Winter’s here, maybe forever, and we’re having the usual Fall Line storms. We have Fall Line storms in the summer too but winter’s are more dramatic. Because Baltimore is perched right on the Fall Line, colder to the left, warmer to the right, our normal storm is snow, then ice, then rain, then ice, then […]
Earth
This week, a headline literally* gave me whiplash. The loss of 1,600 points on the Dow? No, don’t be silly. Another government shutdown? No, not that one either. I mean the big news. Backpackers no longer have to filter their water. Because there’s nothing in the water that can hurt them! Wow, right? Like many outdoor […]
Last Friday night the Boston runway looked like an Arctic landing, bits of tarmac barely visible through sheets of blowing snow. I had a good view of the runway with the plane tipping like a seesaw, coming in on the tail of an explosive cyclogenesis, or bombogenesis, media-shortened to a bomb cyclone. This unusual storm […]
If you are planning a huge, calorie-dense feast for dinner later this week, you might want to take a moment to thank a man you’ve likely never heard of—a man whose scientific breakthroughs in agriculture made food cheaper and more plentiful around the world. Norman Borlaug may have saved up to a billion lives by […]
In caves and rock walls of the southern Utah desert, pictographs have been painted, added to the backs of clamshell-shaped sandstone enclosures. Many are noted to have acoustic properties, meaning these ancient, Indigenous images seem to be correlated with the way sound reflects around them. I’ve spoken in a normal voice back and forth from […]
I never meant for this to happen. When I moved to the Pacific Northwest from arid Colorado three years ago, I was one of those people who insisted on horizons. The town where I was born is a place where the foothills of the Rockies stand like a cliffy coastline overlooking a dry sea of […]
A couple of weeks ago, I set out through sun-shot low clouds to the North Cascades with my friends Devon and Kate. My truck is a 1998 with an exhaust leak under the cab, so we may or may not have been a little stoned on fumes when we piled out into the overflowing parking […]
You’ve never heard a kid scream until you’ve heard one who knows his daddy is no longer in control. When the earthquake struck, I had my headphones in. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t working, I was starting to zone out a bit. Some days I’m more productive than others and this was not a productive […]