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Buckeye
by Scott Russell Sanders, with Audio
 Years after my father’s heart quit, I keep in a wooden box on my desk the two buckeyes that were in his pocket when he died. Once the size of plums, the brown seeds are shriveled now, hollow, hard as pebbles, yet they still gleam from the polish of his hands. He used to reach for them in his overalls or suit pants and click them together, or he would draw them out, cupped in his palm, and twirl them with his blunt carpenter’s fingers, all the while humming snatches of old tunes.
Full Essay with Audio >>
Pilgrimage to the Magdalen
by Fenton Johnson
The story is familiar and ancient — seeking to obliterate a local cult, an upstart religion appropriates its holy places and fabricates a myth in keeping with its own designs — but here I, the writer, and you, the reader enter the story. I go on these pilgrimages in homage not to relics but to the imagination that calls them into being, and to remind myself of my roots among these pilgrims who still come by the thousands, many of them Roma or Gitanos, outcasts for whom the Magdalen is patroness.
Full Essay >>
The Perilous Career of a Footpath
by Howard Mansfield
The pedestrian who walks through the planning manuals is a hunted beast. He or she is given seven seconds to cross the street in the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices — or less. It is accepted practice to shorten the crossing time to four seconds. The manual assumes that you’ll step out smartly at four feet a second. But if you’re an older citizen crossing a six-lane road, you may find yourself stranded in the last lane as the light changes, a candidate to become a hood ornament.
Full Essay >>
Say the Names
by Lyn Baldwin, with Image Gallery
 Two coastlines, two maritime landscapes. Neither is where I live, but one is home and one is not. In less than a week, the juxtaposition of work and holiday has me flying from the tortuous bays and inlets of Nova Scotia to the isolated fields of Washington’s San Juan Islands. On one Tuesday, I am on my hands and knees, amidst a tour of botanists, exclaiming over the chartreuse, red-veined, vase-like leaves of carnivorous pitcher plants in the coastal barrens.
Full Essay with Image Gallery >>
Concerning couguar
by Amanda Giracca
The creature was long and tawny, like the late-fall grass. Its head was small and round, as were its ears. Months later, Jay would see a pair of mountain lions at Catskill Game Farm in upstate New York, much bigger than the one he now looked at, but leaving no question in his mind. He stood looking at what state and wildlife officials would have told him he couldn’t have been looking at. It was probably a dog, they would have told him, or a bobcat, a deer, or yes—a housecat. That’s what you saw, they would say.
Full Essay >>
Ghosts
by Sharman Apt Russell
Obviously, ghosts exist. We conjure them up. My great-grandmother is 60 years dead. I never knew much about her until recently, yet here I am conjuring. Surely, I think, she walked this path along this creek bed, passing these sycamore trees, white bark and rust-colored leaves, black walnut and green willow, the riparian corridor snaking Wood Canyon in Arizona’s Chiricahua Mountains. She saw these rock faces—Cochise’s Head overlooking the ubiquitously named Outlaw Spring and Hell’s Half Acre.
Full Essay >> |
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Green Green is the Ground
Essay and Photographs by Abeer Hoque, with Audio
 Despite the new smooth roads, it takes my cousin Gorjon Bhai and me close to five hours to drive from Dhaka to the district of Feni. The broad two-lane highway is well kept, but overused by every manner of vehicle, man, and beast. Once we enter the village of Barahipur, it’s like being a planet away from Dhaka. There are hardly any roads, let alone traffic, and when night falls, the human silence deepens.
Full Essay and Photo Gallery >> |
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Transit ~ Photographs by Yozo Takada
 Japanese photographer Yozo Takada aims to consider our life and world by photographing artificial environments that alter earthly landscapes while simultaneously supporting changes of relationship between people and nature. Transit ~ Photographs presents three sets of photographs and narratives from northern Japan and southern Arizona.
