Old Maps to the Secrets of this Land

A small collection of flash essays on place

I wanted to share with you some of the work coming out of the Journey in Place course. I have been gripped by it. Place is proving to be a thing mysterious and vast, wild and beautiful, fecund, sinewy, sinuous. The human relationship with place is complicated by layers of feeling—longing, anger, nostalgia, gratitude, love, and so much more. Place holds all this. I’m more clear than ever of the bonds—invisible though they are—that tie us so powerfully and seemingly permanently to our places.

Here are excerpts from writings that folks have shared. I am grateful for these stories.

(The title above comes from Caroline’s lovely piece.)

Sue,

Fifteen Years and Counting...

Cascade Range, southern Washington State

The place I belong to is a one-mile by one-mile square of sorts, bordered by two graveled roads. It’s part of a rural area that is 15 miles outside of a small village that has no traffic lights. My elevation is 2400 feet--a gradual climb in the foothills of the Cascade Range of southern Washington State that I refer to as "30 minutes from everywhere." 

I abandoned a career and suburban lifestyle to move here, to change my lifestyle after living in urban and suburban settings for 50 years. My friends called it my mid-life crisis--I agreed 100%. I was 50 and my crisis was a life of discontent, boredom, and a brewing hopelessness. I had a vision of living closer to nature, a return to four distinct seasons, a connection to the small village down the hill, and days spent outside.

I was widowed unexpectedly, in one night, in my second year here. My grief was complicated and at times profound. City friends urged me to move back to the city -to come home--I couldn’t possibly live here by myself. But it was too late; my heart was now part of this place and it had laid claim to me.

It could be the towering Douglas firs, who offer some protection from this region’s infamous winds. It might be the ravens who fly over and greet me with a loud caw as I work in my garden. Or the arrival of the swallows, who cause me to stop and look up to watch them eat on the fly. My relationship with the gawky and prolific elderberry shrubs is key to my winter wellness, wildcrafting their spring flowers and late summer berries for remedies. Those not-native-but-always-welcome wild turkeys that migrate each day from my neighbors on the left, through my front yard to my neighbors on the right, and then back, sometimes make me flinch at their seemingly unkind pecking behavior. And the light! The 14 hours of light of the northern spring, the hot intense overhead sun of the summer that forces me into the garden at dawn, and my favorite, the diffused low light of autumn highlight the pasture dying grasses. 

Mule

Clarksdale, Mississippi

His daddy bought this land in the forties and it was a grocery store when the road was lined with houses, as a matter of fact there used to be three grocery stores on this road, but now you can count the houses on one hand. The land takes it from there. He has cropland restoration project woods, otherwise trees only grow where the land is too poor or it is too much trouble to tear them down to try and farm. Still, the deer and great blue heron and snow geese and all of the familiar kinds of woodland creatures are here. Quail are down the road. Hawks abound, little falcons. He plants his summer garden only after they’ve stopped spraying dicamba. Coffeeweed, pigweed, amaranth. Gin trash gardens. Buckshot dirt. Still, oyster mushrooms and lion’s mane, and crappie and catfish in the pond. Still, the sky is big and the moon and stars are brighter and the sunsets and the quiet and the neighbors. Sister Corita Kent says find a place you trust and then try trusting it for awhile.

Monica Miller

Macon, piedmont of Georgia

I live amidst sprawl, in a two-bedroom, two-bath apartment with what the management company generously calls a “deck,” in a pre-fab apartment complex on the other side of the interstate from Kroger, Walmart, and Macon’s AMC movie theater. My daily walks allow me to see the hidden ecosystem that surrounds and survives despite all of the human activity. 

My walks take me on the sidewalk on one side of Zebulon, past the Chevron and auto parts store, to where the sidewalk ends at the “Jesus Saves” sign that marks the entrance to the Rock Springs Church, thrift store, and mission. There’s a drainage ditch there where the first butterflies appear each spring among the rocky grass.

I cross the street at the light and walk down the sidewalk on the opposite side of the road, past a couple of abandoned houses to where the trees begin. Pear trees, privet, and wisteria are prominent among the tall pines. I walk to where a chain stretches across a sort of entrance to the woods. I’ve never gone in there–having seen other small glades in the neighborhood where people had set up small camps, I’m afraid of disturbing a place that isn’t mine.

