Essay Contest Winners

Meet Shane Behler and Anderson Smith— Award Recipients of the 2025 Waterman Fund Emerging Writers Essay Contest

The Waterman Fund is proud to announce the winners of our sixteenth essay contest.  We welcomed nearly 70 essays of which thirteen made the final round.  The committee is composed of current and former board members, outside readers, and the editor of Appalachia Journal.  Our First Place Winner for our 2025 Essay Contest is Shane Behler for his piece, "Immersion."  Our Runner-up is Anderson Smith for "A Forager’s Guide to the Wilderness."

The prompt for 2025 was as follows:

Wilderness and wildness have two distinctly different meanings. Yet we have observed they can be used almost interchangeably.

Wilderness is often spoken of as a means of protecting land through an act of legislation. In this country, the ideal behind it has preserved great tracts of land for public use. It has also allowed justification for times when governments displaced and took land from indigenous peoples. And perhaps the act of codifying or naming Wilderness (with a capital “W”) only further distances humans, in an abstract sense, from their primal and profound connections to the land itself. The narrative is complex and nuanced.

Nonetheless, in today’s day and age in this country wilderness areas contain some of the more rare, wild and undefined places available to citizens. The Waterman Fund invites submissions that explore how moving through mountains and rivers and wild lands brings out the uncultivated spirit, the unscathed, non-commercial, honest primal human in all of us. What is the wild in wild(er)ness?

The following are excerpts from this year’s picks. . .

 

. . .

 

And with that, I never saw so much color in the wilderness. Russulas grew underfoot in autumn hues. Coral mushrooms sprouted, pink and branching, at the corner of my eye. Yellow fairy cups festooned the underbrush. Fly agaric mushrooms burst across the ground, a buffet of vermillion-colored plates. I saw a potluck: black trumpets infused entire copses of trees with their scent. Fishy oyster mushrooms flared along rotten logs. Furred lion’s mane and dripping bear’s tooth clotted along trunks. Boletes as thick as pancakes with porous underbellies bruised blue on injury. Across lawns, puffball mushrooms lodged like golf balls. Fluted chanterelles chorused along the riverside. Their smaller cousins, golden-footed chanterelles, mixed in with spiny wood hedgehogs among the boreal carpets. I passed a group of college students, hauled up from the city for a wilderness weekend, on one of my foraging expeditions, so I plucked a tiny mushroom from my cache—“it’s a wood hedgehog, they’re edible”—and handed it to one young woman. On my return, I found the same mushroom abandoned on the trail before her where she sat, bewildered by my enthusiasm. I tried not to mind; I had a feast to prepare. I cooked the mushrooms in an ancient cast-iron pan on a propane camp stove that never burned evenly. Wilderness tasted lightly of meat, lightly of mystery. In fall, I found a lump of orange chicken-of-the-woods like a treasure chest held high on a tree. I weighed it at home: almost three pounds. I kept it in my fridge in Boston and feasted on chicken-of-the-woods noodle soup for weeks.

Anderson Smith, "A Forager’s Guide to the Wilderness”

 

. . .

 

What I’ve always sought in nature—purity in spirit, refreshing solitude, that vague sense of wildness and all it does to us—are increasingly scarce commodities. Economics teaches that when supply falls, prices will rise. As prices rise, supply—in this case access and availability—continues to fall. Fewer and fewer people will have a childhood like mine. If those parents hadn’t brought their kids to the waterfall, could they ever love the river? What if the waterfall becomes their morning on their kayak, their rambling hike with their favorite dog? What if the waterfall becomes their bobolinks?

A mirror had been held up to my privileged view of nature. The reflection was sharp, critical: I am one of the lucky few. I think about my hometown and my childhood. Most of the kids in my high school had parents who supported them, loved them, opened the right doors for them. Just like mine had done for me—a yard, a garden, a bird feeder; summer camp in New Hampshire, trips to national parks. The nature I was surrounded with while young, the nature I had taken for granted, existed on the tax dollars of those who could afford the price of admission. To lean on economics again, in my hometown, nature is a luxury good. And most people can’t have luxury goods. They would no longer be a luxury.

Shane Behler, "Immersion"