2024 · 3,400 words
The Quiet Hour Before the Market Opens
On the dark courtesy of an auction shed at four in the morning, where the ice arrives before the fish, and where two men have been arguing about the same bonito for a decade. I went expecting a piece on commerce. I came away with a piece on attention.
"The lamps over the sorting tables throw a light that is neither kind nor unkind. It is the light of a place where decisions are made quickly by people who have known each other a long time."
2024 · 2,100 words
What the Nets Remember
A week in a mending shed on a small cove. The vocabulary of knots in three coastal dialects, the weight of a wooden needle against a plastic one, and the question of whether a net, after enough repairs, becomes something other than what it began as.
"The old man held the net up to the door so the light came through it, and he read it the way a doctor reads an old X-ray — with sympathy, and without surprise."
2023 · 4,800 words
Olive Trees That Lean Toward the Sea
A walking piece, inland from a small harbor, through a grove that a single family has kept for five generations. On inheritance, on the strange botany of trees that have grown up in steady wind, and on the question of what a place owes to the people who keep returning to it.
2023 · 1,700 words
On Fog, and the Courtesy of Engines
The unwritten rules by which small boats move through a crowded channel when the visibility collapses. How captains signal without speaking. What the newer boats lose by being too quiet. A short essay, written in a single afternoon, after a passage I will not soon forget.
2022 · 2,600 words
The Man Who Counted Gulls
For forty-one years, a retired schoolteacher walked the same stretch of breakwater each morning and wrote down the number of gulls he could see. I spent three days with him in his last summer. This is not, in the end, a piece about birds.
2021 · 3,000 words
A Shelf for the Slow Winter
Seven books I keep within reach when the boats come in early and the shed doors stay shut. A fisheries report from the 1930s, a pocket book of Black Sea weather lore, a novel about a ferry pilot, and four others — with notes on why each has earned its place.