Sublime

She would like to believe there will be a place, again, where the streetlights end and wilderness begins. The wolf border. And if this is where it has to begin in England, she thinks, this rich, disqualifying plot, with its private sponsorship and antiquated hierarchy, so be it. The ends justify the means.

It was January and weirdly warm. The whole world was warm. The deep freezes and wide snowfields that my mother remembered from her youth had transformed to winters that now oscillated between unsettlingly temperate damp and bitter cold.

ten degrees Centigrade.” As a result, Lusseyran wrote, “I had to keep the meager heat of an electric bowl only an inch away from my fingers.” This warming bowl—a 1930s-era space heater—in Lusseyran’s freezing bedroom struck me as the blind equivalent of reading by candlelight.)

English economist and writer Barbara Ward, an eminent intellectual and moral leader, whose legacy was rooted in the belief that the environment and development are fundamentally linked. Human beings, she once wrote, had forgotten how to act as good guests on earth and to tread lightly on our planet as other creatures do.

Whether on foot, on showshoes or by sled, into the summer hills and their late freezing shadows—a high blaze, a runner track in the snow would show where I had gone. Let the rest of mankind find me if it could. JOHN HAINES, THE STARS, THE SNOW, THE FIRE: TWENTY-FIVE YEARS IN THE NORTHERN WILDERNESS

The night before Ramona’s funeral is the first really cold one of the autumn. Not the first when the temperature falls below freezing, nor even the first with snow, just the first one that can’t really be described in words, no matter how many years you’ve experienced it: the first one when you’re already accustomed to it, when the cold feels