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Holiday Neighborhood
Boulder, Colorado
 The 27-acre Holiday Neighborhood in north Boulder, Colorado combines outstanding energy efficiency and renewable energy use with a mix of uses and housing types on the original site of the Holiday Drive-In. The pedestrian-oriented project, completed in 2008, includes a commercial core, large community park and community gardens, live/work areas, mid-density and single-family homes, Habitat for Humanities homes, and more. Built on principles of green design, the colorful Holiday Neighborhood also meets Boulder's aggressive affordable housing criteria.
Full Case Study >> |
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Laramie: A Gem City Atlas Reveals an Uncharted West
by Chavawn Kelley, with Image Gallery and Audio
 Rebecca Solnit’s purpose in Laramie was to discover if the model of map as blended narrative and visual feast, which she introduced in Infinite City, could be emulated in Laramie, Wyoming. Over the course of four weeks she immersed Master of Fine Arts and Environment and Natural Resources students in books, maps, and readings — inspiration and philosophies of place and representation. The result was Laramie: A Gem City Atlas.
Full Article with Gallery and Audio >>
Holding Pattern: A Melon's Cross-Border Journey from Farm to Fridge
by Megan Kimble
Every day between October and April, 3,000 semi-trailer trucks pass through Nogales. In the winter, 70 percent of produce on American supermarket shelves comes from Mexico, and most of that produce gets funneled through here. Although McAllen, Texas is seducing an increasing number of semis — with easier access to the Eastern Seaboard and a state legislature that understands a border functions as a membrane rather than a wall — the Mariposa port of entry in Nogales is still, for now, the Ellis Island of Mexican produce.
Full Article >>
On the Trail of Mountain Lions
by Melissa L. Lamberton
We’ve crossed the inexact elevation line where grassland gives way to oak and piñon. I look back. The wooded sides of the Dragoon Mountains slope down to a plain of brittle grasses, spiked with the upright spears of blooming agave. It looks empty of people, but I can see the pale scar of the dirt road we drove here, the glimmer of cars on the freeway. This is ranching country, although in recent years subdivisions seeking scenic vistas have sprouted along Interstate 10.
Full Article >>
Deepmaps: Reading Tim Robinson's Maps of Aran
by Eamonn Wall
Over the past decade, while writing a book on contemporary writers from the West of Ireland, and in my own way, tracing their connections to their American counterparts, I spent a great deal of time learning about how contemporary writers, working from various environmental and independent perspectives, have begun the process of remaking/remarking maps, of transforming military maps into deepmaps.
Full Article >>
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 Latitude
by Joanna Beth Tweedy, with Audio
It was this figurative state of affairs she’d been attempting to communicate after scouring the aisles in search of pickled anything-but-cucumbers, except her response to the stockboy’s not just helpful but also cheerful “The pickles are right here, ma’am” left the young man puzzled, as is wont to occur when 16 years are confronted with sarcasm ten years their senior. “Um, well, maybe you remember your name?” he tried, reaching out and gently placing four fingers on the fossa side of her elbow. He was skinny and smelled like her first kiss.
Full Story with Audio >>
 Bycatch
by Tom Noyes
I’m stern-side, leaning over the gunwale, answering nature’s call when I see her break the surface. She gets a good five or six feet of air before crashing back into the water. As I tuck myself in and zip up, I’m thinking maybe steelhead, maybe lake trout, maybe sturgeon, but my sunglasses are in the cabin, and the sky’s cloudless, and the lake’s all shimmers and flashes, a carpet of diamonds, so I can’t quite make her out. On her second leap, though, I get a good look and then some. Like how Goliath got a good look at David.
Full Story >>
 If, Minnesota
by Steven Woodward
Ellis counts his arrival in If as the last in a line of cosmic jokes: a town named for possibility. As the bus pulls away, he feels that everything around him—the implied query of the town name, the city population sign, and the coffee mugs stamped with question marks at the Flying J truck stop—is calculated to remind him of his absurd existence. His choices cling to him as though beads on a string, each one a glassy reminder of the mistakes that bring him here.
Full Story >>
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