By James Conaway
We are paddling on wind-hazed water, in another century. Spruce, jack pine and balsam cozen the shore of this drinkable lake, an unbroken expanse of green under a cloud-streaked sky that is both broad, and intimate. Floating below us, the inverted reflection of Spencer Mountain is scored by the long, straight wakes of two cruising loons.
Maine, for me, has always been synonymous with the outdoors and the ramblings of Henry David Thoreau, author of Walden and the assertion, made in a time before boom boxes and squealing electronic devices, that people “lead lives of quiet desperation.” But he wrote another book that captured a different place and different sentiments, The Maine Woods, about the wild north country that made me, when I read it, want to see a moose knee-deep in a tea-colored river and discover other remnants of a landscape that profoundly moved this the most famous of American nature writers.
GROWING UP
with Jo Tartt Jr.
On a trip to New York back in the late sixties, one of my first, I encountered a Nigerian cab driver who I noticed had four slanting scars on each cheek and one or two on his forehead just above the eyes. I’d noticed these things before and was curious what they might signify. So in full-throttle provincial innocence I ask the guy if he’d explain the meaning of his scars to me. He said nothing. I asked again thinking he’d not heard me.
We stopped for a light and he wheeled around on the seat to say said, “Sir, you must not call them scars. It is an insult. They are not scars. They are marks. They are my proud marks telling of my family and my village. Wherever I go I am me to all the world. Can you say that? You must not call them “scars” they are marks.”
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John McCain’s had a bellyfull of methane. When it comes to the issue of livestock emissions, he is turning up his nose at some basic biology and making barnyard jokes.
But hey, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is at stake and to reach the very best in public housing sometimes you’ve got to get in touch with your inner ninny (check occupant). After all, it isn’t easy these days being a Republican presidential nominee who believes in evolution and global warming — not if you’ve been rash enough to say so in public. So, to make up for those gaffes, you’ve got to play to the chucklehead base.
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Whorled baby
fist, stuck fast
against my window
pane, don’t you see
me trying to sleep?
How I envy you.
Take leave of
me—Go, now,
and disappear
into your own
den, which you
fill completely.
By John Lang
The river looks desolate on the cusp of spring, when the geese are gone and the ospreys are still few. The sky is faded blue and the water a rough slate under a hard west wind. Distant trees are dark sticks. The Chester’s most distinctive feature now and its only warm color — amber walls lining banks above Morgan Creek as far as I can see — is something that maybe doesn’t belong here and certainly wasn’t here like this a few decades ago.
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By James Conaway
Excerpted from Vanishing America, in Pursuit of Our Elusive Landscapes
Just south of the Carmel River, a field of artichokes ran down to the beach where surfers risked cold waves heaving against black rocks. Beyond that point the land shed its California trappings, including Carmel’s pastel bungalows, and the continent seemed to tilt upward and to the right. The place was one perpetual edge, I thought, where ordinary concerns paled before the prospect of gravity and its effects. To live was to cling to the mountain and view things in a vertical perspective that surpassed what was commonly considered beautiful; it was to feel the heat of a persistent sun, to smell eucalyptus and red dust, and to hear – when the wind was right – the reverberation of waves in rocky crypts hundreds of feet below.
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By Peter W. Knox
Winter breezes ruffled the printouts in my hands as I shifted position on the wooden bench. It was a late afternoon in New York City and I was in Union Square Park waiting for friends, planning to go on to a Village bar for happy hour, but waiting so long the sun had set over the metronome clock and I found myself reading by streetlamp. Tightening my jacket and straining eyes to read in dim light, I suddenly was hyper-aware of increasing activity around the bench. Glancing down at my feet, I saw the dark ground moving and couldn’t figure why. Then I felt something brushing over my Italian business shoes. I raised my feet and peered closer and suddenly understood: beneath the bench was alive with dusk’s rush hour of mice, commuting to their night jobs of hunting and gathering.
A year ago I would have been standing on my park bench in a shouting panic, drawing attention and scorn from longer-time New Yorkers enjoying the park after nightfall. Now, though, I was more concerned with how the article would end, so I just lifted my feet off the ground and continued reading:
In New York City, as in all great seaports, rats abound. One is occasionally in their presence without being aware of it. In the whole city relatively few blocks are entirely free of them. They have diminished greatly in the last twenty-five years, but there are still millions here; some authorities believe that in the five boroughs there is a rat for every human being.
– Joseph Mitchell, “The Rats on the Waterfront” (1944)
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