This post first ran on Dec. 31, 2010, though with a different main image, and it has run just about every New Year’s Eve since then. Back in the day, the lead image was a close-up of the crown of the 2009 pole. That image still appears as part of this essay, only farther down. […]
New Zealand
By the time you read this post, 2020 will have already arrived at the South Pole. Even if you read it the instant it pops up on the Internet, at 7 a.m. EST December 31, 2019, the New Year will already be an hour old. You don’t have to go to the South Pole to […]
It has been raining for three days now, really raining, the kind of rain that can only occur in a place that receives upwards of 7 meters of rain a year. Three days ago, water began pouring out of the sky the way it might during a tropical afternoon storm or a monsoon — a […]
In the Southern summer of 2004, my then-girlfriend and I were camped in a shelter near a rock climbing area in New Zealand called Flock Hill. It was a gorgeous landscape, sweeping grassy hills made famous as Rohan in the “Lord of the Rings” and glacial erratics from the final battle scene in “The Lion, […]
I sleep with old sneakers and work gloves under my bed. My house and car are stocked with hand-crank radios, potable water and archaic, shelf-stable foodstuffs like hardtack and jerky. In my closet there is a crowbar and a very large axe, which I will use, should an earthquake tumble the walls, to excavate through […]