Infinite Peninsula
Welcome to a deeper exploration.
Join me, Chris Rurik, on a journey through the worlds of wild creatures and home places. I am an award-winning writer and self-proclaimed naturalist-spy who is four generations deep on this peninsula of fragmented forests—and fully invested.
In my Substack newsletter you will learn the tools of attention carried by a naturalist-spy. You will come on the adventures of an explorer—tracking bobcats, scaling bluffs, seeking big trees—who believes that the deeper your knowledge of your home landscape, the more powerful your stories.
My terrain is one of brambles, farms, beaches, wetlands, homesteads, clearcuts, rotting fifth wheels, new development. A land of edges, loaded with rich life forms, halfway busted and still beautiful. Sound familiar? What I write could be many places: what is real, now, surrounding us in Cascadia.
How does this work?
My Substack newsletter comes roughly once a month. For more of what to expect, and the inspiration behind the name, see this introductory post.
Your subscription helps me keep going. Thank you. Please consider a paid subscription if you are able. While I am purposefully keeping all my writing free, paid subscriptions help to ensure that I can do this for decades to come.
You can also check out my Table of Contents page for links to many past adventures. To receive my monthly “In the Wild” article for Key Peninsula News (highly recommended) visit this page. I have a long-running Instagram, @chrisrurik, which is dedicated to minutiae in nature.
My hope is that you will not just learn from this newsletter but feel what it is like to be out in the tangled world, shoulder-to-shoulder with our wild neighbors, working to care for our spaces and ourselves and abandon the machine.
That’s my daily life. It’s a practice. It’s pretty great.
You can expect my writing to be filled with science, adventure, history, poetry, policy, rambles. To call these explorations hikes or expeditions would be to confine them to pathways with starts and ends. It would put the focus on me. Catching a scent, I duck through a fence and head for the woods.
A ramble isn’t exactly aimless but it’s freeform and reactionary and never complete, like a good novel. Along this endless bushwhack I’ll carry several ongoing storylines:
There is the dam removal on a neighbor’s land to restore salmon to a forested canyon.
In the neighboring uplands there is The Bald, a clearcut I managed to purchase and am working like a dog to reforest.
Equally tangled is the fantasy-not-fantasy novel I’m writing.
Across the peninsula, through my work for the local newspaper and as a naturalist-at-large, I have built a network of informants and landowners through whom I can enter many corners of the larger landscape.
My newsletter will center on practical know-how about land conservation and reforestation and attention and adventure. I am particularly drawn to those who are laboring against all odds to rewild the peninsula. The forests have been torn to shreds again and again, and long hot summers are making it harder for things to bounce back.
Yet life fills every corner. It waits to be explored.
My life and work takes place on the ancestral homelands of several Coast Salish tribes. I am indebted to their knowledge and land management practices and recognize their displacement as well as their ongoing presence and guidance.
Subscribe to join the ramble
