The 16-year-old was surprisingly easy to roust from sleep at 1:30, even if the room was almost pitch black. The full moon light that had earlier been seeping its way around the edges of the blind had diminished to almost nothing. A wrap of a down jacket around his shoulders, and a minute later we were outside on the back patio, with its wintertime view of...
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During the year of my birth Life magazine, at that time the carrier of the pulse of mainstream America, featured a ten-page spread on the fad of taking a 50-mile walk. The idea came from half-century-old executive order from President Teddy Roosevelt, no slouch himself when it came to physical fitness, who had mandated that officers in the Marines needed...
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It’s tantalizing how some of us who got to experience the privilege of working from home during the (we hope) worst days of the pandemic have been able to savor the obverse, the glorious and energizing feeling of being (carefully) back among other people after our long isolation. In my case, the place is a college campus, where after a year in which...
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It will probably draw some nods of recognition in Flagstaff, if not in a number of other lower, flatter places, if I suggest that much of what lures people to live at more than a mile above sea level is gravity itself — pulling us upward, so to speak, rather than pushing us downward as we might intuitively expect. It’s gravity that literally fuels so many...
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I knew before we got to the fallen tree that something had changed. All spring I’d been hiking up the Elden Lookout Trail, often looking up to see how quickly I was gaining elevation on the steep slope. On one of those hikes while it was still quite cold in early April, I noticed the stark bleached skeleton of a stately old pine that stood adjacent to one...
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