Terrain.org essays in this issue:
 

Night at the World's Largest Atomic Cannon, with Audio
by Christopher Cokinos

Watershed and extinction folders stacked beside me, I must have been driving home from the quarterly state gathering of activists when suddenly I needed to climb the hill beside the highway, where the dark of just-past-dusk gathered all around the World’s Largest Atomic Cannon.  No one else there in the parking lot, I took so many steps on the steep, broken asphalt path, I didn’t try to keep count.

Body Exposed in the Golden Wind
by Florence Caplow

So there we were, onlookers, while hundreds of feet below us a person died in the waves, or was dying as we stood above. A Coast Guard boat slipped from the small harbor on the north side of the bridge as the police interviewed witnesses and waved traffic around the van. The van had stopped at the mid-point of the bridge. I noticed the light pouring like a benediction from the west, the ocean tilted like a mirror to the sun.

Positioning
by J. David Bell

Melanie, our co-pilot on this Father’s Day trip to Derry, Pennsylvania, was not entirely a figment of my imagination, but neither was she a real person. Rather, she was a digitized construct of our new portable GPS receiver, a gift from my wife’s twin sister. (Dizygotic, my wife six minutes the elder.) Melanie was no acronym, though it was easy enough to devise one for her (Motorist’s Everyday Locator And Navigational Interior Equipment); she was a simulacrum, a ghost of a person, represented onscreen by a silhouetted profile with luxuriant sweep of shoulder-length hair.

Lee's Ferry
by Ben Quick

Five-hundred feet below, between vertical walls of limestone, thin sandbars show here and there along narrow scree slopes, and chunks of bark and broken earth boil up in the greenish-brown current of the Rio Colorado as my son scoots back across the concrete neck of the old Navajo Bridge above Lee’s Ferry, Arizona, on June 1, 2007. We are at the midway point in the car ride from Tucson to Logan, Utah, where Sage will spend eight weeks with his mother before returning to me and the desert at the end of July.

Mustering the Sky
by Mark Treddinick

The heads of 30 kangaroos poked from the grasses bunched by Potter’s Cottages. The animals held themselves as still as holy men, if nowhere near as calm. They stood in a sustained and perfect vigil of alarm, and we were what alarmed them: two men on horses, crossing their ancestral grasslands. But Jim wasn’t looking at the roos. He was pointing at the fox stealing through the grasses away from us. “Knows ’is way around these tussocks,” Jim said, and steered his horse after the fox. “The old bugger. Ya see ’im? There ’e goes.” I turned my horse after Jim, but I lost the fox at once.