The fall season arrived officially on September 22, but fall colors arrive on their own time. I am out on the Kickapoo River to survey for a deadfall removal project. I am in the front of the canoe, mapping and fidgeting with my GPS locator. Then I look up and...
We think of evening as the ideal time for stargazing. The sun sets, the sky darkens, and one by one the stars and planets emerge. If you look to the east just after sunset, you can see Earth’s shadow just above the horizon. Darkness does not fall—it rises! We spend...
I’m told that I use the word awesome a lot. I’m usually content enough with the everyday experiences of hiking in the Driftless Area, biking its back roads, and enjoying outdoor music and plays. But I love those moments of awe when they happen. I’ve been reading some...
Eclipses are an amazing coincidence. The Moon needs to orbit between Sun and Earth. It can’t be too high or too low when it passes between. It needs to be the right distance so that it exactly covers the Sun. And we need to be on the right spot on Earth to stand...
Authors note: I wrote this story for Tapestry Magazine ten years ago, but it could have happened yesterday. Rivers have had their say again, and seldom have they spoken so loudly. Halfway through summer, people throughout the Midwest are still wrangling with the...
There’s a little bit of showmanship in sharing stargazing. It helps to be mindful that other people might not be quite as wowed as you are by the sight of a faint fuzzy thing in the eyepiece of a telescope (even if it is the combined light of hundreds of billions of...
