Watershed Journal: Spring & Summer 2008 by Watershed Journal

Watershed watershed

Brown and RISD’s Journal of Environment and Culture. Issue 4. Volume 1.

Mosoquotaash — It is All Connected Rick Benjamin JJ and the Buddha Pool Michael P. Branch Still Life Josh Winegar Proust at Sea Kevin Sieff This Thing of Beauty Jeffery Thomson

$ 5 u.s./ $7 canada www.watershedjournal.org

spring & summer 2007

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spring & summer 2007

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E ditor ’ s N ote Like all ecological systems, Watershed is ever evolving, ever in flux. As you may note, we’re smaller, fitter, more sustainable with this issue. Now, The Shed — as I’ve affectionately nicknamed the journal — is easier to read cover-to-cover, easier to slip into your pocket and carry on a foray. Scribble some natural or not-so-natural notes in its white spaces and send us photocopies of your marginalia.We appreciate those kinds of letters. Inside, you’ll find animals: fish, birds, moon jellies, bears, and more. Veteran Watershed contributors Rick Benjamin and Lucas Foglia begin with a collaborative photo-text essay that busses us to a Rhode Island preserve to show the power of an education you can wade through and feel crawl across your hand. But in ways, this issue is also an exploration of memory. Michael P. Branch bridges the gap between critter and recollection with his lively narrative (in which the only beast to be found is the one at the bottom of a bottle). His essay represents a new vanguard of “nature writing,” one unafraid to speak for the kind of connection most of us have to the natural world: short, urban, and sometimes under the influence. Yet, his story is also about a sustaining remembrance. Reporting from further afield, Jeffery Thomson exposés on “the nature of beauty,” reflecting on and imagining travels to Costa Rica. Kevin Sieff, meanwhile, recalls toward the opposite pole with a pioneering angle on the fishing narrative: a conflation of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and his summer in salmon country, Alaska; a finely woven net cast over a challenging literary and littoral experience. Thanks also to Kevin for his wonderful photos. And finally, our featured artist is Josh Winegar, whose Still Life series is a colorful centerpiece to this issue. This is my fourth and final effort as editor of Watershed, and I’d like to thank the many staff members, illustrators, and contributors, who have made these years possible. As I move west, I’m thrilled to introduce Alice Costas as the journal’s next Managing Editor. One of Brown and RISD’s first simultaneous students, Alice’s leadership signals a new level of institutional and creative collaboration for these pages. I wish her and The Shed the best and greatly anticipate many more issues, cross-country. Front Cover Illustration by Jack Turnbull Back Cover Illustration by Brian Elig

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Nick Neely Managing Editor

Box 1930 Brown University Providence, RI 02912 watershed@brown.edu www.watershedjournal.org ALICE COSTAS . . . . . . . . . . . . . Managing Editor HELEN MOU . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Co-editor ROBERT CULLITON ERIN WETHERLEY . . . . . . . . . . . . . Features Editors DENA ADLER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Prose Editor

NICK NEELY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Design BEN CARMICHAEL EVAN FRAZIER IAN GRAY BEN GODDARD NICK NEELY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Editors Emeriti ELIZABETH TAYLOR NORMAN BOUCHER THALIA FIELD RICHARD FISHMAN KARL JACOBY DAN JAMES SIMONE PULVER CAROLINE KARP

. . . . . . . . . . . Advisory Board Watershed is published with funding from Brown University’s Creative Arts Council and Undergraduate Finance Board, from the RISD Illustration Department, and from invidividual donations and subscribers.

C ontents

Abacus 6 · Switchboard 7 · Contributors 52 · Days 54

P rose RICK BENJAMIN . . . . . . . . . . . . Mosoquotaash — It is All Connected 12 MICHAEL P. BRANCH. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .J J and the Buddha Pool 18 KEVIN SIEFF . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Proust at Sea 34 JEFFERY THOMSON. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .This Thing of Beauty 44

A rt JOSH WINEGAR. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Still Life 28

P oetry LENÉ GARY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Craving Fog 11 FRED McVAUGH. . . . . . . . . . . . .Walking Around Standing Bear Lake 27 TULORA ROECKERS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . An Elegy 41

submit to watershed Prose, poetry, art. Send us your work for review. Fall Deadline: November 1st Detailed submissions guidelines available online: www.watershedjournal.org Submissions and inquiries: watershed@brown.edu

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A bacus DAMing Situation The combined length of all rivers in the United States……… 3,500,000 The number of river miles impounded behind dams ………………….. 600,000 The 2008 water deficit of Lake Mead, the reservoir which provides water for millions in the southwest United States ………………………………

50%

The year by which Lake Mead could be completely dry ……………….

2021

NEEAd Some Help In 1990, the National Environmental Education Act was signed into law by President Bush. As of 2005, the EPA had given out over $ 30,000,000 in grants under the NEEA. And, the NEEA’s programs had trained over 75,00o teachers and educators. Yet, the largest yearly sum ever appropriated by Congress for the NEEA is $ 7,800,000. To date, the EPA has been able to award only 5 percent requested funds for EE. And, regional NEEA offices are able to award funds to only 20-30 percent of proposals. (See Rick Benjamin’s essay about the power of environmental education on page 12.)

ECosta Rican Tourism In 1963, the first nationally protected park was established in Costa Rica. By 2001, the number of protected parks and reserves in Costa Rica numbered 70. Today, the land area of these parks and reserves covers

25 percent of the country.

75 percent of tour agencies in Costa Rica are owned by Costa Ricans, but... ...although 93 percent of service workers are residents, they earn only 77 percent of wages. In the late-80s, milk production accounted for up to 67 percent of Monteverde’s earnings. But by the mid-90s, tourism yielded as much as 66-70 percent of the region’s income. (Monteverde is well-known for its cloud forest, where one can see a quetzal, a marquee neotropical bird; turn to page 51 for Jeffery Thomson’s essay about the nature of beauty in Costa Rica.)

Abacus sources on page 51 6

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S witchboard

Lessons of the Forrest Massachusetts

I grew up in Canton, Massachusetts, a small, suburb south of Boston. My childhood was spent riding bikes, playing hide and seek, and getting lost in the mass of forests that was my playground. Those forests are now housing developments. I can’t recall any major protesting, that is, except from us. Our protests were without signs or petitions; without any rhetoric at all. They were silent, even from one another, because it was cool not to care. We were risk-takers. At the age of twelve or thirteen, it was cool to be gross, outrageous, and impulsive. Rock fights, stick fights, and fist fights were regular. Usually, the combat ended when blood was drawn, but not always. There were surprisingly few major accidents. Deep in the woods, on paths that we had spent hours clearing ourselves, we learned our limitations. Once, we spent two solid days digging a pit, seven feet deep, and constructing a dirt ramp just before it. On the third day, we sped our bicycles downhill, up the ramp and over the pit, again and again. It was dangerous and stupid; and heavenly. Each of us fell in at least once, and each had lacerations to prove it. When construction first began, we would take our frustrations out on the window panes, piping, vinyl siding and tools the construction guys would inevitably leave around. We must have destroyed hundreds of dollars worth of supplies. Sure, it felt fun being destructive, but we were angry, and we couldn’t say why. We were led to believe that clearing out forests to make way for houses was normal and necessary. If we were to oppose it, we’d be the selfish ones. Our worlds were younger, simpler. We cared about our bikes, our paths and our forests. The houses all looked the same, and we hated them for it. Every day we spent in those woods offered the best kind of lessons, the ones you can’t easily verbalize. Once, the three of us got lost for six hours. It was dark by the time we made it to a main road and hitch-hiked back to town. Another time, we went “hunting” with bee-bee guns. Jeff hit a squirrel in the neck. We spring & summer 2007

went over to see the poor creature, which lay twitching, looking us in the eyes, asking a question we all heard: why? One time, Dan lit a couch on fire. A second later it was totally engulfed. The flames spread fast. We ran. I’ve always been ashamed of that. The lessons of the forest were lessons in humility. If you went too far out into its bosom, you’d be lucky to make it out. If you lit a couch on fire, it might spread to the trees, as if to mock your façade of control. If you climb a tree to the very top, you can see how small your town is, how self-contained we try to be, and how false it is. If you kill something, be prepared to look it in the eyes. ~Brett Greene When I looked up to where my husband was standing, I discovered a bear behind his back. We had just hiked up Vernal and Nevada Falls in Yosemite on the first afternoon of my first backpacking trip. We had only been married several months. The bear was about three to four feet tall when on all fours, as he was now. If I had not been so utterly exhausted, I might have screamed. Instead, I simply said, “There’s a bear behind you,” as if announcing the presence of a friendly-looking dog. My husband turned to see the bear and said, “Pick up your pack and slowly walk away with me.” All we could hope was that the bear wasn’t really interested in us. Surely, he wasn’t as scared of me as I was of him. Some folks visit national parks hoping to see bears, but I prefer my nature a little less wild and woolly. Glancing back, I saw to my relief that the bear was detained by something on a fallen log. He was not pursuing us. His black-tipped nose was sniffing insects in dead wood. Like all bears in Yosemite, he was an American black bear, and in spite of the name, they are often brown. This one’s woolly fur was cinnamon brown. He was about five feet long, nose to rear. Heading down the mountain was not a viable option for two reasons: already late in the day, the light was fading, and, more importantly, I was too tired to climb down the very challenging trail that had taken us half the day to scale. I was stuck there for the night. Stuck with a bear. At a designated camping area a short walk down the trail, we watched with concern as the bear wandered into another couple’s campsite. Concern changed to horror as the man pulled out a gun and fired off a shot, thankfully into the air and not at the bear. But the bear was not the least concerned. He pawed the air, made a little bawling noise, and then lumbered off. Hoping for safety in numbers, we aligned with a group of high schoolers and their counselors. After dinner, a little distance from camp, we threw our remaining food — and anything that smelled like it could be food — up and 8

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Barely Wilderness

California over a line designed to foil the bears, set up our tent, and sat around the campfire. I fell asleep to talking and laughter, but was awakened every so often to the sound of pots banging together like cymbals. Apparently, the high school group did not bother to hang up their food, choosing instead to stay up on guard most of the night. I slept, but not like a bear.

