Wildbranch: An Anthology of Nature, Environmental, and Place-based Writing

CAPLOW

A Brief History of Wildbranch

The earliest correspondence in my cardboard box archive of Wildbranch material is dated January 1986. The letter was written by Annie Proulx, a freelance writer living nearby in northern Vermont. A mutual friend had introduced us the previous fall, and we soon discovered a number of common interests including trout, ruffed grouse, apple cider, and wooden canoes. At that time I was on the faculty of Sterling College, a small (less than 100 students), nontraditional college with a program combining academic and hands-on work in the natural resource fields.

Annie felt a need for a program targeted at people such as foresters or wildlife biologists who knew much about the outdoor world but less about how to share that knowledge with a wider audience. In one of her early letters she wrote, These people all know a tremendous lot about the outdoors, and most of them eat their livers out because they ‘can’t write.’ Indeed, it would be a big job plus for many of them if they could handle the written word. . . . And I would rather teach people who already know the outdoor world than to get a bunch of soft-handed A+ English students who didn’t know spruce root from goose gut, since a large part of good writing technique is keen observation with a fresh eye. And you have to know at what you are looking.

Lacking the facilities and support staff to offer such a program, Annie asked me if Sterling College would consider hosting such a workshop. At that point Sterling’s facilities were only lightly used during the summers. Her inquiry received a favorable response, and I agreed to work with Annie to flesh out her idea.

Annie already had an extensive network of contacts in the publishing world, including book and magazine publishers, editors, photographers, and other writers. I began putting together a mailing list derived from the National Wildlife Federation’s Conservation Directory. This annual directory included listings of all the federal, state, local, and private agencies involved with natural resources as well as all the colleges and universities with programs in forestry, wildlife management, agriculture, and so on. We agreed to start with a weeklong session and chose the last week of June in 1987.

On St. Patrick’s Day in 1986, Annie and I drove down to Massachusetts to meet with Ed Gray at Gray’s Sporting Journal. On the way down we were struggling to come up with a name for our new writing workshop. The Wild Branch, a local tributary of the Lamoille River, came to mind, and by changing this to one word we felt we had a promising name. Ed generously agreed to provide some advertising for the new writing workshop. Annie lined up a list of faculty for the inaugural session, wrote text for the brochure and poster, and asked her mother Lois to do a pen-and-ink sketch of an alder branch, which became the Wildbranch logo.

The results of our mailings were disappointing. As the dates of our first session approached, we realized we lacked enough participants to run the program. Reluctantly, we cancelled the 1987 workshop and agreed to get a much earlier start on the mailings for the next year.

Mailing results the following year were much improved, and we ran the first Wildbranch session in late June of 1988 with 28 participants and 9 faculty. The week was completely packed with presentations and talk of writing, but provided neither the time nor the framework for actual writing and feedback.

One of our initial interests in putting together the workshop was to strengthen connections between the fishing and hunting community and those with other interests in the outdoors. Many of the attendees in earlier years represented agencies such as the U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, the Appalachian Mountain Club, Nature Conservancy, Ducks Unlimited, the Wilderness Society, state fish and wildlife departments, and others.

For the 1989 brochure cover I began using a painting by watercolor artist Thomas Aquinas Daly. This tradition continued through 2005 when we discontinued printing a brochure. One of my favorite tasks each fall was selecting a painting from a batch of transparencies of recent work Tom would send. It is very pleasing that Tom has agreed to provide the artwork for this book’s cover.

By the third year we had arrived at a structure that struck a good balance between presenting information and providing time for serious writing and feedback. Faculty and participants also spend time enjoying the very special place that is Craftsbury in June. The format has endured to this day with only minor changes.

Annie remained actively involved with the planning and teaching through the 1990 session, after which she bowed out of the picture. This left me, with some trepidation, holding the reins. Shortly after this time, Annie’s writing received a great deal of national and international attention, and she moved away from Vermont. With Annie’s departure, I relied heavily on faculty members who in many cases found me, rather than the other way around, and who were extremely generous with suggestions and ideas.

Beginning in 1989 and continuing through 1995, the Orvis Company provided much-appreciated advertising and scholarship funding. From 1997 through 2006 the Outdoor Writers Association of America provided a scholarship for a member to attend each year. A Vermont-based magazine, Northern Woodlands, provided advertising for several recent years. We gratefully acknowledge the support of these organizations.

