LISSY GORALNIK OTTER DANCE: an autoethnography I pulled up to the ferry, a metal toy-looking thing against a vast and blue lake, eight students standing around me waiting for instructions. This part I was comfortable with: backpacks, stoves, bulky food bags, and group organization. Just do what you know. Act in charge. It'll fall into place. “Let's fireline our bags up to the dock and I'll figure out how they want us to load up,” I told them. The students, science and social science undergraduates and a lone zoology PhD candidate, hung around, fidgeting, still sleepy from the early morning wake-up. So I lined them up, demonstrated a fireline, and ended up carrying most of the bags to the edge of the dock myself, which was fine because I feel better when I'm busy. We re- parked our cars in the grassy lot, then hovered at the water's edge taking pictures and making hesitant early-morning conversation until the scraggly captain dropped his cigarette into the still lake and waved me up to lower our bags, coolers, and backpacks into the hold under the boat. And this is how it started. Not really, of course. I had just spent nine months developing curriculum, reading environmental philoso- phy and human dimensions and experiential, place-based, and envi- ronmental education articles, willing myself to become a faster thinker, smarter reader, better faker so my facade as a writer posing as a philosopher in a natural resources department wouldn't creak so loudly whenever I explained what I was doing there. In the last 12 months, I had bought a house in a strip-mall town in mid-Michigan, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (2015), pp. 1–19 doi:10.1093/isle/isv046 © The Author(s) 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com by guest on June 3, 2015 http://isle.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from