Rounding a bend, I see what I have been hoping to find: an immense sandstone amphitheater branching off from the main canyon with a series of high ledges and alcoves, forming tiers in the far wall of the escarpment. Leaving the gravel wash, I wind my way through fragrant, dew-covered sagebrush on the valley floor toward the base of the canyon wall. The soft caress of the brush against my clothing and my rhythmic breathing seem conspicuously loud in this place of early morning quiet. The way the old sandstone walls lean over the valley floor create a feeling of security. This would be a good place for a home. In the center of the amphitheater, I stop and scan the ledges and overhangs on its southern face. Concealed in shadow are the faint outlines of what looks to be a perfect ledge. A sloping boulder stands embedded in the canyon floor with a sense of permanence. The Volkswagen-sized rock must have come tumbling down the canyon ages ago in a fit of violence. I hop up its face in two large steps, where I trace the lines of the ledge with my eyes. On the far left side of the ledge, just before it intersects the roof, I notice a humble little wall composed of stacked and fitted stonework thirty-five feet off the valley floor. A series of step-like shelves in the rock face intersect a talus slope that trails all the way to the valley floor. While working and traveling in the Colorado Plateau, I’ve stumbled across many archeological sites: dreary, cramped Basket Maker burial cysts under dark north-facing walls, and multi-room Anasazi dwellings perched high above slot canyons with sunny “porches” that make the most spacious modern verandas seem claustrophobic. Though this area was densely populated, finds like these are relatively rare. Most archeological sites are physically nothing more than shards of broken pottery or a few lithic scatters — flakes of chert left behind from the making of a tool, perhaps a spear point or an axe. Larger sites are ~ Martha C. Diehl hard to find, purposefully hidden by their makers. Behind a site’s physicality, though, lies a power and charisma that is hard to explain. A tough and fragile spring & summer 2007

Passing Through

Colorado landscape becomes someone’s home, and I have the privilege of poking around their living room. Though the people that built these dwellings are long since gone, what they’ve left behind breathes life into this landscape. As I start up the talus slope, the sun’s rays hit the bottom of the wash, though I am still in the shadow of an eight-hundred-foot wall of overhanging rock. Dew on the sagebrush looks like tinsel glinting in the sun, and the warm breeze smells of its fragrance. Where the talus slope meets the ledge, I strip off my jacket, stuff my hat in its pocket, and place a ten-pound shard of sandstone on top. As I work my way out along the ledge, I start to notice details unseen from the valley floor. In between the masonry, meticulously packed gray grout is still intact, indicating that the granary hasn’t been severely tampered with thus far. On the slickrock ledge, my fingertips slide along the cool gritty sandstone of the cliff wall. At the far end of the ledge is an intact Fremont granary. This ancient rock silo is about four feet in diameter, and belly button high. Pieces of sandstone are held together with fine-grained clay from the muddy shallows of the Green River about a half-mile from here. Diminutive whorls of fingerprints show the hands that packed these stones centuries ago. When I peek over its lip, the old juniper lintels that once held a stone “lid” to the granary are still in place. They are smooth and bleached, but strong. Inside, among the abandoned treasures of packrats, is a single cob of corn: an ear of maize, only slightly bigger than the “baby corn” in an Asian take-out dish. I am lucky to see such a treasure. I sit down, letting the coolness of the stone seep into my body, and scan the canyon wash below. At its mouth, the muddy ribbons of the Green River seem to warm as morning sun filters through tall cottonwood trees and budding coyote willows. I imagine kids playing below. I imagine mothers, fathers, enemies, and friends loving, laughing, and fighting amongst red walls and cottonwood glens. This was once a human landscape, too. This tough maze of sandstone was Home for the Fremont. I am merely passing through.

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~ Michael Fiebig

Craving Fog I lie awake, wanting to feel the gentle abrasion of taupe-colored sand against my aging feet. I can still hear the deep boom of a half-mile long wave, crashing all at once onto the cold, lonely, morning shore. Clumps of kelp draw crooked paths along the curve of this world I walk in. Sandpipers jet to the foamy, ever-changing edge and back, while the voice of gulls gets lost in the spilling of saltwater over sand. Filing out of the harbor, one by one, the masts pass quietly across the horizon, breaking the hazy shades of gray, breaking the slippery slate of the Monterey Bay. Be where I am, I tell myself. I am.

~ LenĂŠ Gary

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Mosoquotaash — It is All Connected Or What Happens When City Kids Shake Hands with Dead Man’s Fingers

Rick Benjamin

hen I was a boy, in a misguided attempt to introduce so-called city kids to farming, a group of us not-so-gifted children were bussed out of Los Angeles in order to become more fully integrated with farm animals. It was an abysmal day, more pedantry than husbandry, and what I remember most was when the farmer, a gruff man who didn’t seem to like kids much, cut off a chicken’s head and laughed while it ran sightless, witless circles around the rest of us. Among other things, I up (chucked) and lost the tuna sandwich I’d eaten for lunch (no doubt made from Chicken of the Sea), and for many years after confused fish with fowl and refused to look tuna, headless or not, in the face. For this reason, among others, I’m skeptical when I hear of inner city kids being exposed to nature. First, the categories don’t quite hold: Is there no nature in the city? Are cities devoid of spaciousness? Doesn’t one’s “ecological address” (in the words of Robert Hass, a former U.S. Poet Laureate) apply to urban Photography by Lucas Foglia settings, too? Does not what we call “nature” also count among its organisms and habitats large numbers of humans and cities? Haven’t birds (even many species of raptors), insects, rodents, and wide varieties of insects, trees, and other plant and vegetable life entered or encroached upon cities with seeming enthusiasm? I’m suspicious of an ecology that privileges the Sierra over Chicago, just as I wouldn’t want strutting around in the latest urban chic to trump trekking through Tibet. What I do like are deep and ritual encounters in cities and canyons that 12

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break down dualistic thinking. When I co-directed River of Words Rhode Island — a project in which high school and elementary kids learned about the environment through the lens of poetry and visual arts — I loved it best when we walked along and talked about the Woonasquatucket (which means where the saltwater both ends and begins), a river in Providence whose sediments contain lethal (at least to fish) levels of dioxins, and where raw sewage runs with the current after every moderate to heavy rainfall. This river is their backyard, a place that the young people who lived near it largely despised and treated as a dump. In years of working together with these students, as well as with their fellow learners and mentors — college and university students — I would wait for the gathering awareness in these young people, which emerged predictably, and startlingly, like the sudden appearance of crocuses through snow, into caring, even custodial relationships with the water running through their neighborhoods. If the Woonasquatucket was polluted, it was only because, through human agency, it had temporarily (rivers are resilient!) lost its native purity; and if it was to once again harbor a full diversity of organisms, it would need human agency — human compassion for all sentient life — to help in its rejuvenation. And this could all happen in the city, within walking distance of where we lived. We did not need to escape the urban jungle (“Turning/the jungle/into/a garden/without/disturbing/a single/flower” — Robert Lax) in order to have meaningful encounters in and with nature, so long as we were willing to deeply engage with our own natures in the process. At the same time, I well remember what encounters in the wild have meant spring & summer 2007

to many of the young people who I have spent my time with over the last three decades. Whether hiking with city kids like me through the meadows of Yosemite (they kept exclaiming over the blue sky, the likes of which they had never seen) or canoeing on the largely pristine Wood River in Rhode Island with high school students from Providence, I have been deeply touched and struck by what effect challenging experiences in wild environments can have on young people. I have seen fear on the faces of the toughest street kids when faced with white water, and then the exhilaration they felt after negotiating that new and daunting roughness; I have seen awe in the eyes of my youngers (which resonated with the awe I felt in my own youth) before deep canyons’ sheer rising walls, knowing that a sudden rain could send flash floods through it — through us. Such experiences jettison one outside of one’s self in a way that few things can: into an awareness that we are a particle, and a paltry one at that, of a wholeness that is awesome in its immensity and in the vibrating and abundant variety of its sentience. Venturing out is as important as venturing in. I witnessed this process happen recently with my friend, the photographer Lucas Foglia, as we accompanied kids and adults from Providence into the wilderness of mythical South County (not really a county at all), in Rhode Island, a state epitomized by the fact that if you drive longer than an hour in any direction you leave its borders behind, or reach the ocean. The kids were from Providence ¡City Arts!, a non-profit whose mission is to provide free professional arts education to the city youth between ages eight and fourteen. This year’s ¡City Arts! program is devoted to Exploring Your World at the Speed of Art, a theme that joins expression and ecology in a way near and dear to my heart. ¡City Arts! serves over four hundred youth in after-school and summer arts programs citywide, offering meaningful learning experiences in visual art and design, performing arts, and creative writing. The work is inspired by the creative process of art-making and the exploration of ideas and concepts that shape communities — in cities and elsewhere. ¡City Arts! has been joined in this endeavor over the last several years by the Community Arts Program at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), a course where students combine their artistic practice with service to the community. Each class starts with a seminar, this year facilitated by Robin and 14

