Dartmouth Digital Commons (Dartmouth College)

Davis, Todd

Appalachia 
Volume 59 
Number 2 Summer/Fall 2008: Adventures Near 
Home 
Article 31 
2024 
Keeping Secrets 
Todd Davis 
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SUMMER/FALL 2008   161
Keeping Secrets
no inlet or outlet, you gather
in the deep bowl of your body 
what the sky will offer, what
the wind will bear out of the west—
an osprey’s wings bend wide,
shadow flying before the shape
of its body. sphagnum moss
does the slow work of laying
itself down, layer upon layer,
softest bed for pitcher plant
and black spruce, tamarack
and cotton grass. 
Meat-thirsty sundew spreads, 
as does bladderwort, their true
designs, like ours, hidden, a secret
we’ll keep in this bog
because our grandmothers
have warned us that the darner
dragonfly will stitch our lips
if we don’t. 
—Todd Davis
TODD DAVIS teaches at Penn state Altoona and has published, or has poems forth-
coming, in The North American Review, Arts & Letters, River Styx, Poetry East, and 
others. His first book of poems, Ripe, was published by Bottom Dog Press (2002). 
His poetry was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2004.
Appalachia_June_2008_v6.indd   161 5/9/08   9:42:30 AM



English

Keeping Secrets

There\u27s no place untouched by humans, but we must preserve the  relative wild

McKibben, Bill

Appalachia 
Volume 59 
Number 1 Winter/Spring 2008: The Wilderness: 
Is It Real? 
Article 5 
2024 
Walking Through an Idea 
Bill McKibben 
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Available at: https://digitalcommons.dartmouth.edu/appalachia/vol59/iss1/5 
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32 APPALACHIA
Walking Through an Idea
There’s no place untouched by man, but we must preserve the 
“relative wild” 
Bill McKibben
Editor’s Note: This essay is an excerpt from McKibben’s ninth book, Wandering 
Home: A Long Walk Across America’s Most Hopeful Landscape: Vermont’s 
Champlain Valley and New York’s Adirondacks (Crown, 2005), which we pub-
lish with the author’s permission.
WHEN YOU WALK THROUGH THE WILDERNESS, YOU WALK THROUGH  an idea, and in fact you walk through an idea that has its roots partly 
in the Adirondacks. Five or six days hence, if all goes well, I will bushwhack 
through the wilderness within a mile or two of the cabin where a man named 
Howard Zahniser spent his summers, enjoying the Adirondack scenery and 
drafting the federal wilderness statute, the one that stated, “A wilderness, in 
contrast with those areas where man and his works dominate the landscape, 
is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are 
untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” 
Passed by Congress in 964, that language may represent the single most phil-
osophical stand our legislators have ever taken; it has also allowed the protec-
tion of tens of millions of acres free from (except where political concessions 
were made) cattle grazing, mining, tree-cutting, road-building, dirt-bike rid-
ing, and pretty much every other intrusion except wandering around on your 
own two feet. For most of the next three decades, the battle over wilderness 
was pretty much between those people who wanted more of it and those who 
wanted to graze, mine, cut, build, and roar around.
In the mid-990s, a new critique began to emerge. Its most prominent 
advocate was an environmental historian named William Cronon, who had 
already written several truly classic books—most notably Changes in the Land 
(Hill and Wang, 983), the story of how both the Indians and the settlers 
had thoroughly and permanently reshaped the landscape of New England. 
Instead of imagining that Native Americans had inhabited a primeval East-
ern paradise that colonists corrupted, he said, his project was “to locate a 
nature which is within rather than without history.” So it was not completely 
novel for him to argue, in a paper he published in 995 called “The Trouble 
with Wilderness,” that land truly “untrammeled by man” was unlikely to be 
found, and that the insistence on a kind of wilderness purity was in fact doing 
the environmental movement harm by leading to a neglect of more-ordinary 
(and much larger) landscapes. That, in fact,  by going out of their way to ex-
cise humans from these sacred cathedrals, environmentalists were alienating 
people from the land. Worshiping wilderness, said Cronon, “we reproduce 
the dualism that sets humanity and nature at opposite poles. We thereby leave 
ourselves little hope of discovering what an ethical, sustainable, honorably 
human place in nature might actually look like.”
Now, talk like this excited a number of academics because it fit reasonably 
well with the deconstructionist agenda of the time. A generation of thinkers 
had become used to the idea of looking at a book and saying it was, in and 
