You will hardly know who I am, or what I mean;
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged;
Missing me one place, search another;
I stop somewhere, waiting for you.

Living in the midst of a massive Ponderosa pine forest during an enduring drought will do that to a person.

I’m afraid of losing this place, and it’s a familiar feeling. I’ve lived other places that were on the edge—often about to be swallowed up by development—and grew up in a place that had long been pushed over it. In my childhood, the dammed-up Columbia River was already a faint shadow of its natural self and bent around the toxic Hanford Nuclear Reservation, where millions of tons of radioactive waste continue to confound attempts at remediation.

And from there to here, I’ve seen much beauty and found peace in places such as Ogden Valley, Half Moon Bay, Placerita Canyon, Cold Springs Valley, and Munn Woods.

Beauty and peace. And fear of loss.

Yet all of this worrying begins with the idea that something is being taken away from me. Each place, while it was part of my experience, also became part of my universe in a selfish, possessive way. I am here, I thought, so I want this place to remain as it is, or possibly even to return to what it was.

The truth, though, is that none of it was ever mine to begin with. The rivers, the forests, the parks—they are gifts, not possessions, and their intersection with my experience is ephemeral.

I suppose I could apply the same lesson to the rest of my life. All that I struggle so solemnly to retain lies within the sphere of my illusion of possession, but in a moment an outside force can reveal the futility of my grasping.

In death, of course, lies the ultimate lesson in transience. I doubt that I’ll have much to bequeath to whomever is there to receive it, and my deep attachment to the places of my life will vanish.

But my experience of them will be with me, in those final moments. Then consciously or not, I will exhale the sweet morning river, the pungent sage, the subtle vanilla pine, and my release of them will mark my passage, not theirs.

I will want to leave here believing that they remain.

In recent issues, you may have noticed that we’ve given a bit more space to individual writers’ work, and I think you’ll see an even more deliberate move in that direction with this issue. In some cases, you’ll see more than one poem from a single writer–as with Andrew Ruzkowski’s four poems that open this issue; in other cases, you’ll see poems that are significantly more expansive than may be typical in journals these days–as with David R. Cravens’s “Credo.” I hope that allowing a bit more space for the work of some of the writers in this issue will give their ideas and images the room they need to develop and, I hope, to resonate with you as they have with me.

Beginning with Issue Twelve, we have offered the journal in digital and print formats through HP’s print-on-demand service, Mag Cloud. Digital versions of this issue, including iPad and PDF versions, are (of course) free. Perfect-bound print copies of this issue will cost thirteen dollars and are available through Mag Cloud.

I hope you find this issue as rewarding to read as it was to assemble–thanks so much to all of the contributors for trusting us with their very fine work.

Issue Fourteen features a cover image by Geoffrey Miller and includes poetry and prose by Alyse Bensel, Kevin Catalano, Pat Falk, Jeffrey Johnson, M.P. Jones IV, Philip Kobylarz, Emma Krosschell, Heidi Reszies Lewis, M.V. Montgomery, Joseph Murphy, Jeff Newberry, Al Ortolani, Scott Owens, Beth Paulson, Rod Peckman, Ian C. Smith, Rachel L. Snyder, Rae Spencer, Carol Smallwood, and Carolyne Whelan.

Beginning with Issue Twelve, we have offered the journal in digital and print formats through HP’s print-on-demand service, Mag Cloud. Digital versions of this issue, including iPad and PDF versions, are (of course) free. Perfect-bound print copies of this issue will cost twelve dollars and are available through Mag Cloud.

We’re already working on putting the spring issue together, so I hope that we’ll have that to you in just a few weeks. In the meanwhile, please enjoy the fine writing that this issue’s contributors have kindly entrusted to us.

This is a place rich in subtext. A volcanic field first erupted southwest of Flagstaff, breaking through the surface of the Mogollon Rim. Tbe molten turmoil migrated on a faintly northeast line, leaving behind a pock-marked trail of steam vents and caldera.

Flagstaff lies in the wake of this transformation and destruction. The scenic, sacred ring of peaks–the highest being Humphreys, Aggasiz, and Fremont–are likely united in origin. Imagine a stratovolcano rising 16,000 feet before blowing off its top half a million years ago, leaving an uneven rim of peaks and a wide caldera that descends in what are now pine-covered, weather-eroded slopes. Just beyond them, easily overlooked, lies Sunset Crater.

