Last week, I crabbed over papers at a late-night kitchen table while my very pregnant step daughter stood near me with her hands clasped atop the globe of her belly. She’d been pacing for most of an hour, not wanting to sleep or sit down. She wanted her pelvis as open as she could make […]
Creating With Nature
It’s hard to know what to say, every twist and turn becoming a knot. Forces are crashing, glass flying. I’m up in the mountains where ancient volcanoes choked themselves to death, then eroded for 30 million years into the throaty remnants of a Colorado hotspot. Forests have grown on the rubble and I’ve been walking […]
Almost 15 years ago I traveled to a polar ice sheet with two key researchers who have since passed away. First, José Rial, who I followed to Greenland, was taken by cancer. His death was followed by his friend Konrad Steffen, one of the great Arctic ice scientists and explorers, who fell into a crevasse […]
A coyote urine mark I investigated with my nostrils in the snow was lemony and oceanic with an aftertaste of burning sulfur and fetid saltwater. A healthy piss from a black bear in the sand I’d call oak barrel stank. I got my nose as close as I dared into the stained hole from the […]
I was hoping for an extra few hours somewhere in the race between hither and yon to write something of substance, but it didn’t come. I do want you to know that instead of writing, I camped near Crystal Geyser in Utah and listened to it gurgle and throb all night long. I dreamt to […]
Returning to this creek was my stepdad’s idea. At 78, he wanted to try it again, but do it right this time. Twenty-some years ago, when we first hiked this mostly untrailed alpine canyon in Colorado, we planned it as a day trip with a car at either end for a shuttle. My mom was […]
My 16-year-old is leaving alone for a month of language school in Tokyo. Being born and raised outside of towns under population 700, closer to 300 in some cases, should put a dizzying spin on the experience. We’ve had epic urban adventures together, but not off this continent, certainly not in the vast compression of […]