Last week, I crabbed over papers at a late-night kitchen table while my very pregnant step daughter stood near me with her hands clasped atop the globe of her belly. She’d been pacing for most of an hour, not wanting to sleep or sit down. She wanted her pelvis as open as she could make […]
Archeology
This week is the 79th anniversary of two nuclear weapons used on a human populace. In remembrance, I look to the region where the first bomb was set off as a test, less than a month before it was used against the Japanese people. Where this devastation begins is hard country, Jornada del Muerto, which […]
This post ran ten years ago, about a landscape that existed where the Bering Sea now lies, and how humans have been plying it from then till now. Living far inland in a desert environment, I don’t think of the sea often, but when I do, my mind flies to this tundra island, once the […]
This is a picture of my mother sheltering from an Arctic wind from when this post first published in 2015. She’s nearing 80 now and I just connected with her last night in southern Utah where she’s joining me for a week on the San Juan River. She teeters more than she used to, not […]
I don’t know how I managed to not know this for my whole life, but here it is: the Americas were the last continents to have people on them. By around 30,000 years ago, all the other continents had people on them. We didn’t have any people. Nobody. Empty of people. Why not? How do […]
This post originally ran in September of 2014 and I’ve not been back to this wild desert party since. I’ve just returned from Burning Man, a Mad Max bacchanalia in the desert of western Nevada. I went to see what my civilization was up to, what fiery pinnacle we’ve invented. I also wanted to see […]
In North America, the oldest images put onto rock date back to almost 13,000 BC, deep in the Ice Age. Those types are rare. Most of what you see — phantom-body figures, snakes, lightning bolts, shields, hunting scenes — come from the last handful of millennia, animistic hunter-gatherers and corn-bearing agrarians, the rise of Native […]
My in-laws are visiting from the East Coast and we’ve had some days to explore. The local bar in our five-hundred-person town is a must-see, its sleek wood and mirrors more than a century old, and the old mountain-mining town of Telluride is forty-five minutes away for window shopping and looking for famous people. The […]