What are the characteristics of good nature and travel writing?

Read the following pieces and pick out passages that you think are particularly appealing.

Annie Dillard, excerpt from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

When I was six or seven years old, growing up in Pittsburgh, I used to take a precious penny of
my own and hide it for someone else to find. It was a curious compulsion; sadly, I‘ve never been
seized by it since. For some reason I always ―hid‖ the penny along the same stretch of sidewalk
up the street. I would cradle it at the roots of a sycamore, say, or in a hole left by a chipped-off
piece of sidewalk. Then I would take a piece of chalk, and, starting at either end of the block,
draw huge arrows leading up to the penny from both directions. After I learned to write I labeled
the arrows: SURPRISE AHEAD or MONEY THIS WAY. I was greatly excited, during all this
arrow-drawing, at the thought of the first lucky passer-by who would receive in this way,
regardless of merit, a free gift from the universe. But I never lurked about. I would go straight
home and not give the matter another thought, until, some months later, I would be gripped again
by the impulse to hide another penny.
It is still the first week in January, and I‘ve got great plans. I‘ve been thinking about seeing. There
are lots of things to see, unwrapped gifts and free surprises. The world is fairly studded and
strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. But—and this is the point—who gets
excited by a mere penny? If you follow one arrow, if you crouch motionless on a bank to watch a
tremulous ripple thrill on the water and are rewarded by the sight of a muskrat kid paddling from
its den, will you count that sight a chip of copper only, and go your rueful way? It is dire poverty
indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won‘t stoop to pick up a penny. But if
you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your
day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a
lifetime of days. It is that simple. What you see is what you get.
I used to be able to see flying insects in the air. I‘d look ahead and see, not the row of hemlocks
across the road, but the air in front of it. My eyes would focus along that column of air, picking
out flying insects. But I lost interest, I guess, for I dropped the habit. Now I can see birds.
Probably some people can look at the grass at their feet and discover all the crawling creatures. I
would like to know grasses and sedges—and care. Then my least journey into the world would be
a field trip, a series of happy recognitions. Thoreau, in an expansive mood, exulted, ―What a rich
book might be made about buds, including, perhaps, sprouts!‖ It would be nice to think so. I
cherish mental images I have of three perfectly happy people. One collects stones. Another—an
Englishman, say—watches clouds. The third lives on a coast and collects drops of seawater which
he examines microscopically and mounts. But I don‘t see what the specialist sees, and so I cut
myself off, not only from the total picture, but from the various forms of happiness.
Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don‘t affair. A fish flashes, then
dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into
heaven; the brightest oriole fades into leaves. These disappearances stun me into stillness and
concentration; they say of nature that it conceals with a grand nonchalance, and they say of vision
that it is a deliberate gift, the revelation of a dancer who for my eyes only flings away her seven
veils. For nature does reveal as well as conceal: now-you-don‘t-see-it, now-you-do. For a week
last September migrating red-winged blackbirds were feeding heavily down by the creek at the
back of the house. One day I went out to investigate the racket; I walked up to a tree, an Osage

0range, and a hundred birds flew away. They simply materialized out of the tree. I saw a tree,

then a whisk of color, then a tree again. I walked closer and another hundred blackbirds took
flight. Not a branch, not a twig budged: the birds were apparently weightless as well as invisible. Or,
it was as if the leaves of the Osage orange had been freed from a spell in the form of red- winged
blackbirds; they flew from the tree, caught my eye in the sky, and vanished. When I looked again at
the tree the leaves had reassembled as if nothing had happened. Finally I walked directly to the trunk
of the tree and a finally hundred, the real diehards, appeared, spread, and vanished. How could so
many hide in the tree without my seeing them? The Osage orange, unruffled, looked just as it had
looked from the house, when three hundred red-winged blackbirds cried from its crown. I looked
downstream where they flew, and they were gone. Searching, I couldn‘t spot one. I wandered
downstream to force them to play their hand, but they‘d crossed the creek and scattered. One show
to a customer. These appearances catch at my throat; they are the free gifts, the bright coppers at the
roots of trees.
Jim Crumley, excerpt from The Last Wolf