I turn then, retrace my steps, and keep going past the Shell Station, the pizza place, the new liquor store. The storefront by the on-ramp that has sat empty for several years just opened as a used car lot. Beyond that is the overpass, and one of my favorite secret bits of nature. I have come to know the ecosystem at the 475 overpass over the past seven years that I’ve lived here, its changing vegetation over the course of a year. I know early spring when the purple morning glory vines appear. There’s a stand of trees where I’ve seen deer more than once. There’s a gully where a flock of purple vervain grows each spring so brilliantly that I’m often reminded of Alice Walker’s warning that it’s a sin to pass a field of purple flowers without giving thanks.

Joe Wilkins

January 8, 2024 – McMinnville, Oregon

From early on I remember wanting a front porch. The house I grew up in, lived the first nineteen years of my life in, had only a mudroom and off that a cement small landing with three steps leading down, a bootscraper near the front gate and the mouth of the coal bin. In the years after, my few vagabond years, renting houses to share first with friends, then with my beloved, I chose on practicality and affordability, yes, but more truly on the presence and suitability of the front porch, where we sat up evenings drinking wine and sharing cigarettes and talking philosophy and dreaming up who we might become. The first house my beloved and I bought though—now we were making bigger decisions and needed to be economic and practical—lacked a front porch, and I felt the loss deeply. It proved a good house, that Cape Codder in Iowa, but it was not home. 

Where did such a wish come from? 

As a child, I spent countless hours perched backwards on the sofa, studying through the cracked front room window what traffic there was on the lonesome, distant highway, one of only two paved highways in the county, and wishing some car or truck might turn down our dogleg gravel road. Wouldn't that be something! Someone come to visit, or, if the season was right, to buy wool or lambs or eggs or a dozen ears of corn. We lived so far out on the prairie of eastern Montana that we could pull in on a good day only two and half television stations, maybe a few more on the radio, the antenna flagged with tinfoil. Too, out that window I watched finches fuss and scatter over my mother's gardens, moss roses growing over the stones. Perched along the fenceline, meadowlarks opened their tiny, beaked mouths and let loose such music.

Sometimes the far field lay sere with ice and windblown snow, sometimes the irrigation ditch ran lip full with dirty water, the banks green as they'd ever be. Every now and again I spied a coyote or a fox shifting through the dry grass of late summer. Magpies and crows in all weathers. On willow thin limbs antelope rose and ran like the quick waters of a river as sunset stained the Bull Mountains and the Rockies beyond. There was as well a long, dark season I waited at that window, or the one in my grandparent's front room—their house just down the gravel road from us—for my mother on her way back from Billings, where my father lay yellowing and cancer-wracked in his hospital bed. 

I have always, it seems, wanted to get closer. Out from behind the window glass. 

And I can now, here in western Oregon, in this small town nestled up against the foothills of the Coast Range, where I sit on an old metal chair we found at a junktique, sit on our very own front porch, holiday lights yet up and shining against the darkness of these rainy January days. Two great, ancient, fully-crowned western redcedars flank our old farmhouse (bless the souls who perhaps a hundred years ago saw these by then nearly hundred year old trees and decided to let them grow, decided to build their home between them.) The tangles of our front gardens—herbs, natives, showy roses, and a few messy hollyhocks from my grandmother's seeds—lead clear to the sidewalk and Birch Street, which carry the passings of neighbors I know and those I don't, of homeless men angling for the park and drivers on cell phones looking this way and that at the corner. 

This, then, is my place to write, our front porch. And from it I feel opening up to the north and south and to the east, the direction I face, the wet, fecund Willamette Valley, and to the west—always I love to turn my nose west—the Coast Range and the rush and pool of the Nestucca River, our home river, source of our drinking water, as it plunges toward the Pacific. 

This is the place I journey into, the place that owns me now, the upper Willamette Valley, the northern Coast Range of Oregon, the wild, lovely, long-desecrated Nestucca. Here is where I live and write.

Cynthia Adams

Africa

The place I belong to? It has always been Africa. 

From the moment I had the beginnings of awareness of this beautiful Earth, I knew I must have lived here before, at least a thousand years ago…maybe a million? To know in my core that my soul has been around forever and that it began here in the Rift Valley in Tanzania where I now live, is a gift from beyond that I was given at birth. 

I sit here this early morning, just before daybreak, having been awakened by a hammering rain on the metal roof. That was soon overtaken by the predawn chatter of hundreds of birds. The smell of fresh earth after a storm has been my most favourite for as long as I can remember. The intoxicating smell from the white ginger blossoms, spice and vanilla and mystery, mingles with petrichor and wet grass. I could not be happier about my start to this day.

