This post ran in 2015, and it remains the coldest experience in my life. Put on something warm and enjoy. In the winter of 2014, most of North America was buried in an unusual cold period. The jet stream had hemorrhaged in early January and the Polar Vortex that usually sits atop the hemisphere like […]
Craig
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 […]
Last night I took a crowded elevator to the hundredth floor of a skyscraper in Manhattan. Not rattled or shaken, we were propelled to the top in 52 seconds, like being beamed up. Doors opened and we all poured into a high-windowed space looking onto the electric-white boroughs of New York City. A revolving door […]
A defensive back playing for a Texas university football team recently said something unusual into a press microphone. “I don’t believe in space,” he said. “I’m religious, so I think, like, we’re on our own right now. I don’t think there’s, like, other planets and stuff like that.” I welcome eccentric ways of thinking. Being […]
This post comes from 2015, which seems like lifetimes ago, and I don’t know what happened to the woman I interviewed or this small patch of earth in Iowa she was defending. I’ve often turned to this memory as a sign of hope in a decaying natural world, one person focusing her life on one […]
The skirt of Las Vegas, Nevada, is a frictional zone scrubbed with busted tortoise shells and Joshua trees that lean toward the sun. High tension power lines intersect at substations and disperse from there into the desert. A buddy and I camped in this liminal space a couple months ago and all night long the […]
Lately I’ve been lingering in Bortle 1 zones, rare dark places untroubled by human lights. On the scale, 1 is where your eyes discern the faintest satellites and the fuzzballs of nearby galaxies. When you wake hours before dawn, the atmosphere lacks the flashing planes, and sometimes satellites seem to have fallen asleep. The stars […]
I was hoping for an extra few hours somewhere in the race between hither and yon to write something of substance, but it didn’t come. I do want you to know that instead of writing, I camped near Crystal Geyser in Utah and listened to it gurgle and throb all night long. I dreamt to […]