of itself, nothing more than a reflection of its author’s subjectivities, some-
thing to be “read” with an eye not to plot or character or language but to 
gender, class, and other such categories. A few years earlier, a feminist aca-
demic named Donna Haraway had scored a great coup with an article that 
argued that humans themselves were, happily, on the verge of finally becom-
ing totally unnatural: cyborgs, connected to computers and soon to be geneti-
cally engineered, and thus liberated from the idea that we were “men” and 
“women” or even “human beings” and hence from the idea that we had to act 
in certain ways. To them, Cronon seemed to be saying that wilderness, too, 
was not exactly real, that it was mere construction, simply another category. 
That I was hiking not through the Giant Mountain Wilderness, but through 
an abstraction—and perhaps even a dangerous abstraction, one that kept me 
from dealing with much more serious environmental problems.
Wilderness defenders, predictably, reacted badly to this news. Partly they 
thought: Damn, this is all we need. Having soldiered on through Ronald Rea-
gan and James Watt, through the attacks (literal attacks, often) of the Western 
anti-environmental “sagebrush rebellion,” and the billions of dollars thrown 
against them by timber and mining interests, now we have to contend with a 
bunch of professors (who had held their key conference in Irvine, California, 
a place about as spiritually far removed from the wild as it is possible to get) 
telling us not to bother? Cronon was seen to be giving aid and comfort to the 
enemy, but in a particularly sneaky way. He’d quoted the poet Gary Snyder 
(along with Abbey and Berry the third star by which I navigated) as saying, “A 
person with a clear heart and open mind can experience the wilderness any-
WINTER/SPRING 2008 33
34 APPALACHIA
where on earth. It is a quality of one’s own consciousness.” But Snyder—in a 
special issue of Wild Earth, edited by John Davis—said he’d been quoted out 
of context. “I must confess I’m getting a bit grumpy about the dumb argu-
ments being put forth by high-paid intellectual types in which they are trying 
to knock nature, knock the people who value nature, and still come out smart 
and progressive,” he wrote. In general, then, environmentalist sentiment was: 
Give us a break. Call it what you will, we’re out here protecting landscapes big 
enough for animals to flourish and for people to occasionally get a little lost 
in, and that’s a good thing, not a bad one.
To his credit, I think Cronon recognized that truth largely from the start. 
“It is not the things we label as wilderness that are the problem—for nonhu-
man nature and large tracts of the natural world do deserve protection—but 
rather what we ourselves mean when we used that label,” he wrote. And he’s 
gone on to write wonderful and sensitive investigations of both the human 
and the natural meaning of particular places. In general, the controversy died 
away. We could still stand here on Owl’s Head in midsummer 2003 and say, 
“This is a wild place.”
But I don’t think the questions about wilderness and its meaning will in 
fact stay tamped down for long. A few years before Cronon, I wrote a book 
called The End of Nature that grew in part from my years in the Adirondacks 
and that raised a somewhat similar challenge to the idea of the wild. It was 
the first book for a general audience about global warming, and half of it 
was pretty much straight science reporting: here’s how much the tempera-
ture is going to go up, here’s how we might rein it in a little. But the other 
half explored the reasons that the prospect of massive climate change made 
me so sad—basically because it threatened my newfound love affair with 
the wild world. I had found the place I belonged, I knew that in my bones. 
But suddenly the meaning of that place was in question. Say people, in their 
carelessness, pushed the temperature up four or five degrees this century, 
which is the current middle-of-the-road prediction. In that case, Owl’s Head 
might never overlook another real winter, just one long mud season. In the 
fall, instead of the birch and beech turning yellow and orange in this vast 
wood, those trees would be dead, replaced, if at all, by the drab brown of 
oak and hickory. In the first warm days of March, there’d be no maples left 
to bleed their sweet sap. Since it’s already started getting warmer, is this still 
the Adirondacks, still the Champlain Valley? Was our place wild, or natu-
ral, anymore? For that matter, was any place? The peculiar physics of global 
warming mean, in fact,  that the North and South Poles will be hardest 
hit—that is, the places that really are free of any other human history, really 
are wild if any place is wild, might just as well be in the middle of the eastern 
megalopolis or the SoCal suburbs.
