Why Geese Don’t Winter in Paradise
John Price
“Where do the snow geese winter?” my student asked. We were standing on the edge of the lake, watching a few of the white birds move on the black water, small, brilliant clouds against a receding storm.
“Oh,” I said, startled from the sleep of other thoughts, “somewhere in the tropics, I believe. South America.”
This was wrong, and another student shyly corrected me, repeating what I had told them in class, that these geese migrate from the western coast of Hudson Bay to the Gulf Coast of Texas. That’s where they spend the winter, in Texas. I quickly agreed with her and feeling the blood burn in my cheeks, stepped back from the shore.
I was embarrassed, but not for the reasons one might think. These were graduate students in my environmental literature course; I had brought them to western Iowa’s DeSoto National Wildlife Refuge, near the town where I live, to witness one of the truly remarkable migratory events in the region: the fall stopover of snow geese along the Missouri River. The few birds we had seen were beautiful, but disappointing—I had told them to expect flocks numbering in the thousands, which is common that time of year. I had told them other things about the species as well, its coloration patterns, its mating and nesting habits, and yes, its migratory routes. I had done my research. Yet, when asked a simple question about the birds, I had without pause given an inaccurate, seemingly random response.
This factual inaccuracy is why I should have been embarrassed. Instead, it was due to being caught inside an intensely personal moment. When the student asked his question, I had been remembering the last time I’d seen geese, a few weeks prior, just minutes after my grandfather had died. I had been thinking of my grandfather and the geese, together. I had been floating inside that surprising connection, confronted—as I sometimes am in nature, despite the facts—with forgotten desires, with questions asked and almost answered, with promises, as yet unfulfilled, of some kind of resolution. I had, in short, been caught inside a dream.
Here’s how it went: My mother calls me on a Saturday morning in October to say that my grandfather, her father, is dying, and that he will probably not live out the afternoon. She asks if we want to join them at the nursing home. At first, I hesitate—he’s unconscious and even if he weren’t, he’s had trouble recognizing me lately. Then I feel the empty space his death will carve inside my life, my body, and I have to be near him. Steph and I rush to the car and make the trip from Council Bluffs to Fort Dodge in a couple hours. We’re not too late; he’s still alive. Most of his family is gathered around the bed: Grandma Kathryn (his wife of over sixty years), my parents, my sisters Carrie Anne, Susan and Allyson. Behind us, slumped in her wheelchair, is Grandpa’s elder sister, Esther. Her hands are folded over her waist, covering the chickadee print on her oversized pink sweatshirt. She and Grandpa have been roommates at the home for several years, but recently, they’ve had trouble getting along. Esther has complained about his hallucinations—they’re crazy, she says, though she herself has begun to tell crazy stories. In this moment, however, Esther is an afterthought; Grandpa, his dying, is at the center of our concern. His eyes are partially open, crescents of white; his breath shallow, irregular. I hear the death rattle. Someone says that it’s a blessing, that he wouldn’t want to live this way anymore. We take turns holding his hand, the good hand, the one that keeps reaching out into space, grasping. Someone says he needs us.
We have been with him for four hours straight when my father suggests we leave to get dinner. We will be quick, nothing will change, nothing has changed. We wheel Esther up to the side of Grandpa’s bed—she doesn’t seem to understand what’s happening—place his flailing hand in hers and leave. At the restaurant, not twenty minutes later, we get the call that he has died. Grandma Kathryn cries, says she should have stayed with him. Carrie Anne tries to comfort, telling her that when she worked at a nursing home this was how many of the residents passed away, often during the few minutes it took for a loved one to step outside to get a drink of water. It was as if they chose to die that way, on their own terms. That would be just like Grandpa, I tell her. Doesn’t the caption beneath his 1928 yearbook photo read: “Muse not that I thus suddenly proceed; For what I will, I will, and there an end”? Yes, Grandma whimpers as I help her into the car, that’s how he was.
I close her door, and when I turn around, I see them. The geese.
