Spring Grove

By Eugene Navakas: 

Winter:

Three mute swans live in this cemetery. We hear one before we see it. It flings itself forward against a stiff, stubborn sheet of surface ice, so fiercely, so indefatigably, that we wonder whether we should help. This is common winter behavior, our phones tell us, not to worry, but the force is so brutal and compulsive, the breast so soft and undefended, that we struggle to believe them. The swan’s face is unreadable. It makes no vocal sound. We’ve seen it in strange postures before⎯once, standing on the steps of a grand mausoleum, gazing into the tomb through a bronze veil of Arts-and-Crafts grape leaves, as if contemplating the past and future and all the world’s lost things⎯but it is, after all, an animal. There is a limit to our ability, however much we may refine it, to understand what it wants.

What we can do is walk. Every Saturday, for twelve months, with our boots we trace trails across 450 acres of hilly parkland devoted to the peculiar mix of feral nature and steady human memorialization. We aren’t the only ones. There are long, snaking funeral corteges for which we respectfully step aside and sometimes halt, arrested by a driving, rhythmic rumble leaking through the windows of a hatchback at the rear. There are joggers, whooshing past in suspended clouds of breath, cheeks flush with wind and cold and the heightened fluency of pounding, reliable hearts. There are even guided tours, groups of five or ten around a single, heavily bundled figure. Sharp mitten-dartings punctuate her recitation, before a familiarly grand mausoleum, about the Canteloupe King within. He grew rich, she says, by using refrigerated rail cars to ship Colorado melons nationwide.

Spring:

In March we turn and gasp at a great blue heron, portent of the coming profusion. It freezes at the lip of a pond, amid sunning turtles, and so do we. The turtles are red-eared sliders, the most popular pet turtles in the United States. They are also among the most damaging invasive species, outcompeting native turtles at great expense to ecosystem biodiversity and even human health, in the form of salmonella infection. The heron is a juvenile, more gently shaded than its maturer counterparts. Instead of blacks and whites, here suffuse more smoky blues and grays, fading as they extend from wing and impossibly sinuous neck to a long spearpoint of orange-bellied beak. The bird stares back at us, sidelong, from the black pit at the center of its banana-bright eye, then flaps up and out over green water⎯gliding, mouth open wide with seeming glee, until resettling, safer, on the far shore. The Eastern Redbuds show early signs of flower, but they’re barely intimations of the riotous, purple future.

Our asphalt path leads straight to May, beneath skies deep as ocean and the soaring, white-hulled wings of turkey vultures. Each branch, now, is fragrant color, sweet with bees. The Higan Cherries weep tears so cream they’re pink, so pink they’re cream, moody and intense as dreams. Around one bend, the stones themselves sprout flowers. Arcing, vibrant, lush cascades of custom, deeply felt bouquets⎯GRAMMY; a can of energy drink; a three-foot baseball; the wreathed photo-print of an ultrasound⎯dazzle gray- and red-granite monuments like stars. Thistles carved in sharp relief peek out behind the floral burst, below all-capped Scottish surnames. Each year, come Memorial Day, Scottish Travelers return to these stones, this parkland cemetery, to mourn and cherish their dead. If you search the digital record, you’ll find a contemptible archive of fear and bigotry, exoticized misunderstanding. An online business magazine tries to link the changing scope and luxury of the annual display to its own broad economic forecast. But if, for a moment, you breathe in the display yourself; if you pause, at respectful distance, on the trip back toward the sliders and the Weeping Cherries; you may feel a sharper, more familiar pang⎯something living, something lost.

Summer:

Summer is a season for the ears. What better place than a graveyard for hungry, roused life to fly shrieking from the ground? Here, specifically, over half a billion Brood X cicadas⎯roughly 1.5 million per acre⎯burrowed into the soil as fresh-hatched nymphs in 2004. For seventeen years, they fed on roots and tree sap less than a foot below the surface, until last week they tunneled up and out. The males broke through first, shedding skins and rapidly contracting tymbals, the clicking reverberators that, in chorus, sync into a jangly, hissing call loud as a motorcycle engine. The females heard that call, and now they’re everywhere. Pavement, grass, bushes, trees. Your car, your hair. Even the chocolate shop uptown, if you’re game for a crunch and can brave a mid-pandemic crowd. Their eyes are ladybugs, glossy red buttons with faint black spots for holes. Or at least that’s what we think their eyes are, until, much later, magnified, we spot the other three. Onscreen, inset like jewels on an igneous plain between submerged red moons, hides a tiny triangular trio. They’re called “ocelli,” simple eyes, and as far as we can see, they distinguish light from dark.

It’s funny how the greenest days, air thick with water, hot with sound, can also feel so full of death. In two short months, the cicadas will have come and gone, their seventeen-year regeneration restarted, today’s lively bodies in stacks like rotting blankets, warming future generations beneath the dirt. One of the most spectacular structures in these half-shorn, half-wild hills is a private Gothic Revival funerary monument built in 1870 in the style of Paris’s medieval Sainte-Chapelle. Its first interment was the English whiskey magnate whose fortune paid for its construction, as well as the transfer of his remains to marble catacombs eight years after initial burial in parts no longer known. On the second floor, above the crypts, sleeps a tall and narrow chapel twelve feet wide but thirty deep and thirty-four high⎯an austere, long-suffering space we’ll likely never see. While even on sweltering, swarming summer afternoons, the exterior remains a popular stage for professional photography, the heavy doors stay locked, the wrought-iron gates chained. Brides and grooms and Instagram influencers grin wide before the retreating flying buttresses of a family in disrepair. Just three Brood-X life-cycles after the building’s birth, the magnate’s granddaughter tried, and failed, to have it razed.

