Dirt roads through the decades; My drives into solo
Music curled through the saloon in Crown King like a breeze of good will, lyrics a swirl of lively truth-telling, a three-chord aching antidote to firefighter woes and worries. Who scored hazard pay, who missed a fire on a day off, who was sleeping with who—the human shapes of fearlessness and foibles—stirred into the graceful guitar, sturdy drumming and sultry vocals until there was no one left sitting on a bar stool. We danced like our lives depended on it, leaning left and leaning right, thumbs hooked onto tooled leather belts, cowboy...
read moreBee odyssey; Of the plenipotentiary
Early in State Fair, the only musical Rogers and Hammerstein wrote directly for the movies, a young woman leans out her bedroom window and sings, “I’m as restless as a willow in a windstorm/ I’m as jumpy as a puppet on a string. I’d say that I have spring fever/ But I know it isn’t spring…” which is about what I feel like on this April day, with a piece of paper in each hand. In one hand, a certificate from an airline begs me to be bold, head out, become the plenipotentiary in my own life and see the world. In the other hand, a photo I took...
read moreA rock is a rock is a rock; In the land of hard and soft
Some of you looking at a crack in a rock think, “Treasure?” Others of you cringe, thinking, “Snakes.” Or perhaps you consider weight, balance, rock integrity and think, “Handhold.” Rocks beg me to climb them, to use friction and muscle to ascend. Where did I learn that? It is a Sunday afternoon in the early ‘60s in Phoenix and cars go up and down Central Avenue as families look at the tall buildings or stop for a bag of McDonald’s hamburgers or sit down at Bob’s Big Boy if Mom and Pop are courageous enough to let their children sprawl and...
read moreDirt road Valentine; Kisses for where our breath takes us
Small notes of music floated from a fountain of oak grove that had sprouted far enough off the dirt road to catch my eye but not draw my footsteps. The reedy small note of a harmonica sawed through an unfamiliar tune. From where I leaned against the hood of my truck, I couldn’t see the human source of the sounds. I looked for movement like I might look for a bird as a source of twittering. Of course I peered into trees first. And yes, below an arc of oak branches I saw a lump of human. You know dirt roads around Flagstaff, how they invite,...
read moreI don’t collect Mac trucks. (Glad to be a paperholic.)
It started with a bottle of French wine. Like a romance? An affair? A hazy remembrance from a night in Paris? No. Just a label that looked different from the bottles of Boone’s Farm which we 20-year-olds passed up, laughing, and different from the Blue Nun which we usually bought, thinking that must be good, it’s foreign. What IS Liebfraumilch anyway, we pondered aloud over spaghetti later. And what was that other wine that came in a fun earthy brown bottle. Lancers. I don’t remember the wine, just the bottle. Oh and those Italian...
read moreA very little Christmas; Where BELIEVE is big
I have taken my three pots of geraniums, my small Boojum tree and a willing gnome to visit with a St. Francis statue in a Tucson home that has a courtyard where a fountain gurgles and a black bird, a Phainopepla with a punk hairdo, dips his beak to drink each warm day. Arugula and lettuce still put out flavorful green no matter how much I pick to have with my lunch of Campbell’s bacon and bean soup. On a porch swing I read one book and then another. Two weeks ago I said, “Please Santa, bring me 40 degree nights and 65 degree days.” For a mere...
read morePlease toast the solitudinarian, wherever she may be
Solitudinarian is a word. It is entry number 922.5 in my Roget’s International Thesaurus, Third Edition, a word grouped with recluse, hermit and, get this, “closet cynic.” Well there is nothing like the fall and winter parade of holidays to bring out the closet cynic in me, old solitudinarian that I am. When you elect me president my first proclamation will be to outlaw Thanksgiving in odd numbered years, Christmas in even numbered years. Every other year is often enough, citizens. We need room to breathe, to restore our appetites for...
read moreBeware of Praying; A Halloween riff on insect carnage
“Oh gross!” I say aloud to pine tree and cabin, bright day and sky. “No, no, no,” I add, startling butterflies and quail. “Say it isn’t so!” A ripped-open long envelope from my twin sister Joyce flutters off the porch into the dry yellow grass. Usually mail from Connecticut brings me cartoons she knows will make me chortle or a photo from the internet of Bears in Unexpected Places. But quivering in my hand is a newspaper clipping that features a far too vivid color photo of a praying mantis with its head buried into the skull of a...
read moreBicycle in the Bardo; How Many Lives Are Left?
Recently a friend and I gave in to the urge to walk to a place with pictographs. Even with the directions to Picture Canyon Natural and Cultural Preserve in hand, it felt strange to skirt a mall and water treatment plant to get to a waterfall, but we found the parking, leashed her dog and happily headed out on a trail new to us. We strolled and peered at sunlight, chatted and only passed two other hikers on a weekday morning. She liked the pictographs on rock faces; I liked standing on a wooden bridge over the Rio de Flag and spotting empty...
read moreSun meets cottage cheese; Delight with eclipse light
On my way to watch the eclipse of the century, I didn’t fuss about a reservation or add miles to the odometer of my old truck. Instead, for four mornings in a row, I worked on my whole-body tan and read a book. I did consider joining the crowd wearing the funny glasses on Mars Hill. (Don’t those glasses make people look like they are in a scene from a 1950s sci-fi flick?) I thought also about joining the volunteer rangers out at Wupatki; an eclipse moment with ruins felt like it might ring a pleasing ancient note. But not for me, a pilgrimage...
read moreSpiraling through a goodbye; With trust and tender intent
When I told an old friend that the sale of my Maine house was closing 100 years and two days after the July moment when my grandfather signed a deed in 1917, he said, “How Finns flip houses.” I laughed and felt a fluttering of scenes from family history parade across my inner eye, like a small flip book making a jerky movie of the Finns landing in America, the Finns buying a farm in Maine, and then the Finns feeding four children through the Great Depression. The youngest in that house, my mother, grows up to marry a soldier and after...
