When you start looking, you see the potsherds everywhere–bits and pieces of the long-ago, scattered throughout the pinyon-juniper forest, standing out in the black volcanic sand like coins on a city street. At the edge of this dry mesa north of Flagstaff you can find pottery fragments in a wild array of colors and styles: Brick-red, slate-grey,...
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Is it mere vandalism, a messy rash on the skin of polite society? Or creativity trickling through cracks in mainstream culture? Graffiti is both, of course, and more. It is vox populi, the voice of the people. Graffiti is all around us. On a bathroom wall it might be nothing but crude sexual gestures. On city streets it can remind us that not all the news...
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In 1985 I was brand-new to Manhattan, and wowed by every bit of it—from Battery Park’s harbor views and the Midtown skyline all the way to the medieval gardens of The Cloisters on the northern tip of the island. To this hick from a one-light town, my new urban life felt unlikely in the extreme, almost fictional. One early winter day, running to catch a...
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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...
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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...
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