Table of contents for May / June 2012 in Orion

AUTHOR CRAIG CHILDS is happiest on the edges of civilization, where amenities, in the traditional sense, are lacking but inspiration abounds. So when writing in this issue of Orion about the possibility of some future disaster, an event that might cause a major disruption to the infrastructure that many of us rely on (think water, electricity, transportation), he is clear-sighted and relatively undaunted. In “Rule of the Phoenix,” an essay on the rise and fall of civilizations, Childs makes a list of what he’d grab while running out the door: headlamp, metal water bottle, fleece hoodie, lighter, a good knife or multitool, good tweezers, bandanas, iodine, parachute cord, raincoat. He calls these items “civilization in a bundle, the things you might have trouble getting your hands on if the bottom…

Linda Hogan’s article “Snow” (March/April 2011) and Sy Montgomery’s essay “Deep Intellect” (November/December 2011) were selected for the anthology Best Spiritual Writing 2013. Edith Pearlman’s story “Honeydew” (September/October 2011) was selected for Best American Short Stories 2012. Following its success in the wake of the Occupy Wall Street movement, Christopher Ketcham’s article “The Reign of the One Percenters” (November/December 2011) is republished in the March/April issue of Utne Reader. And Sy Montgomery’s essay “Deep Intellect” was reprinted in Hebrew in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. As part of the Berkshire Festival of Women Writers in March, Orion cohosted a reading with food magazine Gastronomica in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and hosted a reading by poets Jessica Greenbaum, Elizabeth Bradfield, Cecily Parks, and Amy Dryansky in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in April. Also in March,…

When I lived under the black oaksI felt I was made of leaves.When I lived by Little Sister Pond,I dreamed I was the feather of the blue heronleft on the shore;I was the pond lily, my root delicate as an artery,my face like a star,my happiness brimming.Later I was the footsteps that follow the sea.I knew the tides, I knew the ingredients of the wrack.I knew the eider, the red-throated loonwith his uplifted beak and his smart eye.I felt I was the tip of the wave,the pearl of water on the eider’s glossy back.No, there’s no escaping, nor would I want to escapethis outgo, this foot-loosening, this solutionto gravity and a single shape.Now I am here, later I will be there.I will be that small cloud, staring down at the…

IT WAS MY DREAM to walk among glaciers. I would tread lightly, blinded by the Arctic sun, following only the scent of prehistory. North would beckon, and more northern still. The ground would not be ground, but a floating mat of ice. My Inuit friends would say, Her soul is ancient, how can she read the ice like that? The ice would crunch, its polar tongue taunting. Have you ever had a death wish? A craving to surrender? I imagined a last bath, bathing in the frigid claws of winter. But it would be summer, and that would be sublime, an endless cold, an endless white, an endless blue, a total endlessness. I dreamt those blues; I dreamt this vast and moody sky. And the land — the land is…

If you could be a feather in a raven’s black wing,indistinguishable from the others, alive as wings must beas the raven caws its mind from a treefilled with other ravens. If you knew the feelingof wind through that wing. If you could be the beakof that raven, or the raven’s eye, if you could bethe way the raven — any raven — thinks, if you could be thatthought and still be who you are now, sittingin an easy chair reading. If you could be a whole flockof ravens ripping the swollen carcass of a deerfar from any town. If you could be the blacknessof a raven at night. But your book has nothingto do with birds or darkness; it’s a novelabout travel and love you suspect you’ve readbefore, more than…

BY WILLIAM DEBUYS Oxford University Press, 2011. $27.95, 384 pages. IN EARLY FEBRUARY my daughter and I drove from our home in Tucson to the Whitewater Draw Wildlife Area, a six-hundred-acre floodplain of wetlands and restored Chihuahuan Desert grasslands, twenty miles north of the Mexico border. We came to watch sandhill cranes, some thirty thousand of which overwinter here in southeastern Arizona. We were not disappointed, either in the birds or the mountain-edged wetlands, which have been enhanced substantially since the land was purchased by the Arizona Game and Fish Department fifteen years ago. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0199778922/oriomaga-20 Whitewater Draw is one of the Southwest’s largely unheralded wildlife success stories, made possible by winter irrigation flooding that itself presents a paradox: vast amounts of water to support migratory wildlife in a region where…

