Orion September / October 2015

I BOUGHT my first tackle box at Paul’s Tackle Shop on Talbot Street in Ocean City, Maryland, in 1972. It’s blue and made by a company called Old Pal. Some internet research suggests that Old Pal went out of business in the 1980s, but Paul’s Tackle Shop is still going strong and looks pretty much the same as it did when I was a kid — except that it’s now called Skip’s Bait and Tackle. I’ve long since graduated to a new tackle box, but last year when it became apparent that my son needed one of his own, the Old Pal came out of storage and he and I outfitted it. The hinges are bent and sticky but mostly it works as well as it did in 1972. It…

Ellen Bass’s latest book is Like a Beggar. Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and The New York Times Magazine. Stasia Burrington is an artist specializing in ink and fabric collage. She grew up in the Pacific Northwest and lives in SeaTac, Washington. Craig Childs, an Arizona native born in the Phoenix satellite of Tempe, is the author of more than a dozen books. D. Bryon Darby is an assistant professor of photo media at the University of Kansas. His photographs in this issue were originally commissioned by the City of Phoenix through the Phoenix officalof Arts and Culture’s Public Art Program. Todd Davis teaches environmental studies at Penn State University’s Altoona College. His fifth book of poems, Winterkill, will be published next year. Errol…

The Preamble to the May/June 2015 issue reminds me of the years, from ages eleven to fifteen, that I lived on Virginia’s Quantico Marine Base. On summer days I couldn’t wait to bolt out the door, grab my fishing rod and my snake stick, hop on my bike, and meet my friends. Our intrepid band of explorers would hike under power lines in search of snakes, splash through streams looking for frogs, salamanders, and crayfish, and cast our fishing lines into ponds and creeks. I’d be gone from dawn to dusk, returning home with stories of snakes and lizards and box turtles, and with experiences that shaped my love of the natural world. I returned to Quantico last summer and found snakes and other creatures in the same places my…

1. Ecosystem. The internet is often described as an ecosystem (or a sky, or a park, or a jungle), and many of its parts are named after the natural world. “Cyberspace,” says the technology historian Fred Turner, “is a frantic mingling of biological, digital, and frontier metaphors.” 2. Tree. Inside every computer, smartphone, and server is a floating forest of branching directories, all sprouting from a deeply buried “root” folder. Open one and you’ll find it connected to many others, like a leaf atop a twig that’s attached, eventually, to a trunk. 3. Spider. One of the first search engines was named after Lycosa kochii, or the wolf spider. Called Lycos, the system was designed to imitate the spider’s habit of catching its prey by relentless pursuit. 4. Virus. Computer…

ONE OF THE THINGS that kept surprising me about Jhonny Rivas was his sense of gratitude. Jhonny, a Haitian living in the Dominican Republic, a country not known for its kindness toward its neighbor, was arrested almost two years ago on charges of having murdered a witch. But you can’t hide the sun with a finger, as the Dominican saying goes: everyone knew that Jhonny was framed for organizing his fellow Haitian workers to demand their rights from the big landowners. Imprisonment was a way of taking him out of circulation and teaching him a lesson. When I visited him at la fortaleza, the dungeon-type fort that also serves as a jail, Jhonny had already been held without a hearing for eight months. The guard at the entrance opened the…

QUINTRON, an experimental musician from New Orleans, has invented an instrument called the Weather Warlock. It’s an analog synthesizer that plays, and is played by, the rain, the wind, the sun, the slide of the thermometer’s mercury from one temperature to another. The synth’s base station, which lives in Quintron’s home studio in the Ninth Ward, is a box studded with knobs and switches. Fifty feet away, on the front porch, sensors mounted to a post detect changes in kinetic energy. Says Quintron: “Analog electronics are breathing things, physical elements of the earth, very touchy and squishy and beautiful, and if you let them hold hands with nature, it’s pretty fucking awesome what they can do together.” Indeed. For the past week I’ve been streaming the Warlock’s strange, dreamy, drifty,…