From the Field

by Meredith Goehring

We knew it was coming but the ash still surprised us, a startling passage from vivid green into bone grey. No warning, just a sudden muting of the world several miles into the trail. Tragedy.

I am shocked, suddenly winded, reminded of the sensation of lost love; the same breathless abandonment at finding there is no color on the ridges receding out to the horizon, no matter how high you go or how far you strain to see.

by Tom Titus

I felt the storm in my body. The spinning energy generated by that colossal pinwheel of wind and moisture coming onshore moved through my being the way a willow rod bends in the hands of a water dowser. My battered left knee began to ache. This was a warm storm, a gusting exhalation that began sometime in the late-December night. I opened my bedroom window a few inches to give the wind-driven rain room to slip its animal fingers inside and massage my sleepless ears.

by Richard Chasm

Pete Small’s father was a hard working logger. They lived in Olalla, but one summer Mr. Small got a logging job up on Twelve Mile Creek the other side of Camas Valley. The loggers camped all week coming home Saturday and going back to work at dawn on Monday.

by Edward J. Kame’enui

The Lahaina fire is now underground
where Pele will gather it without voice
and when the wind is right and
ancient warriors have their backs to her,
she will release it again and follow its path
in her long, alabaster white mu’umu’u.

by Helen Baczkowska

A solitary raven has flown over my tent every morning this week. Most days I have heard the prrr-ruk call before seeing the bird’s silhouette, with its fingered wings and wedge-shaped tail. Below the raven, my green tent nestles on waste ground between a housing estate and red-brown rocks that tumble down the sea. This week I am one of maybe two hundred environmental activists squatting land where England’s newest coal mine for decades is planned.

by Duane Noriyuki

I can picture my father as a young man in northern Colorado walking into a field at day’s end, pushing his shovel into the ground and kneeling to study roots of pinto beans or corn. He would hold a fistful of soil to his nose, checking for who knows what, then crumble it between his fingers. He saw something, smelled something in the land that I never did.