This is an excerpt from a story I wrote last autumn. As you read this I will be on my second antelope hunt. There has never been a deer emerging cautiously from the forest at last light that I did not love, nor a bull elk bugling in the night that I did not find …
Sagebrush Sorrow
Today my husband and I lost out on a bid for a rental apartment in upper Manhattan. Here, housing is expensive, competition is fierce, and the application process is circular, Byzantine, Kafkaesque. (No offense to Kafka or the Byzantines.) I spent the day on the run: ordering checks, printing documents, making conference calls with brokers …
Younts Peak Teton Wilderness Adventure
Ferry Lake, Teton Wilderness Breathe in. Step. Breathe out. Step. Repeat until I crawl my way to the top of the ridge. Sweat runs down my cheeks and between my breasts. I’m huffing at 9,000 feet altitude as I follow Jane into the Teton Wilderness. Our goal is Younts Peak, which, at 12,156 feet, is …
Three Lessons Taught By Birds
When I was in third grade my teacher assigned our class an essay. The assignment was to write a story about bird migration. She asked us to imagine what it would be like to fly south to Florida for the winter or perhaps cross the Caribbean Sea to the Yucatán Peninsula. Our imaginations might even take …
More-Than-Human in New York
A hot wind cures my face as the L-train roars to a halt. It's ninety-two degrees outside and almost a hundred underground. I inhale, just once, and hold my breath, trying to keep out the saturated stink of urine, and the sort of squalor that produces bedbug pandemics and Medieval diseases. I am a new, reluctant New Yorker, …
Writing the Wild 