There’s a little patch of horror growing along my weekly drive, a strange blossoming on the side of the highway. People can’t stop pulling over for it. Flowers have appeared in profusion, alpine firecrackers of penstemon and some blue-hooded species, maybe an Aconite, wolfsbane, not one I know because they are invasives seeded across a […]
Geology
Earlier this month, a pinpoint landslide let loose onto a highway near where I live in southwest Colorado. No homes were destroyed. No cars were crushed, though three were narrowly missed. One pickup punched into reverse, its body hammered with rocks, occupants safe. What is significant is the tonnage of two boulders that tumbled a […]
“When one is alone and lonely, the body gladly lingers in the wind or the rain, or splashes into the cold river, or pushes through the ice-crusted snow. Anything that touches.” –Mary Oliver, “Leaves and blossoms along the way: A poem” It was 95 degrees out on the day I drove towards the wildfire. I […]
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 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 […]