A Family Divided by Color (Vicious Ink Publications Presents)
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No one could have been received with greater acclamation than he was. It is certain indeed that many ladies were ready to show him their favours. The names of three at least were freely coupled with his in marriage — Clorinda, Favilla, Euphrosyne — so he called them in his sonnets. To take them in order; Clorinda was a sweet-mannered gentle lady enough; — indeed Orlando was greatly taken with her for six months and a half; but she had white eyelashes and could not bear the sight of blood. She was much under the influence of the Priests too, and stinted her underlinen in order to give to the poor.
She took it on her to reform Orlando of his sins, which sickened him, so that he drew back from the marriage, and did not much regret it when she died soon after of the small-pox. Favilla, who comes next, was of a different sort altogether. She was the daughter of a poor Somersetshire gentleman; who, by sheer assiduity and the use of her eyes had worked her way up at court, where her address in horsemanship, her fine instep, and her grace in dancing won the admiration of all.
Orlando, who was a passionate lover of animals, now noticed that her teeth were crooked, and the two front turned inward, which, he said, is a sure sign of a perverse and cruel disposition in women, and so broke the engagement that very night for ever. The third, Euphrosyne, was by far the most serious of his flames.
She was fair, florid, and a trifle phlegmatic. She spoke Italian well, had a perfect set of teeth in the upper jaw, though those on the lower were slightly discoloured.
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She was never without a whippet or spaniel at her knee; fed them with white bread from her own plate; sang sweetly to the virginals; and was never dressed before mid-day owing to the extreme care she took of her person. In short, she would have made a perfect wife for such a nobleman as Orlando, and matters had gone so far that the lawyers on both sides were busy with covenants, jointures, settlements, messuages, tenements, and whatever is needed before one great fortune can mate with another when, with the suddenness and severity that then marked the English climate, came the Great Frost.
The Great Frost was, historians tell us, the most severe that has ever visited these islands. Birds froze in mid-air and fell like stones to the ground. At Norwich a young countrywoman started to cross the road in her usual robust health and was seen by the onlookers to turn visibly to powder and be blown in a puff of dust over the roofs as the icy blast struck her at the street corner. The mortality among sheep and cattle was enormous. Corpses froze and could not be drawn from the sheets. It was no uncommon sight to come upon a whole herd of swine frozen immovable upon the road.
The fields were full of shepherds, ploughmen, teams of horses, and little bird-scaring boys all struck stark in the act of the moment, one with his hand to his nose, another with the bottle to his lips, a third with a stone raised to throw at the ravens who sat, as if stuffed, upon the hedge within a yard of him. The severity of the frost was so extraordinary that a kind of petrifaction sometimes ensued; and it was commonly supposed that the great increase of rocks in some parts of Derbyshire was due to no eruption, for there was none, but to the solidification of unfortunate wayfarers who had been turned literally to stone where they stood.
The Church could give little help in the matter, and though some landowners had these relics blessed, the most part preferred to use them either as landmarks, scratching-posts for sheep, or, when the form of the stone allowed, drinking troughs for cattle, which purposes they serve, admirably for the most part, to this day. But while the country people suffered the extremity of want, and the trade of the country was at a standstill, London enjoyed a carnival of the utmost brilliancy. The Court was at Greenwich, and the new King seized the opportunity that his coronation gave him to curry favour with the citizens.
He directed that the river, which was frozen to a depth of twenty feet and more for six or seven miles on either side, should be swept, decorated and given all the semblance of a park or pleasure ground, with arbours, mazes, alleys, drinking booths, etc. For himself and the courtiers, he reserved a certain space immediately opposite the Palace gates; which, railed off from the public only by a silken rope, became at once the centre of the most brilliant society in England.
Great statesmen, in their beards and ruffs, despatched affairs of state under the crimson awning of the Royal Pagoda. Soldiers planned the conquest of the Moor and the downfall of the Turk in striped arbours surmounted by plumes of ostrich feathers. Admirals strode up and down the narrow pathways, glass in hand, sweeping the horizon and telling stories of the north-west passage and the Spanish Armada. Lovers dallied upon divans spread with sables. Frozen roses fell in showers when the Queen and her ladies walked abroad. Coloured balloons hovered motionless in the air.
Here and there burnt vast bonfires of cedar and oak wood, lavishly salted, so that the flames were of green, orange, and purple fire. But however fiercely they burnt, the heat was not enough to melt the ice which, though of singular transparency, was yet of the hardness of steel. So clear indeed was it that there could be seen, congealed at a depth of several feet, here a porpoise, there a flounder. Shoals of eels lay motionless in a trance, but whether their state was one of death or merely of suspended animation which the warmth would revive puzzled the philosophers.
Near London Bridge, where the river had frozen to a depth of some twenty fathoms, a wrecked wherry boat was plainly visible, lying on the bed of the river where it had sunk last autumn, overladen with apples. The old bumboat woman, who was carrying her fruit to market on the Surrey side, sat there in her plaids and farthingales with her lap full of apples, for all the world as if she were about to serve a customer, though a certain blueness about the lips hinted the truth.
In short, nothing could exceed the brilliancy and gaiety of the scene by day. But it was at night that the carnival was at its merriest. For the frost continued unbroken; the nights were of perfect stillness; the moon and stars blazed with the hard fixity of diamonds, and to the fine music of flute and trumpet the courtiers danced. Orlando, it is true, was none of those who tread lightly the corantoe and lavolta; he was clumsy and a little absentminded. He much preferred the plain dances of his own country, which he danced as a child to these fantastic foreign measures. The person, whatever the name or sex, was about middle height, very slenderly fashioned, and dressed entirely in oyster-coloured velvet, trimmed with some unfamiliar greenish-coloured fur.
But these details were obscured by the extraordinary seductiveness which issued from the whole person. Images, metaphors of the most extreme and extravagant twined and twisted in his mind. He called her a melon, a pineapple, an olive tree, an emerald, and a fox in the snow all in the space of three seconds; he did not know whether he had heard her, tasted her, seen her, or all three together.
For though we must pause not a moment in the narrative we may here hastily note that all his images at this time were simple in the extreme to match his senses and were mostly taken from things he had liked the taste of as a boy. But if his senses were simple they were at the same time extremely strong. To pause therefore and seek the reasons of things is out of the question. A melon, an emerald, a fox in the snow — so he raved, so he stared. When the boy, for alas, a boy it must be — no woman could skate with such speed and vigour — swept almost on tiptoe past him, Orlando was ready to tear his hair with vexation that the person was of his own sex, and thus all embraces were out of the question.
