaurs—embark on to become fossils, few rarely complete. Decay or disintegration destroys more than not. Then, too, paleontologists tended to collect fossils that were accessible rather than remote. More collections came from loose sediment than solid rock. And, the rocks exposed at Earth’s surface do not chronicle all of Earth’s past.

Third-graders with scissors would have liked helping James Gilluly show this in 1969. Then in his 70s, and as ever the independent scientist, Gilluly cut apart large geologic maps of North and South America. The maps displayed each continent’s bedrock and sedimentary cover in colored patterns based on age. He cut out and separated each patterned area. Then Miss Vertie Smith, whom he called “a skilled chemist of the U.S. Geological Survey,” weighed each age-heap of map fragments. From these weights Gilluly estimated continental outcrop area of different-aged rocks. However crude the approach, these snipped-apart maps gave a “rough measure” of the diminishing completeness of the geologic record with the passage of time. Gilluly recognized a crucial aspect of Earth’s past. Not just that younger rocks buried older rocks, but that younger rocks largely came to be by “cannibalizing of the older.” Earth’s material completeness was impossible. Tectonic upheavals and unending erosion saw to that. We’ve always lived among relics and ruins of former worlds.

We also are all potential fossils. But the geologic odds are against our mortal remains withstanding the sequence of preservation ifs over millennia. Post-mortem transitions from biosphere to lithosphere guarantee nothing. Eluding decay is only the first step.

What remains of our lives in the passage of time? Where are memories kept?

Leverett’s stone walls.
Photo by Lauret Savoy.

I live in a landscape of moved stone. The bedrock of these long, low hills in western Massachusetts formed as deep metamorphosed roots of long-vanished mountains. To geologists the most reasonable approximation of that distant past, when uplift yielded to relentless erosion, is well over 300 million years ago. Then, only yesterday in geologic time, the Pleistocene ice sheet dumped a chaotic jumble from boulders to mud that had been plucked up and entrained in its southward advance. This till mantles much of Leverett’s lowlands.

Cobbles and boulders—of gneiss and schist, quartzite and granite—were also moved by human hands. Most common are rock structures built by European colonists and their descendants who, after displacing native peoples, changed a native landscape. One can find cellar holes of homes and barns, remnants of mill dams and raceways, boundary markers, wells. Most ubiquitous, though, are the stone walls that thread Leverett’s woodlands.

Leverett’s stone walls.
Photo by Lauret Savoy.

Glacial till does not make ideal farmland. As settlers cleared forests, they hauled and stacked stones. Walls marked the edges of crop fields, hay fields, and grazing pastures. Preceding a summer’s harvest of grain was an early spring harvest of stone, frozen and thawed, frozen and thawed upward by inches to the field’s surface. “Two stones to one dirt,” one early Leverett homesteader supposedly put it. To this I can attest each spring when we turn the garden soil.

Stone walls are lebensspuren, life marks. Of rocky, marginal landscapes cleared for farming two centuries ago. Of a merino sheep boom that radiated from Vermont in the 1810s, and went bust three decades later.

Patterns in the woods today, the ages and shapes of conifers and hardwoods, are also life marks. They give clear evidence of a forest resurging after farmland was abandoned. I try to remember Tom Wessels’s lessons of forensic ecology to read these changes in a field and forest mosaic.

Returning home from the pond, just a stone’s throw away, I rest my hand on a dying Eastern red cedar. Now deep in the forest, this tree began its life in the full warm sun of an old field. Through such tangible traces, I can imagine back across two centuries. But I can’t reach or feel the life breath of that time.

Woods reclaim abandoned field.
Photo by Lauret Savoy.

One day has passed. Now a huge nor’easter envelops the region. A TV reporter in New York City says this will be “another storm of the century.” Four inches of snow are on the ground here by sunset; at least two more feet in the forecast.

I walk again on the pond. Time and space intermingle on such a night. Crystalline water defines the world, underfoot and overhead. So thick are the flakes, swept sideways by the north wind, I at first inhale as much snow as air. Footprints left 40 yards back have already disappeared.

Trace. As a noun, a way or path. A course of action. Footprint or track. Vestige of a former presence. An impression. Minute amount. As a verb, to make one’s way. To pace or step. To travel through. To discern. To mark or draw. To follow tracks or footprints. To follow, pursue.

Many pathways to the past converge.

I often ask my students to pause and consider several questions as we explore the environmental history of this country.

What is our relationship to the past? Is the past over?

What is memory? Can it be owned?

How do we know what we (think we) know?

Who are “we”?

“Why don’t you have us read the books with the answers?” sometimes comes in response.

The inquirer wants texts that present a tidy, unchanging, official story. A complete chronological picture that highlights the important names and dates—preferably told in an omniscient third-person voice from above. No matter that the presented picture may be a somewhat petrified single dimension. Or, if two-sided, the wrongness of one view meant to emphasize the rightness of the other. No ifs, ands, or buts make facts easier to memorize. I had read many of these books in school.

As much as some students wish it, we can’t retrieve an unaltered, intact history from repositories of the past. Documentary records, like records of Earth’s past, are fragments. Their existence is not a matter of unbiased preservation or re-collection. No single or simple narrative can claim the authority of history, or of collective memory. Think of the Second World War.

Holocaust. Manzanar. Enola Gay.

On one level these are just words. Burnt sacrifice. Apple orchard. The name of a pilot’s mother. But each is heavily weighted, its meaning dependent on one’s perspective and memory.

Citizens of Germany, Poland, Austria, Israel, and the United States do not remember or memorialize the same version of the Holocaust.

Manzanar War Relocation Center, in California’s Owens Valley, was one of several internment camps to incarcerate Japanese American citizens and resident “aliens” during the war. Manzanar National Historic Site is the first of the camps to open as an interpretive center under the National Park Service. Controversy has accompanied every step. Many Americans struggle with commemorating forced exile as part of a “collective national memory.”

The Smithsonian Institution had planned to mark the 50th anniversary of the war’s end with an exhibit of the B-29 that dropped the first atomic bomb, on Hiroshima, on August 6, 1945. Curators hoped to ask visitors to consider, among other things, the consequences of using “the” bomb. But veterans and other powerful lobbying groups condemned the plan for its alleged pro-Japanese bias and lack of patriotism. Pressured by intense criticism and Congressional threats to its funding, the Smithsonian in the end omitted any historical context from the actual exhibit. Visitors read of the bomb only in reference weapons technology.

In order to remember, one must also forget. Otherwise each of us would drown in a sea of every detail of every experience of every day of our lives. To make sense of things, to function—to gain retrospect—we must forget, and instead sort what remains in memory. To remember—re-member—is to piece together constituent parts toward some whole. Re-membering is selecting, arranging, interpreting. “The memory is a living thing,” noted Eudora Welty, “it too is in transit.”

Marc Augé writes of “oblivion” as loss of remembrance. Oblivion crafts memories “as the outlines of the shore are created by the sea.” The sea erodes, remodels. Our remembrances are outlined by the traces of what once was, crafted by what we have forgotten.

Groups of people also sort, arrange, and discern patterns of experience through time. By attributing significance to some events, they construct narratives to make sense of their past and their lives. It is here that forgetting has a more troubling side. With so many peoples making America, no single “we” can possibly suffice. For some social memories or historical narratives to be prominent or privileged can require an amnesia or silencing of others. These may be discordant experiences of other people of the same time or event, or they may be what Jacquelyn Dowd Hall calls “unacceptable ghosts of our own pasts.”

Where does the boundary between then and now lie? In so many ways “the past” is not securely or safely past. What is considered important to remember (and how to remember) may be transmitted from one generation to another, as history, as memory, as artifact. But it is in the present where acknowledging and interpreting the past occurs, in response to the concerns and needs of today. Current forms of public remembrance, even of events long past, reveal much about ourselves now, our politics, our society.

Gettysburg National Military Park in winter.
Photo courtesy GettysburgDaily.com.

A few months ago I visited Gettysburg National Military Park. My last time there, when I was 16, the park service presented the battle by troop movements each day, by land held or lost. The round tops, Cemetery Ridge, Seminary Ridge, the Wheatfield, Peach Orchard, Devil’s Den. This bloodiest battle was depicted as a turning point in the Civil War, but no account offered why the Blue and Grey went to war. Now the new visitor center situates the battle within the context of the war, the war within the context of slavery, and slavery within the context of this nation’s life past to present. Now, in the public history, three days in July 1863 do not stand isolated from what came before or from who we, as Americans, are.

Loren Eiseley wrote in The Immense Journey that we are denied the dimension of time, so rooted are we in our particular now. From this circumscribed pinpoint of time, we cannot in person step back or forward. I could not touch an oak leaf in ice—nor could I hold the history of the world in a piece of shale.

But back we gaze. We try to re-member; we write and tell history. A single “what happened” will never be possible, though, for Earth’s deep time or for our many pasts to present.

These thoughts relieve an hour’s cold stings on my cheeks as I return home near a path hidden by deepening snow.

A Few Readings of Interest

NEXT: “Craft and Context” by Mark Sofield >>

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Successional Urbanism

Interview by Galina Tachieva

About Architect and Town Planner Andrés Duany

Andrés Duany.
Photo courtesy Galina Tachieva.

Andrés Duany is a founding principal at Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company (DPZ). DPZ is widely recognized as a leader of the New Urbanism, an international movement that seeks to end suburban sprawl and urban disinvestment. In the years since the firm first received recognition for the design of Seaside, Florida, in 1980, DPZ has designed and built hundreds of successful new towns, suburban retrofits, regional plans, and downtown revitalization projects. This work has exerted a significant influence on the practice and direction of urban planning and development in the United States and abroad.

Goodbee Square in Goodbee, Louisiana, is a new town designed in 2008 by DPZ that expands on Thomas Jefferson’s planning technique of civic squares accessible by every lot. The squares are also utilized for natural drainage.
Image courtesy Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company.

Interview

Galina Tachieva: Can you summarize the big topics that are on your mind today? What about some short-term actions we can take as urban thinkers and doers?

Andrés Duany: We at Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company have been engaging many of those topics, and are in the midst of writing a book to be called Lean Urbanism. Big things changed on a permanent basis around the 2007 meltdown; many of the false premises that guided American urban planning seem almost comical today, while, in fact, in the past they had the dignity of seeming tragic. One of the most interesting topics is identifying another set of appropriate models. Our current thesis is studying the great American continental expansion of the latter half of the 19th century, when thousands of towns and cities were founded in the absence of financing. We must understand what allowed that and what makes it seem impossible today. Among the constituent elements are a very light hand of government and, often, management genius—as well as normative patterns like the continental survey, the town grid, etc. But the key element is successional urbanism. Start small at the inauguration, and later build well, culminating in the climax condition of the magnificent cities of the 1920s. By contrast, for the past 15 years or so, planners have been going straight to the climax condition, bypassing the inaugural condition and successional stages of urban molting. We need to develop protocols for every level—financial, administrative, and cultural—that will allow successional planning to occur again. Those are the big things.

Butler buildings at Alys Beach, a DPZ-planned community on the Florida panhandle, may serve as shopfronts.
Image courtesy Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company.

Some of the small things, then: I am fascinated by the potential of large and small blocks to allow decisions subsequent to those by the planner. In other words, questioning the orthodoxy that the small block is always better. It is exciting that since the meltdown, there is an open window to question, not just the orthodoxies of sprawl, but also the orthodoxies of New Urbanism.

Galina Tachieva: Why is it important to talk about and further develop Lean Urbanism?

Andrés Duany: Some of the conditions we find ourselves in are permanent. Even when the effects of the real estate bubble are overcome, what is revealed is an underlying impoverishment. We are no longer the fantastically wealthy nation that we had been since the Second World War, in which we could implement simpleminded ideas and then proceed to mitigate them by throwing money at them. The primary wasteful idea is the building of very high-grade highway infrastructure, not just for inter-city commerce, but also for securing quite ordinary things. Taking an arterial to get a cup of coffee at Starbucks is now conventional. This posits an urbanism in which it is assumed every adult will purchase a car because it is a prerequisite for a viable social and economic life. This is an astoundingly profligate conceit, and one quite unfair to the 50 percent or so Americans who don’t drive because they are too young, too old, or too poor to have access to a car. We can no longer even pretend to afford that kind of thing.

Galina Tachieva: You are working currently on a multi-volume treatise called Heterodoxia Architectonica. What is its relevance to urban planning theory and practice?

Andrés Duany: Heterodoxia is intended to be a hobby. Collecting the Classical Orders of the last 300 years, recording them in plates, and developing a theory to explain them is, to me, the equivalent of becoming a birdwatcher or stamp collector. The analytical tools of architecture are applicable to both planning and studying architecture, but the intention is to avoid overlap. I will admit that in my work, I am unfortunately becoming rather fascinated by the whole field of classical architecture, and may cross the threshold from what is a hobby and enter the realm of professionalism.

Galina Tachieva: What do you see for the New Urbanism movement in the next decade or so?

Andrés Duany: The New Urbanism movement is now old enough to have a history. It has evolved as a result of external driving forces. The New Urbanism began as essentially market-oriented, when, after Seaside, it turned out many people wanted to live in walkable, diverse places and the developers were not yet providing them.

The second phase was when NIMBYism arose, like a storm, and people wanted no more of the traffic and imbecilic development. They could not precisely identify the problem, but instinctually hated it. The New Urbanism bonded with NIMBYism as part of the solution and not part of the problem as we, too, were critical of conventional development. Together with the public participation process, the principles of the CNU Charter provided an explanation for the failure of the promise of sprawl, and an alternative model, and it still does.

The Tipping Point, a multifunctional building and diner, serves as one of Hampstead, Alabama’s “third places”.
Photo courtesy Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company.

The third phase was driven by health concerns. It began with the scientific proof that the sedentary and socially isolated lifestyle required by sprawl caused problems for both physical and emotional health.

The fourth phase coincided with the emergence of environmentalism as the principal political movement of our time. The New Urbanism, with its compact, walkable, transit-ready patterns, is inherently sustainable, and integral to the environmental movement.

What the future holds is based on both the failure of the New Urbanism to become pervasive and the failure of environmentalism to succeed as it should have. Environmentalism is somehow always on the defensive. I believe this is because the environmental movement has only half of the tools—those of nature: preserving nature, restoring nature, the wetlands, forests, and so forth—while lacking the other half of the tools, which are the urban and cultural one that the New Urbanism offers. The entire Transect, from wilderness to urban core—from the Adirondack Parks to Manhattan, and everything in between—must be assessed for its environmental performance. I think the evolution of the New Urbanism lies in its absorption by the environmental movement and the imperatives of climate change.

Galina Tachieva: Are the Millennials as revolutionary in their thinking and doing of urbanism as they are claiming to be?

Andrés Duany: We don’t know enough about Millennials yet—whether their personalities have been permanently formed by their rather too benevolent parents, or by the biases and gaps in their education, or whether it is something intrinsic to the infinite Internet. We don’t know what the consequences will be of growing up with the endless and futile wars in the Middle East, the limits of the terrible recession, plus the stubborn inability of the baby boomers to cede power. We really don’t know what they are like yet. In my opinion, they are so far a little too polite, a little too tolerant, and entirely too allergic to becoming workaholics. The 60s hold lessons for them that they seem to acknowledge, but they miss the anger and the passion and, may I say, the sense of anarchism.

An Airstream food truck at the Seaside town center, which has incubated all sorts of enterprises in movable, one-story structures.
Photo courtesy Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company.

Galina Tachieva: What is your advice for young urban planners who want to devote their careers to the betterment of the built environment? Should they be optimistic or just learn other skills?

Andrés Duany: The best skills for an urban planner are difficult to learn from books and photographs, in the manner that architecture can be learned. Urbanism can be learned only by experiencing places, by visiting them and spending days there observing how people use their environments day and night, and then figuring out what makes things work.

This involves not just looking, but measuring and really thinking about, for example, work hours, locations of schools, and so on. The list of relevant factors is literally endless. There is nothing remotely as important as travel for an urban planner’s education. The only thing that needs to be learned is how to see—to really understand—not just look, and to be intelligently critical about what works and what doesn’t. One of the most disappointing things to me is the number of urbanists who admire a place like, say, Austin, confusing urban vitality with the existence of a hundred bars.

Going to planning school has been, until recently, a really dreadful idea. The most confused people I know are the middle-aged educated planners. It would be much better to have studied geography, which combines the natural with the social. Geography, that now very unfashionable subject, is the second-best education for a planner, after travel.

Successional urbanism: the six Transect zones and the successional nature of urbanism. Click image to view larger version.
Image by Eusebio Azcue, courtesy Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company.

Galina Tachieva: You are a well-known skeptic about the efficacy of scientific data and metrics for changing human behavior toward more sustainable trends. What is it that will make people build and live in settlements that are good for the environment and humanity?

Andrés Duany: I am not a skeptic. I am skeptical of metrics as science. They are currently deployed as political tools to induce or persuade people of a desirable outcome. Metrics won’t help your planning—as they’ve become virtually relativistic today. You must have principles such as those of the CNU Charter or propositions such as models, like Portland, and then test them against the metrics.

Galina Tachieva: What’s next for Andrés Duany?

Andrés Duany: We’re busy with our nonprofit, the Center for Applied Transect Studies. We’re working on version 10 of the SmartCode. It’s a Transect-based model development code, free for municipalities or developers to download and calibrate, and v10 will be a significant update, incorporating what we’ve learned about coding over the last 10 years. We’ll have at least a draft of it to present at CNU in May.

We’re also finishing the production of a book to be called The Transect, a compilation of essays and images that will be the definitive resource on the Rural-to-Urban Transect. The essays cover the development of the theory and its application in practice, written by some of the foremost authorities in our field. It will also have an extensive, nearly comprehensive collection of Transect images drawn by many hands over the years, even predating the formal concept. We’ll include an image with this interview that’s a beautiful drawing by Eusebio Azcue—an eloquent illustration of several ideas related to the Transect. On one hand it shows examples of the six Transect zones, but at the same time it shows the successional nature of urbanism, as we discussed earlier. It also shows how the many elements of urbanism change over time and by T-Zone—not just building types, but also frontages, setbacks, thoroughfares, landscaping, fences, sidewalks, lighting. It even helps understand the typical size of the T-Zones. The perspective is from the same place in each panel, but as they progress the buildings narrow the view, so you see a smaller area. That’s accurate, because the more natural zones of T1 and T2 are usually much larger than the others. It really is an amazing image.

Header and home page image of New Town St. Charles, Missouri courtesy Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company.

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Conserving the Biodiversity of
Massachusetts in a Changing World

Henry Woolsey, Andy Finton, James DeNormandie, and Sarah Haggerty

BioMap2 is designed to guide strategic biodiversity conservation in Massachusetts over the next decade by focusing land protection and stewardship on the areas that are most critical for ensuring the long-term persistence of rare and other native species and their habitats, exemplary natural communities, and a diversity of ecosystems. BioMap2 is also designed to include the habitats and species of conservation concern identified in the State Wildlife Action Plan. Click image to view interactive map.
Graphic courtesy Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife.

Although Massachusetts is a small state, it is extremely varied. From the beaches and salt marshes of Cape Cod, to the forests and ridgetops of the Taconic Mountains, the Commonwealth supports a remarkable diversity of plant and animal species and natural ecosystems. These ecosystems serve critical ecological and societal functions by purifying water, cleaning the air, providing a wide range of food and forest products, and enhancing the quality of life in Massachusetts.

At the same time, native species and ecosystems across the Commonwealth face unprecedented threats. As the third most densely populated state in the nation, development continues to eliminate and fragment important habitats. Traffic volume has increased over time causing a rise in wildlife mortality, and invasive species continue to displace native plants and animals. Meanwhile, the emerging effects of climate change threaten complete disruption of the natural systems our native species depend on. In light of these threats, there is a critical need to protect the state’s biological diversity and ensure that ecosystems across Massachusetts remain viable.

BioMap2 provides a framework for protection and stewardship of those lands and waters that are most important for conserving the diversity of native plants and animals in Massachusetts. It was created to identify critically important species habitats and intact ecosystems across the state that, if protected, will enhance ecological resilience to climate change and other threats.

Aquatic core habitat identified in BioMap2 includes the Connecticut River.
Photo by Chris Buelow.

Massachusetts’ Biodiversity Conservation Vision

A Comprehensive Approach

In 2001 the Massachusetts Natural Heritage and Endangered Species Program (NHESP)—a program within the Division of Fisheries and Wildlife—produced the first conservation plan for Massachusetts that actually laid out a map of the areas needed to protect the state’s breadth of terrestrial plant and animal habitats. That plan was called BioMap, and it identified “Core Habitats” as the highest priority for protection, and “Supporting Natural Landscape” areas as additional targets to help protect the integrity of the core habitats. In 2003, Natural Heritage produced a companion plan, Living Waters, which focused on freshwater species and ecosystems by mapping important aquatic habitats and watersheds.

The BioMap and Living Waters plans and maps were widely accepted by the conservation community and were immediately used in land protection work across Massachusetts: public funding programs for land acquisition projects incorporated the BioMap into their ranking systems, towns incorporated it into their open space plans, and it was used to prioritize natural resource protection by state agencies, land trusts, and nonprofit organizations. Close to 72,000 acres identified as core habitat in 2001 were protected between the publication of BioMap and BioMap2, as well as 45,000 acres of supporting natural landscape. Combined, this represents nearly 70 percent of all lands protected by all entities between 2001 and 2010.

Roseate and common terns are identified as a critical species for related habitat protection in BioMap2.
Photo by Bill Byrne.

Massachusetts’ original BioMap plan was based on data collected prior to 2001. By 2010, more than 4,000 new and updated rare species records had been added to the Natural Heritage and Endangered Species Program’s database. Over that decade, enhanced understanding of species requirements had also led to improved habitat mapping for state-listed species by NHESP. In addition, researchers at The Nature Conservancy and UMass Amherst had continued to develop spatial analyses to define resilient ecosystems, applying the latest understanding of how to best ensure that natural systems are able to respond to changing climate. There had also been significant changes in land use, development, and other threats to native biodiversity over the years. In 2009, the Massachusetts Audubon Society released the 4th edition of Losing Ground, which shows that, outside of developed areas, over half of the remainder of Massachusetts was now either in the Sprawl Frontier or Sprawl Danger Zone.

Additionally, in 2005, the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife completed its comprehensive State Wildlife Action Plan (SWAP) documenting the status of Massachusetts wildlife and providing recommendations to help guide wildlife conservation decision-making. The SWAP includes all the wildlife species listed under the Massachusetts Endangered Species Act (MESA), as well as more than 80 species that need conservation attention but do not meet the requirements for inclusion under the state Endangered Species Act. The SWAP document is organized around habitat types in need of conservation within the Commonwealth. While the original BioMap focused primarily on rare species protected under MESA, BioMap2 also addresses other species of conservation concern, their habitats, and the ecosystems that support them to create a map of most of the elements of SWAP.

Selection of forest core for BioMap2, identifying forest interior habitat: a) map of forest cover in Massachusetts, b) the same forests categorized by ecological integrity, c) selection of highest integrity forests across the state, and d) final selection based on size thresholds in each ecoregion.
Image courtesy Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife.

For BioMap2, the Department of Fish and Game and the Division of Fisheries and Wildlife—primarily through the NHESP—worked closely with the Nature Conservancy to build on the success of the initial BioMap and Living Waters biodiversity conservation plans, and to implement the State Wildlife Action Plan. The result is an enhanced, updated, and more comprehensive BioMap using innovative GIS capabilities, improved biodiversity data, and increased biological expertise.

BioMap2: One Plan, Two Components

BioMap2 identifies two complementary spatial (geographic) “footprints”: core habitat and critical natural landscape. Core habitat identifies key areas that are critical for the long-term persistence of rare species and other species of conservation concern, as well as a wide diversity of natural communities and intact ecosystems across the Commonwealth. Protection of core habitats will help protect these specific species, natural communities, and habitats.

Critical natural landscape identifies large natural landscape blocks that are minimally impacted by development. If protected, these areas will provide habitat for wide-ranging native species, support intact ecological processes, maintain connectivity among habitats, and enhance ecological resilience to natural and manmade disturbances in a rapidly changing world. Areas delineated as critical natural landscape also include some of the lands adjacent to wetland, coastal, and aquatic core habitats to help ensure their continued health.

Atlantic white cedar bogs such as this are a priority natural community in Massachusetts.
Photo by Chris Buelow.

The long-term persistence of Massachusetts’s biological resources requires a determined commitment to land and water conservation. Protection and stewardship of both critical natural landscapes and core habitats are needed to realize the biodiversity conservation vision of BioMap2.

Building a Better BioMap

The goal of the team behind BioMap2 was to build a readily accessible tool to guide land protection and stewardship for natural resource conservation in Massachusetts. To do this, the team first had to identify specific conservation objectives and determine which aspects of biodiversity should serve as conservation targets. Specific goals for rare and vulnerable species, natural communities, wetlands, rivers, forests, and landscapes were defined in order to prioritize areas critical for ensuring the long-term health of native species and ecosystems. This is essential for conserving the current biodiversity and for preparing for the largely unknown changes coming in the future from climate change and other threats.

BioMap2 employs a combination of fine-filter and coarse-filter approaches. The fine-filter approach targets the conservation needs of individual species, especially those that are currently rare or uncommon, as well as those that may be threatened in the coming decades. The coarse-filter approach focuses on conservation of natural communities, intact ecosystems, and unbroken landscapes. Conservation of these systems will ensure that the vast majority of species are effectively protected, and that natural ecosystem functions, such as habitat connectivity and water purification, are maintained.

An example of Atlantic white cedar bogs delineated using aerial photographs and on-the-ground data collection.
Image courtesy Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife.

The selection and mapping of BioMap2 core habitats and critical natural landscapes involved identifying and mapping each conservation target, and ensuring they were well represented across the state. Each species, natural community, ecosystem, and landscape target was carefully mapped using innovative techniques to highlight those areas least impacted by development, and thus most likely to support biodiversity over time. The completed core habitats and critical natural landscapes were brought together under a single conservation plan: BioMap2.

Putting BioMap2 to Use

BioMap2 Components

Core Habitat

Core Habitat consists of 1,242,000 acres that are critical for the long-term persistence of rare species and other species of conservation concern, as well as a wide diversity of natural communities and intact ecosystems across the Commonwealth.

The greatest contributor to the loss of critical habitats and intact ecosystems in Massachusetts has been the direct destruction of habitat by residential, commercial, and industrial development.
Photo by Bill Byrne.

Species of Conservation Concern include 475 species that are directly mapped in BioMap2. There are 413 species listed under the Massachusetts Endangered Species Act and an additional 62 non-listed species that were directly mapped in BioMap2. The directly mapped species totals are nine mammal, 50 bird, 15 reptile, seven amphibian, 27 fish, 111 invertebrate, and 256 plant species.

Priority Natural Communities include natural communities with limited distribution—regionally or globally—and the best examples documented of more common types such as old-growth tracts of widespread forest types. There are 782 examples of 94 different types of priority and exemplary natural community types included in BioMap2. Natural communities are defined as interacting assemblages of plant and animal species that share a common environment and occur together repeatedly on the landscape. Conservation of these areas will support the persistence of numerous characteristic common as well as rare species within Massachusetts.

Aquatic Cores identify core habitat for fish species of conservation concern and other aquatic species of conservation concern. In addition to various rivers and streams, a 30-meter band around each river segment is mapped, as well as wetlands that are wholly or partially contained within the band. The resulting aquatic cores are designed to protect ten MESA-listed fish, 17 non-listed fish, as well as 145 MESA-listed species with all or a portion of their life cycle in aquatic habitats.

In BioMap2 core habitat, over 92,000 acres of intact freshwater wetland ecosystems are mapped as wetland cores, of which 49 percent remain unprotected.
Image courtesy Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife.

Wetland Cores identify the most intact wetlands within less-developed landscapes—those generally with intact upland buffers, little fragmentation, and minimally disturbed by other stressors associated with roads and development. These wetlands, selected across a diversity of ecological settings, are most likely to support critical wetland functions (i.e., natural hydrologic conditions, diverse plant and animal habitats, etc.) and are most likely to maintain these functions into the future. All wetland priority natural communities are also included as part of wetland cores.

Vernal Pool Cores identify the top 5 percent most interconnected clusters of potential vernal pools. Each cluster of pools is buffered to create vernal pool habitat areas to target for conservation that includes the pools themselves and the surrounding habitat to allow for successful breeding, dispersal, overwintering, foraging, and migration. Targeting clusters of vernal pools, rather than only individual pools, will maximize the resistance and resilience of vernal pool habitats and their resident species in the context of climate change.

Forest Cores identifiy the best examples of large, intact forests that are least impacted by roads and development, providing critical “forest interior” habitat for numerous woodland species. Forest core minimum sizes range from about 500 acres in eastern Massachusetts and major river valleys, to over 2,000 acres in the western Massachusetts highlands.

Critical Natural Landscape

Critical Natural Landscape consists of 1,783,000 acres complementing and in many cases overlapping core habitat, including large natural landscape blocks and buffering uplands around coastal, wetland and aquatic core habitats to help ensure their long-term integrity.

Because the landscapes and wildlife of Massachusetts are integrally connected to surrounding states, BioMap2 was developed in the context of regional landscape patterns, as shown here.
Image courtesy Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife.

Landscape Blocks provide habitat for wide-ranging native species, support intact ecological processes, maintain connectivity among habitats, and enhance ecological resilience. They are large areas of intact and predominately natural vegetation, consisting of contiguous forests, wetlands, rivers, lakes, and ponds, as well as coastal habitats such as barrier beaches and salt marshes. Pastures and power line rights-of-way, which are less intensively altered than most developed areas, are also included since they provide habitat and connectivity for many species. Different size thresholds were used to select the largest landscape blocks in certain ecoregions.

Foraging Habitat for Tern Species identifies the offshore habitat used by MESA-listed roseate, Arctic, common, and least terns when foraging for food.

Upland Buffers of Wetland Cores identify upland areas adjacent to all wetland cores. If protected, these upland areas will help support the functioning of each wetland over the long term.

Upland Buffers of Aquatic Cores identify upland areas adjacent to all aquatic cores. If protected, these upland areas will help protect river, stream, lake, and pond habitat over the long-term.

Upland Habitat to Support Coastal Adaptation identify upland areas adjacent to salt marshes where these habitats might move to as sea levels rise. Undeveloped lands adjacent to and up to one and a half meters above existing salt marsh elevations are identified, and included as part of critical natural landscape given their high potential to support inland migration of salt marsh and other coastal habitats over the coming century.

The ecoregions of Massachusetts were used to select ecosystems across a diversity of ecological settings.
Image courtesy Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife.

Ecoregions

Ecoregions are geographic areas with similar topography, geology, and predominant vegetation, and therefore represent areas of relatively homogeneous ecological setting. The ecoregions of Massachusetts were used to select ecosystems across a diversity of ecological settings, and are (from west to east): Taconic Mountains, Western New England Marble Valleys, Berkshire Plateau, Connecticut River Valley, Worcester Plateau, Boston Basin and Southern New England Coastal, Bristol and Narragansett Lowlands, and Cape Cod and Islands.

Land Protection

Land protection is a crucial tool to protect the biodiversity values defined by BioMap2; however, it will not be possible to protect the entire BioMap2 area in the near term. Thoughtful local, regional, and statewide land-use planning will complement direct land protection in safeguarding these areas and supporting human communities that rely on our state’s natural resources. In addition to differences in scale, core habitat and  critical natural landscape differ in the amount of human impact each can tolerate and still retain their important habitat values. Simple land protection may be the best conservation strategy within most areas of core habitat, but extensive landscape blocks (found in the critical natural landscape) will support moderate levels of compatible human use such as timber harvesting in working forests and specific agricultural practices. This allows more flexibility in the types of land protection tools available for preserving biodiversity within critical natural landscape.

Conservation groups—including local land trusts, statewide nonprofits, government agencies, and municipalities—have their own goals and criteria for conservation. Prioritization for protection among core habitat areas and critical natural landscapes will depend on the overall goals and objectives of each conservation organization. For example, an organization intent on protecting vernal pool habitat could target areas within core habitat delineated for that specific habitat type. An organization intent on maintaining landscape level processes, such as a watershed conservation association or town-based conservation group, may target critical natural landscape. BioMap2 is a flexible tool to allow individual conservation entities to further their specific conservation goals.

BioMap2 can contribute to improved conservation planning, increased coordination among conservation groups and government officials, and more effective biodiversity conservation. Often, by necessity, land conservationists find themselves reacting to immediate crises, whether the imminent construction of 50 houses in a favorite forest or a family needing to sell its woodlands to settle an estate. Using BioMap2 to develop and target protection priorities proactively, before a crisis emerges, can facilitate more efficient use of limited conservation dollars.

In addition to biodiversity protection, there are many other reasons to protect land from development, such as protecting drinking water supplies, providing recreational opportunities, and preserving aesthetic and cultural landscapes. Coupling biodiversity protection efforts with these concerns strengthens public support for land conservation overall and develops broader and more effective constituencies. Incorporating BioMap2 core habitats and critical natural landscapes into municipal open space and recreation plans, for example, can help communities to discover overlapping reasons to focus on particular areas.

Stewardship and Restoration of Biodiversity

Although the economic pressure to develop natural land in parts of Massachusetts has slowed recently, land protection continues to remain an important focus for many conservation organizations, agencies, and municipalities. However, management of land and water, and ecological restoration of habitats are also critical components of biodiversity conservation. Some species require active management by humans for their habitats to persist, either because the natural ecological processes that support biodiversity have been disrupted or because humans have encroached upon and altered the habitats of native species.

More than 80 species of mammals occur in Massachusetts. BioMap2 forest cores, wetland cores, and landscape blocks include 1,511,000 acres likely to provide high-quality habitats in much of the state for terrestrial mammals of conservation concern including larger, wide-ranging mammals such as moose, black bears, and bobcat. Approximately 53 percent of the total terrestrial mammal habitat mapped is currently unprotected.
Photo by Bill Byrne.

In the past, dynamic ecosystems and important natural disturbances, such as flooding, storms, or wildfires, created conditions many different species were dependent on. With the current density of human development in the state, formerly dynamic systems are now constrained by roads, commercial and residential development, and other infrastructure, rendering the landscape more static and biodiversity less resilient. But by restoring ecological processes, habitat management can often restore the specific conditions required by different species or natural communities.

Other challenges to biodiversity, including the introduction of invasive species, habitat fragmentation from roads and dams, and alterations to stream flow, also require active management. Innovative strategies—such as invasive species control, dam removal, culvert replacement and improvement, and removal of tidal flow restrictions—are necessary to abate these problems.

BioMap2: Into the Future

BioMap2 builds on the original statewide conservation plans and the State Wildlife Action Plan to prioritize and guide biodiversity conservation in Massachusetts in the context of continued development and the anticipated effects of climate change. It is based on the latest survey information and spatial analyses available, and it identifies the areas of highest conservation value for a wide variety of plants, animals, and natural systems. Working together, with BioMap2 as a roadmap, we can protect the natural heritage of Massachusetts for years to come.

Resources

References

Header photo and home page photo of moose by Bill Byrne.

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ARTerrain Gallery

For most of her life, Kate Protage has been a wanderer. Growing up, she and her family lived in more than 18 different places of suburban sprawl. As an adult, she shifted toward more urban environments, but continued the same pattern of movement. Despite her best efforts, she’s never traveled light—the hobo’s stick from the fairytales was, in her case, a large moving van full of comfortable furniture, hundreds of shoes, and boxes upon boxes of canvases. Along the way, she earned a BA in studio art from Smith College and an MFA in painting with academic distinction from Pratt Institute. She then moved to Seattle, her home for the past eight years.

Somewhere in between, Kate cultivated a decade-long career in marketing, but over time she found her way back to painting. Flashes of the perfect composition crept back into her head until the desire to paint again became so strong that she quit her corporate job and set up a studio. Today, Kate is a full-time artist who regularly shows her work at galleries in San Francisco, Philadelphia, Princeton, New York, and Seattle. In Seattle, she does her best to keep up with the resourceful gallery team at the Seattle Art Museum’s Sales and Rental Gallery. Her artwork has recently been included in three books: The Better Bombshell, an anthology in which writers and artists redefine the female role model, Look Up Here: Five Years of NW Urban and Contemporary Art by Bherd Studios Gallery, and Painted Landscapes: Contemporary Views by art consultant Lauren P. Della Monica (due May 2013).

Kate’s work is a reflection of the love/hate relationship that she has had with the cities in which she has lived. Depending on the time of day, there are two worlds that exist in the same physical space: streets that appear gritty, dirty and depressing by day turn into an environment infused with a strange kind of lush, dark beauty and romance at night. These are the moments that remind her that there is still beauty in the world, despite all of the chaos that surrounds us. Painting these moments is Kate’s minor act of rebellion.

Her process hints at a slightly obsessive, meticulous nature. The drawings underneath her paintings can take days to create; yellow ochre lines get repeatedly drawn and wiped out until she’s satisfied with the composition. Once down, the carefully blocked forms and shapes eventually turn into something else. Layers of paint that are transparent and opaque, thick and thin are applied one after another, back and forth, until everything overlaps and interacts. Intense colors, shapes, and textures develop out of a process that can sometimes look loose, but is in fact highly controlled.

While Kate’s paintings are rooted in the real, it is the junction between sensation and fact that interests her. Her paintings are meant to exist in that grey area between representation and abstraction, where light and solid form are given equal consideration and are almost interchangeable. Recognizable objects become almost incidental—it is the detail of an individual shape, an expressive brush stroke, and the way that everything comes together that generates excitement. The moments may pass, but the feelings remain.

ARTerrain Gallery by Kate Protage

Hover over an image to see its details, or click image to view in larger format and begin slideshow:

View more artwork by Kate Protage at www.KateProtage.com.

All images in this ARTerrain Gallery are copyright © by Kate Protage. All rights reserved. No work may be used or reproduced without express written consent of the artist.

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Alison Hawthorne Deming Reviews
Through the Second Skin
Poems by Derek Sheffield

Through the Second Skin
Poems by Derek Sheffield
Orchises Press, 2013
96 Pages
ISBN 978-1932535280

Wallace Stevens wrote, “I am the necessary angel of earth, / Since, in my sight, you see the earth again.” It was a remarkable statement for a man who spent his days in the executive office of an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut. Of course, he spent time too contemplating the shoreline in Key West, Florida, so the earth did have a direct line to his poetic receptors. He understood too that the imagination, as well as the eyes, shape reality, that poetry—a kind of second sight that has made human beings keen to their surroundings throughout and before history—is “the supreme fiction.” Reality may be created in our minds, he might have said, but let’s make reality glorious.

Derek Sheffield, in his fine first book, does not invoke Stevens. He invokes Darwin, Schopenhauer, James Wright, Thomas Merton, Van Gogh, Robert Frost, and Zbigniew Herbert, among his artistic paramours. He invokes friends and neighbors and oystermen and firefighters shopping at “Mountain Sports.” His poetry allows no division between those who know the earth from studying it and those who know the earth from working it. Through the Second Skin is a book full of keen attentions to world and word, demonstrating a crafty formal intelligence and a gift for empathic seeing. And while Sheffield reaches to see through “Darwin’s Eyes,” as the book’s signature poem does, his work demonstrates that a poet’s eyes can become an instrument that refines and extends our seeing both outward and inward.

