Bringing It All Back Home

Today is the vernal equinox of my tenth year in North Carolina, a state I never expected to be in. Moving here I gave up the glory of New England falls, the colors and slants of light rarely seen in this humid place. But it turned out I got something unexpected in return: springs that rolled out long and easy from March to June, not like those I had grown up with, northern supernova blasts of green followed by a sudden drop off into summer. I have come to love this season in the South. Already now, in late March, we stand poised on the edge of a great explosion of birds and blooming. Four days ago I saw my first returning osprey, back from South America, and soon the painted buntings will return too, feathery bursts of wild color. I look forward to it, as I do to much else in this place I have come to call—still sometimes grudgingly—home.

This issue of Ecotone, my first as editor in five years, marks a return to our roots. A quick glance at the table of contents reveals not just some familiar names, but two themes that have been with us from the beginning. The first is that of human beings as animals: hungry, sweating, instinctive, lusting creatures who also do their share of caring, thinking, and creating. The second is that of home, the places that these human animals regard as turf and territory.

Fittingly, our very first cover was a collage by the artist Pam Toll which featured an unmoored house floating on the water. Right off we were stating that our relationship with the concept of home was a complex, sometimes uncertain, one. This was in part a reaction to an earlier generation of writers who made home central to their work. I am thinking here of Gary Snyder talking about re-inhabiting the American land, Barry Lopez celebrating home ground, and Wendell Berry going home again to Kentucky. These are writers who have deeply affected the way I, and many others of my generation, write, think and live, but who are of course only part of a larger dialogue about place and home. Ecotone’s goal was to introduce new voices, like that of Jennifer Sinor, who returns to our pages with this issue and whose earlier essay for us, “Through the Particular We Come Home,” spoke of what home meant to that certain type of migratory animal known as the army brat. And voices like Jill Sisson Quinn’s, another returning writer, who in this issue, at the end of a love letter to Lake Michigan, writes: “It doesn’t matter where I was born or where I grew up. I am indigenous to nothing.”

In this spirit, it was important that that first house on our cover wasn’t rooted, that it was floating. Just a week ago I returned from a trip up the coast from the Outer Banks to Boston and back. Along the way I witnessed hundreds of unmoored houses, many splintered and some actually floating in the sea as a result of Hurricane Sandy. This after a summer during which I drove from Carolina to Colorado, out through the crisped, drought-killed cornfields of the Midwest, to discover a whole region in flames. The point is that anyone with eyes and ears must know that we are living in a time of deep danger and uncertainty, and that making a home in this uncertain world has never been harder than it is now.

Or maybe that is overstatement. The homing instinct may be battered, but it can’t be squelched. Our turfs may be smaller, more crowded, and more threatened, but they are still our homes. Maybe it has always been a wild gamble to try and find our places. Maybe, for the furless animals we are, finding a place has always had an element of danger and wild risk. Or, as Rick Bass says of his belief in wilderness in the West in his essay, “The Thinness of Soil”: “But I would stake my life on it. Have...