Among the many rewarding aspects of my well-documented beaver obsession is this: it makes for interesting road trips. Roads tend to follow water, which means that you stand good odds of encountering Castor canadensis and its works during any long drive. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve screeched to a halt on a […]
The other day I was rifling through a drawer in search of a notebook — I have a filing system best described as “post-tornado” — when my hand touched an old external hard-drive. I plugged it into a USB port, and years of photos, many of which I’d assumed were lost forever, bloomed on my […]
This time last year Elise and I were bellied up to a bar (remember those?) in Montana, talking about what childless dog-owning couples generally talk about: our pet. We’d owned Kit — or had she owned us? — for a year and change at that point, and we’d taught her the basics: to sit, to […]
For the last few days I’ve been slowly completing an annual rite of fall: raking leaves. The colossal Norway maple that looms over our yard, which sheds each October with all the messy gusto of a yellow lab on a dark couch, makes this a rather herculean task. For most people, leaf-raking is utterly quotidian, […]
When, years from now, I reflect on the debacle that was 2020, I will remember it for COVID, of course, and for its possibly planet-saving election; but I will also recall it as the Year of the Fire Tower. Decommissioned fire lookout towers stipple ridgelines across the West, many of which can be rented for […]
Several days ago I found myself in Idaho, driving west along the St. Joe River with a couple of companions, when, rounding a bend in the road, we came upon a snake. The creature was sprawled in the east-bound lane, and although she wasn’t moving, she had a certain three-dimensional je nais se quoi that […]
The quietest place in America is fern-swaddled, lichen-draped, moss-blanketed. It is past the splintered tree, through the tilted spruce, beyond a damp pocket of bog, its precise location marked by a tiny cairn of polished riverstone. Its floor is a dappled jumble of deadfall and blowdown, nurse logs melting back into the earth even as […]
Last weekend Elise and I spent three days backpacking in the vicinity of Pyramid Pass, a high notch in the stony spine of the Idaho Selkirks. With a couple of friends in tow (don’t worry: absolutely no hugging!), we crested the pass and descended to a teacup lake nested in a bowl of granite and […]