I didn’t think much about them at the time, a half dozen Canadas flying low over the parking lot. Migrating geese are a common sight that time of year. And I certainly made no symbolic connection between them and my grandfather—nature had never been part of the vocabulary of our relationship. With him, there had been no camp-outs, no gardening, no fishing or hunting trips. Beyond the sunny, well-groomed slip of a golf course, he had not seemed to care for the outdoors. This fact, like the geese over the parking lot, had never seemed unusual. Fort Dodge, Iowa, the hometown we shared, was small, industrial, a place that neither contained nor stood witness to what one might call the undeniable poetry of the wild. I’d also considered that as a young man my grandfather might have come to associate nature with the freezing, often brutal labor that the Depression had forced on him: digging ditches, shoveling coal, spreading creosote. That he might have been glad to achieve the cramped, but interior walls of a manager’s office—one of the landscapes that, as a child, I most associated with him. Others included the small white living room where he taught my sisters and me how to shuffle cards, the looming cavern of the gas and electric service garage where he let us blast the truck horns and the cryptic facade of the Masonic Temple where, at Christmas, he passed out toys to children in need. Grandpa’s generosity and kindness and fallibility were, in my memory, mostly played out within these artificial structures of home. I had believed, as a boy, that he was indelibly anchored to them, and because I loved him desperately, to us.
I was surprised and hurt, at eight years old, when he and Grandma moved to Green Valley, Arizona. In retrospect, though, I can see the signs of the migrant spirit. His parents were Swedish immigrants, and as a boy, he liked to hop freight trains to Sioux City or Omaha to caddy at golf tournaments. Later, as a young man, he liked to drive fast, colorful cars along country roads. He liked to dance; he liked to drink, which can be another kind of absence. Grandpa was always restless, I now recall, fidgeting in his seat, soon up to play with us or wrestle. His body itself became a landscape on which we traveled, riding his shoulders, climbing his legs as if they were trees. So, it shouldn’t have been a surprise that after the immigrant parents were dead, the daughter grown, the job finished, he decided to leave Fort Dodge. Especially for Arizona, where it is always warm, where he would be free to walk the golf courses and mountain trails all year, free to dream of another kind of life. Perhaps one spent outdoors.
For a few months after they moved, that’s exactly what he did. Then, in the middle of a patio bridge game—the Sonoran moon was full that evening, my grandmother told me, the quail were singing—there was a numbness in his arm, a darkness, a slumping beneath the table. In the years following the stroke, he would learn to move again, to sit, to walk, but not very far, only the couple blocks to the pool and back. Mostly, he would sit in his chair in the sunroom and watch the television or the evening light as it swooned across the Santa Ritas, even more imprisoned by place than he had been in Fort Dodge. “Imprisoned” was the word I often used—it’s how I assumed I would have felt, if I were him—but as with the snow geese, as with many of the assumptions I make about life beyond me, I was wrong. Grandpa was not imprisoned; he was just beginning to move.
On the deck at the DeSoto visitor center, the students and I passed around a pair of binoculars to look for bald eagles. During my turn, I scanned the tree line and spotted a few white heads flaring like votives against the dun branches. I passed the binoculars to the student next to me and continued searching the skies. I caught the wobbly sliver of a turkey vulture. We are made of dust, the minister had said at my grandfather’s funeral, and to it we return. But what of the air? I thought. More than the earth, the air caresses and enfolds our bodies; it penetrates, migrating through the lungs, becoming rivers of blood, the tributaries of flesh and spirit. The air never truly leaves us, until the end. Yet, when asked, I can barely find the words to describe it: cold and warm, dry and humid, stable and unstable. Sometimes, during the spring storms—the floods, the tornadoes—I’ve heard it called “crazy.” But what I was reminded of in the visitor center is that whatever else it might be called, the air here is also full. Of wind, of cloud, of birds—all of it moving or migrating. Right then, the students and I were concerned with birds, and though there weren’t as many snow geese as we had hoped, there were the bald eagles and the vulture. The eagles were moving from Alaska to Mexico, while the turkey vulture might soar all the way to the tropical heart of South America. Those are the kind of grand distances I liked to imagine when thinking of migration, journeys worthy of recognition, even celebration, such as the one I’d heard about in Hinckley, Ohio, where each spring residents welcome the vultures back from their odyssey. Not quite the swallows of San Juan Capistrano, but remarkable for its singularity, here where the migrations are so prominent and the celebrations of them so rare.
Whether he noticed it or not (and I had always assumed he did not), my grandfather was raised within this full, migratory air. Any wonder that when his body became confined to chairs, his mind took flight? It was a family friend who first noticed. During her visit to Green Valley, she told my grandmother that she had been sitting with him in the living room watching Guiding Light when he picked up the phone, dialed Houston information and asked if there was a listing under his name, Harold T. Anderson. A few minutes later he was on the line with a complete stranger, Harold C. Anderson, asking him if he was sure he owned the house he lived in.
