Orion November / December 2016

RIGHT AFTER the election, as this issue of Orion was going to press, a friend called to tell me that a red-throated loon had showed up on a nearby pond. Red-throated loons are common enough in other parts of the world, but not in Berkshire County, Massachusetts where Orion is based — only a few are seen here each year. So, still in the post-election daze that many of us were experiencing, I decamped with my spotting scope and binoculars and went to have a look for myself. When I arrived at the pond, the bird was easy to find, and I stood there for a long time, watching the loon bob on the water in the company of ducks, geese, and gulls. Given the decision the electorate of the…

Laure-Anne Bosselaar’s latest book, A New Hunger, was an ALA Notable Book. A Pushcart Prize recipient, she teaches at the Low Residency MFA at Pine Manor College. Jim Daniels’ most recent book is Rowing Inland. Born in Detroit, he is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Brian Doyle is editor of Portland Magazine, and the author most recently of The Mighty Currawongs & Other Stories. Janice N. Harrington’s latest books of poetry are Primitive: The Art and Life of Horace H. Pippin and Catching a Storyfish. She teaches at the University of Illinois. Barbara Hurd is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA fellowship, and the Sierra Club’s National Nature Writing Award. Her most recent book is Listening to the Savage (reviewed on page 59). Sarah Anne…

The juxtapositions, magic, and pathos in Sharman Apt Russell’s “Ordinary Beauty” (May/June 2016) were brilliant. The essay touched me as a reader, and as a New Mexican, in a way I haven’t been touched in a long time. Pieces like hers, where words act as a kind of sorcerer’s spell, are why I have supported and will continue to support Orion whenever I am able. CHARLES VANE Albuquerque, New Mexico I’m heartbroken to read of the dams being built along Laos’s Nam Ou River (“The Last Days of the Nam Ou River,” May/June 2016). In 2007, I stayed a week in three villages along its banks, traveling by boat for two-and-a-half days upstream from its junction with the mighty Mekong River. There was no sign then of this massive disruption,…

1. May I feed the animals? Feeding ancient animals is forbidden! It can have dire results. When the Time Travel in Nature Tours® (TTiN) staff first explored the Devonian period, we had scarcely brushed the 350-million-year-old millipedes from the backs of our necks when Tiktaalik roseae, the fish with a neck and wrists, common ancestor of land animals, came frisking up out of a streambed. No one had foreseen Tiktaalik’s cuteness. That body like an oversized tadpole. Those little fin feet. That funny big head waving on its world-historical neck as it goggled at us from two fishy eyes that held the ancestral gleam of a puppy hoping for a treat! We fed Tiktaalik. We even got it to hop on its hind fins. Then we watched the first neck…

BOTTOM CREEK, southwest Virginia, late April. It had been a dry spring. Then, a thimbleful of rain. Gentry and Percy and I were out hunting in the early afternoon. Turkey season had just opened. We could see where they had been: little scratches in the duff revealing the dark, rich soil below. But we weren’t hunting turkeys. No, we and the turkeys were hunting the same thing. At least Gentry thought so. “Turkeys are our number one goddamn competition,” he said. Gentry is from out near the West Virginia state line, raised in the mountains, but he talks fast and clipped, as if always slightly perturbed about something. He was wearing camouflage and a straw cowboy hat, with his shoulder-length hair pulled back. He’s a forager, chef, farmer, and glassblower…

ONE COLD MORNING last autumn, with the shower’s hot, steamy water pleasantly pelting my neck and shoulders, I glanced up and noticed a spider hanging in the corner above my head—a quivering, spindly, brown spider. I’m not a spider aficionado, but I do know about poisonous spiders in our area of the Pacific Northwest: the hobo spider and the black widow. My shower companion was neither. A daddy longlegs, I deduced, Pholcus phalangioides to be precise, minding its own business near the showerhead. Daddy longlegs spiders build messy webs with no particular pattern to them, and they eat insects, mites, and other spiders, including the poisonous hobo (and, I’m sorry to say, sometimes each other). They like ceiling corners and warmer spaces, so the beige fiberglass tub/shower combination in our…