Working with an astoundingly talented young writer, Sylvia Linsteadt, and with contributions from the Heyday staff, we return to the East Bay Regional Parks to marvel once again at the animals, plants, sounds, geological formations, and histories so close to home and yet so exotic. Drawing from scientific fact, human history, photography, and literature, thirty exquisite essays on topics as diverse as mountain lions, flower seeds, vernal pools, Indian languages, extinct volcanoes, and beetles reveal “the profound secret that our schools, jobs, government, and all our institutions conspire to keep hidden from us”: namely, that the world around us, when seen through fresh eyes, is in its entirety and in all its parts nothing less than a wonderment.