But the skater came closer. Finally, coming to a stop and sweeping a curtsey with the utmost grace to the King, who was shuffling past on the arm of some Lord-in-waiting, the unknown skater came to a standstill. She was not a handsbreadth off. She was a woman. Orlando stared; trembled; turned hot; turned cold; longed to hurl himself through the summer air; to crush acorns beneath his feet; to toss his arm with the beech trees and the oaks.
As it was, he drew his lips up over his small white teeth; opened them perhaps half an inch as if to bite; shut them as if he had bitten. The Lady Euphrosyne hung upon his arm. Very little was known of the Muscovites. In their great beards and furred hats they sat almost silent; drinking some black liquid which they spat out now and then upon the ice. None spoke English, and French with which some at least were familiar was then little spoken at the English Court. It was through this accident that Orlando and the Princess became acquainted.
They were seated opposite each other at the great table spread under a huge awning for the entertainment of the notables. It was laughable to see the predicament she soon had them in, for though both were fine lads in their way, the babe unborn had as much knowledge of the French tongue as they had. The one helped her largely to horse-radish sauce, the other whistled to his dog and made him beg for a marrow bone.
He laughed, but the laugh on his lips froze in wonder. Whom had he loved, what had he loved, he asked himself in a tumult of emotion, until now? An old woman, he answered, all skin and bone. Red-cheeked trulls too many to mention. A hard-bitten cruel-mouthed adventuress. A nodding mass of lace and ceremony.
Love had meant to him nothing but sawdust and cinders. The joys he had had of it tasted insipid in the extreme. He marvelled how he could have gone through with it without yawning. Yet perhaps it would have been better for him had he never learnt that tongue; never answered that voice; never followed the light of those eyes. Who were those bumpkins, she asked him, who sat beside her with the manners of stablemen? What was the nauseating mixture they had poured on her plate? Did the dogs eat at the same table with the men in England?
Was that figure of fun at the end of the table with her hair rigged up like a Maypole comme une grande perche mal fagotee really the Queen? And did the King always slobber like that? And which of those popinjays was George Villiers? Though these questions rather discomposed Orlando at first, they were put with such archness and drollery that he could not help but laugh; and he saw from the blank faces of the company that nobody understood a word, he answered her as freely as she asked him, speaking, as she did, in perfect French.
Soon it was observed Orlando paid the Muscovite far more attention than mere civility demanded. He was seldom far from her side, and their conversation, though unintelligible to the rest, was carried on with such animation, provoked such blushes and laughter, that the dullest could guess the subject. Moreover, the change in Orlando himself was extraordinary. Nobody had ever seen him so animated. To see him hand the Muscovite as she was called to her sledge, or offer her his hand for the dance, or catch the spotted kerchief which she had let drop, or discharge any other of those manifold duties which the supreme lady exacts and the lover hastens to anticipate was a sight to kindle the dull eyes of age, and to make the quick pulse of youth beat faster.
Yet over it all hung a cloud. The old men shrugged their shoulders. The young tittered between their fingers. All knew that a Orlando was betrothed to another. It was she who had the supreme right to his attentions. Yet she might drop all the handkerchiefs in her wardrobe of which she had many scores upon the ice and Orlando never stooped to pick them up. She might wait twenty minutes for him to hand her to her sledge, and in the end have to be content with the services of her Blackamoor. When she skated, which she did rather clumsily, no one was at her elbow to encourage her, and, if she fell, which she did rather heavily, no one raised her to her feet and dusted the snow from her petticoats.
Indeed, as the days passed, Orlando took less and less care to hide his feelings. Making some excuse or other, he would leave the company as soon as they had dined, or steal away from the skaters, who were forming sets for a quadrille. Next moment it would be seen that the Muscovite was missing too. But what most outraged the Court, and stung it in its tenderest part, which is its vanity, was that the couple was often seen to slip under the silken rope, which railed off the Royal enclosure from the public part of the river and to disappear among the crowd of common people.
She could stand it no longer. Their dogs ran between her legs. It was like being in a cage. In Russia they had rivers ten miles broad on which one could gallop six horses abreast all day long without meeting a soul. But this was not enough. Instead of taking the road to London, therefore, they turned the other way about and were soon beyond the crowd among the frozen reaches of the Thames where, save for sea birds and some old country woman hacking at the ice in a vain attempt to draw a pailful of water or gathering what sticks or dead leaves she could find for firing, not a living soul ever came their way.
The poor kept closely to their cottages, and the better sort, who could afford it, crowded for warmth and merriment to the city. Hence, Orlando and Sasha, as he called her for short, and because it was the name of a white Russian fox he had had as a boy — a creature soft as snow, but with teeth of steel, which bit him so savagely that his father had it killed — hence, they had the river to themselves. Hot with skating and with love they would throw themselves down in some solitary reach, where the yellow osiers fringed the bank, and wrapped in a great fur cloak Orlando would take her in his arms, and know, for the first time, he murmured, the delights of love.
Then, when the ecstasy was over and they lay lulled in a swoon on the ice, he would tell her of his other loves, and how, compared with her, they had been of wood, of sackcloth, and of cinders. And then they would marvel that the ice did not melt with their heat, and pity the poor old woman who had no such natural means of thawing it, but must hack at it with a chopper of cold steel. Nothing was too small for such converse, nothing was too great. Then suddenly, Orlando would fall into one of his moods of melancholy; the sight of the old woman hobbling over the ice might be the cause of it, or nothing; and would fling himself face downwards on the ice and look into the frozen waters and think of death.
For that was the way his mind worked now, in violent see-saws from life to death, stopping at nothing in between, so that the biographer must not stop either, but must fly as fast as he can and so keep pace with the unthinking passionate foolish actions and sudden extravagant words in which, it is impossible to deny, Orlando at this time of his life indulged. But Sasha who after all had no English blood in her but was from Russia where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden, and sentences often left unfinished from doubt as to how best to end them — Sasha stared at him, perhaps sneered at him, for he must have seemed a child to her, and said nothing.
But at length the ice grew cold beneath them, which she disliked, so pulling him to his feet again, she talked so enchantingly, so wittily, so wisely but unfortunately always in French, which notoriously loses its flavour in translation that he forgot the frozen waters or night coming or the old woman or whatever it was, and would try to tell her — plunging and splashing among a thousand images which had gone as stale as the women who inspired them — what she was like.