read moreOne day in the dry June woods the fire crew meets the Bard
The Boss, Chuck, Jeff, Chris and I sat in the shade of pine trees with lunches at our knees. A couple of the fellows enjoyed wife-wrapped leftover chicken and Tupperware squares of salad from home gardens. Jeff the Vegetarian smelled like garlic but not because of his lunch. He wore cloves around his neck to prevent something, I forget what; perhaps he dared illness to approach his sturdy, muscled body. Chris ate grapes as if each one held a bubble of fortune. I chewed my PB&J while peering at a worn paperback of Robert Frost poems, and I...
read moreWhy I am a fool for first miles
In the first mile I saw what I needed so I went no further that day. That is to say, though the topo map and my memory presented me with a 4.7-mile trail to the highest point in Arizona, within the first mile flower color slowed me down again and again. Purple and yellow caused me to bend over and finally stop altogether, take my hat and pack off, and stand completely still to my core. Aspiration gave way to inspiration, so filled was I. To add more mountain to my morning would only crowd my heart. By walking a mere 20 minutes from my truck I...
read moreFinding focus near and far; Unconventional, but happy
I looked through three closets, two trunks and assorted boxes; I found love letters I’d forgotten and folders to support taxes filed in the ’70s. I found my first bolo tie and the softball glove that caught stinging line drives in 7th grade. I came back to the search the next day and thought of a plastic bin stored in a crawl space and after a tricky reach from a ladder there it was at last, my collection of stereo cards with viewer, and my dear View-Master with reels. It is my treasure, a quiet sit with alternative realities at my own pace....
read moreSqueeze a tree, tote a bucket, find the sugar
Oh sure, tell me there is a time for every season, what goes up must come down, what swings left will swing right, but echoes of homilies don’t make a dent in the flushed swirl of sleeplessness I feel at 3 a.m. Too often inside the long hours of a winter night I blink at the dark, staring down shapes I can’t see, dark forms I can’t name. But not this morning! At 5 a.m. I inventory the curl of my arms around a pillow, the embrace of my body’s heat from head to toe, and savor my float into this next March day. I feel stirred back into my bones...
read moreFootsteps or reading; Two paths to the next best day
I was just standing on the edge of the stopped again by deer tracks. I like to stand with my feet on deer tracks. Don’t ask me why. Don’t know why. Not a habit, or compulsion, I’m sure. But there I was, out to get air between waves of weather, and I can’t not pause with my new Merrells to stand on sharp, heart-shaped prints in damp ground. Do my toes hear stories of places seen, pathways sought? Mostly my walking today browses through old Arizona Highways. I am feasting on my collection of pages that show the state in 1948 or 1953 or l968....
read moreIn my hands-on life; Where melting happens
At the back of the head between shoulders and skull there is a stalk of tender plant; it is the rise of spine sturdy enough to hold the sunflower-like head of a body and bendable like a flower twisting toward healing sun. That few inches of neck one can’t see without a mirror, that place with the hairs that stand up with fear, that few inches of neck I have stroked with attention and care on 1,000 bodies. With permission for me to attend, with trust in a simple contract between trained massage therapist and client, people lie down on a magic...
read moreWhat costume does your heart wear? Mine takes the shape of a pilot bear
“Gently, gently into the trees,” murmurs a small voice on the window sill. “Morning light tickles all of the leaves.” Bear is singing to the dawn as I wake from a dream of a trail in the Grand Canyon, an old friend smiling by a wooden post with mileage on it, my feeling sense of one decade pleasantly knitting to the next. Then I think, the day must be delivering a package of color this morning. Bear only sings when sunrise is scenic. But what is the tune? Old Cat Stevens? Van Morrison? Or original Bear. His quivery voice continues, “First cup...
read moreSpoonfuls of random voices; Stirred into coffee-high locals
“To eat lambs quarters,” murmurs one friend to another, “pick them when they’re small then add them to your omelet. They are little triangular leaves of surprise.” Surprise like unexpected syllables wafting between tables on a Friday morning. The piquant flavors of overlapping conversations at the coffeehouse can add zest to sipping and nibbling of latté, scone or bagel. Even words that are less dainty add flavor. “Crappy elevator music … it makes me crazy,” says the woman in a corner whose handbag sprawls on the extra chair, wide open as if...
read morePutting a foaming Miller on the page; Cool, clammy, summer sweet
Of course it dates me to describe a time and place where a cold draft of a tame American beer was the answer to the summer end of day craving of a GS 3 firefighter in a mountain town. But it was the early ’80s and we liked our tall Buds in brown bottles and cold cans of Olympia. Heineken was as close as we got to differently brewed. There weren’t the 50 or 60 names of beers you find on menus now. We climbed onto bar stools and nodded and the bartender knew if there was one in the well left over for you from the night before, bought by a buddy...
read moreThe spark plug of a new paintbox; Go. Drink. Eat. See.
