The guy who hits the big shot at the end of the game may be seen as a hero, but if he missed seven of nine shots earlier…

If young Bernd was sometimes a reluctant recruit on his father’s collecting expeditions, he came to love the study of nature.

A drowning, a feud between fishing families, a threatened way of life take on cosmic proportion as even the tide threatens “to flood the whole operation.”

Each year, I buy three cords, cut and split, which costs me $675. Even as cold as last winter was, I still have a cord left over, stacked in the basement.

One day we made the trip to Cousins Island and then to Portland, where I got a plastic boat in a department store, maybe W.T. Grant's. When we got back to the house we lived in somewhere on the east side of the island, I realized I had left the little orange boat in a brown paper bag on the ledges at Cousins Island. I knew exactly where it was, lying there in the bag. Maybe I could still find it now.