Real

True Narratives

The air varies in different regions, at different seasons of the year, and even different hours of the day. The odorous, fresh sea-breezes are distinct from the fitful breezes along river banks, which are humid and freighted with inland smells. The bracing, light, dry air of the mountains can never be mistaken for the pungent salt air of the ocean. The air of winter is dense, hard, compressed. In the spring it has new vitality. It is light, mobile, and laden with a thousand palpitating odours from earth, grass, and sprouting leaves. The air of midsummer is dense, saturated, or dry and burning, as if it came from a furnace. When a cool breeze brushes the sultry stillness, it brings fewer odours than in May, and frequently the odour of a coming tempest. The avalanche of coolness which sweeps through the low-hanging air bears little resemblance to the stinging coolness of winter. The rain of winter is raw, without odour, and dismal. The rain of spring is brisk, fragrant, charged with life-giving warmth. I welcome it delightedly as it visits the earth, enriches the streams, waters the hills abundantly, makes the furrows soft with showers for the seed, elicits a perfume which I cannot breathe deep enough. Spring rain is beautiful, impartial, lovable. With pearly drops it washes every leaf on tree and bush, ministers equally to salutary herbs and noxious growths, searches out every living thing that needs its beneficence. [Helen Keller, The World I Live In (1907), chapter V, “The Finer Vibrations”.]

Chroniclers of nature:

• David Neilson, Southern Light: Images from Antarctica (Abbeville Press, 2013): the book is “. . . a blast of beauty.”
• Lauren Redniss, Thunder and Lightning: Weather Past, Present, Future (Random House, 2015): “She is, to use a contemporary word, a curator: arranging information with a distinct aesthetic and a point of view.”
• Steve Inskeep, Imperfect Union: How Jessie and John Frémont Mapped the West, Invented Celebrity, and Helped Cause the Civil War (Penguin Press, 2020): “He shines an unsparing light on his subjects, and he finds unnerving similarities between the Frémonts’ America and our own.”
• Barry Lopez, Horizon (Knopf, 2019): “With a very real environmental and existential crisis at hand, Lopez takes us back to the Arctic, as well as to other far-flung places where he has spent time over the years — searching both memory and meticulously recorded field notes to reconstruct his experiences, mining their accumulated wisdom, seeking glimmers of hope.”

Technical and Analytical Readings

Photographs

Documentary and Educational Films

• The Silent World, a collaboration between Jacques Cousteau and Louis Malle
• Sweetgrass: on herding sheep in Montana