“Jean. Jean! I found one!” “Wait a minute, Vennie. There’s a bar whispering to me.” Last fall my friend Vennie came down from Albuquerque to meet me in Lincoln County, N.M., as I drove across the country. She’d read about the Little Free Libraries in Carrizozo. These are more than a dozen decorated 36 inch long by 36 inch wide by 36 inch tall boxes around town that offer a Take One, Leave One plan for lending books. We both added volumes to the mix. We took away photos and ended that day at the Smokey Bear Historical Park in Capitan down the...
read moreFeasting on years of yes; I’m glad I was saved from no
The driveway to the front door of the cabin where I live is a steep 50-yard lunge off a dirt road. Much of the year I goose my old truck up it without incident, but sometimes the travel of the gravel results in wavelike potholes that require a head start to gun through. Last week with gritted teeth I clutched the steering wheel of my old truck and felt the eyes of my passenger get wide as groceries bounced around the cab and tires spun a tower of dust cloud into the afternoon air. After unloading, I checked under the hood and discovered the...
read moreA map to spring grace; Where tulips meet dark
The woodstove that keeps heat in this cabin has changed into a sleeping bear. A match put to the teepee of crumpled newspaper and kindling offered an hour of warmth two mornings ago, and I approved. The flames were easily coaxed, miserly with woodpile leftovers, quickened by low humidity and higher temperatures. I went back to bed but then got up later to add in sticks of juniper, a woman in a white robe, hurrah! My silk long underwear are put aside at last. The woodstove beginning its deep sleep is not a surprise. My Vermont Castings...
read moreAt the table inside my head; storytellers mix worlds together
Memo to Mr. Zuckerberg: why isn’t there a Facebook emoji for, “I appreciate this delicate ripple passing through my heart?” Dear Shonto Begay, Peter Friederici, Darcy Falk, Laura Kelly and Tony Norris, I am cured of highway numbness when my smart phone tosses a two by three inch pebble of you into the blurry pond of my road fatigue. It is a long reach to enter Uptown Pubhouse from a rest area somewhere in America, but your faces cause me to feel how a wood chair might scrape to widen the circle around a table to include me. My nose detects...
read moreIgloos were us! A snowcone night in the woods
In a mood for big city recently, I scooted down to Phoenix in my little truck and noted with pleasure the sparkle of the Agua Fria downhill from Sunset Point. I took the exit to Rock Springs not to have pie but to have a closer look and sure enough, curley cues of snow melt laced together rocks under the bridge. I paused an hour for a walk on the Black Canyon National Recreation Trail and after enjoying the smell of wet creosote and the curves of big saguaros I motored on into the billboards, shopping centers, and lively intersections of the...
read moreGo for the glow; Share the gift of presence
Because this year the full moon peaks in the wee hours of Christmas morning, I found myself imagining Santa straying in his rounds. I pictured him in a fit of lunacy landing on the top of the Weatherford Hotel to look for a pine cone, and then entranced by the vision of the big moon from the balcony of the Zane Grey, he wanders the streets seeking a gin and tonic and dancing and maybe a food truck. I picture the moon strutting her stuff so fully on Christmas Eve it inspires coyotes from hither and yon to howl Christmas carols across the...
read moreRTDFIRELO meets LGHTHSKPR; A dispatch from Maine
When you drive an older white Toyota truck with Arizona plates in mid-coast Maine it’s not hard to bump into conversations here and there. You already look like an odd duck by having a white truck in a land of dark vehicles, and how strange, there’s no rust on your truck. “Maybe you want to sell that handy little truck?” asks the fellow in the pit changing the oil at the Prompto. “I’ve got near 300,000 on my Tacoma,” says a lanky stranger in the Rite Aid parking lot. “I have a cousin in Scottsdale,” says the man outside the bank, who thinks...
read more“You dared us to write!” A fistful of letters to the fire lookout
I tip back in a stout red wood chair to read mail at the lookout. When I leap up excited to write a reply to a good letter—BAM!—the feet crash with a metallic bang on the catwalk before I go inside to make the typewriter chatter with sentences. Beginning with Flo who sent a calligraphic meditation on the letter R until a couple of weeks ago when a woman living along the Rio de Flag observed, “the yucca in my yard sent up 5 stalks instead of the usual 2,” dozens of you readers responded to my May invitation to send me letters...
read moreO’Leary Quintet: Red, red, red, red and rain
Dawn light overtakes the candle I’ve been writing by, sleepless. Sleepless with too many thoughts for one lifetime Sleepless with guessing at how friends fare far away Sleepless because my pillow nests by the Milky Way. Awake where stars witness meteors. Look. The Universe. Then the red smear of dawn rewards my attention. On the first walk to the outhouse I pass ladybugs huddled on a tree trunk. They’ve chosen this peak at near 9000 feet for hibernation. I’ve chosen this peak at near 9000 feet to be as awake as possible. For weeks and...
read moreCelebrating unions on Independence Day
“Actually,” I say, “I’ve been a fire lookout for 22 seasons because I like how I can sneeze as loud as I want and no one laughs at me.” The hiker on the catwalk isn’t sure what to make of this. Am I teasing? I peer through binoculars at the dust kicked up on the 776 Road and remain inscrutable. “Actually, what I most love about solo,” I tell the next pair of hikers an hour later, “is how I can go to work on a bad hair day and not even notice it is a bad hair day until noon.” They can’t tell it is a bad hair day because I’m wearing the white...
read moreWant a letter from a fire lookout? Invest in a stamp
After I wrote my first letter of the summer, I asked a hiker who stopped by the fire tower to put the envelope into his pack and walk it the five miles off the mountain and mail it for me. I hoped he wouldn’t forget and find it a month from now stained by orange peels and smelling of sunblock-stained handkerchief. In the past six summers, I think most of the letters have gotten through that I’ve trusted to chatty youths hiking in church groups, foreign travelers amazed at the view and local hikers doing their annual trek. One letter even rode...
read moreSoon I will conduct pine trees from my summer podium
“I often conduct an orchestra in my sleep; my orchestras are so huge that the back desks of the violas vanish into the horizon. And everything is so wonderful,” wrote Finnish composer Jean Sibelius to a colleague in 1943. I had to call my violin-playing sister in Connecticut to ask her about the “back desks of the violas.” “Oh,” she said from her desk at the town office in West Cornwall. “Desk is another way to say stand.” Ah, I thought. Not the back of the actual instrument, but the pair of two musicians with a music stand. The back desks...
read moreI like my cold weather companions quiet. With lots of legs. And wings. Or big ears.
