In 2014 I wrote about backpacking through live lava flows in Hawaii. The experience was remarkable, and the man who showed us the way has since watched his own house burn, its remnants consumed by molten rock, something he said he thoroughly enjoyed. On that journey, I threw a penny into live lava, expecting it to […]
March 26-30 Helen and her co-conspirators created a peep show like none other to start the week. In a menagerie of fossiliferous marshmallowness, they followed the original ichthyosaurus discovery in 1810-11 by Mary Anning on the coast of Southwest England, brilliantly replacing Mary with a marshmallow peep. This will make perfect sense if you see […]
Today you get a poem, or prose with line breaks, about an archaeological dig and what happened there. Please take this post with a grain of salt, or sand, and enjoy. East of Winslow, a tarp tied at six points pumps like an enormous drum Wind does not stop, not even to breathe, Hot […]
Driving home through the bottom of Colorado you can’t help hitting mountains. A jigsaw puzzle of passes lies ahead. In the winter, choose your poison, Lizard Head, Wolf Creek, or, in the middle, the dangerous one. The route we took last week put us through the middle route, a chain of two passes leading to […]
Have you seen events in the sky you can’t explain? I’m asked this question frequently because I’ve spent many nights out, a likely candidate for seeing things that can scarcely be fathomed. One happened last week. I live near the Utah-Colorado border, no human lights to be seen. Carrying groceries and my work down the […]
I was snooping around an old uranium mill the other day in southern Utah, taking advantage of an unusually warm January day in the desert to explore washes, ridges, and places where I could hunt for artifacts. You’ll find here glass bottles, metal tags, and pieces of machinery. It was a field mill, looked like […]
I have a friend who is a magician. He performs the occasional stage show with card tricks and coins hidden behind the ear. His work is sleight of hand, a flash of movement deceiving the eye. He’d say it’s science. You experiment and find what actually works. My friend, Angus Stocking, is also a tarot […]
Last Friday night the Boston runway looked like an Arctic landing, bits of tarmac barely visible through sheets of blowing snow. I had a good view of the runway with the plane tipping like a seesaw, coming in on the tail of an explosive cyclogenesis, or bombogenesis, media-shortened to a bomb cyclone. This unusual storm […]