“The thing we find the most of in Puget Sound is artificial vanilla,” he says, scooping water into a cube-shaped collapsible bottle.

Keil is an associate professor in the Keil Lab of Aquatic Organic Geochemistry at the University of Washington’s School of Oceanography. What he’s demonstrating is a water-testing kit developed by the lab’s new nonprofit effort, SoundCitizen. The group aims to build a citizen-based water-sampling network for Puget Sound. Its inaugural project, Environmental Spices, offers water-sampling kits online at soundcitizen.org. Designed for individuals or school groups, the kits include a few test strips, a sample bottle, and a postage-paid mailing label. Participants use the strips to test basic water qualities, like pH levels, before collecting water samples to send back to the lab along with a GPS location. The Aquatic Organic Geochemistry Lab analyzes the sample for spices, industrial chemicals, and perfumes, and posts the results online. Researchers can identify more than two hundred commonly found chemical compounds including caffeine, cooking spices, and additives used in cigarettes and household cleaners.

The program is already popular, with more than seven hundred kits distributed and lots of coverage in regional media.

“We’ve kind of become a holiday favorite,” Keil says. SoundCitizen can literally track the holidays by what shows up in the Sound. After Thanksgiving and Christmas, the water is laced with thyme and vanilla, re-entering the sound via water treatment plants. After Valentine’s Day, an excess of ethyl vanilla—used in making chocolate—turns up. The Puget Sound Indians had a saying extolling the region’s abundance of shellfish: “When the tide is out, the table is set.” It seems that when the tide comes in, the table is set again—with leftovers.

It’s all in good fun, but the program has a more serious side, too. On many fronts, Puget Sound is threatened. Seattle’s industrial history, from paper pulp mills to Boeing, has left a legacy of point-source pollution. Agricultural chemicals and leaky septic systems sully the water; storm water runoff from rampant development pours household pollutants into the mix. Pharmaceuticals and artificial hormones, which aren’t removed by water treatment processes, are also turning up in water supplies. So why not test the water for toxic things, instead of harmless cinnamon-latte runoff?

According to Keil, harmlessness—and humor—is exactly the point. SoundCitizen discourages people from using the testing kits to support water quality activism. That’s not because they’re unconcerned about water quality. Much of their research tracks emerging pollutants such as lilial and muskonate, fragrance additives that can become toxic in large quantities. But their main goal is education.

“We’re always telling kids, ‘everything you do is bad,’” Keil says. “We take kids out and talk to them about the environment and they think one of two things. They think: ‘People older than me have screwed up the environment.’ Or they think: ‘Everything is bad—I don’t even want to think about this.’” SoundCitizen wants to avoid that. Their kits provide a way of demonstrating the connection between people and the watershed without being a total bummer.

“I don’t mind if people laugh at us,” Keil declares, water sample in hand. “I don’t mind if kids laugh about vanilla pee or the guys in the bar laugh about whales getting Viagra. They’ve understood the concept of connection when they didn’t before.”

Knowing that I was also studying geology, Tom pointed me immediately to Angle of Repose and, subsequently, the biography of Bernard DeVoto, and then all the rest of it: enough books, it seemed, to last a lifetime. A book a year is a modest and sustainable quota for a writer, and even more modest for a practical and committed reader; would not anything more, on the reader’s part, be classified as stalking?

This was one of the things that most impressed me about Stegner, beyond the obvious vibrancy of his voice, and the specificity of his observations, and the confidence he exhibited with pace and tone: the fact that he was accomplished and artistic in both the broad and relatively gentle waters of nonfiction and the turbulent mountain-rivers of fiction. And though I was not an intellectual, I respected and admired the fact that he so clearly was one, and at a time when there was not necessarily an overwhelming degree of respect for such a temperament. Such integrity of spirit—the calm and resolute insistence upon being one’s self, under any conditions—seemed to me, and still does, to be one of the definitions of courage—the low-level step-by-step progression through the cumulative days, avoiding, at every turn, any possible shortcuts whatsoever.

Certainly, there have been writers who have worked with greater lyricism, word-for-word and sentence-for-sentence—who have produced more fluid and varied sounds from the language, and more vibrant imagery, and more intricate story turns—but Stegner’s particular genius, I think, was at the cultural and even spiritual intersection of geology and geography—in the shape of things at the surface, and the contrast, then, with what might lie below. Consider such geomorphology in “Coda: Wilderness Letter,” not just the emplacement of some of the elements we might view as requisite in “nature” writing (“The earth was full of animals—field mice, ground squirrels, weasels, ferrets, badgers, coyotes, burrowing owls, snakes”), but in his grounding of the reader within a space—a spaciousness—and thereby setting the boundaries for the story, the essay. A mapmaker, always:

The sky in that country came clear down to the ground on every side, and it was full of great weathers, and clouds, and winds, and hawks. I hope I learned something from knowing intimately the creatures of the earth; I hope I learned something from looking a long way, from looking up, from being much alone. A prairie like that, one big enough to carry the eye clear to the sinking, rounding horizon, can be as lonely and grand and simple in its forms as the sea.

Time and again, his work includes landscape, and the connection between humans and that landscape, celebrating the far and relatively untouched, unmanipulated backcountry—the pristine benchmark of American wilderness—while also understanding and celebrating no less those frontcountry farms and ranches across which humankind had been spilling, the intersection of history and landscape.

TODAY THE WIND is howling, here in Montana’s Yaak Valley, bending the still-green marsh grass almost flat, swirling it like long locks of flowing hair. It’s the Fourth of July, and I just don’t feel like driving down into town and being around so many people. Instead, I’m delighted to be enmeshed in the steady, cool forest-wind and occasional birdsong of the newly hatched birds: tiny chatters of sora rails, as if laughing at a joke told among themselves. No one else for half-a-hundred miles is what it feels like, and it is almost true. Skipping the parade to work.

And doing so—laboring on this essay not so much about what Wallace Stegner means to me, but what I think he means to the country, in all his various personas—award-winning novelist and essayist; environmental activist and spokesperson for the seminal concept in the American conservation movement, the preservation of wilderness; and founder of the powerhouse creative writing program at Stanford University—I find that I’ve come without any subtle run-up or introduction straight to the heart of the question, Why do any of us do what we do?

I can’t imagine that the desire for acclaim was the sole or even primary fuel for such sustained and varied excellence, for surely such thirst would eventually have been slaked or muted. Instead, he kept on going, to the point where his life, in so many ways, seems almost like a parody of success. And then, as everyone must, he left, while the residue of where-he-was and what-he-did remains.

For a while some of us who looked to him for guidance in environmental matters fretted after he was gone. We were worried he would be forgotten by the next generation, and never known by the one after that. In the first years after his death in 1993, we watched and waited—keepers of the flame. It seemed that we could begin to see his legacy spilling through the cracks and draining away, and it was a fear that was sharpened by the old story or perception—dare I say myth?—that even in life, Stegner was, if not ignored, underread and underappreciated, particularly by readers and reviewers in the urban East.

Maybe he was. But perched here at the centennial of his birth, looking back before leaning into the deeper waters of the next hundred years, maybe not. There’s little doubt that he felt that way, and that we-his-fans felt it; but the truth is he somehow managed to sell 570,000 copies of Angle of Repose alone. It seems plausible to me that one day that number will be a million. If that’s obscurity and underrepresentation, I know more than a few writers who would be thrilled with being so overlooked.

To haul off and exit the stage with a Pulitzer as well as a National Book Award, to have taught at the greatest universities in the world, helping raise such an astounding intergenerational crop of writers (Evan Connell, Robert Stone, Larry McMurtry, James Houston, to name only a very few), to have served in Camelot, working in the Kennedy administration on, among other things, early drafts of the Wilderness Act, which would subsequently protect 3 percent of the American landmass—well, looking back, I think almost anyone would have to call it a good day’s work.

In Philip Fradkin’s biography of Stegner, Wallace Stegner and the American West, there is an excerpt of Jack Miles’s review, from the Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, of Angle of Repose. The review deals in part with the habitual East-versus-West straw man by which Stegner and his work were so often discussed in his lifetime. Miles wrote of the “rough spirit” of the West that shaped Stegner, who “first fled it, then served it and turned . . . [it] into his art.” He spoke of “a Stegnerian habit of saving what we can from the Western wreckage.” He said, of Stegner, “[he] was calmly putting things together when I believed, instinctively, that what strong writers did was tear things apart.”

This is what great literature does: acknowledges loss, either through the lamentation of what has come and gone, or even the celebration of what-was, or what-is, or what-will-be: assembling stories of meaning and intensity from the absence of some things, or the presence of the wrong things, or the eventual going away of good things. Loss or impermanence is to me the foundation of it all, and the manner in which artists deal with that condition is what makes all the difference.

And in the case of Stegner’s beloved natural world, there was very much over the course of his life a net loss going on. What he did in the face of that knowledge—trying to hold on to what he found valuable, and trying to help put back together that which was broken—seems courageous and heroic, seems easily a value one could live one’s life by; and a good life, a meaningful life, at that.

