Yesterday, I took a walk in the winter desert where snow on sandstone melted and filled dishes eroded into rock. A common local name for these shallow catchments, just enough to drink, is waterpocket. You’ll also hear kissing pool. That’s how you access them, down on your knees, lips touching the surface. Water conveys itself […]
This post originally ran October 30, 2017 Sand blowing and grains hurdling over each other, landing and knocking the next, is called saltation. This is how dunes move, not sheering chaos, but each grain effecting the other, billiard balls knocking each other down the line. Kids found that if they stood on a dune crest, […]
At a biological field station in the Chiricahua Mountains of southeast Arizona — towering canyons and clear-running creeks — a Stanford scientist attending a poetry workshop volunteered to get up for an evening reading. He’d spent the week studying with poet Sherwin Bitsui in an environmental writing program put on by Orion magazine, using specimen […]
The other night we were supposed to see a meteor shower with fireballs. That’s what they predicted, fireballs. My gal and I went out on the deck in the late fall chill, dropped a single sleeping pad, covered ourselves in a blanket, and stared up at a midnight quarter moon. The Taurid meteor shower and […]
My teenage kid is driving, and six feet tall. His feet are bigger than mine. On the way to school we come down a frozen dirt road, him behind the wheel and me in the passenger seat when a rear tire blows. It flops like a seal and he pulls over. The road is a […]
A former in-law came online a few days back to call me a troglodyte, and then a caveman. And not a nice way. I’m not averse to the title. I am a bearded, trunky fellow, strong legs and back. I can carry much weight through high passes and rocky canyons. I can’t recall the number […]
First must have come listeningto the wind or regardingthe movements of animals,then monitoring the starsand sometime after thatscrutinizing fire;but somewhere in there belongswatching the progress of a river… Billy Collins, “The List of Ancient Pastimes” Most of the last couple weeks I’ve been sleeping on the ground. I stayed in southern Utah canyons long enough […]
QUESTIONER: I see you wrote a new book that just came out. It’s called Virga and Bone: Essays from Dry Places. Does anybody ever make fun of you for that title? AUTHOR: I don’t understand the question. Q: I mean, Viagra and Boner, you haven’t thought of that? What does virga mean? A: It’s when […]