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Wilderness yesterday, wilderness today Alexis De Tocqueville visits America in the 1830’s and wants to see the wilderness. The early settlers don’t understand his fascination. The pioneers explore the wilderness for economic reasons or colonial reasons, say for logging, war, trapping, mining, but never for pleasure. It is chaos, the face of the deep, the unfettered darkness.…

Geography and the landscape of the heart Home is two places, and anybody can see a heart leaned up against itself leaves a gap in the middle. There is the Cumberland river country, a wrinkled bit of geography in southcentral Kentucky where steep hardwood ridges cradle skinny hollows pushed out by enterprising settlers. The other…

Received an email recently noting that my favorite authors are “white men.” (The emailer found a list of author-mentors on my website.) This, I took the liberty to infer, was an accusation. It put me, a white man, in a circular conversation with other white men, who have historically held and wielded power. This might…

This essay was first published on the Plough.com on 16 February 2024 On a typical morning in my childhood, I wake and trudge down to the barn to help Dad with the farm chores: chickens, two horses, a milk cow, a dog, a pig or two. I am often conveniently fifteen minutes late. When we arrive…

According to the digital thermometer it is six below, Fahrenheit. The horizons are crystallized in a band of orange and contrasted with the deep blue of the sub-arctic sky. The sun is out of sight now, but while the land is in shadow, the clouds over the mountains refract the last rays of the sun…