In winter I miss them. Without the windows and doors open I don’t come across them as often, those others who live where I live, the lively silent ones. I like finding ants, spiders, moths and other tiny beings on my windowsill, under the sink, outside the door and on the kitchen counter. I peer at them closely. I gather them onto paper or shoo them into a cup for a chat before setting them gently outside. They are the winged ones, the crusty shelled ones, the many legged ones. And they don’t talk a lot, and they don’t look preoccupied with...
read moreWarm Rock and Water Sound: January alternatives to ice fatigue
My legs tire of being tentative with steps. My eyes glaze with looking so closely at the danger lurking in sidewalk ice or trail snow. Eventually one winter morning between the whirls of Christmas/New Year’s holiday events and SuperBowl/Valentine’s Day partying, I wake up starved for planet delicacy. I need rocks, not snow. Time to go south for an afternoon. Or time to add two hours to a Phoenix trip to pause and curl up on warm granite for a nap or step tenderly along water’s edge someplace damp and warm. You know where, don’t you? ...
read moreOn meeting the wild: Me, Reese, Cheryl and Barb
The full color movie ad in the New York Times makes me do it. I pull the Kodak slide projector from the back of the closet and aim it at the white refrigerator and click through slides from 1967 until I find me on my first backpacking trip, which was through Aravaipa Canyon. The projector hums; I look at a 10-inch version of me in an orange T-shirt with an overstuffed pack. “Like Reese Witherspoon,” I chuckle. “Wild, indeed.” I don’t often see women in the Times that remind me of myself so you’d think that ad would send me straight to the...
read moreBaby A and Baby B and spontaneous song
Our father kept a wooden ladder permanently leaning against the eaves of the cinderblock duplex he built to house his family. It was not a ladder like you’d imagine poking out of the dark well of a kiva. Instead of hand-shaved poles, it was nailed together from wood leftover from various projects, and it was heavy, so maybe that was why it was always there, never put away—a permanent invitation to climb up out of routine and meet the wider world. He used it to tend the swamp coolers that needed pads changed, hoses reattached, belts tightened;...
read moreAwake with Orion; Dancing wishes, dreaming yellow
Earlier this month “Star Date” on KNAU caught me at a stoplight, so it sunk in through my idling split attention that pieces of meteors might delight one’s eyeballs in the wee hours of a Sunday or Monday morning. I even looked for more details at the Sky and Telescope magazine website. There it said the radiants of the Orionids would be near the raised arm of Orion. Look for shooting stars emerging there. Moonlessness will help the show. The skies look promising. Of course by nightfall I’d forgotten about it, and I hadn’t set an alarm. But my...
read moreTwo chairs for friendship; By a compass of color
On a Sunday morning at the cabin where I winter, a delicate clunking of deer hoof against rock stirs me out of easy dreaming. When I go from window to window looking outside for spindly legs, I blink the night out of my eyes and see nothing but light caught in bird wings. Below the front porch new marks in the dirt look as delicate as elf footprints. A rabbit bounces down the driveway and a moment later two rabbits come back up. I wish they’d bring me my first cup of tea. A blue jay at the bird feeder squawks, “In your dreams!” It...
read moreCloud kissed and stained by sunset; I am passing through
These sunflower days are smearing the hillsides with a daily wash of yellow and I want the color to paint truth for me, help me tuck the summer into memory. My fire season flew by with almost no fires. My side of the mountain slept through the summer it seems. Now I watch 25 violet-green swallows make passes by the windows of the lookout as if they are pulling banners that read, “Fall is coming, fall is coming.” Snapshots begin to layer in my mind like fallen leaves caught against a fence: an arch of rainbow that looked like it was coming...
read moreTwo pictures from the fire lookout, with a kite string between
Except for a small misgiving that haunts the echo chamber that is my heart, I am very happy these weeks out at the fire lookout. What a relief to be done with the windy tense drama of June. What a pleasure to voyage through the shadows and rain festivals of July. Now I record an inch of rain one day, a quarter of an inch the next. The night lights up vast ships of storms near and far. And clouds, wet clouds, wrap around peaks and ridges many afternoons. And yes, lightning crashes here and there, dropping blue buckets of precipitation and...
read moreMe and Smokey Bear; Gearing up for another season
Some time ago I stopped by Smokey Bear’s office in the Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C., and I said, “Hey Smokey! Aren’t you tired of holding down a desk? Why don’t you come out to Arizona and work in the woods again.” He didn’t commit, and the winter passed, and about the time Fisher Point started smoking this spring I got a text message that said, “Meet me at the Grand Canyon.” I went up to Tusayan and what do you know: it was Smokey with a shovel in hand. “Time to get ready gal!” he said, and after chili on the porch at the El...
read moreMy Tree by Moving Water; Where Root Meets Rock
I collect trees. That grove of oaks out A-1 Mountain Road, the grandmother juniper beside a trail north of town, the biggest aspen of them all on the west slope of the Peaks and the trees that lean over the St. George River in Maine to drop golden leaves each fall. And the mulberry I climbed when I was a child in Phoenix. And the one I call My Tree, a pal I met in high school who has become a sturdy, steady friend for life. In high school our hiking club filled up Beaver Creek campground with two station wagon loads of students and their...
read moreTwin winters savored with pages as unique as snowflakes
We both like tea in the morning and wine in the evening. We both talk into handheld radios in the summer: she on the volunteer ambulance squad in a little town in northwest Connecticut, I on a fire lookout near Flagstaff. We’re both likely to delight and probably call each other if we hear a canyon wren in an unexpected place. But, unlike those pairs of highly bonded twins in the spotlight at the recent winter Olympics, we haven’t shown up at most of each other’s events for years or been inseparable roommates or cheered each other on to a...
