Orion January / February 2015

ON THE FERRY from Lewes, Delaware, to Cape May, New Jersey, nature was putting on a show. Schools of dolphins and porpoises swam beside the ship. Strings of sea ducks flew in long, ragged lines, and gannets—gleaming white, torpedo-shaped birds—plunged into the water around us, catching fish. A bald eagle soared overhead. It was late fall, but uncommonly warm, and lots of people were outside on the ship’s deck. Many of them were staring at their phones, some shielding their devices against the glare of the sun as if actively trying to shut out the world. Two groups of children were huddled over portable DVD players. And at the bar on the foredeck, the bloody marys and mimosas were getting more attention than the birds and dolphins. The importance of…

Evgenia Arbugaeva, a freelance photographer, was born in 1985 in the Russian Arctic town of Tiksi. In 2009, she earned a degree in photojournalism from the International Center of Photography in New York. Leslie Harrison’s first book, Displacement, was published in 2009 by Mariner Books. Her recent poems can be found in The New Republic, The Kenyon Review, West Branch, and other publications. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland, where she teaches at Towson University. Jane Hirshfield’s eighth book of poetry, The Beauty, and her second collection of essays, Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World, are forthcoming from Knopf in March. A current chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, she lives on the hem of Mount Tamalpais in the San Francisco Bay Area. Alex Carr Johnson migrates seasonally…

Terry Tempest Williams is at her best in “The Glorious Indifference of Wilderness” (September/October 2014), and Jourdan Imani Keith raises timely and provocative questions in “Desegregating Wilderness” in the same issue. However, in “Taming the Wilderness” (also in the issue’s special section), Christopher Ketcham does a disservice to both Orion readers and the legacy of the Wilderness Act. After decades of incubation, the Wilderness Act was introduced in its original form in 1956. Like other major bills of the Great Society period of American history, it was a grand bargain, a work of compromise and collaboration. No wonder, then, that the Act passed with only twelve dissenting votes in the Senate and just one dissenting vote in the House of Representatives. In “Taming the Wilderness,” Ketcham writes, “There’s no ambiguity…

1. The Sea Turtle. Rapt in the rhythm of pulling my canoe across the brackish bay, I was unprepared for the encounter: a barnacled shell split the surface inches from my outstretched palm. A pair of eyes met mine in shared brilliant shock. I had not known sea turtles could scream, but I swear to you that as I shrieked and fumbled and nearly swamped the canoe, this sea turtle screamed silently too before rushing gape-beaked to the bay’s grassy bottom. 2. The Centipede. As it munched on mites and midges in a sweet recess of rotten log, the centipede could not have known what cataclysm was to visit it next. Even if the creature possessed the cognitive capacity to guess, and even if it had a thousand guesses, it…

THIS SUMMER I bought a blue wristband that counts every step I take. Its display is microscopic, it grants me nine or ten bonus steps whenever my truck hits a pothole, and in all likelihood it’s uploading data about me to a surveillance satellite this very second (Are you impressed with my thirteen hundred steps at lunch, NSA?). Worse, it will almost certainly end up in a landfill in the not-too-distant future, its little battery leaching hydrofluoric acid into my grandchildren’s trout streams. But! If you presumed we were launching into a screed against what mega-corporations have taken to calling “wearable computers,” think again. Because there is one wonderful thing about this device on my wrist, and it might outweigh everything else: It’s making me walk more. Way more. I…

ETHEL, WEST VIRGINIA, population zero. The mobile homes were all demolished. What’s left is a concrete stoop, a sprawling apple tree, a cluster of daffodils. My friend Gabe and I are standing under the tree counting used condoms on the ground when a shiny pickup pulls up. The guard takes his time getting out, popping his gum. “This here’s private property,” he smiles, and stands there until we leave. Lindytown, West Virginia, population two or three, depending on whom you ask. The old union hall—its windows broken and its floors littered with yellowed papers—sits by the mine entrance. Strips of metal dangle from the ceiling, swaying uneasily in the breeze. On the outside, spray-painted in big, defiant letters: local 8377. We’ve spent the day prowling the ghost towns of Appalachia’s…