Birds command Sheffield’s attention. An ivory-billed woodpecker is “epic of air.” James Wright becomes conflated with a frail yellow warbler that “lay in my palm, thinning from its journey, / a breath of fierce light searching me / with one dark eye,” and the ornithology student finds that after dissecting specimens and giving “new vision / to a blackbird with two dabs of cotton,” the birds have gained dominion over his sensations.

                            . . . and when you walk out
               among the world’s perches and Latinate streaks
               at the edge of sight, the air is feathers
               measuring the bones of your face.

The precision of his observation, language, and lines mark a poet who has spent enough time with his craft to make attention to the page an analogue to attention to the world. Some lines are neat equations of juxtaposed images: “soft sparrow. Scaly talons” and “before Pepsi and the pyramids” and “for Sabbath and dialysis” and “against the sky. We are.” Taken out of context, they speak to me for the poet’s role in creating balance in a world that perpetually teeters on the fulcrum of danger and beauty, loss and abundance, the evanescence of life and its solidity.

Sheffield is equally keen at rendering field observation with finely honed description. Here are water striders

                                              . . . whose spidery,

         wire-thin limbs do not
                 pierce and sink, but press
         into being supple dimples,
                 and as they stir they talk

         in clear syllables, a jittery council
                 I can only watch.

And to what end, this observation and granting of agency to the allegedly insignificant? There is agency in every living thing. And if one can make the scale shift to know that, the human position in the marvel and mess of the whole becomes more clear and humble.

Attention too is paid to that register of being that’s probably the spur to all poetry—the inner questions that call for scrutiny, “the intersection of Eternity and Moment” that has troubled the philosophers of which Sheffield writes in “Holy Traffic at the Universal Gate.” This is a domain (“an axiological forest”) where words may accrete but in the end the poet’s summary can be to “let nothing / do the work that nothing can.”

Among my favorite poems in the collection are those populated by family and neighbors where anecdote serves as field for contemplation of and awakening to the weight of human responsibilities. In “The Ramp,” a man works to make accommodations, physical and emotional, to a grandfather’s disability and decline. In “Alice,” a woman reclaims her words after a stroke by putting Post-its all over her house—and thereby attempting to reclaim her world. And in “Near Wild Grasses” a man’s benign encounter with a rattlesnake turns into a wounded parable of how a man learns to become a father. No knee-jerk didacticism here, but a quiet moral intelligence built on observation and presence. Poetry this keenly engaged is enough to make me think that, as the supreme fiction, poetry is an instrument that just might have the power to keep the world in balance. “There is no question,” Sheffield writes, “we live by relations.” This is a book to be read and re-read in contemplation and admiration for the way it opens up the reflective space so many of us hunger for in a frenzied time.

NEXT: Corey Lewis Reviews The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place
Edited by Tom Lynch, Cheryll Glotfelty, and Karla Armbruster >>

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Corey Lewis Reviews
The Bioregional Imagination:
Literature, Ecology, and Place
Edited by Tom Lynch, Cheryll
Glotfelty, and Karla Armbruster

The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place
Edited by Tom Lynch, Cheryll Glotfelty, and Karla Armbruster
University of Georgia Press, 2012
440 Pages
ISBN 978-0820335926

As a bioregionalist living in northern California, and as a professor of environmental literature and writing, I expected (or was prepared to demand) great things from this collection. Fortunately, my expectations were soundly met. In their introduction to The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place, for example, the editors elegantly illustrate the wide variety of practices occurring in communities all over the world that are bioregional in nature, while providing a succinct and lucid history of how the bioregional philosophy and movement has evolved. Editors Tom Lynch, Cheryll Glotfelty, and Karla Armbruster note that early bioregionalists’ “motivation was to address matters of pressing environmental concern through a politics derived from a local sense of place, an approach they felt would effectively complement efforts on the national and international levels.” Following this same principle The Bioregional Imagination collects, from all over the map, a variety of local projects and perspectives, assembling them into a seamless whole, demonstrating that despite their variety they make up a unified practice following the same principles of sustainability.

The collection includes classics of bioregional thought, such as the “Where are you at?” quiz as well as an alternative version, “How you live?” that was revised to reflect more recent and urban bioregional perspectives. Important bioregional voices like David Robertson and Robert Thayer, and familiar places like the Columbia River Basin have also been included, providing a solid foundation in bioregional history and thought. Representative bioregional projects from around the United States range from John Lane’s “Still under the Influence: The Bioregional Origins of the Hub City Writers Project,” to Rinda West’s “Representing Chicago Wilderness,” and Kent Ryden’s “The Nature of Region: Russell Banks, New England, and New York.” This part of the anthology provides helpful introductory information on bioregionalism and an excellent sampling of important bioregional projects.

Then the book branches out, taking readers all the way to the outback of Australia, with Libby Robin’s “Seasons and Nomads: Reflections on Bioregionalism in Australia,” in which Robin demonstrates that in the Australian context a nomadic or migratory lifestyle may be much more sustainable than the traditional bioregional approach of localized “in-dwelling.” Other international perspectives include Serenella Iovino’s “Restoring the Imagination of Place: Narrative Reinhabitation and the Po Valley.” Now one of Europe’s most polluted fluvial areas, the Po Valley’s future depends in many ways, Iovino argues, on our ability “to imagine with a place,” rather than using our imagination as an act that is disconnected from it. Also included are the climate change concerns of bioregionalists in Alaska, Greenland, Iceland, and Canada’s High Arctic. Pavel Cenkl explores the work of both native and nonnative communities in this region in his essay “Reading Climate Change and Work in the Circumpolar North.” I found such breadth of coverage, so many varied international perspectives on bioregionalism, to be one of the many key strengths of the collection.

Bioregional approaches to teaching can also be found here, from Laurie Ricou’s demonstration of outdoor, field-based education in “Out of the Field Guide: Teaching Habitat Studies” to Laird Christensen’s discussion of online, graduate-level distance education in “Teaching Bioregional Perception—at a Distance.” And the important role environmental artists and authors have played in the movement is the focus of such essays as David Landis Barnhill’s “Critical Utopianism and Bioregional Ecocriticism” and Daniel Gustav Anderson’s “Critical Bioregionalist Method in Dune.” Bioregional readings of literature, such as “Figures of Life: Beverley Farmer’s The Seal Woman as an Australian Bioregional Novel,” or Heather Kerr’s “Melancholy Botany: Charlotte Smith’s Bioregional Poetic Imaginary” round out the anthology. A useful annotated list of bioregional books concludes the collection, summarizing 18 of the most well-known texts in the field.

This breadth of coverage, as well as the in-depth discussion of so many different types of bioregional projects, provides much to recommend The Bioregional Imagination to readers, students, scholars and teachers alike. I am confident we will see this collection grow to become a staple in our field, much like Glotfelty’s 1996 collection The Ecocriticism Reader. For anyone working in ecocriticism, environmental writing, or bioregional sustainability, it promises to be of much value, reaching classic status in the bioregional literature canon.

NEXT: Andrew C. Gottlieb Reviews The Natural Building Companion: A Comprehensive
Guide to Integrative Design and Construction, by Jacob Deva Racusin and Ace McArleton >>

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Andrew C. Gottlieb Reviews
The Natural Building Companion:
A Comprehensive Guide to Integrative
Design and Construction
By Jacob Dev Racusin and
Ace McArleton

The Natural Building Companion: A Comprehensive Guide to Integrative Design and Construction
By Jacob Deva Racusin and Ace McArleton
Chelsea Green, 2012
416 Pages
978-1603583398

For a long time, I didn’t consider myself a handyman. It sneaks up on you—this ability to build or fix things—one project at a time. But I’d never consider designing and building my own home. If I did, though, the first book I’d read is this one: The Natural Building Companion: A Comprehensive Guide to Integrative Design and Construction. Authors Jacob Deva Racusin and Ace McArleton have put together a thick, comprehensive, and attractive handbook covering almost all aspects of building—from an earth-first, environmentally-sound, considerate, socially and ecologically thoughtful approach.

My father—a man born and raised on a farm—taught me to use tools at a very young age, insisting (when I was probably seven) we build out of wood and chicken wire a cage for my pet hamster rather than buy a standard 10-gallon glass tank. After college, I found myself one summer standing high atop pump-jack scaffolding pounding nails on the new framing of my pal Nick’s soon-to-be post & beam house. Since then, I’ve learned to install lighting, swap outlets and switches, and frame-in and install doors. I’ve installed flooring, sheetrock, and toilets. My stepson recently needed a table for a school project, so together we built one.

The idea of building an entire house, though, is daunting for me. Handyman, maybe. General contractor? No. Perhaps that’s the fascination with books like Thoreau’s Walden. Or Tom Montgomery Fate’s Cabin Fever. These men who build cabins in the woods. Even if you want to tackle a small building, it doesn’t take too much reading to realize how unhealthy are some very common building practices and materials, for humans and the earth. Plywood is chemical-filled, potentially off-gassing for years. Pressure treated lumber? Don’t breathe the sawdust. PVC pipe? That’s polyvinyl chloride. The Wikipedia segment on PVC’s health issues is equally as large as the section simply defining what it is and how it’s commonly used.

What are Racusin and McArleton doing differently? They’re living and building in ways that take multiple dimensions of our world into account—not just the bottom line. They tell us, “the act of building should promote social and ecological health and well-being while creating structures that perform well in all weather conditions and are comfortable, beautiful, and long-lasting.” In case one thinks this might be a standard green-movement style tome, the authors reassure: while they support the industry efforts and movement of the United States Green Building Council (USGBC) and the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program, they believe these “do not dig deeply enough nor span broadly enough to address humanity’s ongoing and increasing challenges.”

So: there’s a difference between green building and natural building. As natural builders, the authors are asking questions like: Is a given building material toxic? What is the sensory experience for the folks using the material (i.e., is latex paint fun or healthy to use?). Does the material fit with the climactic demands, the local ecology, and the local vernacular building style? The final, and perhaps broadest question is if the materials used connect you to the planet. For instance, can you watch the straw grow in a farmer’s field that will eventually become the wall of your house?

The majority of the book focuses on the structural construction of a house. Framing styles, wall structure, foundations, insulation, heating, air movement, moisture control, plastering, roofs, finishes, coatings (paint). The chapters are dense. Lots of two-column text with color photos, diagrams, drawings. What’s impressive is the way the data is not prescriptive but descriptive and inclusive. There are three chapters on wall systems. How complicated is a wall one might ask? Studs and sheetrock? Racusin and McArleton know differently. They can create a straw-bale wall multiple ways. Insulation? Straw-clay, wood-chip clay, or cellulose. Natural mass-wall systems? It’s in here.

A question many readers will ask is: Why do this? Why consider straw instead of fiberglass insulation? The first five chapters of the book work to answer that. Besides the above questions on how building affects the earth, natural builders are aware of the embodied energy of a building material. Energy and its use creates and releases CO₂, affecting global warming, so knowing what energy you’re using is important. Using a “cradle-to-grave” measure, the authors tell us that embodied energy includes “all energy used in resource extraction, manufacturing, production, transportation to site, inclusion within a building, and disposal.” They use the example of bamboo flooring versus concrete. Bamboo typically measures 15 megajoules/ton of embodied energy, while concrete comes in at 1,452 megajoules/ton. That is until you factor in moving the bamboo from Hunan, China to Colorado to your building site: the bamboo now skyrockets to 4,942.1 MJ/ton, far more than locally produced concrete. For reference the book includes a table with various materials—timber, sand, concrete, plastics, lime, glass, copper, cements, mortar, brick—and their embodied energy, embodied CO₂, and the like.

Some of the materials and processes are more expensive than mass produced materials, and there’s a section on budgeting and financing. A big focus of natural building is community, and a potential way to lower costs is to use your community (friends, people, helping hands) as helpers in the process. The book also comes with a DVD with some instructional footage showing natural building techniques in action.

This book isn’t designed to turn anyone into an architect, general contractor, or DIY homebuilder overnight. It’s a reference book to aid in the process, offering strategies and instruction that inform how one designs a building, while raising awareness about what’s involved in the building of a home—and what should be involved, given global and local environmental dilemmas. The Natural Building Companion is an excellent starting point for anyone wanting to build smarter: more naturally.

It closes with a call to action, reminding us of the need to work to make change now, and to stay connected with the relationships that sustain us. It’s a good message: “The process of natural building acts as a web, connecting us back to ‘place’ and all those who help make that place.” These are two authors and builders I’d like to work side by side with on my first cabin in the woods.

NEXT: Alison Hawthorne Deming Reviews Through the Second Skin, by Derek Sheffield >>

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Earth, Rock, and Craft on
the Grand Canyon Trail Crew

Nathaniel Brodie

LTB was grunting. He always grunted as he moved stone, just as he muttered as he shaped it, but this was ridiculous. I looked up, annoyed, then awed—he was heaving an oven-sized block of limestone end over end, grunting with every push.

“Jesus, LTB.”

“What?”

The author and his crew mate wait for rock to be conveyed by cables to the worksite. This wall was blown out by spring melt-induced slope failure.
Photo courtesy Grand Canyon National Park.

“That thing’s gotta weigh 300 pounds.”

“Yeah,” he said happily, looking down at it.

LTB stood for Little Timmy Beale, though he was little only in a squat, muscular, troglodytic sort of way. Even among all the characters that made up Grand Canyon National Park Service Trail Crew, LTB stood out. He wore a black bandana headband to keep his stringy-long, sun-blonde hair out of his eyes; he braided the rest behind him. He never wore a hat because he feared it would bald him;  his hair receded all the same. His moustache overhung much of his upper lip; he trimmed it with his teeth. He wore short shorts that showcased his tanned, trunk-like thighs; he didn’t wear underwear. He rarely wore work gloves, begrudgingly pulling them on in the bosses’ presence. He preferred his bare hands, his stubby paws, good for grasping a single-jack sledgehammer or breaking apart a mastodon femur to best suck out the marrow.

His block of limestone was to be a foundation stone in the reparation of an old dry-laid retaining wall that supported a section of trail that wound along the lip of the South Rim. Some 20 linear feet of the six-foot tall wall had sloughed into the abyss of Bright Angel Canyon, taking with it most of the trail.

Piñon and juniper roots dangled into the open space once occupied by stone, roots that had wormed between the wallstones and wedged them apart as they fattened with age. Soil spilled from the breach. The Civilian Conservation Corps workers who’d built this wall sometime between 1933 and 1942 had used dirt instead of rock as backfill, and all that soil, year after year, had been inundated by snowmelt, frozen, then thawed, then frozen again—the pulsing, sodden earth working against the wall’s weakest connections. The wall rose out of a steep slope of decayed rock; we could see, where the wall still stood, how the slope had slipped from beneath the foundation, undermining the entire structure.

The CCC were generally phenomenal craftsman, but this particular wall was a barely coherent aggregation of unevenly stacked plates and chunks of weathered Kaibab limestone. LTB and I referred to it as a “cowboy wall,” as though some cowpoke-turned-miner had thrown it together over a century earlier, as they had on many of the trails that plunged from rim to river. But we also knew that it didn’t matter who had built the wall, or even how well it had been built—we’d both looked long enough across the Canyon’s vast expanse of exposed rock to accept the essential futility of our attempts to staunch the greatest active example of erosion in the world.

The Colorado River cut through 5,000 feet of the Kaibab Plateau in six million years, a geologic heartbeat. As the river cut, the walls of the forming canyon crumbled into it and were swept away. As the river cut deeper still the walls crumbled still, and receded from one another, and the canyon widened. As the river ate further into the earth the streams running from rim to river had more energy to eat headward, into the rimrock—these side streams gnawed great scalloped bays into the rims, further widening the Canyon, until, by the time LTB and I attempted to prop up the disintegrating rock, the river ran more than a mile beneath us and ten miles of naked rock lay between us and the forested plateau of the North Rim.

Company 818 of the Civilian Conservation Corps building the Grand Canyon’s Clear Creek Trail, 1934.
Photo courtesy Grand Canyon National Park Museum Collection.

As to propping up the disintegrating rock, LTB and I would replace the blown-out section of the old wall with a better, burlier wall. We’d replace the flakes and chunks with solid stone blocks. We’d dry-lay the stone so that the wall would weep water, so that it could shift and settle against the slumping earth. We’d use the rock from the not-yet-sundered sections of the old wall as backfill for the new. We’d make sure that each course had at least one “deadman”—a wallstone extending deep into the retained earth, riveting the wall to the slope. We’d position each stone’s “batter,” or the intrinsic cant of the rock, its unique center of gravity, so that the wall as a whole reclined at an even angle. We’d make sure that each stone broke the joint in the two stones it rested upon; that the stones of the new wall intertongued with those of the old wall like fingers fitted together in prayer. We’d bless the wall with blood and sweat and curses and laughter.

All this was routine. Our method of procuring stone for this wall was not. We usually worked on trails within the Canyon, and looked for loose rocks on slopes above the worksite, or split boulders into usable blocks with a rockdrill. We’d roll these rocks by hand; occasionally we’d convey them with a rigging system of block and cables, straps and manual winches. Once we had a stone we’d winch it down to those doing the masonry. Or we’d pull up the stone from the wall’s previous incarnation to reuse. Winching stones inch by inch upslope was a pain in the ass, but fitting, too, in that headstrong human way: not for nothing did Robinson Jeffers refer to stone masons as “fore-defeated challengers of oblivion.”

But the cowboy wall was perched on the rim itself, right above the South Rim Village. All we had to do to get stone was drive a stake-bed truck eight miles to the quarry, select good building stone, load it onto the truck with a Bobcat, drive back, roll the stone out of the truck into a pile by the side of the road, then use a rock-dolly to roll them the few hundred mostly-paved yards to our worksite. It was a carbon-intensive process, and almost embarrassingly easy, but we got great stone, and great stone was not easy to come by even in the world-of-stone Canyon.

The Colorado carved the Canyon out of a remarkable diversity of rock: sandstone, limestone, mudstone, shale, schist, gneiss; lumpy chert nodules on the rim and glossy schist flutings along the river; basalt slabs scabbing over western cliffs and cardeñas lava vomited forth in the earth’s infancy. But the majority of that rock is choss—friable and rotten, wasted by up to a billion and a half years of geomorphic activity: supercontinents formed, melded with others, ripped apart; thousands of millions of years worth of strata laid down and scoured off even before the Canyon’s current sedimentary layers were deposited; hundreds of millions of years of strata laid down and scoured off the top of the Canyon’s current strata. The strains of the restless earth shattered the Canyon’s rock into faults—gravity faults, growth faults, reverse faults, thrust faults, anticlines, monoclines; faults that strain, shear, slip, heave, throw; faults that if traced across a map of the Canyon would resemble the crazied glass of a broken windshield.

One of the things I loved most about working trails in the Canyon was this diversity of rock, no matter its variable quality. I loved how the material of the stone structures supporting the trail corresponded to the strata through which the trails thread—Coconino riprap as I moved through the Coconino, stacked shale retaining walls as I passed through the Hermit shale. So when the Trail foreman decided to helicopter some 240,000 pounds of quarried Kaibab limestone into the “Red and Whites,” a steep section of trail ascending a cliff of Redwall limestone, I shook my head. I understood the reasoning—there wasn’t enough available loose rock along the trail to rip-rap an entire series of switchbacks—but I disliked the act of flying 50 pallets of rock into the Grand Canyon, not only because of the astronomical cost, nor because it vindicated what I had always thought was one of the dumber tourist questions (Where’d you get the rock?), but because, aesthetically, it seemed a shame to have Kaibab limestone inlaying a section of Redwall cliff.

The author repairs a wall on the North Kaibab Trail, 2008.
Photo courtesy Kelly Gleason.

More so, the helicopter-delivery betrayed the artistic pride I drew out of our work. Though on occasion I’d envy trail crews in the Sierra Nevadas, working all that beautiful, sectile granite, I agreed with David James Duncan’s paraphrasing of the Mahabharata: that one of the signs of a true artist is a willingness to work patiently and lovingly with even the most inferior materials. Duncan was referring to fly-fishing with a beater pole, but that’s how I felt about working the Canyon’s stone, the limestone in particular: the Redwall limestone iron-hard and damn near impossible to shape, the Muav limestone capable of absorbing a hundred sledge blows before a crack shanked straight to the closest edge, the obdurate rock popping off in awkward, unusable pieces. The Kaibab limestone, a friable mix of sandy limestone and calcareous sandstone, often fractured unevenly around its exceptionally hard chert nodules, but it was still the best of the lot, and prolific along the rimlands.

LTB, no longer grunting, was standing next to his block of Kaibab and looking about, trying to figure out how he was going to roll his stone around the huge pile of the old wall’s rock that we’d crush and use as backfill for our wall. I was standing down at the foundation level of the wall, I tossed up a flake then scrambled after it to help Tim maneuver his stone. He was staring vacantly at the pile of white rock, some of it speckled with lichen and black moss, some of it bearing the marks of a chisel.

“Yeah, too bad we don’t have the rockcrusher down here, huh?” I asked.

LTB looked at me, snorted, reached behind his head to adjust his bandana.

“That thing is dumb.”

The rock-crusher was our bosses’ latest investment: a 2,200-pound, six-foot wide, caboose-shaped rock-crushing machine. It could digest bowling-ball-sized rocks and spit them out as chunks and chips. The thing was a monster, so much so that it seemed as though they’d bought it as an intentionally over-the-top response to the barely-veiled insults we’d receive on a daily basis: the tourists who’d watched LTB and me roll rocks off the truck by hand and shouted, Surely there’s a better way; the ubiquitous Isn’t there a machine for that?; the snide or incredulous comments implying a young man in his prime spinning a sledge in circles against a rock was not a beautiful act but a crude throwback, a primitive means of production yet to be replaced by progress.

Even if that was their intention in buying the beast, which it certainly wasn’t (having more to do with end-of-the-fiscal-year-budget-splurges), LTB was right. It was dumb—too wide to drive down the Canyon trails and too heavy to be flown into the Canyon by the Park Service’s helicopters. We’d have to wait until a sky-crane flew into the park for one reason or another. The rockcrusher was incredibly loud and incredibly dusty, necessitating a half-face respirator, which in turn necessitated a clean-shaven face, which few of us were in the habit of maintaining.

“Besides,” Timmy said, squatting beside his boulder, “I like crushing rock.”

I grinned. Of course he did.

I considered many of us craftsmen. We regarded crappy rockwork with the same disdain we reserved for an opponent who wished to play “slop” pool—where any ball hit haphazardly into any pocket counts, rather than the precise, intended shot of a devotee of the game. Trailwork mirrored the desert it crafted; it stripped you bare as its own rocks: you couldn’t hide shitty work anymore than you could hide from the sun, the cold, the wind in the pines. You embraced the work just as you dedicated yourself to the Canyon. That or you left. Most stayed. And, after awhile, the work defined you.

The Red and Whites.
Photo courtesy Grand Canyon National Park.

Every spring I returned to the Canyon after a winter away and my body would shift in phases, with and like the seasons. My muscles fatigued in spring, tightened in summer, and diminished back toward bone in winter. My neck, forearms, even the webbing between my fingers shifted from white to beige to brown then back to white. My hands and heels blistered then callused. My lungs acclimated to the hikes and heights. My nosebleeds would stop after the first week back; my eyes would stop rasping in their sockets; I’d need to drink less and less water. I knew, as I maneuvered large rocks onto my tabled thigh before straightening up to carry them, that where the rocks had rested bruises would blossom and fade like mariposa lilies, that the fronts of my thighs would be chapped hairless by hiking in denim pants.

Nor was it just physical, this personal phenology. Working trails became the lens through which I viewed the Canyon—there came a time I couldn’t see a rock without immediately evaluating its batter, couldn’t see a reiterating juniper tree without counting how many checkdams I could cut from its candelabra trunk. At times, deep in the backcountry, I’d pass the snout of a rockslide and assume, in the instant before logic set in, that the randomly stacked stones were an old rubble wall.

This last wasn’t entirely illogical. Humanity’s spoor, its deep permeations, were everywhere evident and inescapable, from Anasazi granaries tucked under overhangs to miners’ blast-marks in bedrock, from motorhomes on roads to rafts on the river, from the squat concrete plug damming the Colorado to the industrial haze that obscured the once glassy views. Always a mark—the chisel marks in the old-wall’s stones, the sun creases inscribed on my face. The Canyon and crew scathed alike. And we liked that, liked our unique and exclusive relationship, how our work was one of the last ways we could know the Canyon by working the Canyon, as humans have done for some 10,000 years, before the Canyon was set apart as a park that essentially relegated humans to onlookers.

Of course, the reason LTB liked crushing rock had little to do with it being part and process of high craftsmanship or a life-defining activity: he liked it because shattering a rock into separate pieces with a single blow was immensely satisfying to cavemen like Little Timmy Beale. It was immensely satisfying to us all, for the same reasons, but also because, like most of trailswork, even the brute act of crushing rock contained a deliberate rhythm, an intentional calm, an edaphic joy, as Robert Frost put it, in the “grip of earth of outspread feet.”

Take carving stone, hewing it to shape so that it fit against another rock like pressing together one’s fisted knuckles. Chisel in my left hand, hammer in my right, I exploit the stone’s existing seams, shave its ridges and flakes. I angle the chisel in various degrees; at certain angles the spalling rock peppers my face. I pop off knobs and nubs with single blows or I scour a groove then rain hard, rhythmic blows along the line, the inert rock absorbing blow after blow until cleaving along the intended line like a sudden smile.

An old Civilian Conservation Corps retaining wall on the South Kaibab Trail.
Photo courtesy Nathaniel Brodie.

After a while I’m lost in the work, lulled by the percussive beat. The periphery of my consciousness flickers with the progress of the rock, but mostly I drift into suspension, islanding occasionally on a stray thought or memory, but then drifting again into the widening stillness. Everything funnels into the particular and specific—a point off here, a nub there, the smell of hammered rock and the ring of hammer in air—and at the same time expands into a greater engagement: I can identify the birds overhead by the way their shadows flit across the ground in front of me: the quick-dart raven, the bent-wing turkey vulture, the darkening of the sun condor. Their sounds too: wind ripping through condor’s braced wing feathers; the dull whup whup whup of a raven’s wing beats.

The rockcrusher—gigantic, loud, industrial—offered no such moment. It violated such moments. It was a needy machine, and demoted us to the assembly-line auxiliaries we’d always set ourselves against. It reminded me of Thoreau’s response to a woman who offered him a mat— “I declined it, preferring to wipe my feet on the sod before my door. It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil.” This was stretching it: we were well-versed in mechanical evils.

We didn’t mind the helicopter long-lining logs to our worksites. We scoffed at the suggestion to use cross-cut saws rather than chain-saws in clearing the North Rim’s forest trails. As long as they were running smoothly, we adored our rockdrills. Some of the same meditative characteristics that flowed from the heft of hammer and dig of chisel also arose out of rockdrills and chainsaws. Take felling junipers and limbing them into logs we’d use as check dams: whether it was the earplugs that deadened the world or the risk posed by both saw and tree, I’d enter an almost hypnotic state. The sight of sawdust spitting out the chain, the cloying smell of the exposed pitch, the incrementally widening kerf as the whorled trunk began to hinge, the dusty whump of the anticlimactic crash, all seemed accentuated, distilled.

These crystallized moments were not day-dreamy epiphanies or catch-the-eye flashes of the unexpected in the otherwise mundane. They didn’t arise out of the good work: they were the good work. The slivers of shaved metal flashing in the morning sun as I sharpened my chain and the needles shuddered loose from the tree’s uppermost branches as it began to fall were aspects as intertwined in the work and life as the ring and piston and clip components of the saw.

Perhaps there could have been similar such attunements while manning the rockcrusher. But I doubted it. It was too much. Offensive, even—from no aspect of its use could we derive pride. And, in the end, this pride was all we had.

I know where lies or stands every wall, waterbar, switchback corner, section of liner or riprap I’ve ever lain. If time has passed since I last hiked past, I’ll stop and study the structures, how they’ve shifted and settled, how the Canyon has worn around them. I’ll search out individual rocks, and if the anthropomorphic attributes I assigned to the rock as I worked it have faded—the obstinate bastard, the easy beauty—the pride or shame of the fitting and placement remains.

We couldn’t sell what we crafted. We owned only the hours we put into the construction. Hell, we didn’t even own those—we sold them for a bimonthly paycheck. No one profited from the placed stones but in the profits of hiking and experience. These profits—benefits, really—are not to be dismissed, but I can’t help but feel it’s a stretch to think: I helped people see and experience something greater than themselves, and maybe they will, in some way, contribute something to the Canyon, or places like it.

Trail crew member Damon Portillo drills holes into a cliff to insert anchors for safety gear.
Photo courtesy National Park Service.

No, our work was our own, and our most important reward.

For though we let go of the hours and the product, we were not alienated as Karl Marx may have feared: the loss of our product a loss of ourselves. The work could be monotonous and labor intensive, but Trails was no assembly line. Our work wasn’t stretched out across thousands of miles, strangers, machines, and meetings. In working these rocks I was invested in every step of the process. I knew what needed to be done and I did it. I knew what type of rocks I needed, I searched for them, I found them, I rolled them into place, I shaped them to fit one another, I dug them a berth and I placed them, all by hand. When I used a machine—a rockdrill or chainsaw—I used the machine, not vice-versa. If it broke, I knew enough about it to fix it in the field. So rather than losing the self, the work empowered.

LTB and I grappled his stone to the edge of the trail then carefully flipped it into its berth. The earth shook as it thudded into place. Marx was right: to be human is to shape the world around us. To be happy as a human is to appreciate that process, to be invested in it as work and art, to embed bits of ourselves in the earth with every rock. Though we knew that in time even the best-built wall will slide into the Canyon, I’d come to see our work in mythological terms, the loss of the wall as sacrifice, an offering celebrating our place in a system, not of the capitalist market or of national parks or even of human endeavors, but one of even greater continuity: order and entropy.

NEXT: “Hook and Sway,” by Tamie Marie Fields >>

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Essay and Photographs
by Tamie Marie Fields

The waves come in waves. They come in translucent-green, fanned-out rays. They pour in rhythmic heaves toward the beach between us and the lagoon. They come in differently to this, our shallow harbor. They come in, exposed and transparent. They pound toward the crescent-moon-shaped beach on the spit’s other side, shushing those pebbles, wearing them smooth.

Every time the Alaska Department of Fish & Game opens the water to commercial salmon fishing on this northwestern side of Kodiak Island, we commence with our ceremony, as much a tradition of body and mind as any spiritual practice—beginning here at the hook end of the net, clipping the metal snap to the ring at the opening, bowing beneath the running-line, tying the first two-on-two knot, moving in scripted fashion down the spine of the net to the shore-end, bending and reaching and holding until we heave out the end ring of the lead line, the armfuls of mesh, the last stretch of the cork line, and then we say amen. Except we do not say amen. It has never been a sacred ceremony. We do not come to the moment of putting out nets as one comes to a holy moment. We arrive with the expectation of frantic pulling and angry yelling; our bodies obey the tradition of knotted guts and pounding hearts. That is our ritual.

We put the nets out, and then Fish & Game closes the water, and we take them up. A friend said to me recently that pulling up nets sounds like a chore and a prayer. He is a poet, he can say these things. And I said yes, it is a prayer of the body and a chore of the mind, but I do not pray on take-up, not even with my body, unless exertion itself is a kind of supplication.

I know this land and sea like I know my own body, but a posture of reverence, toward either the land or each other, is so foreign in our fishing family and on our islands that it is only now that I am 33 that it occurs to me as a possibility, despite growing up with psalms of awe and God worrying over sparrows.

Our nets, like our lives, are tied to shore. We are set netters, living on Bear Island, a tiny island that we own, we its sole inhabitants. We fish during the day in open, aluminum skiffs. “We” are my father, a dozen hired male crew members, and me. My uncles and cousins live nearby and fish with us too; my family has been fishing this way for 50 years. To meet the legal definition of set netting, our nets have to be tied with thick line or chain to the rocks that, at least at low tide, are above water. Out in the water, the net is held in place by buoys, anchors, and line, the anchors like tent stakes pulling against each other to hold the net in place, the line connecting the anchors like tent poles that make up a tent frame. The lines and anchors are always in the water, but we can only tie on our nets when Fish & Game open the water to fishing. The process of tying on our nets is called “put-out.” When Fish & Game closes the water to fishing, we “take up” and pile them back into our skiffs.

Farthest out in the water, each net reaches around in a diamond shape we call a hook. The hook is where most of the fish are caught. The rest of the net is a straight line, perpendicular to shore. To keep the net from arcing wildly in strong tides, we attach several anchors, along the length of the running line. The anchors run up to buoys, and these are called sways.

Today is put-out day and I’m in my uncle Duncan’s skiff with two new crew members.

The waves surge in bright blisters, they come in flickers, in gasps, they come like the sweep of a broom. The waves come in memories or the memories come in waves; there are memories on these waves, though they’re new every time. The waves sweep the wide way an arm dismisses, they come like the aftershocks of abandonment, like the way hope gets burned.

To know you can read a man’s body in a second, to know the loudness of a storm doesn’t mean incapacity because you could have worked without words anyway, to know the way you feel the skiff’s floor in your feet, feel the balance in your hips and shoulders—he’s feeling it too—you’re correcting together, moving gas cans, lifting poles, handing a screwdriver (silently, though he didn’t ask), hooking a snap, holding the tension, taking up slack. You’ll pull past exhaustion for each other: you know that, and it is a refuge and a prayer inside the larger circumstance of being trapped in my uncle Duncan’s skiff during take-up. That is what I want, what the new crew members John and Jaap do not seem to have, and so I do not trust them to move with me in a way that will keep us safe.

Greg, for example, who used to be crew and is still a dear friend, Greg would defy my uncle Duncan in any instant if it meant my life, or even safety, or even, really, comfort. Greg, whose love is greater than his fear. If the dance between bodies in a skiff is not one of hospitality I don’t know what it is, but I would not have known it without Greg. But Greg is not here. Jaap and John are; it is with them that I will take up Duncan’s share of nets.

My cousin Naphtali and I talk about how the crew, if they’re new, don’t have the right instincts. They’re like surgeons sipping tea in the emergency room when a helicopter has just flown in. They hear the chop of the chopper blades and go right on sipping. They don’t know what the sound means.

It is a warm, calm, sunny day, the kind of day you’d have said was perfect for fishing. My stomach is knots, my body’s habit on take-up day, waiting for the emergency. I try to think. Is there an emergency? Do any of us have the right instincts?

I am half right about John and Jaap. Jaap seems to have no instincts, one way or the other. He pulls at rote and seemingly at random, until Duncan tells him to pull somewhere else. He pulls half-heartedly and doesn’t know when to stop, or he will stop without provocation. He stands on the wrong side of the boat, pulls in the wrong direction, unless someone tells him otherwise, and even then we have to tell him twice. The only thing he has in his favor is that Duncan seems to find him understandable and endearing, which assessment a wonder in itself, but this is no time to question wonders in our favor.

About John, though, I am mostly wrong. He isn’t worthless. He throws himself into it like one in fear of drowning. He is everywhere at once. I untie the knots and he is there, his orange rain-geared arm bumping mine, his body at the ready when I have to stretch over the bow, breathing close. What we share, we both understand almost immediately and without saying it, is the desire to keep Duncan at bay. To get the nets in on time, to pick the fish, to leave behind the kelp, these things are not a part of our desire at all, except that they are Duncan’s desire, and so we make them our wholehearted wish. We want nothing on Earth so much as to pick fish and untie knots with all the nimbleness and speed of a seasoned woman crocheting.

Everything I do, John thanks me. I help him pull web, he thanks me; I untie a knot, he thanks me. In all my time fishing, I have never been thanked as much, so I take notice. Then it occurs to me: his gratitude is a consequence of his terror. And it occurs to me again: it is a warm, calm, sunny day. There will be no external emergency. There is no storm, no onslaught of fish. And yet, John is terrified. I look at Duncan. I think about how much he loves fishing, this place, his children. I think about how sometimes we create around ourselves the circumstances in which we will not be able to receive what we long for the most.

When we are close to the hook on the first net we take up, Duncan leans over the boat and shouts, “Oh no! Stop pulling! Stop, stop!” The tone you’d use for a whale coming at you, or a hole in the boat.

Calmly—determined to remain calm—I ask, “What is it?”

“A bag of kelp,” he says, his voice tense. John and I look at each other over Duncan’s back. A bag of kelp in the net is as much an emergency as a quiet rain is an emergency. Fishing, it is the most slight of inconveniences. So we stop pulling, roll out the kelp in seconds, and resume pulling. I think about how this is the kind of thing that precludes knowing when there really is an emergency, which of course increases the danger, because not knowing how to gauge danger is its own danger. This reliance on crisis, and where there is no genuine crisis, the need to make one up.

In the end, we get the nets up easily. There is no strong tide, no wind, no rain, no storm, and almost no fish. We take up the last net, Duncan puts John and me in another skiff, gives us the fish, and sends us to the tender, the larger boat that will take the fish to the cannery.

“Have you taken up much with Duncan before?” John asks me.

“Yeah, a lot,” I say.

“One time he got so mad on take-up, he started hitting the motor with a picking pole.”

“Yeah, I know,” I say, “He does that.”

“How do you deal with it?” he asks, his eyes searching mine.

“I don’t,” I say, fumbling, navigating around a reef, steering around our islands. “I mean, my brother and I, we don’t often come back.”

Gloves cold as the night has been, grey with old fish blood and aluminum residue washed out and out. Thirty seconds, maybe less, it takes me to get into full gear. The skin around my breasts contracts when I pull on the still-wet gloves; I put them on quick, don’t think about it, shake my arms out, move on. On the way to the running line rock, I pick up a 40-pound gas can in one hand, lean way over for counter-balance, walk down to the running-line rock. I don’t pause for rest.

The day is hook and sway. A hook is the diamond of a net and it is the metal curve in my hand to hold the corkline in the boat. Two sways: the buoys and anchors holding the net’s midsection, and the sway of my body. Knots, balance, skiff, rails, rain or not-rain, slick spray, wind. Safe inside the balloon of my rain jacket hood. Salt sores on my arms. They tell me drunk is like tired; if that is so I’ll never understand why anyone goes for drunk. Balance, balance, untie.

The waves come in vices, in ripples, in confidence, in stride, they come like a woman curving and flicking flamenco, they come like the contractions of birth. They come in undulations, in rhythms, they come unattached. The waves come in bends, they come in riots, they come (simultaneously) subdued. They enter as an appetite, not easily sated. They swarm as a grief not easily freed. They come like hunger, like panic, like the persistence of God. They come as a testament (can I get a witness?) to a mechanistic universe, they arise as evidence of gravity and the moon.

Time is a tide here, and here the tide comes high. Twenty vertical feet in a day, the tides swell and flush, laying everything bare then laying it all to waste. Only what’s heavy or held down will remain, til the tide goes out again. As with the water, so with Earth’s spin; as if they were two different things. Winter rises, heaving boulders high onto the grass with the winter storms, and when winter recedes whatever wasn’t gripping fast is gone. Deer fall into the wells, starving for water. The outhouse gets washed away. There’s a skiff in the lagoon, still mostly intact because the tide doesn’t reach it. Billy Woods tied the skiff there in 1977, intending to come back the next summer to fish, as he’d always done. But that winter he went down with his boat.

