Going Out

I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.
JOHN MUIR

Second Nature
When I was seventeen in 1959, the lake was as wild a place as I knew. My friend Jeremy Hooker and I would arrive there at around four a.m. in early summer, ditch our bikes in the tangle of rhododendrons, and pick out the narrow path by torchlight as we tiptoed, in existentialist duffel coats, through the brush. Still a long way from the water, we moved like burglars, since we attributed to the carp extraordinary sagacity and guile, along with an extreme aversion to human trespassers on its habitat. Crouched on our knees, speaking in whispers, we assembled our split-cane rods. In the windless dark, the lake’s dim ebony sheen was at once sinister and promising. Somewhere out there, deep down, lay Leviathan, or at least his shy but powerful cyprinid cousin.
Jonathan Raban

Ghost Species
The spectres of the Norfolk Fens
On a cold morning last January, I travelled out to the Norfolk Fens to see a ghost. First, I caught a train twenty miles north from Cambridge to Littleport, a market town on the Cambridge–Norfolk border. At Littleport I was met by a friend called Justin Partyka, and Justin drove me in his little white baker’s van up into the Fens proper.
Robert Macfarlane
http://www.granta.com/Online-Only/Video-Ghost-Species

Encounter
We face south-west towards the Isles of Scilly. To our left is a coastal hill, Carn Gloose. On our right is Cape Cornwall and beyond, exactly a mile offshore, I’m told, is a series of rocky outcrops known as the Brisons. In Priest’s Cove we hop from boulder to boulder towards a series of larger, weed-mottled granite monoliths. They stand closer to the tide edge and offer us a perfect view of the incoming tide.
Mark Cocker

Butterflies on a Wheel
Migrants meet in western Wyoming
B etween 1995 and 2005, because of graduate school, jobs, wanderlust and love, I moved across America sixteen times. Always by car, always in spring or fall. The drive I made most often was a 2,000-mile stretch between Idaho and Ohio, in either direction, sometimes alone, sometimes with my dog, once with a goldfish named Fran riding shotgun in a one-gallon water jug. Eastward, westward, I travelled the great unspooling latticework of American interstates – sun-baked juniper flats of southern Idaho, incandescent canyons of Utah, rambling prairies of Nebraska, the deep, heavy damp of Iowa in August.
Anthony Doerr
Granta 102 Essays