read moreGetting out to look around with friends in high places
Feeling overwhelmed by distances recently, I parked my truck on Mars Hill where I could see the plateau as a game board instead of a web of gas-sucking, spine-sagging miles. A train snaked through downtown. Mormon Mountain hibernated with blue-shouldered grace. A half-hour of perspective from above nudged my glum mood a bit. It could be I was TOO pensive with the new year. I’d spread a folder of photos of me out on a table: sixty years of me peering from school IDs, credit cards, snaps from friends, and glory shots from assorted...
read moreA Loner’s Christmas; The shepherd who didn’t show up
One year I made up a story to help a friend and I complete a walk. We’d left her car near a ranch at one end of a desert canyon and taken my truck to a side drainage to walk back through and have a day outdoors together. Even with ice at the edges of pools, the full sun and a cozy warmth with lunch on a big slab of granite made it a classic Arizona December walk. We looked at petroglyphs, and hawks glided above us to settle on the canyon rim. But the boulder hopping made progress slow and mindful of days being short, we were a little fitful...
read moreHeading north with a plan; Feasting there, on “nothing”
Do you enjoy details of Arizona land and lore? Here is a quiz for you: where is Doyle’s Saddle? Why is there a Sharlot Hall Museum in Prescott? If you are sitting on the porch at Kane Ranch, what cliffs glow with end–of-day light? Ok, so you have walked up the Weatherford Trail, and been down to play or listen to folk music in Prescott, and if you’ve driven to the North Rim you beetled through the great vast space of House Rock Valley where black cattle from Kane Ranch chew. Sitting on the porch of the ranch headquarters, I peer at the...
read moreLearning to frolic with change; Fall leaves and leave taking
As certainly as yellow creeps down the sides of the mountain where groves of aspens change daily, I feel my thoughts creeping away from the duty hours of looking for fires. Now I imagine distant adventures. For five years I’ve started winter by spending October in Maine in the small house my mother was born in. It belongs to me now and little old houses like to have regular attention paid to them. The last two years I drove to Maine in my little Toyota truck. But driving along Route 66 this summer on a day off I whooped and rolled into R...
read moreOn first responders everywhere; You and me and a stranger make three
As a fire lookout on a local peak, I am thanked many times each season for doing what I know how to do: sit quietly, look, notice detail, pay attention, respond effectively. That’s the work. I appreciate you all paying your income taxes that support my federal job to turn in smokes and read books. I appreciate the miracle of years of such employment in my life. I also know it is a good thing when one’s work suits one’s true nature. I taught at a community college for a decade and observed it again and again: whenever a student found work...
read moreTattooed by lightning; From pulsing cloud to spiral scar
A bolt sizzles between the fire tower and my truck 100 yards away. A thick lump of smoke wafts across the steep road. My eyes widen at sound and shape exploding in the woods. Though I’ve seen hundreds of bolts in 20 seasons, I am astonished. From my wooden chair I peer out the west window trying to see into the draw where lightning has once again not hit the highest point. Will fire start? Inside days of monsoon moisture, it could go either way. A tree blows up and pine needles catch or all that electricity grounds without flame. I am eager...
read moreHey Zephyr! Hello Notus; Living with windy pals
A summer camped out in a fire lookout on a peak gives me breezy company. On this plateau that means mostly the daily presence of winds named after the Greek gods of the south and west: Notus and Zephyr. These changeable companions amuse me when I step onto the catwalk to blow bubbles, startle me when a 40 mph burst charges past my door, and lure me in to musing about their absence when I lean out from the catwalk at dusk and listen to the delicate hum from steep slopes where aspen leaves gently flutter and pine needles vibrate. Wind cuffs me...
read moreThe day-off town; Where miles meet merry
Your day-off town is not the place where you wake up most mornings. If you have a day-off town, you work elsewhere: on the road, on the river or at a duty station for the park, the forest or for science. You guide or you fight fires or record artifacts, educate on the rez, or service trains east and west. After you’ve spent nine days on a cot, or weeks eating off enamelware dishes in government quarters, the vision of time in town starts to glow like an angel on the horizon beckoning, come hither. Soon, soon you can do your laundry with a...
read moreHow to draw; Sharing one line at a time
Standing in front of a whiteboard in front of a class of wide-eyed second graders or a group of squirming teachers in a faculty meeting I wouldn’t say anything, but instead pick up a blue marker and draw a line that approximated a desk in the front row. Then I would pick up a red marker and create the shape of a head with a line of bangs and a graceful droop of hair from ear to cheek. I’d risk a couple of marks to approximate eyes and then pause for a count of six to really look at what might come next. I’d try not to let the fact that 20...
read moreWhere is my novelist? The eager reader seeks down south
It was an impulse. I couldn’t predict I’d suddenly need to read the first paragraphs of the novels written by old friends, but once it felt necessary I found myself at Bookmans pulling hardbacks from shelves and standing on a stool in an aisle muttering words aloud. And then, satisfied I hadn’t forgotten my wonder at their words, I spent the day imagining what if the ambulance-driving, poem-writing, dance-creating, songwriting, champions-of-social-justice friends of mine who aren’t novelists wrote novels, what kind of novels would they be? I...
read moreHow to draw; Sharing one line at a time
Standing in front of a whiteboard in front of a class of wide-eyed second graders or a group of squirming teachers in a faculty meeting I wouldn’t say anything but instead pick up a blue marker and draw a line that approximated a desk in the front row. Then I would pick up a red marker and create the shape of a head with a line of bangs and a graceful droop of hair from ear to cheek. I’d risk a couple of marks to approximate eyes and then pause for a count of six to really look at what might come next. I’d try not to let the fact that 20...
read moreGraced by silence; Words and the river flowing
I’ve never been called a motor mouth. Except for the occasional morning when compelling insight from overnight dreaming must be described in intricate detail upon waking, people I’ve lived with report they want me to say more, not less. I presume I inherited this reticence from my grandparents. All four came over on the boat from Finland. Perhaps you’ve heard that joke: “How can you tell when you’ve met a Finnish extrovert?” Don’t know. “When he speaks he looks at your feet instead of his own.” This can make the supper table the land of...
