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 […]
Craig
We’ve been living in a tinderbox, precipitation at an all-time low, summer temperatures unusually high, snowpack paltry. The ground feels as if it’ll ignite just from looking at it. A few days ago a blaze started near Basalt, Colorado, a couple rivers east of where I live, forcing rapid evacuations. It started from tracer bullets […]
My boys and I have gone to the sun and back. Not literally, of course. We’ve been on the curve of the Earth the whole time. But we’ve been on a mission, 20 nights on the road traveling north toward the longest day of the year. Our trip started in Colorado near the 40th […]
The first thing you need to do right now is read Ann’s meditation on vulnerability. She has stitched together three disparate parts of the world no one else would put together, and created something that will make you hate people, love them again, and finally remember that we are all on a different part of […]
A man and his well-traveled family came by the house the other night, friends of friends needing a place to stay. He was a gray-bearded mountain climber, tall plank of a man 70 years old, one eye squinting, the other permanently closed from some accident in his youth that I didn’t ask about. He came […]
I lay under a boulder not long ago with a sculptor. The rock must have been 20 tons or more, balanced on a sandstone pedestal hardly bigger than the crook of my elbow. The actual points of contact between the boulder and its support had been winnowed by the wind down to almost nothing. The […]
April 16-20 For much of the country, spring warmth is too long in coming this year. Much too long. But we are well past the equinox and the days are getting longer, and that means the running and buzzing and frolicking is under way. Some of the heightened activity means animals are getting busy, Ann […]
In 2014 I wrote about backpacking through live lava flows in Hawaii. The experience was remarkable, and the man who showed us the way has since watched his own house burn, its remnants consumed by molten rock, something he said he thoroughly enjoyed. On that journey, I threw a penny into live lava, expecting it to […]