The Painter of Mountains

THE THING about the mountain after the wolves came was that it started to change colour. We
noticed the change the second year, in the spring. All along the level shelf at the foot of the screes
where the deer used to gather in the evening there was a strange haze. We had never seen that haze
before. It was pale green and it floated an inch or two above the ground, a low-lying, pale green mist.
We had only ever seen the red deer there, deer by the hundred, deer browsing the land to a gray-
brown all-but-bareness, all-but-bare and all-but-dead. It is, we thought, what deer do. They gathered
in the places that sheltered them, places that accommodated their safety-in-numbers temperament.
And every morning, once the sun had warmed the mountain, they climbed to higher pastures. They
commuted up and down the mountain. But their days routinely ended browsing the level shelf to the
bone, to the almost-death of the grasses, mosses, lichens, flowers. When there was nothing left to eat
they moved. But as soon as new growth began they returned because they liked the comfort of the
shelf under the screes, and the browsing to almost-death resumed. In the long wolfless decades they
forgot how to behave like deer. Then the wolves came back, and overnight they remembered.
We looked out one evening and there were no deer. None. We scoured the lower slopes, all the ways
we knew the deer came down the mountain in the evening. Nothing.
We saw no deer for weeks without knowing why, until on the stillest of evenings a wolf howled. We
had never heard a wolf howl. Not even the oldest folk in the glen held the memory of wolves, only
the handed down stories that grew out of an old darkness. That howl, when it came, when it sidled
round the mountain edge the way a new-born breeze stirs mist out of stillness, when it stirred things
in us we could not name because we had no words for what we had never felt and never known…that
howl sounded a new beginning for everything in the glen that lived. Everything that lived, breathed,
ran, flapped, flew, flowered – and all of us – were changed from that moment.
And in the spring of the second year after the wolves came, we saw the mountain start to change
colour. Where the deer had been, where they smothered – suffocated – the growth, bit and bit again
the heather-high trees (twenty years old, twenty inches high and going nowhere until at last they
were bitten to death)…in that second spring we saw the evening sun illuminate a green haze, low on
the land. At first we didn‘t understand its meaning, so we climbed from the floor of the glen to the
old deer terrace, and we found its meaning: fresh, sweet, young, vivid, green grass. The wolves, by
keeping the deer constantly on the move, had restored to the mountain a lost meadow. And as the
spring advanced, flowers! Splashes of white and yellow and blue, and the grass ankle deep. And with
every new season after that, the new growth summoned others to the change: butterflies, moths,
berries, berry-and-butterfly-eating birds; then the first new trees.
It has been ten years since the wolves came back. Their howls have become the mountain‘s anthem.
The deer still come back to the old terrace of course, but in much smaller groups, and only for a few
days at a time. Then they vanish, and we know they have moved on to the rhythm demanded of them
by the wolves. The trees are many, and tall, taller than the biggest stag. The oldest memories in the
glen do not remember trees there before.
Now every year at the first hint of spring, we watch the low sun in the evening for the first
illumination of the new green mist.
The wolf that was handed down from the old darkness was a slayer of babies, a robber of graves, and
a despoiler of the battlefield dead. The wolf that howls in our dusk is a painter of mountains.
Marie Winn
This article was published in the Wall Street Journal on 11/26/91 under the headline Flying Rat Trap Finds Home in Central Park

