Animal One Thousand Miles Long

The phrase “an animal a thousand miles miles long,” attributed to Aristotle, refers to a sprawling body that cannot be seen in its entirety from a single angle, a thing too vast and complicated to be knowable as a whole.

For Leath Tonino, the animal a thousand miles long is the landscape of his native Vermont. Tonino grew up along the shores of Lake Champlain, situated between Vermont’s Green Mount...