BY GARRETT HONGO Alfred A. Knopf, 2011. $26, 102 pages. GARRETT HONGO’S longawaited third collection of poetry, Coral Road, begins with a dramatic monologue in blank verse in which a boy describes how he learned to be a street musician. A quarter of the way into the poem, the speaker says, “I went put on the dark glasses and pretend I blind.” Thereafter he speaks in Hawaiian pidgin sprinkled with Japanese, making music with the language and its sounds. The poem ends with an invocation, “Ass how I learn for sing.” The answer is anything but simple, for the song is an intergenerational, multilayered, place-based search for home. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0307594769/oriomaga-20 The book is divided into five sections in which Hongo evokes the various migrations and dislocations that crisscross his personal history…

NEW IN 2012: Change Everything Now! Essays from Orion on urgency and the need for change Wonder and Other Survival Skills Orion essays that revivify the connection between people and nature ALSO AVAILABLE: The Future of Nature An anthology of essays published in Orion between 1992 and 2007 on nature, culture, and human ecology, edited by Barry Lopez In the Presence of Fear Three essays by Wendell Berry on true patriotism Place-Based Education A handbook on bringing classrooms and communities together through the exploration of place Beyond Ecophobia A guide to nurturing children’s ability to care for and connect with the natural world More information about Orion Books, and free, downloadable teacher’s guides are at www.orionmagazine.org/books.…

Bobby Neel Adams was born in Black Mountain, North Carolina. He has received grants and awards from the Aaron Siskind Foundation, LEF Foundation, and the Mac-Dowell Colony. His photographs have been exhibited worldwide. Caren Alpert’s photographs have appeared in Condé Nast Traveler, the New York Times, San Francisco Magazine, and other publications. She teaches editorial photography at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. Wendell Berry’s New Collected Poems is just out from Counterpoint Press. A new story collection, A Place in Time, will be published later this year. He lives in Kentucky. Craig Childs lives in western Colorado. He has written several acclaimed books on nature, science, and wilderness travel. His next book, Apocalyptic Planet: Field Guide to the Everending Earth, will be published in October by Random…

Priscilla Kinter Hexenkopf Hill, Pennsylvania HEXENKOPF, the witch’s head. Mountain summit in Northampton County. Peak elevation: 791 feet. Isolated prominence on a ridge of South Mountain. Home. The ghost of a headless hunter, the ghosts of witches, and strange lights have been seen here. Strange sounds come from the woods. The stone that makes up Hexenkopf Rock is embedded with tiny flecks of mica, reflective scales that once covered the rock’s entire surface. The mica has largely eroded away, but during the various times when the densely wooded hill was clearcut by owners trying to squeeze an income from their rocky property, the mica would mirror the moon and glow white in the night. Morgan le Fay could easily have lived in the brambly woods covering Hexenkopf, fingertips sparking. When…

THIS IS HOW I came to be standing inside a sodbuster’s hut at the edge of the Badlands, breathing 1876 air and hearing Spanish in my mind. Maybe it was Jim Morrison’s fault. Maybe it was Okie Bob’s. I have always had a mystical urge toward the biggest, emptiest, western landscapes — they promise mysteries and verities, room to spit and walk about. I spent barrio boyhood Sunday mornings with Okie Bob’s corral of cowboy movies and old western music in vivid black and white on channel six. But my nights? They belonged to The Lizard King. “The West … is the best,” he intoned. “Get here and we’ll do the rest.” Psychedelic cowboy tunes on the edge of the continental shelf. I was as west as one could get…