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Felice, both graduate students at RISD. During the year, students run what has become known as the “RISD Friday” program, which emphasizes the power of community arts and the importance of being creative and exploratory in out-of-school settings. This year the Community Arts Program focused on the “Exploring Your World” part of the ¡City Arts! theme, particularly with the program’s younger kids. The RISD students created an activity for each continent (ink drawings for Asia, rainforest dioramas for South America, among them), letting art inspire and stimulate conversations about other cultures and parts of the world. An older group of ¡City Arts! kids focused more on inner exploration, creating mythical creatures that also represented some part of themselves. They devoted time to sketching their dreams and hopes, and these canvas sketches will eventually be sewed together to create a mural. And the oldest group made books fashioned from life-size self-portraits cut down and pieced into almost cubist, page-sized geometries (again, the human as a series of countless and constituent parts). In other words, the stage had been set at ¡City Arts!, through the Community Arts Program, for work in the field, where lessons learned in the city — observation, description, cataloguing, sketching, building conversations and other structures — could be tried out in an outside-the-city province, a place in their own small state where none of the kids (and most of the adults) had ever been. I should probably mention that Rhode Island can be a little parochial in this way, almost fiercely local (this is a beautiful trait, for the most part), so much so that both elders and youngers born here and elsewhere frequently cling to their neighborhoods, communities, and cities as if these places were the footholds of last resort. This means that sometimes they don’t get out much, and that even a ten or fifteen minute drive can seem too much of a bother. Even while the Californian in me revolts, I can see the pride of place in such a position. It makes the local primary; it creates the frequently squandered opportunity to really know where we live. So it was with quite a spirit of adventure that over twenty-five ¡City Arts! kids (“twenty-two of them girls!” as one of them pointed out), RISD students and arts mentors in the Community Arts Programs, and the rest of us riff-raff adults (interlopers, like Lucas and me, as well as ¡City Arts! staff and a few parents) set out on a bus on loan from the Rhode Island Department for Fish and Wildlife on Cinco de Mayo for a visit to Kettle Pond and its visitor’s spring & summer 2007

center in the Ninigret National Wildlife Refuge: forty-five minutes, but a world away from Providence. More than half the group was Spanish-speaking first, a fact I mention simply by way of saying that the cultural diversity of Providence was in full evidence on this trip. It mirrored, of course, the ecosystem the kids were about to explore, in which moon jellyfish, owls and hawks, sea skates, and an algae called “Dead Man’s Fingers” (yes, it is aptly named) awaited them. You can imagine that even the ride itself produced a heightened sense of awareness. As Abigail, age nine, put it: “I love busses — I can tell this going to be so much fun!” Upon arrival, we walked the Grassy Point Trail a short way to the pond. Using all of their powers of creative observation, the kids were soon a whirlwind of activity, donning gators, snaring hundreds of moon jellies, crabs, and skates with long nets. Some kids catalogued, classified, or drew what they saw; others exclaimed at the tactile rush of holding moon jellies in their hands; and all asked countless questions about what they were seeing. This outdoor venue was far less a classroom than a place of discovery and delight. The ranger guiding us was careful to answer questions when asked, but also restrained from imparting too much information, from saying too much about what the kids could see and smell for themselves. Brian, who is five, collected a whole “family” of shells, one for each member of his own biological family. Shirley, age eleven, told me how to tell the difference between male and female blue crabs (“the male has a triangle on the bottom of his thingamajig, I mean, shell,” while the bottom of the female’s is a circle). 16

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Tyrin said that she had found a horseshoe crab shell as big as a piece of furniture, and Angelina placed a snail in my palm that started to slide up my lifeline. She befriended this snail, asking all of us to say good-bye to “Gary” before she placed him, lovingly, back into his element. At the visitor’s center, Vivian Mattson provided all of us with the unexpected gift of a live great-horned owl and red-tailed hawk she had found injured and orphaned. I was once again instructed on wildlife gender when one of the kids, upon questioning by Vivian, correctly distinguished between female and male red-tailed hawks. We saw a film about Rachel Carson, made by a high school student, and, as was the custom all day long, the kids asked questions about her and her life as an ecologist and writer. Later, after lunch, the Fish and Wildlife staff and RISD students led the kids in a fish-print project, and after that, the kids shared projects they had completed at ¡City Arts! with the rest of us: beautiful masks, books, and vessels. It was quite moving to be part of a circle in which kids, obviously as a matter of both ritual and routine, talked about their creations while the rest of us observed and listened, then celebrated each others’ work with comments and questions. The fieldwork had again moved inside. On the bus-ride back to Providence, I kept on thinking that the experience was going to find a permanent place in these young psyches. I had witnessed the beginning of a custodial relationship with multiple and disparate environments, one that could exist and flourish as easily and appropriately in a city as in a pond. On the bus, Felice talked about her Peace Corps experiences in Cameroon, and they became, simply, part of the fabric of day, in which monkeys and crabs and humans and moon jellies for once happily co-existed and the humans were the ones humbly exploring others’ ways of life. I thought of the Narragansett saying, Mosoquotaash, attributed to Ella Thomas Sekatau, a Narragansett Tribal Medicine Woman, which I read on a wall of the visitor’s center: It is all connected. This Cinco de Mayo, it was.

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J J and the Buddha Pool Michael P. Branch

t’s an old memory, too precious to be worn out by regular use, from that last summer before we lost Jimmy John. Back home in the Virginia of our youth, JJ and I used to park on the Old Dominion side of the Potomac and take the soaring walk across Key Bridge into D.C., where our wanderings usually led to adventure. The first stop was the celebrated Dixie Liquor, at the head of the bridge, where we’d buy a box of beer and sit out on the curb at the foot of a steep, cobblestone alley nearby, watching the evening haze settle over the big brown river. Or we’d climb up the even steeper stairs there — the same ones you can see in the movie The Exorcist — and from there the view of the river was even better. At dark we’d walk to a brick tavern called the Rat Cellar, which was in the old heart of the city and which, despite its name, was the best provisioned beer hall in the district. The Cellar’s claim to fame was that they served beers from around the world — not only beers we hadn’t heard of, but beers from countries we hadn’t heard of. JJ and I would sit in the Cellar on summer evenings and philosophize, speculating about the landscapes and music and women in the places named on the bottles in front of us. D.C. was a wonderfully cosmopolitan city, and we were unregenerate hicks from across the bridge, but on those long, muggy nights we felt like we owned the city. Or, at least, its basement. JJ was insanely brash in conversing with strangers in the Cellar. His favorite pastime, which he modestly called “Jimmygame,” was to engage in lengthy conversations concerning topics about which he knew nothing, but professed to know a great deal. The longer he sustained the illusion, he felt, the greater the challenge and achievement, and so he worked constantly to outdo his many amazing performances at Jimmygame. JJ would ask calculated questions, listen carefully, and then seize and deftly build upon details that emerged in conversation. There were a million permutations of the game, but typically he’d begin by asking something general, like what a person did for a living, and then smartly improvise from there. “Really, you’re an attorney in Congressman Parsons’s office?” he’d say, “I went to school with his kid!” Here he’d bank on the statistical fact that most Congressmen have at least one child. If the pigeon responded, “No kidding? 18

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Well, Miss Math Whiz just headed off to college,” then he’d say something like “No surprise there. You know she won the high school science prize twice?” But if the guy instead said, “Did you play baseball with him?” or “You weren’t in that band of his, were you?” or “Did you hear about her accident?” he’d say, “Sure did, and I was the left fielder!” or “Nope, but how could you forget that kind of music?” or “I couldn’t believe it when I found out, and she was hurt pretty badly, wasn’t she?” Wherever the conversation went, he’d read the guy (or, more often, girl) like a book, following its threads with likely replies, learning and building, building and learning as he went. The houses of cards that JJ built were towering, impressive, and precarious. Jimmygame was equal part art and science, and required a human intelligence that could simulate artificial intelligence, as it was played on a dynamic, threedimensional, conversational flow chart that could only be navigated through a perilous combination of statistical calculation, human insight, and raw, ballsy hunch. It was astounding how long he could keep this up, what risks he would take to win, how many far fields he could follow folks into. JJ’s gift and curse was that he had tremendous insight into all human nature but his own. I swear I’ve seen him carry on a two-hour conversation with a plasma physicist who left the bar believing that Jimmy was a budding astrophysics prodigy. The guy even invited Jimmy to Stockholm to give a talk about his “black hole research” (what Jimmy thought of in a pinch) at some big meeting of physics nerds. Not likely. When the guy left the bar, Jimmy pumped his fist in Jeremy Schilling victory and immediately downshifted to the vernacular, using his “black hole research” to segue into a story about a hooker named Ida who worked at Chocolate City, the neighborhood brothel. Jimmy did eventually get a college degree — in philosophy, not astrophysics, on the nine-year plan, and by attending a record-breaking seven institutions of more or less higher learning — after which he framed his diploma and hung it in the cab of his eighteen-wheeler. To invoke a Southerner’s distinction, JJ was ignorant, but he was nothing like stupid, and though he didn’t get anything out of school he was freaky smart. Here was a guy in the top one percent on his college entrance exams who drove a fruit truck when he could have hitched a free ride to any school in the country. Jimmy could glance at a fourteenpanel, two-dimensional diagram and tell you immediately that, assembled in three dimensions, the thing would be a nadaractazoid, or supraheganalofuck, spring & summer 2007

or whatever. Anyhow, JJ was enough of a prodigy to assemble those abstract, multi-dimensional boxes in his mind, where no doubt he was also filling them with ice and beer. Despite his gifts, my genius hick buddy hauled freight instead of folding boxes of subatomic particles in some underground lab. What made this worse was JJ’s shitty old haul truck, which was tricked out with those mudflaps showing stumpy, pistol-flouting, mustachioed Yosemite Sam shouting “Back Off!” and, between them, a double-bulging latex scrotum, which swung hypnotically as he scorched down Routes 64, 29, and 66 from the hazy orchards of the Blue Ridge to the muddy banks of the Potomac. It didn’t help that the flaps and nads were ragged out from having been mounted on every vehicle he had owned since outgrowing his old man’s riding mower. The only recent touch was a glossy bumper sticker that read: “Jesus Loves You, But the Rest of Us Think You’re an Asshole.” JJ hauled peaches, mostly. In company he referred to the run from the Blue Ridge to D.C. as the “Shenandoah Sleigh Ride;” around me he called it “Perfect Peaches for Pit-iful Pricks” or “. . . Pussies,” depending on whether his load was being delivered to lawyers in the northwest or politicians in the northeast part of the city. And although JJ spent some mighty dulling years as a medium-haul fruit trucker, he was always sharp enough to make you believe he had dated your neighbor, or lived in your dorm at college, or poured the foundation of your house, or played you once in squash, or was in the same bass fishing tournament you were, or whatever. That is, if you liked to talk.

