I’ve always had a thing about mud, which is to say, about in-between places. As a boy roaming the Lake Michigan beaches there was nothing better than climbing the “clay hills,” an eroding bluff whose bare gray face was constantly calving off in sharp-edged chunks during the summer, or oozing slowly downhill during the wet of winter. That mud...
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The artist Shawn Skabelund was in Ashurst Hall on a recent Saturday afternoon, surveying what has surely never been seen before in the oldest building on the Northern Arizona University campus: a dwarf forest of charred logs ranging from head-high to stubs no taller than a monsoon mushroom. There were many hundreds of them, perhaps a few thousand—Skabelund...
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The red cabbages in the garden are fattening up nicely with the monsoon rains—knock on wood, right now!—which pleases me because as someone who grew up in a household of German background, I look forward to stewing them up with some apples and red wine and vinegar, and some cloves or a bay leaf depending upon mood, to create a nice big pot of what they...
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Sometimes a rock is just a rock. And sometimes it’s something more. I had the occasion to experience a lot of rocks last week, in Labyrinth Canyon on the Green River in Utah. It was a hot and buggy time for a river trip, but our small party was driven by vacation schedules and buoyed by ignorance: of the five of us, only I had been there...
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It is the daily pileup, delivered by someone I never see but sometimes hear when I am awake early, a light thump! that is as good an indicator as anything going on in the sky that dawn is about to come. There it is, the daily paper, and I know I will sound like an old fart here when I write that it is how I prefer to get the day’s news even though once in...
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