Snow, cream, marble, cherries, alabaster, golden wire? She was like a fox, or an olive tree; like the waves of the sea when you look down upon them from a height; like an emerald; like the sun on a green hill which is yet clouded — like nothing he had seen or known in England. Ransack the language as he might, words failed him. He wanted another landscape, and another tongue. English was too frank, too candid, too honeyed a speech for Sasha. For in all she said, however open she seemed and voluptuous, there was something hidden; in all she did, however daring, there was something concealed.
So the green flame seems hidden in the emerald, or the sun prisoned in a hill. The clearness was only outward; within was a wandering flame. It came; it went; she never shone with the steady beam of an Englishwoman — here, however, remembering the Lady Margaret and her petticoats, Orlando ran wild in his transports and swept her over the ice, faster, faster, vowing that he would chase the flame, dive for the gem, and so on and so on, the words coming on the pants of his breath with the passion of a poet whose poetry is half pressed out of him by pain.
But Sasha was silent. When Orlando had done telling her that she was a fox, an olive tree, or a green hill-top, and had given her the whole history of his family; how their house was one of the most ancient in Britain; how they had come from Rome with the Caesars and had the right to walk down the Corso which is the chief street in Rome under a tasselled palanquin, which he said is a privilege reserved only for those of imperial blood for there was an orgulous credulity about him which was pleasant enough , he would pause and ask her, Where was her own house? What was her father?
Why was she here alone with her uncle? Then, somehow, though she answered readily enough, an awkwardness would come between them. He suspected at first that her rank was not as high as she would like; or that she was ashamed of the savage ways of her people, for he had heard that the women in Muscovy wear beards and the men are covered with fur from the waist down; that both sexes are smeared with tallow to keep the cold out, tear meat with their fingers and live in huts where an English noble would scruple to keep his cattle; so that he forebore to press her.
But on reflection, he concluded that her silence could not be for that reason; she herself was entirely free from hair on the chin; she dressed in velvet and pearls, and her manners were certainly not those of a woman bred in a cattle-shed. What, then, did she hide from him? The doubt underlying the tremendous force of his feelings was like a quicksand beneath a monument which shifts suddenly and makes the whole pile shake.
The agony would seize him suddenly. Then he would blaze out in such wrath that she did not know how to quiet him. Perhaps she did not want to quiet him; perhaps his rages pleased her and she provoked them purposely — such is the curious obliquity of the Muscovitish temperament. To continue the story — skating farther than their wont that day they reached that part of the river where the ships had anchored and been frozen in midstream. Among them was the ship of the Muscovite Embassy flying its double-headed black eagle from the main mast, which was hung with many-coloured icicles several yards in length.
Sasha had left some of her clothing on board, and supposing the ship to be empty they climbed on deck and went in search of it. Remembering certain passages in his own past, Orlando would not have marvelled had some good citizens sought this refuge before them; and so it turned out. They had not ventured far when a fine young man started up from some business of his own behind a coil of rope and saying, apparently, for he spoke Russian, that he was one of the crew and would help the Princess to find what she wanted, lit a lump of candle and disappeared with her into the lower parts of the ship.
Time went by, and Orlando, wrapped in his own dreams, thought only of the pleasures of life; of his jewel; of her rarity; of means for making her irrevocably and indissolubly his own. Obstacles there were and hardships to overcome. It is true that a landscape of pine and snow, habits of lust and slaughter, did not entice him. Nor was he anxious to cease his pleasant country ways of sport and tree-planting; relinquish his office; ruin his career; shoot the reindeer instead of the rabbit; drink vodka instead of canary, and slip a knife up his sleeve — for what purpose, he knew not.
Still, all this and more than all this he would do for her sake. As for his marriage to the Lady Margaret, fixed though it was for this day sennight, the thing was so palpably absurd that he scarcely gave it a thought. Her kinsmen would abuse him for deserting a great lady; his friends would deride him for ruining the finest career in the world for a Cossack woman and a waste of snow — it weighed not a straw in the balance compared with Sasha herself. On the first dark night they would fly. They would take ship to Russia. So he pondered; so he plotted as he walked up and down the deck.
It was blood-red and sinking rapidly. It must be almost evening. Sasha had been gone this hour and more. Seized instantly with those dark forebodings which shadowed even his most confident thoughts of her, he plunged the way he had seen them go into the hold of the ship; and, after stumbling among chests and barrels in the darkness, was made aware by a faint glimmer in a corner that they were seated there. He blazed into such a howl of anguish that the whole ship echoed. Sasha threw herself between them, or the sailor would have been stifled before he could draw his cutlass.
Then a deadly sickness came over Orlando, and they had to lay him on the floor and give him brandy to drink before he revived. And then, when he had recovered and was sat upon a heap of sacking on deck, Sasha hung over him, passing before his dizzied eyes softly, sinuously, like the fox that had bit him, now cajoling, now denouncing, so that he came to doubt what he had seen. Had not the candle guttered; had not the shadows moved?
The box was heavy, she said; the man was helping her to move it. Orlando believed her one moment — for who can be sure that his rage has not painted what he most dreads to find? Then Sasha herself turned white; stamped her foot on deck; said she would go that night, and called upon her Gods to destroy her, if she, a Romanovitch, had lain in the arms of a common seaman.
Indeed, looking at them together which he could hardly bring himself to do Orlando was outraged by the foulness of his imagination that could have painted so frail a creature in the paw of that hairy sea brute. The man was huge; stood six feet four in his stockings, wore common wire rings in his ears; and looked like a dray horse upon which some wren or robin has perched in its flight.
So he yielded; believed her; and asked her pardon. But there was something in her tone it might be the fault of the Russian consonants that reminded Orlando of a scene some nights since, when he had come upon her in secret gnawing a candle-end in a corner, which she had picked from the floor. Was there not, he thought, handing her on to the ice, something rank in her, something coarse flavoured, something peasant born?
And he fancied her at forty grown unwieldy though she was now slim as a reed, and lethargic though she was now blithe as a lark. But again as they skated towards London such suspicions melted in his breast, and he felt as if he had been hooked by a great fish through the nose and rushed through the waters unwillingly, yet with his own consent. It was an evening of astonishing beauty. As the sun sank, all the domes, spires, turrets, and pinnacles of London rose in inky blackness against the furious red sunset clouds.
All the time they seemed to be skating in fathomless depths of air, so blue the ice had become; and so glassy smooth was it that they sped quicker and quicker to the city with the white gulls circling about them, and cutting in the air with their wings the very same sweeps that they cut on the ice with their skates. Sasha, as if to reassure him, was tenderer than usual and even more delightful. Seldom would she talk about her past life, but now she told him how, in winter in Russia, she would listen to the wolves howling across the steppes, and thrice, to show him, she barked like a wolf.