ne humid August night in the Rat Cellar, after we had visited the Dixie Liquor alley and the Exorcist stairs, and then too many foreign lands on the magic carpet of their ambassadorial beers, JJ launched a round of Jimmygame with a hulking, hairy guy who opened the bottom of the first by answering that he was a high school wrestling coach. This would be entertaining, I thought, since Jimmy knew nothing about wrestling and had the additional handicap of being soused. True, JJ had already succeeded admirably in rounds of Jimmygame with an older guy who was a cabbie, turned cabbie-poet, turned cabbie, and a lady who was some kind of disgruntled legal secretary, and a youngish guy who said he was a USAID field administrator, but was obviously a spook — a CIA guy — which made this match especially fun to watch, since both players were lying, and both knew it, but neither could call the other’s bluff. But by now Jimmy was so extremely toasted, and Hairyman so extremely large, that JJ really should have known better than to go another round. But Jimmy never knew better, which was how I knew he was my best friend and not an evil robotic imposter, who would have been more logical and easier to keep out of trouble. Because Hairyman was a wrestling coach, of course Jimmy claimed to have been a wrestler in high school.“Yeah, I wasn’t very good,” he admitted,“but man 20

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could I do that flip ’em over move — can’t remember the name of it.” He used his hands to vaguely gesture some indiscriminate sort of reversal in the air. But JJ didn’t get far before Hairyman asked him if he knew a wrestler named Frank Singledewkey, or something, at whatever high school Jimmy was pretending to have attended. Now too drunk to execute any of this with his usual aplomb and surgical restraint, JJ foolishly overstepped himself, claiming energetically to have been “tight buds” with “Frankie.” I turned to my beer and cringed. Jimmygame rule number one: “Eschew Prolixity.” If you give up too much, you lurch toward the implausible, straining your credibility and risking your cover. As it turned out, in this moment of impulsive loquaciousness JJ had done something even worse. Abandoning his usual strategies, he offered a daring variety of inspired details about his good friend Frank. Great guy, lots of fun, oh the great times we had together. That Frankie, you know, best buddy you could imagine, funny as hell, killer curve ball, blahblahblah, and what a damned ladykiller! Jimmygame rules two and three: “Avoid Specificity” and “Reflect, Don’t Project.” Well, as JJ recklessly offered details about this and that and, oh, the times he and Frankie used to have, I saw a look of dangerous seriousness break across the swollen face of Hairyman. He bristled and then rose slowly from his barstool, fists clenched and towering over Jimmy in a Bambi-meets-Godzilla, impending doom sort of way. “You scrawny bastard,” Hairyman growled through a picket of clenched teeth, “that shithead buddy of yours screwed my sister! When I find him, I’ll break him in two, and in the meantime, maybe I’ll break your ass in two.” I got JJ out of there as fast as I could, even as he objected slurrily that he wanted to explain to Hairyman about how Frank used to be a good guy, but had really turned into a yellow-bellied bastard. “That Frank, what an asshole he turned out to be!” JJ yelled over his shoulder, as I shoved him along in front of me. But our quick exit in the non-Hairyman direction had meant taking the nearest door, which was a small, kitchen-hall doorway I had never noticed before, and which, I soon discovered, opened onto a small, dark, cinder lot — an angular, isolated alley box separated from the street and surrounding buildings by old brick walls that were, I guessed, about fifteen feet high. As I made a reconnaissance of the lot, Jimmy rocked heel to toe, pissing on a dumpster and muttering: “Essentially, the ass is already broken in two, which is how people give a shit. And how about thong undies? Just wouldn’t look proper on an uncracked ass . . .” He laughed aloud at what he earnestly believed was cleverness, and then continued rambling, now trying to perfect some fake wrestling lingo, as if honing for a rematch with Hairyman. “JJ, dammit, you about got us whacked in there, and now we’re stuck in this brick box.” I suddenly thought of bluesman Elmore James’s tune “Dust my Broom,” which JJ loved because he said that the idea of dusting a broom could keep a monk meditating until twenty-five o’clock on the twelfth of never: “Raise your window high, cuz I ain’t goin’ out that door.” Like Elmore, I wasn’t willing to go out the door I came in — and we didn’t have windows either. spring & summer 2007

We were Cellar rats stuck in the dead-end chamber of a brick Skinner box, desperately without cheese or even beer. But Jimmy John was the only person I have ever known who was simply never daunted. To JJ life was a game that was always already in extra innings, and at any moment he was ready to spend his last dollar to buy his own poster — and then autograph it for himself. He looked at me in genuinely offended disbelief. “Fuuhhhck yoou,” he said, slowly. Then faster: “Fuck you, you fuckin’ fucker!” This from a guy who aced the verbal part of his college entrance exams. “I’m a fuckin’ wrassler! I’ll give you the ol’ reversing death grip!” he said, enthusiastically reprising his recently failed Jimmygame role. He was drooling a little now, but he wiped his chin with his sleeve and then sprang into a B-movie martial-artsish pose: knees bent slightly, shoulders hunched, turned three-quarters to me, eyes opened wide and partially rolled back in his head, and circling his clawed hands like an insane, brew-soaked praying mantis. He looked to me more like Inspector Clouseau than Bruce Lee, but he was just so damned serious that I never knew quite what to do about him. I kept looking at him for a long time, during which he maintained this absurd posture without flinching. I couldn’t help but love his unfailing earnestness. “JJ, that shit is so fake that you out to be retired from Jimmygame — busted down to Triple A. Lordy.” Now I had made the mistake of hurting his pride. Without saying a word he suddenly turned away from me, strutted over to a telephone pole that was a few feet from the big brick wall, and started climbing. What was amazing was how he did this: he put his back against the wall and his feet against the pole, and he started gracefully inching his way up, like Batman escaping a well shaft, or a big-wall climber ascending a granite chimney, or, I suppose, maybe like a wrestler. I swear he couldn’t have walked a straight line to stay out of jail, but now he was going right up that wall and pole like a damned crab. By the time I was able to speak he was ten feet off the ground and still climbing. I begged him to stop, first by pleading, then by insisting that if he didn’t quit he’d end up trading in his truck for one of those wheelchairs you drive with your mouth. “Damn it, JJ, how do you think your rubber scrotum is gonna look dangling under a wheelchair? I’m warning you, man, it’ll drag.” When he didn’t reply, I knew he was concentrating intensely. And, unbelievably, he managed to crab his way to the top of that giant wall, flip over suddenly and hug the top with his armpits, then hoist himself up onto it. Perched in a squat atop the big wall, Jimmy stood up slowly, first balancing with his arms out and palms down, and then standing straight up, raising his arms and fists over his head, and silently awarding himself the gold medal in the wallclimbathon event of the drunken Olympics. I could tell that even he was surprised at what he’d managed to do, but he was trying not to show it. He looked pretty good up there, actually, like a proud groom on top of a brick wedding cake, and even if he was just marrying his idea of himself, as usual, at least I knew he’d have a lifetime of happiness — however short that might turn 22

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Maureen Seigart

spring & summer 2007

out to be. Jimmy John was always a huge pain in the ass to me, but I loved him, and I remember how relieved I felt to know he was safe. But safe never did work for JJ. He looked straight down at me and said, in imperious slang, “Peon, who’s the wrasslinest death-grip king now, you fuckaaaahh . . .” and at that instant, while trying to strike another fake karateguy pose, Jimmy suddenly lost his balance and tumbled backwards and head first off the backside of the big wall. I couldn’t believe my eyes. There was a brief, blurry, mantis-like flailing of limbs, a short pause, and then a splintering crash. Then silence.

“H

umpty Fuckin’ Dumpty?” I said, though I meant to say, “Are you all right?” I called to him, and then called again, and when he didn’t answer I started to worry. I didn’t want to be a sucker — I kept picturing him just fine over there, back to the wall, grinning as usual — but it was a big damn wall, and who knew what was on the other side, and after a header like that.Ten minutes went by but it felt like ten hours. Total silence. I started to get a little scared, and I decided that I’d have to get over there somehow to help him if I could. Still, I covered my bases: “JJ, this shit isn’t funny. I’m going to get over this wall, and when I do you’d better be hurt bad — I’m serious, man, you’d better be stone fuckin’ unconscious . . . ” Of course my fear was that he was hurt, and at that moment I’d have traded anything in this world to see his signature drunken cat grin, even if it was at my expense. Not finding any way up but the phone pole, and feeling now that I needed to do something right away, I started shinnying. The backwards crab wrestler ascent was out of the question, and even the shinnying ascent was hairy. I didn’t have too much trouble climbing up, but the exposed reach from the pole to the wall would have been terrifying if I hadn’t been so distracted by my worry for JJ. At last safely atop the wall, I crouched, turned slowly, put my hands on my knees, and looked down into the green darkness on the other side, straining for signs of Dumpty. All I could make out was the jade glow of splintered shadows in what was apparently some sort of garden. I could see the feathery tops of small, ornamental trees, and the bare silhouettes of some kind of statuary. Immediately below me, where I reckoned Dumpty had landed, there was a pile of jackstrawed pieces of what looked like bamboo, but I couldn’t see too well in the shadow of the wall, and I couldn’t tell if any of the jackstraws were Dumpty’s appendages. “JJ, you down there?” I whispered, though I had been shouting just a minute earlier. Then, just a little louder: “Jimmy John, hey, you okay down there?” No answer. As I walked carefully along the wall, Elmore James came to mind again: “Look on yonder wall, and hand me down my walkin’ cane.” I soon found a spot where I was able to squat down, reach the branch of a large tree, and then swing down from the branch and, by extending my arms and body fully, get within a few feet of some kind of round platform that looked, in the dim light, like it 24