In the mirror this river made of youwaxes a mother’s wish: I want the whole worldto see what they did to my boy. In the casket,you whistle, stuttering. You reek under glass. Sothis is what a river will do, carve and swelljust like a woman, singing a glossy blues.Lord knows, your face — it sorrows across my page. Lord knows your face. It sorrows across my pagejust like a woman singing a glossy blues.This is what a river will do, carve and swell.You whistle, stuttering. You reek under glass, soto see what they did to my boy. In the casketwaxes a mother’s wish. I want the whole worldin the mirror this river made of you.…

In the blooming period, everywhere is open.Winds make you arrive where you do not want to go. Disrupt theSequence of the hours. Everything starts talking: bract, awn, butterfly,Godwit. You collide with the place,Leave tattooed and bone crackled. Even the chickens shout. Such that these are calledBooming grounds. The sun appears to set unexpectedly.The earth, to widen and shrink to a moving flatness, As if Jacob’s ladder were built sideways.Angels roam restlessly Anxious to deliverTheir burden. They make crossings of weird Gravity and synaptic light. You see words are not always accurate. Sometimes they are proneTo excess. And mutiny. What does the body mean to say by Trembling? O sparrow, speak the bird’s O until the breath runs out You can read your wound. Its hidden seam.Its slip-knot.…

CALL ME WILLY. My father does. I traveled down from the forests of Maine through Boston and further yet to the sea like a young man in another century looking for his ship. My paler but still daunting adventure was simply this: attendance at the sixteenth annual marathon reading of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. Twenty-five hours, 160 readers, “light whaleship fare” the only sustenance promised. The museum is situated within sight of the Acushnet River, from which, 171 years before (and nearly to the day, January 3, 1841), a young Herman Melville embarked on his own great adventure, sailing with the whaling vessel Acushnet on a trip that would take three years. His dispatches from that voyage, especially his reports from the Marquesas Islands (where…

For thirty years, Orion has stood for the values of people who care about nature and culture, and has helped readers think deeply about humanity’s place in the world. Now Orion is depending on you to help sustain another thirty years of conversation and community. To discuss making a gift of stock or securities, an outright gift, or a planned gift to Orion’s 30th Anniversary Fund, please contact Madeline Cantwell, Managing Director, at 413/528-4422 ext. 28, or at mcantwell@orionmagazine.org; or use the envelope bound into this copy of Orion to request more information.…

BY THOR HANSON Basic Books, 2011. $25.99, 352 pages. No other organic structure elicits such wonder, such delight, and such covetousness as the feather. Nor do many natural objects engender as much scientific debate and name-calling as have surrounded attempts to unravel the evolutionary history of feathers and the creatures that bear (and bore) them. It’s this rich tapestry of science, history, and culture that biologist Thor Hanson explores in Feathers: The Evolution of a Natural Miracle. Part natural history, part portrait of human obsession that takes the author from a fly tier’s bench where beautiful salmon flies are created, to Vegas dancehalls, to the secretive world of feather dyers and costume makers, Hanson’s book shines with the evident love of an enthusiast — even if he did find his…

Daylight Books and Photolucida, 2011. $29.95, 108 pages. People have criticized ticky-tacky, pop-up neighborhoods since the 1950s and ’60s when they first began to take over the American landscape. Now, in regions with up-and-coming economies like Monterrey, Mexico, where contemporary housing developments are going the way of American suburbs, the lack of planning, aesthetics, authenticity, and sustainability inherent in such development is as clear as ever. Photographer Alejandro Cartagena lives and works in Monterrey, where he photographed Suburbia Mexicana, which features a mix of intimate portraits and soulless, peopleless suburban landscapes. Following in the well-worn footsteps of American photographers of the New Topographics movement, Cartagena dwells on the everyday vernacular, but, unlike much of the derivative work in this genre, his images advance a conversation about economic development, environmental awareness,…