“But Andy was a perfect gentleman,” the friend said. “You’d never have known that he was, well, funny.”
The doctor eventually diagnosed arteriosclerosis, describing how the vessels in my grandfather’s brain were hardening, restricting the flow of blood. He warned that the hallucinations and amnesia would probably get worse. When I first heard this, I felt a rush of panic. I was in college, still in Iowa, and though Grandpa had lived in Arizona for nearly twenty years, though I had grown up without him, I believed he still had a significant role to play in my life. I was, for the first time, awakening to the necessary complexities of commitment—to a possible teaching career in Iowa, to a long-term relationship with Steph, to what seemed an increasingly solidified, unimpressive future. More than anything, I wanted to leave that future behind and set out for the unknown country, the unknown self. I had a feeling that, of all the people in my life, Grandpa might understand this desire to fly, might even grant me the permission, the courage, to embrace it. After all these years, the stories of our lives might entwine. But not if he forgot me.
A short time later, after Steph and I decided to indefinitely postpone marriage, I booked a flight to Arizona. Grandma picked me up at the airport and, during the car ride to Green Valley, told me that the hallucinations had gotten worse. She pleaded with me to corroborate that he had never gone to Texas, never gone anywhere since the stroke. Together, she thought we might be able to bring him back to reality. I nodded and prepared myself to be strong, to find gentle ways to correct him, for Grandma’s sake and my own.
When I arrived, Grandpa was watching television on the sun porch, zipped tight inside his navy blue sweat suit. His face had aged since I last saw it two years ago, a bit more gaunt, but it still possessed a handsome, stubborn intelligence that led me to hope things weren’t as bad as I’d been told. When he saw me, he straightened his back and smiled.
“Sit down,” he said, as Grandma left to cook dinner. “I have something to ask you.” He reached out his good hand and touched my arm. “As you know, Grandma kicked me and you out of the house a couple years ago and into the desert. She told us not to come back until you grew up and I could take care of myself. She was sick of us, and who can blame her, the way we behave. In any case, we decided to hitchhike to Las Vegas, and on our way there this skinny fellow, Jack Anderson, pulled over and said he was from ABC News and was looking for a good story. He’d heard we were going on an adventure and wanted to film us. I told him, ‘Sure, but you better keep up—we’re not slowing down for the likes of you.’”
And so my grandfather and I took off, first to Vegas, where he whipped Muhammed Ali in a street fight and earned us an invitation to join the Olympic boxing team. When Carter boycotted the games, we decided to go to Moscow anyway and returned home laden with gold medals (we’d filled in for the American track team, as well). After the ticker tape parades subsided, we played a few legendary years of football at Johns Hopkins University. Foregoing our pro careers, we moved to Texas to enroll in graduate school at the University of Houston, where I majored in English and Grandpa majored in Acupuncture, studying with the world famous Dr. Chang.
“Now, this is where you come in,” he said. “I need to get back to my house in Houston to get my needles. If I can get my needles, I can heal myself and make some damn money. Have you brought your car?”
“No,” I replied. “I’m sorry.”
“That’s too bad,” he said, and fell silent. We watched television.
The next morning, I overheard Grandma scolding him on the sun porch.
“Andy,” she said, “John was only ten years old when all of this supposedly happened. He couldn’t have gone on some crazy trip to Russia or wherever. Besides, John knows that since your stroke you aren’t able to travel. John knows that, but doesn’t say anything because he doesn’t want to hurt your feelings—can’t you see that? You just have to come back to reality, Andy; we all love you too much.”
I sat in the bedroom, listening to Grandma slam pots in the kitchen sink while Grandpa munched deliberately on his Raisin Bran. I felt guilty for betraying her, for not doing more to anchor Grandpa in place and time, but there was something about his story that had forged its own allegiance. In a week, I would be heading home to Iowa, to the same decisions I’d left behind. I didn’t want to go back. I wanted, in one form or another, to keep moving.
“So where did we go after Houston?” I asked, quietly, when I joined him for breakfast. He grinned.
“She thinks I’m dreaming all of this up,” he said, shaking his spoon at the kitchen, scattering droplets of milk. “She says I don’t know the difference between dream and reality, but I know the difference. I’ll tell you about a dream—just the other night I’m golfing on this beautiful course in Florida. I need to take a leak, so I walk over to the bushes and unzip. I woke up and found myself standing between the beds, pissing all over my meds on the table. Now that, goddamnit, is a dream.”
