“Other islands begin to appear out of the mist, sparkling in the rain-washed light. It happens slowly. Tatters of fog will cling to the trees like gray-white ribbons for hours, but that seems fitting too. These islands reveal themselves slowly. No matter how you come here – by sail or paddle or powerboat or on the excursion boat – the Apostle Islands cannot be taken in all at once or captured as easily as a postcard sunset. They are too much for that. There are stories among these islands, but they come slowly, one lifting fog, one wave, one island, one story at a time.”

“Three humpbacks slide through the water of an unnamed bay in Chatam Strait. Forty feet long and weighing nearly 40 tons, they move as gracefully as curved light in the water, their slick backs rising and falling like dark wing beats until finally they show their tails and dive. Alaska begins here, in the flick of a whale’s tail sending a spray of water high into the air, a spray that falls like raindrops back into the sea.”

“[The] endless sun fuels the burst of life which defines summer in the far North. The Arctic is often unfairly depicted as bleak – lifeless and barren. It is an old joke: hold up a blank white piece of paper and call it a picture of the Arctic. But summer in the Arctic is a symphony of life. Clouds of insects drift on the breeze like smoke. The tundra vibrates with birdsong; patches of fireweed and cotton grass seem to bloom before your eyes. Whole hillsides resound with the chatter of ground squirrels. It is a frenzy. It has to be; soon it will be gone.”

“The sight of a black bear in the wild draws the eye like lightning. It ripples the air with excitement. Seeing a bear, even along a familiar trail, turns the woods to a different place. Each cracking twig, each movement of shadow, carries with it the possibility of a bear … The landscape is suddenly alive.”

“Wildlife is the heartbeat of the land. The sight of deer grazing in a high meadow, a red-tailed hawk circling in the sky, or a set of coyote tracks stretching across the snow can make the Colorado landscape come to life. It is the bighorn sheep and the ptarmigan that make the high country more than just rock and ice. It is the cloud of dust behind a running herd of pronghorns that makes the prairie more than empty horizons. And it is the song of the canyon wren that makes the canyons more than silent walls.”

“From somewhere out in the darkness of Duncan Bay a loon calls, a low sound shaped like the moon rising. It is early and still, and the call echoes among the shadows pooled along the shoreline. A string of stars is still tangled in the branches low along the horizon but already the night is beginning to fade … Suddenly the sun lifts out of the water dripping with light. The shadows move back in among the trees, and what is left of the night shatters. It is morning on Isle Royale. I lift my paddle once, sliding it silently through the dark water to turn my canoe toward the sunrise, and then drift quietly, listening again for the loon.”

“Wild rivers are more than just pathways of water from here to there. They are as much pathways into ourselves. There is no rushing a river. When you go there, you go at the pace of the water and that pace ties you into a flow that is older than life on this planet. Acceptance of that pace, even for a day, changes us, reminds us of other rhythms beyond the sound of our own heartbeats.”

“This was no myth. The bear had been there just moments before the bow of our canoes rounded the bend in the high Arctic river and scraped to a stop on the small spit of beach. In the thick air of a three-day rain we formed a circle around the fresh tracks. Lines were sharp; the edges unbroken; the long claw marks intact even in the rain. Bear tracks.”

“These are the mountains of Colorado, the weavers of weather, the makers of myth. Here some dig for riches like gold or silver. Others come to look, climb, or just sit, gathering a more lasting treasure. Peaks become cornerstones, landmarks in a personal landscape for those who live in these mountains. And for those who visit, the memory of an ice-gray peak gone gold with sunset becomes a memory as lasting as stone.”

“Once, in a shack on a roadside near a river in the southwest corner of the state, I watched a Navajo woman, her eyes the color of worked copper, weaving a tapestry of a river. With thick wool threads of silver, black, gold, and a shade of green like young willow leaves, her hands drummed a rhythm like wingbeats and on the loom appeared a river – slivers of light under a rising moon … The old woman called her tapestry “Shining Waters” and when I asked how soon it would be done she shook her head slowly. “Soon,” she said, “and never.” The story of the rivers of Colorado is like that too.”