I was at about 11,000 feet when the last of the sunlight vanished. That’s where the trail grows steep and the trees begin to give out, the bristlecone pines and subalpine firs increasingly stunted and wind-sculpted. That’s also the elevation where I always feel the thinning atmosphere, and have to stop more often to pant. But from here there was no...
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I never thought speaking German would come in handy in the Southwest. Wouldn’t learning Spanish have been more useful? But I’d been in Arizona only a couple of years when I found out about an intriguing job: drive vanloads of German-speaking tourists around the Southwest, guiding them on hikes in the national parks. I signed on at once. It was far better...
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You know it when you see it. There it is, gathering again on the bookshelves and under the bed. It crunches between your teeth on windy days. You feel it underfoot while walking to the patio; wipe it off the windowsill with a moistened rag; scrawl “Wash Me” on the back of a delivery truck that’s been down a rural road. Everyone knows it....
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Mr. Philyaw was the cool English teacher, the one with the shoulder-length mane of wavy silver hair, the one the girls talked about, the one who could teach Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance with some authority because he rode a motorcycle himself, as was readily evident on early spring days when you’d see him strolling the halls in...
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It was a good thing I didn’t grow up in Arizona. I was too much of a pyromaniac for that. I well remember a time when I was in fourth or fifth grade and playing with the slightly wild kids who lived across the street. Jonathan and Danny: their house was a mess, and they didn’t have an established dinnertime like we did. I envied them no end. They ran...
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