In latitudes closer to Earth’s belly, tides are smaller and you can tie your boat to shore, eat lunch, come back to the boat ready for the next thing. If we did that here, after lunch our boat would either be dry on the rocks, or it would be too far from shore to reach. The tides are huge. So we have running-lines: a triangle of line with pulleys at all three corners. The apex of the triangle reaches several hundred feet out from shore and is moored with a buoy and anchor; the other two corners of the triangle are attached high on shore. In this way we can tie the boat onto the line and then pull it out to the buoy where it will stay while we eat, rest, do shore work.

How a running-line is configured depends on the lay of the beach. Most running-lines in Uyak Bay and elsewhere around Kodiak extend from a smooth beach, so all that’s needed for the beach-end of the running line is two sturdy pieces of driftwood tipped vertical and dug deep into the beach like footers or pilings. Attach pulleys to the driftwood and you’ve got yourself a running-line. But on Bear Island, the calmest harbor is a beach rich in big rocks.

The largest of these rocks, we call the running-line rock, or just the Rock. In it are cemented two metal poles that serve the function of driftwood elsewhere. During fishing, we climb the running-line rock several times a day and tie or untie the complex design of running-line knots meant to keep the rope from sliding back through the pulleys while the boats are on the line. Whereas elsewhere, one two-on-two knot would suffice, here we tie two four-on-fours and two three-on-threes. Our calmest harbor can get storms so severe they’ll slowly swing and drag the skiffs, slamming them back to shore, destroying the outboards, battering the aluminum.

Song birds, so light, perch in wild gooseberry bushes, or in the thick grass that forms the bluff. Their tiny feet clutch the twigs and grass. But they do not venture as far out as the Rock. There isn’t food, and the wind is stronger. This far from tide line, only the heavy birds—eagles, crows—stick it out.

The waves come as a reflection, a revelation, a penance, a storm. They come like disappointment. They come like the future known in eroding stone. They come like children, like death, they come like doubt. They come like disease, like renewal, reminiscence, resistance, release. The waves come like desire, like a split and thrusting heart.

When there’s low cloud cover on the mountains over Seven Mile, above Bill Woods’ old place, a southeast is coming. Like the red at night, sky predicts wind, and low barometric pressure of small tides means the tide of human despondency and sadness rises. Swell is the underwater wind, the way we’re above the sky-roof of the sea, fish like birds swimming through the firmament. Surf the skidding breath of God. Angels falling, waves mark when they hit.

Sometimes I believe ocean is all the god we have. I debate myself: is this god good? Or is she impassive as an animal? Are the waves her roiling, her writhing, itchy as a dragon for some death, some fire? But what animal, what dragon is ever impassive? She—the ocean—God—feels resolute, and I can’t escape the conviction that her brutality is her love, beckoning me to surrender. Batter my heart, and all. But I don’t want to be battered. I just want to walk across this Island with no knots in my belly. I want home to be home.

I am outraged, and hungry as winter deer. I will open my mouth to sing, or eat. I will let the wind shake the house for me. I will watch the angels breathe or drown. I will watch the knots on the running-line rock hold.

The Shelikof Strait has sent these waves, the volcanic gods that stew and lord over our horizon have sent these waves; for 40 miles they have been unencumbered until we confront them and they assail us. If we stepped from shore into the water, it would overpower us. But that does not mean that we cower. It does not mean that we are afraid. It does not mean that we are not afraid.

It seems the waves are bowing again and again the ocean is bowing. I am sitting in the third generation watching the ocean in a blow. Wind pushes into sea as easily as Grandma used to scoop the dipper into the tin bucket of well water. Grandpa sat listening to the radio, watching the running line rock, the skiffs, our going out fishing, our coming home.

A boat is shaped like a ribcage: if I crouch to stay warm, am I the heart?

I come to the Rock without poetry. It is morning and the only way that my hands are empty are the way a spirit gets emptied, which is no way the eyes can see. The Rock is crowded with crew, a full tide of orange raingear, untying knots, pulling in the skiff and piling into it with a heavy kind of grace, none of us talking. If you ask anyone, is your spirit empty?, he will raise an eyebrow at you, look at you with tired incredulity, go back to the work. It is morning and we have been fishing for 45 days.

When I say that I come without poetry, I mean only that I come to work. You may say, Let’s talk about Rilke, and I will say, Let’s not. You may say, Let’s talk about T.S. Eliot, who is my favorite poet, but at this moment I cannot imagine what relevance poetry has at all. I just want to work, eat lunch, go to bed. You say, Do you know that one Picasso painting? and I think, Can you just shut up? Lift up that line, help me with this sway.

It is more than the tiredness of so many days fishing. When I am 16, it is skin starvation in the middle of all that human proximity. When I am twenty-three, it is hunger too, the lengths I go to for satisfaction, the hopelessness of feeling what I am willing to give up to get contact. I make my eyes neutral but compliant. Whatever I am asked to do, I will say yes. On my hands are double layers of wet cotton gloves.

It is morning, and I walk to the running line rock with everyone else, and I notice that we are all like stone. Hit us with a hammer and we’ll crack apart, but it will take the fire of Earth’s heart to make us soft. Sometimes I think everyone feels obligated to be testy; it is morning after all. But I know these men, and I know that what they really want is to be held. Actually, what they really want is a good cup of strong coffee. Actually, what they really want is another hour of sleep. What we all really want is rest.

Together, we all pull on the running line, bringing the skiff to the Rock, and together we all climb into it. Dad will drive this skiff to all the other skiffs tied onto moorings further out; two men will get into each skiff, and when everyone is apportioned to his vessel, we will make our way to the nets. Two skiffs to a net, we will fan out to the farthest nets first, then work our way toward the middle, toward each other.

We hunch in the skiff, from the Rock to the moorings, day after day, storm after rain, face to the spray, until kingdom come, and ask any of these men, while we are all together, do you want to be held? and he will mock or pity you. But enter a skiff with one of them, just you and that one, and fish for half a day with that man, dance the functional ballet of fishing, bail when you are not lifting line, clean the skiff when you are traveling, pull out a granola bar and offer him half when there is a pause, and then ask the question. Do you wish, sometimes, that you could be held? He will always answer: yes.

I come to the Rock. I fall into line. I am tired. I am strong. I can tie knots fast, I can carry gas cans down the beach without pausing to rest.

I try to just fall into line, which implies indifference, and I rarely manage indifference. No matter how hard I try to hunch, stare at the skiff bottom like everyone else, I can’t help myself: I keep looking up. I keep trying to understand what is happening. I feel. I stay alert, watching both for danger and the possibility of contact. I watch my father, watch the tension in his face, gauge his mood.

Our boats are empty of fish in the morning. It is the perfect moment. The emptiness satisfies. It is like the smooth inside of wildness, like a pelt or like skin. Morning plays us for fools. Morning says, “It’s a new day, full of possibility.” I think this is why experienced crew always look down. Don’t let the sun—or the boss—see a glint in your eye.

The waves come in light, in heat, in wind. They come in exhaustion, in concentration, in lore. They are hurt, they are bent, they are bright. They are a resurgence, an apology, an uprising, a relief. The waves come and they are more than they are. They come, they come.

NEXT: “Bromancing the Gar,” by Mark Spitzer >>

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In Pursuit of Trinity River
Seven-Footers

Mark Spitzer

When I lit off for Texas in October, I had no idea what the story was supposed to be. To get the research travel grant from my university, I explained that my investigation on “the changing gar-scape on the Trinity River” would examine the effects of the new state laws for alligator gar. Meaning I intended to evaluate the management plans on this fishery now that commercial fishing and bowhunting had been reduced. But as I told my pal Minnow Bucket―who was just as psyched to catch a big-ass gator gar―my real goal was a seven-footer.

We were in my 1999 Jeep Laredo towing my bat-finned runabout. Everything that could’ve gone wrong already had. That’s why we were winding through a rutted farm road in the middle of roadkill-nowhere, detoured by construction and poorly marked roads. The sun was going down, we still needed to buy fishing licenses and groceries, but worst of all, we were in a dry county.

A supposed nine-foot alligator gar at Schindler’s Tavern in New Hamburg, Missouri.
Photo by Mark Spitzer.

At least I had sponsorship, though. My friend the wildlife writer Catfish Sutton had set me up with Penn Rod and Reels, who had sent two brand new heavy-duty combos: a mongo 330GT bait-caster on a seven-foot Ugly Stik, and a golden 750SSm spinfisher on an equally tough Slammer pole designed for hauling deap-sea dino-fish up from the depths of hell. Both of these were equipped with 100-pound woven test. I also had support from Daiichi Hooks and Tackle, who had sent hundreds of bucks worth of gear, mostly gynormous circle hooks.

So it wasn’t just Minnow Bucket and Hollywood gone fishing: it was us plus expectations from my university and two corporate sugar daddies who had invested in the idea of another garbook, which didn’t even have a publisher yet. Whatever the case, the sun was setting, the pressure was on, and there was no booze in sight.

Still, we made it to the Walmart in Athens and got our licenses, two steaks, some cans of chili, potatoes to fry, Gatorade, etc., then shot on over to Caney City. The canned beer there was a huge disappointment, but they had some bottled Dogfish Head IPAs. I bought a six-pack of that and some gin and tonic, and Minnow Bucket got a case of Heinekin and bottle of tequila. We also got five bags of ice.

It was dusk when we hit the river, took off upstream, and made it to the sandbar I’d discovered three years back. It was on a bend of the Trinity and the 25-five-foot hole in front of it was roiling with six- and seven-foot gar. That’s what I’d seen when I came up to fish with Jeremy Wade, then went off on my own. Now, however, nothing was rising, nothing was rolling, and the sandbar I’d been dreaming about camping on was covered by a foot of mudge (a cross betwixt sludge and mud) that sucked our shoes right off our feet, got all over everything, and promised to be the bane of our existence for the next three gar-mucking days.

Nevertheless, we started in on the beer.

Before taking off, I had emailed David Buckmeier at Texas Parks and Wildlife asking for his perspective on how the gator gar populations in the Trinity were faring since the new harvesting regulations had been passed in 2009. Buckmeier was in charge of all things gar in Texas, so I figured he’d know―and he did, replying that “the public’s opinion of alligator gar seems to be changing toward conservation.”

He also attached a study titled “Alligator Gar Movement and Macrohabitat Use in the Lower Trinity River, Texas.” Granted, we were on the upper spectrum of that river, but this report by Buckmeier, Nathan G. Smith and Daniel J. Daugherty was highly relevant to where we going and what we were doing.

To break it down, the study explained how the researchers had used acoustic telemetry to study effects of flow on alligator gar. In essence, they had documented what Minnow Bucket and I suspected was the case in Arkansas: that alligator gar “moved into tributaries and inundated floodplains during large flood pulses”―which accounts for why we’d hardly seen any full-grown adults in the Garhole over the last few drought-stricken winters.

A seven-foot alligator gar shot with bow and arrow in a tributary of the Arkansas River.
Photographer unknown.

As for migration, the study noted that “research to date . . . suggests that although alligator gar have the potential for long distance migrations, linear home ranges might be relatively small”―like less than 25 miles. This was what Ed Kluender told me regarding gar he tracked in Arkansas, which never ventured more than 15 miles from their wintering hole.

The fish for Buckmeier’s study “were collected using rod-and-reel, jug lines . . . large-mesh . . . [and] heavy-duty, multifilament gillnets.” A cordless drill was then used to attach ultrasonic transmitters with 14 months of battery life that corresponded to eight submersible underwater receivers (SURs) that detected fish and recorded data. They had some other SUR stations out there, but they got vandalized.

One interesting finding was that “[d]etections of tagged alligator gar at SUR stations near deep pools where fish were observed . . . tended to be highest during the night.” Minnow Bucket and I had been fishing for gator gar all summer, and had noticed an increase in hits an hour after the sun went down. Most previous studies note that alligator gar feed primarily in the morning, so I’d thought it was unusual to experience such vigorous nocturnal activity. This study, however, confirmed that those other studies were wrong. This is exactly what Minnow Bucket and I had speculated was the case, sitting out there, drinking beers. Or, to put it in other terms, researching gar “Toad Suck style.”

I may be obsessed by gar, but there ain’t nobody more gung ho for gar than Minnow Bucket. He’s also a better fisherman than me, which often results with him getting gar and me getting squat. This caused me some consternation at the beginning of the summer (because I’m supposed to be the “gar guy”), but after a few months I made my peace with the fact that he was hooking them and I wasn’t.

Getting to this point involved two major steps. The first was redefining my objective, which was to get an Arkansas gator gar before the summer was over. The main reason I felt the pull to do this was because I felt I owed it to my sponsors to bag one with the gear they supplied. But stuff came up and I wasn’t able to get out on the river as much as I wanted to. Rebuilding my rotted-out transom took weeks, then weeks more finding and sealing the microscopic leaks. It was also the hottest summer on record, with the heat index topping 110 for two months straight. So in August I decided to give myself a break and resign myself to the fact that I caught my dream gar a few years back, so didn’t have to prove anything to anyone.

Besides, there’s no shame in assisting. That’s what I did when Minnow Bucket hooked a 43-incher on a sandbar above Cadron Creek. When he horsed it in, I ran out and blocked its run back into the river. That gar then decided to shoot along the shore in just a few inches of water, but I raced alongside it, and when it turned to try and ditch me, I dove down in front of it, scooped it up, hugged it to my chest, then carried it up onto the beach. It weighed 18 pounds, a beautiful healthy juvenile. Catch and release, of course.

A 27-pound alligator gar caught by Minnow Bucket in the Arkansas River.
Photo by Ben Damgaard.

My point being: assisting Minnow Bucket with a gator gar for our own research wasn’t much different than assisting the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in sampling and telemetry. Because that’s who I am: I’m an assister, whose assistance comes in many forms. The most important form being typing these words right here, right now, to entertain and educate for the purpose of propagation. And it works. My research got noticed by Animal Planet, NatGeo followed, the book came out, and word got out that gar don’t maim and kill, that they’re vital to ecosystem stability, and the big ones need our help. And because of this increased awareness, gator gar are better off. That’s what I keep telling myself―to the point that I actually believe myself. For the most part.

The second rationale for not getting bummed out at the fact that Minnow Bucket catches more gar than me is that I’ve learned a lot from him. And the main thing I’ve learned is that what works on the Trinity doesn’t work on the Arkansas. For years I tried giant hunks of buffalo and whole drum on heavy-duty rods and reels with shark-sized treble hooks but hardly ever got a bite. Minnow Bucket, on the other hand, would catch sunfish to use as live bait. He’d cast them out on lighter weight catfish rods with smaller semi-circle hooks (i.e., size 6/0 to 12/0 shiner hooks and wide gap octopus hooks), and he got a maddening amount of runs over the summer. Sitting there in our fishing chairs, we’d be just about to give up when suddenly we’d hear a clack-clack-clack arise from a bait-clicker. It was always one of Minnow Bucket’s rods, and nine out of ten times we’d wait it out to the point that the gar would either drop the bait or it’d get off right before he got it to shore. But sometimes he’d bring one in: a longnose, a shortnose, and once in a while, an economy-sized gator gar.

At first I was pissed―that Minnow Bucket was getting all this action and I wasn’t. Sometimes I was even secretly glad when a gar dropped his bait and he’d throw his hands over his face and howl his lament to the stars above. It didn’t make me feel the way I wanted to feel, though, to see myself snickering at my buddy’s misfortune, so I knew I had to change my attitude. The way I did this was through the if-you-can’t-beat-‘em-join-‘em approach: I decided to use bream like him. I even bought a similar Abu Garcia Ambassadeur 6600 RCX reel and equipped it with 50-pound braided line. But did I get more hits after that? Not really―but at least I felt like less of a dick.

Minnow Bucket and I often discussed the merits of sunfish vs. big minnows. For one thing, any type of gar would bite on a sunny, which expanded our probabilities of catching something. Minnow Bucket’s theory was that there’s a lot less competition in the Arkansas River, compared to the Trinity. In the Arkansas, the big ones are less concentrated, so therefore less desperate for resources. Plus, there’s a lot more sunfish in the Arkansas, which is pretty murky, but not as muddy as the Trinity. Hence, you get a higher concentration of carp, buffalo, shad, suckers, and drum in Texas, because these fish—unlike sunnies—don’t require gravel beds to spawn. The upshot of his theory being: predators eat what’s most plentiful in their environments.

I had a different theory: that when the main populations of Arkansas gator gar got wiped out in the ‘50s, they were basically overfished out of the rivers—with rough fish as bait. So maybe the holdout-gars that didn’t get caught were those that preferred sunfish over big minnows. And maybe their spawn, and the generations that followed and eventually repopulated the system, had a genetic preference for bream.

Minnow Bucket with an alligator gar caught on the Trinity River.
Photo by Mark Spitzer.

My wife argued that this was ridiculous; that a species can’t just change its traits in a few generations. But I countered that it wasn’t just a few generations. I suggested that millions of years of evolution in the region might’ve developed a taste for sunfish in certain strains of gator gar, especially those in clearer water, where sunfish tend to swim. Like maybe after the big river gar got fished out, the lake-locked gar and those in the deltas of mountain streams got back into the rivers and brought their numbers up.

That’s all speculation, though, and it might be that both Minnow Bucket and I are right. Perhaps both of our theories worked together with other factors to make sunfish preferable for gar in the Arkansas River. But one thing’s for sure: Minnow Bucket caught two good juveniles in a year, and neither of us have caught anything on big old slaps of meat.

Still, there’s another thing I learned from Minnow Bucket: the utility of the Carolina rig―a concept I never knew of before. Basically, there’s a weight that sits on the bottom with a hole going through it, and the fishing line goes through that hole. So when a fish takes line out, it can run for hundreds of yards with no resistance whatsoever.

Anyway, I still feel a bit of competition when it comes to garfishing with Minnow Bucket, but for the most part I feel a kinship in what we quest: prehistoric monster-fish. That’s what we’ve been fishing for, and that’s what we’re on the Trinity for, linked through the Brotherhood of the Gar. And as long as he keeps reeling ‘em in, I’ll be more than glad to assist.

Or so I thought.

After setting up camp, we broke out the bait: 75 pounds of carp, buffalo, and drum on ice, compliments of Fishman. Then we were in the dark, kicking back on canvas chairs, digesting two greasy steaks grilled on the campfire. And, of course, we were enjoying a libation or two. Maybe three. Maybe four.

By the time maybe five or maybe six came around, the half-moon had lit up the hole with a ghostly luminescence. The mosquitoes weren’t too bad, and Minnow Bucket had his “Mexican wormline” in the water. I don’t know why we called it that, but it’s a light-weight pole for catching bait, with a one-ounce weight on the end and four small hooks a yard apart. Minnow Bucket sometimes describes this set-up as “a trotline on a stick.”

Anyhow, we kicked back and started talking smack. Like usual, I was getting on his case for bringing thrice as many poles as me and taking up space in the boat. I had two rods stuck in the sand (one with a worm, one with a two-pound chunk of fish) and he was maintaining six, so kept running back and forth to reel in and cast out again. Eventually, he caught a small blue cat on the Mexican wormline and threw that out as bait.

Then, sometime around maybe seven or maybe eight drinks, I was down to one pole and he was only using three when we heard a bait-clicker start to click. It wasn’t a long, steady, heading-out-to-deep-water click; it was more like a clickety-clickety-pause-pause click—which meant a catfish.

It didn’t take Minnow Bucket long to haul it in, all eely ribbed and kicking up a fuss. Too lazy to rise from my chair, I watched him pull it up on the sand, then stagger off in search of a stringer.

Hollywood with a three and a half-foot longnose gar and Minnow Bucket with a 6.6-pound catfish.
Photo by Rob Mauldin.

“Looks like a six-pound flatty,” Minnow Bucket slurred, meaning a flathead cat. The next day, though, we found out it was a 14-pound blue with an ugly white splotch on its head. It was also a cannibal, since he’d caught it on that smaller cat.

After that, Minnow Bucket fell down once or twice (a tradition which, according to him, signals a successful night), then trudged off to his tent. Meanwhile, I passed out in my chair, wrapped up in my sleeping bag, pole extending from my lap.

From that point on, the night was a blur. Every 20 minutes or so one of our clickers began clicking. If I wasn’t jumping up and groggily releasing line, then waiting for a suspected gar to make its second run, Minnow Bucket was lurching from his tent and doing the same. We couldn’t tell if half these runs were the wonky currents of the hole or actual fish messing with us, but they felt like gar—definitely.

Minnow Bucket had a few small pieces of buffalo out and I had half a gou (my preferred word for freshwater drum). Whereas I was betting on the big boys, Minnow Bucket was going for anything from a medium cat on up—so of course he kept getting more hits than me.

It got to the point that I kept waking every time his bait-clicker clicked. But those fish, they just kept dropping the bait. So around three in the morning, I took my pole up to my tent and crashed out. Still, every half-hour, Minnow Bucket would blast from his flaps and battle a phantom fish. And all the while he was doing this, he would narrate what was going on, blow by blow.

For example: “It’s a runner!” he’d yell. “It’s taking it, it’s taking it! Yeah, it’s definitely on! It’s spooling me, it’s spooling me! Guess I better set it. Okay, okay, I’m gonna set it… here goes!” A second would pass, then: “DAMN! That badboy got off! What a rip off! You Mofo! Why you gotta play me like that? I demand my money back!”

So after his eighth or ninth fight of the night, I wasn’t about to haul my sorry ass out of bed. But the thing was, there came a point when he actually had a fish on.

“Hollywood!” he yelled. “Are you sleeping?”

“I’m trying to!” I snapped.

“I could really use some help!”

I decided not to reply. Instead, I just lay there listening to the splashathon going on.

“It’s a big bastard!” Minnow Bucket shouted. “Come to papa!”

But that big bastard didn’t want to come to papa. It kept on slapping and taking out line, his drag screeching urgently.

Finally, I got up—but not to help my pal. I got up to see the fish.

The sandbar was shining with a weird fluorescence when I crawled out of the tent. He had the gar along the sand, parallel to the shore, and I could see it in the moonglow: a serpentine five-footer rolling in a wave of its own creation―like it was wrapped in a skin of water. I even saw it smiling inside that crystalline tube. It was a strange, sudden, eerie sight, and in less than a second—SNAP!

“It Broke The Fuggin’ Hook!” Minnow Bucket cried.

I stood there for a second, no reply, then stumbled back into the tent as the swearing rose into the sky. Something about “Knob-Slobbing!” and “Dob-Gobbling!” but those were just the adjectives. Something about the hugest fish he ever could’ve landed on rod and reel. Something about “Thanks for the help, bro!”

Hollywood and Minnow Bucket wrangle a three and a half-foot alligator gar near Toad Suck, Arkansas.
Photo by Tim Thornes.

Right before breakfast, though, Minnow Bucket got another hit, and we didn’t even hear it make a run. I simply looked over from the fire, saw Minnow Bucket bringing it in, and a minute later a small silver gator gar came splashing in.

This time I jumped up for the assist, leapt into the Trinity, pinned its head to the sand, got both hands around its girth and carried it up on shore. It was a three-footer, weighing 13 pounds. And even though I was glad for my friend, the score was clear to both of us: Minnow Bucket 3, Hollywood 0.

All morning long, they were out in that hole—six-footers, seven-footers, maybe even eight-footers, rolling up a storm. All morning long, they just kept porpoising, as Buckmeier’s words replayed in my head: “the public’s opinion of alligator gar seems to be changing toward conservation.”

This made me think of Bubba, the guide Jeremy Wade had hired for the “Alligator Gar” episode of River Monsters. When I first met Bubba, he actually threatened me, telling me he’d throw me out of his truck if I got all PETA on his ass. Or something like that.

Bubba ran this bowhunting outfit called Garzilla, in which he’d take trophy bowhunters out on his airboat to shoot the big ones. Bubba had claimed there were enough mongo gar in the system to spare, and he let his disdain be known for the less-than-masculine practice of fishing with rod and reel. Still, he condescended to try it out and actually tossed some bait in the water. And when Jeremy hooked that six-foot-eight lunker that they didn’t even show on the show, then landed it, then let it go, Bubba wasn’t so skeptical.

A year later, Bubba changed the focus of his business. He no longer took bowhunters out, he only fished with rod and reel, and he always practiced catch and release. Why? Because he knew the supply wasn’t as plentiful as he had claimed, and that if he planned to continue making a living off gar, then he had to do his part to preserve them.

A year after that, I saw an article on GoFishn.com titled “Texas Drought on Alligator Gar,” with a photo of what looked like the cracked terrain of the Sahara Desert with a mudhole in it. And in that mudhole, there were forty or fifty log-looking gator gars waiting to die in the sludgy soup. That picture had been taken by Bubba, and he’d written the caption under it.

To paraphrase, he explained that this place used to be a lake, but because of a month of 110-degree weather, it had shrunken into a shallow swillhole. He also wrote about how that water was so dang mucky that the gar couldn’t even breathe it, so kept raising their heads for swigs of air. Bubba, however, contacted Texas Parks and Wildlife, and they went and rescued those fish.

Good for you, Bubba! But better yet, good for the gar.

By one o’clock, it was ninety degrees and we knew they wouldn’t be biting till after dark. Still, that didn’t stop us. We went upstream and tried some spots, getting roasted by the sun. I had two beers and Minnow Bucket had ten or twelve. When late-afternoon rolled around, we were both back at camp, baked by the heat index, which was somewhere around 100 degrees.

Both of us then took a swim with alligator gars as large as us, chilling out in the cool of the hole. After that, I tooled on over to the other side and crashed out in the shade, fishing poles propped in my lap. Minnow Bucket did the same in a camp chair on the sandbar.

I napped out for 20 minutes but awoke when Minnow Bucket yelled, “Hey Hollywood, check out the snake!”

Mark Spitzer and a six and a half-foot alligator gar caught on the Trinity River, Texas.
Photo by Eric Tumminia.

It was swimming right between us, downstream, with no concern for the apex predators hunkering right under it. Probably because it was a rattlesnake: bright gold, four feet long, with a checkery pattern on its back. That snake rode high, more out of the water than your standard copperhead or moccasin, just winding along like it didn’t have a care in the world.

In fact, it made a B-line for Minnow Bucket, then pulled up on the shore ten yards downstream from him.

“It’s a timber rattler!” Minnow Bucket shouted.

I figured it was attracted to the deadfall behind the sandbar, which was no doubt filled with mice and voles and random rodii. And that rattlesnake, it didn’t give a crap about Minnow Bucket being there. It just flicked its tongue and stared at him while he broke out his camera. Then, when Minnow Bucket went running toward the snake, it didn’t just stand its ground, it charged straight toward Minnow Bucket, letting him know whose turf this was.

Minnow Bucket stopped short, and so did the snake. They faced off, just a few yards from each other, and that rattler didn’t even coil up or shake its tail when Minnow Bucket got all up in its grille. He shot a bunch of pictures of it, and then it slithered on.

Later that night, we had another wildlife encounter, this time with wild pigs. We heard them in the dark, splashing and squealing and snorting up a storm, but we couldn’t see a thing. They came clamoring right over to our camp, so Minnow Bucket grabbed his gun. I didn’t know he’d brought one along, but there he was waving it in the air: a chromy, blunt .45.

I was shining my spotlight on the bank, where I saw what looked like the silhouette of an oval-shaped basketball scurrying toward a pile of brush. I figured it was a piglet, but couldn’t tell for sure.

As for fishing, we didn’t catch jack that night. There were a couple runs, but that was it. I passed out in the camp chair again, and Minnow Bucket repeated the antics of the night before—jumping up and battling gar, in and out of his tent all night. I even fought a few myself. Still, there were a lot less hits.

By morning, it was overcast and colder out. At one point, something large pulled down a Gator Ade bottle I was using as a bobber to suspend a chunk of drum. Then three minutes later, it popped up fifty yards away in the eddy, exploding with a plasticy “KRACK!” But overall, the gar were less active, and we had to put on our jackets.

Minnow Bucket broke out his smart phone and saw a storm heading in. Then he went to weather.com.

“It’s going to be thirty degrees tonight,” he told me, which neither of us were prepared for. When we left Arkansas, the weather report said it would be sunny and bright for three days straight, never dipping below fifty degrees.

We were therefore forced to skedaddle.

After breaking camp, we headed downstream, me wondering, Is this it? Is this all we get? No more gar, no more nothing?

It didn’t make sense. Where was the story? I mean, my university paid for our travel, and Penn and Daiichi had thrown down as well. And what did I have to show for it? A tale of two drunken brochachos dicking around in the mud? Sure, we caught one small gar, but other than that we were coming back with nothing more than a close encounter with a snake and some razorbacks.

The alligator gar found by Mark Spitzer that he just got back from the taxidermist and hung on his wall.
Photo by Mark Spitzer.

Then, as we approached the launch, we heard the country music twanging from above. There were two tents under the bridge, a generator was chugging away, and some stereotypes on four-wheelers were giving my boat the thumbs up. It looked like a camp for homeless people, but they weren’t.

They were just some beer-swigging rednecks fishing from the concrete rubble. And when we pulled up, we saw what they’d left on display: a freshly dead gator gar, only two feet long.

“I can’t believe it,” I told Minnow Bucket. “I just don’t understand it—why people are so proud to kill these fish, then let them stink up the launch for everyone else! I mean, what’s the deal with this stupid-ass tradition?”

Minnow Bucket just shook his head, and we got out and tied up.

Heading to my Jeep, I considered going over to those yahoos and telling them what the deal was. But that, of course, wasn’t the story. The story—and the story that found me—was that I grabbed that beautiful baby gar and packed it in ice, drove it on home, and took it to the taxidermist—to skin and stuff and mount for my wall. Because ultimately, I wasn’t about to let it go to waste.

So that’s what I brought back. And in a few months, I’ll have it above my TV set, frozen in mid-leap, gills flaring, fangs agleam—a symbol of what could’ve been, and what is still possible, in Texas and beyond.

Alligator gar header image courtesy Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources.

NEXT: “She Poured Out Her Own,” by Julene Bair >>

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Julene Bair

Used to be you could see the place from miles away—not only because my grandfather built a grand house in 1919, but because he chose the highest land around. High Plains Farm, he painted in white letters on our red barn. Now all you can see is the silhouette of a pivot sprinkler.

About ten years ago the farmer who manages the land for the out-of-town owner bulldozed the house, the outbuildings, the yard trees and the hundreds of elms in our windbreak. He burned the rubble piles and sold all the old implements to a scrap iron dealer, leaving virtually no trace. He did this reluctantly. I know, because the day I discovered everything gone, he happened to drive up the dirt trail in his late model white Ford pickup as I stood gazing in befuddlement at empty air.

Although this young farmer with the clean seed cap and thick red neck and arms, close-cropped hair and clean shave was 20 years my junior and had himself grown up in a different county, he’d married into a Sherman County family, and through them knew the names of my grandparents and father and mother. I was the great-grandchild, he the great-great-grandchild of pioneers, and he could imagine what the old place must have meant to the Carlsons and Bairs. He was apologetic, although powerless. The abandoned farmstead was rendering useless a good flat quarter section that could be planted to corn, a Program crop.

Program crops receive government subsidies, practically guaranteeing a profit. I know this because my family still farms. In the 1960s, my parents traded this home place for land closer to their other holdings. Like many other successful farmers in our northwest corner of Kansas, they moved to town, where they built a brick ranch-style house that would blend well in any suburb. From then until his death in 1997, my father commuted to farm the land we still own.

Every few years, I obey the compulsion, as instinctual as a migratory bird’s, to return to the home nest. Last time I went, I parked my car by the pole that used to bring electricity to our house but now conveys power to the pivot sprinkler, keeping it clocking around the field. Irrigation circles are a quarter-mile across, and the center of this one lay beyond where our north windbreak had been, not a great distance over the empty ground, but in my early childhood, anything beyond the windbreak had seemed like the edge of the earth. The sprinkler wasn’t running that day, but sat stationery. If due north was noon, then the long line of its rigging and towers pointed to two-o’clock, toward where the sheep barn had once stood. A thousand ewes and their lambs used to churn and bleat in the corral when penned there for lambing or to be dipped for ticks, vaccinated and marked with chalk. They always ran in a circular motion, like soap bubbles at the bottom of a sink, but now it was as if all life, human and animal, had circled down the drain.

A windmill in the west Kansas landscape.
Windmill photo courtesy shutterstock.

It was late May, and I walked down the rows of ankle-high corn examining the ground. I found a curved piece of white glass and a saucer shard with a faded orange flower painted on it. I examined both for a long time—this broken lip from the bowl my mother used to mix cakes in, this fragment of a plate my family and I used to eat from. I am always surprised by how a small scrap of the past can excite me, how alive the connection still is. Any discovery at all is like having a lucid dream, a direct link to the revelatory power of the subconscious. Along with the object, restored in memory, bloom images of my mother and father in their prime and all the life their union and work brought into being, including younger versions of my brothers and myself.

The object that most arrested my attention that day was the head of our old windmill. I found it lying on the ground in a tall clump of weeds near our pit silo, where we used to burn our trash and throw our junk. I must have seen it on previous visits, but in waking life, as in dreams, we fasten on those objects that have immediate meaning for us. I had recently begun reading, thinking and writing about the Ogallala Aquifer, and I could not imagine a more telling artifact.

The windmill head lay in a nest of bent vanes, some of them buried almost completely in the dirt. Inspired to take a rubbing of the embossed print on the gear head, as from a gravestone, I went to my car and grabbed a pencil and a piece of paper. Back at the mill, I had difficulty holding the paper flat as the wind whipped the edges. It would have been an unusual day on the Plains had the wind not been blowing. Even on relatively quiet days the well-greased reel had turned, the shadows of the vanes serenely revolving over the ground in my mother’s vegetable garden, irrigating our yard as well as providing water for us and our livestock. Now, in an odd seeming role reversal, my shadow fell across the rusted crankcase and twisted vanes of the bodiless giant. I rubbed the edge of my pencil back and forth.

FAIRBURY WINDMILL CO.
FAIRBURY NEBR 10-34
PATD. DEC. 04, 1926

I used to climb the tower. I liked to sit up there and gaze over our windbreak at the sunset. It excited me to think how magnificent the prairie must have been in its original state, to imagine buffalo instead of our sheep grazing the pastel hills above the Little Beaver, the dry, sandy streambed that meandered northeast through our sheep pasture, headed toward its outlet in the Republican River beyond the Nebraska border. I was always careful to brake the rotor before climbing the mill. I wouldn’t want to be sitting on the platform when the fan began turning, and even on quiet evenings, I never knew when a breath of wind might arise. The latent danger demanded my respect.

Now the tallest, most commanding object on our farmstead lay at my feet. The windmill’s corpse reminded me of the buffalo bones that I’d read had littered the Plains when settlers first arrived, on the heels of the hide men and soldiers. All that waste. It reminded me also that the destruction had never ceased.

As the historian Walter Prescott Webb pointed out in his seminal 1930s history of the Great Plains, until immigrants from Europe, the eastern U.S., and the Midwest were able to shed their preconceptions and meet our treeless and virtually waterless savannah on its own terms, it remained what the explorer Stephen H. Long had labeled it: The Great American Desert. The incessant wind blew many pioneer families back home before those who remained recognized its value, but gradually, homestead by homestead, as Webb put it, “primitive windmills, crudely made of broken machinery, scrap iron, and bits of wood” began to appear. These “were to the drought-stricken people like floating spars to the survivors of a wrecked ship.”

I have read that the Apache and Pueblo Indians emerged into their desert by way of sacred springs. We came into ours up the stems of windmills. I’m speaking figuratively, of course. The literal movement was downward, into the wells. Some of the earliest settlers hand-dug their wells, a dangerous enterprise, as the sides could cave in. Later, horses were employed to turn augers and then to hold the weight of casings as they were lowered. One pioneer descendant, quoted in the Sherman County history volume They Came to Stay, remembers her father being eased down a well on a swing with a sledgehammer in his hands. His job was to steady the casing while the men on the surface clinched the rivets connecting the next section. “I visioned the rope breaking or the case slipping,” recalled the daughter. “I was in control of the horses holding all that weight! As it got heavier, my horses began to strain.” By the time a fresh team was brought, hers “were stretched on their bellies.”

This firsthand account reminds me of the pioneers’ heroic accomplishments and perseverance, but lurking behind the story is an unremarked miracle, the water itself.

Ogalalla Aquifer water changes in feet, 1980 – 1995. Click image for larger view.
Image courtesy U.S. Geological Survey.

In 1899, when the geologist N. H. Darton named the rock formation containing the Ogallala, he was probably thinking of the southern Nebraska town of Ogallala and not the Oglala Sioux Indian tribe that once occupied the region along with other Plains tribes, most notably on my west-central plains, the Arapahoe and Cheyenne. He may not have known the meaning of the word in Sioux, which I have seen variously translated as “to scatter one’s own,” “she poured out her own,” and “spread throughout.” Yet no name could have been more appropriate. The water in the Ogallala is itself spread throughout the area its tribal namesake once roamed, all the way from South Dakota to the Texas Panhandle, 174,000 square miles.

If current day Plains dwellers and interested ex-natives like myself were mindful of our bioregion, we would call ourselves the Ogallala people, not directly after the tribe that lost its home to the Euro-American invasion of the Plains, but like this:

                          the tribe
                                     the town
                                               the aquifer
                                                                          us

The name would cascade as water does, down stairs of years onto us.

I never heard the words “Ogallala” or “aquifer” in my childhood. Water was water. Even though it was hard to come by, no one in my family nor any of my teachers dwelled on the science or mystery of its origins. Not until enthusiasts began promoting irrigation, did the word “aquifer” enter the Plains farmer’s lexicon, as a limitless underground lake. In the aftermath of the 50s drought, the notion of engineered rain from a source so plentiful it would never run dry must have cheered farmers up quite a bit. The promise must have seemed like the fulfillment, finally, of the fantasy proliferated by earlier settlement boosters who promised that rain would follow the plows as pioneers moved westward.

If we had been aware of ourselves as belonging to a cherished place, one that we wished to leave intact for future generations, we might have reacted to the promises of irrigation promoters the way the Hopi Indians did in the 1970s, when the Bureau of Indian Affairs wanted to drill a well and install a water tower in Hotevilla, on Arizona’s Third Mesa. Their ancestors had been desert dwellers for several thousand years. The knowledge that flowed into them from these deep roots was far more persuasive than the government hydrologist’s promises. The elders reasoned that the ability to store thousands of gallons of water in the tower would engender a false sense of plenty. They knew that the tower would lead to waste and the pumping would dry out the spring where they’d gathered water for centuries. I’ve since read that the elders lost the battle against the tower. It was installed, but most people in Hotevilla refused to hook their houses up to it.

The pioneers and we descendants have always acted in the opposite manner, grasping whatever new technology would make our lives easier. As justification, we point to the hardships we faced. When I dared to ask one of my father’s old sheep buddies, as they liked to call each other, if he regretted our having plowed most of the prairie under, he said, “Hell no.” This man, like my father, had grown up in a sod house. “We had it hard. Baloney, good ol’ days. Outside toilets, freezin’ your butt off. Look at you, Julie. You’re sittin’ in a pretty nice chair, you’re not out in a teepee somewhere, weavin’ wool.”

Despite cold and a host of other hardships, the Indians, whether they wove wool in Southwestern hogans and adobes or tanned buffalo hides in Plains tepees, developed a different set of values. The Hopi are actually grateful they live in a desert. In too easy a climate, they were told by their maker, Spider Woman, they would fall into ignorance and irreverence, as they had in other incarnations in the previous three worlds they inhabited. The unreliability of the rains keeps them diligent in their rituals.

