She Speaks for Protection

My mom used to work for the Environmental Protection Agency. She rode the bus downtown every workday from where she lived in the mountains outside of Denver. A golden-hearted woman, she believes in the EPA’s mission, which is protection. She saw her agency’s job as preventing the water we drink and the air we breathe […]

Tender Days

Facebook is a rough place to mourn. When we reached a million dead from COVID in the US this month, I put up a post saying it seems there’ll be no memorial, no park with sculptures where we can gather to share common grief and remember the dead, many of whom passed in isolation. I […]

Where Stories Lie Down

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 […]

Why I’m Smiling in a Megadrought

We had a doozy of a snowfall last week in southwest Colorado, the high desert blanketed a foot and a half deep, the mountains getting a good four feet. Knock on wood, I don’t like to tempt the fates of nature and climate change, and I’m not meaning to brag, I just want to celebrate […]

From the Edge of Beringia

This post originally published in May of 2015, which, considering the age of the Bering Land Bridge, wasn’t that long ago. During the Cold War, a U.S. Air Force telecommunications network was erected in Western Alaska, a series of gray metal radio-towers like obelisks on a hilltop over the town of Nome. Each points a […]

The Artifice of Mondays

I am not especially fond of Mondays and I never have been, at least since learning of the existence of this artifice. I use the word not to mean fake — because Mondays are quite real — but to define them as made by human hands. In the rest of the universe with its whirling […]

Following Shadows Around the Room

Daylight Savings Time swapped out almost a month ago and I’m still off kilter. Who thought of such an assault on the senses? We’re sapiens and all, masters of adaptation, but mind and body don’t like to be parted. I prefer watching light shift day by day, squares of sunshine stepping forward and back across […]

Kiss of the Assassin Bug

    I was bitten the other night. I would have taken a picture of the turgid, blood-filled bug that stuck its rostrum inside of me for a liberal helping of hemoglobin, but my girlfriend smashed it with a rock and spattered the thing while I cheered her on. It was hard to resist the killing. Normally, I try and treat other […]