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might hold my weight. Releasing the branch I dropped safely onto what turned out to be a table, cast in beautiful, spiraling arabesques of tendrilled wrought iron, and surfaced with a shattered mosaic of sculpted, cobalt-blue tiles. As I climbed down from the table I looked up and saw, for the first time, the fantastic nature of the world into which I had dropped. It was like no place I had ever seen: a lovely Asian garden, with immaculate gravel paths winding contemplatively around perfectly tended bonsai trees, carefully placed boulders rising like storm-beaten sea cliffs from the imagined breakers of neatly raked white sand, artfully trellised flowering vines twining along the bases of shellwhite statues of human figures and pagoda-shaped huts. The place was quiet, dimly lit, deeply shadowed, and absolutely still, save for the slightest humid breeze, which rippled around the ankles of the trees and at moments set the mounded banks of ferns trembling. The art of nature and the nature of art were here united with greater perfection than I have ever experienced, either before or since. It was a world apart — a green world of quiet beauty hidden behind brick curtains of alley walls, a dark emerald set in the city’s silent heart. Echoing from somewhere within this secret garden was the faint sound of water. Walking very slowly, I wound along the gravel paths, through sculpted bowers of delicate flowers, beneath the interlacing canopy of low trees, around polished statues, drawn forward by the gentle sound of trickling water. As the sound became more clearly discernible, I stooped beneath an arched portal of vines and stepped into a small, open courtyard where the vault of the sky suddenly came into view. Surrounding the courtyard were sinuous rock walls overflowing with ornamental trees and flowering shrubs of wonderful variety and beauty. The courtyard itself was made of flat, irregularly shaped stones that appeared, in the dappled light, to float on a sea of greenish sand. In the center of the courtyard was a formal, rectangular, natural rock pool, adorned with water lilies, the hatched ovals of their pads rocking gently beneath creamy unopened buds. In the pool at one end sat a large, half-submerged stone statue of the Buddha: cross-legged, fat-bellied, placid, earringed, smiling widely, shoulders back, hands outstretched, his cupped palms overflowing with living water that fell into the pool in a slight, but constant trickle. At the other end of the pool, also half-submerged, sat Jimmy John: buck naked, cross-legged, unflinching, and looking, earnestly as always, across the lily-studded pool at Buddha, who, ever smiling, looked directly back. I sat down by the side of the pool and looked at them both. JJ was in worse shape than Buddha — pretty well scraped up, with a big cut on his chin that would need at least a couple of stitches — but I could tell he would be all right. I had found the water, and in finding the water I had found the Buddha, and in finding the Buddha I had found Jimmy John. And that was all. We just sat there. JJ didn’t say a word, and Buddha didn’t say a word, and I didn’t say a word. It was the opposite of Jimmygame. I didn’t know much about Buddha, but I knew plenty about JJ, and so I knew that whatever was happening would take awhile. But I didn’t care — or, I spring & summer 2007

guess I did care, so much that I never wanted to leave that place. I took off my shirt and spread it out on a big, flat stone by the side of the pool, and I stretched out on my back and looked up at the sky. I thought about how someday I’d be older, and everything would change, and maybe I’d have a wife or even a little kid, and it would be impossible to know what to say to them about JJ and the Buddha pool. I didn’t know were I was, but I loved it there, and I knew I would never be back. Though I didn’t sleep that night, I closed my eyes sometimes. I could hear the gift of Buddha’s handfuls of unfailing water and I could picture his tender smile. And I knew Jimmy John so well that I could hear him thinking, knew he was absolutely awake, and could picture him sitting in that green water looking intensely across at the fine fat man. Beneath the canopy of the sky was the pulsing city, and at its secret heart was the silent garden, and at its bowered core was the green gem of lily-studded water, and in it sat JJ and the Buddha, staring at each other all night, lovingly. It was a time and place of which I can give no further account.

Illustration by Michael Lauritano

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Walking around Standing Bear Lake after watching Larry, Moe & Curly pan-fry old boots on a big screen Each evening people gather here By this man-made lake Round & reflective as Curly’s cranium — Fishermen & housewives In cut-off jeans & tank tops Standing at lake’s edge, The water lapping their toes Like faithful dogs; Kids with five poles & Earthworms In a flowerpot, each slouched in a lawn chair In a spot so often occupied The grass is ground to earth. On the water, canoes, Rowboats & twenty-footers With puttering outboard motors Trail lines thin & translucent As wind-blown cobweb. Chances are They won’t catch a single fish, Neither catfish, carp nor trout. By August, the lake’s fished out. It’s less likely still They’ll hook a waterlogged work boot. Do you remember the Stooges? That’s slapstick born Of Depression and desperation. That’s poking fun at misery In hope that laughter would Distract the children From the empty ache gnawing Their stomachs like dogs Clawing carcasses. Today, you wouldn’t fry sole, Least of all worn sole. Who’s going to laugh? Hunger doesn’t exist in the suburbs.

~ Fred MacVaugh

spring & summer 2007

Still Life Josh Winegar

Still life. A painting or drawing of arranged objects, often incorporating fruit and blossoms, as well as items of contrasting texture, such as saucers and vases. There is, in still life, an emphasis on the non-moving; but still life can be moving in ways that complicate our relationship to art, to environment. In an Old Master painting, you might find a freshly snared hare wrapped in satin folds, long ears drooping from an elegant oak table. In Josh Winegar’s work, you might find a photograph of a bagged mountain lion, floating in abstraction, wrapped in us. Call it nature morte in France, but in Spain, it’s of the pantry, or bodegón. Ribbons, like scarves around cold necks, like ice dancers, like teepee through neighborhood trees, or unraveling bandages. Groundless, we tighten our connection to animal, and new shoots grow.

~ Watershed

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Note: all images are details.

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spring & summer 2007

Proust at Sea Commercial Fishing with In Search of Lost Time

Kevin Sieff

t is the roughest day of the commercial fishing season in Pilot Point, Alaska, and I am playing tug-of-war with the changing tide.Waves hit the side of my skiff, sending white water onto the aluminum deck, through holes in the bag of salmon, and into my eyes. While I hold both boat and net in place, the other deckhands, Joe and Rob, move their hands over the skiff ’s floor with a pianist’s grace, reaching for two or three salmon at a time, tossing them over my head into the hull. My precarious grip on the net’s polyethylene rope is all that keeps the boat from drifting away with the violent current. Our three-hundred-foot net is stretched between two anchored buoys and now holds two thousand sockeye salmon. Each is healthy, ready to spawn, and fighting for life. Before the season ends, forty-three million of their brethren will pass through Alaska’s southern coast. It is one of nature’s most impressive spectacles: the largest salmon run in the world. But on days like this one, the ocean’s chop makes the run nearly unmanageable. When a six-foot swell knocks me off balance, I feel the rope slide through my cold hands. In remembering what followed, I rely on the slow motion histrionics, which so conveniently avail themselves to fishermen and writers. I see a wave cresting quietly over the boat’s twenty-five-foot frame. Joe and Rob turn slowly to look at me — now sitting on a pile of salmon cadavers. Sinews bulge from their necks as they inspect the inexcusable distance between my body and the escaped net. Both faces are bearded, bloodied, and covered in fish scales. Their mouths open, in operatic preparation, to ask the same question with laborious delivery: “Whaaat thee fuuuck?” Before I can respond, the net swings out of control, salmon are snagged and swept overboard, and the contents of a lunch bucket are strewn across the skiff ’s bow. Food and fish scatter everywhere. I pick up a granola bar that has attached itself to a salmon eyeball. Joe digs through the rubble, snarls at me, and extends his hand, holding a silver copy of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. He almost slips as the skiff bobs between swells, but he is hell-bent on making a point. “I think this is yours,” he says dryly, shaking his head 34

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Photography by the author

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I wish that the book did not belong to me. It is largely unread, and now covered in salmon blood. I’m not sure which confession is more shaming: that I expected to trudge through Proust’s aristocratic reminiscences while hauling in salmon for sixteen hours a day, or that my ineptitude sent the book flying into a pile of dead fish. I take the book from Joe and contemplate dropping it overboard.

am reading In Search of Lost Time for the same reason I decided to become a commercial salmon fisherman in Alaska: I found myself with the time and the predilection to begin long and arduous journeys of uncertain value. I wanted to see the edge of a continent and the end of a novel, both of which seemed unimaginable as I began on page one at Miami International Airport, six thousand miles and three thousand pages away. Of course, an attraction to In Search of Lost Time based simply on challenge is bound to fade. And so I heeded the recommendations of my favorite writers. Graham Greene claimed that Proust was the greatest novelist of the twentieth century. Virginia Woolf was plagued by her obsession with his work. At twentyfive, Samuel Beckett wrote a 150-page analysis of In Search of Lost Time, Beckett’s first attempt at codifying his own literary views. For so many great twentiethcentury modernists, it started with Proust. Even Hemingway, another commercial fisherman who dabbled in Proust, seemed smitten. “Because a man sees the world in a different way and sees more diverse parts of the world,” he told Time magazine in 1954, “does not make him the equal of a man like Marcel Proust.” If after wars and bullfights and African safaris, Hemingway was humbled by the aristocratic Frenchman, then I could bring In Search of Lost Time onto a commercial fishing boat. Hemingway’s words helped bridge the gap between Pilot Point, Alaska and Combray, France, where most of the novel takes place. It wasn’t what Proust saw — mostly the quotidian lives of pre-war French society — it was how he saw it. In seeing, Proust was unrivaled.

