We’ve had a number of cats around here over the last year, roamers and strays. Two we brought in and three, the feral ones, came on their own. A little more than a year ago, a barn cat showed up at a friend’s ranch an hour from where we live in southwest Colorado. It was […]
I attended a repatriation of artifacts and bones under Native American claim recently. The remains of 41 people and the artifacts buried with them, retrieved from an archaeological collection, went back in the ground. There’s not a lot I can write in detail. Returning the dead of a millennia-old village is an involved procedure and […]
A friend, author Ginger Strand, recently took this picture of a handprint I spray-painted on a wall in Manhattan. When I put it up a few years ago, the wall was blank, and she wanted me to know that graffiti has bloomed around it, along with this sweet little cluster of stars somebody put […]
I walked along the beach a few days ago a quarter mile landward of the San Andreas fault zone. Surfers were swimming out and riding the curls back on the west side of San Francisco. Sets picked them up over the Pacific Plate and swept them onto North America. A hundred feet below, the […]
This piece originally ran a year ago, Sept 22, 2018. Right now I’m in the bowels of the Grand Canyon, sending up a flare of a redux. I often think back to this story, especially when violence swells in the world. This is one small antidote. I was with a group kayaking and camping on […]
You know it’s bad when you have to dig a hole and crawl in to survive. That’s what is going on in a creek bed at the bottom of the canyon below where I live. The creek stopped running a little more than a week ago. I walked down the other day and lifted […]
Summer’s been long and hot. Usually, I’m still enjoying it by August, but this time, winter is looking sweeter than ever. This post originally ran in January 27, 2015, and is about being colder than I ever had before, and about a time North America was colder than it had been in thousands of […]
Disclaimer: chiggers are not actually insects as the title suggests, but arachnids, and insects are not a kingdom, but a class. I personally classify them all together into one creepy kingdom of small mechanical exoskeletal pests up to no good. They wear their skeletons on the outside and inside are nothing but goop. They bite […]