When the 2008 financial crisis hit, I didn’t lose a thing. There was nothing to lose. No house, no 401K, no stocks or bonds. My minimum-wage job at the bakery still paid minimum. My battered old truck had quit on me, but my bicycle tires still held air. I was doing OK Nonetheless the Great Recession was a wakeup call. For decades I had been enjoying...
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My thoughts kept returning to the letters I’d mailed…to say that my mom was hurt would be an understatement; in fact, she was heartbroken. Crisp autumn sunshine flooded the streets of upper Manhattan that afternoon. City buses and yellow cabs lurched from light to light, horns honked, pedestrians milled along the sidewalks. I stood in front of a big...
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May your hope always outweigh your doubt Till this old world finally punches you out… — Todd Snider, “Like a Force of Nature” It’s midnight on Saturday in my little shack, rain tapping on the roof. Just the dog and me and the music of the late Todd Snider. The barefoot bard of East...
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Range after range of mountains Year after year after year. I am still in love. ― Gary Snyder If you were to design a gateway to heaven, Spirit Pass would do: a deep granite bowl that scoops up a giant chunk of sky above a million-and-a-half acres of spruce-pine forest, silvery trout streams and crystalline lakes by the hundreds. Spirit Pass (not...
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US Route 93 shoots north out of Vegas as if it can’t stand the place, ditching the noise and nonsense of the casinos and the tedium of urban sprawl for the lean beauty of the high desert. Thirty years ago this week I peddled a grossly overloaded bicycle up this highway, intending a marathon trip west across central Nevada. Along the way I planned to...
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Oh the water Oh the water Oh the water Let it run all over me… — Van Morrison, “And It Stoned Me” A shining ribbon of water flowed through my childhood. On family picnics during the early sixties in Camden, NY, I toddled along the grassy banks of Fish Creek, enchanted as only a child can be. While my mother grilled...
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The dying palo verde is poor shade but will have to do. At noon the sky is cloudless, the temperature pushing 100. The tire is a puddle of useless rubber, a dime-sized hole gaping through what’s left of the tread. Pavement lies 15 miles to the north. I stretch out in the gravel wash and stare up at squadrons of bees weaving through the spiky, tangled...
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Help Wanted: New midtown Italian bistro hiring seasoned hospitality professionals. New York City experience a must. Trattoria Dell’Arte, 900 Seventh Avenue. My inability to pronounce the name should have scared me off. During three years in Manhattan I’d never set foot in a place like Trattoria Dell’Arte. I couldn’t afford to. But...
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When you start looking, you see the potsherds everywhere–bits and pieces of the long-ago, scattered throughout the pinyon-juniper forest, standing out in the black volcanic sand like coins on a city street. At the edge of this dry mesa north of Flagstaff you can find pottery fragments in a wild array of colors and styles: Brick-red, slate-grey,...
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Is it mere vandalism, a messy rash on the skin of polite society? Or creativity trickling through cracks in mainstream culture? Graffiti is both, of course, and more. It is vox populi, the voice of the people. Graffiti is all around us. On a bathroom wall it might be nothing but crude sexual gestures. On city streets it can remind us that not all the news...
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In 1985 I was brand-new to Manhattan, and wowed by every bit of it—from Battery Park’s harbor views and the Midtown skyline all the way to the medieval gardens of The Cloisters on the northern tip of the island. To this hick from a one-light town, my new urban life felt unlikely in the extreme, almost fictional. One early winter day, running to catch a...
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The dead pinyon pine behind my shack still looks sturdy. For now, at least. Short and stout in the way of its kind, the tree is more than a foot in diameter, but just 25 feet tall. When I bought this place ten years ago it was almost dead, battered by the one-two punch of drought and beetles. It finally gave up the ghost during an especially dry summer a...
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Shady Acres was exactly what I needed in August of 1995. That spring I had been living out of my pickup truck while waiting tables at Grand Canyon. In July I quit the job and set out to bicycle across the Great Basin desert–a fool’s errand writ large. On the afternoon that I peddled into Laughlin, NV, the temperature spiked at 117 degrees. Four...
Read MoreThe flying ants showed up in mid-July, as usual. Each summer they whir into my life, unbidden and unwelcome, like the airborne monkeys in The Wizard of Oz–creepy and scary, highly motivated, seemingly guided by a dark force. These are red ants, good-sized, as ants go. Though not exactly warlike–I have never been bitten–they are,...
Read MoreI pledge allegiance. To the pinyon jays at the feeders and the coyotes that woke me up at dawn, yipping at the moon. To the local ravens, jackrabbits and pronghorn antelope. Even to the black Angus cattle in my neighborhood, slow and stupid though they are. I pledge allegiance to the land, all of it: forests, meadows, deserts and bogs. Especially to public...
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The house is tiny, 40 miles from town, off the grid. It sits on the high plateau south of Grand Canyon, on desert grasslands dotted with pygmy junipers and pinyon pines. This morning, warm orange light from an oil lamp washes over the death’s-head painting on the wall, and seeps out the windows into the last hour of blackness. A wood stove chases off...
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