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Thoreau’s Borderlands

October 6, 2014 Essays, In House

In Henry David Thoreau’s essay “Walking” he writes, “Give me a wildness whose glance no civilization can endure.” It is this longing for wildness that drove Thoreau to live and continue to return to Walden pond; to seek out nature whether along rivers, or the seashore, in the Maine woods, or his home town.

But at times Nature complicates Thoreau’s idealism by presenting raw, untamed forces—true wilderness, rather than just wildness—that stand in stark contrast to the pastoral that he often evokes in his writing.

Spritehood

October 3, 2014 Essays

By ANDREW SHADE

drawing of dragon and sea

The continent, it turned out, was not ready for people. The settlers chopped down every tree and killed every animal, then started in on each other. They hoarded finite resources—furs, lumber, ore—until there weren’t any left to use. Counterfeiters discovered a way to alchemize gold, bringing about hyperinflation and economic collapse. The strong terrorized the weak, not just once but repeatedly, hounding them through one life after another. Normal people became outright thugs, enacting fantasies of domination. Dominated people had a tendency to become informal police, enacting fantasies of justice. Every so often a server crash would plunge everyone weeks into the past, to the most recent backup.

The Teak House

October 2, 2014 Essays

By LAMTHARN HANTRAKUL

house in black and white

I like pressing my cheek up against the cool embrace of the teak floor, letting the chill lap against my face, chest, arms, and legs. I especially like the feeling of a freshly mopped teak floor. The wood becomes softer, more soothing like a cool straw mattress in the hot summer. When I walk barefoot, the gentle tickle below my feet beckons me to lie down. I like the rush of wooden veins flowing underneath my thighs and arms, brushing them into slumber.I’ve tried resisting the temptation on many occasions, but I always succumb to the elbow-rubbing intimacy that ensues. Remain too far away and there is nothing to smell. Rub too close and all the pleasure is gone. But get close enough to brush your tingling nose against the grainy grooves on the surface and you become lost in the aroma. I steal another whiff; the smell is subtler than rosewood, more subdued than pine, but sweeter than cedar.

In House

September 22, 2014 Essays, In House

By ELIZABETH WITTE

pots

The ending place is empty—nearly. I am writing this in the beginning place because it seems not quite right to start in a place that is ending.

On the phone, completing the last of the cleaning, he describes to me the ending place. He is there and I am here. He describes the span of those walls (now spackled) in which we made our lives these past eight years. Walls from which we hung postcards and pictures, pieces of metal and lace, the mirrored shadowbox, the plaster cherub, all the instruments. There, where the doors were painted a sloppy garish teal long before our arrival, where the ‘beautiful hardwood floors’ finally gave up, splintered into thick spears. The EIK, table now gone, in which innumerable parties dwindled to their inevitable but elusive ends, linoleum peeling along its edge. But I am here, 100 miles west, two days in: surrounded by countless boxes, all the stuff, the anxious cats—on the cusp of the new, an expansive place—beginning.

I Believe in New Yorkers

September 8, 2014 Essays, In House

By MELODY NIXON

“I believe New Yorkers. Whether they’ve ever questioned the dream in which they live, I wouldn’t know, because I won’t ever dare ask that question.”

– Dylan Thomas

In my first months in New York City I rode in the back of taxicabs through Central Park thinking, “When will this sink in? When will it feel like I know where I am.” I didn’t think I was dreaming – rather, I felt the whole city was dreaming with me inside of it, a poppy-field illusion, a drug trip induced by hidden valves releasing an experimental hallucinogen. The city needed to pinch itself awake, collectively, and climb out of the hollow to find out what was really going on.

“I stopped at Lexington Avenue,” wrote Joan Didion of her arrival in the city, “and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out of the West and reached the mirage.” You arrive, you reach the mirage, and you wait for it to clear.