Without a spiritual tradition that recognizes the balance of nature and holds it sacred, our relationship to the land and its bounty is like a child’s in a candy store with no adult present to restrain us from gorging. We don’t identify ourselves as natives of ecosystems bounded by natural limits of land and climate but as citizens of countries, states and counties, and as owners of farms, places demarcated by lines on maps. We conduct ourselves within an economy that depends on the depletion and degradation of the real things—plants, animals, soils, air, water—that sustain us.

Today, people know that the Ogallala aquifer is not a lake, but a vast accumulation of gravelly deposits saturated with fossil water. These sediments washed down off the Rockies at the end of the Miocene epoch, five million years ago, and were deposited by streams that changed courses continually, braiding, unbraiding, and rebraiding themselves over the Plains. Glacier melt from the mountains collected in the deposits, but today little water from the mountains reaches the flatlands. The aquifer depends mostly on rainfall for recharge, and in the dry climate, most rain evaporates or is used by plants before it has a chance to seep downward. Today’s sprinkler irrigation systems are about twice as efficient as the gated pipe we flooded fields with when we first started irrigating, yet the Kansas Geological Survey reports a yearly pumping average of almost two feet, over 40 times more than the recharge estimate of one-half inch.

It has been only 50 years since “development” or mining of water became widespread in my region, but depletion rates are alarming. I have become accustomed to the funnel shape of the hydrology maps—wide at the top, where the aquifer underlies most of Nebraska, narrowing to a rounded tip just south of the Texas Panhandle. The shape is reminiscent of a whirlwind or dust devil, a common sight on High Plains fields, or the actual, more or less conical shape of a heart.

Percent change in saturated thickness for the High Plains aquifer in Kansas, pre-development to 2007-09. Click image for larger version.
Image courtesy Kansas Geological Survey.

On the Kansas Geological Survey map, the western half of Sherman County where my family still farms is mostly solid orange, indicating declines of up to 30 percent. In southern Sherman County, Rorschach blots of brighter orange show depletion rates of 30 to 45 percent. A couple counties south of ours, large areas range from dark brown to almost black, for declines between 45 and greater than 60 percent. Studying maps from different years, I have seen how such dark areas of high decline in Oklahoma and Texas began as little freckles but spread like cancers into oblong or larval shaped blots. These gradually enlarged, indicating whole regions depleted below usable levels.

Our windmill pumped water onto my mother’s garden and into our house and stock tanks at the rate of only a few gallons per minute. Since my father’s death, I have been preparing our family’s water reports and have acquired a disquieting awareness of today’s irrigation rates, which range from 500 to 1,200 gallons per minute–and of how much water that factors out to over the course of a growing season. Each summer our farm’s five irrigation wells pump between 100 and 300 million gallons. Sherman County’s 886 wells pump between 29 and 50 billion gallons. By comparison, the city of Denver sends 70 billion gallons through its pipes. In one dry year, Sherman County’s 158 irrigation farmers use two-thirds as much water as used by the one million people served by the Denver system. And ours is just one of several dozen High Plains counties where irrigation farming predominates.

Farmers must file annually with the Kansas Water Office, reporting how much water they’ve used, but they have political clout and have so far resisted any serious curtailment of their water rights. Some minor restrictions have been passed. Existing rights have been frozen, no new rights will be issued, and a recent regulation requires all irrigators to install meters, making it more difficult for them to under-report the number of gallons they pump. But to date, the serious conservation measures proposed by directors of water control boards and state governors have not floated.

A plan called Zero Depletion, for instance, had the worthy goal of “sustainable yield” and would have set a future date after which no more water than what seeped into the aquifer would have been pumped out of it. One of our current farm’s neighbors, whose father worked for my grandfather as a young man, tells me, “If that Zero Depletion had gone through, you could have shot a bullet down Main Street and not hit anybody.” He is probably right. Plains economies depend on irrigation. But unfortunately, he was describing an inevitability, whether the plundering is stopped by regulation or depletion. As the desert writer Charles Bowden puts it, “Humans build their societies around consumption of fossil water long buried in the earth, and these societies, being based on a temporary resource, face the problem of being temporary themselves.”

My father’s old sheep buddy thinks he sees the writing on the wall. “You know Denver’s gettin’ so huge, where in the world are they going to get their water?”

“Where’s California going to get their water?” his wife put in.

Her husband resettled his cowboy hat, which he’d placed on his knee when he sat down to talk to me in my mother’s living room. “That’s where the water trouble’s going to come from, because all these legislators in the cities want water for their people. They’re not going to worry much about us out here gettin’ a little water or not. They’re going to try to tie up all the water they can.”

His wife said, “I don’t think the people in the cities have any idea about how important farm land is and what the farmers are doing. They’re not going to think about it and realize the importance of it until they look and the shelves are empty at the grocery store.”

When the environmental soundness of a practice is questioned, farmers and the ag industry often make this familiar argument. “How else would we feed the world?” they ask. The implication in this case was that if city people vote to curtail large-scale irrigation to secure their own water needs, a food shortage will result and people will be hungry. But as George Pyle, an editorial writer from western Kansas, argued in his book, Raising Less Corn, More Hell, the United States and Europe actually overproduce and undersell grain. They flood world markets with cheap, subsidized commodities. The shortage to worry about is in cash. Over one billion of the world’s people earn less than one dollar per day and can’t afford to buy enough food to eat even at the lowest prices. Like representatives of many countries who argue the point in the World Trade Organization, Pyle believes that U.S. and European farm subsidies exacerbate poverty and hunger in less developed nations, where farmers are forced off the land because they cannot compete in the artificially suppressed market.

Even if by some stroke of altruistic genius we came up with a means of feeding the world’s starving without charge, we could do so most efficiently if we grew corn for human use instead of raising feed corn to fatten cattle and hogs. Over half of each year’s corn crop is fed to livestock within the United States, as is much of the corn we export. By processing seven pounds of corn through a steer, we produce only one pound of weight gain, mostly in fat.

The chief irony in this waste is that we needn’t have disturbed one blade of grass in the first place. The most convincing study I’ve read estimated that the nation’s grasslands once supported around 40 million bison. The environmentally exhaustive practices that support the beef industry could have been almost completely avoided had we stewarded instead of decimated the original herds. We might not be eating as much red meat, but we would be eating meat better for us.

And were it not for the government Farm Program, we would not be growing much corn west of the hundredth meridian—the invisible rain curtain running through the middle of the Plains states and separating the High Plans from wetter, more easterly regions. The crop requires two feet of moisture in Sherman County, about a foot more than what falls out of the sky in the ideal growing season. On one 120-acre irrigated circle, where a sprinkler equipped with the latest conservation technology applies water even at an ideal efficiency of 90 percent, this translates into about 40 million gallons. The Ogallala waters one-third of the nation’s corn crop, and irrigated corn receives roughly that proportion of the $4.5 billion in annual corn price supports.

Color-saturated NASA satellite image of circular crop fields in Kansas, characteristic of a landscape dominated by center pivot irrigation.
Image courtesy NASA.

“They can keep their cheap food policy,” said my father’s sheep buddy. “We sold our souls when we started taking subsidies. If the government got out of farming now we’d all go broke.” The “cheap food policy” he referred to is farmer code for the government program designed to secure an inexpensive food supply. Government subsidized grain suppresses the price that citizens, when wearing their consumer rather than taxpayer hats, pay and that farmers receive for grain. To increase both their income from the sale of grains and their share of Farm Program payments, farmers turn to yield-enhancing chemicals, genetically modified seed, bigger farms, bigger, more complex machinery—and to intensive irrigation. They have no choice, given the low price of grain, but to maximize their returns through increases in production and scale.

I asked our neighbor, the one whose dad worked for my mom’s dad, what he would do to change things if he were boss of it all. “I don’t really want to tell others what to do,” he replied with typical Plains humility, then proceeded to outline his own four-year crop rotation system—one season of pinto beans, two of wheat, one of corn planted back into the wheat stubble to conserve moisture. The system relied less on water-thirsty corn, but more on “no-till,” a method that keeps weeds down with chemicals while reducing the number of passes a tractor makes through a field. He told me that Roundup, the chemical used more in no-till than in conventional tillage, “is only contact. It doesn’t go into the ground.” I hope he’s right, because as farmers are becoming more aware of the water’s limits and as the cost of fuel to pump the wells escalates, they are turning increasingly to this alternative.

But environmental thinkers looking at the bigger picture suggest that, in the face of our dwindling fuel and water supplies, with farm chemicals showing up in our drinking water and with nitrate run-off killing the coral reefs and threatening life in the oceans, we can no longer afford to underwrite agriculture as currently practiced. The emphasis needs to shift onto conservation—less rather than more reliance on chemicals; the restoration of our grasslands; more direct marketing systems that do not waste resources in shipping, processing and packaging; smaller, biologically diverse farms; and the return to dry-land agriculture on the Plains. Given increasing global competition, farmers might always require subsidies to stay in business, but the only practices that warrant taxpayer support are those that truly do secure our food supply and those that preserve the land, water, and soil, not those that waste or pollute resources essential to the nation’s future.

Instead of lobbying for revisions in the “cheap food policy,” farmers are too often duped into blaming environmentalists for their problems. When I worry about chemical residue building up in our soil and water or mention my regrets over the depletion of the aquifer or suggest that the Farm Program should underwrite conservation rather than depletion, our farm’s neighbors like to josh me about being a “greenie.”

“We’re the endangered species,” says the neighbor with the no-till plan. He and another farm neighbor spend winter nights plotting their vengeance. “We’re thinking of starting an adopt-a-prairie dog program for city folks. We could send them a picture each month. ‘What Your Prairie Dog Did Today.’” He cracked a lopsided smile. “They could all be the same picture.”

I had to laugh. But I also had to ask if he’d seen many burrowing owls lately. The odd little birds used to stand like sentry soldiers on our pasture’s prairie dog mounds, but I’d read they were now rare.

He continued to grin. “We try to take care of them too, because they and prairie dogs go together. They’re hard to shoot though.” He made a wave-like motion with his hands. “Cause of how they fly.”

He was both kidding and not kidding, I knew, getting my goat with the truth.

For my people, the highest value has always been production and yields, the unbridled use of whatever could advance these, the removal or suppression of whatever got in their way. Yet my grief over the loss and destruction is not, as my Plains friends assume, born of my life among urbanites. The environmentalists I met in college or in Colorado, where I now live, did not brainwash me. My conviction in these matters comes from my past on that farm. Had I not sat atop our windmill and gazed over what still remained then of the native buffalo grass, I would have no direct sense of what has been lost. I don’t know a farm kid who didn’t climb their family’s windmill and ponder the same things. What we saw sank into us. Most Plains-born people are not content in other landscapes. When I lived in the Midwest, going back to school, I hated not being able to see far, the humidity, the low and overcast skies, and the blatantly green grass. The term “greenie” attaches the wrong hue to my environmentalism. I like the shortgrass prairie as much in its winter-cured, yellow phase as in the summer, when the pale, variegated greens range into blues. The Plains are too intensely green now, almost every inch of the native grass gone, the sod turned and planted to non-sustainable crops made possible by wasting a substance to which we owe our own lives.

The water allowed us to live safely within shelterbelts and comfortably on lawns, the fragrance of domestic blooms floating around us, but we were also touched by wildness. June bugs slapped against our screen doors summer nights. Toads hopped across our porches to feast on them. Lizards skittered through yucca litter in our pastures. The ears of kit foxes sailed over ditch weeds. Coyotes yipped from beyond the corral fences. Jack rabbits zigzagged drunkenly ahead of our cars. Prairie dogs and burrowing owls perched on our pasture hills. We would not have known these creatures had the water not made it possible for us to live where we did and to, by consequence, become who we were, with our particular sense of aesthetics, definitions of beauty particular to that place. We wouldn’t have known the luminescent, high evening skies, the glorious sunsets over wheat fields and pastures, the soft pastels of buffalo and gramma grass, the brilliance of snow-covered fields. We would not be us.

A Fairbury windmill in western Nebraska taps into the Ogalalla Aquifer.
Windmill photo courtesy Shutterstock.

FAIRBURY WINDMILL CO. From my father’s point of view, windmills were mechanical contraptions. He complained of the damnable amount of attention and servicing they required. The pump leathers had to be pulled and replaced every so often, the towers climbed and the gears greased. Yet to most of us windmills are romantic Western icons. They stand starkly on the remaining Plains grasslands. They seem to grow out of the ground like huge daisies, as if they are natural features, or emblems of humans as natural creatures.

One family, one tower, and some danger in getting what that family needed from the earth in order to survive. The difficulty constituted what I have heard called “right relationship.” Labor is expended, risks incurred that keep the supplicants mindful of their dependence on a resource, and the resource is not depleted, at least not seriously or rapidly. It is only tapped.

The rubbing still hangs over my desk. On its back side is a list of my mother’s certificates of deposit, the only piece of paper I could find in my car that day. The irony doesn’t escape me. It didn’t escape me then. Since my father’s death I had been helping her shop for competitive interest rates and keep track of her savings, money that had accumulated thanks to the Ogallala. Up the metal stems of windmills had flowed the water that made it possible for my family to establish a foothold, then a stronghold from which we further enlisted that resource for our personal benefit. For 38 seasons now, the water has gushed out of our wellheads. First, when we were flood irrigating, we channeled it down the furrows of row crops ranging from sugar beets to corn and pinto beans. Now we sprinkle it on from overhead, as if it were real rain. When harvesting these irrigated crops, we have been harvesting the water, transferring it from the aquifer into our own dark bank vaults. In inverse relationship to the draw-down of the underground water, the money grows in storage, although there is really no vault and no sheaves of bills.

Our words for money come from actual things. A buck was originally the name given to a deerskin, a common unit of trade during this country’s settlement. “Fee” comes from the German vieh, meaning cattle. We use the term “shell out” because Native Americans traded in shells. Salary comes from the Latin word for salt, because Roman soldiers were paid partially in this essential mineral. But today our financial system rests on several levels of abstraction. The more years that separate us from the days when all of us ate directly from land and soil—when we ate our own grains, dairy products, vegetables, produce, and meat instead of the processed, pulverized, packaged foodstuffs they are now turned into elsewhere—the higher we have built the tower. We’ve removed the supports as we built so that today our system floats on invisible perceptions. No stockpiles of gold back the dollar anymore. As the economist Milton Friedman says, “The pieces of green paper have value because everybody thinks they have value.” Most transactions don’t even require greenbacks. Our wealth is in name only, figures recorded, except on those occasions when we print them out, in binary code on computers.

My mind reels at how this transfer took place on the Plains. We went from actual wealth in the form of natural resources on which all past and future generations depend to the individual abstract wealth of a few generations of pioneers and their descendants. Actual substance that you can touch—real water from within real ground—has been transformed into binary code. We can’t transform any of it back.

Header pivot sprinkler farm image courtesy Shutterstock.

NEXT: “Order and Entropy,” by Nathaniel Brodie >>

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Poetry by Christopher Cokinos
Photography by Stephen Trimble

Stone That Leaps

A Utah Sequence

Preternatural strands,
the gesture of reaching.
Held as earth, just so.

~

The raven’s gurgle
is a cat with wings, purring
quick to canyon echo.

~

Cold, full moonrise framed
by Partition Arch.  Portals
to fins, mesas, dusk–

~

Bushtits.  Then thumper
trucks?  Thus an arch: silent.
Erosion’s revenge.

~

I am 43.
Birthday moon, cold wine, firelight.
Stupid smile!  Years of this!

~

Ravens tumbled as
I set up the tent, missing
you, the moon a blue juniper berry.

~

Mormon tea,
like crinoid columns
of a former sea.

~

And sandstone’s slow cascade:
This place.
Lifted, cracked and stilled.

~

Wind-drift sand, sunlit:
How to make eons,
stone that leaps.

~

To thought’s last thought:
Balanced Rock:
Wisdom’s cairn.

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David Rose

I remember—yes, I have clear memories of this—my childhood home. It dominated, blighted, my early years.

It was by no means a slum. Indeed, it was comfortable, in its bourgeois way, a large, ramshackle Late Victorian house with a vaguely Arts And Craft veneer—florid William Morris wallpaper, reproduction Voysey curtaining, Baillie Scott furniture—due mainly to the influence of my mother, who was considered “arty”. In fact she was: she’d studied at the Slade under Augustus John, which was as arty as one can get. What I objected to, grew depressed over, was the muddle attendant on artiness. An abiding impression of cats and wellingtons on the kitchen table. Even now, that is my sharpest childhood memory.

With an auditory component: my father attempting Bach on the violin in his study.

My father, in contrast to my mother, wasn’t in any way arty; he was a stockbroker. But he was, or considered himself to be, musical, in a limited way. Limited in his talent, but also in his taste. He only ever played Bach. Bach and balance sheets were his confessed pleasures. I would hear, sometimes listen to him as he picked his way slowly through the Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin.

He struggled hardest over the Second Partita, with its arduously long Chaconne. Even when he plausibly pulled it off, I never cared for the Chaconne. I found it heavy-gaited, not to my taste. But Chaconne á son goût, and in retrospect I realize that that was my father’s refuge, Bach and balance sheets, the dry dancing figures. As long as he had the austerity of those, he could turn a blind eye to mother’s muddle.

I couldn’t.

Which is why Eva made such an impression in my most impressionable years. She was Viennese, liberated, a thoroughly Loos woman; she introduced me in the most casual way to the work and credo which changed my life.

Her father was a lecturer at the L.S.E. She grew up in a suburb of Vienna whose name now escapes me. We met in, or rather outside, the Dorchester, where I was lunching with my father. I was lounging in the street, smoking. She came up, asked for a cigarette and if I was awaiting anyone. I said, no, having a rest from the décor.

She said, with a rather languorous vehemence, “ornament is crime.” I sensed quotation marks.

Prompted, she explained. It was an article by the Viennese architect Adolf Loos, the correct title being, I later discovered, “Ornament and Crime”. I preferred the vulgarized version; I wanted it tattooed on my forehead, on everyone’s forehead (this was the high tide of 60s Victoriana).

She was actually familiar with his work, his houses in Vienna, the Moller house especially. She said she used to pass it on a detour to the Vienna Woods. She described its street front elevation, a flat rectangle enclosing smaller symmetrical rectangles, one inset, one projecting. Two days later she sent me a photograph from a magazine pasted to a postcard. On our first date, she presented me with a book on Loos’ work, with an introduction by Pevsner.

It had the impact of a religious conversion. I resigned my junior partner-cum-dogsbodyship in the stockbroking firm secured by my father, enrolled in architectural studies, and on graduation took up a junior partner-cum-dogsbodyship in an architectural practice, again secured by my father.

Sadly, he died soon after. Of disappointment, perhaps.

In the meantime, Eva and I spent holidays and weekends scouting out examples of English Modernism, of which there were some surprisingly rigorous examples, all pre-War, within motoring distance: Chertsey, Angmering, Cambridge….

We even made the pilgrimage to Vienna, imposing on Eva’s distant relatives while we toured the Loosian sites: the Café Museum, the Goldman & Salatsch shop, the Lainz social housing, the Steiner, Scheu, and of course Moller houses. Eva insisted we have a drink, on the final day, in the American Bar. In fact, I had several, to dull the disappointment. Despite its acclaim, and the simplicity of Loos’ design, the exterior is unbearably opulent and the interior oudoes the Dorchester. I in turn insisted we go back for a last look at the Moller house, to restore my faith.

At work I preached a revivalist Modernism in its purest form. By the time I was entrusted with projects of my own, fashions were changing rapidly: New Brutalism, the first stirrings of Post-Modernism, High-Tech. My designs were professionally decried as anachronistic, elitist, old-fashioned. As if symmetry, mathematical beauty could ever be out of date. The latest fashion now appears to be “organic” or “green”. I’ve even seen a tree-house in the Architectural Review, for God’s sake.

Fortunately there was still the odd client who appreciated austerity. My father’s legacy meant I didn’t need to accept any commissions, but it was a vocation, not a job. It meant I could pick and choose. I was a dilettante, perhaps, but a diligent one. When the client and I were in accord, I went to the utmost lengths, in design details, materials, in planning battles, even compromising, trimming my sails if really necessary. The important thing was to see them built. For, truth be told, these few commissions were important. They served as dry runs for my real objective: to build for myself, with absolute integrity, the home of our dreams, Eva’s and mine. For she was still then my soul-mate.

She spotted the plot. We’d trundled out to see a Connell Ward and Lucas house in Wentworth (sadly, now demolished), cutting back to the A30 down Callowhill when she pointed up.

It wasn’t in fact a vacant plot; there was a ramshackle wooden chalet teetering on dereliction. Which made it perfect. A commanding site, no problems with demolition, and of course close to the A30. We bought it. I planned.

It didn’t go to plan. Planning consent for Modernism at its purest was even harder to obtain than in the 30s, as I knew. And the local planning committee more obdurate than most. I managed to win them round on the design by including a fictitious striped conning tower, which I then offered to forgo, but the surveyor had concerns about subsidence, being a hillside site, and the weight of concrete as opposed to wood.

I had to rethink it structurally, but was determined on the design. A perfect white cube. With the front elevation uncluttered by “holes for doors and windows” which, as Corbusier put it, “are the destruction of form.” So from the bend in the road below, all that would be seen was a pure, unbroken square.

I even had to convince Eva of that. Being south-facing, there would be a loss of light, sun, views. I argued that a solid wall would be cooler in summer, compensated for the windows with a central stairwell and large skylight, and wide ground-to-roof windows on the east and west walls. No compromise, our watchword.

Ideals exist to stretch us, morally, aesthetically. Ours was to be a house to live up to. It would out-Loos Loos, tighten up Loos. His interiors I always found a let-down, fussy, sensual, eclectic. Even his dress was old-fashioned English tailoring—in photographs he looked very much like my father.

I put the kitchen upstairs, with vents directly through the roof. That meant the ground floor could be completely open plan, with just spatial variations in the ceiling heights around the stairwell.

I aligned the left-hand side of the windows with the central axis of each wall, giving a diagonal asymmetry, and incorporated glass entrance doors within each window, giving a single unbroken column of glazed, black-barred panels in each wall. The black glazing bars I echoed in ladder-back dining chairs, which, together with white leather sofas, would be the sole visible furnishings downstairs. All the other essential furniture, including drop-down table, bookshelves, hi-fi, would be concealed behind sliding plywood panels spanning the two blank walls.

I allowed a little luxury with the panels. Three tiers, one behind the other, each half the wall length, and each in a different colour: pale lemon, pale blue, dove-grey. They could thus be paired in different combinations, altering subtly the mood of the room. (The parquet was silver birch.)

Eva eventually was as delighted as I.

We would sit watching the sun through the east window in the morning, trace its movement through the skylight, wait for it in the west. We rarely unpanelled the television. We would listen to music, not Bach but the Viennese classics, Brahms, Mahler, Zemlinsky, though I preferred Webern. But mostly we sat and talked.

We had house-coats and smoking jackets made to blend with the panels. We would decide jointly on the colours for the evening, and sit and talk well into the night, exploring every metaphysical avenue, every cultural cul-de-sac.

We would often discuss Wittgenstein. Eva’s granparents had known his sister and, briefly, his pianist brother. Eva told me how his sister had enlisted his help in building her new home, in partnership with the commissioned architect, a student of Loos’, but designing all details of fittings himself, even having a ceiling lowered by two millimetres to enhance the proportions.

I wondered aloud why he didn’t go on to build for himself, but as Eva pointed out, he lived in college rooms and rented huts, spartanly furnished: deck chair, camp bed; carpetless.

Yet despite, or maybe because of his monkish austerity, he would go to the cinema to watch Westerns or films noirs, in the front row with a pork pie and possibly a disciple.

She also told me he would recommend his pupils to apply for jobs in Woolworth’s. I assumed she was kidding me, but no. Woolworth’s. Not even Marks and bloody Sparks.

But his Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations—known to Eva—cued many of our conversations.

Apart from talk, much of our precious time together was spent in the upkeep of the house. Maintenance was a must. Despite adhering rigidly to my design, I had been forced to make concessions structurally. (Am I repeating myself? I possibly am.) With planning restrictions and the nature of the site, I had opted for a steel frame with blockwork infill, rendered in white Portland cement, with only the roof in concrete. Subsidence problems were minimal; nonetheless the roof and rendering needed periodic repair and, in the damp English climate, regular whitewashing, twice a year for the exterior, spring and autumn, once a year for the interior, early summer. We did it all between us, initially. Then I did the exterior, while Eva did the interior.

I found it satisfying, both in the mental refreshment of the manual process, and in the results. Eva found the same, or said she did. But I sometimes wonder if it was partly the painting….

She once suggested, out of the blue, putting up curtains. Jokingly, so I assumed.

But a little later she asked if we could put pictures up. This time she seemed serious. I explained that we could hardly hang them on the sliding panels, and on the window walls they’d be against the light. I allowed one in the bedroom, though—a Ben Nicholson monochrome relief. She was satisfied.

Later still though, she took to keeping on her outdoor dresses all evening. And they became, I noticed, continually brighter, more vivid, even primary colours. I began, I’m ashamed to admit, to suspect her of having an affair. But there was never evidence, and indeed she appeared to live alone after the divorce, in a nondescript flat in – where the hell was it? Quite closely nearby. I would have forgiven her for it, and forgave her anyway, for what I felt more was the intellectual betrayal.

I soldiered on. There were sequential helpmates; none stayed the course.

It was a curious experience; I can’t quite describe it. I had finished the autumn whitewash, so it would have been October, but gloriously warm, clear skies all day (I’d had to finish the south wall in sunglasses). I was sitting in the west corner, windows and door open, enjoying some wine and the setting sun. There was Bruckner on the radio—his Third, I think—and someone down the hill had lit a bonfire; I could see the smudge of smoke, smell the wood burning, mixed with the odour of the leafmould outside… I noticed tears on my cheek… I’m sorry.

I don’t remember how long I sat there, I’m not even sure it was the same occasion—the radio was off, I think. I revealed the TV and turned it on, went upstairs to the fridge, found some sausage rolls. I remember pulling my chair right up to the screen. I don’t remember what was on, some soup opera, I think, no, I mean soap… sorry, there was a point to all this….

There are views aplenty here, too: rolling hills, bracken in  the grounds, corpse of birchtrees beyond the boundary. On one of my walks through the woods I discovered a holm oak, obviously old, evergreen amongst the rest. It had the remains of a tree house in its crown. Caretaker’s children, I presume.

Sometimes I climb up—I can reach the first branch with a little jump, pull myself up—when I have the energy, sit on the rotting platform, enjoy the silence, fragrance. Below me, generations of oakleaves are turning to leafmould. I’ve even toyed with the idea of finding some boards, repairing the tree-house. Pine perhaps, maybe birch. A home from home, a home from holm… in the sifting leaves… quiet… quiescent….

But no. No.

That perfect square.

White modern house interior image courtesy Shutterstock.

NEXT: “Drifting,” by Steve Edwards >>

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Steve Edwards

Your father was a mechanic. His hands dwarfed the wrenches and ratchets they held, the screwdrivers, the pliers, the bottles of Bud, your mother’s limp hand in her hospital bed the night she stopped breathing. The last time you saw your father was two years ago, when he’d come stumbling into the bar where you’d parked yourself in front of a baseball game and a beer. He was alone. You almost didn’t recognize him. He’d been in some kind of an accident and every last inch of him—the skin on his forearms, the backs of his hands, his neck and face and eyelids—was splotched with little flaming welts, like cigarette burns, that he’d dabbed with ointment. “Riding lawnmower cut out,” he said, shrugging off your concern and swigging his Bud. “Bellied down to the blade and, why shit, ended up dry-humping a whole motherfucking nest of ants.”

That night when you told your wife the story you thought she might ask if he needed to go to the hospital, if maybe he was having an allergic reaction and needed your help. You thought if she asked you that, then you’d have an excuse to go back and talk to him—really talk. Instead she just frowned.

“That’s sad,” she said.

“It is.”

In the fall you went back to college and your wife left you. The first few weeks she would call home every night, and you were sure she’d come back. You read the Beat poets. Nothing made any sense.

There were a few nights after she left, a few nights in your crappy apartment, alone, when you turned off the TV and sat in stunned silence wondering what had happened and what was going to happen next. But mostly you got up each morning and dutifully sat in your classes at school, watched the eighteen-year-olds as though they were some alien species. The dopey boys in their sweatpants, staring out the window. The girls with their enormous daily planners, their highlighter pens. When class got boring, you doodled the house centipede you’d seen one night while taking a piss. It drifted across the wall before you, fluidly, its hundred legs like long rippling eyelashes.

In the spring you dropped out and took a job third-shift at the electric meter plant, making overloads for electric meters. On a good night, you made 500 of them. Overloads—tiny jigsaw pieces of tin crimped around copper bars dotted with glue and baked hard in a blast oven. You kept your head down. You worked. You figured that if no one there knew you it would be like you weren’t there at all, and to square that circle you began to wipe clean from your consciousness every last one of your coworkers. That aging nympho Janet with the bouffant hair who squeezed your biceps and said she liked them young muscles. Janet’s best friend, Blondie, whose husband Bobby Ray was a drag racer laid up in the hospital burn unit, burnt to a crisp after his racecar flipped and lit up like a struck match. The sociology major with the Neil Young sideburns. The lunch-break Bible studiers. The pornographic graffiti artist whose drawings appeared each night on the bathroom stalls and would have almost been funny if they possessed an ounce of irony. With each kuh-chunk of the overload machine they vanished.

One night that scruffy redhead Danny, forty and freckled, stole the book you brought to read on break—The Pleasures of the Damned. Bukowski. You didn’t say a word to him because even though you knew he stole it (and he knew you knew he stole it), you wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of existing. You had read that book a hundred times anyway. Bukowski died from leukemia—the same thing that finally took your mother—and though you were tempted to deify the man and his writing, you always suspected that really he was just a common drunk. Like your father.

One night you saw your father strolling down the long tiled hallway on his way to the shop floor and couldn’t believe he’d taken a job here. But then it wasn’t him. It was someone who looked like your father.

One night you saw your father’s hands at the ends of your arms, operating the overload machine. Kuh-chunk.

Nights the work got slow, you told yourself that the meter plant made more sense than a college degree. Your 500 overloads would go into 500 electric meters, which would be fitted onto 500 homes. Your work was not theoretical but actual. Real. You stuffed your thumbs into the safety sensors and the machine sprang to life in a series of mechanical grunts and spasms, and moments later spit out a shiny new overload for the oven. But you couldn’t think of those 500 overloads and electric meters without also thinking of the families who would use them in their homes, the mothers and fathers, the brothers and sisters, who as they went about their lives would be blissfully unaware of you and your work. Which made you feel like a ghost. Which made you see ghosts everywhere. In the produce section at the grocery store stood the Mexican migrants who picked the strawberries. Behind the counter at the bowling alley were the gangs of Chinese women who stitched together the shoes.

You thought about calling your father. Just calling him. Or maybe stopping by the house with a sixer some Saturday morning after work. You remembered Saturday mornings as a kid—he and a few buddies slowly getting lit at the picnic table in the front yard, then sleeping it off all afternoon. You remembered the way a sweetness would sometimes creep in and you could get close to him, sit in his lap, take his big hand in your own and knead it like a lump of dough.

You thought if you brought over a sixer and the two of you sat out front drinking it that that sweetness might return, that life could be normal again, that a world without your mother might be bearable.

But on Saturday morning after work, and after stopping by the liquor store for beer and ice, you lost the nerve. You sat in your car just staring at the house. It seemed more rundown than you remembered. There were big cracks in the stucco. The gutters sagged. Scabs of moss clung to rotting shingles.

So instead you drove out of town on 9th Street, past farms and fields, over the muddy Wabash River and through the small towns of Battle Ground and Brookston, just driving, the windows rolled down, the morning’s coolness washing over you, the scent of freshly broken soil like a long-forgotten dream recalled. You played baseball in these towns. You stood in the outfield in your uniform, in stirrups and cleats and cap, under a dome of clear blue summer sky. You fished these streams and creeks, hunted rabbits in these woods. You knew yourself out here. Your mother wasn’t dead out here. And as long as you kept aiming the car down these county roads, kept this abandoned corner of childhood scrolling past your windshield, she would never die. You thought about that. Jesus. And you pulled over and shifted into park and killed the engine. Outside, a thousand acres of black earth quietly steamed in the morning sun. Red-winged blackbirds called from their perches on cattails in the drainage ditch. Your mother had a special name for you, a name no one else ever used. You listened to the blackbirds. They were saying it.

NEXT: “Shuttle,” by Katie Rogin >>

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Katie Rogin

Jayne Bateman’s travels had become a series of Alice’s rabbit holes. She felt sleepy, slow and ready for a nap at home in New York and then would descend, dream-like, onto the airport tarmacs of other cities and emerge in altered worlds, not quite Wonderlands, but places that made her wonder.

As she walked through airports she found the disorientation of this dream-life especially bad. Moving along the length of a terminal she would be absolutely certain beyond any doubt that when she emerged at the taxi stand she would be confronted with, say, the liquid air of summertime Atlanta. But just as she went through the glass doors, she would be shocked to see a checkerboard pattern on a policeman’s cap. Chicago.

She craved cheese steaks in Milwaukee, fish tacos in Philadelphia, bratwurst in San Diego, pizza everywhere but home. The local beers offered the same foaminess. The hotel rooms whiffed similar vapors. The conference rooms were all silvery and fraying. The clients were interchangeable: overweight women in slimming black cardigans with extravagant sets of bands and jewels on their ring fingers; lean men in chinos and button-down shirts with goatees that communicated end-of-workday wildness.

Charleston in July did not seem like a good idea to Jayne. Hot, humid, unbreatheable air—all by 6:45 in the morning. The hotel didn’t have a gym, but it did have an arrangement with one six blistering blocks away. Google Maps on Jayne’s iPhone took her the long, wrong way and she arrived dizzy and dehydrated. Colleagues from a sister agency also there for the client’s yearly meeting had already staked out treadmills and elliptical machines. Jayne nested her ear buds into place and climbed aboard a stationary bike. For the next fifty minutes she was Lance Armstrong in the Pyrenees pedaling to the pace of Madonna club mixes.

The workout had a normalizing effect on Jayne until she stepped outside again. The air temperature was too high, the natural light too bright, her sweat indistinguishable from the moistness of the air. Her brain didn’t know what to do with the many misfiring signals. She had been in Mobile once, in August, a few years before for a friend’s mother’s funeral. A number of the friend’s New York crowd had travelled together, dressed in black per urban requirement as well as mourning custom. Amid the various rituals of religious service, cemetery burial, casserole heating, cocktail pouring and kitchen cleaning most of their conversation had consisted of comments about the humidity. Stunning humidity, standing in a sauna humidity, wading through a swimming pool humidity. Jayne had wondered then if wearing black had made the sensation of moisture worse.  Weren’t light colors supposed to help? But that was heat, she remembered, not humidity.

“Last year we developed three strategic imperatives under which we aligned our major tactics for the year.” A large client in a cardigan flaunted her corporate-speak as she stood before the group. “We’re going to spend the morning in breakout sessions around each of our three moments of truth in the consumer journey and we’re going to challenge those strategic imperatives to see if they still apply for 2012.” She darted her head in the direction of her boss before continuing. “We encourage you to develop bold ideas, think out of the box, and remember, if you come up against a knowledge gap in your discussion, please write it down on a Post-It Note and place it in the Parking Lot of IWIKs on the wall by the door.”

Jayne instinctively turned to see where the client was pointing and was not surprised to see a large piece of sticky easel paper pasted to the wall with the words PARKING LOT marked across the top in red. The first time Jayne heard the phrase “parking lot” in this context she knew from the evocative placement itself what it meant. IWIK, however, had stunned her into dim submission. I Wish I Knew. It was simple, obvious and poetic under certain corporate circumstances, but it was also Cheney-esque in the way it rang of military acronyms. Jayne avoided using it in speech and reserved it for slide titles in the appendices of PowerPoint presentations.

The day was a series of small group discussions, brainstorming sessions and PowerPoint presentations to all the client and agency teams. There were interruptions at regular intervals for meals and snacks, wheeled in by murmuring members of the hotel conference staff. Water bottles and soda cans sweated in bowls of melting ice next to platters of carefully arranged not-quite-ripe fruit. Protein bars shared space with large disc versions of chocolate chip cookies in an effort to provide options for the business traveler who sometimes indulged in a sugary treat to fend off stress, but who mostly stuck to a regimen of guilt and restraint. Jayne pocketed the free healthy options for the stockpile in her laptop bag. She usually held her own on most travel days, keeping to her diet, never reaching for the release of a treat, but the Charleston weather had opened something in her that could not be quenched by discipline. She ate everything that was put within a five-foot radius of her mouth.

At the end of the day, Jayne lurked near the clients to see if she could overhear the evening plans in order to assess her interest and/or required presence in any phase of the dinnertime activities. The restaurant’s name range a bell in Jayne’s catalogue of memories of clients stretching their entertainment budgets to impress their big-city agencies. She decided to join the festivities and headed up to her room for twenty minutes of alone time before having to be with other people again.

In the elevator, Jayne found herself, given the heat and humidity’s effect on her, in grave danger. She was alone with one of the male clients she could convince herself she found vaguely attractive. They exchanged weak smiles and settled in for the ride up to their floors. Jayne stood to his side and a step behind him in the small space. She inspected his clothes, noting they could all be upgraded with a quick trip to the men’s floor at Barney’s. He wasn’t that far removed from a decent haircut, and his universal goatee—worn by Brooklyn hipsters and midwestern brand managers alike—worked its magic as a Romulan cloaking device. It disguised all the evidence Jayne shouldn’t overlook and replaced it with impossibly fantastic outcomes for their imaginary future together. The bewilderment of her travels imploded into pulsing sexual desire in the time it took for the elevator to reach the third floor. If his sideburns had been a quarter of an inch longer—communicating Hot Mess in the language of facial hair in which she was fluent—she likely would have been panting.

“See you at dinner.”

Jayne became alert just as he spoke and stepped out into the hallway, half looking back at her. She feared there was spittle at the corners of her lips, but she managed a smirk and a nod. Actually speaking in her condition was out of the question.

The agencies and the clients occupied five crowded tables at the restaurant. The elevator client was not at Jayne’s table, but she had a clear sightline as he took aggressive, biting slugs of golden-brown alcohol from a heavy rock glass. With every swallow he seemed to be telepathically sending a heavily cc’d message that announced he drank like a man. She was sure she was supposed to find this modern display of plumage attractive—and she kind of did. She watched him suck—perhaps, even chew—on his ice cubes, but the action reminded her of numerous movie scenes where men did things like run companies and load shotguns exceedingly well—scenarios that made her feel like she was drowning in the dark. Jayne turned her attention from her fantasy life to her own table, asking people to pass things like salt and pepper and Tabasco sauce just so it would seem as if she was socializing. The tall French doors of the restaurant stood open to the street, failing to let in cooling evening breezes or any relief at all.