hen I step down from a two-seat Cessna bush plane onto the slim landing strip in Pilot Point, no one is waiting for me. I have arrived in a village with no roads, running water, or public telephones, and I have no information except the name of a man who, according to a Craigslist ad, owns a boat. Eventually I find John Peterson pushing his skiff into the bay at low tide. Older than I had expected, he is fifty-seven with silver hair, dark blue eyes, and a wool sweater, holes lining the sleeves. On the back of his four-wheeler, I clutch my bag with one hand and the back of the driver’s seat with the other. In Search of Lost Time is squeezed between my elbow and rib cage. I am sure that something — my bag, my book, or my body — is going to fall as we hit bumps and depressions in the beach at spring & summer 2007

thirty miles per hour. We pass a massive seal carcass, a nesting eagle, and eight primitive cabins decorated with whale vertebrae and retired fishing nets. Two miles later, we are home. I set my things down in a metal cargo hold in which John has built four plywood bunks. Thirty years ago, John flew over Pilot Point in a bush plane for the first time and saw boats pulling in their hauls. By the next season, he had his own commercial operation. For hundreds of years, fishermen have harvested salmon in Bristol Bay, on which Pilot Point is located. Until the turn of the nineteenth century, most of them were natives from Yupik and Aleut tribes fishing for subsistence, but word about the enormous sockeye run soon spread to North America and Western Europe. Sailboats replaced native-built rigs before motorized skiffs were popularized in the 1950s. Today, native fishermen are vastly outnumbered by men like John Peterson, who arrive in Pilot Point every summer for money and adventure and isolation. The season doesn’t begin for a few days, and I am the first deckhand to arrive at camp. I try to busy myself by finishing the first chapter of In Search of Lost Time, but I can’t concentrate. Proust describes his protagonist’s vaguely Oedipal relationship with his mother in early childhood, but my eyes are torn from the text by words etched in the wooden bunks by previous generations of fishermen. There are names, incoherent conglomerations of curse words, and sketches of naked women. Some of the sketches have captions — attributions like “Jim did this picture.” I glance back and forth from Jim’s picture to Proust’s text. “Jim and Proust,” I write in the book’s margin for no reason, “Combray and Pilot Point.” I return to the novel’s protagonist, Marcel, who now suffers waiting for his mother’s goodnight kiss. I look around the dank cabin, which lacks any semblance of maternal charm. Was Jim’s crass contribution to the room’s décor — like Marcel’s childish tantrum — an unmediated expression of his loneliness, of his desire? I begin to imagine his face, to pity him, to wonder what is in store.

ver the next few days, I make trips between the landing strip and the cabin, picking up crewmembers, gear, and food, all of which are delivered on the same tiny Cessna that brought me here from Anchorage. One by one, I meet the men I will be living with for the next month, and in between these meetings I sit down with Proust. In Swann’s Way, he writes that reading, “purged him of every commonplace incident of my personal existence, which I had replaced with a life of strange adventures and aspirations, in a land watered with living streams.” I suppose my brief encounters with Proust — before being called on to perform some menial, but vital preparatory task — have exactly the opposite effect. I am listening to conversations about hunting grizzly bears; I am living ten miles from where the Bering Sea meets an active volcano. Proust brings me to 38

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a place I’m more comfortable navigating — a grandmother’s garden or a family dinner table. For a few days I’m jolted back and forth between Pilot Point, as it prepares to play host to millions of spawning salmon, and Combray, as it provides the backdrop for Marcel’s developmental vicissitudes. And then — at five o’clock on a morning in late June — the season starts. We march into the bay wearing rain jackets and waders. I trudge through mud with a screw anchor in one hand and a bucket — complete with sandwich, headlamp and novel — in the other. I assume that we’ll break for lunch and that I might have time to catch up with Marcel. “Take M. with you on planes and trains and into hotels and to the dentist’s office and into your child’s piano lesson,” writes novelist Jane Smiley. “In Search of Lost Time will not have its full effect if you sequester it. It must diffuse into your life, color every place you go and every scene you look at with its own tints.” I heed Smiley’s advice, hoping that Proust will paint the Bering Sea as it ebbs and flows and carries sockeye that leap through its surface like tiny fireworks. But an opportunity to read — or to rest — never arrives. Instead, we work almost non-stop, pulling in our net and the thousands of salmon entangled in its small nylon holes. When we remove all the fish, we set the net again and watch it fill almost instantly. By midnight, we’ve hauled over twelve thousand pounds of salmon into our twenty-five-foot skiff. At 1:00 am, I watch as the last sliver of the sun finally disappears from the night sky; the Alaskan summer is one of near-perpetual daylight. Hours later, we walk up the beach and back to the cabin. It has been a twenty-four-hour day. No one speaks. I am carrying the orange bucket in which In Search of Lost Time still sits, having gathered its first fish scales.

ver the next four weeks, my relationship with Proust grows routine. I wake up — at 4:00 am, noon, 7:00 pm, or whenever John knocks on the door of the crew’s cabin — and move In Search of Lost Time from my bunk to the bucket that I carry onto the skiff. What began as an ambition becomes an unquestioned habit. I take the book with me, not because I expect to proceed with my reading — the idiocy of this plan is clear. I carry Proust because I’ve become accustomed to the weight of my book at the bottom of the bucket. Because in a profession that champions utilitarianism, I like that my contribution to the boat’s load is functionless, that its presence onboard implies at least the illusion of excess. As with Proust’s prose, seemingly inessential details prove to be critical, sustaining. I begin to ignore the snow-capped Aleutian Range that plunges into the bay. I’m no longer curious about the abandoned cannery built of rusted sheet metal, or the rotting wooden boats scattered in the tall grass behind the beach. Over the course of the season, these dilapidated anachronisms become ahistorical; they become — like the steeple that oriented Proust’s childhood geography — 40

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An Elegy

At first we thought the dark flurry engulfing us was nothing but a bag of leaves fallen off the back of that speeding truck in front of us. We passed through your wake without a word a downshift or a swerving-look back. Suddenly — you were explosive and I looked up just as your feathers whipped by the side mirrors but missed the impact of you, being as I was preoccupied with humming along and listening to Bjork sing she believes “he believes in beauty” on the CD player playing in Lisa’s car; preoccupied with listening to the metered rattle of my own dashed line down the fluttering page and missed the moment real wings stopped beating in the early air. If you had postponed desire, sought flight a second or so later we would have borne the weight of a flesh-emblazoned bumper, sinuousy grill, and we would have stopped, stared framed in blue looking down upon you and paid humbled respects, beings as we were better for our bookshelves, hotels and those magnetic mementos of the beautiful things we keep on the fridge; we would have written you odes even though you were not beautiful enough to be the symbol of anything sober or dear. We might have thought twice as we noticed our shoes reflecting in the stare of your bleeding eye — might have recalled flight, the violent uplift of feathers in the dawning sky, or smelled the diesel not the pheromones in the breeze.

~ Tulora Roeckers

spring & summer 2007

simply a way of locating oneself. If I can see the cannery, our cabin is only two miles away. If I can make out the painted name on the side of a wooden boat onshore, I need to prepare to tie the skiff to its mooring: the workday is almost over. Long hours infect the crew with an eerie composure. By the season’s third week, no fish is big enough to warrant acknowledgement. No engine malfunction is serious enough to justify panic. One afternoon, we watch as a fisherman shoots a seal that is stealing fish from his net. Blood leaves the seal’s neck, forming a serpentine red line in the murky bay as the animal swims slowly away. I look around at the men on my skiff. No one reacts; this has happened before. Of course, there are fractures in the quietude of long days at sea. When I let the net slip through my hands, taking my novel and my lunch with it, I know I have caused one. As Joe returns In Search of Lost Time, I feel like I have shattered a tenuous, but holy symbiosis. Productivity ceases, and I accept the book with my bloody gloves, as an accessory to my ineptitude. I have failed to navigate the distance between two worlds, between Combray and Pilot Point, between literature and commercial fishing. And it is for this reason that I contemplate dropping the book overboard. But I don’t let go. I return the novel to the bucket and, hours later, relocate its wet pages to the bottom of my suitcase. The book remains there, untouched, until long after the salmon have disappeared from Pilot Point.

have since crossed the U.S. again, returning to the city from which I sought to escape. In South Florida, where Alaska is whittled down to its most inane stereotypes, I find myself trying to preserve the details of my excursion, which — like my recollection of In Search of Lost Time — are quickly fading from memory. After two weeks at home, I reach into my suitcase for In Search of Lost Time; it is the only object left at the bottom of the bag. I begin reading from the beginning, turning pages that are brittle with fermented salmon blood, scanning now incomprehensible notes. As on first reading, Proust sweeps me away with his overture. But this time, the text is imbued with an additional layer of association. I am transported first to Combray and then to remote corners of the Alaskan coast. Proust writes that “the past is hidden somewhere beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object of which we have no inkling.” When Proust found this object — in a morsel of a French pastry — he celebrated his good fortune. “It depends on chance,” he continues, “whether or not we come upon this object before we ourselves must die.” Proust puts down the pastry. The truth that he seeks is connected to the taste of the cake, but it “infinitely transcends those savours.” Could this be true 42

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of my reading of In Search of Lost Time? Could my own reminiscences supersede the text that enables them? I put down the book. I have been away from Alaska for one month. I have shaved my fisherman’s beard. I have washed the smell of fish out of my hair. But Proust’s words, and even the deplorable state of my book, recall an orange bucket, the faces of hardened men, and the languorous hours spent fighting the tide for salmon. I think about the rope that slipped through my grip, about what the book looked like in Joe’s hand, what it looks like now, sitting on my desk. Maybe there are better places to read Proust than on a commercial fishing boat. Maybe my understanding of In Search of Lost Time is skewed toward the sensory, the nonacademic. Maybe, but I, like Proust, “feel something start within me, something the leaves its resting-place and attempts to rise, something that has been embedded like an anchor at a great depth.” I want to tell Proust about this feeling, to discuss the nuances of commercial fishing and memory. But I am sitting alone in a room with In Search of Lost Time — just as I was when I moved into the cramped cargo hold in Pilot Point. “I can hear the echo of great spaces traversed,” Proust writes. I find myself reaching for the book, turning to a page I once read some months ago, and underlining these words for the second time. The millimeters between my two annotations — each sketched to remember a fleeting encounter with Proust — mark a great space traversed, a distance made navigable by an unlikely guide.