WITH SO MANY BOOKS by Stegner, and such varied books, it really doesn’t matter where a reader begins, or in what order he or she reads the books. Part of the beauty of the mass and density and quality of Stegner’s bibliography is that it’s like a planet; you can land on it anywhere and begin making immediate discoveries. I recall branching off in several directions—The Big Rock Candy Mountain, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, the famed Wilderness Letter, etc.—becoming more and more impressed by the range of his talent and depth of his passion, as well as his constant commitment to excellence, sentence by dignified sentence. But these days, when I allow myself the indulgence of thinking of Stegner as the mortal man rather than the literary artist, Crossing to Safety is the book that intrigues and impresses me the most, for no other reason than that he wrote it not as a young or middle-aged man, but instead as a bona fide old man. I think that with regard to improving with age, Stegner accomplished at least as much with Crossing to Safety as Hemingway did with The Old Man and the Sea. I find that thrilling. I feel guilty for reading the text with such an awareness intruding upon a purer textual appreciation of the book, but I can’t help it.

I know nothing, or next-to-nothing, about the circumstances in Stegner’s life while he worked on this book, which is set in New England rather than the mountain West of which he was so accustomed to providing fluent descriptions—this in itself makes it a bravura performance, an old writer working in a new land, new from a literary standpoint, at least. And although the facts of his life would certainly be interesting, I don’t see how they can be any more so than the emotional map I have already constructed in my own imagination for how he approached that novel, so late in life, and with so much acclaim already behind him, and with every passion and power he had ever known—and there had been so many—in rapid flight from him now.

And yet something in him—something not darkly or crassly ambitious, but instead, something noble, some commitment to what in olden times was called the Muse—still burned and challenged him, tempted him to throw away his infirmities or diminishments and pursue one more time, one last time, the glory of excellence, and the intoxicating, transformative rewards of novel writing: the glory of an almost impossible challenge well met, and exceeded.

By that age he would have known precisely how difficult, how exhausting, the journey would be, and how easy it would be to fail, and how great the risk of failure—the capping of a great career with the humiliation of mediocrity rather than the ascendancy of further triumph. But he set out on the journey anyway. As if his desire and belief in the importance of the sustained creation of another, better-made world was for him the rootstock of all the other values for which he is so well known.

All the other things were important, too: the reasoned, passionate, intelligent articulation in his essays, the necessary political gruntwork of showing up and speaking out, and, as a teacher, the passing on of beliefs, techniques, values, and general knowledge to future generations; but I love that further into the second half of his life, he returned to the novel, and that he produced a great one—that he was fortunate enough to have one more story he wanted to tell.

STEGNER-THE-MAN could get angry easily, evidently. There were numerous dust-ups with reviewers, students, and fellow writers, which are instructive I think to we-the-living for the utter uninterestingness they possess, once the all-important present has so rapidly become the past. What I find fascinating is how the different extremes respected him—the “assemblers,” like Ivan Doig and Wendell Berry, who were concerned with reformation and social betterment, and the hip, like Ken Kesey, the deep spirits, like Terry Tempest Williams, and the laconic and hyperintelligent, like Tom McGuane. The sacred and the profane were deeply influenced by him alike.

Which brings me back to this idea of tearing down or building up: I think this may be the grand theory of unification, how the faces of respectability, such as Tillie Olsen and Scott Turow—the latter who helped endow the writing center that bears Stegner’s name—and the faces of gleeful disrespectability, such as Edward Abbey and Gary Snyder, have coalesced in different ways around Stegner’s teachings and legacy. They have all, I think, been interested in trying to put things back together, or hold things together, whenever they picked up a pen.

I simply don’t have Stegner’s drive, and, gratefully, I don’t have whatever inner wounds drove him so hard. Within the triumvirate of writing, activism, and family, I find myself trying to balance those first two things, particularly, with the other work, and with what seems to me these days to be equally important: sitting quietly, doing nothing at all. Why is that, and did he ever feel that temptation? The world certainly was no more unsettled, no more revolutionary, then than now.

I JUST GOT UP and went out to pull some weeds, to take a break from essay writing, and was struck by a couple of thoughts: one being that at this time of year, I prefer picking weeds to writing an essay, and the other being a deep mental exhaustion when I try to consider how in the world Stegner got all the stuff done that he did.

There is a feeling I get sometimes, here in midlife, when I am moved by a moment of perceived if not actual clarity. In those moments, it seems that with any of my enthusiasms, much less my obsessions, I am venturing into some sort of funnel, like those weirs that humans have used to trap salmon for tens of thousands of years. I want to draw back from such narrowing. When I look at Stegner’s life I see how every time he was faced with such a choice, he pushed forward, sometimes even bulled forward. It does not appear that he stopped to rest much.

I think occasionally—not overmuch—of the ridiculousness or at least insignificance of almost everything when measured against the finality of the long dirt nap—whether one was read “enough,” or appreciated “enough”! What really is the bottom line? Maybe it is only how a man’s or woman’s friends and family remember him or her.

Today, the wind keeps bending the luminous green marsh grass, as it does every July, and I find myself wondering: whether teaching, or writing, or working at activism, wouldn’t any of us, at the end, trade any of it for one more afternoon spent picking berries with loved ones? Then I consider this blasphemous question: what if, with all his energies and efforts—all his accomplishments—he was wrong to have worked so hard, and to have produced so much? When I am at my desk with my head down, darkening the pages, I sometimes worry that he was, at least in part. When I am in the mountains—particularly mountains he helped protect—I remember, or believe, that he wasn’t. He was noble and exemplary in every way—successful at more things than most ever even attempt or fail at—but in the end he loved the land, and his successes and efforts bought those of us who love these same things the luxury of even asking such questions.

The only possible answer now seems clear: we do what we do—spend our long hours writing or teaching or working—to preserve or create that which we find beautiful.

Something he touched upon, and grappled with, still touches some of us today, and here we are, still reading his books a hundred years after his birth. I feel confident we will be reading his books a hundred years after his death; that for his canon, there will be no angle of repose, but instead his texts will always be carried forward, from one generation to the next, for as long as there is a geography of hope, or the idea of a geography of hope. For as long as people can read.

I live on Tolowa (Indian) land. Prior to the arrival of the dominant culture, the Tolowa lived here for 12,500 years, if you believe the myths of science. If you believe the myths of the Tolowa, they lived here since the beginning of time. This story may sound familiar, but its significance has, thus far, been lost on the dominant culture, so it bears repeating: when the first settlers arrived here maybe 180 years ago, the place was a paradise. Salmon ran in runs so thick you couldn’t see the bottoms of rivers, so thick people were afraid to put their boats in for fear they would capsize, so thick they would keep people awake at night with the slapping of their tails against the water, so thick you could hear the runs for miles before you could see them. Whales were commonplace in the nearby ocean. Forests were thick with frogs, newts, salamanders, birds, elk, bears. And of course huge ancient redwood trees.

Now I count myself blessed when I see two salmon in what we today call Mill Creek. Another Tolowa staple, Pacific lampreys, are in bad shape. Just three years ago you could not hold a human conversation outside at night in the spring, and now I hear maybe five or six frogs at night. Salamanders, newts, songbirds, all are equivalently gone. The rivers are poisoned with pesticides and herbicides. All in less than two centuries.

Why? Or, perhaps more important, how?

Only the most arrogant and ignorant among us would say something that implies that all humans are destructive, and that the dominant (white) culture is the most destructive simply because somehow indigenous peoples around the world were too stupid to invent backhoes and chainsaws, too backward to dominate their human and nonhuman neighbors with the efficiency and viciousness of the dominant culture. They might even try to argue that the Tolowa weren’t actually living sustainably, even though they lived here for at least 12,500 years. But when 12,500 years of living in place won’t convince them, it becomes pretty clear that evidence is secondary, and that there are, rather, ideological reasons the person cannot accept that humans have ever lived sustainably. One of these ideological reasons is very clear: if you can convince yourself that humans are inherently destructive, then you allow yourself the most convenient of all excuses not to work to stop this culture from destroying the planet: it’s simply in our nature to destroy, and you can’t fight biology, so let’s not fuss about all these little extinctions, and could someone please pass the TV remote? It’s an odious position, but a lot of people take it.

If we want to stop this culture from killing the planet, we might instead try asking how so many indigenous cultures lived in place for so long without destroying their landbases.

There are many differences between indigenous and nonindigenous ways of being in the world, but I want to mention two here. The first is that the indigenous had and have serious long-term relationships with the plants and animals with whom they share their landscape. Ray Rafael, who has written extensively on the concept of wilderness, has said that Native Americans hunted, gathered, and fished “using methods that would be sustainable over centuries and even millennia. They did not alter their environment beyond what could sustain them indefinitely. They did not farm, but they managed the environment. But it was different from the way that people try to manage it now, because they stayed in relationship with it.”

That last phrase is key. What would a society look like that was planning on being in that particular place five hundred years from now? What would an economics look like? If you knew for a fact that your descendants five hundred years from now would live on the same landbase you inhabit now, how would that affect your relationship to sources of water? How would that affect your relationship with topsoil? With forests? Would you produce waste products that are detrimental to the soil? Would you poison your water sources (or allow them to be poisoned)? Would you allow global warming to continue? If the very lives of your children and their children depended on your current actions—and of course they do—how would you act differently than you do?

The other difference I want to mention—and essentially every traditional indigenous person with whom I have ever spoken has said that it is the fundamental difference between western and indigenous peoples—is that even the most open Westerners view listening to the natural world as a metaphor, as opposed to something real. I asked American Indian writer Vine Deloria about this, and he said, “I think the primary thing is that Indians experience and relate to a living universe, whereas Western people, especially science, reduce things to objects, whether they’re living or not. The implications of this are immense. If you see the world around you as made up of objects for you to manipulate and exploit, not only is it inevitable that you will destroy the world by attempting to control it, but perceiving the world as lifeless robs you of the richness, beauty, and wisdom of participating in the larger pattern of life.” That brings to mind a great line by a Canadian lumberman: “When I look at trees I see dollar bills.” If when you look at trees, you see dollar bills, you’ll treat them one way. If when you look at trees, you see trees, you’ll treat them differently. If when you look at this particular tree you see this particular tree, you’ll treat it differently still. The same is true for salmon, and, of course, for women: if when I look at women I see objects, I’m going to treat them one way. If when I look at women I see women, I’ll treat them differently. And if when I look at this particular woman I see this particular woman, I’ll treat her differently still.