Three hours, three dinner courses and three glasses of a crisp Marlborough sauvignon blanc later, Jayne found herself back in the same elevator with the same client as well as a few other colleagues. Her interest in this man had turned to dismay during dinner and now disintegrated into boredom. At least they would always have that first elevator ride. And as he—now of the bad shoes and ill-fitting shirt—passed into the space beyond the closing elevator doors, Jayne dismissed him and her desire to fill empty spaces and wondered how hot and humid the next morning would be when she made her way to the gym and how she could do better this time in keeping it all at bay.

Jayne returned to New York on a Wednesday night. The effects of the out-of-town weather eased out of her and she was partially restored. She ate less, pulsed less with longing and left the stash of protein bars in the laptop bag even as she carted it to and from the office.

Montgomery was hot without the humidity so Jayne experienced simple stupidity, without the flailings of lust. There had been a male flight attendant from Atlanta to Montgomery who narrated their journey over the PA through most of the flight. He sounded like Truman Capote speaking in tongues and Jayne wondered if some part of her brain only neurologists had a name for had been damaged. Now she sat in the backseat of the rental car while her knucklehead colleagues in the front seats tried to get the GPS to work. Neither the account director nor the media guy seemed to be technically inclined. Jayne leaned her head back against the seat and closed her eyes, listening to their Two Stooges dialogue. They were sweet, funny men who managed multimillion-dollar pieces of business for the agency, but the GPS set-up menu defeated them.

“Can we have the British woman’s voice?” Jayne didn’t lift her head from the seatback or open her eyes, but she felt the media guy twist in his seat to face her.

“Seriously? This is your contribution?”

“Just use your phone to get us there.”

“Then it’ll be the New Jersey man’s voice. Does that work for her highness?” He said it lightly with the usual smart-ass bite that characterized all the friendly conversations at the agency.

“I’ll pull this car over right now if you two don’t stop fighting.” This was the account director practicing for the kids he and his wife were considering.

“We haven’t even left Hertz yet.” Jayne lifted her head, opened her eyes, and smiled at her colleagues. “Montgomery is totally the blast you promised. Which client is this again?”

Once the GPS was up and running and they all had their phones out as just-in-case back-up, they finally were able to pull out of the airport lot. Jayne thought that having been to Mobile that August years ago she’d been to Alabama, but as soon as they got on the highway, she realized she’d never been any place like this. A sci-fi version of Mars came to mind. A barren landscape punctuated with strange structures and alien beings.  A sign outside a church offered: Simple. Intense. Worship. The words made sense, but the punctuation confused her.

“What does that mean?”

“Some kind of religious event, I guess.”

“Is it a branded service?”

“You mean the competition offers Complex Moderate Blasphemy?”

“I’m confused. Do you think it’s trademarked?”

“Is blasphemy the opposite of worship?”

“I think we might get in trouble for talking this way.”

“You mean we might go to Hell?”

“Did you say that with a capital H?”

They drove in silence past the sign that read Combustible Fire Ministries.

The Montgomery host client served bad food for snacks and lunch, but assembled the best meeting supplies Jayne had ever seen. She actually felt her eyes widen as she surveyed the day-glo Post-It Notes in a variety of shapes and sizes, multi-colored felt tip pens, table-top easels of large sticky paper with cardboard handles for easy carrying, and boxes of impossible-to-find small binder clips. Jayne was in first-day-of-school heaven, lining up pens and paper and feeling very prepared to do everything right on her clean slate.

In the first breakout session, Jayne’s group gathered around a large glossy whiteboard propped against the wall in the corner of the meeting room. A junior account person from another agency grabbed up the dry erase marker and assumed a sentry-like position, awaiting orders. Jayne was generally very good at these events although she knew she had a tendency to talk too much to impress and not enough to collaborate. She also often interrupted and talked over or through people, especially if they worked at another agency. She liked to think it was a competitive streak, but she knew it was more about wanting to be seen to be earning her agency’s hourly billable blended rate.

Jayne looked out the window to the Martian landscape of the Montgomery suburbs and wondered if either the avenging conflagration or the glory of salvation that the various church signs had promised could reach her here behind the protection of the receptionist, the chief marketing officer and the holy cordon of strategic initiatives and bold tactics. It was just half a beat after she offered her first nugget of expected wisdom that she felt the desire to please seep suddenly from her like waters rushing back out to sea. She was unable to form thoughts of value or figure out how to express them in ways that were coherent. Her head was filled with illogic, non-sequitors and general nonsense. She was required to speak here, or was she? Was this rust or rebellion?

As the day went on—in small group sessions, during breaks, and at lunch—Jayne experimented with not speaking. She gestured, she smiled, she stared into space above people’s hair. She became absorbed in guessing which color marker would be used.

At first it was difficult to stay silent. She felt an inner pressure, as if someone was reaching into her trying to pull out large strangely shaped objects, but slowly she realized it was all right not to speak. No one seemed to think she was stupid or unprepared, no one seemed to think she wasn’t doing her job. She began to think that people actually liked her more when she was silent.

Near the end of the day, the media guy gradually became alarmed when he turned to her expecting her to speak, only to find her tight-lipped and nodding. In an afternoon breakout session the account guy leaned down from his towering height and asked if she was feeling okay. Jayne smiled and nodded again.

“Do you have a sore throat or something?”

Jayne cleared her throat. “I’m good.”

“Did you forget to read the pre-read?”

“I’m good. Just don’t have anything to contribute.”

“You can just repeat what they say. It’s really why they pay us.”

Jayne chuckled as he expected her to. “I’m good. It’s fine. I talked a lot last time.”

“You need to contribute.” He was firm, no longer friendly.

Jayne hardened her face and for once took a moment to think about what to say. She could remind him that she didn’t report to him, that he was being ridiculous, that she would, of course, offer up marketing wisdom at appropriate moments, that she wasn’t feeling well, that she was just kidding around, that maybe he could get off her back. But instead she told him that everything was fine, she was good and, hey, she wanted to mention to the client that consumer tracking study they had talked about last time. Was that okay with him?

At the close of the day’s session, Jayne selected the best pads of Post-It Notes and grabbed up as many pens as she could and shoved them into the outer pocket of her laptop bag. She remembered the collection of protein bars in the inner pocket and for a brief moment wondered if she was stealing. She used to relieve her local Starbucks of fistfuls of Splenda packets to keep at home until a friend informed her this was theft.

“But it’s free. It’s there for people to take.”

“It’s there for people to use,” her friend explained. “To use while they are actually still inside the Starbucks, in the drink they’ve bought at the Starbucks. Not, for people to stock their kitchen cabinets with at home.”

Jayne felt like an idiot about things like this—she suspected it had something to do with lacking a moral compass, but she wasn’t even sure what that was. She stopped liberating the Splenda packets, but her laptop bag and her drawers at the office were filled with other acquired freebies that could be used as evidence against her in the increasing likelihood that she was a thief waiting to be caught and prosecuted.

She begged off dinner with the clients and the other agencies—Montgomery’s best restaurant held no allure—and thought for a moment about having a cab drive her to see the Hank Williams statue she had read about. The sun setting around that not-such-an-angel from Montgomery seemed as if it might be the kind of moment that could restore her equilibrium. But she ended up watching unmemorable television in her room until she fell asleep. The Hampton Inn offered a self-service waffle machine at the breakfast buffet and she wanted to be well rested when she used it.

Jayne returned to New York later in the week and couldn’t help but notice all the churches and temples she passed as she commuted between her apartment and work.

Jayne flew into Columbus very late on Sunday night. The flight was quiet with none of the usual thundering noise and dramatic swoops of takeoff and ascent to cruising altitude. The interior lights stayed off for the duration and the aisle of the plane was lit in a few rows by laptop screens. As she closed her eyes, the screens of spreadsheets seemed to flicker, reminding her of lighters held aloft at concerts accompanied by pleading requests for favorite songs. What song was it she wanted to hear? She slept a little and felt relaxed within her disorientation in the air, but as she made her way through the terminal—rolling her suitcase behind her, her laptop bag hunched over her shoulder—she became over stimulated. Shops were open, drinks were being served. Jayne thought it was too late for this kind of commerce. She felt out of time, sleepy and awake all at once.

When the taxi driver pulled up to what he said was her destination, she thought he had made a mistake. The cab idled in the middle of what appeared to be a shopping mall. She could see a Banana Republic Sale sign flapping in darkness against a stone building. Then she looked to her right and saw the hotel entrance.

Jayne went to sleep immediately after getting settled in the room, willing herself instantly into unconsciousness as if switching off a light. She awoke a few hours later, rested and ready to start her day, but it was too early for that. She stood at the window looking out at the dimly lit weird geography of hotel-as-mall. Maybe she would buy some shoes.

When morning finally came she ran on the treadmill in the too-cold gym. She never really warmed up and struggled to finish the slow three miles she settled for. She walked outside in the hotel-mall parking lot—seeking warmth and her bearings—and found herself mesmerized by the array of options: Pottery Barn and West Elm and Restoration Hardware. Was all this necessary? She walked the strangely named mall streets—could malls really have streets?—her hands on her hips and she wondered, looking at the carefully arranged window displays, why we do this to ourselves.

She walked deeper into the deserted mall, taking a turn at a street called Chagrin Drive. She wanted to laugh, because she was sure this was funny, but she couldn’t remember the precise definition for chagrin so she just snorted to herself and walked on. The mall was scary in the usual way—scary in the way that when faced with too many options she became overwhelmed or scary as when that desire to have, to buy, so quickly overpowered her. When America lined up all her brands in one place there was a certain martial massing of weaponry that brought to mind Soviet May Day celebrations. She didn’t feel like looking at shoes after all and sensed that she would be late to the meeting if she didn’t get back to her room to change.

The morning sessions were filled with everyone’s bosses’ bosses presenting their underlings’ work and showing off their corporate shmoozability. Jayne nodded and assumed she was smiling. She doodled and admired the hotel pens, grabbing a few from the tables around her. Hilton always had good stuff like that. She would take the note pads from the room when she left.

By the time they broke for lunch, the air conditioning had been on Super High for hours. She needed to feel warm again and took her lunch plate outside into the Midwestern summer sun. There were no chairs or tables, only the sidewalk’s curb to sit on. She sat on the cement, balancing her lunch plate on her thighs, waiting for the sun to warm her bones. The hotel loomed over her and she could sense the shopping mall beyond the hotel, humming at her back.

She moved the bean salad around with a fork, put a small amount in her mouth and chewed it slowly. This was the last trip for a while, but the dreamlike disconnection felt heavy on her and within her. What was happening? What was her current experience, as her client would phrase it? And what was the new unparalleled experience she required? Maybe she just needed to stay home.

She finished off the bean salad and took a bite of the turkey sandwich. The attempt at healthy eating constructed for the business traveler made her gag a little. The idea of lite had not seemed to produce anything actually edible. She tried to think of something she would rather be eating instead but nothing came to mind.

Three days later Jayne was home, back on the New York subway, picking up her iced coffee, going to work, going to the gym, doing it again. She lugged her laptop bag from destination to destination, heavy baggage that left her body distorted.

On Friday morning she got off the 1 at Times Square and made her way through the station, joining the stream of commuters heading for the Shuttle. It was crowded, but she fell in with the right current of movement and was carried along mindlessly toward the correct platform. She wasn’t able to find a seat, but the trip was only two minutes. A guy claiming he was homeless, sick and a war veteran pushed his way through the crowd on the train. He was of indeterminate race—like the actor cast in the latest television commercial the agency had made for the Indianapolis client—and he wore a red Phillies T-shirt under numerous layers of unbuttoned shirts in a variety of pale colors. He hummed as if it was some kind of practiced entertainment performance and shook a dingy, damp paper cup with a few coins in it.

At Grand Central Jayne was gently shoved away from the open doors while other passengers got off ahead of her. She sank back against the unopened doors on the opposite side of the train and watched as the car slowly emptied. Just before the new set of passengers heading back to Times Square embarked, Jayne took a step toward the open door, but an inchoate impulse stopped her. She swiveled on her foot, turned and sat down heavily and definitively in a seat as if she was very tired. People crowded around her, the doors closed, announcements were made and the train headed back west.  The homeless vet had stayed on the train as well and moved through the crowd again, humming and shaking his cup.

Jayne didn’t get off at Times Square. She remained seated. She watched the homeless vet do his thing as the Shuttle headed back to Grand Central. Jayne stayed in her seat, watching him, wondering if he would notice her.

It was the fourth time they pulled into Times Square that the homeless vet came up to her. He stared at her and shook his cup in her face. The tails of his shirts seemed to lift and flap as his arm moved back and forth. She reached into her laptop bag and pulled out one of the protein bars and dropped it in the cup. It felt good giving something away.

For most of the rest of the morning Jayne Bateman rode the Shuttle back and forth communing with the homeless vet by relieving herself of her hotel and conference contraband and giving it to him. She started with the protein bars, then the pens and Post-Its. When she felt the prized small binder clips in her hand, she paused, fingering them out of sight deep down in her bag. They felt clean and efficient and useful. She visualized the black matte and bright silver as she stroked them. She didn’t want to part with these, but ultimately did, bringing them up out of the darkness of her bag. She dropped them, almost defiantly, one by one into the shaking cup in front of her. The hotel memo pads were easier to cede although she thumbed the sheets in a fan just to briefly hear the lovely sound that reminded her of shuffling playing cards.  Days later, when asked, she would have liked to say she thought about it for a few minutes before she handed over the laptop itself, but she would have been lying. As she stood at Times Square she flung the empty computer bag at the homeless vet. He caught it, straightened himself up to an almost military stance and then bent abruptly and briefly at the waist in a bow of some kind of acknowledgement Jayne could not decipher. She then offered her eyeglasses, folded and gently perched in the open palm of her hand. He sniffed and looked away. She was not yet fluent in the signals of gratitude that ended completed transactions.

She went slowly up the subway exit steps and emerged from the transit system below onto the sidewalk of the world above. She was awake, alert, brightening slowly like a rising sun. She looked back down the stairs to where she had come from and felt as if she had been away for a very long time. She walked toward her apartment, feeling the lift of not being where she was supposed to be, where she was expected. The rest of the day lay before her as a time of wonder and a place called home. She moved slowly up the avenue, stepping carefully because she was barefoot.

NEXT: “Rectilinear,” by David Rose >>

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Among Driftwood

Trees haven’t come here to die. They’ve done that
            in other forests, on other coasts, having lost 
                        their leaves and their bark and come ashore 
by themselves on a five-mile sand spit. Branches 
            and split logs, upended stumps, roots in the wind, 
                        and in one small cove, someone 
with nothing better to do it with 
            has built a shack, then abandoned it—
                        a doorway, but no roof, accidental windows,
no hope of a foundation. It’s already 
            slumping back to what it was 
                        like a sandcastle. These parts of trees
have surrendered and been washed clean
            of imperfections. They won’t be judged
                        for punk knot, frost crack, pitch scab,
or heart rot by lumbermen. The stump outside
            the door has ninety rings on its face
                        and is looking good for more,
regardless of contractors. I remember
            shacks in the woods and shacks nailed up in trees
                        and along bent railroad tracks,
under new freeways, and up skid-road alleys
            where the impulse was to be half savage
                        or halfway civilized, to be where
no one could say, at least for a little while,
            Get out of there. Keep moving. Go away.
                        I crawl inside as if I’m coming home.

Road Kill

The three crows are scuttling back and forth 
            between the gutter and the dead possum
                        near the yellow-striped center
where commuters are trying hard not to encounter 
            anything but the road on the way to work 
                        this dark winter morning. The crows are hungry,
and their half-finished breakfast is no longer
            worrying about its share of the wealth, 
                        so it’s all theirs. Other birds, if down here 
on their own, on their own two feet, would panic instantly
            instantly seeing us rapidly approaching 
                        in our free-wheeling machinery,
but not these customers who’ve learned exactly 
            how much time and space are being offered 
                        between the violent edges 
of a snatch-and-grab breakfast. None of us
            bothers honking. We’ve grown accustomed 
                        to their evasions and skillful getaways,
their unflutterable manners in keeping this highway clear 
            of the evidence of our hurry to get somewhere, 
                        no matter what might be unable 
to get out of our road quickly enough. Sure, 
            later, in the middles of our day, 
                        we might slow down 
a little or even swerve, but it’s rush hour 
            for everyone involved in forward progress
                        except the possum. The crows know 
they have to take chances now 
            while there are still chances to take
                        and their share of the market is still open.

Natural Disasters

Long ago, we had to admit, in acquisitive English
the Romans knew what they were talking about
when they made a negative out of lucky stars
by labeling some of the deadly ones disasters,
and it’s in their very nature, naturally,
to be disastrous, to give even their most
distant inhabitants and poor dependents
hell now and then. Always, inevitably, as sure
as we happen to be born in the abnormal
course of events, more of them show up
at all the wrong times and places and occasions
with bad attitudes, ready to be that cave-in,
this lightning stroke, that twister, those earthquakes,
tsunamis, sudden rearrangements of shores
and mountains and half or whole continents,
and we’re expected to be theirs in sickness
and health in what we’ve dubbed forever
and a day with stars still in our eyes
and a star-like core still burning under our feet.

Header and home page photo by John Wallwerth; driftwood photo on beach courtesy Shutterstock.

NEXT: Two Poems by Maureen Kingston >>

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Le Havre, 1872. Monet Stares Out His Window.

The fungal fog spreads, infecting dawn.

Damp, bellowing breaths. Gristle gray.

The monochrome weight of it.

The expanse of expectation.

A father’s ambition on the prowl,

gnawing his pier, his pylons,

invading his will to paint.

Père et fils. Pourquoi pas?

A future in salted beef.

Rolling casks of wine up gangplanks.

The fat, florid fingers of a grocer.

Paint on the side. A noble hobby.

Pourquoi pas?

In the distance, the lit cigar of dawn

rouses itself from the ashen haze.

Whose halyard lifts the orb?

Whose pulse throbs in front of him?

His palette knife mashes red into orange.

His brush dives beneath the char,

steals a blob of magma from this

unsigned glory hole.

Free fire. His for the taking.

Impression, soleil levant.

Plaster of Paris

Before Satie and Renoir. Before Lautrec’s posters
of the Molin Rouge. Before Picasso & Dali
cut & pasted time there,
Montmartre
was a mere mound—a rustic butte
ripe for the taking.
Her sedimentary layers delighted.
A Smith Island Cake of chalk, clay,
limestone & marl;
her natural perfume part lake, part sea.

For centuries before the Revolution
miners sliced vertical shafts
into her sides,
windmills crushed her gypsum
& ovens baked her rock bits
to a fine white powder,
to plaster of Paris.
She was the first to fashion faux—
whatever ambitious men
wanted her to be—
building facades, sculptural first drafts,
temporary arms & legs.

The lost bourgeois boys of la belle époque
were her last conquerors.
Jesus beards, pink-eyed & drunk,
they burrowed into her abandoned mines,
into her sacred catacombs,
reconstituted bone dust
with gutter water,
resurrecting her desire to please,
then mended
their fractured psyches
with the mortar of her lower caste.

Header image: Claude Monet’s “Impression, Sunrise”

NEXT: One Poem by Susana H. Case >>

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Frank Lloyd Wright, Copper Urn

He focuses on a favorite—repoussé—
places the urns in the Dana house,
Coonley house, Unity Temple,
his own house. In a dining room,
two on opposite sides
like repeating copper spittoons,
separated siblings spurning connection.
Urn with dried branches, flowers,
weeds. This is before he secedes from Kitty,
takes Mamah, before the yearning
loosens the life bolts,
before he lets his hair grow over his collar,
before he’s displeased
at not-big-enough commissions. Later,
all hope lost.

Ever-restless, ever-separate,
he shakes from his sleeve
corrugated copper roofs at Auldbrass—
its brass (copper and zinc)
screws and fittings, clerestory glass
in the main house, copper spires,
downspouts that evoke
Lowcountry Spanish moss—
Wright’s only southern plantation.
It’s World War II—he yearns for copper,
though the copper he gets is thin.
Nina Lunn Stevens, third wife of his client,
is dissatisfied too. Wright throws up his hands,
cables her husband, All hope lost.
Near the lake, like separated siblings,
a grove of cypress trees iterates the vaulted
interior, the dissatisfaction,
the exterior’s board and batten.

Header image: Frank Lloyd Wright ink and watercolor on paper, Unity Temple. Courtesy The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation.

NEXT: Two Poems by Al Maginnes >>

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Footnotes: Folklore

No carbon-14. No search for provenance or title,
no crawl through pages dimmed by the scrubwork
of time’s greased elbows and the entitlements of light
will say exactly when these walls were hoisted into being.
The idea of “wall” was there from the beginning,
a beast slumbering, a word waiting for air.
Time begins when one stone is placed atop another.
When the first shadow lies down. And with time,
all the weight, all the slow music of accumulation.
So we scrape acres of dirt to uncover shells, bent nails,
teeth laced with gold, bone scraps, things built
to outlast the fire. Tomorrow, I will ask my students
what myths they know about their country. The swamps
and smoky fields of history stretch their infinities
beyond the windowless borders of my classroom.
There’s a story about a writer famous for loving whiskey
and guns. When a student offered a story with the line,
“He held a gun to my head, but I wasn’t scared,”
the teacher, half-cocked, pulled a pistol from underneath
his corduroy jacket, aimed and asked “Are you scared
now?” At the hearing he said he didn’t remember
if the gun was loaded or not. Fired, he left town and wrote
his best book. Years later, sober and stricken by illness,
he learned the name of a god that mattered and died
writing letters filled with his visions of the afterlife.
The story never doubles back to find the student
and tell us where he went with his new understanding
of the power available in language. He vanished
as supporting characters are meant to do, but he may
pass among us still, the man drinking CC ditches
in an airport bar, speaking to no one. Or the voice
in the next booth unreeling every play of a game
no one cares about or saw. Or he may not exist at all,
the whole story a shadow woven by time, sculpted
from tissue and wishful thinking, a notion that gained
flesh with each telling until our speaking made it real,
a lesson in giving the nameless one an immortality
built from lies, which have their own truth to tell.

The Old Language

There was a time I believed all they said. And a time when
I believed nothing that came from their mouths. Either way,
they kept talking. Chewing the brown air into words.
Trombones sliding familiar riffs. Headlines that shift
but always sign or sing the same words. You only learn so much,
no matter how old you get. Especially once you lose the habit
of hearing. Tonight’s rain was foretold by scripture.
So was the score of yesterday’s game. The juice and salt
of a tomato’s ripening. The lungs grow scarred
with so much breathing. Nothing sure but the soft-shoe
of words, phrases repeated so often no one can be sure
if they were said aloud or simply imagined. Somewhere
beyond seeing, the alliances of planets shift. No scripture for that,
no pat saying. A girl drops a pinch of cat hair
into a bowl of fire, squeezes a pin-drop of blood from her finger
into the flame. In five years she will have forgotten why
it seemed necessary to do this. But that is five years,
and they must pass one breath at a time. The chord
that flutters forth and the inholding. Point and counterpoint.
The betrayals of gravity. Galaxies swirled into being, each waiting
its turn to be named. This is work for old mouths, for thin tongues,
teeth browned by time. Not the words they say. The ones they do not.
Old language kept in the swamp of gray shadows under
every human tongue. To say without saying, the noun
just finding shape, the small life learning to breathe.
The girl who watches the fire and can’t recall if she struck the match
to say love or to say hate. Or if she only meant to say fire.

NEXT: One Poem by Jenny Morse >>

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When she sees lines, she spins them

In the border of her room, a wheel. 
Skia leans into its pine burls. When light
twines the mist around spindled branches
all her lonely moments become an epilogue. 
She cannot speak through eternity: 
black holes stretch bodies
                                                  into spun glass.

At this hour, the cloth hushes
in its beauty. Awake, Skia spins
a cloak of sediment to protect her.
Her throat mottles with prints. She captures
oranges, serpentine reeds, roots of willows curled
along the banks, leaves like turned pages.

She sees the landscape forced to an arrangement,
quilted squares, patterns like boxes, like bricks.
There are no squares in nature.
                                                           This is how we know we built it.

One whole world—
                                         outside, squares.
                                         inside, an apple.

NEXT: Three Poems by Julie Lein >>

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Noted :: Knotted

                        The phonic image-
            bearer, sound-

            bringer: Persephone 
yet not her, per se— 

basket and weaver together 

gathered blooms from single 
roots, now pulled 
through gulf and glyph 
to earth and death 

groans scattered like grains 

I would follow that 
            billowing gown 
            run through 
                        ruins grown 
                                    to runes

W a n d e l n *

To wander * To transform the root:
Walking through plateaued Green River
grounds, tracing what that maker wrote
through sediment and canyon routes *
Walden carried on back, writing ever
to wander, to transform the roots
and echoes living in this land * Calf trots,
hoof caught in a bleached skull, over
ground: Tracings: What that maker wrote
names here * How antelope in rut
migrate and mount in October,
wander to transform their root
genetic script * Once DDT-wrapped
peregrines unfurl, recover
ground, retracing what that marker wrote
in songbird prey * From cliff-hung scrape, concrete
bridge, who can say what the falcon hears?
A wandering, transforming rotor-root *
Ground traces * All that these makers wrote.

Sister Bay Birches

—white, white hairpins
charcoal in our joints—

what though the wind be a lathe?

we are at the barre
and watch: we stretch
even so ourselves

and whisper, listen—
unlatch that leather grip—
this is when December starts
scratching out its waltz

Cow skull image courtesy Shutterstock.

NEXT: Three Poems by Lauren Eggert-Crowe >>

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Weeding

We know the ocean will stay
awake long after.

I have begun to speak

of light as a character. Always
my hips break their bowl. Tilt:

I pour you into me as light
invades us.

In the garden, chilies suck
red into their waxy hearts. Your heart,

tenacious fennel: Six years ago I loved someone
else. Nine years ago you loved

someone else. We haven’t learned

the names of the seeds.

The way memory bites us, says play, says
need. You said love was alchemy and I said hand

me the spade. I have long since stopped thinking o

f body, yours. Animal means spirit; spirit, breath.
Bend close, you can hear

the leaves animal backwards.

Symmetry, Again.

You be a tank girded with steel.

I will perch on your grate or
the welded navels of your bolts.

You be the hulking battle
creature and I, wispy spangled

machine, will press upon you with
the weight of brine and nectar,

the gravities that pull me up I will push
into your armor.  You will tremble

as if I have turned a key, set your belts
in motion with the burning engine

inside the axle of my long body.

Basic

Some of us were cheated of war deaths.
We know how well our weapons work.
Your fingers forget. One switch unlocked.
After training. Mounting the cannon onto the tank.
Heavy enough for six on the ground.
He stood on the bed of the truck, pulled towards.
(Discharge: Someone leaves always.)
His body opened like wings.
Red thistles oxidized in the grass.

NEXT: Online Chapbook by Jeevan Narney >>

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Odes to the Little Ones

The poems in this online chapbook of poetry, images, and audio were inspired by Jeevan Narney’s two-year stay in Dezhou, China. They reflect upon his solitude with creation no matter where he lives. “There I was, gazing at the small floral wonders amidst city life,” he says. The poem-image diptychs are also a personal reflection of how Jeevan is “starting to see the soul in everything. It was my intention to give dignity and speak to these things as I would to a human being.”

Having trouble with the viewer above? If so, click here to view the online chapbook at www.terrain.org/poetry/32/odes.

NEXT: Three Poems by David Wagoner >>

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Mount St. Helens,
Washington

A scientist stakes data grids on the pumice plain at Mount St. Helens, with Loowit Falls in the distance.
Photo by Simmons B. Buntin.

In this special edition of “To Know a Place,” Terrain.org presents writings from, about, and inspired by Mount St. Helens, that beautiful, temperamental lady the indigenous peoples call Loowit, that last erupted on May 18, 1980. Thirty years later, scientists gathered to share data, research techniques, and stories of the region’s renewal at the Science Pulse. The Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word, along with the U.S. Forest Service, brought a dozen writers and artists to interact with the scientists, and the volcano.

Some of the resulting literary and artistic work is presented below. Though many of the scientists have been returning to Mount St. Helens regularly since the eruption—and indeed before—most of the writers included here spent just one late July week on the mountain in 2010. Was it long enough to know that place? Certainly it was a start:

Editorial

The giant drifting fir and spruce of Spirit Lake.
Photo by Simmons B. Buntin

Poetry

Nonfiction

“Spirit Lake”, a site drawing.
Image by Jolie Kaytes.

Drawing from the Blast Zone
Jolie Kaytes, with image gallery

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Craig Reinbold Reviews
The Chalk Circle: Intercultural
Prizewinning Essays
Edited by Tara L. Masih

The Chalk Circle: Intercultural Prizewinning Essays
Edited by Tara L. Masih
Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing
2012, 224 pages
ISBN 978-1936214716

More PC, but also more realistic maybe, we as a nation no longer strive for alchemized homogeneity, but rather embrace (or at least endorse, for the record) real cultural diversity—so the new utopia is not a melting pot, but a salad bowl. But what happens when the vinaigrette runs into the mustard, the fish sauce oozes onto the apple, the feta tastes like fennel, and the iceberg, arugula, cabbage, bok choy, and chard begin to feel misplaced, confused, and alienated? What happens when these many cultures collide?

Such is the issue at the heart of The Chalk Circle: Intercultural Prizewinning Essays, an anthology edited to life by Tara Masih. Introduced by Japanese-American writer David Mura, each of these essays presents “a snapshot of America today—a country of unprecedented ethnic and racial diversity.” He writes, “In a few decades, this country will no longer be characterized by a white majority, and these essays can be read as attempts to grapple with this coming shift and to redefine what it means to be an American in light of this inevitable change.”

As the first black reporter working for the Salt Lake Tribune in its 122-year history, Samuel Autman confronts the racism inherent in his new city. Journalist Kelly Hayes-Raitt shares a moment, and an ice cream, with an Iraqi girl in a Baghdad market just months after the U.S.-led invasion—shares a moment, gives a hug, “and then I’m gone.” Toshi Washizu, an Issei, a first-generation Japanese-American, portrays grief as a bond that transcends borders. Christine Stark, of both European and Native American ancestry, struggles to accept an identity that she was raised to run from. Shanti Elke Bannwart discusses the possibility of forgiveness as “the descendent of Nazi ancestors.” Simmons B. Buntin leads us along a lyrical path from theism to deism to pantheism. And in perhaps the finest essay of the collection, Lyzette Wanzer dines at a ritzy country club and realizes that she and her waiter are the only African-Americans en scene. She suggests, in standout poetic prose, that “something is awry, off-kilter about there being only we two here, in Atlanta, just us two in a city like Atlanta, only we two here, just us two, and you serving me.”

In these pages, we’re allowed to revel in a real diversity of stories, and discover that there are no easy answers. These essays exude a realistic—and often troubling—ambiguity, an ambiguity inherent in the process of constructing a genuine intercultural identity. Intercultural being the choice word here.

Editor Tara Masih prefers intercultural, as “multi, to me, means many and separate. Inter begs to be more inclusive.” Intercultural, as in existing betwixt cultures, living with connections to so many cultures, but defined by no one culture exactly: interconnected, cultures interwoven, intercultural.

Each of the writers featured in this anthology are themselves cultural composites, writing from unique vantages, from the spaces between easily defined categories. To be intercultural then suggests an inability or unwillingness to be so easily typecast, means to unabashedly accept complication, to cultivate nuance, to engender greater cultural understanding not through platitudes, but through experimentation and interpretation and ambiguity: to make suggestions rather than statements, to fix ourselves and yet remain mobile, to seek answers and yet be satisfied by simply having posed the questions. The Chalk Circle hammers home that our cultural identities are becoming ever more difficult to pin down. And this—the collection suggests—is entirely okay.

Reviewing this book, it’s difficult not to want to throw my own intercultural story in the mix. Not my story, necessarily, but the story of a Brazilian girl I met once, in Japan, when she was seven. A tall, skinny girl with curly black hair. Her name was Paula.

Paula’s father invited me for a Sunday barbecue. They lived just outside Hiroshima, and their small town was a bastion of some 5,000 South American emigrants—some legal, many not—who worked in factories and in service and in schools around the city.

With the churrasco on the grill and the other adults lounging with a cooler of Sapporo, Paula and I spent the afternoon practicing handstands, trading capoeira tricks, and playing pick-up soccer in the street with some other neighborhood kids. She had been in Japan for three years, and spoke to me in a fluid mix of Japanese, Portuguese, and English, often switching between the three in a single sentence. I asked her if she was nervous about her family’s impending move back to Brazil. She shook her head, confused. Why would she be nervous, she asked me. “Brazil is my home.”

“Are you going to miss Japan, then? Are you going to miss your friends?”

“Of course,” she said. “This is my home.”

And this answer, I know, was not a contradiction, but an affirmation of her status as a consummate Third Culture Kid—intercultural to the bone.

Paula would be a teen now, somewhere in high school. And thinking of this anthology of intercultural essays, I wonder where her story is, what story here might reflect her experience. If The Chalk Circle comes up short, it is because this ultimately provincial collection depicts the U.S. as the hub of world cultures; every writer featured here is essentially United States of American by birth or residence, and this leaves me wondering about everyone else in the world, the East-Asian migrants to Dubai, the Palestinians in Israel, the Christians in Egypt, the Algerians who call Paris home, the Québécois in Canada, the Ukrainians in China, the Italians who somehow landed in Brazil, and the Brazilians who trek to work in Japanese industry, and so on and on. Where are their countless intercultural tales?

No, The Chalk Circle does not capture everyone’s story, and I suppose it never intended to. Maybe it simply couldn’t, being a book rounding out at a relatively slim 200 some pages. Maybe this is only the beginning, the first anthology of many, a fine start to an ongoing project. One hopes so. One hopes for more of this intercultural essaying.

NEXT: Andrew C. Gottlieb Reviews Recapture & Other Stories, by Erica Olsen >>

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Andrew C. Gottlieb Reviews
Recapture & Other Stories
by Erica Olsen

Recapture & Other Stories
By Erica Olsen
Torrey House Press
2012, 165 pages
ISBN 978-1937226053

Recapture & Other Stories is a compact volume that compares the real and the replica, memory and the object, preservation and isolation, all amid the geology and geography of the Southwestern desert of the United States. In publishing this first collection of short fiction from writer Erica Olsen (whose “Driveaway” was a finalist in the 2011 Terrain.org Fiction Contest), Torrey House Press has produced a gem, a small collection of stories that is a pleasure to read and consider.

What stands out first is the confidence of Olsen’s writing, whether via the well-fleshed voices of her characters or the thoughtful, intelligent prose that makes up the description: Olsen has worked these stories so that—for the most part—the reader will find a seamless, rewarding experience as they enter the desert worlds of Utah or Colorado, California or New Mexico. The other interesting facet to this collection is the mix of realistic fiction and metafiction. Olsen can craft a realistic tale along the lines of a Richard Ford or Tom McGuane with their fugitives, loners, and outlaws, but she’s adept, too, at the imagination and creation of a Donald Barthelme world, a Jose Saramago tale, a place of the future, a fantastic story that in its invention reflects on reality to reveal to the reader something critical we might not access via realism.

The opening story, “Grand Canyon II” (a piece of flash fiction barely two pages in length), may be the epitome of Olsen’s work. The narrator—living in a world that has a seen both an earthquake and a toxic mining disaster leaving the popular national park off-limits—has been working to build a five-mile long replica Grand Canyon and visitor center. “It’s a geological clone made possible by the recent advances in rapid prototyping with which we have all become familiar.” It’s a comforting voice, a tour-guide style revealing to the reader a future they’re obliged to accept. “In an office in Los Angeles, I worked on the editorial team, checking contours, textures, Munsell color specifications. I proofread the Coconino sandstone.” This is a clever author who’s turned the beauty of the desert landscape into a text, a manuscript able to be created, read, and proofread.

But all is not well in the replica park of the future, as one might expect. Though “these compromises were found acceptable by most visitors,” the story revisits the narrator’s first trip to the original canyon via brief flashback, and we see a literal snapshot, the only meeting of the Norwegian and Korean grandparents, the narrator’s speculation that, “In me there must have been, already, the promise of unsuitable boyfriends.” The past is not perfect at all. We experience what Olsen is trying to get at: the place of replica in our lives, the way in which the created unreal so often fills a void in place of the actual fact of our existence. Even her narrator is taken in, though she tells us at the end, “At the edge of this vast and unimaginable copy, I remember tent-shade and fire-warmth. I reach for absent hands.”

This is the warning that exists throughout the collection: no matter how difficult the reality of life, humans face a different complexity in trying to survive through plastic, through an alternate, created reality. The ways in which we may choose to supplement our lives: movies, theme-parks, road trips, photographs. The list of alternate realities is long. Facebook: the website that lets us represent ourselves and our lives online with and to our “friends,” many of whom are people we’re likely not to have met in person. This is fiction that Edward Abbey would approve and celebrate, the man who demanded we park our cars, hike for miles, and bleed a little before we could or would actually experience the physical, wild world around us.

Olsen’s fiction is reminiscent of, and perhaps the next generation of writing down from, Walker Percy’s essay “The Loss of the Creature”—the essay that also took the Grand Canyon as one of its subjects. Percy showed us the layers that exist between humans and the reality they purport to see or experience, from their preconceived notions to the photographs they so quickly take, the attempt to capture reality in a black box rather than stand and experience it in living color with all the other physical sensations it may manifest. One can imagine Percy shelving Olsen’s book, shaking his head at Facebook pages or internet tours of the Grand Canyon.

There are a lot of interesting and colorful personalities here, and the realistic fiction involves trading-post proprietors, park rangers, and bookmobile managers, as well as hikers, campers, and other vagrant types. In the story “Reverse Archeology,” Paul and his former girlfriend, our narrator, return to a former hiking site to put back an Anasazi artifact, a bowl, to the site from which they’d previously taken it. It’s a creative plot, and one that adds to the world Olsen’s writing creates. The difficulty that our narrator confronts is how challenging—or impossible—it is to resurrect or replace a former world. The site she remembers has changed drastically, and her relationship with Paul will likely not revive, even if Paul is already planning their next trip. She tells us, “As I head back down the canyon, then up onto the ridge, I feel things loosening. Nothing stays the same. All this preservation is overrated, in my opinion.”

This isn’t a perfect collection. Here or there an ending feels abrupt. The protagonist of the story “Persuasion” seems strangely determined not to learn or take opportunities presented, leaving the story feeling a tad forced or stunted. But I recall Amy Bloom once saying—to paraphrase—that any good short story collection has a couple of gems, about eight good stories, and a couple of duds. Any weaknesses here are made up for by the philosophical and thoughtful world Olsen is crafting in a smart variety of plots and styles. There is a uniformity of world presented by an artist at work. And it happens to focus on the Southwestern desert, on the failed attempt of humans to live via false realities, to try to preserve the past as if that might improve the future. It’s a very human flaw. Olsen writes, “It’s ugly and sullied and beautiful, the real. There’s conservation, there’s preservation. Does any of it matter? We don’t want much, just paradise.”

NEXT: Simmons B. Buntin Reviews Earth Works: Selected Essays,
by Scott Russell Sanders >>

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Simmons B. Buntin Reviews
Earth Works: Selected Essays
By Scott Russell Sanders

Earth Works: Selected Essays
By Scott Russell Sanders
Indiana University Press
2012, 376 pages
ISBN 978-0253000958

There is an ongoing conversation that those of us in the place-based writing arena just can’t seem to get away from, and it centers on the question of “nature” writing. Am I a nature writer? the author asks. Am I a publisher of nature writing? the journal and the press ask. No doubt it’s an engaging discussion—check out David Quammen’s biting response in a Terrain.org interview five years back, or Kathryn Miles’ response in this issue. But it’s also a frustrating argument, one that I often counter with another question: Why does it matter? Or: What isn’t nature? Why must we categorize any of it, other than for the purposes of determining which shelf (the old way) or which Amazon.com category (the new way) or which hash tag (the newest way) is best for marketing the writing?