read moreUseful nothing; What I am doing in Maine
The silence before the collapse: that’s what made us laugh. Three kids stack playing cards to make little rooms on the living room floor and then the colorful rectangles barely whisper when they fall down, turning our long minutes of focused concentration into one shared gasp. Dismay and delight mixed together. That’s what I think of when I stand back to look at the temple I’ve just built from old postcards, a fragile monument I’ve balanced on the wooden kitchen table of my house in Maine. Postcards have been collecting in the attic forever...
read moreQuittin’ time; A fire lookout meets winter
When great pools of standing water shine day-break orange out along the Little Colorado, and I see spray from Grand Falls without my binoculars, I begin to think, “Outta here.” When a lightning-struck dead snag burns like a chimney but doesn’t start wet pine needles on fire, my mission shifts. This morning before sunrise, there I was bent over the beam of my six-cell Maglite re-setting the screw that loosens on my glasses every other month. To start my day groping for a popped-out lens on the floor nudges me to consider visions. What shape...
read moreService is the adventure; On daring to go far in a life
Nurse Nina Poore has singlehandedly inspired me to dare to be great in my 80s some day. “Nina won’t tell you” I heard repeated about Nina around town. She won’t tell you about being Arizona Daily Sun Citizen of the Year in 1990 or that Governor Rose Mofford awarded her a clock for her work with preventing substance abuse among children. That might be characteristic of inspirational leaders, it occurs to me: they have more important things to do than blow their own horn. She will tell you stories about a life that ranged from Hawaii to Fresno...
read moreGlimpses from the fire lookout; (Not quite of this world)
“Dispatcher, I have a small glowing red and purple disc at 174 degrees, 31 miles, hovering over Mormon Lake.” “I copy, 174 degrees, 31 miles. We’ll call this Incident #4.” In 18 seasons at a handful of fire lookouts in central Arizona I’ve seen flares dropped from Air Force craft, I’ve seen dust from the Painted Desert roll down the Little Colorado like a puffy red dragon, I’ve seen a rock slide in the Grand Canyon send a column of white 1000 feet high; I’ve seen peregrines plummet, kestrels float, ravens swirl and eagles inherit the earth. ...
read moreI love it local; Tips from my tip jar habit
It’s not that I wouldn’t enjoy seeing Mary Chapin Carpenter and Shawn Colvin at the Lensic in Santa Fe, or Gillian Welch at the Orpheum, or Taj Mahal, or Melissa Etheridge at Fort Tuthill—worthy performers all—but in the big balancing act of my wallet and the world, I want always to keep a 20 dollar bill ready for a tip jar. If I too often buy the expensive tickets out there, as seductive as those shows might be, when I look into my fraying Kavu wallet I do not find the 20 there I keep ready to show my appreciation for the Spring Fed Band or...
read moreEmpty that pack! Lighten up and move on
Recently I had dinner with a woman who arrived in Flagstaff on foot from Mexico. Passersby on Aspen who peered into the window of Mountain Oasis could hardly guess that gal savoring forkfuls of Greek salad had been hungering for feta cheese for more than 30 miles as she goosed herself along the Arizona Trail to get to Flagstaff ahead of a snowfall. We’d never met before, though we’ve both contributed to a ranger round-robin letter that has spiraled through Canyonlands, Alaska and assorted Arizona and Colorado fire lookouts for years. I knew...
read moreWherever I am, I can be somewhere else
I used to pull picture books off library shelves to decide what vistas I longed to inhale, what routes I’d take through foreign lands, what hotel lobby would be just right for making a phone call to get a room at a youth hostel. Like me, perhaps you have furtively rifled through expensive guidebooks in the bookstore trying to memorize the 800 number for a key contact over there, far way, someplace else. But now one can travel online ahead of time, or in real time, or even in place of ever actually leaving. Yes, I admit to “leaving” a snowy...
read more“Love u 4ever” revisited; When ‘our song’ is long gone
Dear Reader, the sweet nothings have been murmured, the roses delivered, the valentines calculated and expensive dinners put on plastic. Now that the yearly ritual created to warm up winter with romantic gushing is behind us, let’s spend a little imagination on creating a new holiday; let’s have one to honor ex’s. How might we celebrate keeping connection after the dismantling of romance? It might be you don’t want to go there. After all, there’s a reason the chorus of George Strait’s song “All My Ex’s Live in Texas” ends with “that’s why I...
read moreThe Deep Listening Tour: Why I Am Not at Home
What if you didn’t owe any money, and all your stuff was in a 10 by 15 foot storage locker, and you were single and not desperately lonely—in fact, it feels like you might never be desperately lonely ever again—and your truck runs good enough, and your body works well, too. No prescription drugs necessary, no surgery pending. A little work on the teeth being put off, but when has that ever not been true. What if you lost your grip on decades of habits of work and play. What if your dreaming at night became voyages through bright...
read moreA fiercely creative life; Where stone steps lead to song
Being creative like Kate Watters is creative causes me to see one of those fierce short swirls down a desert canyon, the kind of wind that causes sand, willow leaves and bird song to brush against your deepest thoughts. The image occurs to me as I wait in her studio while she finishes a detail at a computer for the Grand Canyon Trust where she is the volunteer program manager. I savor the mix of postcards, journals, feathers and shafts of grass, pens in the yellow El Pato salsa can, and scissors in the Café Bustelo tin. Colorful cloth spills...
read moreThe warming center; You will want one someday
One hopes not to have bad things happen, but bad things do eventually and that’s when you’re lucky if you “live in a good place to have bad things happen.” My path to and from Maine takes me through my sister’s house in northwestern Connecticut. There I have plucked eggs from under the chickens, tapped maple trees to boil sap to syrup, pressed apples for cider and this trip I watched a smart small town respond to the Northeaster of a storm that put 22 inches of snow through trees that hadn’t lost their leaves yet. For hundreds of square miles...