spring & summer 2007

This Thing of Beauty Jeffery Thomson

n the fat edge of the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica, eight and a half degrees north of the equator, eighty-three and a half degrees west of the prime meridian, brown pelicans ride the surf with no purpose I can find beyond beauty. Off an olive-colored beach at the edge one of the largest untrammeled patches of rainforest left in Central America, they drop down in tight lines as waves pile in to shore, forward, up, and over. The birds ride the waves like surfers, the tips of their enormous wings almost touching the water; they ride the swell of air each wave pushes as it draws water up from the trough into a crashing curl. The pelicans ride a wave until the last possible moment, when it breaks in a wash of white foam. At the zero point, the birds kick out of the curl and rise subtly off the edge of the wave with a few fast pumps of their wings. Then, in tight formation, beak to tail, they drop in again. I watch them for hours some mornings and can’t find a reason for their actions beyond pure delight in their ability, beyond beauty. Pelicans are big-winged birds, strong gliders that have little need for the extra shove of air the waves provide. I have seen them in flocks a hundred strong high in the air, coasting the vertiginous shore in strict squadrons. “Costa Rica’s air force” the local joke goes, since the country abolished its military in 1949. Their surfing acrobatics are also risky — too close, and a wave might snap across a wing, tumbling the bird into the surf, possibly to drown or break a wing. They are not fishing along the waves, either. Pelicans fish from high above, circling until they spot their prey loitering near the surface. Tucking their wings like peregrine falcons, they arrow and hit the water hard, surfacing with a pouch fat and wriggling with fish. So why do it? Why would an animal risk life for pleasure? It certainly looks like pleasure — perfectly arbitrary, unnecessary, marvelous pleasure. And why do I find this all so beautiful? What is it about beauty that makes me believe in the order of the world, makes it seem that the drama of this coastline in being played out for me? On the rough coast of Central America, I am playing out a dominant tradition in Western philosophy. Some believe that the mind finds order because it sees the echo of the divine in a fragmented and downtrodden natural world 44

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Illustrations by Brian Elig

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— that the human soul finds an echo in the work of its creator. “Remember how in that communion only,” Plato says, “beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities (for he has hold not of an image but of a reality), and bringing forth and nourishing true virtue to become the friend of God.” Or, is it all in me? Is it simply my mind’s eye wanting structure in light cascading across water? Perhaps the pelicans slashing though on their own mysterious errands have nothing to do with beauty. The rainforest — hot, wet, and alive with the chatter of scarlet macaws, raucous as sports fans in the cebia and wild almond trees — poses abundant questions: What does beauty offer us? Is it true, as Emerson writes, that “Beauty is the mark God sets on virtue”? Are the heliconia — flowers that dangle like orange rungs in a canopy of leather banana — ladders to the divine? Is the flight of the pelican a testament to its elemental perfection? Or, is beauty simply sex and advertisement? Does the scintillated throat of the magnificent hummingbird flash simply to catch the eye of a female in the welter of rainforest underbrush? Or, is this splendor just Darwinian “descent with modification” and my own evolutionary biases for form and color? Is the pungent yellow of the eyelash viper simply the ideal camouflage to hunt hummingbirds?

n a tight, box canyon below the stunted parramo of the Cerro de la Muerte, Rio Savegre slices through rolled boulders and plashes in pools clear as acrylic. The bright, cool air is cut with hummingbirds slashing and chipping rough territories from fragrant hyacinth and orchid. Quick black tongues wire the blossoms: volcano hummingbirds, small as thumbs, and green violet-ears, whose name speaks to the delicate drop of color that trails from their eyes. Above the valley floor, small coffee farms give way to dry oak forest, gnarled and hung with bromeliads like escalonia, a scarlet plant, suggestive of aloe. Cipresillo oak, plentiful in this valley and endemic to Costa Rica, remains in only a few other places across the country, though it was the principal tree of montane forests until heavy logging and agriculture limited it to the steepest of canyons. The dominant trees here reach 125 feet in height, like the wild brazilletto and winter’s bark tree. The Talamanca Range rises abruptly out of the Pacific, climbing to more than ten thousand feet in less than fifty miles, and its canyons capture the clouds as the moisture-laden air flows off the ocean and up the steep slopes. The clouds lave the forests with mist and produce rich mats of bromeliads, lichen, and ferns, which drape over every horizontal branch and wedge into each crotch. The air is verdant and chiming with water falling from every pitched boulder. Tree ferns, prehistoric survivors, stand up in the understory, as philodendrons, with leaves hollowed-out like slotted spoons to avoid insect predation, snake up the thick, buttressed trunks of cebia and wild almond. 46

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These are the canyons of the resplendent quetzal. Emerald green with a dramatic ridge crest, streaming tail feathers that flash green-gold, and a crimson chest, the male quetzal is one of the most sought after birds in the world — a life-list all-star. Also one of the sacred birds of the Mayans, the quetzal’s mythology testifies that the bird received its bright chest only after the conquest of the Americas. As one story goes, during the invasion of the Spaniards, a flock of birds descended onto a battlefield to weep over fallen Mayans, staining their chests in the blood of their worshipers. They carry that color still in remembrance. A member of the Trogon family, the quetzal is the size of a large parrot and feeds mainly on fruits and berries, which the bird plucks as it hovers. In Costa Rica, the birds are especially fond of figs and wild avocados. For the most part, quetzals sit motionless in the high trees, elegant, as if posed. During

spring courtship, however, males launch from the crowns of hundred-foot-tall trees, circle in song, then rocket down, tails streaming like a comet’s. Just before striking the earth, the male pulls out of his dive and alights next to his audience. If the female is impressed — if the ascent is high enough and the descent sufficiently shallow — they will make their nest together. This cycle is the beauty of sexual selection, of fitness measured by extravagance. For the Mayans, the quetzal symbolized the moment of creation and the will of the creator come to earth; his flight through the trees — like a wobbling sine curve — evokes the give and take, life and death cycle of the universe. And, in fact, the eleven-hundred-year-old temple of the Kukulcan, in Chichen Itza, may be acoustically designed to mimic the ascending-descending call of the spring & summer 2007

quetzal. A fast clap of hands at the base of Kukulcan’s staircase and a “chirped echo” follows — a “chir-roop” like the cry of the quetzal. Along with jade, quetzal tail feathers were among the most valuable commodities of the Mayan empire and adorned the robes of kings and priests. In this cloud forest, where trails staircase through mossy roots of brazilletto and oak, I finally see the bird, a male. The sight has taken me ten years and four trips to Costa Rica. The bird sits stoically in high branches, its chest and tail bright as orchids in the humid air. Its call rings out — two notes, high-low — and females appear. Two of them, fluttering through backlit branches. Females lack the dramatic crest streaming tail of the male, but they are still striking: deep emerald with a dun-scarlet chest. Chir-roop, chir-roop! Their answering fills the valley. I want to think that this is a message from some god, Mayan or otherwise, that perhaps, somehow, just by sharing the same air with these birds, I am blessed, and the resonance within the moss of my own consciousness is an echo of design. But experience teaches me otherwise. The canyon is compressed to the space between the ridgelines, the overwhelming wealth of forest shaking around me as water drips from every leaf and light shifts through the ladder of trees. Voices of birds resonate back and forth until the valley seems filled with sound. The male turns his head, the black bead of his eye following the females as they approach. They swirl around him, and then move off, leaving the blessing of their presence hanging in the air. As they twist through the layers of the cloud forest, the male follows, like a living caduceus.

or Immanuel Kant, beauty offers an intellectual engagement with the world; it shows us that the world is ordered and complete. But, for Kant, beauty lies not in the thing itself, but in an act of perception. Beauty is what we see in the world; it’s what our minds create, and what the world allows us to create. Through the beautiful, the world obeys the mind and enters into an arrangement with our senses. We search out beauty, then, because it allows us to occupy and define the world — the colonizing mind at work. The landscapes I love attract me because I order them. Start with something simple — the dead snag filled with white herons in a canal near Cano Blanco as we rise in the morning light, mist sweeping off the windows of the plane. The plane slices through the muscular press of the clouds. Farmers with pearl buttons on their shirts, iridescent as flies, look up from their fields of aloe planted in rows like jade octopi. The imagination churns. One moment I watch a plane vanish into stormclouds, the next I am in a canal watching birds lift off a sun-drenched snag. I turn earth with a small hoe as the sun pummels my neck and sweat whispers at my temples. The eye sweeps in and occupies, assuming every form 48

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as its own. What careful narrative could I provide that will let you know that I am not only the observer, but also the maker of this landscape? But then Kant was a homebody. Never traveled much. Never left Prussia, and hardly left Königsberg. If beauty is only in the mind of the observer, why go to the ends of the earth to search it out? It is the unknown edge that attracts me. I want to see what I have never seen, to experience what is still unordered and unclear in my mind, to be startled by the new.

“T

he remote island in which I found myself situated, in an almost unvisited sea, far from the tracks of the merchant fleets and navies; the wild luxuriant tropical forest, which stretched far away on every side…all had their influence in determining the emotions with which I gazed upon this ‘thing of beauty.’” So writes Alfred Russel Wallace, co-founder with Darwin of the theory of evolution and perhaps the greatest field biologist of his era. He writes from an elevated bamboo hut on Aru in the far-flung islands of the Malay Archipelago, his headquarters for the exploration of a root crop village at the head of the Watelai River. Rainforest looms up around the village like storm clouds, but he has brought the sun with him, the natives say. Striped light pours down through the canopy. He pays his rent in cloth and axe heads, in beads and tobacco. The quest for beauty and wonder takes us into the difficult territory of desire. Wallace has come to collect specimens for collections at home in Britain, but one suspects a deeper, more primal craving. His work and thought resonate with wonder. This thing of beauty he seeks at the fringe of the Empire is the remarkable genus Paradisaea — the bird of paradise. There are forty-two species of Paradisaea, which evolved in New Guinea, a land with abundant food and, importantly, without mammalian predators, a detail hinted at by their raucous cries and the variety and beauty of their feathers, shields, streamers, and wires, the astonishing plumage of the males. Like the quetzal, the bird of paradise’s beauty is an evolutionary endgame. The lack of predation demands another means of distinguishing genetic quality; the elaborate, luxuriant plumage and display of the males is therefore pushed forward by sexual selection, which has nothing to do with the human mind.We look in on the world through a narrow window of time, our time, steadfastly believing that everything we see belongs to us, physically or spiritually. What is Plato’s universe of forms, or Kant’s formless form, but another model of colonization that would organize the earth under the domain of the mind? No less so for us than for the Mayans, the beauty of world suggests an equally perfect representation in our consciousness. We speak, and the world organizes around our thoughts; we clap, and the world answers us in the voice of gods. Our desire for beauty is either a correspondence in the vertebrate mind (patterns found in the blueprint of nerve and receptor, of eye and brain) or a spring & summer 2007

