Orion May / June 2012

AUTHOR CRAIG CHILDS is happiest on the edges of civilization, where amenities, in the traditional sense, are lacking but inspiration abounds. So when writing in this issue of Orion about the possibility of some future disaster, an event that might cause a major disruption to the infrastructure that many of us rely on (think water, electricity, transportation), he is clear-sighted and relatively undaunted. In “Rule of the Phoenix,” an essay on the rise and fall of civilizations, Childs makes a list of what he’d grab while running out the door: headlamp, metal water bottle, fleece hoodie, lighter, a good knife or multitool, good tweezers, bandanas, iodine, parachute cord, raincoat. He calls these items “civilization in a bundle, the things you might have trouble getting your hands on if the bottom…

Bobby Neel Adams was born in Black Mountain, North Carolina. He has received grants and awards from the Aaron Siskind Foundation, LEF Foundation, and the Mac-Dowell Colony. His photographs have been exhibited worldwide. Caren Alpert’s photographs have appeared in Condé Nast Traveler, the New York Times, San Francisco Magazine, and other publications. She teaches editorial photography at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. Wendell Berry’s New Collected Poems is just out from Counterpoint Press. A new story collection, A Place in Time, will be published later this year. He lives in Kentucky. Craig Childs lives in western Colorado. He has written several acclaimed books on nature, science, and wilderness travel. His next book, Apocalyptic Planet: Field Guide to the Everending Earth, will be published in October by Random…

As a retired military member and former environmental scientist, I enjoyed Don Lyman’s description of his return to Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia (“The Place Where You Live,” January/February 2012). Few people realize how important military training lands can be to wildlife, much of it protected by fences erected years ago that continue to keep out development. The U.S. Department of Defense now manages almost 30 million acres, including everything from longleaf pine in the Southeast to Pacific coastal sage and chaparral. These areas provide habitat for over four hundred listed species — about the same number of species found on Forest Service lands. The Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, for example, is one of the largest remaining longleaf pine habitats in the Southeast, home to red-cockaded woodpeckers, gopher…

Linda Hogan’s article “Snow” (March/April 2011) and Sy Montgomery’s essay “Deep Intellect” (November/December 2011) were selected for the anthology Best Spiritual Writing 2013. Edith Pearlman’s story “Honeydew” (September/October 2011) was selected for Best American Short Stories 2012. Following its success in the wake of the Occupy Wall Street movement, Christopher Ketcham’s article “The Reign of the One Percenters” (November/December 2011) is republished in the March/April issue of Utne Reader. And Sy Montgomery’s essay “Deep Intellect” was reprinted in Hebrew in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. As part of the Berkshire Festival of Women Writers in March, Orion cohosted a reading with food magazine Gastronomica in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and hosted a reading by poets Jessica Greenbaum, Elizabeth Bradfield, Cecily Parks, and Amy Dryansky in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in April. Also in March,…

Priscilla Kinter Hexenkopf Hill, Pennsylvania HEXENKOPF, the witch’s head. Mountain summit in Northampton County. Peak elevation: 791 feet. Isolated prominence on a ridge of South Mountain. Home. The ghost of a headless hunter, the ghosts of witches, and strange lights have been seen here. Strange sounds come from the woods. The stone that makes up Hexenkopf Rock is embedded with tiny flecks of mica, reflective scales that once covered the rock’s entire surface. The mica has largely eroded away, but during the various times when the densely wooded hill was clearcut by owners trying to squeeze an income from their rocky property, the mica would mirror the moon and glow white in the night. Morgan le Fay could easily have lived in the brambly woods covering Hexenkopf, fingertips sparking. When…

ALDO LEOPOLD was a righteous man — in a midwestern sort of way. When it came to nature, he disapproved of “tinkerings,” as when domestic species are substituted for wild ones, and he advised against “readjustments” of the land’s circulatory system. In fact, he insisted calmly, the land should be appraised not as a commodity but as a living community that commands our respect because it is the source of both human culture and human freedom. To narrate the message, the father of wildlife conservation took us to his own beloved plot of land on an abandoned farm in Sand County. Which, as all good students of Leopold know, is really Sauk County, but his larger literary and geological point was that west-central Wisconsin is essentially a sandbox, and that…