Tabla de contenidos para May / June 2017 en Orion

Orion magazine invites readers into a community of caring for the planet. Through writing and art that explore the connection between nature and culture, Orion inspires new thinking about how humanity might live on Earth justly, sustainably, and joyously. Orion is simply honest and beautiful. It reminds me that there is so much more going on than I can see here in my suburban bubble. I feel centered, wiser, and more connected to a world of like-minded people. Orion also challenges me to do more. — Anonymous We are kindred all of us, killer and victim, predator and prey, me and the sly coyote, the soaring buzzard, the elegant gopher snake, and trembling cottontail, the foul worms that feed on our entrails; all of them, all of us. Long live…

Editors’ Note: Our good friend and long-time Orion writer Brian Doyle died of brain cancer on May 27, 2017. He is much loved and deeply missed. I was saddened to read H. Emerson Blake’s Preamble (January/February 2017) about Brian Doyle’s illness. I discovered Doyle by reading Orion and am always entertained and uplifted by his writings. I read his pieces several times just to savor the way he combines words and images. Then I read them again to trace the number of lines a sentence takes before I get to the period. Doyle has definitely elevated the run-on sentence (the bane of English teachers everywhere) to high art. I have shared his Coda about kindergartners (“Their Irrepressible Innocence,” from November/December 2016) with a couple of elementary school teachers. They all…

A WIGGLE-FLASH of black and rusty red — all I saw of a salamander as it dove down a burrow. What did I expect? I’d tipped over its rock, scaring the bejesus out of it. I imagined myself shrinking, a sort of Alice in Salamanderland, venturing down that tunnel to get a good look, when I stopped short — You fool, Suzanne, that gentle-looking creature would gladly eat you if you were that small. My mission that day at Grayson Highlands State Park was to draw a particularly large salamander called the yonahlossee (pronounced “yon-ahh-low-see”). Most visitors head to the highlands for spectacular mountain vistas; the park contains a trail to Mount Rogers, the highest peak in Virginia at 5,728 feet. But salamander hunting led me in the other direction,…

APRIL 12, 1784, Innere Stadt, Vienna. Wolfgang Mozart sat at the small desk in his apartment, dipped his quill pen, and entered the lovely Piano Concerto No. 17 in G in his log of completed work. This was Mozart’s 453rd finished composition; he was twenty-nine years old. May 26. Mozart received confirmation from his father, Leopold, that the fair copy of the concerto he had sent by postal carriage had arrived safely in Salzburg. Wolfgang wrote back that he was eager to hear his father’s opinion of this work and of the other pieces he had sent; he was in no rush to have them back “so long as no one else gets hold of them.” Mozart was always a little paranoid that his music might fall into the wrong…

AMERICA HAS A PROBLEM with reality. You only need to look at the country’s current governing administration, with its newspeak claim that there is such a thing as “alternative facts,” to see the problem laid bare. Science advocate and writerfilmmaker Shawn Otto details exactly why this matters in his new book, The War on Science: Who’s Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It. The book’s basic argument is both important and, I believe, correct: without an agreement on facts and a trust in basic science, democracy fails. The promise of democracy is self-governance and freedom, and the message of this book is that accurate information is our strongest hedge against authoritarianism. Otto lays out a convincing argument that there is a war for our perception of…

IN THE 1950s, the United States and Canada assembled what was then the largest concentration of heavy machinery in history to tear into the St. Lawrence River between Lake Ontario and Montreal and channel a once-impassable stretch of rapids into a seaway to carry ships from the Atlantic Ocean into the Great Lakes. The St. Lawrence Seaway would reshape North America’s geography and economy, boosters claimed, creating a “fourth seacoast” and turning Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and Duluth into global ports to rival New York and Rotterdam. Walter Cronkite called it one of humankind’s greatest engineering marvels. Queen Elizabeth joined President Eisenhower to celebrate its completion in June 1959. By that time, the seaway was already proving a royal boondoggle, writes journalist Dan Egan in his spectacular The Death and Life…

SOMETIMES America fails to live to up to the values it was founded on. To see how true this is, one need only to consider the country’s history with slavery, segregation, su=rage, religious intolerance, and international aggression. But today, people on both sides of the political spectrum would agree that America’s present moment is one of special confusion and — many would say — weakness. Make, great, and again was always a problematic combination of words, and in the last six months, it’s become clear that the slogan’s premise has less to do with greatness than with a wholescale abdication of leadership — both national and international. Internationally, this abdication was made clear in the White House’s announcement that it will begin withdrawing the United States from the Paris climate…

1 Choose a friend with no camping experience. Your choice of companion is key. He or she should be strong, durable, positive. Willingness to follow orders a bonus. 2 Forget the navigational guides. Both of you have a list of stu= to bring. Your jovial comrade, however, does not think to mention the absence of map, compass, or GPS until you’re heading o= trail. For the next several days you will hike based on dead reckoning. Hopefully the emphasis is on reckoning and not dead. 3 Fail to check the weather forecast. You want to argue it was his job to check the forecast, but he can’t hear your cursing as you cling like a four-legged insect to a slick, moss-caked log and inch your way over foaming whitewater. And…