Here’s where people usually ask, “Okay, so how do I listen to the natural world?” When people ask me this, I always begin by asking them if they have ever made love. If so, I ask whether the other person always had to say, “put this here,” or “do that now,” or did they sometimes read their lover’s body, listen to the unspoken language of the flesh? Having established that one can communicate without words, I then ask if they have ever had any nonhuman friends (a.k.a. pets). If so, how did the dog or cat let you know that her food dish was empty? I used to have a dog friend who would look at me, look at the food dish, look at me, look at the food dish, until finally the message would get across to me.

How do we hear the rest of the natural world? Unsurprisingly enough, the answer is: by listening. That’s not easy, given that we have been told for several thousand years that these others are silent. But the fact that we cannot easily hear them doesn’t mean they aren’t speaking, and does not mean they have nothing to say. I’ve had people respond to my suggestion that they listen to the natural world by going outside for five minutes and then returning to say they didn’t hear anything. But how can you expect to learn any new language (remember, most nonhumans don’t speak English) in such a short time? Learning to listen to our nonhuman neighbors takes effort, humility, and patience.

The Tolowa believed the nonhuman world had something to say, and that what the nonhuman world had to say was vital to their own survival. Given that they were living here sustainably for 12,500 years, and given that we manifestly are not, perhaps the least we could do is acknowledge that they were on to something, and maybe even explore just what that kind of relationship might look and feel like.

Two earlier pieces of writing inspired by the Andrews Forest residencies have appeared in Orion: Robert Michael Pyle’s “The Long Haul” (September/October 2004) and Alison Hawthorne Deming’s “The Web” (March/April 2007).

I TOUCH TREES, as others might stroke the fenders of automobiles or finger silk fabrics or fondle cats. Trees do not purr, do not flatter, do not inspire a craving for ownership or power. They stand their ground, immune to merely human urges. Saplings yield under the weight of a hand and then spring back when the hand lifts away, but mature trees accept one’s touch without so much as a shiver. While I am drawn to all ages and kinds, from maple sprouts barely tall enough to hold their leaves off the ground to towering sequoias with their crowns wreathed in fog, I am especially drawn to the ancient, battered ones, the survivors.

Recently I spent a week in the company of ancient trees. The season was October and the site was the drainage basin of Lookout Creek, on the western slope of the Cascade Mountains in Oregon. Back in my home ground of southern Indiana, the trees are hardwoods—maples and beeches and oaks, hickories and sycamores—and few are allowed to grow for as long as a century without being felled by ax or saw. Here, the ruling trees are Douglas firs, western hemlocks, western red cedars, and Pacific yews, the oldest of them ranging in age from five hundred to eight hundred years, veterans of countless fires, windstorms, landslides, insect infestations, and floods.

ON THE FIRST MORNING of my stay, I follow a trail through moist bottomland toward Lookout Creek, where I plan to spend half an hour or so in meditation. The morning fog is thick, so the treetops merge with gray sky. Condensation drips from every needle and leaf. My breath steams. Lime-green lichens, some as long as a horse’s tail, dangle from branches. Set off against the somber greens and browns of the conifers, the yellow and red leaves of vine maples, bigleaf maples, and dogwoods appear luminous in spite of the damp. Shelf fungi jut from the sides of old stumps like tiny balconies, and hemlock sprigs glisten atop nurse logs. The undergrowth is as dense as a winter pelt.

Along the way, I reach out to brush my fingers over dozens of big trees, but I keep moving, intent on my destination. Then I come upon a Douglas fir whose massive trunk, perhaps four feet in diameter at chest height, is surrounded by scaffolding, which provides a stage for rope-climbing by scientists and visiting schoolchildren. Something about this tree—its patience, its generosity, its dignity—stops me. I place my palms and forehead against the furrowed, moss-covered bark, and rest there for a spell. Gradually the agitation of travel seeps out of me and calm seeps in. Only after I stand back and open my eyes, and notice how the fog has begun to burn off, do I realize that my contact with this great tree must have lasted fifteen or twenty minutes.

I continue on to a gravel bar on Lookout Creek, a jumble of boulders, cobbles, pebbles, and grit scoured loose from the volcanic plateau that forms the base of the Cascade Mountains. Because these mountains are young, the slopes are steep and the water moves fast. Even the largest boulders have been tumbled and rounded. Choosing one close to a riffle, I sit cross-legged and half close my eyes, and I am enveloped in water sounds, a ruckus from upstream and a burbling from downstream. Now and again I hear the thump of a rock shifting in the flow, a reminder that the whole mountain range is sliding downhill, chunk by chunk, grain by grain.

Although I have tried meditating for shorter or longer stretches since my college days, forty years ago, I have never been systematic about the practice, nor have I ever been good at quieting what Buddhists call the “monkey mind.” Here beside Lookout Creek, however, far from my desk and duties, with no task ahead of me but that of opening myself to this place, I settle quickly. I begin by following my breath, the oldest rhythm of flesh, but soon I am following the murmur of the creek, and I am gazing at the bright leaves of maples and dogwoods that glow along the thread of the stream like jewels on a necklace, and I am watching light gleam on water shapes formed by current slithering over rocks, and for a spell I disappear, there is only this rapt awareness.

EACH MORNING at first light I repeat the journey to Lookout Creek, and each time I stop along the way to embrace the same giant Douglas fir, which smells faintly of moist earth. I wear no watch. I do not hurry. I stay with the tree until it lets me go.

When at length I lean away, I touch my forehead and feel the rough imprint of the bark. I stare up the trunk and spy dawn sky fretted by branches. Perspective makes the tops of the surrounding, smaller trees appear to lean toward this giant one, as if conferring. The cinnamon-colored bark is like a rugged landscape in miniature, with flat ridges separated by deep fissures. Here and there among the fissures, spider webs span the gaps. The plates are furred with moss. A skirt of sloughed bark and fallen needles encircles the base of the trunk. Even in the absence of wind, dry needles the color of old pennies rain steadily down, ticking against my jacket.

I don’t imagine that my visits mean anything to the Douglas fir. I realize it’s nonsensical to speak of a tree as patient or generous or dignified merely because it stands there while researchers and children clamber up ropes into its highest limbs. But how can I know a tree’s inwardness? Certainly there is intelligence here, and in the forest as a whole, if by that word we mean the capacity for exchanging information and responding appropriately to circumstances. How does a tree’s intelligence compare with ours? What can we learn from it? And why, out of the many giants thriving here, does this one repeatedly draw me to an embrace?

The only intelligence I can examine directly is my own and, indirectly, that of my species. We are a contradictory lot. Our indifference to other species, and even to our own long-term well-being, is demonstrated everywhere one looks, from the depleted oceans to the heating atmosphere, from poisoned wetlands to eroding farmlands and forests killed by acid rain. Who can bear in mind this worldwide devastation and the swelling catalogue of extinctions without grieving? And yet it’s equally clear that we are capable of feeling sympathy, curiosity, and even love toward other species and toward the Earth. Where does this impulse come from, this sense of affiliation with rivers and ravens, mountains and mosses? How might it be nurtured? What role might it play in moving us to behave more caringly on this beleaguered planet?

These are the questions I find myself brooding about as I sit in meditation beside Lookout Creek. One is not supposed to brood while meditating, of course, so again and again I let go of thoughts and return my awareness to the water sounds, the radiant autumn leaves, the wind on my cheek, the stony cold chilling my sitting bones. And each morning, for shorter or longer spells, the fretful I quiets down, turns transparent, vanishes.

Eventually I stir, roused by the haggle of ravens or the chatter of squirrels or the scurry of deer—other minds in the forest—and I make my way back along the trail to the zone of electricity and words. As I walk, it occurs to me that meditation is an effort to become for a spell more like a tree, open to whatever arises, without judging, without remembering the past or anticipating the future, fully present in the moment. The taste of that stillness refreshes me. And yet I do not aspire to dwell in such a condition always. For all its grandeur and beauty, for all its half-millennium longevity, the Douglas fir cannot ponder me, cannot reflect or remember or imagine—can only be. Insofar as meditation returns us to that state of pure, unreflective being, it is a respite from the burden of ceaseless thought. When we surface from meditation, however, we are not turning from reality to illusion, as some spiritual traditions would have us believe; we are reclaiming the full powers of mind, renewed by our immersion in the realm of mountains and rivers, wind and breath.

AT MIDDAY, sunlight floods the gravel bar on Lookout Creek, illuminating strands of spider filament that curve from one boulder to another over an expanse of rushing water. At first I can’t fathom how spiders managed this engineering feat. The wind might have blown them one direction but not back again, and yet at least a dozen gossamer threads zigzag between the massive stones. Then I guess that the spiders, after attaching the initial strand, must climb back and forth, adding filaments. The stones they stitch together are as knobby and creased as the haunches of elephants. Even in still air, butter-yellow maple leaves come sashaying down. A pewter sheen glints from the bark of young Douglas firs tilting out over the stream.

