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 […]
At 4 am, driving west from Ashland, Wisconsin, I flicked on BBC news and heard a report out of the North Fork of the Gunnison, a place I lived for a couple decades in western Colorado. It was about oil and gas development and the unprecedented rollback of environmental protections. Voices I know from home […]
I was at the Getty Museum in LA not long ago, and inside its cavernous entrance my kids and I found a spot where we could stand one at a time, speaking, making sounds, snapping, clapping, and hearing ourselves bounce back in surround-sound. Since this post originally ran November 21, 2017, I’ve found numerous more […]
It’s been said and often quoted that 10,000 hours of doing anything will make you a master. Never mind the squishy definition of mastery that makes it apocryphal, I believe it. When the term mastery is used, I figure it’s not that you’ve risen flawlessly to becoming a great chef or engineer, but that you’ve […]
