Letter from Home appears weekly in Flagstaff Live! each Thursday, and is written by a rotating cast of Flagstaff-based writers, including Tony Norris, Shonto Begay, Jean Rukkila, Peter Friederici, Darcy Falk, Laura Kelly, Kate Watters, Margaret Erhart, Allison Gruber, Stacy Murison, and an occasional guest writer. Click the Read More button below any of these posts to read the full version and view any images that the authors have shared.
Some Things Fade
Shady Acres was exactly what I needed in August of 1995. That spring I had been living out of my pickup truck while waiting tables at Grand Canyon. In July I quit the job and set out to bicycle across the Great Basin desert–a fool’s errand writ large. On the afternoon that I peddled into Laughlin, NV, the temperature spiked at 117 degrees. Four searing days and 200 miserable miles later, I called my best friend in Flagstaff, pleading for a rescue. She obliged, and on the drive back from Nevada mentioned that the cabin next to hers...
read moreThe Testiest Prodigal Daughter
Let me introduce myself. I moved to this area in 1996, growing up with this column as a familiar voice. I’m feeling like I finally got invited to a cocktail party because it was weird not to. My son and I went to Jerome’s second annual music festival last weekend; we enjoyed the temperature in the shade and the jaunty vibrations of Jerome’s relaxed haunting. I watched the frisbee being tossed across the street in the same way I may head nod to a particularly chilling folk ballad. The music festival on wrap-around winding streets got me...
read moreWay Stations Remembered; One traveler’s tollbooth fandom
Every summer I make a pilgrimage to New England where I did some of my growing up. In a rented car I drive the familiar roads of Massachusetts and Maine, reacquainting myself with humidity and the color green. The farther north I go the fewer people there are, and along the coast the air cools and becomes salty. I don’t pull off the highway to find a bowl of fish chowder or a lobster roll, though I wish I were the kind of person that did that even just once. One thing I’ve learned about travel is it puts you right up against who you are,...
read moreBeauty and fear go with the job; Sweet dreaming follows
Stepping to each direction, pausing with both hands on the catwalk railing, softening my eyes, I pour all of me into one leg, then the other. My day on duty at the fire lookout begins with looking in the four directions before calling the dispatcher, “Flagstaff, Turkey Butte.” “Turkey Butte.” “I’m in service, winds NW at six, precip .35 inches.” He reads it back. Elden, O’Leary and East Pocket lookouts report their rain which I jot down, interested in the on-going story of moisture in the woods over summer. Then I put on my good...
read moreTalk Me Through It; Remembering Phil Donahue
Phil Donahue, whose 29-year, groundbreaking talk show spanned from the late 60s to the late 90s, died a few weeks ago at the age of 88. Headlines called him a talk show icon, a free speech champion, a pioneer. His New York Timesobituary dubbed him the king of daytime television. When Donahue began his show in Ohio in 1967, Lyndon Johnson was president, the Vietnam War was in its twelfth year, the first Super Bowl was played, Aretha Franklin released “Respect,” the Big Mac was created, and Elvis and Priscilla Presley married. My mother was 32;...
read moreEarly
In August, the ticking of the world’s clocks grows ever louder. In part that’s due to the looming closeness of the school year, a tangled cliff that’s always been present at the edge of summer’s smooth plateau (and that through my lifetime has come to begin ever earlier). This is my fault: I have clearly exacerbated my sense of summer’s mortality by choosing a career at a university, where I get to experience over and over again the mingled stress and excitement, the do-I-really-want-to-be-here-again doubt, that comes of the ever-renewed and...
read moreCreeping toward Coexistence
The flying ants showed up in mid-July, as usual. Each summer they whir into my life, unbidden and unwelcome, like the airborne monkeys in The Wizard of Oz–creepy and scary, highly motivated, seemingly guided by a dark force. These are red ants, good-sized, as ants go. Though not exactly warlike–I have never been bitten–they are, nonetheless, aggressive and disagreeable beasts with an impressive talent for creating misery. On hot summer nights they sneak around the window screens and into my off-grid shack near the South Rim,...
read moreBreakfast with the Captain
When I was a chubby five-year-old in puffed sleeves and shiny red shoes, and people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I had one answer: I want to be famous. I had learned not to say I wanted to be a fireman. Everyone laughed at that. But I couldn’t say what people expected, a teacher or a nurse. I didn’t want to be a teacher or a nurse. My first grade teacher scolded me for coloring outside the lines, and coloring a cow red, so being an artist was out. Sea captain brought the same reaction as fireman, and really after that, what...
read moreStories of my father
The last time my parents were in Flagstaff it just so happened to be the time my Letter From Home was in the paper edition of Flag Live. Although I’d sent hyperlinks of my essays to them, my dad held the paper and marveled that my essay was in print. “They gave you the whole page,” he remarked while folding it under his arm. I was waiting for him to say it was about time I used my journalism degree. But he didn’t—instead, he kept reminding me the rest of that day that I had a whole page for my ideas in the newspaper. He sounded proud. I...
read moreSummer/Time: To Everything There Is a Season. Again.
Last week, in the lazy thick of summer, my friend V and I woke up in her lake house, a small cottage on the edge of a town with no stoplights, no commerce, no noise. I read, she wrote, I napped, we hiked. The hours noodled on. The day was more like a cloud than a parking lot, and the unstructuredness of it all invited a burst of joy that I could only respond to by genuflecting. Gauzy, indolent summer. The season of cloud spotting, ice cream on a stick, and naps. The season when I can rewild my time. When I was a kid, I thought of time as...
read more