Unconsciously, I resort to human terms for describing what I see, thus betraying another quirk of our species. We envision bears and hunters and wandering sisters in the stars. We spy dragons in the shapes of clouds, hear mournfulness in the calls of owls. Reason tells us that such analogies are false. For all its delicious sounds, the creek does not speak, but merely slides downhill, taking the path of least resistance, rubbing against whatever it meets along the way. Boulders have nothing to do with elephants, lichens are not horsetails, moss is not fur, spiders are not engineers, ravens do not haggle, and trees do not confer. Scientists are schooled to avoid such anthropomorphism. Writers are warned against committing the “pathetic fallacy,” which is the error of projecting human emotions or meanings onto nature. The caution is worth heeding. Yet if we entirely forgo such analogies, if we withhold our metaphors and stories, we estrange ourselves from the universe. We become mere onlookers, the sole meaning-bearing witnesses of a meaningless show.

But who could sit here, on this gravel bar beside Lookout Creek, and imagine that we are the sole source of meaning? Against a halcyon blue sky, the spires of trees stand out with startling clarity, their fringe of lichens appearing incandescent. Moths and gnats flutter above the stream, chased by dragonflies. The creek is lined by drift logs in various states of decay, from bone-gray hulks to rotting red lumps. Wet boulders gleam as if lit from within. Cobbles jammed against one another look like the heads of a crowd easing downstream. The muscular current, twisting over rocks, catches and tosses the light. The banks on either side blaze with the salmon-pink leaves of dogwoods, those western relatives of the beloved understory tree of my Indiana forests. Everything in sight is exquisite—the stones of all sizes laid against one another just so, the perforated leaves of red alders, the fallen needles gathered in pockets along the shore, the bending grasses, the soaring trees.

Only cosmic arrogance tempts us to claim that all this reaching for sunlight, nutrients, and water means nothing except what we say it means. But if it bears a grander significance, what might that be, and what gives rise to such meaning? What power draws the elements together and binds them into a spider or a person, a fern or a forest? If we answer, “Life,” we give only a name, not an explanation.

THOSE WHO FANCY that humans are superior to the rest of nature often use “tree-hugger” as a term of ridicule, as if to feel the allure of trees were a perverted form of sensuality or a throwback to our simian ancestry. Of course, many who decry tree-hugging don’t believe we have a simian ancestry, and so perhaps what they fear is a reversion to paganism. And they may have a point. The religions that started in the Middle East—Judaism, Christianity, Islam—are all desert faiths, created by people who lived in the open. Theirs is a sky god, who would be eclipsed by a forest canopy. In every civilization influenced by these faiths, trees have been cut down not merely to secure wood for cooking and building or to clear ground for agriculture or to open vistas around settlements where predators might lurk, but to reveal the heavens.

Worship of a sky god has been costly to our planet. Religions that oppose the heavenly to the earthly, elevating the former and scorning the latter, are in effect denying that we emerge from and wholly depend on nature. If you think of the touchable, eatable, climbable, sexy, singing, material world as fallen, corrupt, and sinful, then you are likely to abuse it. You are likely to say that we might as well cut down the last old-growth forests, drain the last swamps, catch the last tuna and cod, burn the last drops of oil, since the end time is coming, when the elect few will be raptured away to the immortal realm, and everything earthly will be utterly erased.

But our language preserves a countervailing wisdom. In Latin, materia means stuff, anything substantial, and in particular it means wood. Materia in turn derives from mater, which means mother. In the collective imagination that gave rise to these meanings, trees were understood to epitomize matter, and matter was understood to be life-giving. Perhaps we could tap into this wisdom by recovering another word that derives from mater—matrix, which means womb. Instead of speaking about “nature” or “the environment,” terms which imply some realm apart from us, perhaps we should speak of Earth as our matrix, our mother, the source and sustainer of life.

It is easy to feel nurtured among these ancient trees. I breathe the forest. I drink its waters. I take in the forest through all my senses. In order to survive here for any length of time, I would need to wear the forest, its fur and skin and fiber; I would need to draw my food from what lives here alongside me; I would need to burn its fallen branches for cooking and for keeping warm; I would need to frame my shelter with its wood and clay and stone. Above all, I would need to learn to think like the forest, learn its patterns, obey its requirements, align myself with its flow.

There are no boundaries between the forest and the cosmos, or between myself and the forest, and so the intelligence on display here is continuous with the intelligence manifest throughout the universe and with the mind I use to apprehend and speak of it.

ONE MORNING beside Lookout Creek, enveloped as usual in watery music, I sit leaning against a young red alder that has sprouted in the gravel bar, its leaves nibbled into lace by insects. Everything here either starts as food or winds up as food. None of the alders growing on this ever-shifting bank is thicker than a baseball bat. The next big flood will scour them away. Beside me, the sinewy roots of an upturned stump seem to mimic the muscular current in the stream. The bar is littered with gray and ruddy stones pockmarked by holes that betray the volcanic origins of this rubble.

Where better than such a place to recognize that the essence of nature is flow—of lava, electrons, water, wind, breath. Materia, matter, the seemingly solid stuff we encounter—trees, stones, bears, bones—is actually fluid, constantly changing, like water shapes in the current. The Psalmist tells us, “The mountains skipped like rams, and the little hills like lambs,” and Dōgen, a thirteenth-century Zen teacher, proclaims that mountains are always walking. Both speak truly. Mountains do move, arising and eroding away over geological time, just as organisms grow and decay, species evolve, tectonic plates shift, stars congeal and burn and expire, entire galaxies shine for a spell and then vanish. Nothing in nature is fixed.

Conservationists have often been accused of wishing to freeze the land in some favored condition—for example, the American continent as it was before European colonization. Back when maps described old-growth as large saw-timber, scientists spoke of forests reaching climax, as if at some point the flow would cease. But we now realize that no such stasis is possible, even if it were desirable. If flux is the nature of nature, however, we still must make distinctions among the kinds of change. We cannot speak against the damage caused by human behavior unless we distinguish between natural change—for example, the long history of extinctions—and anthropogenic change—for example, the recent acceleration in extinctions due to habitat destruction, pollution, climate change, and other disturbances caused by humans. The capacity to make such a distinction, and to act on it, may be as unique to our species as the capacity to use symbolic language.

Thoughts flow, along with everything else, even in the depths of meditation. And yet the human mind seems compelled to imagine fixity—heaven, nirvana, Plato’s ideal realm, eternal God—and the human heart yearns for permanence. Why else do we treasure diamonds and gold? Why else do Creationists cling to the notion that all species were made in exactly their present form? Why else do we search for scientific “laws” underlying the constant flux of the universe?

Our yearning for the fixed, like our craving for dominion over nature, may be another expression of our fear of aging and death. This occurs to me as I sit, transfixed, beside the narrowest, noisiest passage in the riffles on Lookout Creek. A dozen dead snags tilt above my head, their bare limbs like the sparse whiskers on an old man’s chin. Upstream, a gigantic Douglas fir has fallen across the creek, its trunk still as straight as when it was alive. Downstream, another giant has fallen, this one snapped in the middle. I can’t help imagining one of the looming snags suddenly toppling onto me and snapping my thread of thought, scattering this congregation of elements and notions bearing my name.

HIGHER UP THE VALLEY of Lookout Creek, in a grove of five-hundred-year-old Douglas firs and western hemlocks, a hundred or so logs have been placed side by side on the ground, labeled with aluminum tags, and fitted with instruments to measure their rate and manner of decay. Designed to continue for two centuries, this research aims to document, among other things, the role of dead wood in forest ecology and in the sequestering of carbon.

On a visit to the site, I stroke the moss-covered logs, touch the rubbery fungi that sprout from every surface, peer into the boxy traps that catch flying insects and fallen debris, and lean close to the tubes that capture the logs’ exhalations. The only breathing I detect is my own. I’m intrigued that scientists are studying decomposition, for as an artist I usually think about composition —the making of something shapely and whole out of elements. A musician composes with notes, a painter with colors, a writer with letters and words, much as life orchestrates carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and other ingredients into organisms. These organisms—trees, fungi, ravens, humans—persist for a while, change over time, and eventually dissolve into their constituents, which will be gathered up again into living things.

Art and life both draw energy from sunlight, directly or indirectly, to counter entropy by increasing order. Right now, for example, I’m running on the sunshine bound up in pancakes and maple syrup. Organisms interact biophysically with everything in their ecosystem, and ultimately with the whole universe. By contrast, the symbolic structures that humans create—songs, stories, poems, paintings, photographs, films, diagrams, mathematical formulas, computer codes—convey influence only insofar as they are read, heard, or otherwise perceived by humans. What happens when we turn our interpretive powers on living organisms? Does raven, Douglas fir, spider, or lichen mean anything different, or anything more, when it is taken up into human consciousness?

What we think or imagine about other species clearly influences our behavior toward them—as notions about the wickedness of wolves led to their extermination throughout much of their historic range, and as new understanding about the role of predators has led to the reintroduction of wolves in Yellowstone and elsewhere. But aside from this practical impact, does our peculiar sort of mind bear any greater significance in the scheme of things? Is it merely an accidental result of mechanical processes, an adaptive feature that has powered our—perhaps fleeting—evolutionary success? Would the universe lose anything vital if our species suddenly vanished?

