Driving through a broad valley in western Idaho eight years ago, my daughter turned toward me and said, her voice deepened with emotion, “I love this valley. It’s so…

Manic whistles rose from the woods at the edge of the lawn. The hair prickled along the back of my neck as I pressed my face to the cool porch screen and peered into the dark.…

There’s something about the angle of light on early spring days in Vermont, when the snow cover is almost gone, and the sun shines through the stark canopy right down to the forest…

I don’t know how the snowmobiles make it up or down the short, steep hill at the edge of the cornfield that borders my driveway. But their tracks drop from the top of the hill into…

Ninety years ago, my grandparents bought a swaybacked farmhouse and 20 acres of land in Orleans County, Vermont. Cedarhurst Farm, as it was known then, sat atop a sloping meadow along the…

Norway Pond is not like the other ponds and lakes scattered around my small New Hampshire community. Those other waterbodies are pristine, with clear, deep water and long, wild stretches…

A twisting tunnel chewed through dead grass, a line of bounding paw prints in mud, a translucent snakeskin on a sunny rock. Those creatures that have passed this way before me stitch their…

Last night was clear and I drove into the game lands above Tipton to where the reservoir sits halfway up the mountain. The sky opens there into a wide bowl, far from the artificial light…

In the Kingdom of October, early morning fog wraiths hang upon hardwood hillsides of burnt orange and smoldering gold. Overgrown apple orchards, each tree bent and hag twisted by the pitiless…

The fog was just loosening its hold on the craggy summit as Sarah and I reached the top of Monument Mountain. As forest thinned to clearing, rays of sunlight reached down to welcome us. A few…