The Auditor
J. Kelly Nolan is a retired benthic taxonomist operating in his fourth quarter on the northern Adirondack dome.
He is a generational witness to the watershed’s recovery, walking the same timber tracts his ancestors were commissioned by the Santa Clara Lumber Company to flay. Having traded the laboratory's academic distancing for the raw reality of the scrawl, the microscope has been superseded by the boot and the trained eye. He no longer isolates the small and overlooked in a sorting tray. Instead, he observes the palimpsest of the watershed as an integrated whole, knowing that when the physical habitat registers as bankrupt, the biological account is already in the red. Lived pattern recognition is the absolute authority. This is a tactile audit of a landscape attempting to settle its own accounts.