A few mornings after returning home I wake up from a dream of Spanish. Not in Spanish, which is an idealistic beginner’s aspiration, but of: the entire language had become a dense tangled mass of plants, a vegetative riot rich with exclamations, scraps of conversations and whispers, and though most of the sense remained murky to me, here and there I could...
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In the hubbub over the Women’s World Cup it has been easy to overlook, in the U.S. at least, that there’s been another major soccer tournament underway. I heard about it on a plane to Paraguay. In the only announcement that didn’t have to do with routine matters of timing, altitude or weather, the pilot reported the results of two first-round matches to...
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Back in the old days, most rivers gathered water from a wide area and delivered it to one place; they were gatherers rather than distributors. That seems profoundly old-fashioned now, at least in the hydraulically engineered West. That’s what I was thinking to myself earlier this spring as I stood in a field down in Eloy, in Pinal County. The field grew...
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My initial exposure to America’s great national parks came as a perk with my first magazine subscription. Thanks to an inspired second-grade teacher who worked to instill a love of nature in her students, I became an avid reader of Ranger Rick magazine. As a subscription bonus I received a set of national parks color-by-number drawings, to be completed not...
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Like good Christians, most thoughtful Americans have readily admitted that our current state is always one subject to improvement. Why else would the preamble to the Constitution underscore that the document’s purpose is to establish the arc of our shared journey toward “a more perfect union”—or, for that matter, why would so many voters believe the...
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