Orion

LIKE JUAN PONCE DE LEÓN five hundred years before us, we arrived on the coast of Florida weary with thirst and age. Once named by its European captor for the lush foliage rising from its wet soil, the state now offered us heaps of gray sand, 800,000 cubic yards dredged from the ebb-tidal shoal and piled along St. Augustine Beach. Designed to put back what the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers refers to as “lost sand” in areas where the encroaching tides wear at the shoreline, these ashy mail-order dunes serve as stopgap flood mitigation—a desperate scheme to avoid the discomforts of retreating from the floods—and we walked gingerly up and down them that weekend on our way to visit the Fountain of Youth. Perhaps you were taught in grade…

I FRAMED A FLASH OF CHARTREUSE in my binoculars. Followed the feathers through the blue for a few bright seconds. Then lost sight as wings blended into the feathery fronds of a palm, the flock in raucous chatter as it foraged fruit. When the parrots took flight minutes later, again my gaze alit on green wings; when the birds landed in the next leafy tangle, my gaze flitted away. It drifted farther, toward the horizon. From the ridge where the house was perched, I could see a length of the canal. A ship’s prow emerged from the trees. The hulk of its hull grew slowly more hulking on the water’s smooth surface. It was the third that morning, now an hour after the sun had lifted. The first that had…

THE WAITER SETS DOWN a plain white bowl with a meticulously engineered wall of rice down the middle. On one side, vegetables and meat float on top of a still pool of honey brown curry, which presses against the wall, threatening a deluge. On the other side, emptiness. I pick up my spoon. Slowly, I begin to dig. My attack steadily weakens the wall, grain by grain. Finally, the dam breaks. Curry pours through the rice to the other side. Free at last. Damukare (dam curry)—a dish that encourages the eater to interact with a small replica of a nearby dam—has popped up all over Japan in recent years. The Japan Dam Curry Association has mapped 190 variations served across the country. Hundreds of dams also offer special handheld trading…

WHEN I WAS A BOY GROWING UP on the south shore of Long Island, my father and I would sometimes haul the family’s kayak down to the water and set off for the salt marsh on the far side of the bay. There, in the veining creeks and waterways, we would collect our harvest: golf balls, shanked from a nearby golf course, set like pearls in the mud. With a swipe of our thumb, we’d wipe off the muck and algae to survey our haul, shouting their names—Titleist, Callaway, Srixon—before tossing the balls into a bucket. Occasionally, we’d pause to watch a heron stalk the shallows or listen to cordgrass shimmer in the breeze. Around us, you could see the hem of suburbs, and looking back, it’s hard to imagine…

MICHIGAN. A TANNINY CREEK. Brown water, greenest grasses. Me in a kayak with my son, not yet two years old. A few weeks earlier, someone asked, “What is the audio world you want to live in?” (I work in radio, so maybe that’s a normal question?) Suddenly, I’m thinking I have the answer. Right here, the purrrrling of the paddle in dark water, the steampunk flickering of dragonfly wings. But then I get greedy. I start thinking of other sounds I’d like to curl up in. My only constraint, they must be real—the splendor and psychedelia of what’s actually here: Raindrops falling off a gutter after the rain has stopped. The moans, beneath the crackle, of a fire. The basily sound of dusk. The purrrling of the paddle stops abruptly.…

THE CRACKS HELD MY ATTENTION. Not the weathered French doors that still beckoned to the Pacific. Not the wave-battered wicker chair still airing out from the last storm. The cracks. I couldn’t take my eyes off the cracks that fractured the concrete patio like an ice sheet on the verge of collapse. This blue-shingled home, plopped right on the beach, had once overlooked a Southern California wonderland that shimmered under immaculate skies. Rolling dunes, bursting with saltbush and beach evening primrose, had unfurled for miles along the wide and sandy shore. But the ocean kept moving in, subtly at first, then more forcefully as our planet continued to burn. The dunes washed away and never came back. The beach started to vanish at high tide. After a big swell barreled…