HeyJaredTouching the Elephant
Nature writing, memoir, poetry and prose from a meaning-making marine biologist.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 7
- Latest publication
- Sep 22, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 9, 2026
Latest issues
A Benediction for the Birds (opens the original)
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<img alt="flying birds above herd of animals near trees" class="sizing-normal" height="3851" src="https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1506333438925-a6203045b492?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=M3wzMDAzMzh8MHwxf
The Whales in our Cells (opens the original)
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I grabbed her hand when the whales came. Not my phone, thank God—not that glowing, inanimate attention‑hoarder. It didn’t occur to me to record the moment, to take a photo or a video to post later. It only occurred to me that I needed her little hand in mine—her soft flesh, the heat and realness and urgency of her. And once her palm clasped mine, all I could think was that I needed to run to them, to get to the shore as fast as I could, throwing open the door and pumping my legs next to hers dow
God of the Untamed Beasts (opens the original)
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Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedDear Friends, I am ragged. Tattered and weary. I will not pretend otherwise. But even here, dragging myself in such an undignified and awkward manner from one place to the next, I find a strange intimacy with the dirt. There is so much contact down here. I can feel everything. Each rock is a greeting-- hello, loneliness. How do you do, anxiety? Ah, and here is fear, my trusted old friend. Maybe there is grace in the sharp to
Writing Through the Smoke (opens the original)
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The smoke is a thick blanket here. I could swear it has gotten inside my skull— swirling and gauzy and gray, the embers settling into ash in the folds of my brain like opium, numbing me from all the beauty on the other side of the wool. Even the wasps and bald-faced hornets are more agitated than they normally are, chasing us for sport like ambassadors of a less friendly world, and I find myself running from them as though I am running from myself— my own buzzing discontent raising welts on my s
Magnificent Frigatebird (opens the original)
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Gloucester, MA 2004Jay Frontero was not a man who was easily impressed. Not by people, not by a full, spinning breach right off the bow, not by spectacular bubble feeding events, and certainly not by young, inexperienced interns working on his father’s boat. He had grown up on that boat; he had seen it all. And he’d been through enough rotations of Whale Center interns to know that we were all going to leave soon enough, and good riddance. He rarely spoke to us— the apple didn’t fall far from th
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