I got in less trouble from wilderness advocates than Cronon did, in part 
because I was clearly one of them, and in part because I was catching so much 
hell from oil companies for suggesting that we needed to overhaul industrial 
civilization. But the argument persists. It’s not easy to see what the idea of 
something apart from man, something untrammeled, will amount to in a 
globally warmed, genetically engineered world, a world totally reshaped by 
our recklessness and our shortsighted desire. Mightn’t we just give up on the 
whole thing and go play video games?
For me, though, the idea that there’s no such thing as pure wilderness has 
made the relative wild all the more precious. Yes, Cronon’s right, and so was 
I—there’s no place that isn’t touched by man. I have a friend, Curt Stager, 
who teaches biology at Paul Smith’s College, the only four-year school in the 
Adirondacks. Curt spent years out with his students looking for a pristine 
Adirondack Lake, one that hadn’t been sterilized by acid rain, one whose 
sediment cores didn’t show telltale signs of logging or road-building in the 
watershed. He never found one, and he had three thousand to choose from. 
And now it rains or snows or doesn’t on those lakes in some small measure 
because of the kind of cars we drive or the ways we heat our homes. In 2003, 
scientists summed up a review of many different studies—studies of leaf-out 
in the spring, of migration dates, or hibernation patterns—and concluded 
that because of global warming, spring was coming seven days earlier at this 
latitude than just a few decades before.
But it’s precisely because of such things that we badly need more wild, not 
less. For pragmatic reasons: if plants and animals are going to need to move 
north against the rising temperature, we have to give them as much room, 
and as many corridors, as we can carve out (assuming, that is, that you buy 
the basic conservationist argument that plants and animals are worth preserv-
ing). But beyond that, we need more wild for human reasons: we need to set 
. I did not escape their wrath entirely, however. Google allows one instantly to dredge up sentiments like 
the following, a quote from Mike Medbury of the Idaho Conservation League in a November 996 issue 
of High Country News: “This whole Bill McKibben Bill Cronon thing about the death of wilderness as 
a concept is utter horsesh**. These guys are getting into this heady philosophy about wilderness; they’re 
trying to deconstruct us or something. I would just like to put them out there in it somewhere and see 
what they say.”
WINTER/SPRING 2008 35
36 APPALACHIA
aside land from our use simply to prove to ourselves that we can do it, that we 
don’t need to be in control of everything around us. The battle for the future 
is precisely between those who are willing to engineer every organism for our 
convenience, who will countenance the radical change of our climate rather 
than risk any damage to our cosseted and swaddled Economy, and those who 
are willing to say there is something other than us that counts. Wilderness 
and Gandhian nonviolence were the two most potentially revolutionary ideas 
of the twentieth century, precisely because they were the two most humble: 
they imagine a whole different possibility for people.
There’s another, less stern, reason we need the wild, too, of course, and 
that’s for sheer comfort. I’d hiked Giant several times in my life—the best 
was on the first anniversary of meeting my wife, Sue, when we walked up in a 
gray fog with a bottle of champagne, only to have the clouds instantly part as 
we sat on the summit, pulled away like stage curtains to reveal the late-Sep-
tember glory below. Probably because of that good memory, I headed back 
on one of the darker days of my life, the morning after the elections of 994, 
when Newt Gingrich swept into control of the House on the strength of his 
Contract with America. It seemed to me as if the nation I loved had finally 
gone totally crazy, that it had settled for the most gimcrack and transparent 
kind of fraud, and that a kind of intolerance was settling over the land that 
would eventually make life scary for people like myself, who seemed suddenly 
not critics of the ruling order, but dissidents. Anyway, a hard day’s solitary hike 
was enough to restore a bit of equilibrium, and Gingrich landed harder than I 
did in the end—but a world without Giant Mountain, or a Giant Mountain 
with a toll road on it, or a gondola, or an ATV mosh pit, seems more worth 
fighting against than ever. “Forever wild,” as the New York constitution puts 
it, even if “wild” means a little less than it used to, and if “forever” seems 
somewhat shorter.
BILL MCKIBBEN, an environmental writer and activist, is the author of nine books, 
the latest of which is Deep Economy (Times Books, 2007). He lives with his wife and 
daughter in Ripton, Vermont.