Upon which he told her of the stags in the snow at home, and how they would stray into the great hall for warmth and be fed by an old man with porridge from a bucket. And then she praised him; for his love of beasts; for his gallantry; for his legs. Ravished with her praises and shamed to think how he had maligned her by fancying her on the knees of a common sailor and grown fat and lethargic at forty, he told her that he could find no words to praise her; yet instantly bethought him how she was like the spring and green grass and rushing waters, and seizing her more tightly than ever, he swung her with him half across the river so that the gulls and the cormorants swung too.
And halting at length, out of breath, she said, panting slightly, that he was like a million-candled Christmas tree such as they have in Russia hung with yellow globes; incandescent; enough to light a whole street by; so one might translate it for what with his glowing cheeks, his dark curls, his black and crimson cloak, he looked as if he were burning with his own radiance, from a lamp lit within. As the orange light of sunset vanished it was succeeded by an astonishing white glare from the torches, bonfires, flaming cressets, and other devices by which the river was lit up and the strangest transformation took place.
The Abbey appeared like the grey skeleton of a leaf. Everything suffered emaciation and transformation. As they approached the carnival, they heard a deep note like that struck on a tuning-fork which boomed louder and louder until it became an uproar. Every now and then a great shout followed a rocket into the air.
Gradually they could discern little figures breaking off from the vast crowd and spinning hither and thither like gnats on the surface of a river. And then into this darkness there began to rise with pauses, which kept the expectation alert and the mouth open, flowering rockets; crescents; serpents; a crown. By this time Orlando and the Princess were close to the Royal enclosure and found their way barred by a great crowd of the common people, who were pressing as near to the silken rope as they dared.
The main press of people, it appeared, stood opposite a booth or stage something like our Punch and Judy show upon which some kind of theatrical performance was going forward. A black man was waving his arms and vociferating. There was a woman in white laid upon a bed. Rough though the staging was, the actors running up and down a pair of steps and sometimes tripping, and the crowd stamping their feet and whistling, or when they were bored, tossing a piece of orange peel on to the ice which a dog would scramble for, still the astonishing, sinuous melody of the words stirred Orlando like music.
Voices in the Air: Is it any wonder that Aru makes up stories about being royalty, traveling to Paris, and having a chauffeur? But if it is possible from a hand to deduce a body, informed with all the attributes of a great Queen, her crabbedness, courage, frailty, and terror, surely a head can be as fertile, looked down upon from a chair of state by a lady whose eyes were always, if the waxworks at the Abbey are to be trusted, wide open. But everything changes when Sophia gets assigned a school research project on solar eclipses. In , he encouraged us to reissue Nehalem Tillamook Tales , for which he wrote a new Introduction. In what may seem to be a barren landscape, hikers and beach walkers will discover the teeming metropolis of life with this guide.
Spoken with extreme speed and a daring agility of tongue which reminded him of the sailors singing in the beer gardens at Wapping, the words even without meaning were as wine to him. But now and again a single phrase would come to him over the ice which was as if torn from the depths of his heart. The frenzy of the Moor seemed to him his own frenzy, and when the Moor suffocated the woman in her bed it was Sasha he killed with his own hands. At last the play was ended. All had grown dark. The tears streamed down his face. Looking up into the sky there was nothing but blackness there too.
Ruin and death, he thought, cover all. The life of man ends in the grave. Even as he said this a star of some pallor rose in his memory. The night was dark; it was pitch dark; but it was such a night as this that they had waited for; it was on such a night as this that they had planned to fly.
The time had come. At midnight they would meet at an inn near Blackfriars. Everything was in readiness for their flight. So they parted, she to her tent, he to his. It still wanted an hour of the time.
Long before midnight Orlando was in waiting. But the traveller was only some merchant, making home belated; or some woman of the quarter whose errand was nothing so innocent. They passed, and the street was quieter than before. Then those lights which burnt downstairs in the small, huddled quarters where the poor of the city lived moved up to the sleeping-rooms, and then, one by one, were extinguished.
The street lanterns in these purlieus were few at most; and the negligence of the night watchman often suffered them to expire long before dawn. The darkness then became even deeper than before. Orlando looked to the wicks of his lantern, saw to the saddle girths; primed his pistols; examined his holsters; and did all these things a dozen times at least till he could find nothing more needing his attention.
Though it still lacked some twenty minutes to midnight, he could not bring himself to go indoors to the inn parlour, where the hostess was still serving sack and the cheaper sort of canary wine to a few seafaring men, who would sit there trolling their ditties, and telling their stories of Drake, Hawkins, and Grenville, till they toppled off the benches and rolled asleep on the sanded floor.
The darkness was more compassionate to his swollen and violent heart. He listened to every footfall; speculated on every sound. Each drunken shout and each wail from some poor wretch laid in the straw or in other distress cut his heart to the quick, as if it boded ill omen to his venture. Yet, he had no fear for Sasha. Her courage made nothing of the adventure. She would come alone, in her cloak and trousers, booted like a man. Light as her footfall was, it would hardly be heard, even in this silence.
So he waited in the darkness. Suddenly he was struck in the face by a blow, soft, yet heavy, on the side of his cheek. So strung with expectation was he, that he started and put his hand to his sword. The blow was repeated a dozen times on forehead and cheek. The dry frost had lasted so long that it took him a minute to realize that these were raindrops falling; the blows were the blows of the rain. At first, they fell slowly, deliberately, one by one. But soon the six drops became sixty; then six hundred; then ran themselves together in a steady spout of water.
It was as if the hard and consolidated sky poured itself forth in one profuse fountain. In the space of five minutes Orlando was soaked to the skin. Hastily putting the horses under cover, he sought shelter beneath the lintel of the door whence he could still observe the courtyard. The air was thicker now than ever, and such a steaming and droning rose from the downpour that no footfall of man or beast could be heard above it.
The roads, pitted as they were with great holes, would be under water and perhaps impassable. But of what effect this would have upon their flight he scarcely thought. Sometimes, in the darkness, he seemed to see her wrapped about with rain strokes. But the phantom vanished. Four times more it struck remorselessly. With the superstition of a lover, Orlando had made out that it was on the sixth stroke that she would come. But the sixth stroke echoed away, and the seventh came and the eighth, and to his apprehensive mind they seemed notes first heralding and then proclaiming death and disaster.
