Real Places
Travels to prime infrastructure

“Visits to infrastructure facilities give a traveler techie info, insight into the big sustainability puzzles, more fun than you might imagine, and deep respect for the souls who build and tend these places.”

First published in The Atlantic, 2001

Watershed
Travels in home territory and time

Selected for This Impermanent Earth (UGA Press, 2021)

”A place like Fresh Pond schools the eye, teaches one to expect surprise, and to rely on minute things — a dark red leaf encased in ice — to unlock meaning for the metaphor-loving mind…Technically however, Fresh Pond is a terminal reservoir and purification plant for the city water supply, and that is why it survives.”

First published by The Georgia Review and Beacon Press,1998; updated for This Impermanent Earth (UGA Press, 2021)

Hymn
A tribute

National Magazine Award for essays

”Nearly a century has passed since W.E.B. Du Bois identified 'the problem of the twentieth century,' but as the millennium arrives, the legacy of the color line is still palpable in American life. One of the times the line is still deeply inscribed and observed is Sunday morning."

First published in The Atlantic, and in Domestic Travels (Beacon Press,1998); revised slightly, 2023

Field Notes from Belize
A laboratory for sustainability

“The most exciting travel writing I have read in years.” — Robert Finch, author of The Outer Beach; ed., The Norton Book of Nature Writing

“On an average day in the country a traveler can encounter roofs built by Scots to withstand the snow loads of Inverness; pyramids designed to take one from earthly to celestial geography; the Maya god of writing; ecologists doing research; visionaries establishing sanctuaries; and Mestizo boys tattooed in honor of their pirate ancestors."

First published in Southwest Review (1991) and The Very Rich Hours (Beacon Press,1992); revised 2024

Neon Effects
Seeking the aftermarket sublime

The Pushcart Prize +
Best of Pushcart XXV edition

”After a long moment peering at each other as across a gulf, I venture an explanation. ‘It's for fun,’ I say. ‘For fun,’ my auto mechanics repeat slowly, skeptically, ‘For fun.’ And now they are smiling and trying hard not to smile. We have unexpectedly stepped over into some new territory.”

First published in Southwest Review,1997, and in Domestic Travels (Beacon Press, 1998)

Zip-A-Dee-Do-Dah
The collage artists of the bird world

Selected for the Norton Book of Nature Writing,“ the definitive collection of nature writing in English”

“The blue jay is the bird of inventive recycling, flexibility, and found art. This spring, the nest outside our window has grown into the most extravagant heap yet… In another kind of guide, I would place the blue jay alongside the great collage artists, those bricoleurs of a recombinatory art, linking decorum and glitz, high and lo, the funny and elegiac, making a moody frisson of the commonplace.” 

First published in Domestic Travels (Beacon Press, 1998); revised 2022

The Very Rich Hours
Houseboat travels in the Everglades

“A tour de force” — The Boston Globe

”Upon entering the shining bay, Pete and I decide to swerve off the platonic line that leads dully through the center of the chart and cruise instead up the winding Joe River.” What could go wrong?

First published in The Southwest Review, and The Very Rich Hours (Beacon Press,1989); revised 2024

Definitions for Homeground

A Guide to the American Landscape
Edited by Barry Lopez & Debra Gwartney (Trinity University Press, 2006)

“A masterpiece”
"A way of reclaiming the language."
— The New York Times Book Review

Contributors include Bill McKibben, Barbara Kingsolver, Emily Hiestand, Frank Burroughs, and other noted writers.  

Introduction for Urban Nature

Anthology edited by Laure-Anne Bosselaar
Introduction by Emily Hiestand
(Milkweed Editions, 2001)

“The idea ‘city’ is almost as mutable as nature. Lewis Mumford, lover of cities, says it has taken us ‘more than five thousand years to arrive at even a partial understanding of the city's nature and drama’: how cities emerge, grow, decay, implode, and renew themselves.”