I was ignorant of all this upon moving here. All of my map study focused on national forests and campgrounds as I tried to learn the roads and towns of northern Arizona. My eyes scanned past Sunset Crater a hundred times without my stopping to consider its meaning and origins. Outside, I gazed at the peaks every chance I had, but never stopped to imagine a violent past.

All of this changed on a blustery day when a family drive to occupy a few Sunday afternoon hours uncovered layers of knowledge about our new home.

A display at the Sunset Crater National Monument visitors center showed the incremental advance of an active volcanic field, and suddenly I stood on a whole new understanding of a place recently transformed. Outside, at the first stop on a loop road, a piercing cold wind blew hard enough to make us stagger on pathways through cinder fields and jagged lava flows in the shadow of the cinder cone crater. From a nearby vista, a trail of vents extends northeast, with the hints of the Painted Desert lingering on the far horizon.

The exotic paths of complex lava flows, called by names such as aa or pahoehoe, awakened memories from my own experience. On May 18, 1980, I was weeks from graduation at Washington State University. The sky over Pullman had been out of sorts that day as an inky black cloud snaked its way from the west. An impending storm, I thought, until a coed ran screaming across the lawn of the apartment complex. “It’s exploded! It’s exploded!” she yelled. It took a few moments, but the dots finally connected. Mount St. Helens. The cloud. I was witnessing the distant shadow of a massive eruption. By that afternoon, it was as dark as midnight, and the ash fell like fluffy flakes of snowfall. By morning, Pullman was a moonscape, eerily gray and quiet.

I still have a jar of the powdery ash, scooped up from the sidewalk outside my apartment, and for years I’ve regarded it as merely an inert souvenir. But now that I’ve learned more about the San Francisco peaks and Sunset Crater, and felt a deeper connection to their origins and spiritual significance, I understand how the mountain in my Washington home had scattered its own ashes as it surrendered itself to fate. They mark the passing of an ancient peak. I’m going to find the ash a more special home than an old Mason jar and put it in a place that honors its significance. Maybe a shelf that faces north, toward the peaks, and toward the remnants of Mount St. Helens beyond.

But as I told the contributors to our thirteenth issues, there were times when it was difficult to find a reasonable explanation for the difficulties I’ve faced in putting this particular issue together. Nothing big, really, except that all of the little things that are normally simple simply weren’t. And I have to admit that I thought, more than once, that this is Issue Thirteen. At last, I think, putting this issue became something best described as a war of attrition with Microsoft Word over page and section breaks. And I’m happy to report that, at long last, I think I’ve won that war, at least for now.

So I’m very happy today to offer, at long last, Issue Thirteen in both digital and print formats. The issue features a cover image by a photographer close to my heart, Hillary Urquhart, and poetry and prose by William Cullen, Howie Good, Gabriel “G” Garcia, Beth Paulson, George Korolog, Karla Linn Merrifield, Rae Spencer, Scott Owens, Carolyne Whelan, Inara Cedrins, Shannon Hennessey, Elise Atchison, Jeff Newberry, Judith Skillman, Craig W. Steele, Heather Candels, Dave Malone, and Jeffrey Alfier.

I am grateful for their patience, and for the trust they put in us. And when you see the fine work they’ve shared with us, I’m confident that you’ll find this issue will have been very much worth the wait.

Beginning with Issue Twelve, we have offered the journal in digital and print formats through HP’s print-on-demand service, Mag Cloud. Digital versions of this issue, including iPad and PDF versions, are (of course) free. Perfect-bound print copies of this issue will cost ten dollars and are available through Mag Cloud.

Looking forward, I anticipate publishing our winter issue in early March, with the spring issue following in late April or early June.

Except that following threads in that category rarely brings me to a better place. (Maybe I just need to follow more uplifting folks, although those posting links to well-executed environmental literature seem to elude me.) Instead, in this season of consumption I’m led to question my integrity, or at least dedication, in the matter of sustainable living.

Am I doing enough? And for the right reasons?