Fall:

It’s not hidden, but it takes a little looking to find the graves of Levi and Catherine Coffin, unmarked until 1902, when a memorial was erected in personal tribute by the city of Cincinnati’s Black population. During the forty-one years from their marriage to the end of the Civil War, the Coffins aided 3,000 enslaved people as they risked their lives in search of freedom. The Coffins’ home in Fountain City, Indiana became known as the Grand Central Station of the Underground Railroad. Levi himself was often called its President. The landmark we use to return to this quiet, shattering spot⎯just seven miles north of the Ohio River and the Mason-Dixon, the old, antebellum border⎯beckons only a few paces away. A fat, trunk-like branch radiates out like a sine wave from the base of a squat tree. It skims briefly above the trimmed, leaf-pocked grass, then dives, submerged, before again swooping back up. So much of Autumn feels between. Leaves turning, half-glorious, half-gone.

Our air comes quick, our tendons groan, as we lean ahead into the circuit’s final stretch. The trees buoy us⎯great oaks and beeches; sycamores; maples; a prodigious, solitary September elm, a national champion⎯as if a god would compete. Pixelated crests of red and orange, green and yellow, each shade just slightly tilted off of true, draw up our eyes to the spotlit, golden-hour sunbursts of hunting hawks. Closer to our feet, a labored scurry. A groundhog galumphs through underbrush and disappears. A frog’s twin bulbs peep up like periscopes above a dollhouse sea, then quickly dive and vanish. Around a corner, flustered scrabbling from a bewildered flock of spindle-legged turkeys, surprised from their leisure beneath the awning of a portable funeral tent. A mermaid rises from a harp atop a bed of kelp and conch and a guardian ring of dolphins. Louisa Lawson fished her out from marble in 1887. Now she decorates the tomb of the world’s once-largest manufacturer of architectural sheet metal. In the end, however, we return to the swans⎯which today, though on opposite sides, all share the same turbid, algal pool. There’s a kind of paradox to writing through the seasons. A temptation to squeeze shape from a cycle that never stops. We turn away and keep walking.

***

Eugene Navakas is a lit. Ph.D. turned TV writer who splits time between Oxford, Ohio and Los Angeles, California. His 2020 crime drama pilot script GALAPAGOS, TEXAS was recognized on Kyle's List here, and his dramedy pilot script EXPECTATIONS won the 2016 UCLA Extension TV Pilot Writing Competition. He also updated and co-performed a 19th-c. folk song about coral, which was featured on a podcast hosted by the Newberry Library in conjunction with his wife's academic environmental research here.

Americana – A trilogy by Shannon Finck

AMERICANA

Pulling strands of hair from my eyes,
I lose my dog down the beach
after gulls.

I watch her until she mottles
the rocks, small plants, 
hazy things.

My dad taught me to play the guitar
with America songs.
America songs are all I know.

Yet, here I am on the coast of California,
and America is just the horse 
with no name I rode in on.

I love this dog, who is 
always running away from me—
a sandy flightless freebird.

I’m writing a poem about you,
I yell to her—the speck of her,
the blur of her, her feet on the wing.

Later, at the foot of the bed,
in a dog dream,
she runs in place.

*

INVASIVE SPECIES

Despicable featherless bipeds, we roost 
under a threadbare sheet, 
tarred together by behind-knee sweat.
Spliffed, suntanned, we count 
each long day left of July, 
spending it, getting lucky
in a Pasadena pool house—
its owner, a slammer of screendoors, 
host to transcendental meditation parties
attended in pitch dark.
You say you saw David Lynch. 
I believe you. It’s pitch dark
as lakes in La Brea.
We squawk through the night— 
in the morning, the parrots talk to us.
The stalwart dachshund howls
at flowers by the mailboxes that, too, have mouths.
Something is said about the noise. 

I thought my bones were hollow
and yours were adamantium— 
a marvel, such mass—
but when we careen 
up HWY 1 in the superbloom,
you scream into sunlight,
and I find I have taken root
in the cane cholla with the 
trashed star map.

*

APPULSE

The robin has flung full
pectus and ventrum
into the window thrice.
It stands on the porch rail
not stunned, determined,
yellow legs like stalks of foxtail barley
swaying with the Diablos
as if made of wildfire. 

It will try again—
the avian arrhythmia
in its sunset breast,
wills the glass to give.
I want to think I know
what unknowable magnetism
causes it to see and not see
and move anyway.
But a bird’s heart
is its own ambit.

When your elbow
bumps the window
where you sit close,
I search the ground for red feathers,
for the body wrenched
like a stiff pocketknife.
It was only me, you say, standing—
only me, clumsy—
and I pitch into your arms, exhaling dryly
into the ridges and canyons,
the firebreaks of your ribcage.
The sky opens, and I fly.

***
Shannon Finck is a lecturer of English at Georgia State University. She earned her Ph.D. in transatlantic modernism with a secondary emphasis in global postmodern and contemporary literatures in 2014. She also holds an M.F.A. in creative nonfiction and narrative poetry from Georgia College (GCSU) in Flannery O’Connor’s hometown of Milledgeville, GA. Her critical and creative work appear in such journals as ASAP/J, Angelaki, Miranda, a/b: Autobiography Studies, LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, The Journal of Modern Literature, SWWIM, Willawaw, Lammergeier, The Florida Review, and FUGUE. She currently serves as Poetry Editor for the independent literary quarterly, Birdcoat, and is Co-Founder of Ghost Peach Press.

Seeing the River

By Nicholas Crane Moore: 

The first river I loved was the Truckee, which my family floated every summer for years. It spilled gently out of Lake Tahoe, clear and cold in the heat of August. From my uncle’s raft, much was visible to astound a little boy. I could see tiny pebbles on the bottom through four feet of water. And small fish, brown and rainbow trout, flitting in and out of the raft’s slowly moving shadow. I could see my feet, magnified somehow by the water as they dangled in the river. But there was much that I could not see. 

The river, then, was nothing more than a highway of water coursing through the mountains. It was just a current towing us across a summer afternoon. It was a feeling. A sensation of sun and water splashing on bare skin. A memory of joy with cousins. It was not yet the centerpiece of a watershed, a catchment for runoff and debris. It was not yet a reflection of the environmental conditions around it.

