Satellite: Essays on Fatherhood and Home, Near and Far
By Simmons Buntin
Terra Firma Books / Trinity University Press | 2025 | 265 pages
It might seem to parents that their children grow similar to the way a satellite orbits the Earth: for a time, they stay close, but as the children age, they push beyond familiar boundaries. Soon, the children enter an unknown darkness, spinning directly into the dark side of the moon, where communication may be lost for a time. But when parents are lucky—and the gravitational pull keeps them on their courses— the children eventually circle back to their starting place (and their parents), a little wiser and braver than before.
It makes for a nice metaphor, though in the titular essay of Simmon Buntin’s debut essay collection, Satellite: Essays on Fatherhood and Home Near and Far, Buntin refines the image further by likening his ten-year-old daughter’s path toward adulthood to binary stars, which “tug at each other so that their orbits may shift.” In this version, neither parent nor child is left alone in the dark; they realign their orbits together. This revelation comes amid the backdrop of Buntin’s father-daughter road trip to Kitt Peak National Observatory in the heart of the Tohono O’odham Nation in San Pedro, Arizona. While there, he and his daughter peer through a telescope to observe a universe beyond human reach. But Buntin also turns his observations inward, wondering how he and his wife might guide their daughter into the world “prepared and ambitious, self-confident and compassionate” while also protecting her from the “darkness” it possesses. “Is it possible to do both?” he wonders.
The bulk of Buntin’s essays explore some variation of this question through various lenses. Such is the case in “The Sum of All Species,” in which Buntin grapples with how to reconcile living in a place (Tucson, Arizona) where wildlife-related dangers threaten his family, while also embracing the need for risk in an authentic life. “Sharing our built environment with wild animals, even the likes of coral snakes and Gila monsters, ensures that we avoid an antiseptic life that would be apart from rather than a part of our desert habitat,” Buntin writes. “That would not be life; but lifeless.” But such a life comes at a price, Buntin acknowledges, recounting the story of a young neighborhood girl who, after being bitten by a rattlesnake, survives thanks to her mother’s quick action and the assistance of 18 vials of antivenom. To understand and inhabit a place fully, “all of the parts are required,” Buntin notes, including the more perilous pests and creatures who make themselves at home around Buntin’s home. It makes for an uneasy alliance, Buntin concedes, but such uneasiness is a component of community. “We cannot live outside of community, whether harvester ant or human,” Buntin writes. “And community is not true without the sum of all species.”
While interspecies community-building comes with occasional peril, so, too, does fostering community within the human realm. We of the fractious 21st century share much, but differ on how we choose to experience the world. In “Songbird,” Buntin recounts a series of hikes in which he attempts to experience the world in a new way: opting for musical accompaniment rather than sounds from the natural world. Armed with his iPod (this was 2008), Buntin strode into the wilderness. “I wondered if the loss of natural sounds leads to a disconnection from place altogether,” Buntin says. “That is, do we become numb to landscapes when they lose their natural sounds?” If so, what is lost and gained along the way?
Throughout the collection, Buntin writes with the vividness of modern essayists like Annie Dillard and Wendell Berry while retaining the weight and rigor of those who came before, like Aldo Leopold and Edward Abbey.
Like them, Buntin brings the world to life in surround sound, whether describing the “otherworldly chortled bugles of the Sandhill cranes” or the “spicy aroma of malt tinged with just-turned earth” of a freshly poured beer. Yet, his essays also share a transcendental flair more akin to Emerson and Thoreau. Buntin revives wonder, showcasing a curiosity that seems to have gone dormant in the artificial intelligence age we currently inhabit. His journeys are part pilgrimage, part fact-finding mission. For Buntin, answers are never just a click away but are the well-earned reward for traveling thousands of miles to witness the Sandhill crane migration near Kearney, Nebraska, or to hear the bells of San Borja, or to photograph wildflowers near the U.S.-Mexico border. His personal writing is also buoyed by his research, which serves to ground his more poetic flourishes with hard facts.
Most impressively, Buntin’s essays contain big ideas in small packages. While each essay wrestles with a question, collectively, they all point toward what might be the question of our time: Amid all the noise, interference, and cross-connection in our overstimulated lives, how might we best make a home in the world? Not only for ourselves, but for our children. And not only for our children, but for the progeny of the plants and animals with whom we share this place.
As Buntin reminds us, we are the sum of all species. Together, humans and animals alike share ecosystems, build communities, and try to find ways to thrive in a swiftly changing world. Robert Frost wrote that “fences make good neighbors,” but such advice falls flat in our ecologically interconnected world. No fence will keep out a snake, nor should we ask it to. It is only by taking the risk of living together that we come to know our most “authentic” world: dangerous and beautiful as it is.
B.J. Hollars is the author of several books, most recently Dinosaur Dreams: A Father and Daughter in Search of America’s Prehistoric Past and Wisconsin for Kennedy: The Primary That Launched a President and Changed The Course of History. Hollars is the recipient of the Truman Capote Prize for Literary Nonfiction, Anne B. and James B. McMillan Prize, Council of Wisconsin Writers’ Blei-Derleth Award, Society of Midland Authors Award, and the Midwest Book Awards Gold and Silver medals. His work has been featured on C-SPAN, Lit Hub, Washington Post, Star-Tribune, The Millions, and Wisconsin Life.
Read nonfiction by B.J. Hollars appearing in Terrain.org: “Safely Ashore” (an excerpt of Year of Plenty: A Family’s Season of Grief), “Thomas Jefferson’s Monster”, and his Recommended Reads entry, “The Unconventional Reading Experience”.
Header photo by Simmons Buntin.
