The Fall of the Giant

The sky was a deep sapphire blue the day they cut down the giant. It was a matter of time, we knew, because they had already cleared out the scrub oaks and the wild cherry trees and the scraggly mountain mahogany. But it was still a shock to see it fall.  The giant must have […]

What the Bears Say

I have some new neighbors who many people would consider a nuisance. They show up at random times. They occasionally kick the rocks that line my driveway, and once they knocked off my downspout. They also eat garbage and leave a real mess.  These neighbors are mostly loners. They watch me, unblinking, and do not […]

Grickle Grass

Finding a decent bedtime story to read to your kid is harder than you might think. Most childrens books are either pointless (Superman likes red! Superman likes blue!), overproduced (A book with buttons and recorded dinosaur sounds! Wait, who made these recordings?), boring (Pokey the Bear showed Susie she had the strength the whole time!), […]

Trillium, a spring flower that lives as long as we do.

It is spring in the mountains, for I have seen my first trillium. These extremely elegant woodland flowers are called trilliums because they have just three lovely petals. They are also known as “wake robin” because they traditionally bloom in little patches of sunlight in the forest around the same time the spring robins appear. […]

Speaking of the Trees

The fires, the fires. When I started writing this some weeks back there were 137 of them torching forests across the American West. There are many fewer now—thank firefighters and weather—but so far they’ve consumed some 8.5 million acres of trees, some of them old growth, many of them on parkland filled with wildlife. British […]

Too hot for moose

Over the last few weeks, stories of moose die-offs have made the news. The New York Times reported that one moose population in Minnesota has all but vanished and another has fallen by more than half. Similar declines have happened in New Hampshire and British Columbia. While scientists aren’t sure of the cause, they suspect […]

How to conjure a forest out of thin air

This summer, I became slightly obsessed with the Ring. Not the J.R.R. Tolkien trilogy, not the Japanese horror movie (which I have vowed never to see), but the epic four-opera series by Richard Wagner. Der Ring des Nibelungen spans about 17 hours and features a cast of gods, dwarves, giants, mermaids, and a dragon, all […]