Walking Through an Idea

Appalachia 
Volume 58 
Number 2 Summer/Fall 2007: Time In the 
Backcountry 
Article 14 
2006 
Letters 
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 Part of the Nonfiction Commons 
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(2006) "Letters," Appalachia: Vol. 58: No. 2, Article 14. 
Available at: https://digitalcommons.dartmouth.edu/appalachia/vol58/iss2/14 
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102 APPALACHIA
Letters
Dear Editor,
I enjoyed Nat Eddy’s article (“My Used Equipment Can Beat Up Your New 
Equipment,” Winter–Spring 2007), although I did do some laughing at his 
expense. It seems to me that for most people the world never existed before 
they were born, or became old enough to notice. Backpacking didn’t start in 
the ’70s. In fact, the big boom in backpacking from 950 to 974 took a nose 
dive from 975 through 985.
My weak back and need for excessive comfort led to the first backpack with 
full hip carry, warmest sleeping bags, and in an effort for lighter bags, the most 
wind-stable lightest tents: somewhat copied, but oddly, never matched.
You will hear that I invented vapor barrier clothes, but the concept was 
at least 00 years old when our military used it in socks for arctic troops in 
World War II. (Although Gore-Tex is an excellent vapor barrier, Gore had it 
backward, so millions in advertising has most people believing the reverse.) 
Colin Fletcher was a good writer and good local backpacker, but used only 
what was available in one local store. On his annual one-week trip he’d try 
what he was told to try. He didn’t like our tent because he set it up on a slope, 
foot end uphill, so tried to sleep with his head at the foot! He didn’t like our 
bag because it was far too warm. (He ended up later buying our tent.) His 
great attitude toward the mountains is what makes his writing timeless!
Sad to see you quote the worst myth—“warm when wet”—ever dumped 
on the public. Only a hot tub meets that criteria.
My fully padded and conforming pack hip belt, which flexed with your 
hips, was sold since 957. We and Bill Moss produced hoop and dome tents 
with preformed rigid poles for many years before bad copies with skinny flex 
arrow shaft poles came on the scene. It is a bit funny that they claim those 
domes are “free standing,” but they all require stakes at every pole end! 
I met Dick Kelty in 957 when he came by after my first ad in Summit 
magazine. He put on my pack with his 30 pounds of sand bags in it, walked 
out and for a mile, came in and said “Well, it’s a lot more comfortable 
than mine.”
The major problem with old equipment is those with urethane coatings 
(you refer to them as rubber coatings). They were the lightest in their time, 
but would hydrolyze, turning sticky and smelling like cat urine. No real prac-
tical cure. In 993, I discovered new parachute fabric with silicone coat, and 
Appalachia_07exp.indd   102 5/10/07   11:10:44 PM
after a year of testing switched to it on all tents and ponchos. Now it is usually 
referred to as silnylon.
—Jack Stephenson, Gilford, New Hampshire
Stephenson is the founder of the hiking and camping gear company, Stephenson 
Warmlite.
The following poem was sent to us by one of Fred Stott’s doctors as a celebration of 
how he handled his illness. (See In Memoriam, page 107.)
Dear Editor:
Fred Stott/Tibetan Bowl
The mourner/celebrant strikes the bowl with his wooden beater.
The moment of conception, violent, forceful,
Produces the softest of tones, barely audible,
But intensified by the friction on the circular rim,
Like the playing of a glass harmonica,
Peaks to a crescendo and then fades,
And resonates through the spirits of the attendants.
It is a perfect expression of the dead man’s life.
The Dalai Lama, Pope and Ayatollah would understand,
That the soul of this man was as perfect as man can be.
He asked not a lot of his friends.
Be generous, be kind, be happy,
Forgive,
Commit to your passions.
In my life, I have seen many men face death.
But none like him.
Calm, accepting, tranquil, beatific,
Buddha like.
He was a man who believed in the gods of nature.
His walks in the wild places extracting their promise,
Death a release, a melting and merging with the river of life.
To become a tree, a mountain.
He didn’t know how much he had already become a part of us all.
—Dr. Nicholas Tsapatsaris, Burlington, Massachusetts
SUMMER/FALL 2007 103
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Letters

