Articles Archive
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Editor’s Note
Silent Spring – the book that forever changed the way the world looks at chemicals – turns 50 this year, and when you’re a writer researching the herbicide glyphosate for a story like the one on page 46, you see and feel Rachel Carson’s presence everywhere. Google search “glyphosate” and you’ll see any number of anti-chemical groups using her… (more)
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Editor’s Note
Logging culture is part of the fabric of rural communities in the Northeast. One might go so far as to say that the logger is a pillar of rural life, in the sense that his trade – like the farmer’s – helps maintain the rural working landscape that most of us idealize. If you live in a rural place, you’re… (more)
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Editor’s Note
I took a kid fishing recently. A friend’s kid – a ten-year-old boy who didn’t grow up rural. We cast rooster tails and panther martins into a tea-colored lake that sat up on the spine of the Green Mountains. At first he was impatient, but it melted away into a postcard moment: man and boy on a perfect summer afternoon.… (more)
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Editor’s Note
It’s mid-May as I write this, on an evening that feels like the transition between spring and summer. Outside, the soggy air smells like dead worms and hyacinth and freshly split birch. The land, which until now seemed hesitant to give itself over to summer, has taken the leap in the wake of recent rain and warmth. Yellow dandelions and… (more)
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Editor’s Note
Judged by the contents of its clutter, my desk is not a particularly happy place. You can picture my computer monitor gasping for air amidst a pile of papers that amount to a sea of bad news. Rummage around and you’ll find news stories on the last paper mill in northern New Hampshire going out of business, briefings detailing the… (more)
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Editor’s Note
By the time you read this, summer will have long ago become a fish story - just a memory in a Polaroid that was “this hot” (spread your arms apart) and went by “this fast.” Autumn’s color also seemed to pass quickly this year, which means that it’s somehow suddenly winter, the best and worst of seasons – an exhilarating… (more)
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Editorial
The ancient Celts spoke of “thin places” in nature – places where the veil between heaven and earth is worn thin.
To those with Thomas Cole taste, “thin” could be synonymous with opulent: sepiatoned thunderheads right out of the Old Testament rolling ominously and gorgeously toward the summit of Katahdin; or brilliant autumn foliage on a postcard sugar maple, the… (more)
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Editor’s Note
I grew up in a rural Vermont town, the son of a forester and a public school teacher. The Vermont part’s not important, but the rural part is. Stories around the Thanksgiving dinner table, then and now, involve tracking buck deer across boreal summits, the price of sawlogs, the 2,500-tap maple sugaring operation that the family still runs together.
While… (more)
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Editorial
My wife recently came across a very interesting family document, an official inventory of the estate of her great-great-grandfather, Robert McCrillis, who died in 1884 in Topsham, Vermont.
Written in a robust script on one single sheet of ledger paper, it enumerates all of his possessions. The entries include four acres of tillage land at $43.75 an acre and two… (more)
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Editorial
“This time they got caught” was the distinct overtone in a recent news story in which 15 illegal immigrants from China who had packed themselves into a crate were found just in the nick of time by an alert border inspector. The fact that this was news, and that the successful inspector was described as being ultra sharp, amounted to… (more)