Inside the visitor center, the students and I studied an aerial photo of DeSoto Bend prior to 1960, when the Corps of Engineers straightened or, as the tour booklet said, “stabilized” the Missouri River channel. The photo reminded me of something my father-in-law, a physicist, once said about fractal geometry, how the most beautiful images occur inside the mathematical border between stability and instability. He showed me some of those images on his computer, brilliant blossoms of color which, though unpredictable, conjured familiar associations: trees, mountains, lightning. In the aerial photo, the unstable Missouri River looked like a fractal image, its boundaries irregular and unclear, but more interesting than the Euclidean line it had become. Back then the natural river, like the air, was migratory, meandering one way then another, blurring the border between states, creating sandbars and shallow wetlands and oxbow lakes. In those borderlands between stability and instability, the beautiful things did indeed occur: the blossoming of wetland flowers and grasses, the gathering of wildlife, the sustenance of innumerable birds.
Some version of that beauty remained inside the visitor center, portrayed in panoramic portraits or displayed within glass enclosures. There was a family of snow geese on a sandy bank, a lonely blue goose, a swan. There was a silver fox, a muskrat, an otter. They were stuffed and immobile, yet they still had the power to evoke, as they were intended to, a sense of concern and responsibility that led straight to the nearby donation box. But when I opened my wallet and discovered I only had a ten, I reconsidered—too much? too little? In the mornings, while munching my own spoonfuls of raisin bran, I had sometimes caught a back page article on the sorry state of the Missouri, on the hundreds of thousands of habitat acres lost since channelization, on the continuing disappearance of its native wildlife. Other articles had informed me that, in the interests of preserving that wildlife, the Corps of Engineers was considering restoring some of the original flow of the river, allowing controlled floods in the spring and lower levels in the summer. If this plan were ever approved, it might be evidence that this dammed, poisoned place continues to dream. Continues to shape and absorb the dreams of others. That’s another kind of power, I thought, and dropped the ten in the box.
One of my last visits to Green Valley, before my grandfather returned to Fort Dodge to die, occurred just after my wedding. Following the ceremony, Steph and I spent a few days in the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho, not far from her home, and then caught a flight to Tucson. It was my idea. On the altar of the church, during the ceremony, we had placed a single red rose in memory of deceased relatives. These included my infant brother and my paternal grandfather, Roy, who had been allowed the dignity to die of a heart attack while I was still in high school, long before he might have lost his mind or our idolization. Grandpa Andy was alive, yet he was less of a presence at my wedding than the dead. I wanted him to be part of the celebration, part of its real memory.
When we arrived, Grandpa was still in his chair in the sunroom, watching television. I introduced Steph. He took her hand and softly kissed it.
“Hello, beautiful,” he said. “Did I ever tell you about the time John wrestled the grizzly bear in Idaho?”
The next morning, Grandma asked if I would mind helping Grandpa with his shower. She said she wanted to show Steph her roses, but I knew that what she really wanted was a break. So I helped him to the bathroom and undressed him as he sat on the toilet. When I removed his shirt, I noticed how the muscles in his left arm had nearly vanished; how the cavities near his shoulders—the shoulders I had once climbed—had eroded, as deep as canyons. They seemed to measure how much we had truly missed of each other, our bodies growing older. When Grandpa began, once again, to talk about our Idaho adventures, I became impatient and a little angry. I hadn’t come all the way to Arizona for this. This time, I had come for something real.
“Grandpa, I was only in the seventh grade,” I interrupted. “There’s no way I could have put a full nelson on a grizzly, let alone snapped its neck. I was a puny kid, anyway—remember?”
“Well, you grew up in a hurry that year.”
“I didn’t grow up that fast.”
In the shower chair, he began the story once again. I tried to interrupt, but he took hold of my wrist and squeezed it surprisingly hard.
“Now, hang on,” he said. “Just listen, for once!”
He explained that, in fact, he had lived two lives. In the first, he had lived in Fort Dodge, Iowa, and worked for the gas company and moved to Arizona and had a stroke. The adventures he was talking about occurred in his second life, his “second chance” as he called it. As he told me this, I washed his rigid, useless left arm, his wilted torso, and concluded that the opportunity for any kind of meaningful connection to this man had vanished a long time ago. Beyond his physical presence, he wasn’t capable of giving me much. I, on the other hand, could at least give him my silent attention.
“You think you were puny, John,” he continued, “but what I keep trying to tell you is you weren’t. You were huge, seven foot umpteen inches. Of course, I was eight foot myself, but believe me, you were something to behold.”