1994 marked the beginning of a long relationship with Orion magazine. A member of the magazine’s editorial staff has presented during the workshop each year since then. In 2006, the Orion Society became a cosponsor and assumed much of the responsibility for promotion and faculty recruitment. This relationship has brought a huge increase in the number of applicants, and even during the current unsettled times it feels as though Wildbranch is on solid footing.

I feel incredibly grateful for all the random events that culminated in the publication of this anthology. The last twenty-two years have brought more than 450 participants from all over the world and almost fifty faculty members to Craftsbury and Sterling College. Many of these people have become dear friends, and my life has been immeasurably enriched by my involvement with Wildbranch, a result of that chance meeting with Annie many years ago.

Special thanks to Sterling College’s administration and staff for their unflagging support through thick and thin; to Chip, Steve, Ted, Diana, Gale, Annie, Jennifer, and Joel, who returned on the faculty for many years and shared most generously; and to Susan, Florence, and Glenda for bringing this anthology to life.

DAVE BROWN

PART I

Intimacy

Our sense of community and compassionate intelligence must be extended to all life forms, plants, animals, rocks, rivers, and human beings. This is the story of our past and it will be the story of our future.

—Terry Tempest Williams, from Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert

Des Ta Te: A Love Story

PAUL GRINDROD

We see you, see ourselves and know

That we must take the utmost care

And kindness in all things.

—Joy Harjo, from Eagle Poem

The eagle and I are surrounded. We are in the center of an open pavilion with dancers circling us, moving to the syncopated rhythm of a pair of drums. Many of the dancers wear elaborate plumed headdresses, and all have rattling shell anklets. One step involves the dancers leaping and bowing towards the center where we stand; when they do, the longest of their pheasant tail plumes brush against us.

The eagle fidgets. The lead dancer leans in, without missing a beat, and asks if the bird is nervous. A little, I reply, but I think she’ll be okay. I close my eyes and concentrate for a second on the drums, trying to will myself invisible so that only the eagle is there. I feel her shift on my wrist and open my eyes to check on her, talking to her softly. The dance lasts for several more minutes and then the music ends. The dancers pause to catch their breath. As I take the eagle back to our corner, the group’s leader acknowledges her once more. Back safely to her perch, she promptly hops into her water bowl and starts scooping mouthfuls.

In Mexico, where it originated, this dance would celebrate the golden eagle, the eagle with a snake dangling from its talons that adorns the Mexican flag. But we are at a powwow in Utah with a bald eagle, and the visiting dancers asked if she would join them in the arena for this dance. It is too interesting a cross-cultural, cross-species opportunity to pass up.

The eagle’s name is Des Ta Te, a western Apache word for a feeling of ease, comfort, and contentment in place, what in Spanish is called querencia. The figurative translation of her name is may the sun shine on your face and in your heart in a good way. The sun today is shining in a very good way on the audience, the dancers, on me, and on the eagle.

Des Ta Te is an adult female bald eagle. She was found in the fall of 2000 somewhere in the state of Washington with a severe gunshot wound to the right wing. In order to save her life, the wing was amputated at the wrist joint. It is the natural property of a wing to raise that which is heavy and carry it aloft to the regions where the gods dwell, Plato wrote. Denied her birthright to soar close to heaven by the selfish, cruel actions of a human being, Des hasn’t flown since she was roughly three months old.

I met her when she was already three years old and newly resident at a nature center and avian rehabilitation facility where I took a job. Excited to be working with a bald eagle in the wildlife education program, I told a friend who had done many years of rehabilitation work with birds of prey. Lucky you, she replied, her voice so disdainful and joyless that sarcasm almost dripped through the phone line. She could have been channeling the pre-Revolutionary War American naturalist William Bartram, who described the bald eagle—soon to become the national bird—as an execrable tyrant: he supports his assumed dignity and grandeur by rapine and violence. Likewise, Benjamin Franklin—following the eagle’s enshrinement on the National Seal by act of the Continental Congress in 1782—wrote to his daughter, For my own part I wish the Bald Eagle had not been chosen the Representative of our Country. He is a Bird of bad moral Character. He does not get his Living honestly. My friend’s disdain did not stem from such lofty moral high-ground; captive bald eagles have a reputation for being high-strung and irascible, they bite and grab with their talons, and they are infinitely well equipped to do damage with either the sharply pointed, hooked beak or, far more dangerously, feet that squeeze upwards of one thousand pounds of bone-crushing pressure per square inch. Shortly before I started working with Des, she had a disagreement with her regular handler over some intended minor medical procedure. The eagle drove her talons through the handler’s forearm in the ensuing debate and the two of them weren’t really interacting much when I got