The self-accounting goes something like this: One vehicle, not two. A townhome, not a house. Repeated spasms of downsizing, first to move, then to move again, then to fit into a space that is destined—by personal commitment, if not exhaustion—to be a “permanent” one. Less food and even less bad food. Gargling with hydrogen peroxide and cleaning with baking soda.

I’d like to feel good about all this as I coast down Beaver Street on my 10-year-old Raleigh or squeeze into a seat on the Mountain Line bus, Route 2, hoping to beat the campus-bound Mountain Link to the transfer stop. I’d like to feel as if these are concessions and sacrifices made for a high moral purpose.

But my mind, socialized in the Boomer generation and irradiated with consumerism, commercialization, and competition, won’t allow it without a fight.

This is my condition, that flinching inner voice says, because something has gone awry. Two master’s degrees and three (four? five?) careers and a few essays published here and there. And now living paycheck to paycheck, savings rate 0 percent. Really? This isn’t about sacrificing. It’s about mediocrity. No, failure.

But, my rational self tries to counter, this is about choices. I’m living humbly and purposefully in a place that speaks to my soul instead of my ambition. I car camp with my wife and son, the elk and coyotes serenading us at midnight. We walk and bike on urban trails. Our commitment to family—stay-at-home mom, 8-to-5 dad—invokes our commitment to sustainability and simplicity.

Maybe, I hold out, this is a deliberate life?

This current state, simple and modest, with little that is discretionary and disposable, may be more than just the accident of falling off the hamster wheel, or of never having gotten a good grip in the first place. Perhaps, after enough time, the underlying principles and traits that have motivated a lifetime of choices—even the inexplicable ones—begin to take shape as a lifestyle. Even if it took me five decades. And if all generally seems right, then it’s about time to stop carrying around my ready apology for how I live.

One less item on the “unnecessary” list.

• David Blomenberg, for “Unlikely Resolutions” from Issue Ten
• John Paul Calavitta, for “A Mountain with No (Geographic) Will To Be There” from Issue Twelve
• B. J. Hollars, for “Dispatches from a Tornado: March 21, 1932” from Issue Twelve
• Tammy Ho Lai-Ming, for “Peak District” from Issue Twelve
• Timothy Gray, for “wilderness wish” from Issue Twelve
• D. C. Lynn, for “Mother Road Vistas” from Issue Eleven

We send our congratulations to these writers, and our many, many thanks to all those who have entrusted their work to us in the past year.

In the elite University campus where I live there are many trees that ebb and flow with tides of the monsoons. Some of the greenery in these parts still can boast of long term heredity as being indigenous to the semi-dry east coast tropics by the Bay of Bengal. Our high tension electricity lines are drawn for the most above and across these tree clumps that when the tropical storms rage and drive through them the charge could easily be outraged and we have to suffer some long dark nights without power. I have often heard people otherwise quite knowledgeable about many things curse the trees and even opining that they ought to tear down the trees that cause so many problems! Perhaps there is little difference between these electrical highways and the motorways of our developing cities. I am often left wondering why instead of drawing these lines over the green belt we don’t invest a little more and draw them through the other clearer parts of our campus. These are the exigencies of modern living so very much like the highways and byways of traffic that becomes our urban living.

Roads are the nerves of our modern day civilization and one cannot even imagine a country without roads. In fact we could say that our essential societal structure is founded on and depends on the breaking of new wood. Does it by extension become the arch writing that Derrida talks about? In the deep dark woods of the early dawn of human culture when the first homo erectus stood up and walked through and laid the first ever track there was no sense of divide and separation but one only of a sense of direction of the left and the right, the front and the back. Of course as life evolved there was a sequential trail of smell and sense that made out for mental maps and directions as well. Paths and roads made ways for communities and social groups to keep up and cohere. All roads lead back to where one started from. Traveller, says and Arabian proverb, there are no paths! Paths are made by walking.