Wentworth, Marjory

Appalachia 
Volume 58 
Number 2 Summer/Fall 2007: Time In the 
Backcountry 
Article 21 
2006 
Tangled 
Marjory Wentworth 
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 Part of the Poetry Commons 
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Wentworth, Marjory (2006) "Tangled," Appalachia: Vol. 58: No. 2, Article 21. 
Available at: https://digitalcommons.dartmouth.edu/appalachia/vol58/iss2/21 
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45 APPALACHIA
Tangled
We return to hear the waves returning
to the beach, one after the other, connecting
us like blood. Long before we came
here, we were listening, remembering
wind, spinning salt, uninterrupted
sunlight. This is a place where dreams
return, fish bones tangled in seaweed.
Rinsed clean and kept, whatever sorrows
come are folded into the sea’s
unbearable secrets.
—Marjory Wentworth
MARJORY WENTWORTH’s poems have appeared in numerous books and magazines. A 
collection of poems, Noticing Eden, was published by Hub City Press in 2003. She is the 
Poet Laureate of South Carolina. 
SUMMER/FALL 2007 45
Appalachia_07exp.indd   45 5/10/07   11:10:30 PM



Tangled

Pierre, Charles

Appalachia 
Volume 58 
Number 2 Summer/Fall 2007: Time In the 
Backcountry 
Article 28 
2006 
Pitch Pines 
Charles Pierre 
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Available at: https://digitalcommons.dartmouth.edu/appalachia/vol58/iss2/28 
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159 APPALACHIA
Pitch Pines
In the stingiest soil, amid sand and gravel,
where sea winds sear the grand hardwoods,
they stand, with stunted trunks, ragged limbs, 
and pale-green needles in gawky bunches. 
Alive to fire, the bark sprouts when burned,
each cone releasing seeds, even in hell heat. 
Far from regions where life is accumulation,
these meager trees grow in rocky scrub lots,
behind ocean dunes, by parched roadsides,
clinging to the little they have. No longer prized
for resin, they thrive in the fertile austerity
of harsh terrain, figures of its stark economy. 
—Charles Pierre
CHARLES PIERRE is the author of the poetry collection, Green Vistas. His work has 
been published in many literary journals nationwide, including The Ledge, Rattapallax, 
Long Island Quarterly, Hidden Oak, Common Ground Review, Aethlon, and Avocet. He 
lives in Manhattan where he works as a freelance writer.
SUMMER/FALL 2007 159
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Pitch Pines

Without getting into yet another boomer “We changed everything” claim, if you compare camping gear from the late 1970s and 1980s to new gear, most of the differences aren’t important

Eddy, Nat

My Old Equipment Can Beat Up Your New Equipment

Editor’s Note: This is a shortened version of an article by a climber who served as Appalachia editor for four decades. This piece first appeared in 1905

Fay, Charles E.

