“I sometimes just come up here… to breathe.”

Freeman quietly breathes and I join. He recollects a season when the trees were as tall as him: a time I have no eyes for seeing nor wisdom to fully understand.
The steep hillside reaches up with its undergrowth to hold last year’s cones and needles and to guide the moment’s breeze. I was truly alive that moment. A followed silence allowed for the hearing of the world beyond our breath.

Tractor trailor trucks crowd our highways and make one wonder what ever happened to trains and how can it be economical for all those big rigs to run all over the country.
But there is something I’ve been seeing a lot of on the back of these trucks that brings a smile to my face.
The wings of a windmill look small in the distance, but when an escorted wide-load passes you on an interstate with one wobbling on its extended trailer you’re humbled by the size and the knowledge that this is only one piece of a giant.

The land is vast, but taxes surely make it expensive. What is the answer?
There are thousands of cows placed on a small plot of land. Food is dumped into troughs, and manure is scooped away. It’s extremely efficient.
The smell is somewhat nostalgic if you have grown up on a farm, but this is not your grandfather’s family farm. These CAFO’s are jarring in their depiction of what is truly for dinner.
Is efficiency what we desire in our animal related agriculture? This is the kind of question we must ask if we are truly to be a sustainable nation.

Irony can be so cruel.
Annah and I parted ways in Iowa City, Iowa. I was in search of sustainability. Annah was on her way back to Athens to make our lives a bit more sustainable. Rent never rests.
She had flown into Columbus, Ohio. I was navigating our 1980 diesel wagon across the fields of Iowa, hoping to make Nebraska by sunset. After a lengthy layover in Chicago, she landed safely at 3 a.m. in Columbus. I stumbled upon rows of “ditch weed,” bordering the oceans of industrial soy beans and corn, while attempting to photograph feedlots on Iowa back roads.
Annah directed the cab driver towards her friends house in Columbus. She paused for roughly five seconds in her decision of whether to turn left or right at an intersection. That five seconds could have made all the difference.
I came close to Nebraska, but ran out of diesel and steam near Dave’s World truck stop in Onawa, Iowa. I pulled my back seat down and made a bed of my car.
Annah eventually told the cab driver to make the turn. A car coming in their direction swerved into the cab’s lane and then swerved again. His car slammed into a telephone pole. He was drunk.

It’s old. Maybe 100 years. Hell, maybe 200. The rings are rotten in the middle, so it’s hard knowin’ not countin’.
But Sheila’s house is caving in from the root system hitting her basement wall, and ours is being pushed to its foundational limits.
Half and half. That’s how they split the bill after a local group of entrepreneurs made our decaying red maple into next winter’s firewood.
It was a conundrum. The giant tree sat exactly in the center of the imaginary line dividing Sheila’s property from ours, which we rent. She wasn’t willing to let the expanding roots deform her house any longer. It had to come down. My landlord wasn’t so concerned. He questioned whether it was worth the cost considering the shape of the house and thought it would be more financially cunning to allow the tree its natural right of taking out the house. This way insurance money could be collected and a more profitable unit built.
The tree is down. There’s more sun on the back porch, and Sheila seems less concerned.

My grandfather consciously taught me a few things. I can remember one such lesson. We were resting after a long day’s work. He was smoking a hand-rolled cigarette and kneeling down when he said, “You want to know how to really throw a punch?” Of course I did. I was a boy with a future of possibilities. So he stood up and stuck his barrel chest out and put up both his fists as if he were preparing for a bare-knuckle brawl. The cigarette was still pursed between his lips as he exhaled the next step in the proper punch. “It’s all in your body,” he said as twisted his torso and right fist in my direction. The impact was jarring.
There’s so much I wish my grandfather had taught me other than how to properly put a whoopin’ on someone. Learning often came in the way of watching and mimicking like a child learns language.
My neighbor just started gardening, actually a number of my neighbors just started to grow their own food. They’re learning from books, from friends and from neighbors. When I made this photograph, I thought about the importance of passing down knowledge and how peculiar a predicament it is to learn the magic of growing food from a book.

“Once, in a self-pitying frame of mind, I was comparing my background with that of an English novelist friend. Where he had been brought up in London, taken from the age of four onward to the Tate and the National Gallery, sent traveling on the Continent in every school holiday, taught French and German and Italian, given access to bookstores, libraries and British Museums, made familiar from infancy on with the conversation of the eloquent and the great. I had grown up in this dung-heeled sagebrush town on the disappearing edge of nowhere, utterly without painting, without sculpture, without architecture, almost wihout music or theater, without conversations or language or travel or stimulating instruction, without libraries or museums or bookstores, almost without books. I was charged with getting in a single lifetime, from scratch, what some people inherit as naturally as they breathe air.
How, I asked this Englishman, could anyone from so deprived a background ever catch up? How was one expected to compete, as a cultivated man, with people like himself? He looked at me and said dryly, ‘Perhaps you got something in place of all that?”
- Wallace Stegner from Wolf Willow

It’s humbling to look out at the stars.
There’s a similar feeling when looking at an endless ocean.
I can remember the first time I jumped off a boat into the open sea. We were far from shore, and, wading in moving waters, I could feel the immensity of the world below. The realization of my insignificance was enough to take away my breath. I panicked and could barely swim. I quickly reached for the ladder of the boat and pulled myself up.
It’s no wonder we grasp for reasons to believe our lives are in some way significant.

Earth’s Day © Jim Korpi

EARTH
b. 4.55 billion BC d.
“The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.”
— Wendell Berry
What’s the alternative? There’s no planet in the solar system better suited for such a wonderful life. Mars looks nice in photographs but appears chilly. Pluto… well… it’s not really… close.

Driving the road from San Clemente to Yosemite National Park is like slowly boiling on asphalt and evaporating into the presence of clouds.
The traffic through Los Angeles guided me in a frantic and tense blur of break lights. Gradually the streams of cars pour off their exits like reverse tributaries from this river of tar. The landscape dilates and the mind begins to relax. Buildings of polished stone and glass crumble, become raw materials, and man’s grasp of the world loosens.
Greater minds have spoke often of the need for pure wilderness, so I won’t speak so plainly. An untouched wild, I’ve come to believe, broadens human thought to the condition of cleansing, to the point at which the tendency for possibilities is loosened and wonder is left to settle into the unknown.