We will head into town later and be caught up in the madness of an African city, full of motorcycles and busses belching their diesel fumes, honking their horns and gesturing wildly for people to get out of the way. Safari vehicles will be pointing out the sites to their guests as they navigate the jumble of humanity and cattle and roadside markets. Vendors weave in and out of standstill traffic, hoping to sell a pair of tennis shoes or sunglasses, or maybe bananas to a captive audience that can’t move forward, stalled on the road for the time being. 

The pulse of this city can be felt on the deepest level. Everyone hustling in hopes of earning enough shillings to put food on the table, but at the same time there's a surrealness to it all, as if playing out in slow motion. Life can feel both timeless and tentative at once. There’s always a feeling of being in a suspended state when experiencing such moments in Africa. Of being so alive every waking second, tapped into the unexplainable and deepest of all connections, the physical location of the origin of humankind.

Brenda Sloan

Barber Creek, Oconee County, Georgia

I call our place Haw Hill. It is our homesite on a hill overlooking Barber Creek. We purchased sixty acres of woodland back in 1982. This area is called Dark Corner because it is the farthest distance from our county seat, therefore the last place where streetlights and county services were made available. When we first moved here, it was truly dark and wild. All of the neighboring properties were either farm pastures or woodland. At the end of this gently sloping hillside is a wide grassy bottomland with an edging of ash and privet along the creek.

I feel intimately involved with the trees and the contour of the land on this hillside. They are my neighbors and greet them eagerly each morning.

Margaret Schmidt

Michigan

I'm sitting here in my camper van, writing in a notebook. I'm camping at Ochlockonee River State Park in Sopchoppy, Fla. This is the first of 6 campgrounds I'll be visiting in the Panhandle and South Georgia. When I'm at a campground, it becomes my home, my place. I walk the trails search for wildlife especially the birds.

By the end of February, I'll return to my little 5-acre farm near Detroit, Michigan. Years ago, we lived a "back to the land lifestyle" but those days are in the past. Our farm, the woods, field, and yard, has become a nature preserve and my "place"--the place I'll write about in the coming year.

I know this farm like the back of my hand. This has been my place for 48 years. I was reading a book and found a Kenn Kauffman quote that basically said, everyone should be able to identify 50 plants and animals in their region. I decided to use this as a challenge. I sat in my blue recliner, my "sit spot" in my office, better known as my Fortress of Solitude and wrote down 50 plants (wildflowers), insects, trees, and mammals, (no birds that would make the challenge too easy) all found through the years on our farm. It took me 20 minutes.

Thomas Tony Paramore

Lake Sinclair, Georgia

As an Army brat, "home" was where the Army sent you. With both parents being from Georgia, family scattered across the state, and living here from 1st to 7th grade I've always said I was from Georgia but not a specific place. Athens has been "home" for two decades but I still consider the area from Athens down the Oconee river, a brief trip up the Little River then back downriver to the coast and then up the intercoastal water way to Savannah as my place. The most powerful place on this stretch for me is the Lake House on Lake Sinclair.

My Great Aunt Margaret bought it in 1959 and it is one of the only places from my childhood that I can still return to. I enjoy the family get togethers, boat rides, cookouts, etc but I enjoy it the most on weekdays when I am there by myself. My power place is the hammock with less boats on the water and less people around nature returns (or maybe it is just easier to notice). The osprey circle calling to each other in a language I recognize but can't understand, blue herons stop for a quick rest on the dock, birds and squirrels eat and play in the trees above me, once a fox even crossed into the yard.

As soon as I arrive my body begins to change it relaxes as I leave the stress and chaos of everyday life behind. I sleep much of the first 24 hours there, recovering from my life and refilling my energy. The longer I am there the more I relax and become my true self.

Michelle Vanstrom

the Niagara River valley

I’m a transplant from western New York—a snowbelt region populated by mixed forests—to a rare Carolinian Forest zone, a deciduous forest that ends across the Niagara River that separates me from Canada. 

The Niagara escarpment, the well-known waterfall six miles upriver, the Niagara River, its gorge, and Lake Ontario create a climate zone more in common with the Upper South. We get don’t shovel snow like the southern tier or even Buffalo.

The Niagara River’s a globally significant bird migration route for neotropicals, for Arctic birds like tundra swans, and elusive snowy owls.

As beautiful as the cascading, green-hued, mineral-rich river is, it’s the trees that own me—the red, black, and white oaks, the shagbark and shell bark hickories, the sweet, white, and yellow birch, the sassafras with its mitten-shaped leaves, the towering tulip tree, paw paws, and hackberry. 