He had told me this before, but now I was beginning to listen in a different way, my hands on his naked body, an intimacy we had never known. Minutes earlier, I had felt his nearly dead weight against my shoulder as I assisted him into the shower. He was a large, heavy man, but I knew from photos that he had been a small boy. I had been small, too, an experience that had cost me a lot of adolescent anguish. Had my grandfather noticed? Is that what his dreams were about? Not just the athletic disappointments of being short (Olympic boxing?), but also my failed desire, early in college, to become a medical doctor (Johns Hopkins?), my drift toward literature (English at Houston?), my fear of commitment (the bear in Idaho?). And, of course, my overwhelming desire to leave home. It wasn’t just me; I recalled others in my family who had visited Grandpa in the desert and returned with crazy, but personal stories: Carrie Anne, who had fought her way through school and a disastrous relationship, was a general in the Army; Susan, the animal lover, owned a farm; Allyson, the youngest, had climbed Kilimanjaro. Mom, his only child, had become thin and healthy and rich thanks to Grandpa’s acupuncture sessions. The truth of these stories, though factually inaccurate, had finally reached me. All along—was it the letters, the phone calls, the terrain of our faces?—he had understood the insides of our desires, had cared, had wanted to help. He had been far away, and yet he had known me. Still knew me.
“You wrote it all down,” he said. “It’s going to be your first book. You’re going to make millions on the movie.”
“I hope so,” I said, rinsing the soap from his body. “And who will play our parts?”
“Ah, hell,” he said. “We’ll play ourselves.”
I wonder if, while growing up in western Iowa, my grandfather ever came to know the Missouri River, its earlier, restless self. He would have crossed over it in those rickety box cars when he was a boy. I wonder if, many years later, he looked at the river from the window of the jet that finally brought him home, from Arizona to Fort Dodge, after he broke his hip and Grandma could no longer care for him. If he did, he would have seen a much different river, the one I was now standing beside, straight and fast and cold. My students and I were walking along the levee, reading how the Corps had built it in 1960 to create DeSoto’s oxbow lake, the lake the geese come to every year. Though the brochure didn’t say so, it was obvious that the new river was no longer an option for the geese—if they landed there, they would be swept away like squawking kids on a water slide. The lake is all they have. “Maybe,” a student thought aloud, “if the Corps does change the flow, there will be more places for the geese and other birds to rest along the river.” Everyone nodded and I tried to imagine that beautiful, immense return, but inevitably, I was drawn back to the river as it is. Unable to move, it digs down into itself, its banks standing sliced and exposed like butcher’s meat. The Missouri has been declared one of the most endangered rivers in the nation, which is another way of saying it is in the act of forgetting itself. This amnesia—that we allow it to happen—is one of the reasons why I am sometimes ashamed to say I live here, why I am still tempted to leave. By moving, the fantasy goes, I might avoid witnessing the destruction of the places I love, the places that created me. I might even find a place where people live a different, more enlightened story on the land. At the very least, I might avoid moments like the one on the levee when, against our silence, the river seemed to amplify the collective judgment: You do not deserve what little wildness you enjoy.
But what other story is possible? No matter where we live, our touch seems to automatically incur shame and forgetfulness, whether it be the natural course of a river or the aging lives of the people we love. That’s what those care facilities are all about, no matter how clean or well run. As soon as Grandpa was wheeled into that room at the Marion Home, he began to truly forget. Within a few years, he had lost all of his first life and most of his second. They were replaced by more immediate, but less inspiring stories about residents hitting him in the head with chairs. For a long time, he hung on to the house in Houston, but eventually even that dissolved, and I did not miss it. His stories had become, for me, less about freedom and more about the pitiful restrictions of his life. But I’d forgotten what I’d supposedly learned while bathing Grandpa in Arizona: to listen carefully to even the most restricted spirit. Even when, during one of my infrequent visits to his room in Fort Dodge, he said, “It’s good to be home,” I did not hear what he was trying to tell me. Instead, I focused on the limited view out his window, the screams of the insane, the pungent odor of disinfectant and urine, the imminence of death. Despite all those years wishing my grandfather had stayed in Iowa, I had, in truth, always imagined him dying in Arizona, his eyes on the mountains, the still lucid desert, his spirit on the move. This was not where his journey—or mine—was supposed to end, in the very place where it had begun. A migration, after all.