MIKE AND I are sitting at the edge of an anonymous prow jutting out from the Grand Canyon’s North Rim, seventy miles beyond the nearest town. It’s not a big campsite, maybe ten feet by ten feet, but it’s flat enough to lay pads and sleeping bags across, with a sheer drop on three sides. The plan — if you can call it that — is to nurse this first beer until the sun goes down, then nurse a second until the moon rises. Two white-throated swifts arc and loop on sharp wings. They fly in close, circle us, disappear over the rim. A lone cloud sponges up the day’s last color. All is quiet without being silent, still without stasis. Mike raises his beer and I reach for a…

As a retired military member and former environmental scientist, I enjoyed Don Lyman’s description of his return to Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia (“The Place Where You Live,” January/February 2012). Few people realize how important military training lands can be to wildlife, much of it protected by fences erected years ago that continue to keep out development. The U.S. Department of Defense now manages almost 30 million acres, including everything from longleaf pine in the Southeast to Pacific coastal sage and chaparral. These areas provide habitat for over four hundred listed species — about the same number of species found on Forest Service lands. The Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, for example, is one of the largest remaining longleaf pine habitats in the Southeast, home to red-cockaded woodpeckers, gopher…

WE NEED A COMPELLING VISION for a new future, a vision of a better country — America the Possible — that is still within our power to reach. The deep, transformative changes sketched in the first half of this manifesto provide a path to America the Possible. But that path is only brought to life when we can combine this vision with the conviction that we will pull together to build the necessary political muscle for real change. This article addresses both the envisioning of an attractive future for America and the politics needed to realize it. A future worth having awaits us, if we are willing to struggle and sacrifice for it. It won’t come easy, but little that is worth having ever does. By 2050, America the Possible…

BY DAVID ROTHENBERG Bloomsbury Press, 2011. $30, 302 pages. FOR SOME YEARS David Rothenberg has been conducting a grand and playful interspecies experiment in making music with songbirds and whales, and in all his work he has been a reveler in and provocateur of the joy to be found in artistic pursuit and collaboration. His new book, Survival of the Beautiful: Art, Science, and Evolution, brings that artful enthusiasm to a delicious array of questions: Why beauty? Why does the human mind see beauty in nature? How do animals experience beauty? How might aesthetic perception have had something essential to do with the unfolding process of evolution? Does survival depend upon beauty? The book is a welcome provocation in the conversation between art and science that is becoming richer by…

BY TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. $23, 224 pages. FOR MORE THAN TWENTY YEARS Terry Tempest Williams has been writing books that manage to be both fierce and meditative, but perhaps these dichotomous qualities have never before been so fully apparent as they are in her most recent book, an unorthodox memoir called When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice. With her trademark the-personal-is-political ethos, Williams sets out, in ways both direct and discreet, to address the question of why, upon her death, her late mother, Diane Dixon Tempest, left her three shelves of clothbound journals, all of which turned out to be blank. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0374288976/oriomaga-20 This sometimes incisive, sometimes meandering book is composed of fifty-four chapters — a number that echoes the fifty-four years of Williams’s…

ORION READERS By our count, 3,261 articles, stories, poems, and reviews have been published in Orion since 1982. Orion Readers assemble past articles from Orion in short collections that are perfect for classrooms, reading groups, and for curling up with on the couch. Several new volumes are available in 2012, each with a free, downloadable teacher’s guide. See the full catalogue at www.orionmagazine.org/books. AMERICA THE POSSIBLE Join James Gustave Speth for a live web event to discuss his Orion manifesto, “America the Possible,” part two of which begins on page 62 of this issue. The event is on May 15 at 4 p.m. (EDT); it is free but registration is required. Find out more and register at www.orionmagazine.org/blog. ORION AT MOUNTAINFILM Join Orion columnist Sandra Steingraber and Editor-in-Chief H. Emerson…