Even as a child, the presence of a road alongside portions of the river seemed strange, somehow out of place, though I was unaware that oil and particles of car exhaust make their way into the water. Or that the paved roadway increases erosion by transforming rainfall and snowmelt into fast flowing sheets. There was a road, and there was a river. They were separate things. The influence of humans on our habitat was not yet something I understood.

Sometimes I miss those days, when I knew less about the harm we inflict on the natural world. Sometimes I wish I did not know, for instance, that the EPA classifies the upper Truckee as impaired based on sediment volumes that degrade aquatic habitat, largely a result of development in the watershed. That the river’s endemic fish, the Lahontan cutthroat trout, survives today in only a small remnant of its former range is something I have wished I could forget.

As an environmental lawyer, it is part of my job to know, and to learn. I have had to acquire a great deal of information that is painful for one who loves nature to bear. Knowledge is power, indeed, but it can come at a cost. Of this price the naturalist Aldo Leopold wrote, “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.” One lived alone because others, he sensed, did not share his understanding of what he called the land organism; ecology in the late 1940s was a burgeoning, niche field. That is no longer the case, but there is an enduring truth to the notion that most of us are not equipped to discern the subtle evidence of a compromised landscape. Quite simply, as Leopold wrote, “Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen.”

In many ways, the modern world is not arranged to promote a deeper understanding of human effects on the environment. Our economic system depends on a certain level of obliviousness to the byproducts of consumption. Businesses in the Lake Tahoe region, for instance, find it in their most immediate interest to speak of the lake and its outlet river solely in terms of their stunning clarity and hue, their restorative qualities. The EPA’s qualms about sediment do not find their way into the brochures of ski resorts and boat rental outfits. Given basin waters are safe for swimming and drinking, I cannot really blame them. It would detract from the tourists’ experience—and perhaps the amount they are willing to spend—to learn that in escaping the grime of Los Angeles or San Francisco they have fled not to some pristine vestige of Eden, but to a beautiful place in which human habitation has similarly altered, to a lesser but still significant degree, the delicate balance of life. To know that one is contributing to that disruption, however insubstantially, would presumably dampen the vacation mood, if only for a moment. I know at times it has for me.

One of life’s challenges, I have found, is accepting that we have hurt someone we love. There can be an instinct to look away, to deny, to assume that everything is fine. But I have learned the hard way that it is only through seeing the pain, understanding its causes, and acknowledging our role that we can begin to heal the wound. I think the same is true of the landscapes we explore and inhabit, which are as infinitely complex, and as sensitive, as any person.

Judging by trends in social media, advertising, and travel, it is a common desire today to find a connection with the natural world. If one is to develop a meaningful relationship with a mountain, or a valley, or a river, I believe it is imperative to engage with that place by learning more about it. Not only about the way it works, the way its dynamic balance is achieved (which can be immensely satisfying), but about the ways in which it has been degraded, and made susceptible to further harm (which can be sobering). By doing this one can begin to love a place in an active, real sense—not in the way we say we love a TV show or a restaurant, but in the way we love a friend. Because protecting ourselves from knowledge of the damage we have caused does not protect either the people or the places that we love. It only leaves them vulnerable.

This is not to say that every road near a river should be torn up, or that it’s reasonable to demand utter purity from every water body. Humankind cannot live on this earth—not in anywhere remotely close to the quality of life and health that we now enjoy—without substantial impacts on its lands and waters. But I think we should at least know what those impacts are. We should understand the trade-offs. Laws like the federal National Environmental Policy Act and its state equivalents, which require disclosure and analysis of the environmental consequences of an array of public and private endeavors, embody this goal. If nothing else, they are triumphs of transparency in an opaque, often sugarcoated world. Combined with the amplifying power of the internet, each of us now has at our fingertips more information than Aldo Leopold could have ever imagined. One need not live alone.

Though my visits to the Truckee are rarer now, they still fill me with wonder. The rich blue of the deep pools, the grace of water as it slides over boulders, the pull of the current coaxing my body downstream—phenomena that can be explained in a scientific sense—evoke a mystery that no amount of scrutiny can dissolve. When I swim in that clear, cold water, I am still a little boy. And yet the river is more to me now than it once was, layered over with learning and meaning. It has become a reminder to look for what is not easily seen, and to accept whatever I find. I love the river more than ever.

***

Nicholas Crane Moore is a writer and public interest environmental attorney in Anchorage, Alaska. His writing on the environment has appeared in Edge Effects magazine, the Revelator, Environs, the Daily Journal, and the Daily Californian.

Out of Place No.01: ‘Housekeeping’ by Marilynne Robinson

Out of Place is an irregular series about movement and place, and the novels that take us elsewhere, by regular contributor Anna Evans. 

It is better to have nothing': Transience in Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

It had never occurred to me that words, too, must be salvaged, though when I thought about it, it seemed obvious. It was absurd to think that things were held in place, are held in place, by a web of words.

Housekeeping, the first novel by Marilynne Robinson, published in 1980, is a book that is strongly resonant of place. It is a book with themes of transience and ideas about the meaning of home, even if that home is found elsewhere. Rooted in nature, it is also deeply human. It is a striking and singular book, full of beautiful imagery, written with a philosophical lyricism. When I first read it, I felt that it existed on its own plane, somehow. 

In the book, Sylvie, described as a transient and drifter, returns to her childhood town to look after her orphaned nieces. It is partly a coming-of-age story, about separation, memory, and loss. It begins with a train derailment, and the haunting image of a train disappearing into the lake. The train lies lost and submerged, hidden in its depths, becoming a legend in the town of Fingerbone, a story which also foreshadows the lives of its characters.

Housekeeping was highly acclaimed on publication, to the surprise of its author. In an interview with Thomas Schaub, Robinson remarks that when writing the book, she felt its style went against the tide of contemporary literature, and of what might be considered publishable: ‘part of what I was doing was trying to write a book that I would want to read, just to see what one would look like.’