read moreOn building a box; My fall in Maine
The AAA TripTik said it is 2,737 miles from Flagstaff to my house in Maine, which is close to true in my truck even with getting lost outside Indianapolis. Now here I am, and today I’m building a box to dampen the noise of the sump pump in the basement. I don’t like launching off the bed when the pump kicks in at odd moments: mid good dream at 3 a.m., for example, when it sounds like a 747 landing beneath the floorboards! If I can build a successful box to hold insulation around the pump I might sleep better and maybe a light bulb could be...
read moreMy sitting practice; Coffee in the Bird Cafe
As I steered toward being first in line at Macys one morning en route to the fire tower, I made a good stop at a Beaver Street yard sale: I scored three snap-button cowboy shirts, a serviceable fanny pack, and a $3 wooden chair from IKEA. That chair has made me the monk of impulsive outdoor meditating. Meditation practice courses through my life as sweetly as a rivulet snaking through granite boulders in a desert canyon. Without being formal, my sitting with the Quakers some Sunday mornings, my upright breathing with assorted knowledgeable...
read moreFlights of fancy; In town and out
Laced into Flagstaff neighborhoods, cinched into local lore, if you’ve lived here long enough you know local old timers who offer a feast of stories. I lived awhile on Dale Street across from the late Mrs. Black, the Boston-educated cowboy-savoring widow of Sheriff Black. If I saw the pink smear of her favorite dress catching sun in a window, I’d stop by for a cup of afternoon tea. She described early times in Cameron with the man Cameron is named after, and she nodded at the giant conifers outside and said that fellow Michelbach brought them...
read moreInspired utterance; Did you get my message?
Downhill dirt roads do focus one’s attention, so as I rounded a curve on a switchback from the lookout this week I easily spotted branches across a narrow stretch ahead. I cinched the parking brake and got out of my truck to clear the way wondering which wind event had broken branches. As I bent to the chunks of pine I saw a message scratched in the dirt. DONNA it announced in foot high letters, and underneath I saw two smaller words made with broken sticks: WAS HERE. I marveled to find a message on a road I’ve driven a hundred times where...
read moreRemind me I’m in love; Dog walkers and disc flingers
Operatic trilling? Amplified gargle? That bird’s intention is to be flutist Jean-Pierre Rampal keeping up with Claude Bolling’s jazz on piano. My dreaming melts into the pillow and soon I’m upright wondering at this bird voice steering me away from tea and e-mail, shower and chore. That bird insists I put footsteps on the planet, until I match its burst of heart with my own ambulatory joy in being. I am not a regular at Buffalo Park. Where people do laps so earnestly I feel left out with my poet’s pace. But nudged by a bird that got me out of...
read moreTo wander free; You can’t get there from here
Though one can leave an hour margin to get to missions in Phoenix on time—and you can avoid the rush hours with wise planning—still you don’t know when the system of pavement, exits and speed limits will seize up and there you are behind an idling semi truck, two lanes halted, with no escaping at Cordes Junction because you’re south of that already; you are ready for the downhill float into desert below Sunset Point but now southbound I-17 has stopped for no obvious reason. An accident near Bumble Bee Road, says a friend I call on my cell...
read moreThe allure of being invisible, 8,000 copies at a time
I see you. You’ve pulled Flag Live out of your book bag and so it is wrinkled where your nursing text, that enormous tome, has crushed both your newspaper and your container of yogurt. And you there: you’ve set the paper down on a ring of leftover latte at your favorite wooden-tabled, street-peeking, or peak-viewing home to seekers of the morning buzz. Or maybe you’re catching up after work or hike or river trip and you wonder where is that last Flag Live as you paw through the piles in the living room and find it between the exploded...
read moreSavoring Silko, shifting shape; A report from my winter reading
During the stillness of 3 to 5 a.m. I might be dreaming, I might be whistling through my nose or I might be noting the Big Dipper balanced on its handle outside my bedroom window, followed by nodding at the half moon grinning over the kitchen sink when I get up to make tea. Lately, a recently published memoir by Leslie Marmon Silko keeps me company until dawn. How nice to feel the desert in my bones as I savor “The Turquoise Ledge.” Silko lives on land at the edge of Saguaro National Park West in Tucson. I bring to her pages my own fond...
read moreWhen tending these many thresholds; Leaf it to me to get goofy
I live in a house where an apple tree keeps sending leaf messengers to the doorstep. Beginning in October and continuing as snow falls at the year’s end, I’ve arrived home to feel the crunch of leaf matter under my feet while I look through my pockets for my keys. For weeks and weeks I’ve been sweeping them up from the front yard to put in the back yard compost bin and still when the wind blows the naked branches seem to divert swirls just right to catch handfuls of leftover leaves and throw them at the door. At first I found I enjoyed...
read moreWhat gift do you want? Angels might want to know
As we munched turkey leftovers spread on toast with gravy the question went around the table, “What do you want for Christmas this year?” Everyone else wanted experiences or edibles: no stuff! I, however, wanted a big thing: that white baby-face Fiat 500 I rented for a day to do a quick trip to Phoenix. I loved the Bose speakers, the moon roof, the handling, the way kids in parking lots pointed at it and tugged their parents’ shirt tails as if they were saying, “Please mommy, can I have a toy like that?” “But maybe experiences do trump...
read moreLightning meets candle; When waking overtakes the still small flame
On a local mountain peak where a metal fire tower begins to shiver with the approach of fall, distant lightning arrives with sunrise one morning. To the creep of yellow and the spread of turquoise on the eastern horizon an insertion of orange meets the flashes of lightning over Winslow. Briefly bright cumulus clouds pulse for a hundred miles along the Mogollon Rim. With that delicate rhythm of sky transformation, a flutter sounds against 360 degrees of glass windows: moth wings startle to movement as if the tiny sleeping critters were...