When the twelfth struck he knew that his doom was sealed. It was useless for the rational part of him to reason; she might be late; she might be prevented; she might have missed her way. The passionate and feeling heart of Orlando knew the truth. Other clocks struck, jangling one after another.
The whole world seemed to ring with the news of her deceit and his derision. The old suspicions subterraneously at work in him rushed forth from concealment openly. He was bitten by a swarm of snakes, each more poisonous than the last. He stood in the doorway in the tremendous rain without moving. As the minutes passed, he sagged a little at the knees. The downpour rushed on.
In the thick of it, great guns seemed to boom. Huge noises as of the tearing and rending of oak trees could be heard.
There were also wild cries and terrible inhuman groanings. Some blind instinct, for he was past reasoning, must have driven him to take the river bank in the direction of the sea. For when the dawn broke, which it did with unusual suddenness, the sky turning a pale yellow and the rain almost ceasing, he found himself on the banks of the Thames off Wapping. Now a sight of the most extraordinary nature met his eyes. Where, for three months and more, there had been solid ice of such thickness that it seemed permanent as stone, and a whole gay city had been stood on its pavement, was now a race of turbulent yellow waters.
The river had gained its freedom in the night. It was as if a sulphur spring to which view many philosophers inclined had risen from the volcanic regions beneath and burst the ice asunder with such vehemence that it swept the huge and massy fragments furiously apart. The mere look of the water was enough to turn one giddy. All was riot and confusion. The river was strewn with icebergs. Now would come down a whole convoy of ice blocks sinking everything that stood in their way.
Now, eddying and swirling like a tortured serpent, the river would seem to be hurtling itself between the fragments and tossing them from bank to bank, so that they could be heard smashing against the piers and pillars. But what was the most awful and inspiring of terror was the sight of the human creatures who had been trapped in the night and now paced their twisting and precarious islands in the utmost agony of spirit. Whether they jumped into the flood or stayed on the ice their doom was certain. Sometimes quite a cluster of these poor creatures would come down together, some on their knees, others suckling their babies.
One old man seemed to be reading aloud from a holy book. At other times, and his fate perhaps was the most dreadful, a solitary wretch would stride his narrow tenement alone. As they swept out to sea, some could be heard crying vainly for help, making wild promises to amend their ways, confessing their sins and vowing altars and wealth if God would hear their prayers.
Others were so dazed with terror that they sat immovable and silent looking steadfastly before them. One crew of young watermen or post-boys, to judge by their liveries, roared and shouted the lewdest tavern songs, as if in bravado, and were dashed against a tree and sunk with blasphemies on their lips. An old nobleman — for such his furred gown and golden chain proclaimed him — went down not far from where Orlando stood, calling vengeance upon the Irish rebels, who, he cried with his last breath, had plotted this devilry.
Many perished clasping some silver pot or other treasure to their breasts; and at least a score of poor wretches were drowned by their own cupidity, hurling themselves from the bank into the flood rather than let a gold goblet escape them, or see before their eyes the disappearance of some furred gown. For furniture, valuables, possessions of all sorts were carried away on the icebergs. Among other strange sights was to be seen a cat suckling its young; a table laid sumptuously for a supper of twenty; a couple in bed; together with an extraordinary number of cooking utensils.
Dazed and astounded, Orlando could do nothing for some time but watch the appalling race of waters as it hurled itself past him. At last, seeming to recollect himself, he clapped spurs to his horse and galloped hard along the river bank in the direction of the sea. Rounding a bend of the river, he came opposite that reach where, not two days ago, the ships of the Ambassadors had seemed immovably frozen.
Hastily, he made count of them all; the French; the Spanish; the Austrian; the Turk. All still floated, though the French had broken loose from her moorings, and the Turkish vessel had taken a great rent in her side and was fast filling with water. But the Russian ship was nowhere to be seen. The black eagles were flying from the mast head. The ship of the Muscovite Embassy was standing out to sea. Flinging himself from his horse, he made, in his rage, as if he would breast the flood.
Standing knee-deep in water he hurled at the faithless woman all the insults that have ever been the lot of her sex. Faithless, mutable, fickle, he called her; devil, adulteress, deceiver; and the swirling waters took his words, and tossed at his feet a broken pot and a little straw. The biographer is now faced with a difficulty which it is better perhaps to confess than to gloss over. But now we come to an episode which lies right across our path, so that there is no ignoring it. Yet it is dark, mysterious, and undocumented; so that there is no explaining it.
Volumes might be written in interpretation of it; whole religious systems founded upon the signification of it. Our simple duty is to state the facts as far as they are known, and so let the reader make of them what he may. One June morning — it was Saturday the 18th — he failed to rise at his usual hour, and when his groom went to call him he was found fast asleep. Nor could he be awakened. He lay as if in a trance, without perceptible breathing; and though dogs were set to bark under his window; cymbals, drums, bones beaten perpetually in his room; a gorse bush put under his pillow; and mustard plasters applied to his feet, still he did not wake, take food, or show any sign of life for seven whole days.
Yet some change, it was suspected, must have taken place in the chambers of his brain, for though he was perfectly rational and seemed graver and more sedate in his ways than before, he appeared to have an imperfect recollection of his past life. He would listen when people spoke of the great frost or the skating or the carnival, but he never gave any sign, except by passing his hand across his brow as if to wipe away some cloud, of having witnessed them himself. When the events of the past six months were discussed, he seemed not so much distressed as puzzled, as if he were troubled by confused memories of some time long gone or were trying to recall stories told him by another.
It was observed that if Russia was mentioned or Princesses or ships, he would fall into a gloom of an uneasy kind and get up and look out of the window or call one of the dogs to him, or take a knife and carve a piece of cedar wood. But if sleep it was, of what nature, we can scarcely refrain from asking, are such sleeps as these? Are they remedial measures — trances in which the most galling memories, events that seem likely to cripple life for ever, are brushed with a dark wing which rubs their harshness off and gilds them, even the ugliest and basest, with a lustre, an incandescence?
Has the finger of death to be laid on the tumult of life from time to time lest it rend us asunder? Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living? And then what strange powers are these that penetrate our most secret ways and change our most treasured possessions without our willing it? Had Orlando, worn out by the extremity of his suffering, died for a week, and then come to life again? And if so, of what nature is death and of what nature life?
Having waited well over half an hour for an answer to these questions, and none coming, let us get on with the story. Now Orlando gave himself up to a life of extreme solitude. His disgrace at Court and the violence of his grief were partly the reason of it, but as he made no effort to defend himself and seldom invited anyone to visit him though he had many friends who would willingly have done so it appeared as if to be alone in the great house of his fathers suited his temper.