It is a book that has language at its centre, and that uses language and metaphor to take us elsewhere. In the Schaub interview, Robinson talks about her interest in the idea that lived experience is something that transcends spoken, everyday language, and that people are more than what they say. In the book, Robinson uses metaphor to explore ideas through the thoughts of her narrator, Ruthie. She says that what interested her in writing was ‘in trying to be beyond my own grasp or outside my own expectations.’ 

The idea behind this series is partly to consider what it is about literature that seems particularly displacing, and what novels can tell us about being in the world. As Robinson puts it: ‘Art in a sense is recurring at the frontier of understanding because it integrates the problems of experience and the ordering of experience.’

In the book, dreams appear as real as memories, and the line between them is blurred: ‘I have never distinguished readily between thinking and dreaming. I know my life would be much different if I could ever say, This I have learned from my senses, while that I have merely imagined.’ 

The fictional town of Fingerbone is based on Sandpoint in northern Idaho, which is situated on a vast lake, Lake Pend Oreille, between three mountain ranges and surrounded by National Forests. A long railroad bridge crosses the lake, as in the book, ‘from any distance its length and the vastness of the lake made it seem fragile and attenuated.’ The Northern Pacific Railroad built a depot at Sandpoint in 1882 opening a trade route for timber and freight trains, and the railroads played an important role in the arrival of settlers into this remote part of North Idaho. Amtrak’s long distance Empire Builder train route, which travels between Chicago and Portland or Seattle, stops at Sandpoint. 

Landscape plays a central role in the story, and is based on the place Robinson grew up, a part of the country where her family had lived for a long time. She describes the early parts of the book as ‘either memories from my childhood in some oblique form or stories from my family.’ Robinson’s all-female cast of characters are significant. When writing the book, she was aware of an imaginative lack and misrepresentations in stories and accounts of the American west, including the absence of women from these portrayals.  

Throughout, the book enacts a tension between transience and settlement, and between movement and stasis. Sylvie likes to watch the passing trains, and all the stories she tells are about boxcars and train or bus stations. She retains her transient habits, preferring food that can be eaten on the move, and the only place she will shop is the five and dime store.  She keeps her clothes in a cardboard box under the bed, and sleeps on top of the covers, fully clothed and with her shoes on. The book plays with the figure of the hobo, and with depictions of female drifters and migrant workers. For Sylvie, the trains represent a home that is always on the move, and through which pass the lives of many people, the invisible transient souls who claim a space within its wagons.

Sylvie’s drifting seems to arise partly as a response to Fingerbone’s isolation and instability. It is dominated by the lake that surrounds and threatens to overwhelm the physical spaces of the town. In Fingerbone, even the wind is watery. Each year the lake freezes over, and then thaws dramatically. Its houses seem like insecure and fragile dwellings, and there is recurring imagery of fallen houses, lost to the weight of snow and ice, and of houses adrift or unmoored: ‘a good foundation was worse than useless. A house should have a compass and a keel.’ 

Water imagery and metaphors of flooding and drifting recur throughout its pages. This connects to the idea of transience: ‘our lives floated as weightless, intangible, immiscible, and inseparable as reflections in water.’ The word ‘transient’ comes from the Latin transiens which means ‘to cross’, and this crossing of boundaries, the seeping and infiltration of water, is everywhere in the book. The lake is a constant presence reaching deep into their imaginations, infringing the boundaries between land and water.  

Robinson writes: ‘Below is always the accumulated past, which vanishes but does not vanish, which perishes and remains.’ We are used to hearing about the movement of people as streams, flows, and floods. In the book, the lake becomes a container for the lost: ‘all those who were never found and never missed, who were uncommemorated’.  

Fingerbone is described as insignificant and negligible, melting into the darkness, as if glimpsed from the window of a moving train. The town’s residents feel unsettled by the presence of the transients who arrive with the railroad, or from the mountains, who are found by the shores of the lake, and in the forests. They are described as ghosts, wandering through Fingerbone, ‘like people in old photographs’, ‘the nameless’ and ‘the dispossessed’. Their presence threatens the stability of the town, its claim to be a tenable and rooted place, and implies a recognition, of something too close for comfort. Robinson writes that, ‘a diaspora threatened always,’ and the book creates a space for the displaced and unknown who haunt its edges. 

Throughout the book, there is a tension between domestic life and drifting. Sylvie struggles with the feeling of being contained within a house, and her housekeeping begins to overlap the boundaries between inside and outside: ‘Sylvie in a house was more or less like a mermaid in a ship’s cabin. She preferred it sunk in the very element it was meant to exclude.’ She opens the windows and turns out the lights, and every evening they have dinner in darkness, with the sounds of the night outside. Leaves begin to gather in the corners of the room. Crickets and squirrels begin to reside in the house, sparrows and swallows begin to nest in the attic. 

The book traces the narrator Ruthie’s thought process as she tries to come to terms with what makes her feel different from others. She describes feeling invisible, like a ghost: ‘It seemed to me that I made no impact on the world, and that in exchange I was privileged to watch it unawares.’ She experiences the absence of her mother, her sense of loss, as a constant waiting and expectation, so that ‘the ordinary demanded unblinking attention.’ The book’s characters feel an intense quiet awareness and stillness: When we did not move or speak, there was no proof we were there at all.’

Ruthie begins to find a greater awareness of fragility, of instability and impermanence. To stay still in the book, is to be caught up in the ordered time of the domestic. It can be a way to hold the past at a distance and keep out the ghosts of those who are absent or lost. For Ruthie and Sylvie, these fragments of memory threaten to overwhelm the present, and a life of drifting become a way of comprehending the ghosts of the past, of keeping them alive through movement. 

Becoming transient is to reach an awareness of the unsheltered, the nameless, the lonely; those who drift outside the lighted windows of the houses. Ruthie begins to feel that she is ‘breaking the tethers of need, one by one’, moving further from the comforts of the settled world, in which the sense of security, of permanence is an illusion: ‘It is better to have nothing, for at last even our bones will fall. It is better to have nothing.’

