Monthly Archives September 2011

Whalers and Quakers On a recent trip to Cape Cod, we spent the first night in New Bedford, Massachusetts, once known as “the city that lit the world” because its whaling fleet was the largest in the world and whale oil was the fuel of choice for oil lamps (and spermaceti, from sperm whales, for the best candles). …...

Walking the Cape with Henry Cape Cod, Thoreau’s last book, begins with “Wishing to get a better view than I had yet had of the ocean…” and the final sentence concludes “A man may stand there and put all America behind him.” It was published posthumously in 1865, three years after his early death from tuberculosis at the age of …...

The View from Limuw The indigenous inhabitants of the island called it limuw, “in the ocean.” A prosaic but apt geographical name for the place. The name has a very matter-of-fact, here and now implication. But the Spanish who explored the Chumash Channel and its islands beginning in the 16th century and colonized the area with their string of …...

The Chumash Channel and its Islands When Spanish explorer Juan Cabrillo sailed into the Santa Barbara Channel in 1542, he found a thriving indigenous maritime culture living along the coasts and on the Channel Islands. One thing that impressed the Spaniards were the large seagoing canoes. One major coastal village had so many canoes on the beach that Cabrillo called it …...

The Art of Ecological Restoration on Santa Cruz Island The large fabric print hanging on the west wall of the dining room of the Santa Cruz Island Reserve research station caught my eye immediately. A tangle of creatures drawn in detailed black covered the white background, intertwining in almost Escher-like fashion. There were sheep and foxes, eagles and jays, oaks and mallows, skunks and …...

Evolutionary Ecology on California’s Galapagos Sunday, October 24th. Our reservations for the trip to Prisoners Harbor on the north shore of Santa Cruz Island had been made months ago. But the weather during the past week had forced Island Packers, the commercial concessionaire that provides transportation for visitors to the four northern islands within Channel Islands National Park, to cancel …...

More Ecological Explorations at the Edge of the Continent October 2021. In my last story posted here I described my ecological explorations in the San Francisco Bay area in June during a writing residency at The Mesa Refuge in Point Reyes Station, right on the San Andreas Fault at the south end of Tomales Bay. I was gathering information and experiences for essays about …...

Ecological Explorations at the Edge of the Continent June 2021. At about the time the coronavirus pandemic struck in the spring of 2020, I was preparing my application for a writing residency at the Mesa Refuge in Point Reyes Station, California. It was an exciting opportunity I had learned about because several of my favorite writers, including Rebecca Solnit and Robin Kimmerer, are …...

Planting Chestnuts at Sky Meadows March 22, 2021. It was a beautiful morning as I drove west on I-66 and turned north toward Sky Meadows State Park. From the Crooked Run Valley, the meadows sweep up to the old farm and on toward the ridge to the west, along which the Appalachian Trail runs. The parking lot beside the visitor …...

A Decade of American Chestnut Restoration on Timber Lane September 2020. In my last story posted here, A Decade of Monarchs and Milkweeds, I described how a decade ago, just as I was leaving a job at an international consulting firm where I had worked for about five years and re-starting my independent consulting business, an experiment to attract monarchs to my yard by …...