When the 2008 financial crisis hit, I didn’t lose a thing. There was nothing to lose. No house, no 401K, no stocks or bonds. My minimum-wage job at the bakery still paid minimum. My battered old truck had quit on me, but my bicycle tires still held air. I was doing OK Nonetheless the Great Recession was a wakeup call. For decades I had been enjoying...
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My thoughts kept returning to the letters I’d mailed…to say that my mom was hurt would be an understatement; in fact, she was heartbroken. Crisp autumn sunshine flooded the streets of upper Manhattan that afternoon. City buses and yellow cabs lurched from light to light, horns honked, pedestrians milled along the sidewalks. I stood in front of a big...
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May your hope always outweigh your doubt Till this old world finally punches you out… — Todd Snider, “Like a Force of Nature” It’s midnight on Saturday in my little shack, rain tapping on the roof. Just the dog and me and the music of the late Todd Snider. The barefoot bard of East...
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Range after range of mountains Year after year after year. I am still in love. ― Gary Snyder If you were to design a gateway to heaven, Spirit Pass would do: a deep granite bowl that scoops up a giant chunk of sky above a million-and-a-half acres of spruce-pine forest, silvery trout streams and crystalline lakes by the hundreds. Spirit Pass (not...
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US Route 93 shoots north out of Vegas as if it can’t stand the place, ditching the noise and nonsense of the casinos and the tedium of urban sprawl for the lean beauty of the high desert. Thirty years ago this week I peddled a grossly overloaded bicycle up this highway, intending a marathon trip west across central Nevada. Along the way I planned to...
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