We can’t know the answer to those questions, despite the arguments of prophets and philosophers. We can only form hunches, and, right or wrong, these will influence the spirit of our work and the tenor of our lives. For what it’s worth, my hunch is that what we call mind is not a mere side effect of material evolution, but is fundamental to reality. It is not separate from what we call matter, but is a revelation of the inwardness of things. I suspect that our symbol-wielding intelligence is a manifestation of the creative, shaping energy that drives the cosmos, from the dance of electrons to the growth of trees. If this is so, then our highest calling may be to composition—paying attention to some portion of the world, reflecting on what we have perceived, and fashioning a response in words or numbers or paint or song or some other expressive medium. Our paintings on cave walls, our photos of quasars, our graphs and sonnets and stories may be the gifts we return for the privilege of sojourning here on this marvelous globe.

IF INTELLIGENCE MEANS the ability to take in and respond to information, then all organisms possess it, whether animal or plant, for they exchange signals and materials with their surroundings constantly. If intelligence means the capacity for solving puzzles or using language, then surely the ravens that clamor above me or the wolves that roam the far side of the mountains possess it. But if we are concerned with the power not merely to reason or use language, but to discern and define meanings, to evaluate actions in light of ethical principles, to pass on knowledge across generations through symbolic forms—then we are speaking about a kind of intelligence that appears to be the exclusive power of humans, at least on this planet.

Some contemplative traditions maintain that this meaning-making capacity is a curse, that it divorces us from reality, enclosing us in a bubble of abstractions. It’s easy to sympathize with this view, when one considers our history of feuds and frauds. Cleverness alone does not make us wise. Yet here among these great trees and boisterous mountain streams, I sense that our peculiar sort of mind might also be a blessing, not only to us but to the forest, to other creatures, to life on Earth, and even to the universe.

I recognize the danger of hubris. It’s flattering to suppose, as many religions do, that humans occupy a unique place in the order of things. The appeal of an idea is not evidence for its falsity, however, but merely a reason for caution. Cautiously, therefore: Suppose that the universe is not a machine, as nineteenth-century science claimed, but rather a field of energy, as twentieth-century science imagined. Suppose that mind is not some private power that each of us contains, but rather a field of awareness that contains us—and likewise encompasses birds, bees, ferns, trees, salamanders, spiders, dragonflies, and all living things, permeates mountains and rivers and galaxies, each kind offering its own degree and variety of awareness, even stars, even stones.

What if our role in this all-embracing mind is to gaze back at the grand matrix that birthed us, and translate our responses into symbols? What if art, science, literature, and our many other modes of expression feed back into the encompassing mind, adding richness and subtlety? If that is our distinctive role, no wonder we feel this urge to write, to paint, to measure and count, to set strings vibrating, to tell stories, to dance and sing.

HURRICANE KATRINA caused a seismic shift in every aspect of New Orleans and the Gulf region. I wondered whether rebuilding could ever fix what had been broken. Would the neighborhoods recover? Would the city ever get its mojo back? Would that thing, whatever it was, that was so uniquely New Orleans return, dissipate, or transform into something completely different? And what about the thousands of small communities that existed within the city—would they survive, or even flourish? What was lost was clear, but what could be recovered was not at all clear.

Following the storm, I spent eighteen months repeatedly photographing a single block in the Holy Cross section of New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward. I attempted to follow both the obvious physical rebuilding of the homes as well as the evolving psychological state of its residents.

I’ve always been drawn to locales that inspire devotion. This is no accident. I was raised in East Lansing, Michigan, and continue to maintain a fierce loyalty and personal identification to that place despite the fact that I haven’t lived there in over twenty years. When I see changes there, I often feel a sense of loss. What, then, of the people of New Orleans? When one resident said to me, “You just wanna be home,” I thought, “Doesn’t everyone?”

The question is, will they ever be?

Jeannot hesitated and then stopped in his tracks. He could feel the head of the ax pressing against the top of his hand, the weight of the rifle in his other hand, and with a slight horror he realized that by holding both he would be able to use neither. The woods fell silent. For a moment, just to his side, he thought he saw a young man, a boy his own age, staring at him with a hungry fear, but by the time he turned the boy was gone. He moved in a slow circle, more afraid that he would see someone than that he would not.

He had been alone too long, he thought, and it was too easy out here in the untrammeled woods to convince himself that he saw and heard something that was not there. He lowered his head again and continued following the creek up the hill, thinking that when he crested the rise he might be able to see the lay of the Sawgamet. For the last few days the river had been running mostly straight up a wide valley. A chain of peaks and mountains rose on the other side of the river and Jeannot liked being able to see the improbable snow that capped the mountains, a fanciful affectation against the midsummer sun.

When he stepped into the clearing, Jeannot risked a last glance into the trees, but with the afternoon’s brightness and the dark of the woods, he was able to see only a few dozen paces back. He still thought there was something in there, keeping just past the edge of his vision. While he looked, Flaireur padded up beside him. Jeannot touched him lightly on the head, and then the dog trotted into the middle of the clearing and collapsed on the ground near a wide creek.

He had stolen the dog from a girl in Edmonton who claimed to be a witch, so when Flaireur—Jeannot named the mongrel in anticipation of sniffed-out treasure—refused to move any farther that day, Jeannot decided that he too would go no farther. He had already been walking for thirty-nine days since leaving Quesnellemouthe, and he thought that perhaps the dog was right; to travel one more day would be to risk the wrath of God. Jeannot dropped his pack, took his ax, and cut saplings and branches to make a lean-to against a fallen tree. He had learned to handle the ax and to fend for himself during the two years and three thousand miles it had taken him to reach Quesnellemouthe from Montreal, and when he was finished making shelter, he cut fallen wood until he had more than enough to burn through the night.

In years to come, Jeannot would eat so much that the growth that had stopped in his childhood would spring upon him, and he’d grow up and out, but on this day, the day that he founded what was to become Sawgamet, Jeannot was sixteen, whip thin, wire strong, and able to both give and absorb a brutal amount of punishment. He would later joke that he had been punched so hard and so often that his nose had rounded his face twice before stopping just off of center. But he would never tell his son or his grandson why he had left the orphanage, would not speak of the girl he had loved who had been taken away from him, the reason why he had traveled across the whole of Rupert’s Land; he would only tell stories from the moment when he had dropped his pack beside the creek, as if he himself were an invention that began to exist at the same moment as Sawgamet.

After he finished cutting firewood, Jeannot forced himself to walk back through the woods and down the hill to the river, so that he could catch a fish to share with Flaireur for dinner. When it was finally dark, he unrolled his blanket under the lean-to and listened to the low burble of the creek, and beyond that, the muted roar coming from the Sawgamet. The sound of the water and the crackling embers were a comfort to him, as was the slow breathing of Flaireur; the dog had not been willing to move from the spot where he had collapsed earlier in the evening, but he seemed restful now. The wind pushed in occasional soft moans, moving warm across his body. Jeannot fell asleep quickly and easily, with the heavy instantaneousness that is only available to the young.

When he woke in the middle of the night, the fire had died completely, as had the wind. Flaireur stood above him, his mouth open in a soundless snarl. Jeannot had spent countless nights in the dark wilderness during his trek—the open plains, the cut-black trees between where he was now and Quesnellemouthe—but today was the first time he had ever felt frightened. He had bedded the witch before stealing Flaireur, and now, with Flaireur standing above him, he thought she had come back, first to steal the dog’s voice, and then to steal Jeannot’s soul. Jeannot could see Flaireur’s teeth in the moonlight, and when he put his hand out to touch the dog’s neck, he could feel the low rumble that should have carried sound. With a start, he realized that the night had fallen quiet as well. Even the creek had been rendered mute.

Jeannot was not sure if he saw the creature or smelled it first. It was fish-pale and carried the gagging scent of spoiled meat. He could not tell if it was a man or a woman, but as it stumbled and lurched across the little clearing, Jeannot could see the milk-white eyes that seemed to be searching for him, like it knew he was there. Its hair clumped over its shoulders, and its skin was loose and mottled, like a drowned body come to claim Jeannot in some hideous marriage. As the creature’s head turned toward him, Jeannot clamped his hands around Flaireur’s silently gulping muzzle, forcing Flaireur’s mouth shut and stilling the dog. The creature seemed to pause, and Jeannot felt his stomach turn at the thought that it might see him through its clouded eyes, but it did not stop its awkward shuffle. As it disappeared into the woods, sound returned—the creek, the river, the birds, the rustle of the wind through the trees, everything except for Flaireur. The dog stayed dumb, and Jeannot knew that he had escaped something that he did not understand.

In later years, when he told the story, some men argued that Jeannot had simply been young and scared, or that he had been dreaming. That in the moonlight and his tiredness he had mistaken a bear or another animal for some perversion. Other men, particularly men who had spent more time in the woods or who had dealings with Indians, men who understood that there were things that they had yet to see, believed him. It was a shape shifter, it was the loup-garou, the Mahaha, it was an Adlet, come to drink his blood. No, it was a Qallupilluit, they said, one of the sea witches who felt the greed running through Jeannot’s body and had come to claim him.

Greed did run through Jeannot’s body, and though the creature did not return for him that night, he resolved to flee. He carried an unwillingness to break no matter how hard he was bent, and a burning desire to find gold in the northern corner of this new land, but he had no desire to spend another night under the lean-to, waiting for the creature to return and eat his soul.

He spent the morning trying to coax Flaireur into leaving with him. Like the day before, however, the dog refused to take another step. Flaireur continued to bark—or rather, continued to attempt to bark, his bristly muzzle dropping and snapping like he was capable of making noise—but he remained tethered to an invisible anchor. Jeannot briefly thought of bashing the dog’s head with the back of his ax, but he could not bear to do so. Instead, Jeannot walked down the slope and through the trees, thinking that a fresh-caught fish might lure the dog away from his post.

