The Auditor

J. Kelly Nolan is a retired benthic taxonomist living in his fourth quarter on the northern Adirondack dome.

A generational witness to the watershed’s recovery, he walks the land his ancestors were commissioned to flay. Having traded professional distance for the raw reality of the scrawl, he no longer seeks to merely categorize the small and overlooked. Instead, he stands on the turtle's back to observe the palimpsest of the watershed as a whole—witnessing the slow, heavy pulse of a landscape attempting to settle its own accounts.