Pirate With A Cause

Paul Watson’s Crusade To Protect Marine Wildlife

A few minutes later the harpoon flew over our bow and just missed our boat. It rammed into the back of one of the female whales in the pod in front of us. She screamed, and it sounded like a woman screaming. It was really quite shocking. Then she rolled over on her side in a fountain of blood, dying.

Speedo

When the dogwoods bloom overnight and the oaks wake one morning with a full complement of leaves, spring has come to the Tidewater section of Virginia. Shad roe, orange and milky, appears on ice in the fish markets, and there are rumors of bluefish running out by the third island of the Chesapeake Bay.

Agonizing Grace

“Do you feel you’re a danger to yourself or others?” Dr. Lyman G. Glandy, head psychiatrist at Fairview Psychiatric Hospital, wants to know. He’s interviewing me for the first time since my arrival here three days ago. We’re in my room, a small, Spartan, dimly lit chamber with all the charm of a prison cell.

Light, Held Together By Water

Finally I slumped in a chair and sobbed. To grieve one death is always to grieve two. Impolite to admit, I may have been weeping mostly for myself.

Awkward Walks With Unavailable Men

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment when my wanting became a problem. Sometimes I think it was at seventeen, when I was a Mennonite girl from a dead-end dirt lane, determined to leave for the Big City, for college, for a career and money and high-heeled shoes and shorn hair, and to have absolutely nothing more to do with the hilltop Mennonites.

View From The Overlook

Large, feathery clusters of snow spiraled toward the windshield. From the passenger seat, Nora could see between the thinning trees to the ravine below, where snowflakes seemed to hover and rise in undulating waves. For a moment she felt content, leaning back in her seat as Gil steered the car up the steep incline.

As A Boy

my two favorite toys were a stuffed rabbit, / British grey and glass eyed, and a raggedy / monkey I called “Monkum” because my tongue / and throat strangled my words.

The Baby Is Clapping

Drunk on red wine and pea soup, my first husband and I will grab our wool hats, pull them over each other’s ears, and pretend we are happy Quebecois sailors home from playacting for the baby.