I’ve slowly converted my back-of-the-subdivision yard from cultivated Norway maples and Austrian pines and invasive burning bushes to these specific Carolinian trees with their associate shrubs for the traveling birds I want to see. It’s restorative for me, the birds, and biodiversity.

Leanne Frank

Atlanta, Georgia

Atlanta is my place. It has been since 1976 when I moved here as a young adult. I knew it was home from the first moment I arrived. 

For the past 16 years, my specific place in Atlanta has been an 0.3-acre suburban lot in a modest 1950s neighborhood near Decatur. It sits on the highest point in this hilly neighborhood and I deeply love it. The light up here is beautiful. I can see the sky at night and have a perfect view of sunrise.

My dad was a Baptist minister of music and we moved every 3 or 4 years. More than anything, I wanted to settle in one place and put down roots. It took years for me to break that nomadic habit. 

Within this place I have a sit-spot and a stand-spot. The stand-spot is atop the back hillside on a stone outcropping. In warm weather I stand barefoot and let the energy of the energy recharge me. The sit-spot is in my front yard--a garden bench under an old tulip magnolia. From there, I can look out over the whole neighborhood. 

Welcome to my place. Home.

Don Miller

north-central Illinois

The place that owns me is the Rock River Valley in north-central Illinois. I have stayed put in this region for all of my almost seven decades of life. If the Rock River Valley landscape can be called the body of “my place,” then the Sugar River Valley held with this region would be the heart. The beautiful sinuous Sugar River flows throughout this gorgeous sand country. It is here where five generations of my family have explored and discovered the natural world. My grandfather was the first ranger of the Forest Preserve located there during the 1920s, and I was there in a recent holiday escape with my grandkids to have a winter picnic and fire at the shelterhouse. It is spot where I have many memories and stories. Nature, as does life, flows in circles.

Rebecca Wood

near Elberton, Georgia

i have a power spot on my property. i live on 3 1/2 acres on the edge of a historic town, but i have ancient cedars and oaks on my property . there's a private half acre out behind the barn that has been neglected for decades. i spent the first year having debris piles hauled out and cutting down smilax and tugging it down from the trees. now it's an open spot surrounded by old trees. it feels so wonderful back there. something so heart lifting and freeing. it's like another world, a private world all my own. i can stand right on the power spot in the middle of the clearing and feel the energy.

i live on top of huge veins or granite that run up to elberton, the granite capitol of the world. interspersed in the granite veins are bands of white quartzite, some bearing gold. i can hardly dig a hole without unearthing a fist size clump of crystals in various stages of growth, and i've got a feeling there is a lot of big quartz crystals under my power spot. whatever it is, it is old earth energy that is grounding and peaceful.

Caroline

Desert Southwest

The Southwest owns me. The mountains and desert and pinyon-juniper forest own me. I live in Durango, CO, a nice enough place to live. But it is the surrounding San Juan Mountains, the La Plata Mountains, the pinyon-juniper mesas, the Animas River Basin, and the red rock desert that lap at the edges of this town that are what truly claim my heart.

The mountains, mysterious and inscrutable, solid and majestic, remind me that I, too, am made of stardust. I am called by the desert, dry and expansive. When I’m there, the quiet of the desert presses on me like being under water, even though there is hardly a drop to be had. The scale of my exploration of this place is big because the mountains and desert that surround me are big. This place is vast, wild and beautiful, but humans have been moving in this landscape for millennia. And when I move through this landscape I see and feel reminders of those ancients.

It is a land of great beauty, but it also bears the scars and on-going wounds of colonization and capitalism. I do not know what it will take to fully heal those wounds, but I can do my part as a witness on the land. It calls to me, to my heart, my mind, my breath.

I long to deeply know this region: its plants and animals, its birds and insects, its geology and its cycle of seasons, the impact of fire and water and the movement of people through the land. I want to be on the land and of it. I long to become intimately acquainted with the mountain tops and valleys, the lakes and streams and falls and pools. I want to shelter under the sandstone arches and the red monuments. I want the comfort of the junipers and the pinyons. I want to follow old trails and old maps to the secrets of this land.