In Housekeeping, the idea recurs that families should not be broken: ‘That’s how it is with family, Sylvie said. You feel them the most when they’re gone.’ As I write this, I have been thinking about the separation of families in a more recent context, about migration and detention; about children caught up in war and conflict. Long journeys across impossible spaces; the events that cause people to become separated, to become lost. 

I’ve been thinking about the Sylvie who exists in me, my own restlessness and tendency to drift. And about the problems with a romanticized impression of life on the road or rails. But the invocation of this book, that families cannot be broken, brings back the idea of displacement. The book makes its transients central, rather than leaving them on the edges of things. 

Housekeeping portrays a longing for movement that is also a deep awareness, that registers the presence of those who have vanished; the unrecorded lives of those who left few traces behind. Perhaps a troubled line runs between these kinds of longing, and the small gratitude of having safety and security, somewhere to hide away, when needed, and to sleep in peace. 

Housekeeping depicts a different way of living in the world and evokes a belonging that can exist outside ideas of home as being rooted in one place. The book questions the notion of a stable past, a version of home that is not available to everyone. It is about the insecurity at the heart of living, of finding meaning and a place to be, within movement.

***

Anna Evans is a writer from Huddersfield who lives in Cambridge, with interests in place, memory, literature, migration, and travel. She enjoys writing about landscape – nature, cities, and all the places in-between. You can read more about Anna and her work on her website The Street Walks In. You can find more of Anna’s contributions to Elsewhere here.

Paper Ghosts

By Anna Evans:

By the water’s edge, the monument to the immigrant, looking back at the city, looking out across the wide and muddy river. Situated at the point of arrival, the old port of New Orleans, marking the point of embarkation, the journey’s end and the start of crossings and travels, hopes and dreams. A two-sided statue, a decorated figure, like those carved on a ship’s prow looks out to the water; an immigrant family look towards the city. The crescent city lies at a bend in the Mississippi River. A city haunted by its migrants, by their comings and goings, the history of these streets and those who walked them.

I remember our arrival. Crossing the Lake Pontchartrain causeway and losing sight of land, as if the train travels an endless bridge to nowhere. New Orleans is a surprise to me, a last-minute change to our plans, an unexpected part of our trip. And like the surrounding Louisiana swampland, it is like a new language, one I had never learned but feel I should know already. 

We have travelled 1300 miles across the land, thirty hours, half in sleep and half in daydream, and it is as if our souls lag behind. From our arrival at sunset, darkness quickly descends to shroud the streets in mystery. We are hushed and excited on arrival, caught in a tangle of new places and new impressions that makes this place feel curiously flat and enclosed, and we wonder what it will look like when daylight comes.

In the morning the sun is caught behind deep overcast skies, waiting to break through. We spend hours mesmerized in the pattern of the streets and the architecture of the old French Quarter. The city of music leads a dance in circles. The vibrant buildings with their elegant shutters, iron porticoes and ornamented balconies, the graceful sweep of the trees above. There are wooden verandahs and carved iron railings, with intricate patterns that take the solidity of iron and give it a careful fragility. 

In the square a group of musicians assemble, playing of impossible dreams, laying their heads beneath the stars of a thousand nights in a hundred different places, drawn to New Orleans from far and wide. Sleeping under the stars and dreaming of boxcars, of all the miles that went before. Something about this place grips and calls them back, the struggle and the sadness. City of roamers, the restless, or those who never had a home. The place to settle if you don’t wish to settle. 

Out on the street the rain comes again as we walk, at a distance from each other so that you are crossing the road while I am standing still staring fitfully, as if the answer could lie in these elegant streets of the French quarter. The rain descends, gallops down from the sky, and we watch from a corner of the street, sheltered by balconies and trees. The skies have darkened, and the rain still comes. For a moment we walk through and it soaks our clothes, water grows in puddles across the streets. The balconies and verandahs make a passageway through and we continue our walk entranced by the rain. Reflected in the pavements, in pools and rippled water forming, are the shadows of the pillars that are everywhere. A place of shadows, the rain brings out the shadows.

The rain in New Orleans. Hurricane season. Rainbow flags and cocktails, and dancing, sprawling tourists, visitors to New Orleans’ spirit of intoxication. Some with a hand on their money, others unguarded, out on the lookout for reckless times. And those elongated souls who look as if they had spent a day too many street wheeling, freewheeling, they forgot where they came from and where they were going.

The French Quarter is like a film set framed in black and white with the tension of a thriller. The restless fans and fire escapes, in all those old detective movies where the private investigator sits late at night in his office, nursing a whisky tumbler. 

We widen and lengthen our walks to the outlying districts, long streets of bright-coloured wooden houses, each one different from the next. It is slow progress as we stop to look at every house, on the way to Frenchmen Street, where the sun has broken through cloud, and shines powerfully through the heat and skies cast over. 

Next to the painted elegance of the dark turquoise green and white house, dark red doors, with its balcony under the sweeping shade of the tree; is a tiny pink house, with a small pointed roof and large windows and doors, green and purple shutters, its steps and iron railings besieged by trailing plants, ivy-covered like something from a story. 

There are pillars with overhanging roofs and lanterns, steps out onto the street. We walk the pavements through trees and plants, depth and shade, and flowers pink and red. Looking down the tree lined street, pillars next to the trees, and shutters purple and green, blue and white, yellow in the streets beyond the French quarter, in Marigny and Bywater. A play of light and shade, shade and light. 

The streets make a poem to the transient. Trees in flower everywhere and hanging baskets with ferns or lanterns decorate the houses, each one taking on new colours and depth, a beautiful façade of permanence claimed back at night by shadow, the deep shadow of darkness that covers the streets when night falls, changing them back. 

Here the pavement is brick and uneven, the roots of the tree below the surface, deep cracks in the road. I always knew the earth was moving but here is the proof spread large. Living on borrowed time, borrowed land, propelled by its legends – the new and the ancient exist side by side - as if this city reveals its faults and its truths like the deep cracks in the road. Life is uncertainty, the roving spirit says it best. The feeling that life is closer here, that it is right at hand, to be lived; the tenuous and unsettled feeling, the one that doesn’t put down roots, or none too deep. For the roots of trees lie just below the surface and erode the stone above as they spread outwards, upwards; as if they might uproot themselves and walk away.

