I grew up with guns. Who didn’t? We had Han Solo blasters and rifles that shot little copper pellets ducks would eat and die from. My dad kept an assortment of firearms, defense weapons, hunting rifles, a couple shotguns for when we went out for rabbit or quail. He never made a big deal out […]
At 10:20 last Monday morning I sat at a table outside of Tucson, Arizona, writing these words: The land does not move, frozen to our eyes. Within a minute or two, a small but notable earthquake struck outside of the almost-ghost town of Bedrock, Colorado, 600 miles away. It was 4.5 on the Richter scale. […]
I spend too much time on the computer. I’m doing it right now. Between files, tabs, and docs, I keep up Google Earth — when it doesn’t crash — catching by accident out of the corner of my cluttered desktop a bolt of a mesa or a canyon’s shadow. I click on it like taking […]
A three-year-old was lost in the woods of North Carolina for two nights last week. The weather was blustery and freezing as searchers covered ground for three days, finding no sign of the boy, doubtful he could have survived a single night, much less two with temperatures reaching the low twenties. On Thursday evening, he […]
We’ve had a number of cats around here over the last year, roamers and strays. Two we brought in and three, the feral ones, came on their own. A little more than a year ago, a barn cat showed up at a friend’s ranch an hour from where we live in southwest Colorado. It was […]
I attended a repatriation of artifacts and bones under Native American claim recently. The remains of 41 people and the artifacts buried with them, retrieved from an archaeological collection, went back in the ground. There’s not a lot I can write in detail. Returning the dead of a millennia-old village is an involved procedure and […]
A friend, author Ginger Strand, recently took this picture of a handprint I spray-painted on a wall in Manhattan. When I put it up a few years ago, the wall was blank, and she wanted me to know that graffiti has bloomed around it, along with this sweet little cluster of stars somebody put […]
I walked along the beach a few days ago a quarter mile landward of the San Andreas fault zone. Surfers were swimming out and riding the curls back on the west side of San Francisco. Sets picked them up over the Pacific Plate and swept them onto North America. A hundred feet below, the […]