From the piers came the first ding of a hammer, the shrill churring of a sander, and in death’s warning afternoon shadow, the cheerful business of fitting out got underway.
Deception Pass was like a lava lamp on a heroic scale. As the tide entered the funnel, it felt the tightening constraint of the land; the bottom shallowed, and house-sized boulders tripped the water up and made it tumble. With far too much sea trying to escape through far too small an aperture, liquid panic broke out in the pass. The obstructed tide welled up vertically in mushroom-topped boils a dozen yards across ...
The scrolled current-lines grew lazier and more indistinct as the flood dwindled to a trickle. Off Lyall Island, eight miles short of the rapids, I could sense the brimming stillness of high-water slack—when the sea seemed to draw breath, the land to be afloat on a painted lake
—Jonathan Raban, Passage to Juneau
(Experiential)
The air screams, rustling movements feather against the skin, squeaks and screeches bounce off the stone walls, and a sweet acrid stench rolls across the room. My mouth chews the darkness like a thick paste.
We stand in feces, hills of feces, and the grey powder slops over our running shoes and buries our ankles. Behind us the light glows through the cave entrance, a slit sixty-five feet high and twenty-four feet wide. Above us the screams continue, the rustling frolic of life. The rock walls feel like cloth to the touch; a wilderness of fungus thrives in the warm room.
—Charles Bowden, "Bats"
By way of saving power, the island authorities don’t turn on the electricity until five o’clock, and all the Europeans and many locals know the routine, so line up at the bar, glasses poised and ready, as the ice machine begins to hum. The cocktail hours produce two dozen cubes every fifteen or twenty minutes. Everyone graciously waits his turn for a cube.
—William Harrison, "Present Tense Africa"
How, exactly, does one dispose of an owl in the living room—a live, wild, great-horned owl two feet long, armed with talons that look like they could rip open an artery, staring defiantly from a perch on your ceiling fan? My friend Don, who had moved to Tucson from the gentler wilds of West Virginia, didn’t know, but he was at least smart enough to not try it alone.
The first animal control officer to respond was baffled; he normally just handled rattlesnakes. And speak of the devil, here’s one now, he told Don, slithering onto your front steps. This complication called for a backup, and it took the two officers three hours to capture raptor and reptile and repatriate them to the open desert. After all this they decided they probably should check Don’s house for any further guests, and in fact there was one: a tarantula was just creeping through the open front door.
Welcome, as they say, to Tucson.
—Lawrence W. Cheek, "Tucson" [published in American Heritage magazine]
(Critical or polemical)
If you were to visit my hometown of Bloomington, Indiana, depending on the season, you could walk with me among market stalls heaped with corn, fragrant cantaloupes, gourds the size of basketballs, eggplants like giant purple tears, and beeswax candles smelling of meadows ... You could listen to musicians playing reggae, rock and roll, classical, or Afropop ... You could watch all manner of people, from grizzled quarriers in bib overalls to executives in suits ...
This delight in the company of other people, so evident in farmers’ markets, is a quality of captivating places. Unlike the private and often exclusive conviviality of clubs, the conviviality here is public, open to people of all ages and classes and descriptions ...
—Scott Russell Sanders, A Conservationist Manifesto
—Ada Louise Huxtable, “Libraries in London and Paris”
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