Jeffrey Dean Stonehill

My childhood was spent in California’s Santa Clara valley. I watched suburban sprawl gobble up the fruit orchards and oak-covered hills where we played when I was a boy. The meadowlarks, frogs, raccoons and bobcats retreated. Wildness and nature gave way to mowed lawns and creeks lined with concrete.

I attended UC Santa Cruz. College gave me a chance to escape the suburbs for the city on a hill, nestled in the beautiful redwood forests above Monterey Bay. I fell in love with the sea and the woods. Yet California's wilderness was under siege and in retreat. The cure, for me, was Alaska. I hitchhiked there in 1972 and spent the next 20 years commercial fishing for salmon. Fishing solo on the Copper River delta in a small boat got me all the wildness I could have dreamed of and sometimes more than I wanted. I learned how insignificant we all are compared to the tides and the winds. Netting thousands of salmon in the summer and hunting in the fall gave me insights into the interrelationship of predators and prey.

Mankind is an apex predator. We have the ability to change the world so it no longer is a supportive place for wild things. I came to understand that we must learn to temper our greed with rational management. The individual counts for little in the balance of predator and prey, which is the fundamental law of the wild. But the predator must only harvest the surplus; not take the ones needed to replenish the stocks. Those future generations need their habitats intact to thrive.

I don’t commercial fish anymore. These days my wife and I stay in touch with nature, tending our orchard, garden and woods on San Juan Island in the Pacific Northwest. My grandchildren keep me tuned to the wonders of the world and motivate me to write my insights, my poems, stories, and memories. And I work to hone my craft in the hope that my writings will interest, inform, and entertain others as well.