M.D. Arnold

Morven

My place moves. I pick at it like a rip that needs mending. It widens. And teases—a memory I’ve inherited. Today it was a warm couch looking out a picture window facing southwest. I felt I was being watched but by eyes a hundred miles away, eyes nearly a hundred years gone. They looked up early one morning, in pain I expect, afraid, and closed for the last time. What did those eyes see, I wonder. And what transpired on the trail from there to here? A town called Morven. It sounds like morbid. A woman named Laura Mae ran that town, or so it seemed. And then, did she run? She came here to my home town, inching closer to coastal pines. Was it the salt air she needed? You can barely smell it from here. I heard it was the turpentine. The only job her man could find. He, too, is nowhere to be found. Somewhere between there and here, I am searching for that rare face I’ve seen only in peeling sepia. And on that trail she followed, the hundred-mile road my grandfather called “over home,” beside the warming fields in early spring—somewhere there is my place.

Frances O’Roark Dowell

Durham, North Carolina

An army brat, I moved seven times before I graduated high school. Now I’ve lived on the same street in Durham, NC, for nearly seventeen years. Almost every morning, I walk from my house at the far southern point of the street to the most northern point (about 2/10ths of a mile) before heading out into the neighborhood. There are seventeen houses on my street, nine on one side, eight on the other. Some of the lots are heavily wooded, others are meticulously groomed. Oaks and pines line the way. Sometimes, when the wind blows through the branches, there's a play of light and shadow on the road that feels a little otherworldly. 

Sometimes when I walk down the street and through the neighborhood in the late fall, the trees turning more skeletal by the day, it can feel like I’ve entered into the setting for a folk tale, a story about children lost in the woods or a village watched over by a trio of crows. It’s hard to explain. I’m still not one for fairy tales or fantasy stories, and yet there are moments where I feel the possibility of enchantment. There’s something about how the light changes in fall and winter, how the air thins and the shadows reconfigure themselves, that puts me in that frame of mind. 

Am I owned by this place? I’m not sure, but after seventeen years of daily walks up and down my street, I feel stitched into it and compelled by it. I feel like I’m a part of it, which is especially nice for someone without geographic roots or a home place that goes back generations.

Tricia Kyzer

Jocassee Gorges, South Carolina

My heart is owned by the Blue Wall, my magnificent piece of the Southern Blue Ridge Mountains. The Jocassee Gorges is my passion, my lover that I am hungry to know every intimate part of. The Mountain Bridge Wilderness is my steady anchor, my strength...where I go to find my center. The rivers are my spirit, my laughter, my tears and my soul-gripping fear. These mountains are where I have ridgelines memorized and where I know exactly how the light falls as it passes over the valleys on a stark winter day. It is where I follow rivers to creeks to springs just to know. It is where I have secret shelters to take refuge in when my heart needs to listen.

The Blue Wall is my heart's home. This is where I feel safest and most alive. This is where I have grown up and hope to grow old. This is where I have found my limits of strength and weakness, my confidences and fear, my place in a world wilder than me. This is the place I come to with my celebrations and losses and all the moments between. The Blue Wall is where I have bared the most intimate parts of myself. If it is possible to have a love affair with the land, I do.

Margaret Shropshire

Atlantic Coastal Scrub

I was a kid, riding in the back seat of a Cadillac headed north on US 1 in Hobe Sound, Florida. Out the open window a scruffy landscape flew by, low, gray-green tangled plant life running up a small rise, broken up by patches of white sand. In my child's eye, it was distinctly not beautiful. Focused on a trip to the beach, I didn't know I was looking at a fast-disappearing and incredibly unique habitat, Florida's Atlantic Coastal Scrub. 

Many years later, I found myself wandering an acre or so of property I'd just bought in Jensen Beach, cataloging what lived there to satisfy my interest in Florida native plants. The site ran a vertical gradient from high sand pine scrub down to what was left of an ephemeral wetland, and contained some patches of scrubby flatwoods, including a stand of big slash pines that had somehow escaped logging. I was pretty impressed with those pines. Nearby, a sparse shrub with bright, elongated leaves demanded attention. I knew I was looking at one of the two species of pawpaws (Asimina) found in Martin County, and it was not the common "dog banana"—this was the 4-petal pawpaw, state and federally listed as endangered. 

I was excited, but also felt an immediate responsibility and a strange bond with this plant, which would change forever how I looked at the Atlantic Coastal Scrub. It led to one of my most treasured friendships, and jump-started a 23-year long volunteer research effort to help the species live on. It also put my feet on the ground in a power spot, Hawk's Bluff, part of the Savannas Preserve State Park. 

Hawk's Bluff is located in the southeastern section of the Savannas in Jensen Beach. It is hill and swale topography—high ancient dunes with brilliant white sands sloping down to wetlands and marshes. These dune-tops are windswept lighting targets splattered with incendiary vegetation—resin-filled sand pines, saw palmetto thickets, quirky low herbaceous plants, and rattlesnakes. 