Ask Scott Russell Sanders, whose newest collection Earth Works: Selected Essays spans his nonfiction writing career, and you’ll get the response included in the book’s preface:

I am sometimes asked if I am a “nature” writer, as if paying attention to our membership in the web of life were a specialized interest, like following sports or fashion or cuisine. What I am is an Earth writer: I’m interested in life on this planet—all life. Since I know most about my own species, I think mostly about human affairs, but I do so while seeking to understand how our kind arises from and affects the living world.

If you were familiar only with Sanders’ recent work in such magazines as Orion, or his previous book, A Conservationist Manifesto, you might want to further press his writing into a sub-category of Earth writing that we might call We Better Get Our Act Together, and Soon Like. That seems to be the category of most writing about the environment these days, and for good reason: we live in a time of manmade global change that is unprecedented. We all know this, and I figure anyone who reads the entirety of essays like those is already on board and tackling challenges as best as possible. And that’s all good and fine and important. And overwhelming.

Fortunately, the essays in Earth Works are anything but overwhelming, anything but pigeonholed into some endlessly debatable category of writing. What they are, rather, is a rich mix of beautifully crafted and progressive pieces that engage the reader in a long conversation. They are best read slowly, providing time to consider Sanders’ propositions, his keen insight and lessons, his critical questioning. Indeed, I read the book over several months, taking it with me for life’s little windows of reading opportunities—a blood pressure checkup, waiting for the car’s engine mount replacement—as well as slow Sunday afternoons and the handful of minutes before drifting off to sleep.

“You sure have been reading that book a long time,” my older daughter said as I grabbed it before taking her sister to an orthodontist appointment some weeks ago. A long time well spent, I’d say.

Taking such a long time to read Earth Works was not my intention, I admit, but early on I realized these essays not only deserve but also invite deliberate reading. From the get go, I felt like I was in a dialogue with the author, who begins the book with an essay on essaying—an examination of why this literary art form above all others speaks for us in general and for Sanders particularly. “In this era of pre-packaged thought,” he writes, “the essay is the closest thing we have, on paper, to a record of the individual mind at work and play.” And the essential parts of an essay? “[E]ach doggy sentence, as it noses forward into the underbrush of thought, scatters a bunch of rabbits that go bounding off in all directions.”

More than an ongoing conversation, however, the experience and wisdom in Sanders’ essays—that bounding off in all directions, the returning to a home again and again—created a kind of mentoring for me. I wouldn’t argue that every reader will reach this level of discourse, but as a father with a passion for community broadly defined, who like Sanders questions the guiding force of the universe and our place in it, it’s an apt term. In the essay “Honoring the Ordinary,” for example, he writes:

Many in our culture would call the source God, but this word carries a vexed history, and an otherworldly air, that I wish to avoid. I prefer the Buddhist term emptiness, which does not mean nothingness, but rather undifferentiated wholeness, fecundity, the brimming, inexhaustible, undifferentiated fullness of being that perpetually casts up new shapes and dissolves them again.

More than any other writer I can think of, Sanders speaks eloquently to the relationship of landscape, spirit, and personal engagement and responsibility. I’ve compared his work to that of Aldo Leopold before, and it remains a reasonable comparison. But Sanders has taken the question of a land ethic farther, continuing Leopold’s conversation in ways that serve the original question well while broadening the audience and deepening the examination.

That’s writing I’m familiar with, and in many cases have read in source publications before. But what I find most delightful particularly early on in Earth Works are Sanders’ earlier essays, work I hadn’t read before and work that places him among our finest essayists, categorized or not. Of these, I may be most smitten with “Doing Time in the Thirteenth Chair,” which first appeared in North American Review in 1983. It recounts Sanders’ experience as an alternate juror for an Indiana trial, told in present tense. In the invaluable notes at the end of the book, Sanders writes, “The weighing of evidence and searching for patterns in a trial is akin to the inquiring method of the essay.”

Inquiring is the central purpose of essaying, and the central approach of the essays in this collection, as well. Not all of the pieces in this collection are personal, however, which we might expect given the broad time period and evolving writing of Sanders, or any essayist. I’m thankful for that, because while I’m moved by Sanders’ personal essays, including “At Play in the Paradise of Bombs” and “Buckeye”, I find myself both moved and inspired by more “public” essays such as “The Mystique of Money,” which is the most direct and imperative essay in the collection. It’s also the essay that convinced me to purchase a copy for my politically conservative father. While my arguments for a more empathetic and less consumerist world don’t seem to hold much water with him, my hope is that Scott’s eloquent, well-reasoned writing in this outstanding essay will. No report back just yet, but considering it’s the first book (other than my own) I’ve sent my dad in a decade, I suspect he’ll give it the attention it deserves.

But here we go with categorizing again: “personal” versus “public.” The truth is, Sanders’ essays are nearly all an elegant dance of both. Take, for example, “Voyageurs,” set in the middle of the collection. The lyrical essay begins and ends in the wilderness, on a canoe trip with his daughter and others in the Boundary Waters of Minnesota and Ontario. Sanders moves between personal, touching moments with his daughter—including a harrowing moment or two aboard canoes—and an examination of wilderness and biophilia, including the risks inherent in nature, in cities, in civilization. “Beyond our campfires, beyond our tents, beyond our makeshift structures,” he writes, “the whole universe is wild, from quarks to quasars, from black bears to black holes, but far from being disorderly, it follows intricate, exquisite rules that we have only begun to decipher.” But also more intimate moments like this:

“I was terrified,” I told her. “Weren’t you?”

“No,” she said. “It was kind of fun.”

“What if you had gone under?”

“I didn’t go under.”

“But what if you had?”

“I would have washed up again sooner or later.”

Recalling those fierce waters, those indifferent rocks, again I lost my voice. Eva frowned at her alarmist father, and we both returned to our work.

How difficult not to be an alarmist—as a father, a community member, a writer. And some might argue that there is more than a tinge of the alarmist to many of these essays, a kind of preaching about why we need to change. Sure, there is. It’s a fine line between engagement and evangelism, and it’s a line Sanders crosses on occasion. But it’s never so intrusive that it turns the reader off—not this reader, at least, and I read a lot of Earth writing, so I’m deep in it.

Sanders’ is a measured evangelism, for sure, but there’s much more at work: a fiction-writer’s knack for storytelling, a wonderful sense of imagery and metaphor, a placing of self within the context of essay as literary art form, and an understanding that we cannot, after all, understand everything. But we can and must continue to seek. In a word, I call this craft. Scott Russell Sanders is a master of the craft of essaying, and more broadly—if these fine essays serve as any indication—a master at living with passion and purpose, with a gift for encouraging his readers to do the same. “So engaged,” he writes, “we are more likely to experience openings, to cleanse the doors of perception, rub the gum from our eyes, and glimpse the true nature of things.”

Whether you engage with Earth Works: Selected Essays as mentor, friend, or casual visitor, you’ll put it down refreshed and rewarded—just one of the pleasures of this long and gratifying conversation.

NEXT: Craig Reinbold Reviews The Chalk Circle: Intercultural Prizewinning Essays,
Edited by Tara L. Masih >>

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Montgomery County, Maryland

John Marcolin

Downtown Silver Spring site plan.
Click image to view interactive map.
Image courtesy Montgomery County Planning Department.

Downtown Silver Spring lies at the heart of the Silver Spring central business district (CBD), an unincorporated, 250-acre transit-oriented urban area located just northeast of Washington, D.C., in Montgomery County, Maryland. Silver Spring’s core was at one time a non-descript area of parking lots, aging retail, office buildings, and boarded-up storefronts. It is now a thriving, mixed-use town center within an arts and entertainment district. The Washington Metropolitan Transit Authority maintains a Red Line Metro station within a five-minute walk of the city center, and a multimodal transit center–featuring access to subway, train, local and regional bus lines, taxi service, a future light rail line, and bicycle trails–is nearing completion.

Today, Silver Spring is a rapidly redeveloping and vibrant city featuring a mix of public plazas and open space, offices, housing, hotel, retail, entertainment, transit access, and civic uses–all easily accessible on foot thanks to sustained downtown and CBD redevelopment efforts by public and private entities alike.

Aerial view of downtown Silver Spring, circa 1950s.
Photo courtesy Montgomery County Planning Department.

A Site with a History

In 1840, Francis Preston Blair discovered a spring northeast of the nation’s capitol shining with mica and named it Silver Spring. Two years later, he built a 20-room mansion named after the spring, on 250 acres of land. By 1854, Blair’s son, Montgomery Blair (who became Postmaster General under Abraham Lincoln and represented Dred Scott before the U.S. Supreme Court) built the Falkland House nearby.

It wasn’t until the early 20th century, however, that growth came to Silver Spring, most notably in 1922 when Woodside Development Corporation bought the 122-acre Alton Farm just north of Silver Spring and built Woodside Park, the area’s first automobile-oriented suburb. Woodside Park is considered one of the region’s best examples of 1920s-1930s residential development (and marketing), its original one-acre, single-family lots providing contrast to the urbanizing core located just north of Washington, D.C. known as Silver Spring.

Aerial view of downtown Silver Spring, with much redevelopment in place, 2008.
Photo courtesy Montgomery County Planning Department.

Access to the District was primarily by car along Georgia Avenue or via the Washington trolley, which halted service in 1926. Twelve years later, one of the country’s first shopping centers with a street-facing parking lot was built in downtown Silver Spring. Silver Spring was also notable for the Silver Theatre, designed by architect John Eberson. In 1948, Georgia Avenue was widened, providing additional lanes for traffic traveling to new suburban developments such as Silver Spring, Woodside Park, and points north.

By the 1950s, downtown Silver Spring was characterized by office and retail uses and the parking lots that served those uses. It had become a major shopping destination for suburbanites living in the Washington D.C. area, with department stores such as the Hecht Company, J.C. Penney, and Sears, Roebuck and Co.

The community’s retail dominance began to change in 1960, however, when the shining, indoor Wheaton Mall opened just three miles north of the central business district. The mall siphoned off much of the Silver Spring’s business, beginning downtown’s slow decline.

Silver Plaza: Public plaza, fountain, and much more.
Photo courtesy BeyondDC.

Planning for Central Business District Redevelopment

Through the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, a series of efforts were made to revitalize the Silver Spring central business district. The Silver Spring Metro Station opened in 1973. A few office buildings, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, opened around the Metro station, but the deteriorated retail core did not benefit. Twenty years later, a new Montgomery County General Plan was approved that encouraged urban renewal through greater density in urban cores, including Silver Spring. Additionally, Maryland’s Smart Growth Initiative refocused development funds and incentives on revitalizing downtowns with access to transit. Administered by the state’s Department of Planning, the Initiative provided planning guidance in four ways. First, it took advantage of the county’s “optional method of development” for CBD zones. This tool allows developers to increase density in exchange for providing public amenities, such as enhanced open space, public art, updated streetscapes, and affordable housing.  Second, the Initiative promotes the use of existing infrastructure and historic buildings. Third, it actively fosters mixed-use development. Finally, the Initiative encourages alternative methods of transportation, which in the Silver Spring CBD has been fulfilled by reducing parking by up to one-half the total number of spaces traditionally required by Montgomery County. Other measures at Silver Spring include development of a new transit center (still under construction), installation of bike trails throughout the central business district, and the inclusion of bike stations in new mixed-use projects.

Silver Spring Shopping Center, circa 1946.
Image courtesy Friends of the Silver Spring Library.

By the late 1990s, county, state, and private efforts began to pay off, particularly with the formation of Downtown Silver Spring, a public-private partnership between Montgomery County and the developers selected to rebuild downtown Silver Spring: Foulger Pratt, the Peterson Companies, and Argo Investment Company. Between 1987 and 1996, however, other developers proposed plans based upon an enclosed mall concept. All three proposals were rejected due to negative community reaction, government skepticism that an enclosed mall would succeed, and a failure to attract private-sector investment. The county then approached Foulger Pratt and the Peterson Companies, firms located in Rockville, Maryland, and Fairfax, Virginia. These developers had experience working in downtown redevelopment, especially in the Washington, D.C. metro area. Foulger Pratt was particularly successful in forming a vision and plan for downtown Silver Spring that residents, businesses, and decision-makers could embrace. Public involvement played a key role.

The evening view down Ellsworth Drive, the heart of downtown Silver Spring, closed on weekends for community events and a farmers’ market.
Photo courtesy Booked.net.

Montgomery County executive Doug Duncan was also essential for the support of downtown redevelopment. He worked closely with Foulger Pratt and the Peterson Companies to attract key tenants, including Discovery Communications and the American Film Institute. He also led efforts to gain approvals at the Montgomery County Council and the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission.

In February 2000, the Montgomery County Council approved the Silver Spring CBD Sector Plan. The Sector Plan begins:

Silver Spring will become the downtown serving the surrounding residential communities, the eastern part of the County, and a broader regional market, including the District of Columbia and western Prince George’s County. The downtown’s Core will re-emerge as the center of the community, with offices, shops, restaurants, and civic uses arranged along landscaped, pedestrian-friendly streets.

Public spaces such as this small plaza off Ellsworth Drive provide opportunity for public interaction while supporting adjacent retail.
Photo courtesy The Peterson Companies.

All of Silver Spring’s districts will be enriched with amenities and linked by tree-lined sidewalks, local and regional trails, and a pedestrian bridge over the railroad tracks. The new connections will capitalize on Silver Spring’s role as a transportation center where local and regional train, bus, road, and trail systems come together. The downtown’s parks and plazas will be connected by a linked park system supplemented by sidewalks edged with trees, and buildings with shopfronts that enliven the sidewalks.

The Sector Plan is based on six themes developed from public meetings and discussions with community members. The themes are designed to help guide the evaluation and selection of development proposals and future redevelopment efforts:

• Transit-oriented Downtown
• Commercial Downtown
• Residential Downtown
• Civic Downtown
• Green Downtown
• Pedestrian-friendly Downtown

Site plan for Silver Spring Civic Building and Veterans’ Plaza.
Image courtesy Montgomery County Planning Department.

Additionally, the Sector Plan identifies four community goals that were articulated in focus groups and public workshops: “Plan recommendations and development projects should be market-oriented to ensure a long-term revitalization; Silver Spring should be an active place with mixed uses attracting people at all times of the day, week, and year; Silver Spring must be an attractive place—an upgraded urban environment will attract private investment; and local, state, and federal governments must commit public resources to support private investment.”

State and local governments have indeed provided financial incentives to help jump start the central business district’s redevelopment, investing over $450 million to purchase land; provide rent subsidies; build two public parking structures; construct a new courthouse, civic building, and Veterans’ Plaza; and renovate Silver Theatre. Since 2000, the CBD has leveraged over $2 billion in private investment, as well.

A Renewed Downtown in Design and Practice

The new, award-winning Silver Spring Civic Building, designed by Machado and Silvetti Associates.
Photo by Anton Grassl / Esto.

Silver Spring’s downtown redevelopment, master-planned by RTKL,  is organized around a central spine, Ellsworth Drive, a semi-private street lined with a mix of retail. Along Ellsworth is Silver Plaza, featuring an interactive fountain, a set of “art” stairs, elevator, and ample seating. This plaza functions as Silver Spring’s town square. At the end of Ellsworth is Veterans’ Plaza, a hardscape mall that features a glazed glass pavilion that provides shade during the summer months while hosting concerts during warm weather and a popular ice rink in winter. This space is surrounded by a movie theater, restaurants, and the Silver Spring Civic Building. The Civic Building hosts a variety of community events. Ellsworth is closed to vehicular traffic on weekends for concerts, festivals, and a farmers’ market.

Downtown Silver Spring has several successful tenants, chief among them Discovery Communications headquarters, which relocated to Silver Spring in 2003. The infusion of daily commuters from the parent company to the Discovery Channel provides a much-needed base of workers who patronize downtown’s numerous restaurants, coffee shops, bookstores, and theaters.

The Discovery Communications corporate headquarters have energized downtown Silver Spring.
Photo by John Marcolin.

During downtown Silver Spring’s planning process, residents requested a grocery store and hardware store. Though there was initial skepticism that a large, natural foods market could do well in this part of the county, the developers convinced Whole Foods to open a new store, and it has done very well, breaking regional sales records year upon year. A new Strosniders Hardware Store has also done consistently good business, even in the economic downturn. Other successful businesses new to the downtown since 2003 are the Regal Majestic Cinema (Stadium 20 and IMAX), several national restaurants, a Marriott hotel, CVS drugstore, Staples, clothing stores, and service-oriented businesses.

Central to the success of the core are two well-placed parking garages operated by Montgomery County. They are screened from the streets by retail and office buildings and provide easy sidewalk access.

The Regal Majestic Theater anchors Silver Spring’s dynamic arts and entertainment district.
Photo courtesy Silver Spring Downtown.

Historic Preservation and Arts and Entertainment District Designation

Two critical factors in the revival of downtown Silver Spring are the preservation and integration of historic buildings and the designation of Silver Spring as an Arts and Entertainment District. This designation is a means of supporting the economy and improving the quality of life in arts districts by making available state tax incentives. The historic Silver Theatre, a 1930s Art Deco-style building, is a wonderful example of these measures in action. It has been restored to its original grandeur and is now the home of the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center, a unique public-private partnership between Montgomery County and the American Film Institute.

Also benefiting is the Fillmore, a new 2,000-seat concert hall located across the street from the AFI Silver Theatre. This public-private partnership between Montgomery County and Lee Development Group preserved the historic façade of the old J.C. Penney store and has a lease agreement with Live Nation to operate as the Fillmore Silver Spring.

AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center, a partnership between Montgomery County and the American Film Institute.
Photo courtesy AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center.

Two other historic buildings have been renovated and integrated into downtown Silver Spring. The first is the Art Deco-style Hecht Company building, which now houses the City Place Mall. Located between Colesville Road and Ellsworth Drive, it is an urban style mall with four levels of interior shops and entries onto three surrounding streets. There is also access via a pedestrian bridge to a parking garage across the street. However, the inward-focused mall has struggled to maintain economic viability.

The 1930s-era strip mall at the corner of Colesville Road and Georgia Avenue has also been renovated. When it originally opened, the shopping center broke the convention that merchandise should be displayed in windows adjacent to the street, visible to people on the street. This complex, which includes a mix of restaurants and retail, serves now as one of the entryways to downtown. The front parking area also now includes downtown entry signage and a fountain.

Unfortunately, Silver Spring’s historic Armory, located near the intersection of Ellsworth Drive and Fenton Street, could not be saved. The Armory’s broad green space and low profile would have been out of context with surrounding buildings, and the land was needed for new parking garages. The new Civic Building now satisfies the requirements for a large, public meeting space once met by the Armory.

City Place Mall, a redevelopment of the Art Deco-style Hecht Company building.
Photo courtesy City Place Mall.

Expanding Downtown’s Success

A central focus of the Silver Spring CBD Sector Plan was to encourage, at a reduced scale, new transit-oriented development in the districts surrounding downtown, particularly to the south and west. Among these districts are Fenton Village, the Ripley District, and South Silver Spring. They were once characterized by industrial/car service, automobile dealerships, and repair uses. Today, they follow in the redevelopment footsteps of downtown Silver Spring. Many new mixed-use buildings have been constructed, and more are planned.

Directly south of downtown Silver Spring, in Fenton Village, lies the site of the future Silver Spring Library. Located at the corner of Wayne Avenue and Fenton Street, it will be built directly over a future Purple Line station. The Purple Line is a planned east-west light rail line between Bethesda and New Carrollton. The mixed-use library project will include retail, county office space, and low-income housing. Among several other mixed use projects in the planning stage is Studio Plaza, a public-private venture that will transform a county-owned surface parking lot into a mixed-use project with underground parking and a half-acre of open space.

Rendering of the new, mixed-use Silver Spring Library, which be directly served by the new Metro Purple Line.
Image courtesy The Lukmire Partnership, Inc.

Across from the new library is a proposed project called 8415 Fenton Street, which will replace a 1950s-era Baptist Church and parking lot. 8415 Fenton Street is a mixed-use development with street-level retail, plus a public plaza and new Baptist church that will integrate the stained-glass windows and other architectural components of the original church. Keeping the church on the same site rather than moving it to further suburbs preserves an important civic use, reduces the need to drive to church, and provides a ready base of people who can enjoy the project’s retail uses and public plaza.

The Ripley District just to the west features a mixed-use project called 1055 Ripley Street. Located on Ripley Street and adjacent to the new transit center, the project will feature live/work units on the ground floor. Directly across the street is Eleven-55 Ripley, a residential high-rise with retail and office uses in a separate, smaller building. These projects are important for the district because their developers have agreed to complete the street grid. They will extend the east/west-oriented Ripley Street to the new transit center (to the west) and punch a north/south street through an existing parking garage (to the north).

In South Silver Spring several new developments have taken place over the last ten years, including the Cultural Arts Center and Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation Arts Center. Linked to the existing campus by a pedestrian bridge that spans the Metro rails and CSX tracks, the centers host classrooms, public display space, and state-of-the-art theater and performance space, helping to activate a once lifeless part of the central business district by expanding educational uses into South Silver Spring. Other new, mixed-use projects in South Silver Spring include the Silverton, a multi-family condominium built in the renovated Canada Dry Building and 1200 East West, a mixed-use project on East West Highway that replaced an old car dealership. It features ground-floor retail and a public art plaza. The recently completed Veridian and Aurora are other mixed-use projects that enliven South Silver Spring.

Aerial rendering of Falkland Chase and Falkland North, which will restore a vital linkage to the natural habitat: a stream.
Image courtesy Montgomery County Planning Department.

Adjacent to the Silver Spring Metro station on the west side of the tracks is an approved mixed-use, high-rise project called Falkland Chase (and in the second phase, Falkland North). When complete, it will replace circa-1930s, three-story garden apartments more than 1,000 residential units, street-level retail, a public green, and an upscale grocery store. The developer has agreed to restore and provide public access to an existing stream that winds through an adjacent parcel, repairing decades of erosion by installing erosion control measures, planting new trees and other flora, and constructing foot bridges and public walkways.

Approved in July 2004, United Therapeutics Corporation’s new headquarters are located at the north end of the Silver Spring CBD. The $32 million, 50,000-square-foot, four-story research and production facility was dedicated in June 2006. The building, which includes ground-floor retail, is the first phase of the drug maker’s expansion project. The second phase bridges the first with a skywalk. Phase II was completed in 2012. A key component of both phases are two public plazas surrounded by retail and community space. The plazas include water features, seating, lush planting, and a “bio-wall” celebrating great achievers of the biological sciences.

Conclusion

Ice skating at Veterans’ Plaza.
Photo courtesy Silver Spring Ice Skating at Veterans’ Plaza.

Today, downtown Silver Spring boasts a vibrant mixed-use town center that has become a local and regional draw. Thanks to public-private partnerships and investment, it is a far cry from the moribund place it was just ten years ago—from the lively pedestrian-oriented Ellsworth Drive, with its fountain plaza and café dining, to Veterans’ Plaza, with its outdoor ice rink, modern multicolored pavilion, and award-winning civic building.

Downtown’s redevelopment success has spilled over to adjacent neighborhoods, as well. Here, the Silver Spring CBD continues its transformation into a vital, 24/7 urban environment where residents can walk, bike, or take mass transit to work and beyond. As redevelopment is completed, residents and visitors will have retail, civic, education, and entertainment venues all within a five-minute walk of their homes—demonstrating how foresight, dedication, and planning by local governments combined with a committed and informed private sector and residency can create extraordinary change in a blighted suburban edge city.

References

Header photo and home page photo of Downtown Silver Spring courtesy The Peterson Companies.

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ARTerrain Gallery

Listen to Lucinda Bliss discuss her artwork in this ARTerrain gallery:

A general discussion of Bliss’ work.

A discussion place and placelessness in Bliss’ work.

A discussion of the Vulcan Net series.

Lucinda Bliss is an artist currently living in Bath, Maine. She was born in Hartford, Connecticut, grew up in northern Vermont, and over the years has lived in Chicago, Santa Fe, Tucson, and New York. Lucinda received an MFA in visual art from Vermont College of Fine Arts and a B.A. in art history from Skidmore College. She currently serves as Professor of Liberal Studies at Union Institute & University, where she teaches studio art and art history/visual culture. She also teaches in the Maine College of Art MFA program as a studio advisor.

Her life as an artist and teacher is balanced with a newly discovered passion for running. Lucinda blogs about running and art at LucindasRunningBlog.com.

Lucinda’s work has been exhibited widely across the United States. Early in her career, she exhibited with Zitlala and Copeland-Rutherford in Santa Fe and Gallery 312 and South of North in Chicago. After moving to Maine, Lucinda exhibited with the Hay Gallery and Whitney Art Works, among other venues, and she is currently represented by Rose Contemporary Gallery. Work has also been exhibited at the University of Arizona, Tucson Museum of Art, Brattleboro Museum in Vermont, University of New England, University of Maine at Augusta, Space Gallery, Boston Center for the Arts, Center for Maine Contemporary Art, and Ross Gallery in Charlotte.

Her studio practice includes painting, drawing, and installation. Recent drawings and paintings are featured in this ARTerrain gallery.

Hover over an image to see its details, or click image to view in larger format and begin slideshow:

See more work by Lucinda Bliss at www.LucindaBliss.com.

All images in this ARTerrain Gallery are copyright © by Lucinda Bliss. All rights reserved. No work may be used or reproduced without express written consent of the artist.

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Telling Stories

Interview by Janine DeBaise

About Author Kathryn Miles

Kathryn Miles.
Photo by Candace Kuchinski.

Kathryn Miles grew up on the Midwestern prairie, where she cultivated a strong desire to be the next Laura Ingalls Wilder. When that role continued to elude her, she turned her attention elsewhere and became a cub reporter covering local oddities like Zamboni drivers, pumpkin chunkers, and barge captains. She took a B.A. in philosophy from Saint Louis University in 1996 and received her Ph.D. from the University of Delaware in 2001.

Now residing in coastal Maine, Miles still dedicates her writerly life to the uncovering of previously ignored narratives and characters. She is the author of All Standing: The Remarkable Story of the Jeanie Johnston, the Legendary Irish Famine Ship, which details the miraculous journeys of the famine ship, and Adventures with Ari: A Puppy, a Leash & Our Year Outdoors, a memoir recounting four seasons as a canine naturalist. An excerpt of the book was included in Best American Essays 2009, published by Houghton Mifflin; two years later, her “Killing Laughter” was named a notable essay by the same publication. Since that time, Miles has written about subjects that include Puerto Rican street food, eel poachers, homing pigeons, and lifesavers. Her writing has appeared in publications like Alimentum, Between Song and Story, Ecotone, Flyway, Meatpaper, and Terrain.org, where she is also an editorial board member and regular columnist.

Miles also serves as professor of environmental writing at Unity College and as part of the faculty for the Chatham University MFA low-residency program. She is editor-in-chief of Hawk & Handsaw: The Journal of Creative Sustainability and a scholar-in-residence for the Maine Humanities Council. She is also an exceptionally messy chef, a reprehensibly lazy gardener, a mediocre sailboat racer, and a clumsy but passionate surfer.

Introduction

By Janine DeBaise

I first met Kathryn Miles in January of 2008 when the leadership of Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment gathered in Boise, Idaho for a retreat. We had just 48 hours to do a whole lot of planning, so this was a working meeting that began just after sunrise each morning and ended with bottles of wine late each night. Kate’s contributions were smart and perceptive, but it was during our meal breaks and after-hours socializing that I especially appreciated her lively personality. She’s charming and self-deprecating, and most important of all, she can really tell a funny story. I got the impression that she’s always writing a narrative in her head. I knew after that first meeting that I wanted to read anything she writes.

Interview

Kathryn Miles (in red jacket) is an avid sailor, and her love for adventure on the seas is one inspiration for writing All Standing.
Photo by Tim Wilkes.

Janine DeBaise: Sometimes environmental writing has the reputation of being rather grim and full of doomsday predictions. Yet, looking at the journal Hawk & Handsaw: the Journal of Creative Sustainability, which you founded and currently edit, I think that the title—and certainly much of the content—indicates that you value creativity, playfulness, and a sense of humor as tools in raising awareness and coming up with solutions to environmental problems. How did you come to the decision to take that approach?

Kathryn Miles: From the start, Hawk & Handsaw has had an unofficial motto of “No Sanctimony.” We adore lovely, lyrical essays, but we also recognize the importance of humor and perspective. Tackling issues like climate change or megaextinction can feel like a grim enterprise, and that, in turn, can make it easy to lose sight of what is beautiful and what is absurd. There’s a danger to doing either, especially if it means that we lose our joie de vivre. Too often, conversations about sustainability become, at best, discussions of how to get by and, at worst, a resigned acceptance of an impending apocalypse. That’s not very inspiring, and it misses what I think is at the heart of sustainability, which is finding a way for all of us to flourish. At Hawk & Handsaw, we try to make sure that that kind of vibrancy is a part of everything we do, both inside the office and out.

Janine DeBaise: You said once that you went to college intending to enter the field of law, to be an environmental attorney, but then at some point your career path swerved. Tell us how that happened and what choices you’ve made along the way.

Kathryn Miles: Well, for starters, it turned out that I was abysmally bad at citing precedent. There was a pivotal moment in my undergraduate career when I walked into my constitutional law professor’s office to talk about a less-than-stellar grade I had received on our midterm exam. I sat down while he finished up his phone conversation, which ended up being a huge debate with Antonin Scalia about the finer points of an old constitutional law case. They were both so impassioned, and as impressed as I was by the nature of the conversation, I knew it wasn’t for me. I swapped my political science degree for one in philosophy, where I felt like I had the freedom I needed to explore theories and ideologies. From there, I did a traditional Ph.D. in English, but criticism didn’t quite fit right either. Now, it seems, I’m mostly back where I started, which is telling stories. The training in law and scholarship has been invaluable, particularly when it comes to conducting research and determining what questions I need to be asking. Working as a writer lets me pay homage to those ideas, but it also lets me move beyond them when I feel like I need to.

Janine DeBaise: Your writing often combines a narrative with scientific facts and information. How do you figure out how to balance telling a good story—and entertaining your reader—with educating your reader?

Kathryn Miles: I think our species is defined by its love for good narrative, and in my experience, the very same literary constructs that comprise fiction propel good nonfiction as well: character development, conflict, narrative arc, that sort of thing. When it comes to braiding that narrative with some of the tougher theory, I always tell my students to follow the TV drama model: have you pushed your story to a place—a kind of cliffhanger, if you will—where the viewer will stay with you, even if you take a commercial break? A good work of nonfiction will do that again and again, and these spaces buy the writer time to tackle theory and science without losing the reader. A great essay will make those moments seem like the very heart of the piece. At Unity College, I’m fortunate to have a group of fantastic scientists in my life who see what is captivating about their work, and who are willing to help me how figure out how to make other people fascinated by it, too.

Janine DeBaise: One of the things I loved about Adventures with Ari is that it’s the kind of book that would appeal to folks who wouldn’t normally wander past the “Nature” shelf in the bookstore. The narrative about your relationship with Ari drew readers who might not normally be interested in the topic of the environment—and yet, the book has environmental messages. Do you self-identify as a nature writer? What are some of the problems and limitations with nature writing as a genre?

Kathryn Miles: That’s a great question, and it’s one that I grapple with a lot. I think, if anything, I would consider myself an environmental writer. That probably sounds like genre equivocation, but to my mind it represents an increasingly significant distinction. We are an urban planet, and for over half a decade now, more people have been residing in urban, rather than rural, environments. This trend will only deepen during our lifetime. For many people, nature denotes a wilderness experience, and while I agree that such an experience is an important and awe-inspiring thing, it is also becoming one of entitlement. I think it’s important to acknowledge that. I also feel strongly that writers have a responsibility to meet readers where they are: it’s the only we way we can forge the kind of connection needed to show them another perspective or worldview. That, in turn, means widening the scope of subject and genre, of acknowledging that a tenement is as formative and defining as a forest or mountain top.

Janine DeBaise: Nature writer Bill McKibben, through his Twitter account and the website 350.org, has done a great job harnessing the power of the Internet, using social media to raise awareness, rally people, and organize to fight environmental battles. What do you see as the potential and drawbacks of the internet when it comes to environmental issues? Do you think the print media will continue to have a role in grassroots organizing?

Kathryn Miles: Let me start by saying that, when it comes to thinking about how writers can effectively use the internet, I always turn to you as a great example. What strikes me about new media in general, and your digital platform in particular, is the way that it builds community. At long last, we’re moving beyond a hierarchical broadcast model—one person, disseminating a message to many—and instead embracing a system based on holism and social ecology. I liken it to the traditional Paris salon, where, literature became the catalyst for group interaction and pursuant action. And I’m heartened when I go somewhere like Orion’s website and see that the string of reader comments is longer than an original article. But, since this is the web and we can get all postmodern here, let me turn it back to you. How would you answer your question?

Janine DeBaise: Well, it’s probably telling that I used Bill McKibben as my example. He’s written more than a dozen books, some of which have influenced me deeply, but in addition, he’s successfully used social media and the website 350.org for grassroots organizing on a global scale. I’m always going to read whole books to grasp the complexity and nuance of environmental problems. But I love the immediacy of the internet and the way we can use it to build community across vast geographic distances. Just last year, I watched livestreams of the Occupy Wall Street movement (Tim Pool, in particular) as it unfolded—and read smart, thoughtful blog posts about the movement written simultaneously. So there were activists out in the streets protesting, but also people at home writing smart, perceptive things on the internet, and I could access both at the same time. The danger with the internet, of course, is that there’s so much information and entertainment out there. If we don’t learn how to filter information and how to use the internet carefully, we could spend our days LOLing at cute pictures of cats while our species goes extinct.

But let’s talk about books. What does the bookshelf by your bed look like? What are you currently reading? What old favorites do you return to? Which authors should be on every reader’s list?

Kathryn Miles: I think the authors on everyone’s reading lists should be the ones that really speak to those people making the lists. To that end, the stack of books by my bed is a sprawling mess of old favorites and new interests. Right now, as I start work on my new book project, the latter category is populated almost entirely by histories of shipwrecks and rescues. As for the perennial favorites, I always have a few cookbooks, which I read like most people read tawdry romance novels, some Buddhist standbys like Pema Chodron, and a few poets, including Gary Snyder. Somehow, I always feel better knowing he’s in arm’s reach.

Janine DeBaise: You’ve got a busy life. What keeps you sane and grounded?

The Jeanie Johnston.
Photo courtesy Docklands.

Kathryn Miles: If you asked the people closest to me, they might tell you that I’m not all that sane or grounded. I have a pretty assertive monkey mind, which requires some serious subterfuge to get it quieted down. Historically, those go-to moments of trickery have been high-energy activities that require a lot of concentration: downhill skiing and surfing, sailboat racing or a long trail run. I still really love all of those things. In the last year or so, though, I’ve made a big commitment to tamping down their focus. I spend a lot more time doing yoga or in mindfulness-based meditation than I ever have before. It’s made a big difference.

Janine DeBaise: Tell us about your newest book, All Standing. What drew your interest to the story of this ship? Tell us about the research you did to write this book.

Kathryn Miles: The story of the Jeanie Johnston is really remarkable. She was built as an act of charity by an enigmatic ship owner during the height of the Irish Famine. This was a time of mass emigration—both coerced and voluntary—and the ships that ferried the starving Irish had mortality rates that easily exceeded those of the previous generation’s slave ships. There were over 5,000 of these coffin ships in existence, and of them, the Jeanie Johnston was the only one never to lose a passenger. I first learned about the ship when I was in Ireland nearly ten years ago, and I was instantly captivated. Hers is a story of courage, and the willingness to stake everything on a chance at the American Dream. I’m humbled by the experiences of those people who sailed on her, and it’s a real honor to tell their tales. This book took a long time to write, because I felt like I really needed to know these people in as much detail as I could, and the reality (which is to say the scarcity) of 19th century Irish archival material made that a challenge. I spent a lot of time reading blurry microfilm in cold libraries—pretty monotonous work, really. But there were also moments of incredible excitement, like making contact with the descendants of the main figure in the book, or sailing as crew aboard the re-creation of the ship. Those are the sorts of experiences that make a book indelibly real.

Janine DeBaise: During your talk at the 2012 Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference, you said that environmental writers have the responsibility to “inspire an ethic of care in our readers.” How do we do that? What might that “ethic of care” look like?

What’s next for Kathryn Miles always includes surfing.
Photo by Candace Kuchinski.

Kathryn Miles: You have a good memory. An ethic of care is based on ideas of interdependence, and the belief that the most vulnerable among us deserve the most consideration. Writers are uniquely suited to raise awareness about both: we can show what unites us, and we can remind people about narratives that have been forgotten or might otherwise become overlooked. There’s that poignant moment in Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese,” where she says, “Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.” That’s what writing from an ethic of care looks like. And it broadens this behest even further: tell me about what you love and what you hate; tell me what frightens you and what you’re willing to fight for. Then, if you’re willing to listen, I’ll tell you about those things in my life. And maybe then we both will understand.

Janine DeBaise: What’s next for Kate Miles?

Kathryn Miles: My new book is about the formation of the Coast Guard and the WWI rescue that defined their organization, and I’m completely obsessed. I’m about to become an aunt again, and I find that I really like that vocation, too. There’s nothing like a little person to remind you how to really live. I plan on doing a lot of that. The rest is kind of detail, really.

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3rd Annual Contest Winner

Courtney Amber Kilian

Color has history. And, our sky is black. During the day it melts into a metallic gray, its edges a charcoaled red, as if it has burned too. During the night it glows with heat, tender skin pulled back to expose a wound. It reminds me of flying off my bike as a child: my blackened knees beading up with dark blood after skidding across asphalt. I want to wrap this scene in gauze. Blot it. Allow its damaged edges time to heal.

Collin is peeling ash off our ranch vehicles like plastic. Long strands of filmy residue come off in strips. My eyes sting to think Collin’s moved to the cars because he can’t look at the land. Soot snows on us, covers every hillside. The ranch is mostly ash; the avocado trees—what is left of them—charcoaled stubs. I watch a fuchsia sun drip through black. Historic black. None of what I want to say, to scream, has been said before—not from my mouth. We had watched the fire roll, licking over the hills, the Santa Ana winds urging it forward. But neither of us could leave.

How is there fear in something so beautiful?

I.

When the Santa Ana winds blow we slather on lip balm and lotion, our parched skin soaking it up. My lips crimson in the dryness. Collin’s hands become rougher from working. Our dry skin burns during the day and peels at night. We slice the pointed fronds of aloe lining our trailer, squeezing out their juice and rubbing the protective seal onto our backs, necks, and shoulders.

The winds blow westward through the canyons reaching speeds of 70 mph, spreading wildfires. As a Southern California farmer, fire is the wild card you play with. You know although the odds are low the chance is there for perfectly positioned winds to send one erratic spark tunneling up the canyon to your trees.