Solitude was his choice. How he spent his time, nobody quite knew. The servants, of whom he kept a full retinue, though much of their business was to dust empty rooms and to smooth the coverlets of beds that were never slept in, watched, in the dark of the evening, as they sat over their cakes and ale, a light passing along the galleries, through the banqueting-halls, up the staircase, into the bedrooms, and knew that their master was perambulating the house alone.
Then the light would be lost altogether, and Mrs Grimsditch, the housekeeper, would say to Mr Dupper, the chaplain, how she hoped his Lordship had not met with some bad accident. Mr Dupper would opine that his Lordship was on his knees, no doubt, among the tombs of his ancestors in the Chapel, which was in the Billiard Table Court, half a mile away on the south side. In short, all his serving men and women held him in high respect, and cursed the foreign Princess but they called her by a coarser name than that who had brought him to this pass.
But though it was probably cowardice, or love of hot ale, that led Mr Dupper to imagine his Lordship safe among the tombs so that he need not go in search of him, it may well have been that Mr Dupper was right. Even this was not enough for him, but he must descend into the crypt where his ancestors lay, coffin piled upon coffin, for ten generations together.
The place was so seldom visited that the rats made free with the lead work, and now a thigh bone would catch at his cloak as he passed, or he would crack the skull of some old Sir Malise as it rolled beneath his foot.
It was a ghastly sepulchre; dug deep beneath the foundations of the house as if the first Lord of the family, who had come from France with the Conqueror, had wished to testify how all pomp is built upon corruption; how the skeleton lies beneath the flesh: The hand of man or woman, of age or youth? Had it urged the war horse, or plied the needle? Had it plucked the rose, or grasped cold steel? So, taking his lantern and seeing that the bones were in order, for though romantic, he was singularly methodical and detested nothing so much as a ball of string on the floor, let alone the skull of an ancestor, he returned to that curious, moody pacing down the galleries, looking for something among the pictures, which was interrupted at length by a veritable spasm of sobbing, at the sight of a Dutch snow scene by an unknown artist.
Then it seemed to him that life was not worth living any more. Forgetting the bones of his ancestors and how life is founded on a grave, he stood there shaken with sobs, all for the desire of a woman in Russian trousers, with slanting eyes, a pouting mouth and pearls about her neck. She had left him. He was never to see her again. And so he sobbed. And so he found his way back to his own rooms; and Mrs Grimsditch, seeing the light in the window, put the tankard from her lips and said Praise be to God, his Lordship was safe in his room again; for she had been thinking all this while that he was foully murdered.
The taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading. They took his taper away, and he bred glow-worms to serve his purpose. They took the glow-worms away, and he almost burnt the house down with a tinder. To put it in a nutshell, leaving the novelist to smooth out the crumpled silk and all its implications, he was a nobleman afflicted with a love of literature.
Many people of his time, still more of his rank, escaped the infection and were thus free to run or ride or make love at their own sweet will. But some were early infected by a germ said to be bred of the pollen of the asphodel and to be blown out of Greece and Italy, which was of so deadly a nature that it would shake the hand as it was raised to strike, and cloud the eye as it sought its prey, and make the tongue stammer as it declared its love. It was the fatal nature of this disease to substitute a phantom for reality, so that Orlando, to whom fortune had given every gift — plate, linen, houses, men-servants, carpets, beds in profusion — had only to open a book for the whole vast accumulation to turn to mist.
The nine acres of stone which were his house vanished; one hundred and fifty indoor servants disappeared; his eighty riding horses became invisible; it would take too long to count the carpets, sofas, trappings, china, plate, cruets, chafing dishes and other movables often of beaten gold, which evaporated like so much sea mist under the miasma.
So it was, and Orlando would sit by himself, reading, a naked man. The disease gained rapidly upon him now in his solitude. He would read often six hours into the night; and when they came to him for orders about the slaughtering of cattle or the harvesting of wheat, he would push away his folio and look as if he did not understand what was said to him. This was bad enough and wrung the hearts of Hall, the falconer, of Giles, the groom, of Mrs Grimsditch, the housekeeper, of Mr Dupper, the chaplain.
A fine gentleman like that, they said, had no need of books. Let him leave books, they said, to the palsied or the dying. But worse was to come. For once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens it so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the inkpot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing. And while this is bad enough in a poor man, whose only property is a chair and a table set beneath a leaky roof — for he has not much to lose, after all — the plight of a rich man, who has houses and cattle, maidservants, asses and linen, and yet writes books, is pitiable in the extreme.
The flavour of it all goes out of him; he is riddled by hot irons; gnawed by vermin. He would give every penny he has such is the malignity of the germ to write one little book and become famous; yet all the gold in Peru will not buy him the treasure of a well-turned line.
So he falls into consumption and sickness, blows his brains out, turns his face to the wall. It matters not in what attitude they find him. He has passed through the gates of Death and known the flames of Hell. Happily, Orlando was of a strong constitution and the disease for reasons presently to be given never broke him down as it has broken many of his peers. But he was deeply smitten with it, as the sequel shows. For when he had read for an hour or so in Sir Thomas Browne, and the bark of the stag and the call of the night watchman showed that it was the dead of night and all safe asleep, he crossed the room, took a silver key from his pocket and unlocked the doors of a great inlaid cabinet which stood in the corner.
He paused, as if hesitating which to open. The truth was that Orlando had been afflicted thus for many years. Never had any boy begged apples as Orlando begged paper; nor sweetmeats as he begged ink. Thus had been written, before he was turned twenty-five, some forty-seven plays, histories, romances, poems; some in prose, some in verse; some in French, some in Italian; all romantic, and all long. As this pause was of extreme significance in his history, more so, indeed, than many acts which bring men to their knees and make rivers run with blood, it behoves us to ask why he paused; and to reply, after due reflection, that it was for some such reason as this.
Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind. Instead of being a single, downright, bluff piece of work of which no man need feel ashamed, our commonest deeds are set about with a fluttering and flickering of wings, a rising and falling of lights.
Thus it was that Orlando, dipping his pen in the ink, saw the mocking face of the lost Princess and asked himself a million questions instantly which were as arrows dipped in gall. Where was she; and why had she left him? Was the Ambassador her uncle or her lover? But whose was it, he asked himself? For we can, if we have the resolution, turn the hussy, Memory, and all her ragtag and bobtail out of the house. Memory still held before him the image of a shabby man with big, bright eyes.