I want to piece it together, to work out if I belong here. So, the saying goes, the legend tells, the city will let you know if you were meant to stay, meant to leave. And I want to be the one the city welcomes, but I know also that there is something here that unsettles, that displaces me deep down.

Under the bridges, the tent cities remain. New Orleans evokes this sense of wandering – for those who choose it, those who don’t. In the faces of those who pace back and forth, day and night, up and down, for a dime, a dollar, a nickel, in the patient, hunted faces of those who lost everything, those who never had it, those who go looking.  

They make paper monuments now to honour all those who were forgotten, unrecorded. You can find them at street corners, down by the water, if you’re looking. From where we cross by boat, to Algiers, on a deserted ferry, to deserted streets between the heavy showers of rain. Heat-steeped, sleepy Algiers, where we trail around, looking for something we never find. 

New Orleans wears its history in layers, like the paper ghosts standing on corners. The city haunted by the spectres of all those who passed through. I float through the map, tracing the streets as I go. I can only write the poem of a stranger to this city, another visitor entering its spell, city of illusion, of powerful emotion. New Orleans you keep on returning to me, keep calling me back. I walk along your streets in shadow. 

I walk along your streets in shadow, watching the changing light, remembering how darkness falls like a cloak, changing the streets, calling them back. 

***

Anna Evans is a writer from Huddersfield in the north of England, currently living in Cambridge. Her interests are in migration and literature, cities and movement, and she has completed an MA in ‘Writing the Modern World’ at the University of East Anglia. She is currently working on a project on place in Jean Rhys’s early novels, and you can follow her progress through her blog, And The Street Walks In.

The Quarantined Photographer

By Stuart J. DuBreuil:

Nature is impersonal, awe-inspiring, elegant, eternal. It's geometrically perfect. It's tiny and gigantic. You can travel far to be in a beautiful natural setting, or you can observe it in your backyard...
– Gretchen Rubin

My time in Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks was inspirational. The abundance of wildlife, in their own unique habitat, far exceeded this photographer’s expectations. Now, like most of us, for the last several weeks I’ve been in self quarantine with my wife at our townhouse in the west end of Richmond, Virginia.

So, what’s an amateur wildlife photographer to do? I found that while I couldn’t venture out to find the animals, they kindly came to me. Or rather, I discovered that they had always been around, but that I just hadn’t seen them. Isolation has taught me to slow down and observe my surroundings. As it turns out, the backyards, front lawns, and surrounding grounds and airspace in the neighborhood is teeming with wildlife. 

We have a bird feeder on a pole in our backyard, just beyond our deck. We fill it with black oil sunflower seeds, approved by the National Audubon Society – you know, the good stuff, that the birds love. It attracts cardinals, robins, finches, sparrows and other birds I haven’t identified yet. It also attracts squirrels and chipmunks, who can’t get to the feeder directly because we have a conical guard on the pole that prevents them from climbing up.  But the birds are generous. While they are feasting at the feeder they also flick out seeds onto the grass and deck so other creatures can share in the banquet. 

I witness this activity daily from inside the house, behind the sliding glass doors that lead to our deck. I will peer through the vertical blinds so I won’t frighten off the wildlife, and then take my photos through the glass door. Recently, I’ve found that I can walk out onto the deck, and if I walk slowly with no sudden motion, I can photograph the creatures without scaring them off. 

My next door neighbor, Scott, is also a keen observer of wildlife. He is working from home, but seems to have plenty of time to look out the window and spot interesting things going on. He will text my phone to let me know when he sees something that I may want to photograph. He told me about the  robin’s nest under his roof gutter, nestled on top of the curved section of the down spout. I was able to get some shots of the mother robin feeding worms to her baby chick. 

He also texted me about two other baby birds that were on his back lawn. One managed to fly up onto the brick wall that divides our yards. I carefully followed this tiny creature’s journey as he plopped down onto our deck and walked across towards the other side of our yard. I was outside, taking lots of photos, until he disappeared into heavy foliage. I spotted him squeeze through a small hole in the wooden fence leading to my other neighbor’s yard. Looking over the fence, I could see him meet up with a larger bird, who I assumed was his mother. I’m not sure what type of birds they were, but it was rewarding to see the reunion.

This is only a sampling of the drama that plays out daily in our yards. Sometimes it is life or death. I once saw one of the neighborhood cats on top of the brick dividing wall staring intensely at something on the other side of my deck. There was a chipmunk backed up into the corner against my house and the other neighbor’s brick dividing wall. Suddenly the cat pounced, and in the blink of an eye he had that chipmunk trapped in his jaws. He hesitated for a second and then bounded straight up the brick wall, prey in mouth, and was gone. 

By far the most amazing spot by my neighbor, Scott, was outside his front door steps. He texted me to look outside at his front steps railing. There, perched on the black wrought iron railing, I saw a magnificent hawk. It must have been 15 to 18 inches long including the long gray and black striped tail. I had never seen one like it before. I later identified it as an adult Cooper’s Hawk, with it’s reddish-orange barred chest and legs and gray back feathers. The head was capped black, and the eyes were bright red. I grabbed my camera and starting snapping away, hoping he wouldn’t fly off too soon.

Turns out he was not skittish at all, like the backyard feeder birds. In fact, it looked like he was poising for me. With his extremely flexible neck, he moved his head to see in any and all directions, while keeping his body perfectly still. He looked left, right, up, down, and behind and down so the head disappeared completely!  When he got bored with that, he flew off the railing onto my front lawn, startling me, so I stepped backwards. From there he pranced across the grass like a runway model, as I snapped away, hardly believing my good fortune. Then in an instant, he flew off.