Sitting on the bank of the river, Jeannot thought of the rotted meat smell of the creature from the night before. He would leave even if Flaireur would not accompany him, he decided. He had been so sure of his choice to stop the day before. He thought that Flaireur’s refusal to go on was some great sign that this was where he was meant to make his fortune. He knew nothing of mining or gold, only that he was a decade past the Fraser rush and he could easily end up like all of the other greenhorns who came late, worked like dogs, and left empty-handed. Before he left the orphanage and started walking west, the nuns had thought Jeannot would be a priest, and they taught him accordingly. What he knew when he started walking west was not of much use in this world. So when he built the lean-to it was because he thought Flaireur carried some message: the dog stopping was a burning bush. Then, when the creature came to him in the night, he thought that he had read too much into the tiredness of a dog. He did not want to leave Flaireur behind, but as he sat by the creek and waited for a fish to take his line, Jeannot knew that he was afraid; the creature’s stench was too close to what he imagined the flesh of his own body would smell like in death.

The line tugged against his hand, and he pulled it in slowly. In the still water along the edge of the bank, Jeannot saw that he had lip-hooked a small, bluish trout. He frowned. Though the fish was putting up a decent fight, it was not worth the effort to pick the meat from its bones. He was willing to wait for something larger, something that he could split equally with Flaireur. He pulled the trout from the water, slipped out the hook, and tossed both the fish and his line back into the river. Instantly, the fish darted back to the hook—the grub that he had used as bait now gone—and hit it hard, swallowing it down. Jeannot shook his head and decided that, given his urgency to make ground before nightfall, the fish would serve his purpose.

Back at the camp, Jeannot cut off a thin slice of flesh from the trout’s back and threw it to the dog. Flaireur caught it in the air, but showed no intention of moving from his guard. The dog barked airlessly, still silent, and Jeannot carved and threw him another piece. He turned the fish over and worked the tip of his knife up alongside the bones, taking off the fillet. He dangled it from his hand. As he waved the piece of fish back and forth, Flaireur’s head tracked Jeannot’s hand, but the dog still did not move from his spot. Jeannot sighed and then tossed the fillet into the air. As he did so, a glint of something caught his eye.

At first he thought it was sunlight off his knife, but when he looked down at the scraped carcass of the fish in his hand, Jeannot saw a dull gleaming from inside the trout. He speared the tip of his knife into the fish’s half-split insides and exposed the nugget to the air. He fished it out with his fingers and, as if he were in a dream, stepped over to the gurgling creek and washed it off. When he held it up in the air, the chunk of gold glistened in the sunlight. It was solid and misshapen, a damaged acorn the size of the end of his thumb, and it was why he had headed west instead of any of the other directions a young man his age could have gone.
He gave what scraps of fish were left to Flaireur, and then he picked up his shovel and a pan and headed down through the woods and back to the river. Damn that sightless creature, he thought, and damn these woods; they would not drive him off. He could not be beaten. He had caught a fish with a belly full of gold, and no monsters, no whisperings from the trees would be enough to drive him away.

He dug by the banks of the river every day, sifting and panning for gold, starting where he caught the fish, and then moving upriver, but he found nothing else of value. At first he tried dragging Flaireur along, but no matter how much he beat him, the dog refused to follow Jeannot. He stayed near the lean-to and continued to bark fruitlessly, sound only a ghost.

Jeannot lost count of the days. He caught fish and gathered berries and nuts, trying to reserve what was left of the stores that he had carried with him from Quesnellemouthe. He stood in the river panning until his feet were numb, and then he dug along the banks. He looked for signs of gold—though he was not sure what those signs would be—in the moss and the grasses along the edge of the Sawgamet. He worked until his hands turned to leather and his muscles into iron, but more gold eluded him. The same hardheadedness that had allowed him to be beaten but not defeated on his trip west, that had kept him going through cold and hunger and through the warnings of men who had headed west and returned home empty-handed, kept him digging until well past the time when the leaves had turned and began to litter the ground.

It was not until the first of October when Jeannot realized what he had done. He was bathing in the river—it was never truly warm, even in the heat of the summer—but as he came naked out of the water, he felt a sudden coldness on his skin, and he seemed to see for the first time the finger of ice that had already begun to cling to the bank. It had taken him one less than forty days and nights to walk from Quesnellemouthe, but he did not have that much time before the snows would be upon him. He would have to winter in Sawgamet.

Flaireur still would not move from the clearing, so Jeannot did the only thing he could think of. He dug shallow trenches in the ground around where the dog sat barking silently, marking out where the cabin’s walls would stand. He took down trees, limbed them, and stripped the bark, working in haste and barely sleeping. Had Jeannot thought he would need to protect himself for more than a single winter, he would have put more care into footing the cabin, but all he was worried about was the simple expedience of shelter and the need to stock food for what he expected to be a long, cold solitude.

The cabin took its squat form quickly, Jeannot building it barely to the height of his shoulders, deciding that once the snows came he could use the enforced leisure of the dark winter nights to dig out the floor, eventually giving himself room to stand. All the time that Jeannot built, Flaireur stayed in the epicenter of the construction, mimicking the motions of a barking dog, leaving off only to discreetly relieve himself in the bushes or to drink from the creek.

It took him five days to build the cabin, working late into each night by the poor light of the fire, and as he finished, snow began to settle in. The cabin was ugly and crude, the logs only partially stripped of bark because of his haste, barely big enough for him to lie out straight inside. It was nothing like the neat, tucked-together homes that Jeannot had been hired to help build in farming communities and mining towns along his journey west, but he did not mind. It was comfortable, and despite the sound of the wind pushing snow around in the darkness outside, he slept warm with Flaireur curled against his back.

After finishing the structure, he spent another two days hauling and fitting flat stones from the river until he had a workable hearth and chimney, and another day hauling enough dead and fallen wood to last him for a few weeks. More pressing than his need for firewood—that was something he could take care of even in the cold, he reasoned—was the necessity of packing in food before the last of the game went to ground.

He did not fool himself. Jeannot knew exactly what he was, which was a young man from Montreal who was, at best, a poor shot with a rifle. He had caught enough fish and eaten enough berries along the way that he still had some salted meat and beans left, maybe enough to get him through a few weeks, a month if he did not give Flaireur a share. Snow was already starting to pile up against the sides of the stubby cabin, and had Jeannot been a different sort of boy he would have despaired, he would have wondered if he should have risked the snow and headed back to Quesnellemouthe. He could have found a job and a place to stay and spent the winter somewhere where he did not have to worry about finding food. But he was not the sort of boy to look back and question his decisions. Instead, he bent himself to the task of procuring food with the same iron inflexibility that he had brought to the task of fruitlessly panning for gold. Over the course of three days, he collected as many of the damaged berries and promising-looking plants as he could find underneath the first coverings of snow, forcing Flaireur to eat a few bites of each variety to ensure that Jeannot would not accidentally poison himself. Then, taking up his rifle, he spent several days tromping through the woods, unaware that the few animals that had not gone to ground as the snow pushed and built were well warned by his heavy step and penchant for colloquial schoolyard cursing that the nuns from the orphanage had failed to beat out of him.

He did not take a single shot, but he walked for miles and miles, from first light until dark, searching for something to aim his rifle at, and finally, he was tired. It had been a week of building his cabin, and then a week of tromping through the snow in a fruitless search for food, on top of the thirty-nine days and nights of walking and three months of working the river for gold, and Jeannot could feel himself worn down. He was aware of his one singular strength—his ability to ignore pain and discomfort and to keep working and pushing until his body collapsed under some weight that he did not recognize—but this moment of weakness, this sudden fragility, terrified him. He did not understand the simple signs of tiredness, of having gone beyond the limits of his endurance, and for the first of many times throughout his long life, Jeannot Boucher knew with absolute certainty that he must be dying.

Though it was early in the afternoon, he built a small fire in the hearth of the cabin. He lay on the ground, too exhausted to even sleep. Flaireur rose from his normal spot in the middle of the floor and ceased his soundless barking long enough to gently lick and nuzzle at Jeannot’s face. Jeannot reached up and shook the scruff of the dog’s neck gently and said, “You’ve been a good boy. When I die, maybe then you’ll be free to leave this spot.”

And then Flaireur began to sing.

For the first time in months—since the creature had passed them by in the night—sound came from the dog’s mouth, and it frightened Jeannot. He thought that the dog was calling for Death himself. Though he was so fatigued that even his bones were tired, he reached for his ax and his rifle. He would put up a fight. He was not going to let Death take him unscathed.

Jeannot rose to his knees and watched Flaireur sing. The dog kept his haunches firmly on the dirt floor, his muzzle raised into the air, eyes closed, and in the dog’s haunting voice, Jeannot, for the first time, recognized the lupine qualities of this animal that he had stolen from a witch. Jeannot finally understood that, like his new master, Flaireur was unable to quit.

Suddenly there was a torrential knocking at the door, an uneven and constant beating that called to mind the legions of the dead that the nuns at the orphanage had always told Jeannot he would join when he went to hell. Solid, weighty thuds attacked the door and then the walls and the roof. He could hear the flap of wings and some terrible cawing that covered even Flaireur’s desperate song. Jeannot, crouched under the low roof of the cabin, felt his hands begin to shiver.