We hear that the man who started the fire was lost. He built his signal fire in the dry dip of a hill less than half a mile away from homes. So close to fields that when the warm winds bellowed, sparks licked the dry grass igniting into torches, marching forward on a crazed hunt, ramming doors and homes down. 90,440 acres burned.

Is there aloe for this?

II.

The Santa Anas send electricity through the air: warm, staticky currents buzzing through my hair and tugging hot shivers up my spine. They bring me back to my childhood excitement for anything resembling weather in Southern California. We don’t have hurricanes or blizzards. We have the rare earthquake and hot winds. Alluring winds signaling something is brewing, being kicked up, rustled from its resting place. The static and heat send odd warm chills through our bodies, telling us things are shifting. I could be wiping sweat from my forehead one minute and watching my hair stand on end, goose bumps rippling up my arms the next. The winds pick up surface dust, stinging our bare skin and scattering sharp, jagged fronds of palm trees along our roads. Eyelashes are a particularly useful mechanism during the winds, catching particles as we walk head down, eyes focused on the sand twirling at our feet.

“Keep busy,” Collin whispers. It is one of the few things we say to each other.

One structure is saved: the small trailer we live in. The barn, storage containers, and skeleton of the home we were slowly piecing together from leftover money in each growing season, all burned.

I’d read humans shed 105 pounds of skin by the time they are 70 years old. Every month, we have an entirely new outer layer of skin cells, almost 1,000 new skins in an average lifetime.

During the fire the sun is a rubbed out circle, chalked over by the grayness of ash. I watch the fire’s movement update online: Northern San Diego County as a stream of dust, darkness blowing through Pauma Valley, arcing toward the City of Bonsall, 72 mph winds forcing it toward Valley Center. Quills of black smoke from individual fires stroke the satellite image, smudging the map along the southern fringe of Palomar Mountain, Rainbow Valley, the Los Coyotes reservation, and moving toward our ranch.

Is this our land shedding?

III.

Fire is black. It isn’t red or yellow or blue. It’s not the bright of a fire at a campsite. We know fire as darkness. Complete darkness. Black smoke, and the heavy weight that the fire is somewhere within it. I re-imagine it as if it had been a film: splitting and grainy—I can only picture it in another era. This devastation as something separate from my life.

We hear about a woman from the City Council in Escondido who ordered a fire truck to stand guard on her street, about sisters burning in their car on their way home, about those who never received the warning phone call, about the husband-wife who met their neighbors in their pool, their heads scabbing and hypothermia setting in, after six hours of waiting out the fire.

If I close my eyes I can see the roof of avocado leaves glowing with midday heat, sunlight splattering the undergrowth. We’d pick avocados late into the evening. Stay in the orchard to feel the fruit twist and pop from the branch. To hear weight shift from umbilical cord to palm.

When we lived in Spain as farm volunteers, we jumped through fire to be reborn. To cleanse body and soul, we were told. When it was our turn for rebirth, Collin and I, holding hands, smoke stinging our eyes, wind sending sparks and flakes of ash across our skin, ran. Leaping together, we skimmed across the bonfire, pyres of smoke disappearing into deep sky.

In the evenings when the winds picked up, the trees came to life. They were silent most days, saturated in heat, lethargic under the late summer sun. In the evening they stretched, exhaling the deep breath they’d held for the day. The forest of avocados surrounding us came alive with whispers.

IV.

Collin and I are covered in it when we come in—head to foot in soot, in the ashes of our trees. I run my eyes over us in our bathroom mirror: my filthy arms and hands, ash resting thick in the soft wrinkles inside my forearms and wrists; Collin’s work boots ash-caked and worn, dampness winding through his shirt and clinging to his spine; the soft ledge of flab poking over his pants that makes him so human so real that my voice catches, cracks, as I clear my throat, trying to say all the things I want to but can’t. A cough sputters from his throat as he brings his fist to his lips, shaking his head. We can’t speak because there is nothing to soothe this, nothing to suture it or synch the heavy numbness ebbing in our chests.

When we wash, it is one of the first times I don’t feel better to be clean. The darkness of our torched trees spirals down the shower drain. We wash off dark sleeves and pant legs of dirt that cling to us, marking our bare skin where our clothes were peeled off. We blow our noses, cleaning them of gray snot. The ash is in every crevice, every nerve, every tendon that helped us work this ranch and its exhaustion creeps through us.

Everything feels fragile—like the thinness of a flower stem, our spinal chords when Collin and I sleep back to back, a hiccup bubbling up from our reservoir, the sunspots and creases that rest along our foreheads. Like anything could break.

I rest my dark forearm against Collin’s light skin, barely beige, the darkest he’ll get even in late summer. Against his chest, I listen to the whoosh of air, the pump of blood, move through him, an entirely enclosed system that feels wooded, planted, a rush of wind blowing through it. I know his blood runs on this place. Is part rock, dirt, and avocado just like mine.

I can’t sleep. I fumble through papers and grab a blank copy of Collin’s irrigation map. The map we use to color-code how we irrigate our avocados each week. I write our memories out by location:

Collin: for you. Because it’s the only way I know how to speak.

1)    The first time we installed irrigation pipe, gluing each piece together after coating them in purple primer. It runs like veins under our charred hills.

2)    Here, I felt your sun tattoo warm my hip, and the branches from the tree of your other tattoo become part of my skin, my earlobes roving over your lips.

3)    The mint leaves that we use to make ice tea for cool breaks and bath tea for summer days grow here.

4)    An imprint—how I will always remember that kiss—not our first—but the one that I can still feel on my neck, on my thigh under the blanket the cobalt sky wrapped us in.

5)    Where your grandfather built the original access road.

6)    In this block are the roads that you designed for a school project years before we knew each other.

7)    Here we cut the agave and attempted to make tequila, baking its fronds.

8)    Where they came out to listen to our land with their equipment and found water—heard it echo and bounce off rock; where we danced jumping and hollering as the water burst from the ground from our own well.

9)    Our wildflower field—where the shadows of hummingbirds flitted across the pages of my journal.

Planted: our avocados.

Water bodies: shivers up and down our spines, taste testing the well water, frog legs brushing against us, the water of the reservoir pulsing and deepening below us.

I leave the map next to Collin as he sleeps, soft snores buzzing through his throat. I want to be in the dirt again, be up to my elbows in ash. The thought that if I keep busy we’ll be that much closer to healing our land, to green instead of black, winds through me, drawing me outside.

How can you turn out the light on something that still glows outside your door?

V.

The moon is orange. A rusty imperfect circle darkening like a decomposing orange peel as it drifts toward the mountains. Its light hits the scars that flick across my forearms, drops of whitened skin from welding in short sleeves. I remember my mother’s scars: similar speckles along her knuckles and wrists from oil splattering out of a hot pan and biting where it hit while she cooked.

I dig my hands further into the charred soil where our garden had been. A light turns on behind me, its angled beam shining on a single blade of grass that was somehow missed. I’d read that some plant species thrive on growing through burnt soil.

Collin’s shadow falls over me, the etching of his face and flickering of his eyes bob next to me like a moving negative. He leans his arm lightly on my shoulder and then pulls me in roughly, kissing my forehead. I think of its imprint.

He sees my hand cupping green against black.

“Like jumping through fire,” he says.

Like shedding skins and hearing fruit twist and pop from the branch, feeling its weight shift from umbilical cord to palm. Like coating burnt skin with fresh aloe and a forest of avocados surrounding us in whispers.

Fiction Judge Skip Horack says…

NEXT: “The Hurricane,” by Hope Coulter >>

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3rd Annual Contest Finalist

Hope Coulter

It began as a “disturbance,” a white blur off the coast of Africa, which the man on the Weather Channel said was becoming organized.

“I’m not,” said George cheerfully.

Jill, his wife, stood watching the TV in boxers and a tank top. Her frown suggested that she was organizing her own system of turbulence.

She was a neurosurgeon, veteran of years of training more grueling than a fighter pilot’s. She could guide a buzz saw through a skull or a scalpel along a spinal cord. One glance from her gray eyes could wither an errant resident or nurse. George admired her strength and steeliness and loved the girlish guise in which they were packaged: she stood five-four in her loafers—notched like a piecrust, the shoes of a third-grade teacher—and chewed the ends of her hair when she was stressed.

“We can’t go,” she said.

“What do you mean?” He knelt by his suitcase, thumbing a stack of his favorite, softest t-shirts. They and some swim trunks were all he’d need for a week at the Gulf Coast beach where he and Jill were headed in the morning.

“We can’t go driving into a hurricane.”

He rocked back onto the heels of his flip-flops and looked up at her face. Stood up. Together they watched the royal-blue map of the Caribbean. A pale, fuzzy mass whirred toward the Florida panhandle again and again as the Weather Channel projected the course of the storm.

“See?” said Jill. “We’ll drive 500 miles and have to turn around and come right back.”

Over the course of their marriage she had predicted that loose parts would fall off, that noises in the car would turn into major system shutdowns, that uninvited people would hear about their parties, and—George hated to admit it—she was usually right.

She too had been packing when the news of the storm interrupted. Now he saw that she was holding tampons. Two light-blue boxes. His heart constricted. “Aw, sweetheart, you won’t be needing those.”

She shook her head. “This is the type of stuff that sells out in a hurricane. I may start any day now,” she said. “If I don’t bring tampons on the trip, that’ll jinx it.”

This was their third in vitro try, and it would be their last. After this—what? He pictured placing ads in newspapers around the region:

Rocking chairs and birthday parties! Jolly executive dad and loving, cookie-baking mom want to give your baby a beautiful childhood and a life full of the best opportunities. Call toll-free….

Only in their case it would have to say: Successful brain surgeon mom and lackadaisical dad want to raise the kind of child who gets their sarcastic jokes and likes old Tarzan movies. He could add: We do have a golden retriever. Sometimes their dog seemed like their only real qualification for parenthood. Nonetheless, George, a percussionist who had failed to get tenure at the local college, hoped that this next gig would be his last—that of stay-at-home dad.

By bedtime the white blot had the beginnings of arms, like an octopus. A man with bouffant gray hair pointed out the eye. “Landfall by 11 p.m. Monday,” he said. “But these storms often turn from the projected path. That’s why we’re going to stay with Tropical Storm Hattie through the night, and that’s why you need to stay with the Weath—”

George wanted this vacation so much—wanted to be at the seaside with Jill, away from her beeper and call list, away from this house where he made his own lonely rounds. Why was she never so thrilled by the beach as he was? Because he liked to rendezvous with his brother in Mobile, his brother who was a wide-load escort driver? Jill and Floyd didn’t have much in common. Or was it that George always arranged to spend a day with Jill’s sister in Pensacola and her four kids? He adored them. Blond hair and big brown eyes. Wide, thin-lipped faces. Their father a school principal, their mother an aerobics teacher, their house overflowing with toys, but maybe that whole scene was painful for Jill.

A few days into the vacation, though, Jill always began to relax. The awful tensions of her work would slide off her shoulders and she’d loosen up, getting happy and excited to spot dolphins from their deck, go for a sno-cone, and snort about George’s made-up Scrabble words. It would happen this time too. It had to.

Early the next morning Jill turned on the television. “Great,” she called. “It’s been upgraded to a hurricane. Two-hundred miles southeast of the Keys. Is it too late to back out?”

George came out of the bathroom zipping up his shaving kit. “Come on. So we have a little rain while we’re there. It’ll still be a change from routine, and in two or three days the sun’ll come out again.” He slipped an arm around her and tried to kiss behind her ear.

She closed her eyes. “You’re always so fucking optimistic.”

She hadn’t always been this profane—not back when they first met, she a shy flutist and George the funny guy behind the glockenspiel in their college orchestra. But a salty mouth, apparently, was basic equipment for a neurosurgeon. Now Jill could cuss, all right.

It was Tess who settled the argument; she jumped in the car when George wasn’t looking, sat on the back seat with her ears pricked and tongue lolling, and refused to get out. Soon after, they were on the road, angling down through the delta on a two-lane highway, bean fields stretched out on either side.

At four o’clock, an FM station out of Ocean Springs sang out, “They’re battening the hatches in the Florida Keys, where—” George slid a Beach Boys CD into the audio player. Surf and fun and Californ-i-ay bounced around the car until Jill punched the power off, swearing. “Enough already, George.”

She was right. He should have picked soothing James Taylor… or Jimmy Buffett… with his shrimp and flip-flops, a beach boy all grown up. Neurosurgeon mom with good taste and stay-at-home dad with questionable judgment want to parent your child….

They exited onto a state highway that wound through pine and hackberry woods. Jill pulled a medical journal from her satchel and put on her reading glasses, which gave her an air of sweet gravity that George found fetching. But at the same time they reminded him of her age—37—and what she called her ticking clock.

Yet as they reached the high, slender-spanned bridge and crossed the bay to the island, the sky was a regal, studio-backdrop blue. No hint of anything bad in the offing.

The rental was a stained-cedar A-frame, raised on pilings. Sliding glass doors along its ocean side showcased the Gulf and a swath of pale sand. Jill turned on the Weather Channel right away, but left it readily enough when George suggested they change and head out to the beach.

Oh, it was what he’d dreamed. She looked so… available… her skin pale and lustrous against the black sheen of her halter suit—and was there, maybe, a slight swell in her lower belly? He rubbed sunblock down the sweep of her back and kissed her freckled shoulder right through the coconut coating. They walked along the surf hand-in-hand like a couple in a resort vacation ad. Brown pelicans labored overhead, seagulls shrieked. Tess chased sandpipers and sneezed at the salt spray, wheeling around now and then to bay at the breakers.

A couple of houses down, a toddler with big cheeks squatted near her father’s lounge chair, patting a mound of wet sand. She looked up at them as they passed, lost her balance, and plopped back onto her bottom, her round eyes widening with surprise. Jill’s fingers squeezed George’s. Next year that’ll be us! he thought, in a blitz of happiness.

Sun and waves gave him an almost uncontainable sense of well-being. It was like what he used to feel playing in the symphony. He used to love being in the middle of the dense, rich orchestral sound. Something about the bombast of, say, Berlioz, or Tchaikovsky, exhilarated him the way the ocean did.

A percussionist’s biggest challenge was not intricate rhythms; it was counting dead time, the silent bars when the rest of the orchestra didn’t need him. But George had a high tolerance for tedium, and enjoyed rallying his wandering mind for one great fortissimo boom.

It was the rest of life that confounded him—the murkiness of departmental politics; Jill, and her overweening career, and the bafflement at the heart of marriage itself.

That night he grilled snapper, Jill roasted vegetables, and they ate on the deck. George had two beers, one for himself plus the one that Jill wouldn’t take—just in case. The moon came up, a yellow dime, and they went for another walk, watching the waves break white in the moonlight.

He woke with a start, his head full of a bad dream and his heart pounding. Jill had rolled in his direction. The bluish light from the windows, even and still now, bathed her face, her worried forehead had relaxed, and her cheeks looked plump and smooth as a girl’s. Her nose was a little bit snub, as if snipped in a childhood accident—another one of those innocent features that belied the high-powered nature of her work.

Maybe a tiny child-seed was snagged somewhere deep inside her—their own little zygote, fertilized in its Petri dish cradle, then tucked back into its mother, implanted and beginning to grow.

Yet how unconnected they seemed, for two people who might have made a baby. He would have said, about his marriage, “We get along okay”; yet there was unease behind the okay-ness. They talked about their house, they compared notes on their separate days, they had sex when they were supposed to—lately, only when they were supposed to, now that their bedroom was populated by the ghosts of Dr. Jenkins, the fertility specialist, and his technicians and nurses. But they also bickered. Behind their banter was a rancor George couldn’t account for. There were hours of loneliness, punctuated more and more now by a searing sadness. Often, now that George was unemployed, these spells came in the middle of the day, in a blank morning or afternoon. When Jill got home, her patients’ urgencies and emergencies trailed her like a cape. She was remote as a queen, while he was her jester, a goofy page. He knew he should take a back seat to her patients. They were in comas, in ICU, the victims of tumors and wrecks and oxygen deprivation, more important devastations than his ordinary angst, his everyday emotional code blue. Yet, to his shame, he resented them. Yes, he was jealous of the mortally ill, the anesthetized, the brain-dead who took up Jill’s attention, obsessed her day and night, got her out of bed, took her away from home, and kept her on the phone when she was at home. How mature was that?

How would he care for their baby, hour after hour, while Jill was off in her grueling consults and surgeries? What if something went wrong with it, and all he could do was stare helplessly, having no idea what to do? What if one of these terrible heartaches came over him when he was supposed to be feeding it or pushing it in a swing, and he just stood there, checked out?

The next day, a police car turned onto the lane to their cottage. George, rinsing the lunch plates, watched through the kitchen window as it nosed into their driveway. A stout officer came up the stairs, tugging at his belt. George dried his hands as he went to the back door.

“Hate to tell you folks.” The officer took off his hat, directed a “ma’am” past George to Jill. “She’s been upgraded. We got orders to evacuate the island. We’re asking that ever’one be over the bridge by four o’clock.”

They packed haphazardly, not sure what to leave or bring. Maybe the hurricane would turn and they could come back the next day; or maybe the whole island would be blown away, this house scattered, its ceiling fans and mini-blinds strewn up and down the beach. In the end they took everything. At 3:45 George locked the door behind them, feeling a little silly—what was a deadbolt to Hurricane Hattie? Tess jumped into the back seat, and they joined the procession of cars moving bridgeward on the island’s main road.

“At least it’s an adventure,” said George.

They drove inland, stopping at motels in vain to find a room. Finally, once they left the interstate and the older four-lane, a crumbling two-lane highway led them to a “VACANCY” sign at a motor court. There was an oystershell driveway overhung with Spanish moss and small, mildew-stained units once painted pink and green.

“We’ll be lucky,” Jill said, “not to be stabbed in the shower.”

The room smelled like roach spray, and the bed was swaybacked. George was tapping a dead fly out of the water cup in the bathroom when Jill called, “No cable.”

“No cable?”

“We managed to find the only room in the entire Southeast with no Weather Channel.”

“We did?” He came out of the bathroom and squatted to offer Tess the water.

“God,” said Jill, “my head hurts.” Her face was pale, twisted.

“Let’s drive to dinner,” said George, “and listen to the radio on the way. Come on, Tess, get your leash. It’ll be fine, sweetie.”

“Have you noticed how often things are fucking not fine?”

George kept his eye on a giant palmetto in the rearview as he backed out. “I think there’s an Applebee’s back at the interstate.”

Jill jabbed the radio search button. “Nothing but AM stations! Nothing but country music!”

“Really,” said George, pulling onto the highway, “it’s gonna be—” He stopped himself. There was a slit in the western clouds, where a virulent light shone through. Sunset.

Shortly after dawn Tess flung herself on their bed and hunkered between them, trembling. The clock radio beside the bed was dark. A high, continuous wail came from outside. Jill rushed to the window and gasped. George peered over her shoulder.

The trees around the motor court were bent as if a giant’s hand was pushing them, bowing the trunks and bending the smaller limbs over to the ground. The highway was a cable of taillights. Across the road a No U-Turn sign flapped, tore from its pole, and went whipping through the air.

George pushed at the television’s buttons and shoved the rabbit-ears antennae this way and that.

“Who cares what they’re saying?” Jill pulled her nightgown over her head and grabbed shorts and panties from her suitcase. “Can’t you tell we just need to leave?”

“It may be too late,” said George. “By now we might be safer inside.”

The picture was fuzz, but the sound worked: “The eye of Hurricane Hattie is now 70 miles southeast of Mobile. Again, the storm has been upgraded as of 5 a.m. to a Category Three hurricane. A hurricane warning has been declared along the Gulf Coast from Pass Christian to Destin. Residents are advised to move inside all unsecured large objects—”

“What is an unsecured large object?” said George. “Like, a house?”

“Let’s just go.”

They entered the stream of crawling traffic. “Hell,” said George, “we need gas.”

Jill fiddled with the radio.

“—routes already underwater. Residents fleeing the area are advised to use the approved Hurricane Evacuation Routes and not to delay their egress from the area. And now let’s go to Bob, a listener on Caraway Island. Bob has made the decision not to evacuate. Bob, can you describe the scene where you are?”

“Well, Mickey, there’s a lotta water—lotta wind blowing lotta stuff around—”

“Tell us what the authorities told you. For our listeners just now tuning in.”

“They came by and they were like, ‘If you decide to try to ride out the storm, will you go ahead and put a toe tag on? Like, write your name and next of kin on it.’”

“Listener Bob, we wish you well! Now let’s go to the latest from Pensacola—”

George crooked his own big toe. How sweaty and tense it was—how alive—pressing his flip-flop against the accelerator. How would it be to tie a morgue tag to his toe, and pad around the house in it, riding out the storm?

A few miles later, they saw a truck stop with cars queued at many gas pumps, and George turned in. The pumps were roofed, at least; he wouldn’t have to stand in the rain.

“What line are we in?” said Jill. “That jackass! He’s trying to cut you off.”

“Go on and go to the bathroom.”

He pumped gas in a wind full of salt, blown rain, and fumes that made his face and unbrushed teeth feel even gummier. A woman standing beside a gold Chrysler was shouting back and forth to a heavy red-haired man in mechanic’s coveralls.

“Not gonna ride it out?”

“Unh-unh!” she said. “I rode out Alistair in ’83 and I said, I’m not ever gonna do that again!”

“Well, my stepfather’s in the hospital. I’ve got to run down to the coast and help my mother get his boat in.”

“God bless you, sugar,” the woman answered. “He don’t ever give us more than we can bear, do He?”

What was it about an emergency that made strangers open up to one another? Hollering confidences. George became aware of a blur at his elbow. Jill rushed past, hands over her face, jumped in the car, and slammed the door. “What?” He tried to open her door but she had locked it. He went around to the driver’s side and slid in, out of the wind. “What’s wrong?”

“I’ve started my period.” She moved her hands apart. “I’m not pregnant, ohhhh.”

Behind them people started to honk.

She flung her hand toward the road. “Just go.” Sobs wreathed out of her, rising, disemboweled cries, like the keening of Arab women he had once seen in the news.

Well, George thought, hunched behind the wheel—well, things have got to go uphill from here. If he said that aloud Jill would scratch his face. He had never seen her like this, not in her worst exhaustion and despair about work, her worst rants about chauvinistic superiors. She was wild, irrational.

“I didn’t even want to vacation at the beach! The mountains were where I wanted to go. Cool, crisp air. Sweaters at night—”

“Mosquitoes can be really bad in the mountains this time of year,” he said. “Lyle Porter told me that! They went to Montana, and even in Montana the mosquitoes were bad!”

“They didn’t go to Montana, they went to fucking Maine!”

Mean-spirited, foul-mouthed baby boomers want to give your infant a fighting chance. Call 1-800….

Mosquitoes were not the point. The vacation was not even the point. The baby was the point, the lost baby, the un-baby, the lost potential of a new person, the road untraveled, the DNA sequence that didn’t align.

Or maybe the point was just her and him, the venom between them laid bare.

Did he dare to reach for her hand? Did he want to? They would definitely never conceive if they couldn’t bring themselves to hold hands any more.

Jill took a deep sniff, tucked her hands under her chin, and set it on her drawn-up knees. “I don’t want to be a famous neurosurgeon.” She raised her face, placed it down the other way, away from him, and cried. “I just want to be a, a, a mom.”

“Oh, honey,” he said. Taillights flared ahead, and he skidded as he hit his brakes.
“I don’t want to be in the goddamn Head and Neck Society. I just want to be in the PTA—” and the “A” trailed into hiccuping sobs.

Traffic had picked up and he was able to hit 40 now, though he could hardly see through the rain.

The radio yammered on. A pair of announcers this time. “—situation developing in Pensacola. As you know, one of the dangers of a situation like this is not the gale-force winds and torrential rains of the hurricane itself—”

“Robin?—I hate to interrupt you, but we’re hearing from our on-site reporter in Pensacola that a state of emergency has been declared there. A state of emergency in Pensacola, where the eye of Hurricane Hattie will be passing in the next hour—”

“Turn it up.”

“Seven confirmed dead, and dozens of injuries, from a tornado that struck a shopping center. Most of the dead were in the parking lot of a Walmart in the Chestnut View suburb northwest of Pensacola.”

Jill sniffed and turned up the volume.

“You know it’s not them, sweetie—they wouldn’t go to Walmart in the middle of a hurricane.” As soon as he said it, he knew that her sister and brother-in-law were the very people who would go to Walmart in the middle of a hurricane.

George glanced at Jill. Framed by her matted hair, her face was pale, her eyes pink-rimmed.

He reached for her hand and she let him take it as if she didn’t even feel it. “Why don’t you find a phone and call your brother?” she said. “He could drive to their house and check on them. He’s got that emergency vehicle. I mean, it has lights on top.”

“‘Hey Floyd,’” said George, releasing Jill’s hand and splaying his thumb and pinkie into an imaginary receiver at his ear, “‘you know Jill? Who’s always been so crazy about you? She wants you to drive over to Pensacola and check on her sister and her husband and kids. Then run back and let us know how they are. We’ll be somewhere along the hurricane evacuation route.’”

He dropped his hand to the steering wheel. Jill had turned her head away.

Miles went by. The windshield wipers thunked a dull four-four.

George sighed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You want to look for some coffee?”

Jill looked at him sharply. “No. Find me a working phone.”

It took nearly two hours, but finally, outside a Kentucky Fried Chicken deep in Alabama, they located a pay phone. George led Tess to a patch of grass rimmed with orange marigolds, while Jill talked on the phone across the parking lot.

George watched her in the open door of the phone booth. She waved a fly away with one hand—or maybe she was gesturing—her hips in cuffed denim shorts cocked sideways, one shoulder hitched up to squeeze the phone and the other supporting her big purse. He swallowed the last melting ice from a fountain Coke and felt beads of sweat roll down his ribs. Tess ate a french fry she found in the grass, then stood panting, her tongue drooping.

In a minute Jill would hang up and come this way. Maybe she was about to say that her sister and brother-in-law were dead, and that the will would name her and George as custodians of the four children. He was fated to accumulate kiddie tapes in his car and Lucky Charms in his cupboard, to spend weekends at soccer fields and pizza arcades, and to watch over and over again with hammering heart while slight, short figures who were dear to him climbed into cars and rode away.

Or maybe, as Jill crossed the parking lot, he would realize that he had known for a long time, deep inside, that the marriage was over. The chain of consequences unspooled: After divorce, hibernation, and drift he would start dating the 23-year-old grad student who worked part-time at the bookstore. He would marry her, but not before he impregnated her, quite without planning. One night as he leaned over the back of her desk chair to nuzzle her nape, he would read this sentence, highlighted in her Shakespeare: Thou mettest with things dying, I with things new-born. George, who in other years had felt himself to be one large unsecured object, would start to feel solid again. He would land a modest job in arts administration, and wheeling his daughter to day care one morning, would hear her chuckle at the pigeons that flew up in a cloud before the stroller, and would find himself a happy man.

Jill gave two big nods and hung up. Instead of coming back to the car she stuck her arm out of the phone booth and raised her hand, a palm-shaking, finger-wiggling salute, then edged deeper into the shadow of the phone booth and picked up the receiver again. Was that a wave? Did it mean “They’re okay” or “Sorry I’m taking so long”? Now she must be phoning the hospital to tell them she’d be home five days early, to put her back in the call rotation. Or checking on some of her patients—Mr. Carmichael, or Mrs. Silva.

God, it was hot. The car would be unbearable. If he’d known Jill was going to take so long he would have tried to find shade.

Finally she emerged into the sun shimmers of the asphalt. George’s sight was shot through with hot blue lines like the cracking in cement. He shook his head, but that only intensified the radiance around his wife. He had another vision, that she was standing by the hospital elevator, absorbed in a chart in her hands. She wasn’t wearing her operating scrubs but her light-blue physician’s smock, and her hair was short and floured with gray. There was no ring on her slender, strong left hand. The elevator chimed and she glanced up, walked through its opening doors, then turned and looked straight at George as the elevator doors closed over her.

Now she approached him, squinting. She cleared her throat. George felt his shoulders starting to shake and heard a cry rising from inside him, a cry he hadn’t given permission to come out.

“Oh, Jill,” he said. “I can’t bear it.”

Surprise and concern spread over her face. “But they’re all right,” she said.

He was sobbing. Standing on the rim of an asphalt skillet, with Tess’s leash wrapped around first his hand and now, as she circled him and Jill in consternation, his legs—he broke down.

“Honey?” said Jill. “Sweetheart, it’s all right. Sissy and Dave and the kids. They know one of those people who was killed, someone who goes to their church, but it’s not them, they’ve taken shelter at a YMCA on the edge of town.”

“It’s been so hard,” George said, getting his chin under control. “It’s just been awful.”

Jill’s body was wrapped against him. He pressed his face into the sunglasses on top of her head, smelled the oil of her unwashed hair, the funky armpit smell she always got during her period. Her shirt was soaked with sweat, but beneath it the sturdiness of her back received the convulsions of his sobs and grounded them, stilled them.

“I wanted it so much,” he said. “The baby. Even if we ever get another one—I wanted this one.”

“Yes.”

They clung to each other.

George pulled back, weak. “I’ve been so alone,” hesaid. “I’m lonely. I miss my job.”

Jill kept patting him. “You must. I’m sorry. Oh, George. Damn it, Tess, hold still.” She bent to unweave the leash, then straightened up and said, “We need to get going. They want me on a consult in the morning.”

George nodded and took the car keys from his pocket. He wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand and started toward the car. But Jill didn’t move. She put her arms again around George and laid her head on his chest. “It’ll get better,” she said. “You’ll see.” He was the one who shook her loose and said, “Come on.”

By the time they got to Starkville, the hurricane was a system of squalls, and by the time they got to Memphis, it was giving needed rain to the fields and gardens of Georgia. They reached home a little after midnight. The house was warm and quiet. It smelled of waffle crumbs and dog hair and the banana they had left in the fruit bowl—of home. And the next morning, when they woke up to pursue their appointed lives, the sky was blue and clear, as if nothing untoward had happened.

NEXT: “Real Estate,” by Kristie Letter >>

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3rd Annual Contest Finalist

Kristie Letter

The best time to invest in real estate is when the market’s down. That’s when I got in.

They were burying Little Roy, but thinking about that hole in the ground made the space between my fingers feel like poison ivy. I left to go check out my property. I trucked across the sandy mud of Elysian Fields cemetery, still steaming from the last batch of summer rain. A few of the guys looked at me funny when I turned away, but I hardly recognized them. Back in the day we were all footballers and brawlers, but now everyone looked soft. Lots of them still had the ponytails, just no hair on top. All us guys had long hair in the 70s, but once the top goes it’s time to quit.

In the church, they had played that music, the echoey kind that sounds like the mall at Christmas. If churches want folks to take mourning seriously, they need to play Hank Williams. Little Roy would have hated what they played. I hummed a little Hank.

At least when I went, I’d have Little Roy nearby. My plot was number D409 and Little Roy was only as far away as the K row.

They must have been doing some kind of groundwork. Or gardening.

My plot of land, my only real estate holding, had recently been dug up. About six feet of it. Maybe I was in the C row rather than the D row. No, I could see the small metal markers. That rectangle of semi-sandy earth was number 409, like the cleaner. Each of the gravesites had a number so everyone could find the dearly departed. I checked, double-checked, and walked up from a new angle. It was D409.

Someone was newly buried there.

Really, who would bury someone in a random grave?

Mobsters.

Husbands who snapped and strangled their wives.

People who were ridiculous about their pets. Maybe a mangy spaniel lay curled on one of those flowery pillows.  Someone had to be out of their socket or up to no good to steal a final resting place, that’s for sure.

I had even made a speech to my boy the last time I saw him and took him to the swimming hole. “I bought some prime real estate for you, son” I said. “Are you going to swim with your t-shirt on? It’ll get in the way.”

“No, I like it on,” Danny said, crossing his arms across the points of his flabby chest. The kid could use some swimming against the current.

“So when I kick it, you don’t have to worry about a thing. Don’t go for anything fancy either. Say a few words over me, and go have some beer. If you’re old enough of course,” I added. I slapped his back with a wet thwomp and he turned to stare at a group of teenagers in a bright rubber raft.

“What’s the real estate, Dad?”

“The plot. In the cemetery. So when I go, you don’t have a bit of trouble.”

He didn’t seem to hear me, or at least he didn’t have any comment. We never did have much to say to each other. As my only son, I thought he’d at least appreciate it.

The cemetery mud covered my dress shoes like icing. I hate any shoe that attempts to put human toes into unnatural shapes and I drove home from Elysian Fields fast. Plus, my friend Cody was going to come pick me up before the social part of the funeral, which I knew from experience would last a long time and leave me in no condition to be behind the wheel. After our friend Roxy’s funeral, I lost my license for a year and a half.

Cops don’t take bereavement into account on DUIs.

Stepping out of my truck, I waved to my next door neighbor. Her long dark hair swirled around her head as she poured birdseed into one of her feeders. Every day she filled them up, and I had never seen so many birds around here. The word was out. When the neighbor lady wasn’t watching birds, she shuttled her son back and forth to several major cities, Washington, Baltimore and Philly, to a bunch of doctors. The little kid was dying. That was probably what made her hands so nervous, always fluttering around. Still, she had a way of wearing blue jeans I could appreciate. But she couldn’t be more than 25 and plus I could never remember her name. She had told me so many times that I couldn’t ask again.

“You’re all dressed up,” she said.

“Yep. Funeral for one of my buddies,” I said.

Her face shut immediately. Are you not supposed to mention funerals to those with sick children? “I’m so sorry,” she said in a voice that seemed more like a hum.

“Well, we’re sad but not surprised. Little Roy lived hard,” I replied. I tried to drag my shoes on the grass to scrape off some of the mud.

“Do you need anything?” she asked.

“No thanks. I’m just changing into something softer for the party.  My friends throw a rowdy funeral.”

She didn’t even smile. I had said the word funeral again.

“I hope everything is a comfort,” she said, stepping backwards onto her porch. I couldn’t ever say the right thing. The next time I walked by her mailbox, I’d have to look closely, to see if it told me her name.

Birds pushed and argued as they swooped down to the newly filled feeder.

The summer rain had stopped but the land was saturated. Everything hung lower to the ground with the weight of water, and the air itself was heavy. Those birds sounded drunk with it.  Right after rain, birds can hardly contain themselves. Changes in the weather meant new plans, new flights, and new ideas.

In his sister’s yard, Little Roy received the part of his send-off that he would have enjoyed; free beer, fresh barbeque, and his name as the center of conversation. Sure we all knew he overdosed, but we focused on the funny stuff.  He once wrestled a live bear in a Charleston bar; we agreed that has to be illegal these days. We tried to name all his girlfriends, all his arrests, and all his lies.

Little Roy had the same legal name as his father, Big Roy.  That fact allowed for many funny jokes and Little Roy’s self-destruction. Big Roy had a prescription for Oxycontin, a big-time painkiller for small town folks, to ease his final days. That refillable prescription put Little Roy in the ground.  Usually, or at least in younger days, Little Roy could handle anything he put in his system, more than most men twice his size. Shots, tokes, enough acid that one time in Atlantic City to have him declared legally insane. Who would have thought that something prescription would have done him in?

“Little Roy would have loved this party,” we said.

I had forgot about the time he hid the frozen fish in his sister’s car until she told the story. The guffaw caught me by surprise and I drooled salad dressing down my shirt. At least I wasn’t wearing my one nice button-up anymore.

A.A. saved his marriage, but sobriety gave Cody a whole mess of us to drive home. After Cody dropped me off (with five drunk men still in the back of his pickup yet), I hesitated in the driveway, swaying slightly in what might have been a mild breeze.

Maybe I should knock on that pretty neighbor lady’s door, whatever her name is. Show her what an older construction guy knows. Nailing. Screwing. Laying wood.

I made myself giggle and put a hand on my fence to steady the sway. Her window glowed.

Naw. If she started dating me she would gain weight. They all did. Something about me made women’s sweet voices go shrill while their hips went wide. Then my friendly neighbor wouldn’t be able to fit into those fine faded jeans. Plus, chances are she would say no to a scruffy man smelling like beer, salad dressing, and cigarettes. (All vices come back at funerals.) Besides she had soft paperbacks split open all over her house. What kind of woman reads that many books at once? I felt pride at my logic. Patting myself on the back would have spun me off balance.

Still leaning on the fence, I felt the pack of Merits in my breast pocket. They weren’t mine; I’d just grabbed them and the nearby matches from that table at Little Roy’s sister’s and started to smoke.

Little Roy would have been proud.

There was only one limp cigarette left. Pretty thorough for a non-smoker. The night stuck to my neck and cheeks; the humidity hadn’t broken, it just hankered down on the grass like dew.

After a few tries I managed to get my last smoke lit. Or whoever’s last smoke. The fire jumped from the wooden match, suspended in the air for a moment, and then died. The gray air pushed into my throat and squatted in my lungs.

Something moved in the corner of my eye. Something yellow blurred above the fence.

A chicken? Maybe her birdfeeders actually attracted poultry, although my experience of chickens suggested that they weren’t bright enough to fly around and scavenge. I blinked and focused.

Were chickens still able to fly? Or had domestication bred it out of them? I had seen a chicken hang-glide down off of a fence, but I had never really seen one fly. Did wild chickens fly? Was there any such thing as a wild chicken anymore?

With a graceful arc, the large chicken swooped away and then glided closer to the fence. The chicken wore yellow pajamas with white plastic feet. I closed my mouth around the cigarette, breathing the smoke out of my itching nostrils. Four feet in front of me, my neighbor’s eight-year old son dove and leapt from the ground like a yellow leaf tossed by the wind.

I was proud of my calm silence; I made the transition from chicken to child without freaking out.

Maybe I am sick, with fever, I thought. Maybe I am just way too drunk.

The boy jumped through the damp night air and paused before floating back down. He flung his thin arms in front of him to change direction. At the end of his yellow pajama arms, pale fluttering hands had visible bruises. The chances that I was imagining all this onto some chicken in my neighbor’s yard were slim. The spirals of motion began to make me feel the circles in my stomach. With a long arc, the boy veered towards the oak tree and seemed to toss a reproachful look in my direction.

Rocks skittered beneath my feet until I felt the concrete lip of my porch and stumbled up. I tried not to yelp as I bashed my shin, and tried not to fumble the door. Was this a miracle? Or a delusion? Or a scientific oddity? Anyone I called might think I was drunk and addled, seeing things on my way home from a funeral.

But even worse, people might run to ask that poor child questions.

Birds can fly because they are just barely enough stuff not to blow away when they scratch the earth for worms. Their bones are completely hollow, almost on the verge of collapse. Why, you could snap a bird bone between two of your fingers. Instead of being a weakness, these eggshell bones are the reason that birds can move with the wind. Penguins have strong bones for climbing across icebergs and braving Arctic winds, but they lose the ability to fly. Other animals that can “fly” work on different principles. Bats and birds have hollow bones. Flying squirrels and flying fish—just stuck with the wrong name. Those things can’t fly. They’re just good jumpers. I looked everything up in my leatherette-bound, seven-volume Encyclopedia Magnifica, as I attempted to keep my hammering skull quiet. And I thought I would never use the things.

