Edward Zahniser

Ed Zahniser retired as the senior writer and editor with the National Park Service Publications Group in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. He writes and lectures frequently about wilderness, wildlands, and conservation history topics. He is the youngest child of Alice (1918-2014) and Howard Zahniser (1906–1964). Ed’s father was the principal author and chief lobbyist for the National Wilderness Preservation System Act of 1964. Ed edited his father’s Adirondack writings in Where Wilderness Preservation Began: Adirondack Writings of Howard Zahniser, and also edited Daisy Mavis Dalaba Allen’s Ranger Bowback: An Adirondack farmer - a memoir of Hillmount Farms (Bakers Mills).

Poetry: Blackflies, Hence Wisdom

May 14, 2022 by Edward Zahniser 1 Comment

Blackflies, Hence Wisdom

The summer after I got out of the Army
in February 1968, Chris and I, who had
married while I was still serving, lived at
Mateskared from mid-April into October.
This was, even to this day, my worst ever
experience of blackflies. My family’s habit
of August vacations put us in the “between
season,” as the late Earl Allen often said:
“First the snow flies, then the blackflies.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson would have added:
“Blackflies live up to the brag about them.”
[Read more…] about Poetry: Blackflies, Hence Wisdom

Poetry: “Gotcha One Donut!”

February 19, 2022 by Edward Zahniser Leave a Comment

“Gotcha One Donut!”

I was deemed too young for the expedition.
My bro Matt was the leader by seniority. He
had eight years on me but only six on the
two Tommys, one Sennet and one Taylor,
Cub Schaefer, and John Hitchcock who lived
year-round on Edwards Hill Road, halfway
to the hamlet of Bakers Mills from our cabin. [Read more…] about Poetry: “Gotcha One Donut!”

Poetry: Night Crawler Double Trouble

February 5, 2022 by Edward Zahniser 1 Comment

Night Crawler Double Trouble

On a joint Schaefer-Zahniser expedition
into the Adirondack Flowed Lands area,
led by Moms Carolyn and Alice, we boys—
Cub Schaefer, my brother Matt and I—
decided we’d catch lots of trout to feed
our crew. So, we carried-in a big, bailed
construction bucket, with some dirt,
slung on a pole for two of us at a time
to transport night-crawlers, in shifts. [Read more…] about Poetry: Night Crawler Double Trouble

Poetry: The Diet of Worms

January 29, 2022 by Edward Zahniser 1 Comment

The Diet of Worms [Read more…] about Poetry: The Diet of Worms

Ed Zahniser On Wilderness & New York State

January 9, 2022 by Edward Zahniser 3 Comments

New York State’s Forest Preserve lands of the Adirondacks and Catskills are living fossils of the broad 19th-century movement to protect wild forests of the federal public lands in the West as forest reserves and not as national forest sources of fiber, forage, and minerals.

New York State’s Forest Preserve lands therefore are living proof that the wilderness preservation movement is not an upstart 20th-century offshoot of the mainstream American conservation movement. [Read more…] about Ed Zahniser On Wilderness & New York State

Poetry: Milk for Morning Cereal

January 8, 2022 by Edward Zahniser Leave a Comment

Milk for Morning Cereal

Pre-electricity at the cabin, we kept
milk cold in the spring across the road.
Whoever was chosen to fetch it would
baptize their footgear in dew drawn
from the atmosphere by temperature
differentials. But you dared not
contemplate that as you negotiated
fetching the bottle from the spring
lest you — as we long feared — pitch
head-first into the sunken barrel
to drown before you were missed
back in the conviviality of the cabin.
I recall images of myself barrel-
stuck like a Charlie Chaplin figure,
feet pumping the air for non-existent
purchase to anchor pulling oneself
out of fatal harm’s way. Imagine that
as your last thought on this Earth,
Heaven itself chuckling uncontrollably.
To reincarnate would be embarrassing.

Poetry: For an Armistice

December 25, 2021 by Edward Zahniser 1 Comment

For an Armistice

Alone in your pup tent with one evasive mosquito
whose presence ramifies with each new fly-by
sounding like Kawasaki cycles winding out
until this bug looms as large as Gertrude Stein
on steroids at the Expatriate Olympics in Paris.
Your choices now are to get out of your sleeping
bag to find your flashlight, track the ‘skeeter down
then swat it dead or lie awake for an all-nighter
longer than our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Poetry: Red Bathrobe

November 20, 2021 by Edward Zahniser Leave a Comment

Red Bathrobe

Our mother Alice liked to get up early,
brew her coffee, then await its boost
in morning’s solitude on our cabin porch,
wearing PJs and her red terrycloth robe.
Alone with Crane Mountain’s stolid monolith
as she nursed such solitude once,
three humming birds hovered about
this unrelentingly red floral display her robe
supposed. The hummers buzzed her wide awake
as no coffee could — a startlement to embed
its three beaks deep into our cabin lore.

Poetry: Noah Banks on a Voice

November 6, 2021 by Edward Zahniser 1 Comment

Noah Banks on a Voice
…that the nations might tremble at thy presence

As we ourselves seem soon to be set upon
by rising oceans and all manner of aberrant
weathers, why, Frederick Buechner asks,
do we treat the Biblical tale of Noah’s flood
mostly as a children’s story? Is this the sole
place this harsh tale can finds traction now
despite current crises of coastal flooding?
Has formerly unthinkable horror become
just another fantasy domain of young minds?
Might we not better see Noah’s flood tale
as prophetic, in all the richness of that term,
“a tale of God’s terrible despair” of humans,
such that God would destroy us all but one
old man, like an ad-framed tv melodrama?
Noah’s Ark a toy with removable roof now,
so you can let the animals out during dinner.
Noah seemed the fool for the longest time,
even as he trekked toward the lumber yard.

Poetry: Hut Next to Wilderness

October 16, 2021 by Edward Zahniser 1 Comment

Hut Next to Wilderness

Set in China’s ancient T’ang Dynasty,
Gerald Stern’s “Ancient Chinese Egg”
poem says “a hut is a hut be it this or that.”
I have like feelings about our old cabin
in the Adirondack Mountains, which our
father christened “Mateskared” to honor
we four kids by combining first syllables
of our names — Mat, Esther, Karen, and
Edward — a strategy he garnered from
Schaefers’ camp “Cragorehol” that used
first syllables of three nearby mountains.

Having examined our father’s writings
about wilderness, I now wonder if he ever
repented of anthropomorphizing our hut
that now rests just across our dirt access
road from the New York State-designated
Siamese Ponds Wilderness Area. It was
formerly simply park lands that hosted
all our past family, and then later sibling
camping and fishing trips — “Excursions,”
Thoreau might have called them — with
what was, even then, their wild character.