If you’re going to build a Church of Ecology, might as well do it dramatically and audaciously. Plant it smack in the devil’s sprawling front yard and rub his nose in it. Build it in Bellevue.
The new Mercer Slough Environmental Education Center is a stunning retort to the grade-it, pave-it and supersize-it ethic that has shaped Bellevue’s built environment, as it has every other affluent American suburb. This clump of five modest buildings doesn’t just suggest a different direction. It’s an alternate universe.
—Lawrence W. Cheek
The Denver Art Museum’s newly opened Daniel Libeskind wing looks as though a volcano has suddenly burped up an immense pile of ship parts, jewel-faceted boulders, and giant titanium pterodactyl beaks. It’s a profoundly alien presence in the huddle of sober, upright buildings of downtown Denver. But it’s also as beautiful as it is startling.
—Lawrence W. Cheek
The ground had just thawed when I drove to Wyoming in 1976. It was night. All I could see of the state was white peaks, black sky, and the zigzag promenade of rabbits unwinding in front of the car ...
—Gretel Ehrlich
I used to walk in my sleep. On clear nights when the seals barked and played in phosphorescent waves, I climbed out the window and slept in a horse stall. Those “wild-child” stories never seemed odd to me; I had the idea that I was one of them, refusing to talk, sleeping only on the floor. Having become a city dweller, the back-to-the-land fad left me cold and I had never thought of moving to Wyoming. But here I am, and unexpectedly, my noctambulist world has returned. Not in the sense that I still walk in my sleep—such restlessness has left me—but rather, the intimacy with what is animal in me has returned. To live and work on a ranch implicates me in new ways: I have blood on my hands and noises in my throat that aren’t human.
—Gretel Ehrlich
I have always been a candy-ass. A cerebral, cautious creature in love with logic, fearful of confrontation.
A hot day, the end of summer. I am playing hopscotch when I feel the pull of someone’s gaze. Across the street in a parched and cactus-strewn yard, a girl about my age is standing. Statue-still. Her frame, short and square. Her hair, edge straight, long and black. Unbelievably cool.
“Hi,” I call out in my best, high WASPy voice, “My name’s Leesa. Wanna be friends?”
Slowly, deliberately, the girl with the long black hair lifts her middle finger, centering it directly between my eyes.
—Leesa Wright
Among the cruelest tricks life plays is the way it puts the complicated part at the end, when the brain is declining into simplicity, and the simplest part at the beginning, when the brain is fresh and has memory to spare.
—Ian Frasier
“This is probably the best thing I’ve done in my whole life.”
Peter Gron, forty-two, is talking about his Arctic Tern, a twenty-three-foot sloop now taking elegant shape beside his home on Gabriola Island, British Columbia. There is no trace of irony or self-consciousness in his voice or expression—he means it.
—Lawrence W. Cheek, The Year of the Boat, chapter 13
I'll admit it upfront: I'm not the workshop type.
Being crammed into a badly lit conference room with 150 strangers, any of whom might be called upon to hold my hand or hoist me into the air as part of some humiliating trust-building exercise, pretty much makes my skin crawl. Same goes for preternaturally perky moderators with microphones and dry-erase markers.
—Diane Mapes
The mirror behind the stage is still streaked with hand prints, smudges of sweat and body oil. The girls still climb up every few dances with a spray bottle of glass cleaner and a rag, wiping it up and down, back and forth, like slutty Cinderellas in their g-strings and bras. There are still black vinyl benches strewn about the room and tucked into dim corners that stick to bare thighs when you sit down. There’s that same odor of slightly rancid perfume, of roses blooming in a pasture of cigarette butts, even though smoking was banned here a year ago.
—Student in 2007 UW Nonfiction class
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