Second Act
by Larry Burke

Fifteen years ago Outside ran a quietly subversive little treatise in defense of mosquitoes, titled "Sympathy for the Devil." The writer, a young novelist from Montana, took the position that though mosquitoes certainly have "a lot to answer for" in the way of deadly plagues, miserable bouts of itching, and that annoying whine in your ear just as you're getting comfortable in your sleeping bag, they really aren't so bad in the global scheme of things. Although we had no way of knowing it at the time, that modest manuscript proved to be the start of a remarkable ride for the writer, the editors, and the readers of this magazine--a ride that takes a new course this month.

The novelist was our extraordinary friend David Quammen, who has penned our Natural Acts column since June 1981, way back in the scary days of Leonid Brezhnev, slam-dancing, and ketchup as a vegetable. One-hundred-sixty essays and two National Magazine Awards later, David in this issue takes leave of his Natural Acts column to venture in new literary directions. To be honest, we've been dreading this day for several years. But we also know how rare it is for anyone to write a column half as well for even half as long, and we're profoundly grateful to have been blessed with David's monthly prose--and his company--for so many marvelous years. And we're comforted by the fact that neither his commitment to Outside nor ours to him is changing in the slightest.

As both a writer and a human being, David Quammen is sui generis. Raised in Cincinnati and educated at Yale and Oxford, he has lived since 1973 in Montana, where before taking up Natural Acts he was by turns a waiter, a fly-fishing guide, a spy novelist, and a student of aquatic entomology. "David's full of surprises," says his friend Tim Cahill, Outside editor-at-large, "and a man of incredible modesty. I knew him for seven years before I found out he'd been a Rhodes scholar. I said, 'Oh, you must have been a pretty good athlete, David.' He replied, 'Not really. My sport was basketball, and what do they know about basketball in England?'"

Outside readers have loyally turned to David's column each month not only to revel in the virtuosity of his writing but to see how he negotiates the moral thickets of our fast-diminishing natural world. Guided by the notion that a good natural science column should be, as he's put it, equal parts "edification and vaudeville," he has given us a front-row seat for some of the planet's wilder sideshows from Banda to his Bozeman backyard. Whether he's plumbing the depths of his own unmitigated fear of black widow spiders, pondering the ethics of eating mountain-lion meat, or, reflecting on what the common pigeon tells us about species' becoming "merely cultivated reflections of human dominance," David brings to his subjects both a command of hard science and a literary sensibility that finds the larger truths hidden behind the scrim. "What's so rare about Quammen," says acclaimed Harvard entomologist E. O. Wilson, "is that intrinsic, gut feeling he has for how nature works and how we can use it as a metaphor for expressing human emotion." Cahill has put it another way: "David's part comic essayist, part fly in the ointment of linear thinking."

Make no mistake: For all these years, it's been pure Quammen. The editors here have never told him what or what not to write; we've simply turned him loose on the banquet of nature and invited him to indulge. David himself once wrote that Natural Acts has given him "enough rope to move between subjects like a kid on a Tarzan swing." That sense of roaming wonder has always been a key to the column's success--and so it will continue to be. For although David won't be writing it, Natural Acts isn't going anywhere, and very soon another writer will be taking up the swinging vine, providing readers with a place to reconnect with the living planet that is the setting for this magazine.

As for David's plans, not only will he be writing features for us in the months and years ahead, but readers of next month's issue will be treated to a feature-length excerpt from his forthcoming book, The Song of the Dodo, to be published in April by Scribner. A nonfiction work about evolution and extinction on islands, The Song of the Dodo is his most ambitious effort to date, the product of eight years of meticulous research and travels to such outbacks as Madagascar, Mauritius, New Guinea, and Tasmania. Over the next few years, David also plans to publish two more nonfiction collections composed primarily of his Natural Acts columns. In the meantime, when he's not out reporting another book or article, you'll most likely find him hunkering close to home--kayaking, telemark skiing, keeping an eye on the Cincinnati Reds, and generally doing his damnedest to avoid black widow spiders.