read moreSleeping inside a cloud; It’s all a dream
Whenever you lie anywhere on a cot in a sleeping bag with a delicious red plaid flannel lining, your very dreaming might feel cozy like floating upon a gentle cloud. If that cot and red sleeping bag is inside a fire lookout at eight or nine thousand feet, and it is an August day with monsoon moisture lowered down around your ears, then you might actually be inside of a cloud as you sleep. Or are you asleep? You might be on duty with your binoculars in hand, useless, as you bend to the glass to examine how the moist noses of a zillion water...
read moreFire on our mountain; Meet Sam McGee in the oven
Lately at the lookout I’ve been reading verses by Robert Service. (In a busy fire season, one finds balance where one can.) Sometimes called “The Canadian Jack London,” Service liked his people and places to have a bit of grit. It’s not hard to imagine him feasting on the details of a fire camp, so as I watched rain sprinkle the dark swath of the Schultz Fire, I felt Service-inspired rhymes arrive like blue veils spilt from fat clouds … A Song of Hazard Pay The Shots are here to swing their tools High above on Doyle’s slope. She scrapes bare...
read moreOn being selective; More musings on not talking
In a classroom at a middle school the effervescent students wanted me to know one among them “doesn’t talk.” Every day we’d all draw and add words to our drawings: I was the honored guest there for a two week arts in education gig. The teacher was a genius with seventh graders. And one among us they called “selectively mute.” I liked her doodles of Ren and Stimpy and the clear current of her own mind following its course amidst classroom chatter. By not talking she seemed to have obtained permission to keep alive her own world, even at...
read moreDid you hear that bird’s wings? A non-talker’s manifesto
I tore the label off of a pint bottle of water to write down the title for this column. On a recent hike I had a pen in my pocket but no paper, and I wanted to keep the sentences that seemed to bob up from the current of my thoughts like a cork that won’t sink. I like to take the cork from dinner’s wine bottle along when I walk by the rivulet at Schultz Pass or sit on the blue granite at Badger Springs. I toss and retrieve the cork awhile and let its dance in the currents show me what resilience looks like. A cork bobbing and sluicing,...
read moreI learn to delight in thrift: When Warrior Mouse does the math
I want Warrior Mouse. As soon as I saw him in the window at Puchteca Indian Art I started putting the occasional extra five-dollar bill into a tea tin savings bank: For weeks I’ve walked San Francisco Street to the post office so I can admire the feather on his head and the white spots on his delicate but fierce mouse body. I make up stories about where he is going with his bow and mallet. Shaped with precision by Hopi carver Watson Namoki, he’s worth every nickel of the $180 price, and while I’ve long believed no art purchase need be...
read moreThe impulse to connect; When mortal, but not lonely
One recent night I e-mailed a photo of my bookshelf to a writer at The New Yorker. It’s hard to recall quite what seized my shy person’s soul to cause me to upload a rectangle of my private life into a stranger’s computer across the continent. I do know I felt wonder to read in a national forum—The Book Bench—an article about analyzing a person by examining a sample of her bookshelf. It’s a kind of palm reading I’d pay 10 bucks for, actually, and here in the online magazine was a picture of a bookshelf belonging to a young woman in New Jersey...
read moreTrusting the tracks; Living with trains
Falling out of orbit in the Friendship 7 space capsule: as a girl I wanted to do it! Maybe that’s when I became eager to spend company with large chunks of fast moving metal. Hence, I can sometimes be found on the platform of the train station when Amtrak arrives in the evening. This Sunday I counted 11 people getting on and 23 getting off. The two engines of the train straddled Beaver Street for under 10 minutes and after that blast of horn recognizable as Amtrak standing in the station, the train pulled away and turned into two bright...
read moreMountain life: Winter walking and Phoenix napping
Because I still have family and friends in the city where I was born, it’s easy for me to be a winter connoisseur of Phoenix back yards. In this back yard, my head rests on a pillow in the shade of a grapefruit tree while my belly and legs and feet bake in afternoon sunshine. Birds squeak, a girl behind a block wall beyond the alley squeals while her daddy cuts a board and hammers a nail, and a foot-high broccoli plant in a nearby garden gathers light into floppy rabbit-ear leaves. A curve-billed thrasher alights on a wooden fence and cocks...
read moreBorn on the Fourth of July; A 5 by 9 1/2 foot remembrance
When I worked for the government as a fire lookout, I would watch the distant dandelions of fireworks on the Fourth of July and toast my father’s birthday. Standing in that dark capsule on a mountain top I’d think of him in Europe with the 94th Infantry and wonder how his experience compared to the episodes of the television show, COMBAT, we watched as children. In the garage a brown uniform hung on a nail pounded into a rafter. We showed it to the neighborhood kids but didn’t have any gory stories to tell. There were photos in his albums...
read moreWandering in the dark; (when ho-ho-ho gets old)
I know a woman who celebrated Winter Solstice at the South Pole by inviting fellow workers at the station there to join her with wine to watch a DVD of the Peter, Paul, and Mary Christmas Concert. When I pictured it, I imagined them as far from Christmas as possible, almost as if they celebrated on a space ship. Indeed I read a blog where a worker who attended that evening described how hard it felt to be working in Antarctica so far from a North Dakota childhood. She had found little solace in the minimal decorations around the station,...
read moreSacred is; As sacred does
The San Francisco Peaks practically whisper through the bedroom window of my upstairs apartment near downtown. Along with the tribes that consider the mountain sacred, I believe the rest of us should more frequently name how that mountain touches our lives. I know I count on the peaceful presence of the highest peak in Arizona. Many times a week I look at its shape and consider the clouds there or imagine the creatures walking through aspen, pine and fir. Lately I’ve been up there almost every other day to pray with my feet. I’ve spent...
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