The Nature Pages from OUTRIDER

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	The Frog Run Words and Wildness in the Vermont Woods by John Elder Milkweed Editions, 2001
	In the Green Mountains of Vermont, author John Elder combines his passion for literature and his affection for the outdoors with his love of family. The essays in this brief book reflect on loss and redemption, deforestation and reclamation, the Bible and the environmental ethic.
	Composed of three essays, followed by a profile and bibliography, this book showcases Elder's nature writing and literary bent. The title of the essay "Aji" comes from a Japanese word meaning "lingering taste," a term used in the game of Go for apparently dead playing pieces that suddenly regain life and influence. He applies the concept to "the surprising reemergence of wilderness from the cutover landscape of Vermont."		"Not only does sugaring help us remember that spring is coming, it also gives us a reason for desiring that it not progress any faster. Once we have awakened to it, we long to dwell in this protracted in-between. This time for standing in the warm, sticky sugarhouse, witnessing the alchemy of air and water into gold."
	In "Starting with the Psalms: A Reader's History," Elder reflects on his literary lineage beginning with the Bible's rich and beautiful 23rd Psalm, which inspired a love of poetry that grew into a broader passion for literature and an abiding interest in nature writing.
	"Sugaring Off," the third essay in the collection, describes the history of New England sugaring as the Yankee farmers learned it from the Abenaki people. Together with his sons, he constructs a sugarhouse in the woods and reflects on the sweetness of life's seasons. "Weeks pass when winter has lost its grip but nothing new has taken its place," he writes. "Watching the temperatures' courtly dance around the freezing line suddenly becomes exciting, however, when maple syrup is the culmination. Amid the half-frozen, half-sodden fields and the late snowstorms, the pulse of sap turns us towards the present's wavering shore."		"The final week of a late sugaring season, when musical excitement fills the nights and there is still untainted sap to boil down, is thus referred to, in a phrase at once celebratory and elegaic, as "the frog run." That phrase captures for me the ludicrous urgency of the peepers' moment -- and the human moment, too. It expresses the fact that we must soon relinquish this harvest we have only recently learned to claim. Focusing all the more intensely on the process as it nears its end, we remember the softening snow that signaled its onset and anticipate the cleanup and battening down of the sugarhouse for another year."
	In the final pages of the book, Scott Slovic contributes a biographical profile of Elder and bibliography of the nature writer's published works.