It was a little after 7 a.m. on September 24th that Dorothy Poole first saw the Central Park barn
owl. This was a few years ago. A bird class she was taking under the aegis of the American
Museum of Natural History was making its way through the Ramble, a little wilderness in the
heart of the park, when a bird commotion arose. ―Stop, everyone,‖ said Steve Quinn, the group‘s
leader. ―Those bluejays are mobbing something. It might be a hawk or owl.‖ A moment later Ms.
Poole, a market-researcher and a passionate birdwatcher, spotted the Barn Owl sitting in plain
sight on a horizontal branch of a Sweetgum tree. It was asleep.
Escorting Ms. Poole‘s group that morning was police Officer Daniel Delia of the Central Park
precinct. Though he was there in the line of duty (the Ramble is not always a safe place), he too
was excited about the owl. Indeed, Officer Delia was the first to find an owl pellet at the base of
the Sweetgum tree.
An owl pellet is not an appetizing concept. Owls eat their prey whole. Then they regurgitate the
stuff they cannot digest – fur, bones, claws, teeth and the like – in the form of a cylindrical mass
called a pellet. Officer Delia‘s find contained a recognizable rat skull and some fur and bones.
A few days later the owl moved to a nearby Paulownia tree. There it sat day after day for almost
two months, always on the same branch some thirty feet off the ground. ―Roost fidelity,‖ the bird
books call such behavior. It means that the bird has found a favorable hunting spot.
The Barn Owl, Tyto alba, is easily distinguished from all other owls by its heart-shaped white or
golden facial mask, which gives it a rather simian aspect. This has led to one of its vernacular
names, the monkey-faced owl. It has ―a slightly creepy expression,‖ according to ―The
Birdwatcher‘s Companion,‖ an encyclopedic handbook. Nevertheless it is considered a beautiful
bird. It is also an exceptionally useful bird: In a life span of about ten years, a single barn owl can
consume something like 11,000 rodents, according to Paul Johnsgard, the author of ―North
American Owls.‖
Indeed, the Barn Owl‘s entire evolutionary history has designed it for catching rodents – a flying
rat-trap, someone once called it. Its eyesight and hearing are particularly adapted for hunting
small prey in the dark. Its wing design enables it to hover for over a minute without stalling as
it homes in on its prey. And thanks to a special layer of soft, velvety feathers, the barn owl‘s
flight, like that of most other owls, is completely silent. This is bad news for the hapless rodent
in its path.
The word ―owl,‖ by the way, is onomatopoeic in origin and descends from the same root as
ululate, which means to howl. Most owls do howl, in some form or other. Some give off the
traditional ―whoo, whoo‖ that owls are known for. The barn owl‘s howl, however, is closer to a
bone-chilling shriek, according to Julio de la Torre, author of ―Owls: Their Life and Behavior.‖
The Central Park Barn Owl soon became something of a celebrity. Barn Owls, after all, are rare
visitors to the park. Day after day small crowds could be seen congregating in the clearing
where the owl was roosting, and when passers-by observed them looking up into a tree they‘d
look up in turn, and suddenly exclaim ―I see it! My God! It‘s really an owl!‖
Joseph DiCostanzo, a research and field biologist at the natural history museum saw the owl
during a lunch break and called his friend Sandy Faison, a vice president at J.P. Morgan
securities. A few days later the banker followed DiCostanzo‘s directions and found the owl roost
just a few minutes after I had arrived for my daily owl fix. ―I‘ve been looking for a barn owl for
fourteen years,‖ he told me with considerable feeling as he stood before the Paulownia tree and
gazed at the sleeping raptor.
Because the owl sat and slept quietly on its preferred roost for most of the day, some people
contended that it was a fake, a cardboard decoy. But on one occasion a birdwatcher made mouse-
like squeaking noises and suddenly the owl opened its dark eyes. It looked from side to side,
swaying weirdly. Then it went back to sleep.
During the Barn Owl‘s stay in Central Park no one ever heard it utter a sound. Not a long,
drawn-out scream nor a loud raspy hiss – sss-ksch, nor even the chuckling note which is like a
snore – as its various utterances are described in the Audubon Society Encyclopedia of North
American Birds. Nor did anyone ever see it glide silently from its perch after dark to go a-
hunting. No one ever saw it raise its long wings and plummet down to grasp a doomed rat in its
talons. No one saw it return to its branch on the Paulownia tree and swallow its prey whole,
head first, tail disappearing last. But serious victims of owl fever – and I was one -- found
ourselves imagining such events at odd moments of the day and especially at nightfall. That was
the best we could do, for no one with any sense would enter the lawless Ramble at night, not
even the growing coterie of visitors captivated by the owl‘s beauty and mystery.
Yet love is inevitably accompanied by anxiety. Nearby signs proclaiming ―Caution: Rat Poison,‖
caused many an owl idolater to feat that the great winged ratter might eat a tainted rodent and
die. Not to worry, said Mark Matsil of the Parks Department. Precisely to protect owl and hawk
visitors to the park, the department had recently switched from a decoagulant type of rat poison
to a substance called Quintox which claims it is not toxic to birds.
By the second week of November the Paulownia, a deciduous tree, was almost bare. Most of its
heart-shaped leaves lay on the ground and only scattered clusters of its pecan-shaped fruit
remained. I knew perfectly well that the owl could not stay there much longer – it had lost its
cover. Yet when I arrived one day for my daily visit and found the owl missing, I couldn‘t accept
the idea that it had gone for good. I continued to check the clearing day after day, hoping against
hope that the bird would return.
On November 16, a Saturday, I had gone to look for the owl one last time. As I was leaving I ran
into a man with binoculars, a badge of the bird fraternity.
―You haven‘t seen the owl?‖ I asked without much hope.
―Oh yes, I just found its new tree, he answered. He exclaimed his success in this way: ―I asked
myself ‗If I were an owl where would I go?‘ Then I looked for the most foliated tree I could find
in the vicinity of its old roost.‖
The man turned out to be Curtis Burger, a professor at the Columbia Law School, and a
birdwatcher with more than 600 North American birds on his life list. This however was his first
barn owl. He led me to a large Norway Maple not far from the owl‘s original roost. And there,
sitting on a high branch, was my barn owl! Framed with dark green foliage, it was beautifully
visible. The sun glistened on its spotted golden breast and I must admit that my heart actually
jumped for joy at the sight
Charlotte Hobson: Black Earth City

