I broke a pot the other day, not just any pot but a ceramic Acoma vessel I inherited after my father died decades ago. I snatched something from the shelf, barely tapping the little seed jar, its mouth big enough for a finger, maybe two. It barely rocked one way and then the other, energy […]
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Ten years ago on the Greenland Ice Sheet I sat at a circular table in the cook tent of a seven-person research station. Wind banged and thrummed outside. A storm had been on us for days. After going out to pee, you’d stomp back inside sequined with the frozen glitter of your own urine. Around […]
The cell phone rang at 9:21 p.m. on a weekday. I almost didn’t answer. Unfamiliar number. Late in the evening. Probably an automated voice expressing urgency about the viability of my automobile insurance—never mind that I don’t own a car. But then: Why not? You never know. So I answered. And I heard the magic […]
Not long ago, a friend who lives nearby, a skilled hunter of arrowheads, found a beautiful fluted spear point. It came from between his house and mine, along a ditch. The find was stunning, what I think has to be Clovis technology from 13,000 years ago, its point as sharp as the day it was […]
As we entered the third decade of the third millennium, many of the science and tech words and phrases in popular circulation had lost all meaning. “AI”, “machine learning” and their newer synonym, “cognitive technology”, for example, had joined the pantheon of synonyms for “snake oil“. Or at least they were becoming placeholders for anything […]
At a biological field station in the Chiricahua Mountains of southeast Arizona — towering canyons and clear-running creeks — a Stanford scientist attending a poetry workshop volunteered to get up for an evening reading. He’d spent the week studying with poet Sherwin Bitsui in an environmental writing program put on by Orion magazine, using specimen […]
My teenage kid is driving, and six feet tall. His feet are bigger than mine. On the way to school we come down a frozen dirt road, him behind the wheel and me in the passenger seat when a rear tire blows. It flops like a seal and he pulls over. The road is a […]