“How is it you thought the geese wintered in a tropical paradise?” another student asked as we walked back to the visitor center. She was smiling, teasing—the autumn wind was cold. I shrugged my shoulders:
“You know, ancient Europeans thought geese wintered on the moon—at least I’m closer than they were.”
What I really wanted to say was: “That’s how far I’d go, if I were a bird. If I were a man’s dream.”
’s dying. We gathered around his bed and laid our hands on his body, still warm. Mom picked up his left hand, the bad one, no longer twisted and cramped. For the first time since the stroke, she was able to place her fingers inside his and draw them to her face. “Look at that,” she said to us, crying. “This is my father.”
We were each given a few minutes alone with Grandpa’s body. During my turn, I circled the bed, looking for the rise of his chest, the twitch of his mouth and arms, the thump of his heart through the pajamas, realizing how active even his dying body had been. Inside the stillness, I had the distinct sense, as people often do, that the person I loved was somewhere else. I knelt beside him and prayed that wherever that place was, it was far away from Iowa: Texas, the Sonora—Paradise. Far away, just as I thought he’d always hoped to be.
“Did you hear the geese?”
I turned and saw Esther—she had been there the entire time, unnoticed in her bed at the far end of the room, the covers pulled up to her chin. She was looking at me.
“Pardon?” I said.
“Did you hear the geese?”
I told her I had seen some geese above the restaurant parking lot.
“I heard them,” she said, her voice almost too low to understand. “Harold always used to call me, in the fall, when he saw the first geese flying south. He’d say, ‘Sister, did you see the geese?’ Just yesterday, he said that to me. He saw them out his window.”
Muse not that I thus suddenly proceed. Yet, that’s exactly what I do back at the DeSoto parking lot. My students have already left without seeing the big flocks. I am ready to go myself, but have paused to admire the fiery scallops of the disappearing sun. This is the time of day that my grandfather died, holding hands with his sister. He chose, if there be such a choice, to end with her, in that place, in this season. He had noticed the geese every year; had loved in his own way the cycles of the land. It held, still holds, the restless spirit that defined him. Even the sky—I can already see a few constellations, a few stars. Soon, if the evening is clear, I’ll be able to spot Orion, Taurus, and my favorite, Vega, a blue-white star much bigger than our own. Vega used to be the North Star, and it will be so again in another twelve thousand years. It will guide, once more, the transient and the lost, including this sun, this planet, which is moving toward it. We won’t arrive for hundreds of millions of years, but when I look at Vega through my binoculars, I think I see, among all the stars, a special brilliance. The fire that lights the end of our story.
So, it will be dark soon, but not yet. The brilliance of the day seems, in fact, to be growing, covering the sky with gold. Near the zenith, there is a smudge of shadow. It grows larger, noisier, more irregular. And then they are above me, the snow geese, thousands of them returning from the fields, blotting out the sky just as I have always imagined and hoped they would. I am sorry my students aren’t here to see it—will they believe me when I tell them?—but I am here, and I am happy about that. Happy, despite everything, to be home. Like he was. I wonder if that would surprise him, to know that in my memory he is forever linked with these birds, that they have become for me his life’s articulation. That wherever else we might travel together, he is also here with me, watching the geese return to the Missouri River. I stare into their loud, shimmering depths and lose my bearings—who is moving, who is still? Who is alive, dead? Can anything be truly lost or forgotten? I look for the answers. They fly on, blurring, as they always have, the border between fact and desire. Rivers upon rivers, flowing forever.
Now that—I can almost hear him say—is a dream.
.
John Price was born in Fort Dodge, Iowa, in 1966. He attended the University of Iowa where he received his B.A. in Religion, an M.F.A. in Nonfiction Writing and a Ph.D. in American Literature. He is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and lives in Council Bluffs, Iowa, with his wife, Stephanie, and their two young boys. His personal/nature essays have appeared in Orion, The Christian Science Monitor, North Dakota Quarterly and the anthology Best Spiritual Writing 2000. His first book, Not Just Any Land: A Personal and Literary Journey into the American Grasslands, which will be published by the University of Nebraska Press, is a memoir of Price’s journey, as a writer and Midwesterner, toward a more conscious commitment to the endangered landscapes of home. “Why Geese Don’t Winter in Paradise” is part of a new collection of essays that explores the daily, unexpected interactions among family, spirit, and the environment. His work is marked by poignancy and sense of humor. Isotope considers Price the David Sedaris of nature writing and one of the most important younger nature writers.