I. One autumn evening several years ago I was driving—I should admit it, I was flying—north on New York state’s Taconic Parkway when I spotted a white tailed deer at the side of the road. It isn’t unusual to see them along the Taconic, especially in the fall, when the rut makes them a little […]
Nature
As I write this, the forecast calls for snow in the next day or so. It won’t be enough at my house, and certainly will be insufficient for the mountains. No matter how much snow falls at this point, it will be nowhere near enough to make up for our absolutely abysmal winter here in […]
I was walking my dog yesterday when I heard them. Sandhill cranes, their distinctive trill high overhead. It’s a few weeks early for them to be migrating through already, but it’s been a scary dry, warm winter and everything is off. So I stopped to listen and look up. It took a minute to find […]
I’ve been in southern Baja reading Ann Finkbeiner’s accounts of the dismal cold of midwinter and I’ve felt bad. I know what it’s like to shiver in the gray, but Baja happened for me, Sonoran Desert splendor (my home desert), along the whale-happy Sea of Cortez, (the first giant body of salt water I ever […]
In late August 2018 I traveled to the northernmost island in Canada to observe white wolves. These were an extremely unusual group of animals, and they had the distinction of being unafraid of humans. This alone was something, but beyond their fearlessness lay a subtler behavior that is perhaps best described as tolerance. Another way […]
Bad things happen quickly; good things take time. This isn’t a perfect pattern, of course, but I think it’s real and worth thinking about. A wildfire, explosion, earthquake, pandemic, gunshot, car crash, heart attack—all fast. Cancer typically starts out slow but then gets fast. Climate change seems slow, but the reason it’s so dangerous is […]
This post first ran in the spring of 2015 and I’ve often wondered if this patch of earth in Iowa is still guarded. A summer not long ago I went for a grueling 3-day backpack through GMO cornfields in Iowa, camping among walls of waxy green leaves that sawed against each other in the breeze. […]
My very healthy father died unexpectedly at Thanksgiving in 2023. In what turned out to be the last 3 1/2 years of his life, he and I went on a lot of hikes. My parents lived close to the Northwest Branch of the Anacostia River, and, in the times of pandemic lockdown, it was a […]
