Avalon 2

•



Repeating yesterday's refrain, naturalist Terry Tempest Williams writes:

“Traveling, for a naturalist, into unfamiliar territory is like turning a kaleidoscope ninety degrees. Suddenly the colors and pieces of glass find a new arrangement. The light shifts, and you enter a new landscape in search of the order you know to be there.”

A stranger in a strange land, a.k.a. a mountaineer on the beach.

The first morning on the Avalon jetty, a fisherman in search of bass kept catching skates instead. He patiently removed the hooks and threw them back into the surf.

Skates are cartilaginous fish with skeletons made of cartilage rather than bone. They are related to sharks and rays, and as you might suspect are not anything like the fish we have in the Smokies.














•

unspoken hunger

•
“As we advance closer and closer, the anticipation of seeing a rhinoceros is like crossing the threshold of a dream. The haze lifts and there they are—two rhinos, male and female, placidly eating grass with prehensile lips…I catch the female’s eye. She does not waver. My vision blurs. Who would kill a rhinoceros? It seems clear that the true aphrodisiac is not found in their horns but in simply knowing they exist.”

- From “An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the field,” by Terry Tempest Williams.

•