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 […]
Craig
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 […]
New York City was my forbidden fruit. It didn’t go with my identity as a nature writer, so I kept quiet about these urban forays. Wilderness trips I’d time so I’d get into the thick of humanity as swiftly as possible. After two weeks backpacking in the west end of the Grand Canyon, not using […]
Manhattan rattles my ears. Subway lines shake the fine bones inside my head. Cars honking on the street change the way my brain physically functions. When I stayed in the city a week ago I noticed the same as I always do: noise. I live in a quiet place off the grid in Western Colorado […]
The other day I was going through someone’s collapsed house on the tip of a mesa in western Colorado. It looked like a small homestead where no one had been in a handful of decades. The front wall with its peaked roof and door still latched shut lay flat where it had fallen. I poked […]
Over the last week I traveled from town to town in southwest Colorado giving stage performances at night, telling stories about being here at the height of summer, tales of drought and wildfires and raging thunderstorms. The moon and stars passed over our open-air venues. I gave the show some science and some mysticism, in […]
This originally ran August 4, 2017. There is a difference between the two. In one you can’t get lost; one way in, one way out. The other is full of dead ends and false passages. I take my kids to labyrinths. When they were little, we walked in socks along the path of a smooth […]
I’ve been waking to red-spotted Scorpio on the southern horizon every morning between 5 and 6 am. I’m aware of the slow clock I’m inside of, the hands of constellations changing so I can tell week to week time hasn’t stopped. Scorpio sitting in my southern view means summer is almost here, while I’m starting […]