The Pine Tree Out Back
The dead pinyon pine behind my shack still looks sturdy. For now, at least. Short and stout in the way of its kind, the tree is more than a foot in diameter, but just 25 feet tall. When I bought this place ten years ago it was almost dead, battered by the one-two punch of drought and beetles. It finally gave up the ghost during an especially dry summer a few years ago. I had planned to cut up the tree for firewood–pinyons make dense and fragrant fuel–but changed my mind. Why? Because I could only burn the thing once. After it had...
read moreSome 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 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 morePledge
I pledge allegiance. To the pinyon jays at the feeders and the coyotes that woke me up at dawn, yipping at the moon. To the local ravens, jackrabbits and pronghorn antelope. Even to the black Angus cattle in my neighborhood, slow and stupid though they are. I pledge allegiance to the land, all of it: forests, meadows, deserts and bogs. Especially to public land – the commons. To village parks and to Central Park; to the Appalachians and the Rockies, the Sierra Nevada and the dark side of the moon. To everywhere that people call...
read morePracticing Resurrection
The house is tiny, 40 miles from town, off the grid. It sits on the high plateau south of Grand Canyon, on desert grasslands dotted with pygmy junipers and pinyon pines. This morning, warm orange light from an oil lamp washes over the death’s-head painting on the wall, and seeps out the windows into the last hour of blackness. A wood stove chases off the nighttime chill. Outside, one of two neighborhood coyote packs announces itself, following its hunger toward unlucky mice and rabbits. The dog stretches on her bed by the stove and...
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