Thank goodness I could spend Saturday drinking cranberry juice and seltzer, leafing through encyclopedias. If I had to lift a hammer, I would be in serious trouble. Earlier in the week, the contractors had called to ask if I wanted double-time to finish the roof on the Sylvan Way job this weekend, but no one could say I lacked foresight. I turned them down flat. No way was a roof safe the day after a funeral. I was still in my robe when the mail came, and still in my robe when I walked the small hot length of my driveway to retrieve three catalogues and my electric bill. My head hurt.

“Hey there,” she said. I checked to make sure I wasn’t hanging out of the robe. I must have looked like death.

“Hey,” I said. “So what’s wrong with Dell?” I had heard her calling to him, so I knew the boy’s name at least. If only he called her something other than “Mom.”

“Dew. Like Mountain Dew.”

“Sorry. What’s wrong with Dew?” I might as well know, since he was flying around my hallucinations.

“He’s named after my uncle Dolittle. Except I couldn’t quite give him the whole thing – just seemed too sad to stick a baby with such a depressing name.”

“Dew is cute,” I said. “Like springtime.”

“Well, he has leukemia,” she said, moving her hands around her shirt, as if she was wiping away dishwater.  I felt a panic. My instincts for trouble sure hit home on this one. I had an urge for flight. I was no good to a woman with this kind of problem, my visions of birds were bullshit. She shoved her hands in her pockets to quiet them.

“Do you want a beer?” she asked.

I most certainly did, hair of the dog, but not here, not now. Not near her swept front porch by the 20 birdbaths. Not where I would have some responsibility to respond to what she just said. “Sure,” I said.

I took a deep breath as the wood door banged crookedly behind her.

“I could tighten up those hinges for you,” I offered.

“My boy is just being eaten, some kind of mutiny in his bones. Nothing I can do or say can help, because it’s all on the inside, making him hollow,” she said, running her hand violently through her hair. I felt like an evil person for noticing the way her breast pushed upward with the motion of her hand. I turned away from her still-lovely stress, as Dew made a small sound on the couch. He did look hollow, an almost unnoticeable lump on a fine secondhand couch.

Water ran beneath the ground, birds covered my neighbor’s trees squawking weather talk, and in between a boy in yellow pajamas defied gravity. Sick boys were supposed to be tied down with medicines and tubes, forbidden to jump and play. Now the ground could not keep him close, much less cover him up. All of it tumbled in my head like laundry, and I figured I must still be drunk from the night before.  I needed to chug the light beer she handed me and to haul my ass back to bed.

Sunday, the official day of inertia, I wandered through my house picking up all the things I had knocked over or left out. Since my whole house reeked (a hot combo of stale beer, cigarettes, and old food) I threw open my windows and doors. My curvy neighbor stood sweeping her front porch.

“Hey, do you guys have a trampoline?” I asked. She put her hand on her hip and tilted her head like I was out of focus.

“No. That’s not really something we thought to get,” she said.

“Good, good. Those things, well, they aren’t any good anyhow. Kids fly off and some get paralyzed. Or worse.” Why did talking to this women compel me to bring up about death and other deadly conditions? “Nope, tramps are definitely not safe.”

“I won’t buy one then. Do you let your son jump on one?”

“Who, Danny? No I don’t think he would ever want to. He’s not the athletic type.”

“Does he ever come to visit?” she asked. And this was where women’s mouths set in those lines, when they find out that Danny doesn’t come over much. Even though he prefers to stay at his mom’s house. I don’t even have cable here, and the guest room is more of a closet. But women just shake their heads as if I chose everything just so.

“Sometimes. Well, I have to go to the cemetery. To check out my grave. I think someone is buried there. At least it seemed like it at the funeral.” No sense even trying to dig out of this one. I turned and hightailed it to my truck. In my rearview mirror, I saw her fade back into the house.

Apparently, families visit relatives on Sundays. The graveyard at high noon had quite a few visitors. Before checking my plot, I checked in on Little Roy. Someone had left him a full can of Budweiser amid all the flowers—maybe the guys did it Friday night. I leaned in to pick up the hot can and thought I would swoon from the sick-sweet smell of the sun-fading bouquets. Bud in hand, I stepped right onto the spot where I though his belly must be and pulled the tab. Luckily it didn’t explode, although Little Roy would have gotten even more of a laugh. I poured the beer carefully onto the earth, ignoring the stares of some uncomfortably dressed couple.

I got my bearings carefully before going on to D409. It was right next to this lady’s ex-husband who had D408. Or right next to where her ex-husband will be eventually. When they divorced, she had me come in and finish the basement. The guy had been promising to do it for years. She didn’t really have any cash, so she signed over her cemetery plot to me, since she couldn’t stand to be anywhere near her ex.

On D409, my grave, a twisted piece of driftwood now sat on top of the turned-up earth. No. Actually, the piece of driftwood was carved. What looked like a random shape from a distance, now clearly was a crude carving of either a swan or penguin. Probably a swan. Penguins don’t seem like they would have the same sentimental value. Beneath the curve of the neck/wing, a ground-bouquet of violets wilted. Someone had been here in the last two days, maybe in the last two hours.

How many Mafia hit-men would return to place violets on the grave? Or to carve driftwood? Maybe some old guy just didn’t really understand the rules on how to bury his wife, thinking he was still in the old country. Maybe some kids just buried a dog, a well-loved Rover.  I felt a pang, remembering how broke up my son Danny had been when our old dog Zeppelin died. I forgot to tell him for a while; the dog stayed with me since the ex couldn’t have pets in the condo they rented across town.  I had already buried Zep when I told Danny on the phone. I could tell by the change in his breathing he had started to cry.  The kid was probably old enough to take it better, but Zeppelin was the sweetest dog, even half-blind.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Danny said.

“I just did. Listen, I’m sorry. But he was old, a geezer in dog years.”

“Did you bury him already?”

“Yep. Out by the clothesline.”

At this Danny began to sob like a five-year old, full of mucus and air. “I didn’t even get to say goodbye,” he said.

“For God’s sake, Danny. He was dead. What’s there to say goodbye to?”

I couldn’t tell what was going on but the phone line rustled and crackled. Danny’s mother finally came on the phone and said, “Can’t you just be nice at all? Ever?” Now that I had just had few words with Little Roy down at the cemetery, I felt bad about Danny not getting to talk to Zeppelin.

After work on Monday, I drove down to the Elysian Fields Cemetery office. After eyeing me (and my overalls) suspiciously, the Elysian Fields manager had promised to check into my grave break-in; he would “double-check the files” and let me know what happened. The cemetery man didn’t look anything like what I imagined (corpse-y, creepy.) Instead he wore a button-down preppy shirt tucked into khaki pants. Some overgrown frat boy who managed gravesites rather than a bank.

I walked around while Mr. Preppie Grave did his detective thing.  I was seeing more of Little Roy now than I had in the last three months of his final, pain-free binge. In those last days, he hadn’t returned many calls. Cody and I thought he must have convinced another hot young thing with his crazy stories.  After a few words with Little Roy (and righting the Bud can more firmly in the dirt in front of his stone so it wouldn’t fall over every time it rained) I returned to my own real estate.

“Well sir, do you have any relatives who knew about this plot?” the cemetery manager asked in a bill-collector’s voice.

“What? No. Well, my son. Maybe my ex-wife?”

“Any chance that one of them would have used it without your permission?”

“Used my grave? It’s not like borrowing the car.”

“Sir, we have to ask. Not only do we have no records of anyone being interred in D409, your plot, but we have no records of any burials in that section since the Fourth.”

“But that’s two weeks ago. The ground there is freshly turned up.”

“Yes, you’re right. I checked it. Someone or something does seem to be buried. It could be some sort of a prank. Could you please check with your family members, and we’ll proceed with the investigation on our side.”

I wasn’t about to call the ex.

Tuesday, we worked late. This lawyer wanted his fancy beach house finished so that he could throw a late-summer party for political friends. We went to high school with the guy. Back then he never had fun, never had a girl. We would pull away from school piled into Little Roy’s orange Mustang laughing at people like him, with cave-fish skin and warped priorities. Driven folk never stayed around shore towns and we mostly never left. This guy’s closets were going to be bigger than bedrooms.

When I got home, I stood in the rocky weeds of my yard. Should I call my ex-wife about the grave? No. Although she resented the hell out of me, she would have called if someone died. Across the fence, my fresh-faced neighbor sat varnishing a slab of wood, probably for another birdfeeder, singing Patsy Cline. I listened for a minute, lulled by her unsteady-but-sweet voice.  Nearby, Dew reclined on a plastic lawn chair, with one pale arm flung above his head. Through half-closed eyes, he watched his mother’s measured strokes in the darkening evening.

“Howdy guys. Hi Dew,” I said, trying to make eye contact with him. “Aren’t you up past bedtime?” She looked up at the sound of my voice and Patsy’s song drifted off.

“I don’t really have a bedtime,” Dew said, lifting his thin arm off his eyes a bit. His head seemed too big for his fragile body, barely able to support its own weight, much less perform circus stunts. His eyebrows were falling out and he had that angel-child thing, the shine. I looked for a sign in his steady gaze and considered making some kind of a joke (“Hey kid, what’s flying?”) But that would be a sure way to convince a mama I was a few eggs short of a dozen.

I wanted to ask Dew questions. How does it feel, Dew? Floating around at night? But his arm changed my mind. Inside his elbow sat tracks and lines worse than those of my friends dead of their demons. He was scarred up like any addict from poking and prodding, needles and tests. I could be someone who didn’t ask dumb-ass questions about the kid’s bones. And someone who didn’t try to jump his mother’s bones.

“Well, goodnight,” I said. Both Dew and his mom mumbled.

After microwaving dinner, I pulled down the ladder to the attic, more of a crawlspace really, to find a few photos of Little Roy for some scrapbook Cody was making. I crawled over to the triangular window by the vent. I pushed and tugged but the thing seemed to be painted shut.  I leaned against the glass (cool at least) and looked over the house next door. Her bedroom had a soft light, probably from a reading lamp next to her bed. I couldn’t see anything except the corner of her dresser. A movement in the unlit backyard distracted me from feeling like dirty peeping Tom. I shaded my eyes from her bedroom glow, so they could adjust to the dim yard.

One still moment, and then yellow pajamas with white plastic feet kicked above the treeline.

At work on Wednesday, my head still felt like the attic, hot and too-full. A squirrel jumped over my feet on his way across the beams; I nearly tumbled off the roof.

“Man, I’m not going to your funeral next. Be careful,” one of the boys below me said.

“I’m fine, like a cat.”

“Yeah, you smell like it anyway.” The boys cranked up the Eminem. My coworkers on the construction crew got younger and younger each year, many not old enough (or bright enough) to graduate from high school. Every other day I let them choose the music. Although they complained about Merle and Hank, I caught several of them singing along. Today, unfortunately, was their turn; the screech and discord barely distinguished itself from the sound of scrapes and hammers.

When I finally got home, I thought I conjured my neighbor’s voice with just wishing. “Hey, could you come into my bathroom?” she called before I could get in my door.

“What is it you need?” I said, restraining myself from making the jokes that bubbled to my mouth, ever-present from years of bar-talk.

“I just… that came out wrong. My toilet won’t stop running. I tried to pull up on that black plunger thing, but it just keeps going. It’s been going for an hour or so and I really don’t want to have to pay a plumber.”

“Those fellows are crooked as pipes,” I said. “Let me look at it.”

“Thank you,” she said. Her face had white spots on it, as if ice cubes had been held to different parts, but most likely she had just been crying a lot.

“Any news on the grave?” she said.

“Nope. No one knows anything. Not the cemetery manager, the coffin sellers, or the embalmer. There’s only one embalmer in this po-dunk town, so he would know who’s been done up or not.”

She winced. I did it again, mentioning the town embalmer to someone might have to call him. Oh well. She brought it up.  I rolled up my sleeve and tightened the water valve in her tank. Even with my hand up to the elbow in the pot, her bathroom smelled like Juicy Fruit gum.

I do miss how they smell.

By way of thanks, she insisted I stay for dinner. Just jar sauce and spaghetti with canned beans. But she cooked up the garlic bread spicy hot. Dew drove a Tonka earth-mover across the tablecloth.

“Sweetheart, eat your spaghetti,” she said.

Lulled by tomatoes and candlelight, I almost answered.

“My belly still hurts,” Dew answered. He smiled at her to deflect the concern that welled up in her eyes.

“Dew is being super-brave about chemotherapy,” she said to no one in particular.

“Did you find out who they buried in your coffin?” Dew asked me. He must have been listening to us when we talked about D409.

“Not yet. The police are looking into it.”

“Because they stole your plot?” she asked.

“No. I didn’t even want to call them. But apparently burying a random body is a big-time crime. In case it’s not just some hamster they have to proceed as if it’s a big-time murder. So they need to do DNA and the works.”

“What’s DNA?” Dew asked.

“Stuff in your body that makes you different from anyone else,” I said.

“Like leukemia?” asked Dew. His mother jumped up to refill his milk.

“Today I saw a blue jay, Dew, while you were napping,” she said loudly. “It was so beautiful, the color of your Superman jammies.”

After dinner I fetched my toolbox, to fix her backdoor. It didn’t latch anymore. Doors and windows around here change shape in the heat and need to be pounded back into shape.

“Thank you for doing all of this,” she said.

“Hey, no problem. You make better spaghetti than me.”

“I used to be able to call the landlord for this kind of stuff. Owning a place is great and all. Dew needs the stability of it, but it’s just that so much can go wrong.”

“Murphy’s Law.”

“Do you own your place?”

“Nope. I rent.”

She seemed to lean into the shoulder of my slightly damp t-shirt and breathe it in. With a last unnecessary tap, I put the Phillips head back in the box. The sky outside had faded, with the last light showing like a glow beneath a closed door. From somewhere behind her kitchen wall, pipes groaned.

“You can stay for a while, you know?” she said, allowing one of her fluttery hands to sit still on my forearm. “We could have a beer?”

Here it was. My invitation. I recognized the shininess in her eyes. I grabbed her hand for a minute.

I let her soft hand go and grabbed hard plastic of the toolbox handle.

The thing about real estate is you have to know when to get out.

NEXT: “At the Dune Shack,” by Joan Kane Nichols >>

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3rd Annual Contest Finalist

Joan Kane Nichols

Rose let the screen door close behind her. She pulled a dust rag from her waistband to wipe a cobweb from the gray hair fuzzing her scalp before collapsing into a canvas chair. Kicking off well-worn sandals, she lifted her face to the breeze blowing up from the ocean, cooling off the warmth of the late June day and ruffling the beach grass, bayberry bushes, and clusters of Rosa rugosa surrounding the dune shack’s splintery deck.

Behind the shack, one of 20 or so cubes of weathered board scattered along a bluff on the Outer Cape, stretched a rolling sea of sand; before it, the ocean intensified its steady boom boom as the day neared its close. In the sun’s withdrawing light a log of driftwood lying beside the chair cast a long shadow along the deck.

The faint pulsing under her scalp eased. The threat of pain subsided. She hoisted the log of wood, spiky with branches, to her lap. Not much driftwood along this beach. The waves smashed whatever came their way to smithereens. She’d had to look for days before finding this thick length of sun-bleached, wind-scoured scrub oak, now washed free of sand and left in the sun to dry. She cupped the driftwood in her palm, caressing its rough crevasses and curves.

Rose’s hands longed for the chisel, the thrust of its blade slowly transforming vision into the solidity of wood. What was it Michelangelo once said? I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free. She could feel the unborn creature imprisoned inside the wood, its shape flowing into the muscles of her wrists and hands. She breathed deeply, allowing the weight of the log to sink into her lap. Her eyes closed. The sun warmed her scalp. Her fingers probed, blindly searching answers to questions of balance, rhythm, line, and shape.

A shuffling in the sand made her look up. Footsteps? So far, no one had intruded on her solitude. Over a mile of thick sand and steep dunes—here and there muddy bogs, thickets of thorny trees—covered the path that led up from the road. A young female figure, slumped over with effort, emerged from behind the nearest dune.

Rose thrust the wood from her lap and stood, waiting, arms crossed, at the top of the steps. Lank hair plastered the girl’s neck. A safety pin joined her skirt’s ripped seam. Style or expediency, Rose didn’t know. Mud coated flip-flopped feet. Gold rings—ears, eyebrow, lips, belly button—glinted in the sun. A large embroidered bag flopped disconsolately at one side.

The girl lifted her head, caught sight of Rose, and waved. “Hi, Grams.”

“Jody, what are you doing here?” Rose scanned the horizon. “Is your mother with you?”

“Me and Mom had a fight.” Jody climbed the steps, dropping clumps of sand and mud in her wake, and hugged her grandmother’s rigid body. “I’ve come to live with you.”

Oh have you? Rose thought.

Jody fell into the vacated chair, draped her arms over the sides. “It was hard finding you.”

Not surprising. Rose had deliberately been vague as to her whereabouts. She ran her hand across her stubbly skull. The bristles pricked her palm. She said only, “How did you?”

“I took the bus to Provincetown. The driver said the dune shacks were up the path from Snail Road. It was a long walk. I’m beat.” The child did look exhausted. Rose checked her impulse to smooth the damp hair back from the peaked face.

Something loud and hip-hoppy shrilled from Jody’s bag. She pulled out a cell phone, scanned its face. “Mom keeps calling.”

“She knows where you are?”

Jody hugged her knees. “I left her a note.”

The shrilling continued. “Shouldn’t you tell her you’re safe?”

Jody handed the phone to her grandmother. “We’re not speaking.”

Rose sighed, put it to her ear. “Hello?”

“Mom?” Her daughter’s voice, pitched high with anxiety.

“She’s here, Karen. She just arrived.”

“Thank God. Let me talk to her.”

Rose raised her eyebrows at Jody, who had kicked off her flip-flops and was swiping sand from her feet onto the freshly swept deck, and proffered the phone. Jody shook her head vigorously. “Karen, she says she’d rather not right now.”

“I suppose she’s still angry about the tattoos. Oh well, she’ll get over that.”

When? was the question. “I’m sure you’re anxious to get her back,” Rose said. She wished this conversation wasn’t taking place in front of Jody, who, back and neck stiff with alertness, was examining her mosquito bites and pretending nonchalance.

“Not as much as you might think. Now that I know she’s safe. You can’t imagine what it’s like, these constant tussles.”

“I can imagine,” Rose said.

“I think she hates me.”

“Oh I’m sure not.”

Karen said, “It might be a good idea for us to have a little vacation from each other. You know?” Rose closed her eyes. “Besides, I just met this guy, someone really nice this time. He could be the one. But Jody will screw it up. You know she will.”

Not my business, Rose wanted to say. She glanced past Jody to the driftwood, half-hidden in a shadowy corner of the deck. “What did you have in mind?”

Jody sat up, alert as a ferret.

“It will be nice for you,” Karen said, “having your granddaughter with you.”

Good old Karen, always thinking of others. It was true Rose hadn’t yet told her the cancer they’d thought was cured had returned and was now invading her brain. If she had, Karen, who wouldn’t care as much as she’d think she should, would try to bully her into continuous rounds of humiliating, ultimately useless, treatment to ease her guilt. “That’s impossible.”

“Why is doing something for me always impossible? Why do you always just think of yourself?” The self-pitying voice was loud enough that Jody couldn’t help hearing.

“I’m not sure she’d be happy here. I live very simply, you know. Primitive.”

“Oh she’ll love it.” Karen’s voice all sweetness now. “It will be like summer camp.”

Fourteen’s a bit old for summer camp, Rose was about to say, but Jody looked up at her through wet eyelashes and, “Two weeks,” she said instead.

“Right. Then we can see how it goes from there. Let me talk to her.”

Rose handed Jody the phone. “Hello, Mom?”

Rose stepped away to give her privacy, lit the one cigarette a day she allowed herself, felt its soothing fire coil through her lungs.

The cell phone clicked shut. Jody hugged her from behind. “Thanks, Grams.”

Rose deposited the pinched end of her cigarette into her shirt pocket, and opened the screen door. “Let’s go inside.”

She watched Jody take in what there was to see in the dim room, which wasn’t much. Bare boards, a long table facing the front windows, a small kitchen area, hooks for clothes, and a set of bunk beds hanging from the wall like shelves. The place belonged to Rose’s friends Jerry and TJ, who’d lent it, as they’d delicately put it, for as long as needed.

“I don’t see the TV,” Jody said.

Rose, who had dropped to her hands and knees to continue scrubbing mildew from the kitchen cupboards, rocked back on her heels. “That’s because there isn’t one.”

“No TV?” Jody gripped the edge of the table so hard her bracelets jangled.

“No electricity,” Rose said, and went back to her scrubbing.

“No electricity? But what about at night? No lights?”

Rose brushed the back of her hand against her forehead and pointed out three kerosene lamps. “They provide enough light to see your way around.”

Jody’s lips tightened. Her wary glance darted from wall to wall, a small animal not yet sure whether its new cage is refuge or trap. “Where’s the bathroom?”

Rose pointed to the window. “There’s a privy down at the end of that path. Very clean.”

“No bathroom?” Jody’s voice jumped in pitch. She looked about to throw up.

Rose forestalled the rest of the interrogation. “There’s a stove and small refrigerator that run on propane gas and a dry sink. Water has to be hauled from the outside pump. There’s no heat, no phone, and,” seeing Jody reach into her bag, “no way, of course, to charge a battery. We can wave that big signal flag over there in the corner in case of emergency.”

Jody let the phone fall back into the bag. Tears welled in her eyes.

“All the comforts of home.” Rose dipped her rag into the bucket, wrung it dry. “Takes work though. I’ll need your help. I hope you brought practical clothes.”

Jody swallowed. “Just what I’ve got on. I thought there’d be shops.”

“I’ve got something here that might fit.” Rose hauled herself to her feet, pulled a pair of faded denim overalls from a shelf, and tossed them over the back of a chair. “These should do. Please hurry. I need your help with the pump now that I have you here using extra water.”

Jody twitched her bracelets back and forth over her wrist bone. “Is it cause you’re poor you live like this?”

Rose laughed. “What? No.”

Jody blinked rapidly, smearing her mascara. “Mom said it was a seaside cottage.”

“So you thought what?—white walls, iced tea on the patio, maybe a swimming pool?”

“Yes!” and Jody dissolved into a small sobbing heap on the bottom bunk.

Rose went outside to dump the wash water on the Rosa rugosa, scour the bucket clean. The shadows had lengthened. Sandpipers skittered along the shore, pecking at patches of sand that flooded with each wave of incoming tide. Seagulls hawked louder this time of day, groups of ten or 12 spooked by the rare passing beachcomber into feathery mid-air explosions. What had she been at Jody’s age? Rose tried to remember. Not a skinny doll trying to be cool.

The screen door creaked. Jody emerged, tripping over overalls that ballooned around her frame. Damp eyes. Wispy voice. “I’m ready to help pump.” Rose bit her inner lip to keep from smiling. A drama queen, just like her mother. Like herself, at times, if it came to that.

Rose pointed to a huddle of empty, gallon-size plastic milk bottles. “Grab a few and let’s get going,” adding, in a voice that must have been gentler than she intended for Jody gave her a shy smile, “You might want to roll up those pants legs first.”

Going down the steps, Rose lost sensation in her legs and grabbed the railing until it returned. She’d done too much today. But she had so little time. Best to get it done while she had the energy. Jody’s brief visit might be a blessing in disguise. She’d put that young strength to use while it was available. Which wouldn’t be for long. Not after a few days of Granny’s boot camp.

Rose sloshed water into the pump to prime it, pointed to the handle. “You pump.”

Jody quickly got the hang of it, was soon pumping rhythmically for all she was worth. Rose saw she’d been right. Under her apparent frailness, Jody’s muscles were sinewy and strong.

Rose capped each bottle as it filled, quickly replaced it with another. When they were done, she showed Jody how to replace the white plastic pail on the pump to keep it free of poop from any resting seagull. They struggled up the path with the filled containers, one in each hand.

“Like Jack and Jill,” Jody said, “and those other nursery rhymes you read me? I never realized they were about what people really did.”

“Mmm,” Rose said. “We’ll be doing this three times a day, now you’re here. Leave your bottles on the deck. We’ll use those for washing.”

Rose refilled the plastic container on the sink with water for washing dishes. Jody drifted in and stood by the front windows examining a shelf’s display—jewelry, shells, a little seal Rose had carved to get a feel for its shape. Seals, oddly enough, were the first thing she’d been able to focus on after she heard the news. She could probably handle one more round of radiation and chemotherapy, the oncologist had told her. It would stop the cancer for a while. He’d hemmed and hawed about putting the “while” into months and/or years.

Finally he’d said a year maybe two with treatment, less than six months without. She’d said she’d think about it, as though deciding on a new car. She didn’t remember the walk from Mass General to the waterfront, only standing before the seal tank outside the aquarium.

Feeding time. Attendants threw fish. Seals clapped and barked. Her skin felt chafed even through her coat. She’d edged back to the harbor wall to keep the crowd of laughing, pointing children from rubbing against her and gazed at the seam joining water and sky. Three years since the sonogram, when she’d seen a black lump prowling like a U-boat through her breast. The only other sonogram she’d ever seen had been of Jody, a wriggly eel in Karen’s belly, safely delivered, squirming and intact, a few months later. Rose’s oncology surgeon had assured her an equally successful outcome. “We got it all,” he said. Only he hadn’t. For three years she’d let herself hope, had dithered instead of working toward her goal. And now it might be too late.

“I like that.”

Rose looked where Jody was pointing, smiled. “The seal?”

“No, behind it. The bracelet.” A cheap little affair of multicolored glass beads.

“Ah yes,” Rose said. “That’s nice, too.”

Jody slumped into a chair, head flung back. “I’m beat.”

She did look pale. Feverish spots of red on her cheeks. Rose felt a twinge of guilt. She didn’t want to kill the child. “Lie down while I make dinner. You can have the top bunk.”

Jody tossed her floppy bag over the railing, climbed the steps. Rose was about to offer a book, but Jody pulled Entertainment Weekly from her bag, was soon immersed in interchangeable stories of interchangeable blondes.

Dishes cleared away, floor swept, and Jody, her face smeared with the mascara and lipstick she never seemed to take off, asleep in the top bunk. Moths flapped against the small windowscreens that kept out bugs, let in the sweet night air. Light from a kerosene lamp pooled on the driftwood spread-eagled across the table where Rose sat, chisel in hand, probing the wood for rot. Wood had become her medium soon after she married, when she’d set up a studio in the attic. Terence didn’t mind. His studio—originally the barn—housed his welding equipment, his monumental structures that only a man, or so it was believed, had the power, the vision (and the funding) to create. No matter. To her, stone and metals seemed dead. Paper, paint, even canvas, too flimsy. She liked wood’s solidity, the vitality of its grain’s twists and turns, its warmth.

No rot. The wood was sound. She ran her hand along it. Still rough in patches, like the rough-coated seal she’d seen earlier this spring. She picked up a square of sandpaper, enjoyed its familiar grittiness as she stroked. She’d been with Jerry and TJ in the dune buggy, still too weak to walk far in sand. They’d come up from Boston to view the shack. She’d decided to spend her last summer working on the Cape but hadn’t yet chosen her subject. Along a deserted stretch of the beach, they’d come upon a female harbor seal, stretched out halfway up the shore, its gray-splotched body slumped sideways into the sand, underbelly exposed, front flippers stuck straight out like a toddler’s arms in a snowsuit. Seeing them, the seal raised its head, let it fall back.

They clambered out of the buggy. Jerry called the park rangers on his cell phone. Rose stared at the seal as Jerry described its appearance. Its filmed eyes, opening and closing, stared back. Probably dying, the ranger said. Seals often climbed on shore to wait for the end. Rose stepped closer. The seal, flippers trembling, heaved up an inch, sank down. Rose thought of the plump, oily seals outside the Boston aquarium, plunging, flipping, shooting the length of the tank belly-up. Or erect on their fins, brown eyes bright and humorous above the waterline.

Best to let it be, the ranger said. Ignoring TJ’s lifted eyebrow, Rose made rapid sketches, trying to capture the way the line of the seal’s forward-reaching head opposed the mass of its body sinking into sand. Then they’d climbed into the buggy, driven away.

Rose stroked the driftwood. Its shape was ideal—long and thick, slender at one end. A branch stuck out at the same angle that flippers attach to the trunk. She’d begin there and work outward, stay sensitive to the wood. She’d have to unlearn much of what she knew. Simplify. Use only a few tools. “Hold onto one impression as you work,” Grete, her old instructor, had said. “Feel the emotion you want to convey.” The trick would be to capture the tensions in the seal’s body that expressed its pain and fear, its knowledge of impending doom. And something else. What—resignation? Not exactly. Acceptance? Words failed, as they usually did. Only wood didn’t lie.

She picked up her chalk and drew a rough outline. Her head felt heavy. She pressed a finger to her scalp to still the painful throbbing. It was the malignancy in her brain, which, in her darkest moments, she envisioned as a host of greedy cells entangling her neurons and synapses, sucking out their juice. She leaned her elbows on the table, held her heavy head in her hand, pressed her fingers to her scalp—here, here, and here.

Fear cramped her shoulders. She forced herself to breathe slowly. A late bloomer, she’d told herself. Some artists produced into their 90s. She still had ten, maybe 20 good years, she’d thought, enough time to move from craftwork to art.

Now she was lucky if she had ten weeks. Perhaps all her life she’d lied to herself. Perhaps it wasn’t Terence’s arrogant assumptions, or her difficult, demanding child, or her father’s descent in Parkinson’s disease, but her own cowardice that had caused her to push her real work aside. She’d reached the bargaining stage. Give her one summer and she would do it. She’d release the angel from the marble, the seal from the wood.

Jody stirred behind her, muttering in her sleep. The chalk slipped from Rose’s fingers. The world outside the pool of light rushed back in. She’d almost forgotten. With Jody around she’d never be able to work, not on something this difficult and important, requiring so much concentration, so much time to dream, to let the truth within the depths of her unconscious mind work its way into her shaping hands. Even two weeks with Jody here was too long.

Rose placed the driftwood on the floor beneath the table. And it wasn’t as though the child wanted to be here. She’d be happier at home with her friends, her cell phone, her TV. Granny’s boot camp would have to step up the pace. She stood up, extinguished the wick, stretched. One of Jody’s feet, still grimy from the cranberry bog she’d stepped into, hung over the edge of her bunk. Rose tucked it in.

“Time to get up!” Rose yanked the covers from around Jody’s head. Jody groaned, turned over to the far side of the bunk where Rose couldn’t reach her, pulled the covers back up again, exposing her silver-painted toes. Rose tweaked them. “Come on, twinkletoes. Rise and shine.”

“Ow, you’re hurting me.” Jody jerked her toes away, sat straight up so fast she banged her forehead against the ceiling. She yawned prodigiously as she rubbed her head.

Rose stood before her, arms crossed over her chest. “Lots of laundry to do today, including those sheets.” She yanked the bottom sheet so hard Jody almost tumbled over.

“Okay. Okay.” She slid down from the bunk, thrust her feet into her flip-flops. “Am I allowed to go to the john first, sergeant?” She flounced out, letting the door slam behind her.

Rose shook her head, grinned. Just like her mother. Well, better a squawky sparrow than a dying swan. She heated water, poured it into a bucket with the dirty laundry. Jody returned. Rose handed her the bucket and a sawed-off broomstick. “Take them to the porch and slosh.”

“I haven’t even brushed my teeth yet.”

“You can do that out on the porch, too.” She raised her own eyebrows in response to Jody’s. “It’s traditional. I’ll bring you a cup of water.”

The sun was halfway up, a fertile egg yolk of a sun, streaked with red. Breezes brisked in off the ocean. Rose handed Jody the cup, toothpaste, and brush. “Spit off the side of the porch.”

“Gross.”

Rose set about making breakfast, noticed a dirty dishtowel, brought it outside. Jody, back to the door, knelt by the side of the porch, brushing her teeth, her spine’s vertebrae stuck up in a curved line under her pink top. She arched her neck, took a sip of water from the cup, spat.

“Aargh.” She jumped up. Foamy flecks covered cheeks and chin, the front of her top.

Rose bit her lip to keep from laughing. “Next time, don’t spit into the wind.”

“You might have told me.”

Rose dropped the towel into the bucket. “Start sloshing. Breakfast will be ready soon.”

Jody ate her eggs and bacon in a cloud of adolescent funk. Rose worked on her sudoko and ignored her. Afterwards, still silent, they cleared the table and stacked the dishes in the sink.

Rose grabbed another bucket, poured in some water, showed Jody how to souse each article in the clear water, then wring it dry. She stood over Jody as the girl’s slender wrists twisted around a pair of soggy shorts. “Harder. Put your muscles into it.” Jody clenched her lips —from effort or anger Rose couldn’t say. She took the wrung-out shorts, pinned them to the line.

They established a rhythm, Jody wringing, Rose hanging. Cottonball clouds drifted across a sky intensely blue. A sharp breeze, angling from the distant dunes across the shrubs of bayberry and pine, tugged at sheets, shirts, socks, and underpants, billowing, flapping, twirling them in a giddy dance. Rose inhaled. “I love the smell of clean laundry hung out to dry.”

Something whizzed by overhead. Rose pointed. “The marsh hawk.”

Jody looked up, her sullen face suddenly alive with surprise. “A real hawk?”

“He lives here all summer, so they say. I haven’t seen his mate.”

“How do you know it’s a he?”

“As a matter of fact, I don’t. A female hawk, then, spending her summer on the Cape.”

“She must be lonely,” Jody said.

Not necessarily, Rose was about to say but thought better of it. She picked up the empty basket, led the way back to the shack. They washed and dried the tin laundry bucket.

“Have you ever picked blueberries?” Rose said. Jody shook her head.

“There should be some ripe ones left. Let’s see.”

Rose clapped her raggedy straw hat on her head, dug her walking stick into the sand, and set off over the dunes. How much longer would she be able to do this? She thrust the thought away. For as long as she could. A few minutes walk and they came to a fork in the path, marked by a log of driftwood some misguided person had festooned with ribbons, shells, and beads. Perhaps, Rose thought, they considered it art. “This way.” She pointed to a stand of scrub pines and a side path hemmed in by blueberry bushes. “Let’s see if the birds have left any.”

They had. Plump, dark-blue berries pushed through the leaves, congregated on branches. Rose plucked a clump, dropped them into the tin pail. “Kuplink, kuplank, kuplunk!” Jody said. “Like the book. Hope there’s no bears around.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Blueberries for Sal. Don’t you remember?” Jody looked shocked. “When I was little you bought it for me and read it to me. It was my favorite book.”

A weekend when she’d visited. “It was winter. We went out in the snow.”

Jody shook her head. “I just remember you reading me the book.”

One of those moments that stick in the mind. Jody had been three, a serious little girl, brown eyes, a tangle of honey-blonde hair. They were headed for the bookstore. Karen had dressed Jody in her snowsuit, but Jody refused to put her mittens on, crying and wriggling away, so Karen handed them to Rose. “Here, Mom, you try.”

She’d waited for Jody to stop crying, held out the mittens for her to see. “Will you let Grandma put these on?” Jody gazed up, eyes damp with tears, considering. How big I must seem flashed across Rose’s mind. Solemnly, Jody’s eyes widened. She nodded and held out her hands.

Absolute trust. That’s what Rose had never forgotten.

By the time blueberries brimmed the pail, Rose was exhausted. She dropped onto a nearby log, mopped her face. Jody, whose energy seemed undimmed, plopped beside her.

“Can I show you something?” Jody reached into her bag, drew out a small chamois pouch and spilled earrings, bracelets, strings of glass beads onto her lap. The pair of earrings she held up twinkled pink, blue, pale green in the sun. “I made them.”

Cheap, amateurish, a dime a dozen at any street fair. “Very nice,” Rose said.

“That’s what I want to be—a jewelry maker, but Mom says I have to go to college first.”

“Silly old Mom. Wants you to go to college, won’t let you get tattooed.”

One by one, Jody silently returned the jewelry to its bag. “I don’t want tattoos.”

“I thought that’s what the big fight was about?”

“It’s Mom wants to get tattooed. For that guy she’s going out with.”

“Oh.” The breeze had dropped. The overhead sun was intense. Rose fanned her face with her hat. Some days the foolishness of the young was more than she could bear. She squeezed Jody’s shoulder, heaved herself up. “Let’s get some lunch.”

After they ate, Rose put Jody to work cleaning blueberries and lay down on her bunk for a nap. This need to sleep frightened her. Did it mean the cancer was already taking her over? Or was it just the strain of putting up with Jody, who showed no signs of wanting to go home. Hard to blame her, with Karen acting like an idiot. Tattoos!

When she woke, darkness was already creeping through the windows. She stared up at the underside of the top bunk, her mind gradually sloughing off bad dreams. She thought about her seal. That tension she wanted wasn’t there yet. Maybe the angle was wrong. If she turned the wood on its side, let that branch be the flipper the seal supported itself on, as though trying to raise itself up as its body sank into the sand? She glanced under the table at the piece of driftwood to check. It was gone. Had she forgotten, left it outside? She shoved herself up, slipped her feet into her sandals, stumbled across the floor, banged open the door.

The driftwood lay on the deck at her feet, its branches draped with earrings, bracelets, and gaudy strings of beads, twirling and tinkling in the breeze. The seashells scattered along its length alternated with bouquets of wilting Rosa rugosa—ripped from the earth, tawdry bits of ribbon wrapped around the squashed stems. Smiley faces replaced her chalk outlines.

Rose crumpled into the canvas chair, her chest aching as though a truck had plowed into it. Terence once, climbing on a table she’d just refinished to reach a shelf. Karen’s childish scribbles obliterating the sketches she’d made for a piece of work. Her father had never taken her work seriously, not when he was old and sick, not when he was young. Nor her mother.

The deck’s wooden steps creaked. Rose opened her eyes. Jody, empty jewelry bag in hand, smiled tentatively. “Do you like it?”

Rose stared at her, clenched her teeth, felt her nostrils flare. “That’s my piece of wood.”

Jody’s smile crumbled.

“You, your mother, all of you—all you care about is your own damn bloody selves.”

Jody’s eyes widened, filled. “It’s a present.”

Rose clamped her lips, looked away. She couldn’t let the anger go.

“I didn’t know your old piece of wood was so freaking important.” Jody fell to her knees, ripping and tossing the flowers and shells, sobbing. A string of beads hurtled across the deck, struck the railing. The string broke. Dazzling particles of pink, blue, green skittered across the deck, jumping and popping in a frenetic dance. Words choked out through the sobs. “You’re the one doesn’t care about anybody but yourself.”

“Jody.”

A screech of rage. “Don’t talk to me!”

“Jody, honey. I’m sorry.”

Jody reared up, a mess of tears, snot, hiccups, disheveled hair. “You don’t care!”

Rose closed her eyes. She was dark and heavy and wet. She had almost struggled free of the sea, but the sea was pulling her back. If she gave in, she’d drown. But the waves were too strong. Defeated, she held out her arms. “Oh, baby, of course I do.”

Jody howled, lunged, buried her face in her grandmother’s lap.

Rose smoothed the limp strands of hair from the child’s damp cheeks, breathing deep to ease the ache in her head. The dunes, shrouded in shadow but still warm from the sun, enfolded her. Beneath the ocean’s steady boom boom, she thought she could hear the harbor seals barking, faint and far away. In the shadows made by the sun’s withdrawing light the desecrated driftwood took this shape, then that, now a dying seal, now a child in a snowsuit, arms stuck straight out.

NEXT: “Color Has History,” by Courtney Amber Kilian >>

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