Sarah

No empty earth

I don’t know when I first saw Cisco, Utah. My early memory of it is imprecise, gathered from a series of impressions over years into one blurry composite. A crumbling edifice of corner store, covered in a mural of eagle and mountains that is in turn covered in black scrawls of graffiti. Dead cars. Piles […]

The Last Word

The first thing you need to do right now is read Ann’s meditation on vulnerability. She has stitched together three disparate parts of the world no one else would put together, and created something that will make you hate people, love them again, and finally remember that we are all on a different part of […]

The Last Word

April 16-20 For much of the country, spring warmth is too long in coming this year. Much too long. But we are well past the equinox and the days are getting longer, and that means the running and buzzing and frolicking is under way. Some of the heightened activity means animals are getting busy, Ann […]

Unintentional treevotee

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 […]

Hike your pants

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 […]

The ritual: When science feels like elegy in advance

Each morning, when the fog was thin enough to see, I went to the cliffs. I’d park the white pickup down a grassy ATV trail. Or off the main dirt road on a pullout. Or in the turnaround at the island’s southwesternmost point, where, when the wind was up at sea, waves coming from the […]