The Mountain as an Influence in Modern Life

Doyle, James

Appalachia 
Volume 57 
Number 1 Summer/Fall 2006: Bringing the 
Journey Home 
Article 21 
2006 
The Cranes on the Sand 
James Doyle 
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 Part of the Poetry Commons 
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Available at: https://digitalcommons.dartmouth.edu/appalachia/vol57/iss1/21 
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summeR/Fall 200 53
A Walk in the Woods
More than mice and spotted beetles
vie for this darkness, these empty spaces
no eye can see into—the shade a fallen
cedar makes, its branches bent under ferns
and mouse-ear chickweed, as if leisurely
walking a treadmill of wind. Even a ring-eyed 
raccoon slumps in this lush hollow. Lichen
will never bloom here, nor the moss that clings
to alders and fiddleheads. A slant of light strikes
a quaking aspen. songs of finch and hermit thrush
drift through willows and snags of pine.
Deer nibble thistle weed, antlers steady
at the snap of a twig, the far-off bark
of a neighbor’s dog. For a moment sun
hooks on a cedar, stitching its way
into morning; the spruce blues its smallest
branches in secret; the shy tick of a fox
sparrow chooses shadows. Everything as it is.
—Kay Mullen
Kay Mullen is a retired teacher and school counselor. she received the Washington 
Poets Association William stafford Award in 2002, and recently a fellowship at the 
Vermont studio Center for writers and artists. Mullen is currently enrolled in the 
MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University. Her first book of poetry is Let Morning 
Begin. 
Appalachia_06SF.FINAL.indd   53 5/11/06   7:09:18 PM



The Cranes on the Sand

Manning, David T.

Appalachia 
Volume 57 
Number 1 Summer/Fall 2006: Bringing the 
Journey Home 
Article 23 
2006 
Middle Fork, San Joaquin River Region 
David T. Manning 
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 Part of the Poetry Commons 
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Manning, David T. (2006) "Middle Fork, San Joaquin River Region," Appalachia: Vol. 57: No. 1, Article 23. 
Available at: https://digitalcommons.dartmouth.edu/appalachia/vol57/iss1/23 
This Poetry is brought to you for free and open access by Dartmouth Digital Commons. It has been accepted for 
inclusion in Appalachia by an authorized editor of Dartmouth Digital Commons. For more information, please 
contact dartmouthdigitalcommons@groups.dartmouth.edu. 
summeR/Fall 200 1
Middle Fork, San Joaquin River Region
Two miles south of Lake Ediza,
i wait at ten-thousand feet
and lean against
a granite scarp where sky-blue
lichens grow, flecks on quartz, so azure
my friend says i’ve painted them.
i dig heels in talus, glissade
past snowfields to where timberline
holds wastes of broken rock, gneiss scree,
look down . . .
There, below the spires of the Minarets
cloud-shadows float
on blue-black Upper iceberg Lake.
summers ago
and trail-fit, i caught trout
in that dark mirror,
rainbows that came down from nowhere.
—David T. Manning
DaviD T. Manning’s work has appeared in Pembroke Magazine, Southern Poetry 
Review, New Orleans Review, and other journals. He has been nominated for a Push-
cart Prize. His most recent collection, The Ice-Carver, won the Longleaf Poetry Chap-
book competition in north Carolina in 2004.
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Middle Fork, San Joaquin River Region