WHEN CHAD BACON began working for a mountain-goat researcher in Montana’s Glacier National Park, he had no experience in wildlife biology. But he wanted a change of pace from his work as a restaurant manager in Philadelphia. Soon he was spending days o=-trail in one of the country’s most remote national parks. One rainy and cold day, I joined Chad and his boss, researcher Wes Sarmento, on a field trip. We hiked along an empty trail until we reached a meadow with views of distant cli=s. “This wind is wreaking havoc on my hair,” Chad joked. “And I don’t see any damn goats.” He pulled out binoculars and started to look more methodically. A white speck, about the right size and color, sat halfway up a cli= face. “That,” he…

WHEREAS I did not desire in childhood to be a part of this but desired most of all to be a part. A piece combined with others to make up a whole. Some but not all of something. In Lakota it’s onspa, a piece or part of anything. Like the creek trickling behind my aunt’s house where Uncle built her a bridge to cross from bank to bank, not far from a grassy clearing with three tipis, a place to gather. She holds threeday workshops on traditional arts, young people from Kyle and Potato Creek arrive one by one eager to participate. They have the option my auntie says to sleep at home and return in the morning but by and large they’ll stay and camp even during South Dakota…

I imagined a place the great whales congregate, a death trench blue body after blue body carried down some current to the ocean floor. I can’t imagine anything more beautiful than the cold depths, whales settled into darkness, huge muscled questions stacked on sand — a kind of preservation. For weeks I kept the words written on the back of my hand, kept bringing it up how these communities for the dead must mean something. Imagine this: A whale fall is both a body and a place. The body makes the place.…

HOW DO WE SPEAK with nature? Or, more aptly put, how do we speak for nature, translating other-than-human experiences into a very human, very fallible language? The opportunities for transgression are endless — for example, by personifying the environment, substituting our emotions and concerns for the actual experiences of wild things, which are ultimately unknowable. K. A. Hays is that rare and indispensable poet whose exquisite and fierce music, in spite of such pitfalls, captures and elucidates the world of fallen trees and hawks, skunk cabbage and damselflies — an inquiry into the mortality of all things. In her third book Hays leads the reader into quietness and contemplation, even while the world is storm tossed, reminding us that “In widening, // a lily mouths its dirge / in praise…

LAYING CLAIM TO LAND is a political act and an act of love: it is a declaration of rights, responsibilities, networks of connection, and obligation. Therefore it’s also a claim of one’s own personhood and self hood, one’s right to exist and belong, even in — perhaps particularly in — a place where those rights haven’t always been acknowledged. In his luminous new memoir, The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature, J. Drew Lanham lays imaginative and historical claim to two hundred acres of his family’s land in upstate South Carolina. He lays this claim as a black man who grew up and fell in love with the natural world there and who retains that love alongside the knowledge that his ancestors were enslaved there.…

IT’S SPELLED DIFFERENTLY, I know, after a German naturalist known otherwise for his scientific descriptions of obscure Arctic animals, including the nowextinct sea cow — and you wouldn’t think that the Steller’s jays would care how I spell their name in any case. But somehow each time they squawk with that voice of outraged determination I think they’ve got to have an opinion about pretty much everything: these are birds that brook no quarter, tolerate no fools, display all the attitude you’d expect of anyone who wears a punk topknot like that. Years ago, for example, I remember standing under tall fir trees on Whidbey Island engaged in an experiment in outdoor living that required filling out some kind of form, and a passing jay dropped a big, purple berry…

Firelei Báez’s paintings and large-scale installations explore confrontational narratives about Caribbean, African-American, and female histories. Dominican-born, she lives in New York City. Her work has appeared in numerous solo museum exhibitions. Ellen Bass’s most recent book is Like a Beggar. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and teaches in Pacific University’s MFA program. Ted Falcon is a Reform rabbi with a doctorate in professional psychology. His books include Judaism for Dummies and A Journey of Awakening. Peter Friederici directs the Sustainable Communities Program at Northern Arizona University. His latest book, with the photographer Peter Goin, is A New Form of Beauty: Glen Canyon Beyond Climate Change. Amanda Hawkins lives with her beloved and their two children in Northern California. She is at work on her first…

EIGHT YEARS AGO this spring, I blew out a lumbar disc while running a jackhammer in the desert near my house — an accident that was the result of simple bad luck, with the odds skewed by the fact that a jackhammer was the wrong tool for the job and that alcohol may have been involved. After a long, miserable recovery period during which I was as ornery as a walleyed mule, I finally mended enough that my wife, Eryn, could get me out of the house, which was a great relief to her. As I began to get back on my feet, Eryn asked what turned out to be one of the best questions I’ve ever received: “Bubba, now that you’re finally healing, how do you want your life…