Charlotte Hobson was born in Witshire in 1970. She spent much of the 1990s living in
Russia. Black Earth City, her first book, is an account of a year spent in Voronezh in 1991.

The human overpopulation was equally intense. There were at least three and often closer to six
people to each room, in which the occupants slept, worked, had parties, ate, drank, sulked, wrote
letters, cooked, smoked and hung out their washing. In Room 179, which Emily and I shared
with Ira, a kind, velvety-eyed girl from a town in the Voronezh region, our belongings were
thrust under the beds and into two thin, coffin-shaped cupboards by the door. The fridge
chugged like an idling truck. The Voronezh-made television, which Ira turned on as soon as she
woke up, crackled and buzzed. The brand-new orange wallpaper peeled gently away from the
walls and the rug we bought from the Univermag gave off puffs of red and purple powder at
every tread.

Less than a week had passed since I'd stepped off the train with our group of 30 British students
into the pale sunshine of a Voronezh morning. The clock had struck nine as we looked around us
at the yellow station dozing in the dust.

"On time exactly," the Komendant, head of the hostel, had smiled, as our luggage was loaded on
to a cart. "Our railway system has not yet adjusted to our new political situation."

We followed him over the tram tracks, up the street, and into a yard in which stray dogs were
picking over a pile of smouldering rubbish. In front of us stood a squat, flat-fronted block: Hostel
No 4. The entrance hall was underwater green; against one wall sat a babushka whose metal
teeth glinted in the half-light. Heaps of rubble lay in the corners. On the fourth floor, halfway
down the corridor, Emily and I were shown into a long, low room, empty but for three iron bed-
frames. The stink of the rust-coloured paint that had been splashed over the ceiling and the
grimy lino floor rose up to meet us, along with a stale, sweaty smell. There was a pause.

"I'm sure we can improve it," I ventured.

Emily did not reply. At last I glanced at her. She was laughing: her silent, hysterical laugh that
possessed her so completely, there was no breath left even to wheeze. I could see what she meant.
A few days later, however, term began and the place was transformed. Ira arrived and our room
filled up. Out in the bottle-green corridor, a crowd appeared, chatting, cooking, scrounging
cigarettes, offering KGB telephones or medals or icons for sale. At any time, half of them were
drunk and the other half had a hangover. Occasionally there were scuffles; sometimes the
Komendant walked past in a lordly way and was bombarded with requests.
 It was a cosmopolitan place, housing more than 20 nationalities. The majority still were Russian,
yet on our floor alone were Syrians, Egyptians and Armenians as well as British, and one Italian,
sent half-crazy by Russian food. Downstairs were Angolans, Nigerians, East Germans; New
Yorkers visited from other hostels, and Venezuelans, studying forestry, Georgians, Uzbeks and
Cossacks. A bubble of languages rose through the smoke and pungent smells of 10 dinners
cooking in one kitchen; 20 stereos roared out different tastes in music. If it were not for the
determined ugliness of the place, we might have been in an Anatolian bazaar. There was no
doubt that it had a certain filthy charm.