Death he could face, but he did not expect to have to fight the entire underworld. The walls began to shake, and he was afraid that if he waited any longer the door would rip off the crude hinges he had whittled from tree stumps, the roof would be torn asunder, and whatever winged and scaled monsters waited outside would destroy him. With his ax and rifle in hand, hoping that Flaireur would cease his singing in order to rip at the Dark Angel’s throat, Jeannot opened the door, prepared to conquer Death and the legions of the damned that he had brought with him.

He was immediately knocked to the ground in a flurry of beating wings, beaks, and claws tearing his clothing and ripping at his eyes. In the whirling commotion, he fired his rifle uselessly into the ground before dropping both the rifle and his ax in order to cover his eyes. After a few seconds of confusion, Jeannot had the presence of mind to slam shut the door of the cabin, and then to latch it in order to keep the hundreds of birds—blue grouse, chickadees, ravens, jays, ptarmigan, even an out-of-season thrush that he spotted for a moment among the flapping hordes—from finding their way out of the cabin as quickly as they had been sung in by Flaireur. With his hands pressed tightly over his eyes, he tried to look through the slits between his fingers, but the flying multitudes made him fear for his sight. He groped for his spare shirt and then quickly wrapped the cloth around his head.

Wings beat against his head, his arms, and he felt the sharp spear of a bird’s beak digging into his side, and the sudden wetness of blood. He placed one hand tightly over the wound and then pulled his knife from his belt. The cabin was so thick with flight that he did not need to see to begin the slaughter. It was enough simply to sit still and stab his knife into the air. Flaireur too joined in the carnage, stopping his singing and opening his mouth now only to tear and bite. Jeannot found feathers invading his mouth, the dirt floor of the cabin becoming slick with the blood of the birds, but after an indeterminable time of darkness and stabbing, the sound of fluttering wings began to slacken, and he dared to pull the shirt off his head so that he could join Flaireur in tracking down the few birds that had managed thus far to elude fang and blade.

Outside of the cabin, Jeannot cleared snow from the ground and then dug until his shovel blade bounced off dirt that was frozen too hard to penetrate. His side throbbed from where the bird had speared him, but he did not want to let any of this bounty go to waste. He loaded this storage hole with the birds that he had killed, packed the hole with snow, and then fashioned a lid of sorts from a flat stone that he found near the riverbank. That night, confident that he had enough food to last through the snows, Jeannot roasted a dozen birds and blew on them until they were cool enough to feed to Flaireur. The dog lay quiet again, and Jeannot saw to the scratches and gouges that his dog had suffered, pressing moss and snow upon the larger cuts that the birds had inflicted. It was only when he rolled Flaireur onto his back in order to treat a bloody gash in the dog’s belly that Jeannot noticed the small bullet hole in the floor.

At first Jeannot thought it was a trick of the light, the fire reflecting off some last vestige of bird blood that had pooled in the dirt, but the glow was something else, something substantial. Jeannot dug with his bare hands, not even thinking to reach for his shovel, and within moments had pulled a rock of gold the size of a dinner roll from the ground. He was stunned at how heavy the chunk was. He guessed it to be ten pounds, and as he held the nugget in one hand, he ran the fingers of his other hand through the coarse fur on Flaireur’s chest. The dog looked at him and opened his mouth like he was going to sing again, but then he went to sleep in such a restful manner that Jeannot wondered if, in Flaireur’s unceasing vigilance, his refusal to take another step, he had known that the gold was beneath his paws the entire time.

In the spring, once the snow broke, Jeannot returned to Quesnellemouthe and used the gold—despite furious digging he had found no more—to hire two dozen men with packs and canoes to carry supplies back to Sawgamet for him.

Jeannot was seventeen by then, and he did not think of what the news of gold would do. The hired men left off the beans and flour and rice and salted meat, the pots and pans, the crate of books, the cloth and the barrel of nails outside of Jeannot’s cabin, but they did not return to Quesnellemouthe. Like the hundreds of other men who had jumped at the news of gold, the hired men stayed to seek their fortunes, panning for gold on the banks of the river. Every day, dozens more joined the men already there, and soon a colony of tents lined the flat plateau above the river, a cramped, pulsing, dangerous pestilence on the landscape.

Some of the men knew what they were doing, and before Jeannot had even finished unpacking his supplies, a Russian man had already panned out a nugget of gold the size of an eyeball. It was a world transformed. Everywhere Jeannot looked he saw men standing in the water panning for gold, men digging on the banks. Though he was unable to find even one more flake of gold, every hour or so another man would yell in excitement, and those men working nearest to that man would also cheer. Men continued to stream into Sawgamet in search of gold, and soon enough a small trickle of men began to return to Quesnellemouthe with their bounty and tales of earth so rich with gold that you could not touch the ground without making your fortune. From Quesnellemouthe the word spread south to Vancouver and then farther south to San Francisco, and from there east to Toronto and Montreal, to Chicago, New York, and Boston, and it was like an earthquake shook the land, so many feet came stomping through the woods.

Today I’m in Male, the capital city of the Maldive Islands, one of the most interesting places I’ve ever been. Male is one of twelve hundred islands in an archipelago that stretches nine hundred kilometers north to south across the Indian Ocean. If you’ve ever gone to one of those yoga classes where they tell you to close your eyes and imagine that you’re on a tropical beach and the sky is blue and the sand is warm and—that’s the Maldives you’re imagining. Male, the lone city, is crowded and bustling, and it’s also in the midst of a political renaissance: a year ago, right before Halloween, the population managed to vote out of power a kleptocrat who had ruled for thirty years, replacing him with a man named Mohammed Nasheed, who had spent too many of his forty-two years as a political prisoner. Think Barack Obama with a dash of Nelson Mandela; among many other reforms, he quickly announced that the Maldives would be the first carbon-neutral nation on Earth.

But he announced something else, too: that his nation would be setting aside a portion of its tourist income each year in case it someday had to buy a new homeland and resettle its population. Because the Maldives is low to the water—most of it only a meter or two above sea level, a bad place to be in a century when scientists think that unless we act swiftly sea level may rise . . . a meter or two. And because those twelve hundred islands are ringed by coral reefs that provide them not only with food, but also with protection from waves and storms, yet the coral is dying—in many places 90 percent was killed during the last strong El Niño in these parts, when seas were warmer than they’d ever been in human history.

It is, in other words, like all places, intensely local, with its own history, and its own peculiar set of problems and possibilities. But it is also, like all places in this age, intensely global, dependent on everyone everywhere making wise decisions if it is to thrive, or even survive. So the question for us as organizers has been: how do we help people pull these two threads together? How do we help them use the particular genius of their own place to have a voice in the most important debate the globe has ever undertaken?

And the answer, here, is scuba gear. Also snorkels. On October 24, the people of the Maldives will hold the largest underwater political demonstration in history, a momentary intrusion of the noisy outside world into the quiet timelessness of the reef. I doubt the floating stingrays will mind, or the green sea turtles, or the clouds of parrotfish—they seem to look on with mild interest at everything that happens. But this will be a scene: 350 divers descending beneath the waves with signs and banners. A local photographer will snap a picture and swim to the surface and plug in his MacBook Pro and upload that image to a server. And there it will join thousands of other images piling in from all the other local places around the planet: climbers high in the Himalayas and Andes and Alps with 350 banners, and the slow food club in Barcelona serving 350 solar-cooked paellas in the town plaza, and teams of 350 bicyclists crossing corners of each continent, and 350 Nigerians planting 35,000 trees. The scale of some of the actions will be enormous: in Johannesburg and Sydney people will spell out giant 3s with their bodies, and in London and Zurich immense 5s, and in Copenhagen and Quito huge 0s—so that CNN will have to do our work for us, putting together the puzzle to show that you can’t solve this problem without crossing borders, without thinking about the planet as, well, a planet. Elsewhere they’ll be very localized: the handmowers league has promised to scythe 350s into many hayfields on that afternoon, in Vermont, and in Nova Scotia, and in Scandinavia.

The only common theme will be that strange number, 350, which—and I cannot say this enough times—is the most important number on Earth, the maximum amount of carbon scientists now tell us we can have in the atmosphere if we hope for a planet “similar to the one on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted.” Which we do hope for—because one thing I’m reminded of every day I travel is just how beautiful that planet is.

But the question is, how do you bring all that incredible diversity and creativity to bear? How do you allow the 300,000 people of the Maldives a seat at the table in the negotiations that will decide their future? How do you let poor people and nations have influence equal to that of Exxon-Mobil? The answer, as best as I can figure, is precisely this creativity I’ve been describing. Instead of another march on Washington or London, we’re collecting images from every corner of the world, that will stick in people’s minds and hearts—images that repeat a single number till it becomes a kind of mantra. And because we live in a wired world, we have a method for bringing those images together, for making that collection of photos add up to more than the sum of its parts.

On October 24, we’ll have a giant screen at the United Nations, where we’ll be flashing up those images in real time as they arrive from around the globe. In the weeks between then and December’s huge climate conference in Copenhagen, we’ll be using those images, and the human energy they represent, to push for a solution, not an agreement. To demand that physics and chemistry have a place at the table alongside economics (maybe even above economics, since its laws are easier to amend than the laws of nature). There’s no guarantee any of this is going to work—some scientists think we’ve already waited too long to get started. But the consensus is there’s still a window.

Which confers responsibility, a responsibility that some days I feel more keenly than I’d like to. Last night after my speech the first question came from an eight-year-old girl who’d been sitting in the front row with her father. “If things don’t go well at Copenhagen, how much longer will I be able to live in the Maldives?” she asked. “When will we have to move?”

