Table of contents for January / February 2015 in Orion

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…

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…

WHEN I WAS A KID growing up on the northern outskirts of Denver, Colorado, my father and I spent part of a summer on a demolition project in our darkened basement. The target was a square tank of reinforced concrete. Ten by ten, its walls were five feet high and a foot thick. The fortresslike enclosure, far more solidly constructed than the rest of the wood-frame house in which it sat, was built to store water warmed by a roof-mounted, solar-heating array. We didn’t need solar-heated water—our natural gas heating system worked just fine—and my parents, a firefighter and a legal secretary, didn’t have the money to install the rest of the system, which called for pricy rooftop solar panels, anyway. With two bedrooms for three kids, what we felt…

Jeri Parker Island Park, Idaho WE COMPOSE ourselves in no small part from the landscapes we choose as home. For me, home is a meadow of wildflowers in Idaho’s Caribou-Targhee National Forest. My grandparents had a sawmill here when I was a girl, and I came back when I was thirty-one and discovered my huckleberry patch was for sale. That first night I pitched a tent where a cabin once stood and drew floor plans under a sky full of hundreds of thousands of lights. Over the next ten summers I built the place I call home, one board at a time. I was a young and vigorous woman when I pounded stakes into the forest floor, trying not to kill even a blade of grass. I used only what…

MOLLY CARO MAY Counterpoint, 2014. $25, 292 pages. “HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH?” Molly Caro May wonders in her new memoir, The Map of Enough: One Woman’s Search for Place. May had always thrived on newness—on the comforts and diversions of modern transitory life and the sheer seduction of new places. But that was before she and her fiancé, Chris, decided to settle down in Montana to build a yurt. As a child May led a “wandering life.” Her father moved the family from Australia to the Dominican Republic to Spain to Mexico, and eventually to Dallas, all before May’s high school graduation. Her twenties brought more gallivanting until, at age thirty, she and Chris headed for Bozeman, Montana, where her parents owned a 107-acre swath of land. Her memoir tells…

LALINE PAULL Ecco, 2014. $25.99, 352 pages. IT’S HARD to be an individual when you’re born into a society whose motto is “Accept, Obey, and Serve,” but Flora 717 is special from the start. Born to the lowly sanitation caste, she’s “obscenely ugly,” “excessively large,” and yes, a honeybee. So opens playwright Laline Paull’s dystopian debut novel, The Bees. Although her hive unquestioningly values only hard work, self-sacrifice, total obedience, and cultlike Queen-worshiping, bold Flora is caught between this ingrained dogma and her own curiosity. Able to speak while her fellow caste sisters cannot, she is tolerated as somewhat of an experiment (a rare thing in this totalitarian state) and is soon allowed to survey hidden parts of the labyrinth hive as she moves in an unprecedented progression up the…

THANK YOU Many, many thanks to the thousands of readers who supported Orion this year-end by subscribing, giving gift subscriptions, making donations, and buying books and other merchandise. Orion simply wouldn’t exist without your support. We look forward to sharing the coming year with you. ORION AT BREAD LOAF The second annual Bread Loaf Orion Environmental Writers’ Conference will be held June 1–7, 2015, at the historic Bread Loaf Campus in Ripton, Vermont. The application period is now open; more information, including a list of this year’s faculty, is at www.orionmagazine.org/breadloaf. POINTING THE WAY HOME In addition to this issue’s special section on writing and art by incarcerated people, you can hear an interview with guest editor and prison writing program founder Richard Shelton, John Burroughs Award–winning writer Ken Lamberton,…

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…

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…

ONCE A WEEK the snake milker’s son bathes the pythons in Brute trash cans filled with warm, soapy water. Usually Jorge Van Horn-Quiros uses Nix, but today they’re fresh out, so he uses Dawn instead. The high schooler hooks the big snakes with a ga=, lifts them out with tufts of soapsuds clinging to their patterned lengths, and files them away in newspaper-lined drawers. Jorge’s father, George, established Reptile World in Saint Cloud, Florida—a small town an hour out side of Orlando—in 1972, and opened to the public four years later. “People,” George Van Horn explains, “would knock on the door several times a week, saying, ‘We heard you have snakes here.’” Today, Reptile World houses more than fifty species of reptile, but what people come to see is the…

