The Trades
The Medievalist Who Drives 612 Miles a Week
An adjunct professor of medieval history teaches at three colleges across Massachusetts and one online, with a 2014 Subaru and a thermos of coffee.
Nature editor
Otis Kane
Otis Kane has been writing about coastlines, forests, and the species that live in both for two decades. Common Hours is his fourth masthead.
Beats
Published in Common Hours
Places
Breakfast at the Bombay Stock Exchange Canteen
On the second floor of the Phiroze Jeejeebhoy Towers, the Modi family has served the same idlis to the same traders since 1957. The market has changed. The breakfast has not.
Stories
Thirty Years of the Same Five Miles
Since 1996, Wendell Cobb has walked the same stretch of Oregon coastline at dawn. He keeps a list of what he has found.
Nature
The Pine Martens Come Back to Kielder
A seven-year study in the conifer plantations of Northumberland and Cumbria has documented the slow, secretive recolonisation of northern England by a predator most people had given up for lost.
Time
The Lawyer Who Bought a Forest: Owen Morgan Edwards and Cwm Elan, 1894
In the autumn of 1894, a Welsh solicitor with a borrowed checkbook stopped the sale of 280,000 acres of upland forest to a Liverpool timber syndicate. He died in 1920 without seeing what he had preserved become a national park.
Places
The Hammers of Medzev
In a small town in southern Slovakia, a guild of blacksmiths that traces its founding to 1376 still meets on Wednesday evenings. There are eleven members.
Letters
The Two Gaelic Verbs Still Spoken in Strontian
In a small village on the western Scottish coast, two verbs of Scots Gaelic survive in daily use that have died everywhere else. A linguist has spent a decade trying to understand why.
Crafts
The Boatwright of Muscongus Bay
On a cove in midcoast Maine, Caleb Drisko builds one wooden lobster boat a year, planking white cedar onto oak frames in a shed his grandfather raised in 1947.
Profiles
The Conductor Who Tunes Pianos for Free
Wendell Brace led a regional orchestra for twenty-eight years. In retirement, he drives between school music rooms in a beat-up sedan, tuning their pianos at no charge.
The Trades
A Flatbed, a Tarp, and Eleven Hours to Laredo
An owner-operator hauling steel coils out of Memphis talks about straps, fuel, and the math of a 2,400-mile week.