The only answer I could give her (after a lifetime of burning fossil fuel) was: “I hope you’ll be able to raise your family here, and I’m doing everything I can to make it happen.” Since I seem now to be an organizer as much as a writer, I hope you’ll give the same answer. If you’re reading this magazine before October 24, I hope you’ll put it down and go to the computer and log on to 350.org and figure out how you’re going to help. But this battle will stretch on for years to come, requiring the same kind of creativity, and the same kind of solidarity, and the same kind of hope against hope. If you can muster any of that, then you’re badly needed.

Returning to photograph the Northwest, I found a region with much history but an uncertain future. Complexities and contradictions challenge the Northwest’s sense of identity at every turn. The forests of the coastal mountains are a patchwork of logged clearings, young third- and fourth-growth timber, and occasional pockets of old growth. Burn piles of tangled branches are heaped on muddy ground. Mountains, covered with Douglas fir seedlings barely a foot tall, appear physically shrunk. The mill towns and ports that once hummed with activity day and night are shadows of once-important communities. Old, rusted machinery and pier pilings recall a time when industry and opportunistic pioneers set their sights on the forest.

Now an eerie, unhurried mood pervades these communities as they search for a refashioned sense of purpose. Homes lie vacant and storefronts closed, streets empty other than the occasional teenagers who wander with no particular destination. They recall a young Kurt Cobain, who spent his high school years drifting and struggling for purpose in the mill town of Aberdeen, Washington.

There is a sense of diminishment and salvage about the region now. The lumber mills that do remain are still a primary employer for timber towns and the main reason for their continued survival. One, Seaport Lumber in Raymond and South Bend, Washington, was closed for years before its current owners resumed the mill’s operation. Today it employs many people from the community, most barely out of high school, turning out not spruce or cedar, but boards of once-scorned alder, bound for furniture factories.

Above the Lower Hoh River, on muddy foothills, Juan Abalos salvages shingle bolts, looking for marketable wood in the rotting stumps of cedar trees logged years before. His chainsaw stands as high as he is tall. Juan is like many immigrants, mainly from Latin America and Southeast Asia, who made their way to the remote reaches of the country’s northwest corner. With local populations falling, immigrants have flooded in, filling the need for cheap manual labor, clearing land, planting tree seedlings, shucking oysters, and gutting fish.

Juan’s life lies in stark contrast to Elizabeth “Missy” Barlow’s. Eighty-seven now, she was raised on the banks of the Hoh on land her grandfather homesteaded after the Civil War. I first met Missy in Forks, at a small store featuring her artwork. She paints with oils and watercolors and creates delicately composed landscapes from bits of dryer lint. She took me down an old road to visit the massive Sitka spruce she had stumbled upon as a young woman collecting pine cones for extra money. The base of the tree measures nearly eighteen feet in diameter; it is estimated to be six hundred years old. Once surrounded by thick forest, the spruce stands alone in the middle of a field. The top fell years before and lies below, slowly rotting back to the Earth.

The wild salmon I remember still return to spawn in coastal rivers, but their numbers are a small fraction of what once were thriving runs. I spent a cold November day with Carl Chastain, head of the Pacific Coast Salmon Coalition, as he visited a handful of small creeks near the Sol Duc River. At each creek, Carl would stop the truck, climb up onto the cargo bed, and toss the carcasses of hatchery salmon into the water below, hoping that they will feed salmon fry downstream as uncounted wild salmon bodies once did.

Shelling the nuts took all evening, but I found this strangely addictive. There’s a trick to it—you pinch off the acorn’s round top first, then its pointed end; after snipping through the shell, peel back the shiny brown jacket. When I found worms, I cut them out with a pocketknife. When a taste test proved the nuts were bitter, I boiled them in change after change of water to draw the tannins. I gathered white oak acorns; those from red oaks are more tannic. Squirrels, knowing this, eat white oak acorns out of hand but bury red oak acorns to use later. The soil’s moisture leaches out some of the tannins, so the nuts taste sweeter when the squirrels dig them up—if they remember. And if they don’t? Another oak seedling unfurls its leaves.

The boiling acorns turned the water dark, and rafts of steam rose from the pot. I roasted them on a pizza pan and ground them into meal with a food processor. Who makes acorn bread nowadays? Manna lying on the ground, free for the taking, but it’s a lot of work.

As long as I can remember, acorns have caught my eye. Living pebbles you shine in your palm, tangible promise of new sprouts to come: willow oak streaked with sienna, overcup big as gobstoppers, water oak packed with sunny yellow meat, burr capped with twisty fringe. Once, as a kid, I made an acorn necklace, carving holes in the seeds and stringing them on yarn. But when the crumbs of meal dropped to the ground, I regretted it. They would never become tall trees.

But I am older now, and calloused. If a tree can bear thousands of acorns in a season, as many do, eating a few pounds won’t make much difference. Is this the attitude that wiped out passenger pigeons, once famous for their migration? That name synonymous with “moving about or wandering,” flocks so great they dimmed the sun, nests so plentiful they split boughs; eggs dropped like hailstones. My loaf of acorn bread rose high and cracked in the middle; it tasted chewy, a little nutty, wild harvest on a suburban campus.

I think of other oaks I know, like the mighty Quercus prinus on nearby Table Rock. The crevices in their thick bark, deep enough for my hand to fit inside, mark their great age, as do their thick boles and tremendous height. They’re likely the last few old-growth trees up there, rooted in ground stony and rough; that country used to be chestnut forest before the blight. Now that the chestnuts are gone, you wouldn’t know they’d ever lived, but for the space their dying made.

Migrating flocks of passenger pigeons once left mountains of droppings, dark and rich, fertilizing ground that otherwise would have been too poor to support trees. Some of today’s mature oak stands may have started with the help of pigeon guano, or the seeds the birds dispersed in the 1870s. It’s possible that passenger pigeons gave my ridgeline oaks the boost they needed to survive.

It is good to return to a familiar place and find something sowed with a generous hand. The sun’s energy translated into fat and fiber; I husked, baked, ate it for breakfast with smears of butter. What life I gathered and poured into my own. Even though the acorns had just fallen, some of them were sprouting already when I collected them, tap roots poking from the meat’s pale skin. Looking for cool damp, and tunneling down to find it. 

In the face of climate change and energy challenges, what creative ways are you finding to forge healthy and durable lives and communities? Send submissions—five hundred words or fewer—to Orion, 187 Main Street, Great Barrington, MA 01230, or via . Submissions become property of Orion.

Great Barrington, Massachusetts— Amid soccer fields, parking lots, baseball fields and the everyday commotion at Monument Mountain Regional High School, there is a 12,500-square-foot organic vegetable garden and heirloom fruit orchard (cherry, pear, and apple). This is Project Sprout, the first student-initiated and student-run vegetable garden at a public high school in the United States. Last year, our first year, was a trial year in which our garden was one-third the size it is now. Our bountiful produce went primarily to local food pantries and volunteers, and we supplemented as much of the cafeteria food with our produce as possible. This year, with well-defined goals of further infiltrating our school’s lunches with organic vegetables and integrating the garden into public-school education, we are successfully conjuring up support from all walks of life and turning our dreams into reality.

Project Sprout’s student founders—Natalie Akers, Sam Levin, and Sarah Steadman—met in a flurry of mutual interest, each looking for a way to take an active part in protecting the environment. In October 2007, after much discussion and research, we met with Mr. Powell (our go-to “green” faculty member), Raina Weber (head and founder of Project Native, the local nonprofit that took Project Sprout under its wing), Bridghe McCracken (our brilliant garden planner and teacher), and boom! Out came a dynamic team of activists devoted to changing the world for the better.  As this group began proving its commitment to the realization of Project Sprout, a community formed around us and the powerful idea we try to represent. Project Sprout became not simply a group of excited kids, but an entire community of people, young and old, working together to make the garden happen. Amazingly, during our trial year, we cultivated a 3,500-square-foot garden, donated over one thousand pounds of produce to a local shelter (WIC), served salads, soups, and mashed potatoes in three schools, and had dozens of kids working in the garden.

Above all, it’s the students who make this project unique. Throughout everything, the students have remained the leaders and designers of Project Sprout; we are the teachers and the activists in the garden, reaching out to the community while fundraising tirelessly to ensure a bountiful harvest. We meet throughout the year with Bridghe to learn as much as we can about the complexities of biodynamic cultivation and to plan as much of the garden as possible. We spend hours searching for the tools for upcoming projects such as a water-catchment system, a composting system, a windbreak for our orchard, the shed we need to build, and much, much more. Meanwhile, students of all ages learn from the high schoolers what it means to be empowered and to feel connected to the natural world in our daily actions. 

Kids and adults alike are loving getting their hands dirty. A classmate once commented that she salivates just thinking about the salsa made at the garden. The kids from detention shovel with pride while thirty kids from the elementary school spill into the garden as part of an after-school program. “Kindergardeners” run over to examine new growth; they ask about each plant, and one even ventures to point out that worms are good because they aerate the soil. We’re impressed. Then again, they are the ones with the fascination for grizzly spiders and the unmatched zeal for obliterating Japanese beetles.

The garden breathes life into tomatoes, lettuce, cucumbers, zucchini, fruits, and myriad other edibles, which in turn breathe life and health into the student body, the local environment, and our community. The journey continues as we dream of our future hoop houses growing lettuce in February, of our soon-to-be blueberry patch, our nearly completed tool shed, and of our future herb garden. Project Sprout, from its plants to its youth leaders, is growing.