I wake and once again the trees have come the treeshave once again grown through me in sleep a tiny foresttiny tangled copse come to populate all the windsweptall the empty spaces dendritic roots curl around cellsas if around stones and the furling tender leaves theirhungry wait for light and now the trees fill with birdswhose wings I feel as faint capillary flutter whose songsrustle in the blood autumn now and the leaves loosenbegin their fall the tiny spiders move in set about theircareful work stitching leaves back to branches mendingthe quilted sky the geese travel over and in the woodsthe mist descends everything is indistinct bleached andpale the mist tastes in the muscles the throat like a chillwhen the mist dissipates it takes everything with itbranches leaves spiders their…

DIANE ACKERMAN W. W. Norton & Company, 2014. $27.95, 352 pages. IN HIS ACCLAIMED 1960 “Wilderness Letter,” Wallace Stegner evoked in the collective consciousness a geography of hope. But that was before climate change, fracking, 7 billion people, GMOs, and the loss of half the world’s species. Given the state of things, it is not difficult to doubt whether he would pen the same words today. And yet, in her new book, The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us, Diane Ackerman maps a radical new optimism for the Anthropocene, an age in which humans have “colonized or left our fingerprints on every inch of the planet, from the ocean sediment to the exosphere.” But before we go any further, we should acknowledge the premise that the environment in…

A GRAPHIC NOVEL BY NICK HAYES Jonathan Cape, 2014. £20, 272 pages. In Woody Guthrie and the Dust Bowl Ballads, graphic novelist Nick Hayes gives us a swirling biography of the beloved singer-songwriter. A moving portrayal of the Dust Bowl era, the graphic novel weaves Guthrie’s musical career and travels as he becomes the voice of the people and tells the story of how their lives were destroyed by economic forces that drove them from their land. Guthrie’s songs of solace and protest find their way into these pages alongside the natural history, settlement, and agricultural development of the prairies, making for a visual experience that is as rich in storytelling and music as it is in lessons for how we might better treat this beautiful land we all share.…

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…

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…

RED HOOK’S Digital Stewards program isn’t for everyone. “If you are afraid of heights,” the organization warns in its training material, “these sessions may pose a challenge for you.” It’s a useful heads-up, because for a year participants learn every aspect of wireless networking: scampering around on rooftops, running cables, and configuring nodes. The stewards, all between the ages of nineteen and twenty-four and residents of Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood, are intent on using their digital skills to knit the community together. They’ve put up nearly two dozen breadbox-shaped plastic routers to create a network of coverage called Red Hook WiFi, which extends throughout the neighborhood, from housing projects to daycare centers to the local library. In a place where there’s little history of digital connectivity, its abundance now is…

BEN HEWITT Roost Books, 2014. $14.95, 176 pages. “ALL I HAD TO DO was be there with buckets to catch it,” Saul Bellow said when asked about writing The Adventures of Augie March. If Ben Hewitt didn’t have the same experience with Home Grown: Adventures in Parenting Off the Beaten Path, Unschooling, and Reconnecting with Nature, it will come as a surprise to anyone reading it. The memoir is a fervent exhortation of unschooling—a step beyond homeschooling where children are divorced from compulsory education entirely, and encouraged to learn through life experiences. Set on his family’s Vermont homestead, Home Grown relays the progression of Hewitt’s sons, Fin and Rye, as they grow up at the farm, learning as their natural volitions dictate—unschooling’s central pillar. From carving bows to skinning chipmunks…

MALCOLM BROOKS Grove Atlantic, 2014. $26, 367 pages. WHEN WE FIRST encounter Painted Horses’s heroine Catherine Lemay, she is a snooty, if plucky, well-bred piano-prodigy-turned-budding-archeologist, who’s been sent to 1950s Montana to examine canyonlands that will soon be swallowed by a reservoir—that is if dambuilder Harris Power and Light has its way. Displaced in the desolate Bighorn, Lemay is greeted by a letter addressed to a “Miss Le Mat” (“She’d come a long way, and he’d gotten her name wrong.”), which begins, “As you are aware the Smithsonian Institution generally will not hire women for River Basin Surveys.” Early in this accomplished debut novel, multiple layers of conflict are engaged. At stake is not only Catherine’s budding feminism, her potential rescue from a life of enduring banality back East, and…

WHEN I SEE DIRT in my dreams, I know I’m going to have a wild sleep. All night long, stories rise up from vast expanses of gritty soil, landscapes that read like hieroglyphics, like love notes, like survival tales, like novels. When I look down at my feet, the earth becomes a pop-up book surrounding me with animals I know well and others I’ve never met but whose stories I read like the tales I loved as a kid, the ones where people walked with wild beasts—rabbits, deer, foxes, mountain lions—and we all shared a language, because we do. It’s the language of dirt. Every life leaves an imprint. Imagine the earth, then, like a fist that holds your actions and the actions of every living thing. When you learn…