This week is the 79th anniversary of two nuclear weapons used on a human populace. In remembrance, I look to the region where the first bomb was set off as a test, less than a month before it was used against the Japanese people. Where this devastation begins is hard country, Jornada del Muerto, which […]
Paleo
This post ran ten years ago, about a landscape that existed where the Bering Sea now lies, and how humans have been plying it from then till now. Living far inland in a desert environment, I don’t think of the sea often, but when I do, my mind flies to this tundra island, once the […]
This is a picture of my mother sheltering from an Arctic wind from when this post first published in 2015. She’s nearing 80 now and I just connected with her last night in southern Utah where she’s joining me for a week on the San Juan River. She teeters more than she used to, not […]
This week I’m in Madison, serving as writer-in-residence at the University of Wisconsin, a gig that’s introduced me to many wonderful faculty, staff, and students. Among my favorite encounters, however, has been with a university resident who’s been dead for around 13,000 years. On a tour of the zoology museum, I had the opportunity to […]
This post originally ran in September of 2014 and I’ve not been back to this wild desert party since. I’ve just returned from Burning Man, a Mad Max bacchanalia in the desert of western Nevada. I went to see what my civilization was up to, what fiery pinnacle we’ve invented. I also wanted to see […]
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 […]
Not long ago, a friend who lives nearby, a skilled hunter of arrowheads, found a beautiful fluted spear point. It came from between his house and mine, along a ditch. The find was stunning, what I think has to be Clovis technology from 13,000 years ago, its point as sharp as the day it was […]
When the National Museum of Natural History, here in D.C., was planning to demolish their fossil hall and build a new one, they knew they would have to deal with something big: Six huge murals. They’re classics, painted between 1960 and 1974, showing wild assemblages of animals from different points in our planet’s history. The […]