Stott, Lucille

Appalachia 
Volume 56 
Number 2 Winter/Spring 2006: Winter in the 
Whites and Beyond 
Article 2 
2005 
High-Country Currents: Leaving the Journal But Not the Pack 
Lucille Stott 
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 Part of the Nonfiction Commons 
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Stott, Lucille (2005) "High-Country Currents: Leaving the Journal But Not the Pack," Appalachia: Vol. 56: 
No. 2, Article 2. 
Available at: https://digitalcommons.dartmouth.edu/appalachia/vol56/iss2/2 
This Editor's Column is brought to you for free and open access by Dartmouth Digital Commons. It has been 
accepted for inclusion in Appalachia by an authorized editor of Dartmouth Digital Commons. For more information, 
please contact dartmouthdigitalcommons@groups.dartmouth.edu. 
   aPPalachia
High-Country Currents
Leaving the Journal  
But Not the Pack
Last summer, The Mountaineers Books sent me a remarkaBle book, Living with Wolves, by filmmakers Jim and Jamie Dutcher. Read-
ing about the Dutchers’ six-year experience observing the behavior of north 
American gray wolves, i was drawn to the way the couple had approached 
these animals — with intelligence, care, and respect, but without misguided 
reverence. They created a huge wilderness enclosure in idaho’s sawtooth 
Mountains and, through trial and error, succeeded in forming a cohesive 
pack to live there. What began as a two-year film project expanded to six. 
Two award-winning films grew out of this experiment, and in the end, the 
animals — who had grown too used to humans to survive in the wild — were 
moved to protected areas.
 From their years of living with one pack of wolves, the Dutchers shape 
wise observations about the leaderly qualities of the alphas, the supportive 
role of the betas, and the resourcefulness of my own favorites, the beleaguered 
omegas, least in stature but certainly not in impact. Though the Dutchers 
develop a deep affection for the members of the sawtooth Pack, they do 
not romanticize the wolves into “spirit animals,” and warn against treating 
these fierce canines like man’s best friend. This measured approach allows 
the wolves to emerge, simply, as who they are. “This is the wolf that we want 
to share,” they write, “a wolf that is neither demon nor deity nor biological 
robot. it is an animal that desperately needs to be part of something bigger 
than itself — the pack.”
 While i was reading Living with Wolves, i was also preparing my last 
Appalachia manuscript and inevitably thinking back on what has been an en-
joyable and meaningful six-year tenure as this journal’s editor. i was puzzled 
at first by the strong response i was having to the book, and then i came upon 
the photograph that appears (through the generosity of the authors) on the 
opposite page. Paw in hand, hand in paw, it is a portrait of connection. if i 
had to pick one gift that this journal has given me during the past six years, 
Winter/Spring 2006   
it is a heightened awareness of all that 
connects me to something bigger 
than myself, all that expands my pack 
to include others — both human and 
non-, and the landscape itself. 
 Some of this heightened aware-
ness has come from my contact with 
outdoor lovers around the world, who 
have shared their own connections to 
the land with me and in these pages. 
Some of it has come from the collabo-
rations I have enjoyed with the great 
people who worked with me on Appa-
lachia, especially the knowledgeable, 
dedicated section editors who widen 
the journal’s reach through Alpina, 
Accidents, News and Notes, Books of Note, and Poetry.
 And some of my enhanced sense of connection has come from the work of 
shaping the stories themselves. I brought to the journal a love of the outdoors 
and a commitment to preserving wilderness. Then, when Appalachia became 
a part of my life, I found myself becoming more mindful during my outdoor 
wanderings, more responsive to the impossible delicacy of trillium along rug-
ged trails, to the many colors I can find in a gray rock, to the enviably long 
eyelashes of the seal flirting with my kayak, to the sun-warmed skin of a 
plump blueberry, to the transparent beech leaf hanging tenaciously to an ice-
coated branch, to the bear and moose and coyote and fox whose pawprints 
dart across my own in the New Hampshire hills.
 Throughout its long history of celebrating both recreation and conserva-
tion, this journal has sought to portray the natural world as “neither demon 
nor deity nor biological robot” but rather as a place of enjoyment and respon-
sibility, a place of essential links and critical interdependence. As the Dutch-
ers so artfully point out, there is no such thing as a lone wolf. Appalachia has 
helped me understand that — whether alpha, beta, or omega — we all have a 
vital role to play in “the family of things.”* 
 — Lucille Stott
Editor-in-Chief
*The phrase ends Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese.”
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