Two weeks ago, for the first time in 15 years, I flushed the toilet inside my house. This — and by “this” I mean the 15 years of non-flushing — was not quite as gross as it might sound. Until very recently, my family and I lived off the electrical grid in rural Colorado, in […]
Earth
On Sunday evening, I was standing in our orchard watching the sunset when I turned around and saw a strange beam of light that appeared to rise from the east, directly opposite the setting sun. Crepuscular rays or “God’s Fingers” are pretty common around here, but usually these majestic light rays emanate from the sun. […]
“In the 1960s we noticed there was a problem with time,” says Witold Fraczek, an analyst at Environmental Systems Research Institute in Greater Los Angeles. In 1948 Harold Lyons at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C. built the world’s first atomic clock, an instrument that keeps time based on the vibration of atoms […]
Spring is a nervous time for skiers and farmers. I’m both of these, and every April I watch the weather even more closely than usual. As a skier, I’m waiting for crust — the year’s most magnificent snow conditions. Spring’s warm temperatures compress the winter’s deep snowpack and when the freeze/thaw cycles line up just […]
Until last week, I’d never heard of the Broomway. Now I long to walk it. The Broomway is a paradox: a path through the ocean, a six-century-old walkway that disappears each day. It begins on the southeastern coast of England and heads straight out to sea, crossing about three miles of sand and mudflats until […]
Kaneohe Bay, a keyhole-shaped notch on the southeastern shore of Oahu, is known for its placid waters, its coral reefs, and one very large, floating vacuum cleaner. Not long ago, Eric Conklin, marine science advisor for The Nature Conservancy, gave me a tour of the bay in his rubber-sided outboard. We called on a small […]
In the mail yesterday I received a grizzly bear skull from an acquaintance and taxidermist in Soldotna, Alaska. Expertly cleaned down to chalk-white bone and glistening, thumb-sized canines, it was the size and general shape of a football, and as smooth as sanded wood. My friend had apologized ahead of time for there being a […]
This morning I awoke to the kind of day that offers an easy excuse to skip the walk. The temperature gauge read -3F (-19C) when I crawled out of bed, and by the time I’d finished the tea and hot porridge my husband had prepared, it was still only -1F. But the dogs were eager, the […]