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...
Read More
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...
Read More
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...
Read More
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...
Read More
Poetry lives in the rigor of its format. A sonnet: 14 lines of 10 syllables each, with a specific rhyming scheme. Haiku: 17 syllables, no more or less. Even a randy limerick has to follow a precise line structure. What irritations writers have felt when what seems precisely the right word in its meaning doesn’t fit the meter or the rhyme—what tyranny, they...
Read More