Almost every night since late February I’ve slept on our deck, watching the star-scape creep westward month by month. Scorpius recently came out of hiding and now the great space scorpion is standing on its tail in the middle of the southern sky. Jupiter has been sailing toward the evening glory of Venus, Power and […]
When I was a kid, I pretended I was a bird, and I did it in front of anyone in early elementary school, winging around with my arms outstretched. Around fourth grade I started learning modesty and only soared when no one was watching. The ground, I imagined, was far away, ants the size of […]
I’ve been in southern Baja reading Ann Finkbeiner’s accounts of the dismal cold of midwinter and I’ve felt bad. I know what it’s like to shiver in the gray, but Baja happened for me, Sonoran Desert splendor (my home desert), along the whale-happy Sea of Cortez, (the first giant body of salt water I ever […]
This originally posted on LWON back in 2022. I took this picture the other day, and it’s a trick. For half a second, I thought I’d made some impossible discovery, the track of what looks to be a giant cat in ancient sandstone. With all the prehistoric tracks appearing lately — Ice Age humans in […]
I’m writing a book about mountain lions and it’s down to weeks, days, pages flying, margins scratched and scribbled, when news comes of a 46-year-old woman killed by such a cat a couple hundred miles from where I live. She’d been hiking alone on New Year’s Day, forensics consistent with a mountain lion attack, asphyxiation […]
This post first ran in the spring of 2015 and I’ve often wondered if this patch of earth in Iowa is still guarded. A summer not long ago I went for a grueling 3-day backpack through GMO cornfields in Iowa, camping among walls of waxy green leaves that sawed against each other in the breeze. […]
This post first ran in April of 2019 and the 6th grader I’m referring to is now in college and I’m leaving every possibility open to journey with them again. I pulled my 6th grader out of school for a week to hit the road. I adore the public school teachers who spend time with […]
A conversation struck up at a writing workshop a few weeks ago between me and a computational biologist who studies the molecular biology and population genetics of the HIV virus and other virulent diseases including Ebola, Hepatitis, and Covid. She’s what you would call a veteran virus tracker, compiling and interpreting viral genetic sequences and […]