Still he looked, still he paused. It is these pauses that are our undoing. It is then that sedition enters the fortress and our troops rise in insurrection. Once before he had paused, and love with its horrid rout, its shawms, its cymbals, and its heads with gory locks torn from the shoulders had burst in.
From love he had suffered the tortures of the damned. Now, again, he paused, and into the breach thus made, leapt Ambition, the harridan, and Poetry, the witch, and Desire of Fame, the strumpet; all joined hands and made of his heart their dancing ground. Standing upright in the solitude of his room, he vowed that he would be the first poet of his race and bring immortal lustre upon his name.
But of all that killing and campaigning, that drinking and love-making, that spending and hunting and riding and eating, what remained? A skull; a finger. Whereas, he said, turning to the page of Sir Thomas Browne, which lay open upon the table — and again he paused. Like an incantation rising from all parts of the room, from the night wind and the moonlight, rolled the divine melody of those words which, lest they should outstare this page, we will leave where they lie entombed, not dead, embalmed rather, so fresh is their colour, so sound their breathing — and Orlando, comparing that achievement with those of his ancestors, cried out that they and their deeds were dust and ashes, but this man and his words were immortal.
He soon perceived, however, that the battles which Sir Miles and the rest had waged against armed knights to win a kingdom, were not half so arduous as this which he now undertook to win immortality against the English language. It was to settle this last question that he decided after many months of such feverish labour, to break the solitude of years and communicate with the outer world. He had a friend in London, one Giles Isham, of Norfolk, who, though of gentle birth, was acquainted with writers and could doubtless put him in touch with some member of that blessed, indeed sacred, fraternity.
For, to Orlando in the state he was now in, there was a glory about a man who had written a book and had it printed, which outshone all the glories of blood and state. To his imagination it seemed as if even the bodies of those instinct with such divine thoughts must be transfigured. They must have aureoles for hair, incense for breath, and roses must grow between their lips — which was certainly not true either of himself or Mr Dupper. He could think of no greater happiness than to be allowed to sit behind a curtain and hear them talk.
Even the imagination of that bold and various discourse made the memory of what he and his courtier friends used to talk about — a dog, a horse, a woman, a game of cards — seem brutish in the extreme. He bethought him with pride that he had always been called a scholar, and sneered at for his love of solitude and books.
After coming to Astoria, Oregon, in , he became a pioneer of the Oregon ocean perch fishery. In his sixty year plus career, Moskovita watched the fishery he had helped build become devastated by foreign factory processing ships. He bought, repaired, traded, and sank more boats than what most fishermen would work in their lifetime.
This memoir provides a unique glimpse of Pacific maritime life in the 20th century, small-town coastal life after World War II, and the early days of fishery development in Oregon. Tucker , and Timo Vuorisalo. Laakkonen, Tucker, and Vuorisalo-- and multiple contributors-- offer the first book-length work to offer global perspectives on the environmental effects and history of World War II.
Based on long-term research, the articles selected give the best available studies in different fields and countries, with contributions touching on Europe, America, Asia, and Africa, this book has a truly global approach. The Long Shadows considers and contemplates the profound and lasting impacts left on global environments by World War II, including polar, temperate, and tropical ecological zones.
Divided into three sections, the first gives an introduction and overview of the War. The second section examines the social and environmental impacts, and the third focuses solely on the history and legacy of resource extraction. In a fourth and final section, the authors offer conclusions and hypotheses. Meander Scars by Abby Phillips Metzger. Abby Phillips Metzger provides personal stories that recount a forgotten Oregon river, the Willamette, as it had existed before white settlement.
Bearing the scars of development and degradation accompanying human settlement, the rich network of channels and sloughs are now long gone.
April 2017
However, through canoe trips and intimate explorations from the river, Metzger discovers glints of resilience: Through the tales of farmers and scientists alike, Metzger is led to ask whether that which has been scarred can fully heal, and whether a disjointed river can be whole again. Ranging from northern California to British Columbia, coastal dunes and beaches provide unique habitats for plants, animals, and insects. In what may seem to be a barren landscape, hikers and beach walkers will discover the teeming metropolis of life with this guide.
Exposing the small, almost blind weevils that live under the driftwood and slowly degrade the wood, these beach hoppers leap up at every step and flee from vicious rove beetles, dune ants, and dive-bomber wasps. Taking a focus on the associations between dune plants and other life forms, this book includes over full-color photographs and comprehensive data for biologists studying dune ecology.
The Next Tsunami by Bonnie Henderson. On a March evening of , ten-year-old Tom Horning woke up near midnight to find his yard had transformed. A tsunami, triggered by Alaska's momentous Good Friday earthquake, had wreaked havoc in his Seaside, Oregon home. It was considered the Pacific Northwest coast's first-ever tsunami. However, 20 years passed before geologists discovered that it was not Seaside's first, or worst, tsunami.
In fact, massive tsunamis have been shown to have struck the Pacific coast every few hundred years, not triggered by distant tremors, but by huge quakes no more than one hundred miles off the coast. Due to advances in technology, scientists have been able to pinpoint the last megathrust earthquake on the Pacific Northwest's coast, coming in at 9 p. This is one of the largest quakes the world has ever known. When the next one strikes, whether it be tomorrow or a hundred years from now, the tsunami it generates will most likely be the most devastating natural disaster in the history of the United States.
The subject of historic struggle and contemporary dispute, public lands in the United States are dearly treasured places. Environmental historian Char Miller explores the history of conservation thinking and the development of a government with stewardship as its mission. Within 19 essays, Miller uses the U. Forest Service as a gauge of the broader debates that have engaged Americans since the late nineteenth century.
A Family Divided by Color
He examines critical moments of public and private negotiation to help explain the tensions that shaped the administration of public lands in the United States. Ricky's Atlas by Judith L. Serving as a sequel to Ellie's Log: Exploring the Forest Where the Great Tree Fell , Ricky Zamora brings his love of map-making and his extraordinary curiosity to the arid landscapes east of the Cascade Mountains. Upon arrival, he encounters a thunderstorm that leaves his family and neighbors scrambling to deal with a wildfire that had been sparked by lightning.
Ricky and his friend Ellie begin to see how plants, animals, and people must adjust to life with wildfires. Color pen-and-ink drawings vividly illustrate the plants, animals, and events encountered in Ricky's summer adventure. Teeming with actual historical, physical, and ecological data about the region, upper-elementary school kids will enjoy the mixture of the factual and the fictional. Rivers of Oregon by Tim Palmer. Award-winning author and photographer, Tim Palmer, brings together over photos and evocative, informative text capturing the life, beauty, and magic of Oregon's remarkable array of waterways.
