Arizona winter night, stars over pines, my buddy and I were heading for a hot tub on the outskirts of Flagstaff when a phone rang. It was a mutual friend, Jayme Dittmar, a dog musher on a 1,300-mile expedition by dog sled from Nome, Alaska, to the village of Utqiagvik on Point Barrow. She was […]
Earth
“There is an aspect to this story that is weirder than you can imagine.” That sentence was e-mailed to me by a geologist, Jan Kramers, at the University of Johannesburg in the waning days of 2017. I had e-mailed him about a paper of his in Geochimica et Cosmochmica Acta. The title of the paper […]
This happened the other day not far from where I live. Boulders fall all the time around here, highways regularly blocked. This time, the wording is what stuck. The local sheriff’s post went viral when this fallen obstacle was described as a “large boulder the size of a small boulder.” With those words, this 10,000-pound […]
I found this ill-cared-for painting from 1976, when I was nine, of a spaceship either taking off or landing on a barren world. This was before Star Wars, but I was well-steeped in forbidden worlds and Star Trek. I dreamed of alien planets, their skies red or green, their landscapes sere and wind-torn. I stared […]
This post originally ran October 30, 2017 Sand blowing and grains hurdling over each other, landing and knocking the next, is called saltation. This is how dunes move, not sheering chaos, but each grain effecting the other, billiard balls knocking each other down the line. Kids found that if they stood on a dune crest, […]
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 […]
When I die, I want to be gently curled into the fetal position and put into one of those biodegradable pods from which a tree of my choice will grow. (I’m thinking weeping willow, for the drama of its wild hair, or maybe something ancient and delicious-smelling like a magnolia.) Or dress me in a […]
When I lived in a small town in Colorado, I knew a woman who most people would describe as a hoarder. She made her home in a log cabin not far from a winding river, under ragged cottonwood trees that shed downy tufts in early summer, and showers of gold each autumn. You could see […]