It’s the second year in a row the monsoon has gone largely missing, which leads me to a dire if irrational thought: maybe the wall is working. Because the purpose of the wall has always been more than the practical matter of deflecting people from crossing on foot. It’s been more about deflecting the whole idea of the South. It has been a symbol of how...
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You may have seen a curious news item recently, namely that the Alaska National Guard used a Chinook helicopter to lift a deteriorating 74-year-old Fairbanks city bus out of the wilderness near Denali National Park. This never would have been newsworthy had it not been for the fact that it was probably the most famous decades-old bus in the world, being...
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Until I had a treehouse to experience them in the gusty winds of late spring afternoons were always an ordeal to me. Back when as a young man I worked as a nomadic bird surveyor I found myself huddled in the meager shade of a government pickup on many afternoons, waiting for the wind to die down so that it would be possible to spot birds again, wearing a...
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Even though it was almost empty you could all but smell the adrenaline in the international terminal. Tullamarine International Airport, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, one of the country’s principal travel hubs, a place where in ordinary times the world traffics: businesspeople, backpackers, retired vacationers on the way home, parents with children in...
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In south Texas the line really was a river, even if it didn’t look like much. From the window of the pickup that Rose used to pick me up from the bus station the land on either side appeared equally flat and bland, the unpainted houses and patchwork fields set amid groves of trees as brown as grocery store bags. Winter had leached the color from the...
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