The book's texts work to address the nature and ecology of these flowing waters, as well as the joy it brings to travel in these waters and the historic saga of Oregon's commitment to preserve, protect, and restore the best of their state for future generations. Readers will travel with Palmer through the underwater views of riparian forests, from distant mountain summits, and on the seat of a kayak.
This photographic journey enables readers to gain different perspectives on the many features that provide us with water, life, and with scenes that would leave us deeply impoverished if we were to lose them. Toward a Natural Forest by Jim Furnish. In , Jim Furnish joined the U. Filled with enthusiasm, naivete, and pride for such an accomplished legacy, he could not have been prepared for the crisis that would rock the agency to its foundations, as an environmental movement questioned the Forest Service's legacy and legitimacy.
The agency tumbled through a wave of lawsuits from environmental groups in the late 20th Century-- a time most recognized by the spotted owl controversy that shut down logging in public forests in the Pacific Northwest. Caught between the powerful timber industry that had been having its way with the national forests for decades and organized environmentalists who believed these lands had been abused and deserved better care, the agency was brought to its knees.
This book gives an insider's view on this tumultuous time, presenting tales of evolution within the agency's and author's environmental consciousness. At an early age, Robert Michael Pyle discovered that he had a greater affinity with words than he did with numbers. Despite this affinity, Pyle was not moved to write until a powerful experience in the summer of , bringing his pen to paper with his passion for the natural world, leading to his first heartfelt essay. This began a devotion to natural history, nature conservation, and language-- and how they all meet in the literature of the land.
Arranged by decade, Through a Green Lens provides samplings of Pyle's work over fifty years. This book is acute and uncommonly attuned to the physical world, giving readers a remarkable window into the natural setting of our life and time. The most remote place in the country, outside of Alaska, is found in a region of Yellowstone National Park, ironically named the Thorofare for its deep history as a route traversed by fur trappers.
Set within a week-long expedition taken by the author and his three friends in , A Week in Yellowstone's Thorofare is a history and celebration of this still-wild place. Through first-person accounts of park rangers, archival documents, and Yochim's own experiences, readers are able to dive into what makes wildness seperate from wilderness. Demonstrating the importance of wild places, this book chronicles the struggles through which it has remained protected from visitors today. Oregon's Willamette Valley boasts rich opportunities for outdoor recreation that are often overlooked.
Wild in the Willamette is a guidebook to the natural treasures found in the valley, extending far beyond the I-5 corridor. Anderson and Metzger incorporate natural history sidebars and essays by notable local authors to connect people to the best hiking, biking, and paddling the mid-Valley offers.
From families with young children, day hikers, long-distance backpackers, kayakers, canoeists, bird watchers, to cyclists, there is something out there for everyone of every skill level. Wild in the Willamette comes equipped with illustrated maps and keys to the many attractions in the area. It serves as an essential guide to the natural wonders of Oregon's mid-Willamette Valley. Eric Dieterle captures the emotional storms of a boy, and a man, hoping to find meaning in a place, or a place with meaning in this powerful memoir. Dieterle's journey brings him from the plateaus of eastern Washington and through the landscapes of seven other states, ending in the shadow of the San Francisco peaks in northern Arizona.
Through a series of essays, Dieterle's struggles with depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and failed relationships are tightly bound to the surrounding landscapes, ecosystems, and ecologies so that a person and place become lost in one another. On April 19, Helquist will present his current research on how Oregon aggressively embraced the Espionage and Sedition Acts during the war years.
His research presents for the first time a tally of Oregonians arrested for disloyalty and a description of their cases. The WWI period in Oregon was the first time that residents in the state were subjected to investigation and surveillance in their daily lives. Helquist notes that never before had ordinary individuals collaborated on an extensive basis with federal authorities to conduct surveillance of one another.
Many historians and writers have asserted that the assault on WWI dissent became the start of an emerging surveillance state in the U. Helquist explains that he became intrigued with this period of Oregon history while researching the life and times of Dr. Helquist's award-winning biography-- Marie Equi: Radical Politics and Outlaw Passions -- will be available for purchase and signing by the author. Also presenting at the April 19 event will be Dr. This event is free and open to the public.
Join our e-mail list. Find us on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter. Armin Tolentino, April 24, Boundary Layer by Kem Luther When referring to atmospheric science, a boundary layer is the band of air nearest to the ground. Collared by Aimee Lyn Eaton "Just as the humans involved in the wolf debate deserve to be seen as individuals, not stereotypes, so do the wolves. Diary of a Citizen Scientist by Sharman Apt Russell Hundreds of thousands of volunteers are monitoring climate change, tracking bird migration patterns, finding stardust for NASA, and excavating mastodons.
Reiger John Reiger, wildlife conservationalist and environmental historian, recalls the outdoor adventures that readied him as a young man for the practices of the great sportsmen-conservationists of the past, with a particular focus on George Bird Grinnell, Theodore Roosevelt, and Aldo Leopold.
Finding the River by Jeff Crane In landmark federal legislation called for the removal of two dams from the Elwha River to restore salmon runs. Fausch Winner of the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award, For the Love of Rivers draws readers over the reflective surface of streams in order to view and ponder what was beneath, and how they work. Markle Douglas F. Thayer Hiking from Portland to the Coast is a guidebook for both the experienced and casual hikers, exploring many trails and logging roads that crisscross the northern portion of Oregon's Coast Range.
Larson Derek R. Mix Michael C. Living Off the Pacific Ocean Floor by George Moskovita Captain George Moskovita offers readers a highly personal and often humorous look at the career of a commerical fisherman. Tucker , and Timo Vuorisalo Laakkonen, Tucker, and Vuorisalo-- and multiple contributors-- offer the first book-length work to offer global perspectives on the environmental effects and history of World War II. Meander Scars by Abby Phillips Metzger Abby Phillips Metzger provides personal stories that recount a forgotten Oregon river, the Willamette, as it had existed before white settlement.
Public Lands, Public Debates by Char Miller "Watching democracy at work can be bewildering, even frustrating, but the only way individuals and organizations can sift through the often messy business of public deliberation is to deliberate Li Serving as a sequel to Ellie's Log: Rivers of Oregon by Tim Palmer Award-winning author and photographer, Tim Palmer, brings together over photos and evocative, informative text capturing the life, beauty, and magic of Oregon's remarkable array of waterways.