South of the Ultima Thule
Travels in Scotland and Orkney

“Altogether terrific” — The Boston Globe

”While remote, the northern shore of Caithness, where we catch the ferry, is still Scotland proper. The Orkney archipelago in the North Sea feels like another world.”

First published in The Very Rich Hours (Beacon Press,1989); revised 2024

Following Hermes
Travels in Greece

“A literary treat for the mind”

”Over a long, warm evening Kostas and Anne demonstrate that the famous host/guest tradition celebrated in the Odyssey  has endured in Greece. They show us how to eat in a taverna; initiating us into the foods, the manners, and, without speaking of it directly, point us toward the significance of the village taverna.”

First published in The Very Rich Hours (Beacon Press, 1992); revised 2024

Colonial Cloudway
A visit to Boston’s Tobin Bridge

"In ten minutes I could have a traffic tie-up, or an accident, or some freak weather like that 65 mph wind gust last week. I could get some emergency report from one of my crew and be here all night. I never know what is about to happen."

— Mr. Durbin, Operations Manager, Tobin Bridge

First published in Homage (Ebb Tide Editions, 2024)

Perils of Travel

“When traveling we are all informal ambassadors, so I am always especially mindful about courtesy when traveling in other territories and lands. But I am also always curious, and that has landed me in hot water several times.”

First published in Homage (Ebb Tide Editions, 2024)

Catfish
Travels in the Delta and Time

“Peter and I chanced upon the catfish ponds of the Mississippi Delta in 1987, during a music road trip in the Deep South. We discovered that the Mississippi Delta — that ‘most Southern place on Earth’ — was then home to most of the catfish ponds in the world.”

First published in Homage (Ebb Tide Editions, 2024)

Hose

Selected for Jo’s Girls: Tales of True Adventures, Editor, Christian McEwen (Beacon Press)

“One very hot August afternoon, when Kevin and I were age six and playing with the garden hose in the front yard, a neighbor lady appeared, walking along the low privet hedge that divided our yard from the sidewalk.” 

First published in Domestic Travels (Beacon Press, 1998), revised slightly, 2024 | Interview

The Riverside Hotel
Travels in the Delta

"‘I decided that it could be a hotel,’ Mrs. Z.L. Hill tells me. ‘I decided in 1943, and opened the Riverside in 1944.’ Such a matter-of-fact statement, which entirely glides over how extraordinary it was for an African-American woman living in Jim Crow-era Mississippi to bring such an entrepreneurial vision to fruition.”

First published in Homage (Ebb Tide Editions, 2024)

Plot

“Irrepressible curiosity and sense of adventure” — New York Times Book Review

“Each of the 60 plots in this quarter-acre community garden is cultivated by a different person, and true to American individualism, each plot proposes a distinct notion of what a garden is: what it should look like; what should grow in it – and why.”

First published in Domestic Travels (Beacon Press, 1998); revised 2024

Store

“The originality of Joyce in Dublin”
— The Cambridge Chronicle

“The idea of ‘store’ that Joe and Alice Bain brought to our street is the closest thing the neighborhood has to a public living room…
and after some years, Joe began to share something of his previous life Haiti with me. Roaming his first homeland, he was smiling, gone on one of memory's weightless journeys. Along the way, he said, ‘People think there was no democracy in Haiti, but before Duvalier, there was democracy.’ In Joe's accent, the word is ‘day-mo-cra-see’ — a pronunciation that makes the old ideal sound new and fresh, the kind of refreshment democracy does, in fact, always need.”

First published in The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine and in Domestic Travels (Beacon Press,1998); revised slightly in 2024

A profound lack of Ellis

”As I reached the entrance to our city’s most famous palace of automotive accessories an unexpected condition revealed itself. Inside the great Ellis showroom, there were no metal shelves with wheel bearings and chrome-plated parts. No custom wheels, radar detectors, no bike racks, no fog lamps. Only a vast shell of a voluminous, bare room. The mind reeled.”

First published in Bostonia, 2001, revised 2024

Maps
forthcoming

First published in Domestic Travels (Beacon Press,1998); revised 2024