Patrick Richardson, Reports from Beyond

Peru: The Amazon River

The first day I was in Leticia, a village on the Amazon on the border of Peru and Brazil, I sat
dreamily on a quay by the huge river and watched life pass by.

The riverboat Ariadna Quinta, Río Ucayali, Peru

Even although it was 3,000 kilometres from its mouth, the river was two kilometres wide, and
dwarfed the river-steamers, barges and freighters lining the banks. Behind corrugated-iron roofs,
thick green jungle came down to the muddy water. A long narrow canoe with a thatched canopy
glided in and two men unloaded oil drums. An old woman stared idly at a giant tree trunk floating
lazily downstream.
I walked over the ramp to the Amazonas bar, which squatted comfortably on stilts above the water.
A crowd sat playing cards and drinking beer. A shifty-looking man behind the bar who was chopping
papaya with a machete looked up and wiped the blade on a dirty towel.

‗What‘s yours?‘ he asked. ‗Coke, dope or a drink?‘

It wasn‘t the only clue I was in Colombia; the red-, blue-and-yellow striped national flag hung limply
from the mast of a paddle-steamer rising and falling gently in the swell. Sweating workmen stripped
to the waist and with cloths wrapped round their heads rolled barrels down the gangplank of the
boat.

‗Fruit juice is fine,‘ I said.

Cerro de Pasco, Peru

I stayed until dusk, and the sun settled into clouds stretched like elastic over the flat horizon. An
aged steamer, its black hulk silhouetted against the sunset, sidled up to the quay, with a green light
on its mast tingeing the tranquil water. A frog belched like a bleary drunk and swallows darted
through the village in a hollow in the jungle behind. In the bar, cigarette tips glowed through the
darkness and candles flickered, attracting myriads of crazily dancing moths and insects until a
generator hummed and a bulb flared in the darkness.

It was still so hot the heat hit you like a punch in the face. In the end, people drifted home and only a
boy was left. He leaned outside and lowered a tin can into the black water before he poured the
contents over his glistening body and threw the rest back into the river. It shattered the reflection of
moored paddle-steamers into a thousand fragments. A few traces of blue still remained in the sky and
I could see the darkened shape of a canoe setting out across the river.
Overheard in a Berlin nightclub: readers' travel writing competition 2012

On a city break in Berlin, Harry Strawson, winner of our short break category, goes clubbing and
overhears a conversation that warms his heart

There is a bar called Roses in Berlin. The walls are lined in bright pink fur, greyed by the smoke of
100,000 cigarettes. The place is a solid mass of all sorts of bodies belonging to all kinds of people.
Short-haired Turkish men grin and smoke as thin transvestites fight for space to dance back to back
with black guys with thick dreadlocks. It has reached that point in an evening where something
clicks and a party seems to become an organism in itself. Only it's not the evening anymore, it's 8am
on a Sunday and there are no signs of things slowing down.

I'm sitting at a table decorated with a picture of Amy Winehouse and overhear a story being told by
a girl on my left. She is talking about "Daddy"; it's a moment before I realise that she's talking about
the keeper of a local spätkauf (late-night kiosk) and not her father. I listen as she describes Daddy. He
is a strong-featured, elderly Turkish man who moved to Berlin in the 1950s and who has "too big a
heart".

A long handwritten list runs across his shop counter of all the things he's given to local down-and-
outs on credit over the years. His kind heart doesn't let him refuse them, the girl says. They in turn
have given him his affectionate nickname. He is so devoted to the customers who rely on him that he
has never taken a vacation. He has never gone back to Turkey.

The girl's story ends, and her friends tell other stories about good-natured characters they have
encountered around the city.

I leave Roses in the grey-blue morning, warmed by the stories. I walk past the 24-hour florist on
Oranienstrasse, under the sweeping apartment complex of Kottbusser Tor and take a yellow U-Bahn
train.

The U1 floats me across the city on its raised track, past remaining stretches of the Wall and the
bomb-damaged spire of Kaiser Wilhelm church. These moving mementos of Berlin's difficult past
seem strangely indifferent after a night at Roses and Daddy's story.

