First must have come listeningto the wind or regardingthe movements of animals,then monitoring the starsand sometime after thatscrutinizing fire;but somewhere in there belongswatching the progress of a river… Billy Collins, “The List of Ancient Pastimes” Most of the last couple weeks I’ve been sleeping on the ground. I stayed in southern Utah canyons long enough […]
Curiosities
At 4 am, driving west from Ashland, Wisconsin, I flicked on BBC news and heard a report out of the North Fork of the Gunnison, a place I lived for a couple decades in western Colorado. It was about oil and gas development and the unprecedented rollback of environmental protections. Voices I know from home […]
There’s a little patch of horror growing along my weekly drive, a strange blossoming on the side of the highway. People can’t stop pulling over for it. Flowers have appeared in profusion, alpine firecrackers of penstemon and some blue-hooded species, maybe an Aconite, wolfsbane, not one I know because they are invasives seeded across a […]
Earlier this month, a pinpoint landslide let loose onto a highway near where I live in southwest Colorado. No homes were destroyed. No cars were crushed, though three were narrowly missed. One pickup punched into reverse, its body hammered with rocks, occupants safe. What is significant is the tonnage of two boulders that tumbled a […]
I know a guy who doesn’t have a birthday. Andy* was born in the Moroccan desert. His parents were nomads. There were no smartphones in the 1960s and a nomadic tribe didn’t have much use for the Gregorian calendar. And when it came to recalling the exact day and month of Andy’s birth, there were […]
At 10:20 last Monday morning I sat at a table outside of Tucson, Arizona, writing these words: The land does not move, frozen to our eyes. Within a minute or two, a small but notable earthquake struck outside of the almost-ghost town of Bedrock, Colorado, 600 miles away. It was 4.5 on the Richter scale. […]
I have been trying to write more letters, the kind that have an envelope and a stamp and go into that white box with the little flag at the end of our driveway. It’s a work in progress, I’m still at a ratio of about 579 emails and texts to one letter. So this […]