My neighbor and I would also scan the skies for large birds flying by, like the Turkey Vulture or Blue Heron. Capturing birds in flight with the camera can be challenging, but I’m getting better at it with practice. Scott noticed that a Blue Heron flies over our houses twice a day, in the morning and in late afternoon, going and coming from somewhere close. I’ve been able to get a few good photos of the bird passing overhead. 

The life and death struggles of wildlife can remind me of what’s going on outside our little oasis. My wife and I are among the lucky ones. We’re healthy, retired senior citizens and we’ve so far been able to escape the harsh reality of getting sick, like so many others all around us. Just a few blocks down the road is an elder rehab center that has lost over 50 people due to the COVID-19 virus. We try not to forget them, nor the brave medical professionals who care for patients every day while putting themselves at great risk. Quarantine time has given me the chance to slow down, observe, and reflect on what’s important in life; and for that I am grateful.

***

Website for Stuart DuBreuil and Yoko Gushi

The Puffin Watcher

By Christina Riley:

In the early hours of a midsummer morning before any other eyelashes began to flicker open, I rolled onto the cool side of the pillow and felt the warm air shift beneath the covers. Not in my city bed, not even in my city; I awoke on a fold down mattress in the middle of a seaside hotel room in Cannon Beach, Oregon. Or, almost seaside. Nestled between the road and the ocean it stood just far enough from the water on one end for the cars on the other to drown out the waves.

The days were busy and my mind chose to mirror them, leaving the usually fierce ocean struggling to get a word in edgeways; today I’d let it speak first.

There was no time for a shower or contacts and it was considerably too early for coffee – those are all markers for the start of the day and that wasn’t quite what this was. This was a secret window, hidden somewhere between night and day, swaying between them in a haze of slumber still lifting. In a jetlagged dreamstate I picked up the clothes that had been laid out across the arm of the couch the night before and layered up the best I could using the contents of a summer holiday suitcase. The sandals sat by the front door were slipped on and I tiptoed out into the west coast air.

Holding down the handle to silence the click, I closed the cabin door and snuck across the courtyard, through a narrow path that hugged the last house in the square. It was signposted for the beach not with words, but with a knee high spout over a metal grate for any returning sandy feet, and beyond a quiet street led the way with pastel porches and the drifting smell of seaweed.

Darkness had passed but it’d be wrong to call it daybreak. The night didn’t snap open and pour the sun over the town. It was more of a day bending, a soft thawing as the last shadows of twilight warmed and melted over the rising sun like butter into the sea.

Upon reaching the end of the street, the air felt freer and swam between the tall thin grass of the dunes and through my hair like an otter. Moving from tarmac to sand with my sandals in hand I took the biggest breath of the morning so far, and whispered good morning to the waves. 

The sand felt cold and a heavy mist was still hovering above the horizon, desaturating a sky not quite as eager to roll back the covers as I was. The whole beach sounded distant somehow, as if it courteously turned down its own volume so as not to wake anyone.

Along the shore the high tide line presented an array of treasures just as on the west coast of Scotland, though its offerings here were notably different; fragments of sun bleached sand dollars, frosted sea glass and one slight white feather, translucent, a whisper diffusing morning light like breath on a cold day and defying gravity in my hand; tracing its spine I couldn’t be sure I was touching it at all. Pristine and unweathered by westerly winds and waters, I imagined it ruffling free from the round belly of a gull. Further down the beach a garden tiger moth splayed flat on its furry chest, shining bittersweetly orange and smooth cream in its sandy resting place. A little further still, a small bird lay neatly on its back with wings by its side, head tilted up towards the houses and black webbed feet pointed towards the sea. Side by side along the beach, they could have been sunbathing.

Up ahead the imposing Haystack Rock shot up through earth, sand, sea and fog, towering over the beach like a mountain peak piercing through the clouds; a reminder to breakable bodies that something much bigger is happening. Initially a dark mass to my tired eyes, one by one its crevices revealed themselves with each bird that fluttered out from its sheltered nook or circled back in from the sky, disappearing into the basalt.

Moving closer to the rock my eyes traced higher and higher as if the stone continued to rise up from the ground before me, until eventually, something invited my gaze back down the horizon.

Drawing nearer, the low mist between us dissipated to reveal a man. Sitting on a camp chair in the middle of the beach he faced the rock purposely, the sand beneath his seat still holding residual puddles from the retreating tide. Unconsciously slowing my stride I watched him; the only other soul I’d seen so far without wings.

Within moments he raised his arms and a pair of binoculars were brought to his eyes, fixed on something at the very top of the sea stack.

He lowered the binoculars, though not his gaze.

After a few minutes of my own hushed observation (and quick weighing of shy trepidation against eager curiosity) I decided to approach him, feeling intensely that I would regret it later if I didn’t.

Conscious not to disturb what looked like a perfectly peaceful morning I approached slowly, rolling over the wet sand to mute my squelching, and all too late became a little concerned that my careful act of consideration could be made redundant by giving him a heart attack. Fortunately he noticed me from the corner of his eye and rested into the back of his chair as I stopped alongside him, letting my feet sink into the ground and deciding to stay. He tilted his head towards me just an inch and squinting up to the bright white sky behind my head, raised the corners of his mouth like they were attached with little strings. Welcoming, almost as if expecting, the company he said “Good morning” with such sincerity in the word ‘good’ I saw it float towards me and make the salty air between us glow a little warmer. 

Glancing at the binoculars resting on his lap, both hands still readily placed upon them, I asked what he was looking for. “Puffins”, he told me.

I listened intently as he gestured to the impressive 235ft shard of volcanic rock and explained that it’s home to around 120 tufted puffins; he was recording their numbers for a local conservation group. 

Puffins! Up there! I’d never been near a single puffin in all my life and here above me perch 120 of them. 

