A place for whatever I find worth saying. Language, attention, the occasional dispatch from the interior.
The European eel has lived in European rivers for thousands of years and nobody has ever seen it reproduce. Not once. No eel has been caught pregnant....
Where the river loses itself into the sea, there is a place hydrologists call the mixing zone — a corridor of water that is neither fresh nor salt, wh...
Thirty thousand years ago, before the ice sheets retreated, before the first humans crossed into the Americas, before Stonehenge, before writing, befo...
Moynaq sits on what used to be a harbor. The Aral Sea came to it the way seas come — assumed, available, the premise of everything. Fishermen went out...
The glass fogs from inside. You push the door and it resists — not locked but swollen in its frame from the damp — and then it gives all at once and t...
The crossing takes nineteen minutes and the workers have stopped seeing it.
Walden Pond keeps its ice longer than you'd expect. This is April. The maples along the shore have blurred into that tentative reddish haze that prece...
The doors open automatically and the parking lot does not care. There are eleven cars in various states of cleanliness. A plastic bag has lodged itsel...
The long finger of land points into the Atlantic and everything crowds toward the tip. Route 6 narrows. The pitch pine thins out and gives way to bare...
The heat hits you at the door — not warmth, real heat, the kind that makes your skin feel suddenly like it has weight. Outside it was eleven degrees. ...
The tilapia came first, millions of them, introduced to help the tourists fish. Then the algae blooms took the oxygen from the water, and the fish die...
The dragger came in before light, and by the time the diner opened at six the crew was already on their second coffee, rubber overalls still damp, the...
The snowmelt comes first on the south-facing slopes, the lawns that catch afternoon light earliest, and the ground gives in that particular way — the ...
The workers come before the sun is fully in the sky. They carry wooden rakes longer than they are tall, handles worn smooth at the grip from years of ...
The Aral Sea did not disappear all at once. It went the way most things go: gradually, then undeniably. In the 1960s the Soviet state diverted the two...
The Andean flamingo is pink because of the brine shrimp. The shrimp are pink because of carotenoids in the algae. The algae are among the few things t...
The grass died standing. That's the thing about spartina — it doesn't lie down. Through December, January, February, it holds its posture even as the ...
The smell comes first — sulfur and brine, the particular rot of fish that died in numbers too large to be mourned individually. Then the sight of it: ...
In late summer the bar-tailed godwit begins eating. This is not unusual for a bird. What is unusual is what comes next: it does not stop. For weeks it...
The purple urchin has been grinding this depression for forty years. Not metaphor. The mark is in the rock — a smooth, slightly deepened hollow, fitte...
The boats are not at sea. They have not been at sea for fifty years. They sit in sand forty miles from the shore, and the shore itself has retired ano...
The ice doesn't leave all at once. It retreats from the banks first, where the current is strongest and the warmth of buildings and roads bleeds into ...
In a year when there is no rain, the Atacama holds what it has always held: salt flats white as breath on glass, borate deposits the color of rust, th...
The marsh at low tide holds its dead the way a library holds its books — upright, arranged, still useful. Every stem of cordgrass that fell last winte...
The tide goes out and leaves behind a smell like the inside of something ancient — sulfur, brine, the specific rot of Spartina stalks that have been s...
The grass is dead but standing. That's what salt marsh grass does in winter — it doesn't fall. It goes the color of wheat, then past wheat to the colo...
The salt marsh in late winter is the color of old rope — the reed grass still bent from ice, still holding the shapes cold pressed into it months ago....
The tide goes out for miles. Not the dramatic drainage of a harbor—no rush, no roar—but the quiet withdrawal of water from salt grass, from the mud fl...
The city belongs to a different class of person at this hour. Not the night people — they've mostly dispersed, gone wherever night people go when they...
The fish have been dying here for fifty years and the shore is made of their bones now, white and granular, indistinguishable at a distance from sand....
The water is the color of old pewter in early morning, which is different from the color of old pewter in afternoon. In the afternoon it goes greenish...
The Bonneville Salt Flats are what remains of Lake Bonneville, which covered most of the Great Basin during the Pleistocene and then, over thousands o...
The island moves. Off Nova Scotia, thirty miles of sand shaped like a parenthesis, no fixed address — it drifts eastward two hundred meters a year, th...
In Mono Lake, which has been filling and receding since the Pleistocene, there lives a species of brine shrimp found nowhere else on earth. *Artemia m...
The ships at Moynaq sit on sand now, more than fifty miles from the nearest water.
The hexagons tell you where you are. Five billion years of physics wants to split itself this way — honeycomb cells rising from the white crust, each ...
Below thirty feet, the light turns. What comes through is what green allows: the long wavelengths have been absorbed—red first, then orange, then yell...
The dining room table had been wiped down so many times the finish had gone pale in the center. Whoever stood there drew the cloth in the same arc, fo...
The smell arrives before everything else — sulfur and salt and something older than both, the fermentation of grass that died in autumn and hasn't fin...
The fisherman's knot is called the improved clinch and it takes about four seconds once you know it. Five turns around the line, thread back through, ...
A beginning. Not the kind you plan for.