Here, you’ll find unfortunately true tales of an accidental naturalist’s misadventures in the wild, as well as shorter, inspirational reflections of nature
The stonemasons of Northern Europe in the 13th century built vaults 100 to 150 feet high without having to calculate the stresses, as modern engineers would. They did this by putting the skeleton of the cathedral on the outside by using flying buttresses. The next seminal development in the erection of tall buildings didn’t occur […]
Hiking a muddy, horse trail through Elk Rock State Park in south central Iowa, taking switchbacks as the riverine forest nuzzled the low bluffs rimming Lake Red Rock, which is just the Des Moines River pinched fat by a reservoir damn. Through patches of oak saplings, I stumbled on a leviathan elm with a trunk […]
Hiking through tall grass prairies on a rain-soaked day, I spied two giant trees in the middle of the American moor, one cottonwood and one maple, standing six stories tall on an else-wise arborless hill. I leaned against the cottonwood for a long time, hugging its circumferences in an attempt to a get a grip […]
It’s a sodden September Sunday afternoon along Lake Michigan and the sky casts its great and impassive face in funereal hues of pallid pewter. No one would walk the woods in this rain. No one’s ever in these woods anyway. I could never figure that out: We live in the grasp of this tentacular metropolitan […]
End of November. I battle the inner and outer solitude I encounter in this conurbation of nine million Chicagoans. I call no one. No one calls me. Loneliness seems my night job. I work out at the gym to battle the isolation.
At the health club, I allow the spaceship bank of big screen TV’s to […]
Funny how serendipity works. Of course serendipity works funny, or else it wouldn’t be serendipity. It would be just regular dipity, or destiny, and regular destiny isn’t as much fun as serendipity.
This morning, the morning after Christmas, and a Sunday to boot, I woke up late. When you have Christmas on a Saturday, it feels […]
Like a great old tree, it takes the sun a long time to die. I drove down I-40 west to Amarillo. I supposed the December sun set about 4:30 or so here in Oklahoma, but I didn’t lose light until about 6:30. To the north, the edge of night overtook me as I struggled to […]
Driving through Iowa, the bough of a great elm, standing above the rest, snagged my eye. What a magnificent specimen. Of the over 3 trillion trees on earth, many are taller or wider or older than this elm, and they’re never seen by human eyes. Does this rob them of their magnificence?
I reflected on all […]
I’m in a Michigan forest. I’m thinking about all the burdens I carry around. I decide to make a stone out of each one and carry their heaviness in a backpack. I empty gear out of my pack. I take a five-pound rock, and stuff it in. This one’s my romance. Another one: I have […]
Downtown Chicago. I wandered through a mélange of tall steel and cold glass, with racing taxis drowning the wide streets, past a sprawling federal plaza ringed by anti-terror truck barriers. I struggled against a stream of a half-million commuters. I despaired of ever finding natural things here. But on the edge of the heartless granite […]