As I traverse slowly on this mud track through the grass carefully avoiding the rain filled ditches, I hear the harsh notes of the black drongo and the sweet melodious fruity call of the golden oriole. At the edge of the tree line I come across newly felled trees and raked up soil. The red earth is breathing still. All trees and bushes are fated to make way for the growing human needs. All birds and insects like all mammals and reptiles have to stand aside to let the juggernaut of the human machine to slide by. Some are lucky enough to adapt to and be adopted by new habitats. Some are not so lucky, resist and fall. The maps of human evolution are constantly altered and the roads run calmly on and on. Like these red ants that scurry along in silent lines and like the unseen energy that flows through the high tension wires we move, trying to find new and newer paths.

My times are definitely changing. In my boyhood to behold a casual tourist was a cause for celebration. All of us brats would perhaps run after the unfortunate guy and stand around and simply stare. If they are from another land and in another costume we would gape open mouthed not knowing the finer aspects of civilization that staring is such a bad habit! We took our way of life and our nineteen streets so very much for granted that our world closed around them. All beings from beyond were aliens and strange. Nowadays tourism itself is considered as a culture of its own—we speak so proudly about tourism in terms of cultural history and the economics of development. Tourists are an inevitable contingent of every developing nation. The fanciest term these days is eco tourism. We cater to the professed lover of nature—the eco tourist—who roams the country and gapes upon “nature and human nature” with the same benign expression of the children our old times. Eco tourism opens up new inroads into the wild and the seemingly untouched. The eco tourist is invited into the virgin forest to trace the tracks of peaceful and healthy living! Those silent mountains and deep green forests that I have secretly enjoyed in my own mighty solitude have now become the common property of many prying touristy eyes! How could they enjoy the profundity of wilderness if they lay broader and broader roads? This is so very much in the spirit of the cartoon depicting the city tourister asking eagerly of the tourist guide while they settle for the night in their camping site: where do I plug in my electric blanket?

What is wild? Is it something that stands counter to the domesticated and the friendly? Is wild the other side of our cultural habitat? Is it where our children should not trek lest they be swallowed into the unknown? Is it where the savages lurk who do not belong to our known territories? Is it the periphery of our centres? The end of our roads? Can we ever know it for what it is?

Robert Frost has a poem that presents a dark wood from within which a thrush song beckons the passer- by to come in. Is it a welcome song or a sign of something sinister that lurks beyond the known and tested? But then, paths are made by walking and walking leads us to the unknown. It leads us to new signs of front and back and left and right. In the wild our world of relatives and the known collapse—we are left to face the presence of the unknown. The pathless woods are virgin deeps. And to sense the unknown we need a path. The paradox becomes more complex as we reach into spiritual truths. In the wild we return to reason and faith, noted the American philosopher Emerson. The Victorian poet Robert Browning writes: Ah that man’s reach should exceed his grasp/ or what’s a heaven for? To reach into the unknown we need to tame it and know it when it simply ceases to be what it was!

The worm glides majestically over the thorns; the rose blooms silently on the left and right of the winding path. The mist rises slowly and I can see right up to the bend in the horizon. Even the huge electrical grids with their high-rise spires and their welter of high-tension wires have never appeared so beautiful. Did I stray far from my well-worn path? Or have I left all paths and taken that road to nowhere?

For now, I’d rather stitch together those peaceful patches than engage with the fractious world; or more insidiously, engage with the internal, incessant struggle to decipher and rationalize, to painstakingly distill meaning from each day.

This is my vacation from existential hand wringing.

Tests of my nascent resolve arrive frequently, and one in particular induced a wavering that nearly pulled my attention from the lenticular clouds hovering over the San Francisco peaks like the aspirations of an artist’s faraway mind.

The occasion was the outcry of a restive few raised up against a discrete phase of the master plan for campus construction—a phase that called for some tree removal. All of the classic elements presented themselves to me, as a representative of the institution, and fought for ascendancy: duty, loyalty, work ethic, environmental ethic, authenticity. Campus administration called the work revitalization. Others called it degradation. My young son called it “the tree fuss.”

At another stage of my life, this is the juncture at which I would dispassionately outline and analyze both sides of the argument while tearing myself up inside by pitting conscience against conscientiousness.

But I won’t because I choose not to go down that path.

I’m not looking the other way on this matter; I’m just watching out for myself. And if that means keeping my head in the clouds for a few minutes each day, then I’ll take the respite and return to work. The vacation isn’t over yet.