AGE SIX, sporting a white jogging cap of my father’s and wandering the beach of North Padre Island, I felt the seagull dung land on my head with a spectacular splatter, though I didn’t know what it was. I had assumed all birds were winged automata, cartoons that hovered in the air, never eating or performing any other bodily functions. Not a cloud appeared in the sea-salted sky. So I assumed the good Lord had dropped a hailstone of ice cream on me as a reward. The cream ran across the cap in a trickle. God must have thought I’d been good, entitled to a gift on a hot shoreside day. So I slid a finger across the shit and slipped it into my mouth. The first question that went…

Four roses drinking from a blue vase,the first one I name Moment of Gladness,the second, Wresting Beauty from Fear.All year I watched my beloved disappearing, the sweet fatof her hips, her laughter, her will,as though a whelk had drilled through her shell,sucked out the flesh. Death woke me each morningwith its bird impersonation. But now she has cutthese Clouds of Glory and a honeyed musk sublimesfrom their petals, veined fine as an infant’s eyelids,and spiraling like any embryo — fish, snake, or human —and she has carried them to me, saturatedin the colors they have not swallowed,the blush and gold, the razzle-dazzle red, rivenfrom the dirt to cleave here briefly.And now, as though to signify our fortune,a tiny insect journeys across the kingdomof one ivory petal and into the heartof…

WHEN I TAKE THE DOG OUT to do her business, my one-year-old son points to our barn, which houses an antique tractor, and repeats in a soprano voice, rolling the r as if this is the only way he can squeak it out, “Carrr! Carrr! Carrr!” It is his first word, a general term he uses for anything with wheels (a hose reel, the high chair) and anything that sounds like a car (an airplane, a strong wind). I’d hoped for something more natural — “tree” or “sun” or “flower” — or, of course, “momma,” having waited years for the role, my husband and I finally choosing to adopt in our late thirties. But “car” it is. I carry him toward the barn. Walking through my flat central Wisconsin backyard…

1. Before I met you, I fell in love with a volcano. I went to the equator with a large format wooden camera. It had a wide-angle lens with unpredictable light leaks. I went to learn Spanish, and because I didn’t know where to call home. I went because it was very far away. The plan was to see the city, see the mountains, and then go to New York and start my real life. But then I saw the volcano. “Give me silence, water, hope. Give me struggle, iron, volcanoes.”— Pablo Neruda “Hence in solitude, or that deserted state when we are surrounded by human beings and yet they sympathize not with us, we love the flowers, the grass, the waters, and the sky.”— Percy Bysshe Shelley “The history…

IT’S SAID THAT the best nature writers give voice to the things of the earth. Walt Whitman and Edward Abbey, Rachel Carson and Gary Snyder — each speaks for the silent wilderness. In the late 1980s, author Christopher Merrill began speaking for the silent wilderness. In Self-Portrait with Dogwood, Merrill’s first work of nonfiction since 2011, the author examines humanity in relation to the eponymous dogwood, which serves — at different points throughout the memoir — as symbol, metaphor, totem, and theme. As with much of Merrill’s writing, Self-Portrait with Dogwood is not a traditionally told story. There’s no beginning, middle, or end, no rising action or climax. There aren’t chapters. Only sections, and each one stands entirely on its own. They are pieces that start in one place, end…

Glitterati, 2017. $45, 132 pages. In Night Stories: Fifteen Paintings and the Stories They Inspired, a prize-winning group of novelists and screenwriters write for miles and miles on the narrative fuel provided by a new series of paintings from American realist Linden Frederick. A rainy highway off-ramp inspires Dennis Lehane to invent a US marshal who has a lifetime’s worth of second thoughts about the addict he’s been sent to arrest. An alley in a port town provides Luanne Rice with the setting for a homeless woman calculating a way to keep her son safe. A light in the basement window of a stark brick house conjures, in Richard Russo’s hands, a gothic tale of invalids and twisted sibling ties. Night Stories is a kind of group synesthesia wherein the…

$35 FOR ORION'S 35TH This year Orion celebrates its thirty-fifth year of publication, and every single issue we’ve published since 1982 has been entirely ad free. In 2017 we’re asking readers who have never donated to Orion before to help ensure that the next thirty-five years can be ad free too by making a first-time donation of $35. Visit www.orionmagazine.org/give35. Thank you. ORION IN BOOKS From social justice to sense of wonder, and from nature literacy to animal hijinks, the Orion anthologies collect both recent and classic writing from Orion magazine on the most urgent and interesting issues of our time. Place an order for yourself or as a gift at www.orionmagazine.org/books. THE QUOTABLE READER We’re always interested in what readers have to say about Orion; if you have something…