Louise Young's Blog
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May.12.2013
Each is the size of a finger, as slippery as a spark of moonlight on roiled water or an individual note of a Miles Davis riff. There's no moon tonight but the silvery mass of them turns starlight into an effervescent wash like tropical bioluminescence on the beach. The smelt are...
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Oct.30.2012
While the media bombards with rending images, mind-numbing statistics, and dire predictions of a storm a thousand miles away, my world is defined by an inescapable dichotomy: yesterday my dog Trooper was alive, today he is not. The reality of loss hits hardest in the naked night: once...
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Oct.11.2012
A few days ago, I was corralled into one of those pretentious conversations about The Meaning of Life. I listened -- or pretended to listen -- until my obvious silence prompted someone to press me for my opinion. I gave my standard answer -- that all life is part of an ecological...
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Oct.06.2012
I've only reviewed a handful of books in my life, and my reviews -- invariably positive -- are written mostly as favors for friends. One book, however, inspired me to post a scathing, one- star review on Amazon. The offending volume is a reprint of an early twentieth century...
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Jun.29.2012
I wrote this blog a year ago about a good place, and yesterday my dog Otter and I revisited that place.
The story is perhaps apocryphal: our neighbor Bill approached John Watson, who at one time owed this entire mountain meadow and had been parceling it out twenty or forty acres at a time...
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Jun.20.2012
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The dying spring bowed out this year in a sunset the likes of which I have never witnessed. At dusk, the simmering atmospheric energy erupted into rain squalls throughout the Shields River valley at the base of the Crazy Woman Mountains, though in the west the sky remained clear....
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Jun.18.2012
About a month ago, my old Labrador retriever Otter began to fade. Her lifelong companion Trooper was the first to notice, and his concern over Otter's health gave rise to an odd suppertime ritual. Most dogs are convinced that any food -- that of humans, other dogs, or ...
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Jun.10.2012
When my late-evening flight from the US landed at La Aurora Airport in Guatemala City, taxis and shuttle buses congregated outside of the airport's exit, jockeying for position, all vying for the privilege to take me not into the city but away from it, an hour or so east to the former...
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Jun.04.2012
The driveway snakes north around the swamp, the Amnicon River muttering sullenly on the other side of the flooded ash and cottonwood trees. The river has restrained itself now, confined to its bed but still powerful a week after the rampage that tore hundred year old trees out by their...
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May.23.2012
Yesterday evening a front muscled down from the north, plunging temperatures twenty degrees in less than five minutes. An atmospheric battle raged overnight as the north wind frothed swells on big lake into whitecaps while stubborn southern clouds spat rain and hail. This...
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May.16.2012
The progress of spring is often easier to trace by sound than by sight. Beginning with the bump and grind as ice breaks up on the river, the season segues through the drip of snowmelt, the first clacking wood frogs, the species by species arrival of north bound birds, wind ruffling...
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May.10.2012
The deer trail cuts through the grasses, sedges, and sapling birches that have sprouted up along what used to be the shallow shore of Lost Lake: during the ten year drought, the receding waters have left a sandy margin around the circumference of the lake. Cycles of drought and...
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May.02.2012
On Lake Superior's shores, spring progresses in cautious, graded increments, always with an eye on the northern sky. While Chicago was basking in sunshine, wind-blown snow blanketed the northland a week ago, and the week before that. White throated sparrows returned to our area...
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Apr.24.2012
Yesterday at dawn, a pair of trumpeter swans glided along the mirror-still, tea-colored water at the mouth of the Amnicon River. The atmosphere was chill, soft-edged with a mist that blurred the definition of earth, water, and sky. The new sun cast no shadows: in the weak light...
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Apr.18.2012
Sometime Saturday night, guided by starlight and the phosphorescence of the surf on Lake Superior, a beaver swam across nearly ninety yards of roiled water and swift spring current at the mouth of the Amnicon River. The animal hauled his bulky body, thick fur slicked back and shiny...
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About Louise
My mother published a novel when I was six. Before that, we had been your typical suburban family: father working, mother staying home and taking care of the eight children (did I mention that we were Catholic?) but once the media got a hold...
Connections
Causes Louise Young Supports
articulation of indigenous rights (organization: Cultural Survival)
sustainable, renewable, and independent energy sources
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Louise’s Favorite Books
THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES by Roberto Bolano, THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS by David Abrams, ANIL'S GHOSTS (or is it maybe IN THE SKIN OF A LION?) by Michael Ondaatji,...