Becoming Earth

Introduction by David Gessner

This is the best thing about Face-book,” I wrote on Eva Saulitis’s page last fall, a few months before she died. And it was. I only met Eva twice and only had one substantial conversation with her, at a hotel bar in Homer, Alaska, where, outside the window, whales breached and otters swam by on their backs while eating lunch on the tables of their bellies. I only knew the world outside that window superficially, but Eva knew it deeply. Her studies on the effects of oil on killer whales were groundbreaking, and by recording hundreds of hours of their calls she learned that the whales she studied, in Prince William Sound, essentially spoke their own language. She got to know whales as individuals. Her approach to research married the tough and tender-minded, and so did her approach to cancer. When she found out she was going to die she faced it bravely, but she also faced it publicly.

Eva let us in and I am grateful for it. I knew her only briefly, but I began to follow her. I follow her still. In Eva’s writing, and, yes, on Facebook too, she wove a story that included traveling, losing her hair, exalting in nature, being scared shitless, playing with her nieces, getting sick after chemo, picking flowers. A story of admitting her illness, but taking her pleasures where she could. This was not a happy Facebook of awards and success. It was a darker one, and an honest one, a radiant one, and a deeply sad one.

And a better one, it goes without saying. That was something she taught us in both her essays and her posts: how to tell better and more complicated stories.

We at Ecotone are proud to publish this essay, one of her last.

© Cecil Sanders CC BY 2.0. via Flickr

Why do I need these landscapes? The image of the sea draws me out of myself, forces all my attention to the surface so that I can cast my thought into the depths once again … The roots of my astonishment at the world cling tight to my inner life, in a tangle of memories, experiences, atavisms from both my own childhood and that of our species.

—Anna Kamienska

It’s April again, and I’m still here, and I still have cancer, and “the roots of my astonishment at the world” sink deeper than ever past last fall’s leaf litter into the muck of breakup and resurrection. This year, spring is early in south coastal Alaska. Every morning, I step outside, and the woods around my house are already awake, speaking through the throat clearings of varied thrushes, earliest of songbirds to arrive. On Facebook, people are reporting things like One greater yellowlegs in Beluga Slough. And Today I saw my first sandhill crane. Just one crane is big news, gets a hundred likes.

Last night, my husband Craig and I hiked around the nature trail near our home for the first time since fall, and a north wind blew across the Beluga wetlands, pressed down on the dead wheat-colored grasses, wrinkled the standing water. We were bundled up in scarves and hats. On the viewing platform, we could see ducks on Beluga Lake through binocs. We heard Canada geese fly over. In spring, during migration, over a hundred species of birds visit this place. Trumpeter swans and red-necked grebes nest along the lake. In winter, you can see a hawk owl, or even a gray. Though I know these basic things, I’m not a serious birder. More than anything these days, it’s the sounds I’m after, the voices; it’s mere presence or absence that matters.

This town is filled with serious birders, people who can identify the peeps, the migrating shorebirds of various species that for most of us are indistinguishable little mottled scurriers lifting from the mudflats into sheets-drying-in-wind flights. People from all over flock to the town for an annual...