Orion July / August & September / October 2016

NOT LONG AGO I learned that the son of a college friend of mine is an Orion subscriber. I also learned that Zak, his son, who’s now twenty-eight, was about to be married. This was all a little hard to get my head around — I still thought of Zak as a little kid. Mostly, it made me happy, for Zak, and happy for the evidence that Orion is relevant — is in play — for a new generation. But as I kept reflecting, I began to think about how much different this magazine is now from what it was twenty-eight years ago. In those days Orion was filled with stories of rainforest conservation and wilderness trips and broad statements about the need for environmental awareness — with almost all…

Mike Brodie, a diesel mechanic based in Oakland, California, made photographs while traveling on freight trains. He won the Baum Award in 2008, and has published two books of photography. Jesse Burke was named one of Time magazine’s top-fifty US photographers to follow on Instagram. A faculty member at RISD, his book Wild & Precious was published in 2015. Jennifer Case is the assistant nonfiction editor of Terrain.org and teaches writing at the University of Central Arkansas. Her writing has appeared in numerous national magazines. Sierra Crane-Murdoch’s work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, The New Yorker online, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of the 11th Hour Food and Farming Journalism Fellowship from the University of California, Berkeley. Deborah Cummins has authored two books of poetry and an essay…

My all-time favorite place to pee outdoors beats the spots on Brian Doyle’s list (“9 Places to Pee in the Great Outdoors,” March/April 2016). It’s a john on the South Kaibab Trail in Grand Canyon National Park, and I had the privilege of using it when I hiked the trail in 1993. It’s a three-sided structure, with a fourth side completely open and facing away from the trail. The canyon spreads out before the user in all its majestic, awe-inspiring gorgeousness. From there I watched two ravens glide in lazy circles, their caws echoing in the vastness, and I wondered if they had any appreciation for the beauty of the place in which they lived. MARY MILAM Austin, Texas C. Dale Young’s poem in the March/April 2016 issue (“At Issue”),…

1. Let’s begin with the hair follicles of Mr. Henry David Thoreau. You know the guy: he built a shack at Walden Pond, planted beans, read some books, communed with woodchucks and thunderstorms. His beard was sort of odd — most images I’ve seen show him with an Amish-style chinstrap — but I’ve put him on the list anyway. You’ve got to put Henry on the list. 2. Next comes John Muir, California’s iconic conservationist. His beard’s reputation is well established, so I will restrain my praise. I like to picture the two of them — the beard and the man — rambling for weeks on end in the High Sierra. When night falls they wrap themselves up and hunker down, sheltering one another. They carry no tent. No sleeping…

WHEN A FOAL IS BORN on Bastøy Island Prison in Norway, it is the inmates who help deliver it and the inmates who name it. Bastøy Boy, the newest foal in the community, arrived last spring in the dark of night, his birth overseen by inmates whose full-time job it is to brush and feed and care for the horses. When the foal is old enough to wear horseshoes, an inmate named George will pat the foal’s thigh and brush rocks and debris from one after another of its hooves. He will do this for nine horses, thirty-six hooves in all. Then George will feed and water the horses before closing their stalls and calling it a day. Bastøy Boy has the leggy profile of a preteen and stays close…

A RANCHER I MET while walking from Charlson to Watford City told me I should camp behind the Lutheran Church, its hard white steeple rising above brown spring fields on the North Dakota prairie. I knew what lurked on the horizon, and the churchyard seemed as safe a shelter as I was likely to find. So, on that May evening, I dropped my backpack on a square of green lawn behind the building and staked my tent, crawling in to sleep. Frogs in a streambed croaked. Buntings darted between stout gravestones carved with names of settlers from a century before: Olson, Johnsrud, Rolfsrud, Larson, Hansen. I had spent the last four days moving step by step across open prairie — and when I settled down to sleep I felt more…