Day 20: "Storm Damage"

Anne Marie Todkill (The Fiddlehead, Autumn 2023)

In this twenty-two-day series, we are counting down the days to publication (October 22, 2024) with a brief passage from each of the twenty-two essays included in The Best American Essays 2024. These excerpts were curated by Best American Essays Editorial Assistant Cheyenne Paterson and are presented in the order of the volume’s table of contents.

“Anxiety in the forest used to hang around me like a compromising odor. I’ve learned to ignore it, or else gear up. I enter the woods in the armor of the citizen scientist, rationalizing the near-wild by means of phone apps, binoculars, a camera. In this way I cast the forest as a fragile character in need of my understanding and diligent surveillance. The forest is a mental construct, precipitated out of a cluster of values—environmentalism, climate-change anxiety, a zeal for species protection—together with a socially phobic disposition. But even this is a proprietary sort of performance. Besides, it’s a geeky and peculiar way to live.”

—Anne Marie Todkill, “Storm Damage,” The Fiddlehead, Autumn 2023.