The city has bloomed from the wreckage left by the Nazis and the Stasi, and nowhere is this clearer
to me than at Roses, where the fiery ashen walls reflect Berlin today: a phoenix rising from the ashes.
BEHIND THE SHADE: BERLIN‘S SECRET CINEMA
By Mary Katharine Tramontana

When my roommate told me that there’s a secret cinema in our neighborhood which you have to
crawl through a window to enter, my heart swooned.

A regular movie theater is romantic enough. The collective ceremony of sitting in the hushed darkness as
we exchange our day‘s drama for someone else‘s. Journeying to an exotic place for a couple of hours,
visiting, perhaps, the desert at dawn, 1920‘s Paris, or a parallel universe. Time traveling the past, the
future, or to a new present for a momentary break from our existential crises.
More than a respite, the movie theater has always been a sacred, magical place for me. As a child it was
the only entertainment available in our small town aside from the adjacent bowling alley, Monday‘s
Blues, and yet it was always an exciting event. My father would stop off at Hook‘s drugstore on the way
and my brother, sister, and I would carefully select one candy item each to smuggle into the theater.
Later, it became the site of momentous rites of passage: holding hands, French kissing, and other new
thrills. In my early twenties, I remember sharing a smuggled beer with a boy I loved in the balcony of a
recreated 1930‘s movie palace, while a golden curtain opened to reveal a massive screen onto which a 70
mm film was projected.

Last Tuesday, I waited outside the window of the former squat which houses the secret Kino along with a
few others. Around 9pm there was a THRROOOOOOM-THROOOM of the window shade being rolled
up, the window opened, and we started to climb inside.

I chatted in my hideous German with the good spirited, older man standing behind the counter who
resembled an aged DJ with his bright pink and black printed shirt, a black hat, a hooded jacket, and worn
face, before handing him 3 Euros. He gave me a beer and consent to walk back through to the cinema.

Behind a thick, velvety curtain, the 35 or so seat theater was packed and the pungent smell of cheap
tobacco filled the air. The film was one in a series of documentations shown this month on gentrification.
After the movie, I returned to the front lounge and sat for a bit while Massive Attack‘s Splitting the
Atom played from the speakers.

Cult, classic and camp

Inside the secret cinema

I asked the other man running the cinema that evening, a man with handsome eyes and shoulder-length
hair in a leopard-print vest and black leather pants, what the deal is with the Star Trek (every Monday is
Star Trek night, there‘s a Star Trek pinball machine, a poster in the theater, and some homemade U.S.S.
enterprise regalia hanging behind the ticket counter). He told me that the Star Trek night finances the
theater. I was later told by someone else that many years ago, when the cinema first started, you could
buy a pre-rolled joint for about 5 Deutschmarks before the Star Trek screenings, and then boldly go
where people who know where to go have gone before!

Aside from Monday‘s, the cinema‘s program is an impressive mixture of cult, classic, camp, and various
other genres, often in original language with subtitles. ―The diversity of the film program is not possible
in a regular theater,‖ the tall bespeckled man behind the ticket counter explained to me when I returned
on Saturday night. Jim Jarmush, Mike Nichols, Yasujirō Ozu, and Malik Bendjelloul are a few filmmakers
featured this month.

Warm and fuzzy feeling

That Saturday the Kino had a warm and fuzzy feeling, like being let into someone else‘s living room. A
friendly girl with long dark hair gave me a cup of hot borscht as we sat around the candle-lit lounge
before the movie (American Hustle) started. A woman sitting beside me was shocked that she had lived in
the neighborhood for 14 years and that night was the first time she‘d learned of it.

On the walk back to my apartment, the last time I crawled back out of the window and left the cinema, I
started to wonder about all the other secrets the city has yet to be discovered. I looked out in the lamp lit
street, beneath the full moon, inspecting the ordinary-seeming windows for signs of something more. I
thought about how magical it was the night I took my favourite person to the covert cinema, telling him
nothing about it before hand and that feeling I had when he took my hand in the dark theater and
whisper-screamed into my ear, ―This is AMAZING! Thank you, babe.‖ And my heart swooned.

Monday, December 8, marks the 24-year anniversary of the clandestine cinema.

Open every day from 9pm. 2€.

Go out and find it, but don’t tell anyone!