It smells good in the scrub, a fresh, hot mineral scent from the sun on the blindingly white sand, combined with a unique resinous smell, something like old-fashioned shoe polish. I have yet to figure out what plant or combination of plants creates the shoe polish smell. There are fire-wracked pine snags both standing and downed that have turned into art. There are gray green scrub oaks decorated with twisted yellow tendrils of parasitic love vine. There are ant hills made of bright golden sand flecked with bits of charcoal the ants have brought up from somewhere deep down. There are pawpaws and gopher tortoises. Now that there's been some fire up there to open things up, there are scrub jays on occasion.

Once I dreamed I was standing deep in the night on a high windy place, looking out at a blazing, star-filled sky. And something was looking back at me from out there. It's hard to describe what came next, because whatever was looking went through me like that lighting on top of the dunes, and knocked me flat. The power of it was incredible. I woke up gasping, flat on my back with hands clenched, and my first thought was, "will it change me forever?" 

The answer is yes, absolutely. Your power spot will change you forever it you let it.

Dawn Chorus

The place I live is not MY place. I moved here under duress, kicking and screaming...though silently. My trees are not here. My sky isn't here--the land bumps up. Warmth is not here, nor real sun. In winter, this place looks like a starved dog. Others love this place, and do go on about it. I respect that impulse. But I don't share it.

Leesa Scudder

the Ohio River Valley

Eventually scattered thoughts began to stick to each other and I noticed a connection between many of the places that matter to me. 

It was the river. 

I had listed the river and hiking spots that overlook the river, a local historic ferry, and a river park trail. 

The thread was my Ohio River Valley. 

I see the river on my commute, watch it in flood stage, and I’m sure it affects the local weather. The river shimmers from my childhood living room window. It defines the wooded hillsides I volunteer to help protect. It is ever present just a few blocks away from home. 

Sheila Knell

northern Pennsylvania

I live in a rural county about an hour northeast of Pittsburgh. Our area never recovered from the loss of steel and mining jobs. The rivers have been cleaned up from the environmental degradation but the jobs never returned. There’s poverty and addiction, a sense of stuckness. People here speak with pride when their kids move away. I, too, dreamed of moving away.

But I am here, living on what was my husband’s grandparents’ sheep farm, now a mixed hardwood deciduous woodland. I have a path I walk that is familiar and yet full of magic and new delights. There is a flat spot where I often sit halfway up one of the hills. I have come to love this spot and yearn for more time in this small plot full of slopes and streams, full of deer trails and falling acorns, full of the pulse and pull of parasites and leaping spores.

Time here is paradoxical. Life slows for me and yet the life surrounding me forces an awareness of how quickly a life passes. I lie on my back throughout the seasons and watch hardened tree buds burst into green constellations, gather sunlight and feed trees. Then, a change in the slant of the sun, leaves blaze and then brown, tumble down through a breeze to shield the roots through the freeze of winter. Spring ephemerals bloom and fade. Ferns unfurl to feathers and die off to a golden brown. Berries ripen only to be plucked by birds. Seasons pass, life passes.

Julie Tennis

Naselle River

My anchor is the Creek, specifically the section between the first logging bridge and the high bank that drops a load of sediment into the river every winter. This section, heading downstream, includes the Spawning Beds, the Turn, Coyote Tree Fall, the Pinch, the Brook Lamprey Flats, the Z, Hanging Alder Straits, and the Gallows. My gravel bar is on the downstream side of Crayfish/Beaver Pool, and just up river from the 90-Degree Bend. I sit across and just downstream from Undercut Alder. I often wonder if that’s how I’m going to die, pinned under that tree when it finally succumbs to the gnawing river.

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Journey in Place

If you have been considering joining the course, I wanted to let you know that it’s not too late. We are in the second week of 2024, and I sent out the second Exploration just yesterday. Even if a person wanted to join halfway into the year, the material will be there.

Registration for the year-long course is a paid subscription to this newsletter at any level you choose. A subscription gets you the weekly Explorations plus the paperback book Journey in Place (a collection of the explorations) at the end of the year.

I thank the many people from all over the world who have signed up and begun to explore their places. Thank you for your reflections and your comments. This is something special.

I sincerely thank Thomas Tony Paramore for a generous donation that provided scholarships for the course.

I resume normal programming next week with Trackless Wild. Thank you so very much for being here.