what, Ulysses

The passenger pigeon tattoo I want was inspired in part by Aldo Leopold’s essay, “On a monument to the pigeon.” I picked it up the other day and read it again.

Whenever I read Aldo Leopold now, I think about this time in South Africa. About a month after I’d arrived, sitting around a music festival with a handful of Capetonians I’d just met in one of the most beautiful places I’d ever seen. A friend of a friend, on hearing I was from Wisconsin, very excitedly told me he’d just read A Sand County Almanac for an environmental studies class, and wanted to know if I knew it. Yes, I said, I love it. I grew up running around in the arboretum he helped create, fifty miles from his little shack, mired in those landscapes he wrote so lovingly of.

He was the first person I’d met in that whole country who I didn’t need to explain ‘Wisconsin’ to (this was before the protests, of course), and it made me suddenly very homesick.

The book itself just feels like home.