So I finally read Craig’s book Stone Desert, and I’m glad I did. It’s a republication of an earlier essay collection alongside his original journals – sketches, scribbles and notes he made in his twenties while hiking and paddling through desert canyons in Utah, along the Green and Colorado rivers. For me, the book was […]
Month: July 2023
The wild boars of Berlin get a bad rap. Last week one of these beasts was mistaken for a lioness, triggering emergency alerts and a two-day armed search. During the pandemic, another boar stole the laptop bag of a nude sunbather, forcing an absurdly ridiculous birthday suit chase. When I lived in Berlin, I was […]
My neighbor and I went to see Barbie this past weekend. I loved it. Without saying too much, I loved the colors and the cleverness and the way that the characters said things that I have thought but haven’t said, and things that I’ve felt but that have never risen up and assembled into consciousness. […]
A well-known fact about beaver lodges, one that any close observer has surely noticed, is that they’re often home to muskrats. I’ve seen this many times, never more than last week up Clear Creek here in central Colorado, where three or four busy muskrats seemed to constantly be motoring to and from a lodge, gathering […]
Some smart cookie timed the release of the movie about Robert Oppenheimer to the week of the anniversary of Trinity, the first test of the first nuclear weapon. (Another smart cookie threw in the release of a Barbie movie and a notable Barbenheimer genre was born, but that’s not what this post is about right […]
The end started a long time ago. I guess that’s always true in a sense. But this was years, really, even before the pandemic–for both of them, though mostly for her. As the dementia worsened and her care became more difficult, her daughters made that decision no one wants to make; the facility was nearby […]
This past weekend, I climbed Glacier Peak with a friend of mine. Glacier Peak is Washington’s fourth-highest mountain, and also one of the state’s five stratovolcanoes. (Perhaps you’ve heard of one of the others; I know I have.) What distinguishes Glacier Peak among its volcanic kin is its remoteness. It is at the eastern edge […]