Residency

August 4, 2014 Essays, In House

By MARIAN CROTTY

I’ve just begun my second week in Baltimore, and already I’ve caught myself with long-term intentions. I’ve hurried through the usual rituals of relocation: I’ve registered my car, and I’ve picked up a driver’s license and library card, an application for a voter registration card, and a collection of guidebooks and maps of the city. But more than that, there’s the way I feel, walking around most nights, slipping into the rhythm of my neighborhood as if I am taking in the details of a stranger who will soon be family, as if it will some day be important for me to know the angles of the fire escapes climbing against red brick buildings or the shape of coiled electrical wires strung along the side of a bridge. It’s an embarrassing feeling—denser and less urgent than infatuation, but shyer and more fragile than love. I’m overeager, ready to attach myself with the guileless certainty of a teenager.

Django: Elegies and Improvisations with Small Boats

August 1, 2014 Essays

By RALPH SNEEDEN

Cikovsky, Nicolai; "The Inlet at Wooley Pond", 1945; Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY

When a boat dies, you usually have two choices: pay hundreds of dollars to have it hauled away, or let it molder and sink into some secluded corner of the yard. A quick tour of my wife’s parents’ town on the South Shore of Massachusetts, where I moored my boat, would suggest that the latter is the norm: those husks and dark prows entombed in plain sight beside rotting cordwood, abandoned swing-sets. Last year, when I discovered that the oaken keel of my sailboat had rotted irreparably, I embarked on my first experiment with time-lapse photography. I rented for twenty dollars a “reciprocating saw”—the contractor’s principal instrument of demolition—known as a Sawzall. After positioning my iPad on a kitchen chair in the driveway of my in-laws’ home, then unraveling forty yards of extension cord from the garage, I plugged in the nasty tool—part torpedo, part robotic swordfish—and grimly laid into the carapace of the little boat over which I had worried and fussed for almost ten years.

Great or What?

July 18, 2014 Essays

By SAHIBA GILL

In May, I was abroad finishing a job, the kind that did not exist when I graduated high school. As I prepared to leave, northeast Ohio, where I grew up, came to me. I would fly down remembered winding gray roads. Sometimes I did this in my dreams. Sometimes the dream was different – I would drive out to the country but turn around because I didn’t know what to do out there, outside a car with only long grass and woods around me and no path to hike. The suburbs were my cradle. In the car from the airport to my childhood home, I realized that what I had thought of as flying was the feeling of the car tugging my shoulders in the backseat as we made familiar turns.

Losing a Hive

July 10, 2014 Essays

By PETER VON ZIEGESAR

Hive

We lost a hive this winter. We’d set our two hives facing south on the roof of our Brooklyn home for maximum sunlight, knowing that in winter that would translate into maximum exposure to wind and cold as well. My wife, Hali, and our beekeeping consultant, Davin, dutifully taped up the cracks with red duct tape so that the bees would expend less energy over January and February with their self-composed heating system. Generally they cluster around the queen, vibrating their wings and shivering to keep her and themselves warm. It was a harsh winter in Brooklyn, however, and we’d gone up to the roof several times in December to check to see whether the hives were healthy. Both of them seemed okay, the workers’ little furry heads crawling up over the tops of the frames or buried head-first into the pale, hexagonal wax cells. Normally, when you open a hive, even in winter, you are struck by the chaos, the thousands of glinting bodies nosing and circulating, and the sharp hive smell that combines sweetness and sourness in equal proportions.

“The Ship Log”: Sea Stories by Young Writers From New York’s Harbor School

June 23, 2014 Essays, In House

By JULIA LICHTBLAU

The Ship Log cover

In February, 2014, eighteen seniors at Harbor School, a New York City public high school devoted to maritime careers on Governors Island, a historic military base turned national park, embarked on their first fiction writing efforts. For the next three months, their composition class, which Harbor School veteran teacher Anna Lurie and I taught was devoted to little else. On June 3, they read their work, first in the library, then after school in the Mess Hall to classmates, teachers, and family and distributed copies of The Ship Log, the magazine containing their stories. It was a big day for all of us.