Hands go up for questions at the end of a talk and someone asks, “What gives you hope?” I say the usual, believing the future to be long, all sorts of twists and turns in the plot. No, not that. Too weak. Too…hopeless. I’ve got to go home and think about this. So, here’s what […]
Back in January of 2014, I wrote a guest post for LWON about a morning with a dog and here it is again, slightly fixed up. A neighbor dog and I walk up a snow-crusted hill together. Glossy black lab mad for sticks and balls, he hasn’t forgotten how to travel with a human in […]
Arizona winter night, stars over pines, my buddy and I were heading for a hot tub on the outskirts of Flagstaff when a phone rang. It was a mutual friend, Jayme Dittmar, a dog musher on a 1,300-mile expedition by dog sled from Nome, Alaska, to the village of Utqiagvik on Point Barrow. She was […]
This happened the other day not far from where I live. Boulders fall all the time around here, highways regularly blocked. This time, the wording is what stuck. The local sheriff’s post went viral when this fallen obstacle was described as a “large boulder the size of a small boulder.” With those words, this 10,000-pound […]
I found this ill-cared-for painting from 1976, when I was nine, of a spaceship either taking off or landing on a barren world. This was before Star Wars, but I was well-steeped in forbidden worlds and Star Trek. I dreamed of alien planets, their skies red or green, their landscapes sere and wind-torn. I stared […]
Happy New Year, for what a year is worth given the light of Betelgeuse fading from the shoulder of the constellation Orion. Thanks to Ann for pointing that out last week, and that it may have gone supernova hundreds of years ago and no longer exists. Beginning of January, heart of winter, is a good […]
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, […]