“They’re actually doing quite well this year”, he reported proudly, comparing his findings to other years, other hopeful mornings, he’d spent monitoring the bright billed characters from his camp chair on the edge of the sea. Together we froze the space around us, spellbound — he with the puffins and I with him. I stood in awe with the sheer simplicity of it all. Of all the options presented to us every time the sun rises, of all the ways we’re told to spend the fleeting hours, productivity and progress and escape and repeat, this is what he chose. To think how much we could do if we just sat still and looked closely once in a while. 

With my mind fluttering I wished him good day and good luck, and turned back towards the house just as the sky finally decided to draw back the curtains, letting the light spill through windows and dance on eyelids all along the shorefront. 

Looking down at the sand I searched for feathers and wondered if I could find any plumage belonging to one of the tufted puffins. Holding my feather from earlier I brought up an identification website on my phone to figure out who it belonged to, selecting ‘White’ and confidently clicking ‘Next’. But is it a primary feather or a secondary feather? Juvenile or adult? I’m not sure, after all it was on the ground (and the bird was nowhere to be seen to ask). I put it back in my pocket where it remained as a gull’s beaming underbelly.

Holding down the handle I crept back into the still silent house and thought of birds for the rest of the day. I thought about the gulls overhead, dazzling white against the velvety grey sky, swirling through the last of the mist to dust off the morning. I thought of feather patterns and of everything I don’t know, of everything I can’t see above and beneath the water’s surface. I thought of how much more there is. 

When I could no longer hear the waves the words of the puffin watcher replayed in my head, and when I was out of sight of the rock I closed my eyes and saw the auks above a gleaming silver sea. 

120 puffins. 

He’d counted 20 so far.

***

Christina Riley is an artist and writer based in Glasgow. She is currently working on her debut collection of essays, At Tidelines, which was long listed for Canongate's Nan Shepherd Prize for Nature Writing 2019, and has created artwork for The Frayed Atlantic Edge (David Gange, Harper Collins), Gold Flake Paint, Lagom and The London Reader. In 2019 Riley began The Nature Library, a reference library and reading space installed in public places across Scotland. 
Website

The Low Country

Photo: Andrew Weidman

By Bridgett Brunea:

The Low Country of coastal South Carolina and Georgia in the eastern United States carries an unmistakable slow charge. It is a place I know as a sun-filled haven when my more northerly home is dusted in snow. Many times have I slipped through the outstretched hand of winter and driven for hours into this story-laden place where time winds itself into a warm, quiet sigh. I sojourn here not only to remember the feeling of sun, but for the sense of otherworldliness that flowers quietly the closer I get to the Low Country. It is a tiny universe unto itself, utterly unlike anywhere else I know. 

I think of the Low Country and I think of hot red-dirt roads plunged into a cool line of live oaks; of coastal forests spun with endless waves of Spanish moss and the heavy scent of sea air; of snowy egrets standing in warm December sun, plunging their sharp beaks into still waters to catch unsuspecting fish; of cooking fresh shrimp in a tin pot on the edge of a saltwater marsh as twilight colors the air; of little tin-shack gas stations in the middle of nowhere, their owners inexplicably encased behind a window of security bars; of boiled peanut stands strung along the edges of slow, lonely highways between Savannah and Charleston; of talking to black Southerners and wondering if they constantly wear the weight of a history not of their choosing; of huge wooden churches forgotten in warm, silent forests; of deep-blue skies in the middle of the winter, charging my sun-starved Northern soul.

It is a relief beyond all else to arrive in the Low Country and see that distinctiveness is alive and well in the United States. We are a country unfortunately infamous for our ability to transform unique landscapes into characterless duplicates. One need only visit the suburbs of a large city or any number of desiccated small towns to see what the power of unchecked profit-driven growth can do. We are a country often shamed by our history, and so we shun it, and old buildings and old customs and old landscapes are thrown out and everything must be new, new, new. We are also a people who have been raised on the myth that familiarity and convenience are to be prized above all else, with the disquieting result that whether you are in South Texas or Eastern New York or Central California you can find many stretches of concrete wasteland that look disturbingly similar. Stunning landscapes and unique cultures are there, but they are often hidden beneath a plastic veneer.

The Low Country is no different; it is not a haven set far away from the impingement of runaway capitalism. And yet it effuses an inescapable uniqueness, not because of being untouched by this crushing sameness, but in spite of it. The Low Country was the first place to show me that uniqueness often persists just outside our field of vision.

Though many of the wealthier communities in the Low Country have managed to avoid the devastation of strip-malls and 6-lane roads through the middle of town, most of these parts of South Carolina and Georgia are, in fact, uniquely drowning in the afflictions of unwise city planning and unbridled development. They are often prime examples of the very worst of such development, with not only McDonalds and Wal-Marts filling the car-choked streets, but all sorts of unimaginable Southern takes on fast-food and cheap buys also lining up for their bite out of peoples' pockets. The affect can be dizzying in its ugliness.

And yet - here is the crux of it - and yet it is still beautiful, it is still distinct, it is a place thoroughly itself. People still talk differently here, little idioms and turns of phrase that leave a Northerner like me baffled and smiling; the tall, stalking shorebirds and the quick lizards and the huge, breathy flowers will all tell you you're in a place distinctly its own; the saltwater marshes still mix with the ocean and fill with her waters at high tide; you cannot miss the genuinely slower pace, the shockingly different view of the Civil War, the quizzical looks you receive when you ask if the blue crabs they're about to boil are still alive; no number of phony-looking "Southern Style" housing developments can shake the drenching experience of walking through a neighborhood of shotgun shacks or through a live-oak avenue of antebellum mansions.

No matter how much a place is overrun with attempts at uniformity, commercialization, or purposeful forgetting of complicated histories, there are some things that can't just be coopted, can't be charged for, can't be erased. For this knowledge, I am forever grateful to the imperfect, saturating beauty of the Low Country.

About the author:
Bridgett Brunea is a writer, naturalist, and rambler originally from the northernmost reaches of Appalachia in the eastern United States. In writing and in life, she seeks to experience and convey the luminous meeting point between inner and outer landscapes. She is creating an online journal of observations, meditations, and questions (terrasanctum.world) which she hopes to make available in 2019.