fortuitous coincidence. “This…must surely tell us that all living things were not made for man,” concludes Wallace. “The cycle of their existence has gone on independently of his, and is disturbed or broken by every advance in man’s intellectual development; and their happiness and enjoyments, their loves and hate, their struggles for existence, their vigorous life and early death, would seem to be immediately related to their own well-being and perpetuation alone.” Wallace’s understanding, like Darwin’s, is that nature needs us not. This is the central and, to some, the most disturbing tenet of evolution. The natural world functions autonomously — full of rich gesture and complex interaction, violence, and, yes, beauty — but these gestures are not made for our eyes. The world is not made for our pleasure or education. Its beauty is not designed to fulfill our desire. Evolution proceeds through random chance and fortuitous circumstance and runs on the engine of death. These two notions — our intense investment in nature and nature’s indifference — must be understood together, a kind of environmental “negative capability.” Nature fills us — the chill of wind, the spiced scent of pine needles snapping underfoot, the rich swell of air rushing off the Pacific, the green that washes down the sides of a peak into the valley of the Rio Savegre — and we give that wealth name. Out of abundance, we define mountains, canyons, rainforests, and watersheds. We identify paths and piste, peak and valley. Beauty is a gift, a raw offering from the world; it is a presence we charge with meaning. Nature saturates us, overflows us, but it is the mind’s imaginative power that engages and orders this plentitude. This is not to say that the natural world exists only in the imagination, only in the representation of its human observers. We must work a mental two-step and let the landscape be both imagined and real at the same time. My quetzal, my pelicans are part my own creation — part a formation of desire and memory and part their own being, autonomous and alive. The bright, startling form of that bird posed in an almond tree is for me the objective correlative of that landscape, that canyon. Likewise, the aerial prowess of brown pelicans will in many ways define my understanding of that stretch of rainforest beach on the Osa Peninsula. The pelicans live on in the imagination because I am long gone from Costa Rica and in memory the mind is most powerful. The quetzal’s vibrant life is a locus of desire and loss, and I write it into existence from a far distance. What our search should teach us is that we are estranged from the natural world. Perhaps we scour the world for beauty because we no longer exist in a world of connection and confluence.

t the Wilson Botanical Station in Costa Rica, owned and run by the Organization for Tropical Studies, there is a garden of tropical plants from around the world. In the wet fronds of a leather banana, I find an emerald 50

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glass frog: small, but gangly, with egg-speckled skin (a deep emerald, naturally) and long toes like drops of water. I locate this very territorial frog by his call, a loud, sharp dink, like a cheap wine glass rapped with a spoon. This one’s a male; the turquoise spines off its forelegs used to grasp and hold the female give it away. Many species of frog congregate here, encouraged by the sprinklers that nightly wash over the gardens. The night air is filled with frogs claiming their territories. One call resembles a cell phone in the distance, while another sounds like a weightlifter grunting. Others chirp or twitter, songbirds for the dark hours. With soft, wet hands, I pull the emerald from the long leaf. He comes off gummy, the pads of his toes hanging on and stretching. Beneath a deep green back, his abdomen is glossy white, translucent really, and beneath my flashlight, his heart beats terrified. I see, through glass skin, the inside of a living body, and watch the tempo of a pulse and the gluey movement of lungs. Blood flushes through his veins. His stomach works on the jammy marsh of insects that made up his last meal as his intestines snake and undulate against themselves like dark rivers. Arteries and veins divide and subdivide in iterations, the architecture of a ruddy forest. Through lucent skin, through the window of another creature’s body, a world opens, becomes wetland, rainforest, valley, and, as fragile as it is, becomes beautiful.

Abacus Sources Fisheye On Sockeye http://news.mongabay.com/2005/1223-cornell.html http://www.cfec.state.ak.us/research/05_2n/bbresidagerpt_060605.pdf NEEAd Some Help http://www.epa.gov/enviroed/pdf/reporttocongress2005.pdf ECosta Rican Tourism http://www.american.edu/TED/costa-rica-tourism.htm Luis A.Vivanco, “Spectacular Quetzals, Ecotourism, and Environmental Futures in Monte Verde, Costa Rica,” Ethnology,Vol. 40, No. 2 (Spring, 2001), pp. 79-92.

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Contributors RICK BENJAMIN is the co-Executive Director of the Rhode Island Service Alliance and the co-Director of Rhode Island River of Words, a project for young people that explores a variety of environmental issues through the lens of poetry and the visual arts. He also teaches Poetry and Community Practice at Brown and RISD. His poetry has appeared most recently in Logolalia, and his chapter on the poet Kevin Young appears in Wesleyan University Press’s new book, The New Poetics: American Poetry in the 21st Century. He lives with his partner and three kids in the Pawtuxet River watershed. MICHAEL P. BRANCH is Professor of Literature and Environment and  Director of Graduate Studies in the English Department at the University  of Nevada, Reno. He is a co-founder of the Association for the Study of  Literature and Environment (ASLE) and Book Review Editor of the journal ISLE. He has published five books and more than one hundred articles and reviews on nature writing  and environmental literature, and his fiction, creative nonfiction, and  poetry has appeared in magazines including Utne Reader, Ecotone, Orion,  Afield, Isotope, Whole Terrain, Red Rock Review, and Terminus. Mike lives with his wife and two daughters at 6,000 feet in the desert north of Reno, where the Great Basin and the Sierra Nevada meet. STEPHEN COOPER is the author of Full of Life: A Biography of John Fante and editor of Fante’s The Big Hunger: Stories 1932-1959. Once a mule packer in California’s eastern High Sierra, he now teaches creative! writing in the MFA program at California State University, Long Beach. MARTHA C. DIEHL had careers in computer programming and accounting in Baton Rouge, Louisiana before delving into journalism and creative writing. A lifelong learner, she studies and works as an English tutor at Brazosport College in Lake Jackson, Texas. Her other passions include family, friends, health, nature, travel, and, last but not least, dark chocolate. BRIAN ELIG RISD ’07 is currently living in Brooklyn, New York and working as a freelance illustrator and production assistant. His website is www.brianelig.com. MICHAEL FIEBIG has spent the past ten years working as a guide and outdoor educator in the backcountry of the West. He is now attending graduate school in Missoula, Montana with his wife. LUCAS FOGLIA BROWN ’05 is a fine-art and documentary photographer who collaborates with people and organizations across the country and uses photography to promote positive change.View his photographs online at www.LucasFoglia.com. LENÉ GARY lives in Montpelier, Vermont and is completing her MFA in Writing at Vermont College. Her recent publications include SAGE, Watershed, Vermont Nature, KNOCK, Seven Days, and The Poet’s Touchstone. When she’s not writing, she can be found paddling her well-worn Mad River canoe. 52

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MICHAEL LAURITANO RISD ’07 is now attempting to survive as a freelance illustrator in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His website is studiomjl.home.comcast.net. FRED McVAUGH is an instructor of English (composition) at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, where he is working on an MA in English with a dual emphasis in technical communication and creative nonfiction. Fred previously studied poetry at West Chester University, Pennsylvania and environmental history at University of Texas, El Paso. Before pursuing an MA in English, he worked for the National Park Service for seven years. This is his first published poem. TULORA ROECKERS instructs courses in English at Kansas State University. Her poetry has appeared in Inscape and the anthology Poems of the Kansas Plains for the 11th International Conference on the Literature of Region and Nation, and is forthcoming in Aethlon. Although earning degrees from Washburn and Kansas State University and editing a handful of journals are major highlights in her life, she is most proud of raising two adult children and three wonderful teenagers. JEREMY SCHILLING RISD ’07 is working to build a career as a fine artist and illustrator. Working in oils, his personal and editorial projects revolve around awareness of art and social matter. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island. For further work, visit his website at www.coroflot.com/jeremyschilling. MAUREEN SEIGART RISD ’07 graduated with a BFA in illustration and is currently exploring and illustrating Upstate New York. Her website is www.coroflot.com/mseigart. KEVIN SIEFF BROWN ’07 is an aspiring writer and fisherman from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He hopes to become a war correspondent. JACK TURNBULL RISD ’07 recently graduated with a BFA in illustration. He currently lives in the scenic town of Ipswich, Massachusetts on Cape Ann. His work flirts with the boundary of reality and imagination, and usually takes place in the New England woods. See more of Jack’s work at http://jackturnbull.com. FREDERICK WAAGE is Professor of English at East Tennessee State University, editor of a founding environmental literature text, Teaching Environmental Literature, and co-editor of an expanded edition due out in 2008. His biography of environmental writer George R. Stewart was published in 2006. He is currently working on an ecocritical study of Ross Lockridge’s novel Raintree County. His most recent chapbook is Greatest Hits, 1974-2000. JOSH WINEGAR recently earned his MFA from Columbia College, Chicago and is currently full time faculty in the department of visual arts at Weber State University.

spring & summer 2007

Days The Great Chain of Being

Stephen Cooper

I opened the garden slider and the hummingbird darted in. The den filled with an electric thrumming. The hummingbird whirred, left-right, left-right, looped back to hover, eyes level with mine, then crashed against the glass and fell, stunned. It splayed there on the dusty baseboard, head swiveling in the bar of sunlight. I leaned over to get a better look and the hummingbird exploded, tattooing my cheek with an iridescent rush of air. It was climbing the pane, prisoner to the invisible, swinging back to trace another infinity when again it crashed, harder, into the glass. The bird lay panting. Those eyes were still darting, but now it allowed me to reach down and gentle it up by the ash-soft fantail. Its form was weightless in my cupped left hand. We looked at each other across the eons and then, as I had heard a person should do, I breathed upon its face â&#x20AC;&#x201D; and like that, in a blur, the hummingbird was gone and I stood gazing out on the garden holding a pair of the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most delicate, ravishing feathers... With which I tied a quill-body grizzly-hackle dry, inventing the pattern as I went, those tiny feathers for upright wings and good enough to beguile a winsome mountain brook trout the next time we rode up there through the timber, our horses cropping meadow grass while the current pressed against my thighs and I crouched into its pulse for the release.

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