I know I am not alone in feeling that the past winter was a tough one in northern Arizona. Though it didn’t feature the epic snowpack amounts of 2023, it amounted to a good snow year—over 100 inches total in Flagstaff—and simply to a long haul of cold days, so that it wasn’t until well into April that we crested over 60 degrees. In March and into early...
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Based on my recent and careful study of the social media zeitgeist, I have come to understand that public confession is the best and most efficacious way to combat private demons. Yet I am ill-equipped to do so there, as my personal engagement with social media tends to be pretty half-assed; I am a dabbler rather than a deep diver. So I have to find some...
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It is hard to conjure up memories of childhood snows without a sneaking suspicion that they have been colored by the relentless mass-media momentum of the original Frosty the Snowman animated TV special, with its insistence on the sanctified magic of the winter’s first snowfall. But I know there are old family photos with that same vibe, images of cute...
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My first camera was a heavy manually operated 35-millimeter model that my parents gave me when I was about 14 years old. It was far from cutting-edge, as newer cameras had built-in light meters and other battery-powered accessories; this one didn’t. But I was satisfied. An older camera conformed to my ideal of what photography was supposed to be....
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It was toward the end of our latest summer of record heat and weirding weather that I finally got to go up into California’s White Mountains to see the ancient bristlecone pines. The mountains aren’t far from the Sierra Nevada with its ample lakes and waterfalls, but they are a world apart, baking in the bigger range’s rain shadow, a province of dry...
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I will confess that I have not read the federal indictment, released last week, that accuses former President Trump of the improper possession and hiding of classified documents. But like many other people, I suspect, I did see the widely disseminated photos of heaps of banker’s boxes piled in various rooms in the Mar-a-Lago. The one that hit closest to...
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spring The evening grosbeaks have been peeping and cheeping pretty much every morning in April, snacking on elm buds and drinking from the creek that’s been running alongside the tracks since the deep freeze of winter left us. The grosbeaks aren’t unusual, as they show up every spring, but the creek is. Old Town Spring often leaks and trickles a bit...
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The first day of spring—March 20, in this year—wasn’t very springlike here in Flagstaff, with rain and snow showers coming on a gusty day of clouds and near-freezing temperatures. More of the same, in other words. It’s been a harsh winter in northern Arizona. As storm after storm has pummeled the high country, the snow days have piled up as high as the...
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By the time I got to The Drive, I’d gotten damn used to small-d driving: all those errands through suburban mall-land, returning home late through the mercury-vapor streets after nights out with friends in some Chicago neighborhood or other, the longer expeditions that took varied combinations of friends, often overnight, to visit someone at a college in...
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Every six weeks, when my time in the lineup comes up, the same question arises, or set of questions: What to write about, and how to write about it? So I went to the hot new tool of the moment: ChatGPT. ChatGPT is the new artificial intelligence writing software that has set academia abuzz, mainly in an alarmed way, because of its great potential to create...
Read MoreWhen I was a kid normal was both a state of being and a place. The place was easier to define. It was a town, for one thing, and it could be found on one of those folded (paper!) highway maps that could be acquired at gas stations: there it was, smack-dab in the middle of the great flatness of Illinois. Corn and soybeans, soybeans and corn; there wasn’t...
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emporium n. Pl. -iums, -ia. [L f. Gk emporion, f. emporos merchant, per- to journey.] 1 A centre of commerce; a market. 2 A shop, esp. one that sells unusual or fancy goods. Chiefly joc. Of all the impacts of the COVID pandemic, one of the most enduring is—in my eyes—an increased awareness of the churning of stuff in the world or the way material goods do...
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It was almost on a whim that we decided, propelled by the latest bout of COVID claustrophobia, to spend a week this summer on the California coast. A day’s drive, no air travel, a rental within earshot of the surf: it was the easiest means we could manage for getting to a dramatically different ecosystem. At intervals I could not predict the fog rolled in...
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Surely you know some irritating over-achiever—for who hasn’t?: the annoying person who shows up in the classroom or kitchen or conference room, or on the athletic field, and seemingly without any effort at all pulls off a perfect meal or project or performance, showing up everyone else who has been working so very hard to accomplish at a lower level. The...
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Slickrock domes and washes of cream-colored sand, groves of tall pinon, blackbrush meadows—the long trail to Rainbow Bridge had not changed much, as far as I could tell, in the intervening more than 30 years. Not that I remembered it in much detail. When I first visited the place I was a newbie to the Southwest, gobsmacked by the scale of mountains and...
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The fortunes of cities rise and fall with their connections to the rest of the world: seaways, airways, roadways, a principle so fundamental that the word “arterial” is defined not only as relating to our blood circulation but as a major road, period. For Flagstaff, I suppose the economically most important are the run-of-the-mill interstates that link us...
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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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My Tuesday Evenings began in high school. I’m pretty sure that day of the week had always existed, and that evening, but never much differentiated from others. It was sophomore year when that changed, when I went to work for the student newspaper. I’ve never been the same since. Nor have Tuesday Evenings, which I feel I have to capitalize to highlight...
Read More…out of growing actual physical necessity, sometimes, or maybe it’s just the power of suggestion, something about waking to the nearby sound of a freight train with the windows open for the first time on a warmer-than-it’s-been spring night, but in any event the reality of the premise doesn’t matter because once the thought has arisen that relieving...
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Glowing from within: ponderosas in the snow. Photo by the author. To my eyes, adapted as they’ve been to the artificial light of the kitchen, the night appears complete as I step out the back door. Complete, but not dark: the waning moon is still up, its cold light reflecting brilliantly off the snowbanks, setting the surface crystals to sparkling. But the...
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My favorite among my parents’ extensive LP collection was a goofy Tom Lehrer record titled That Was the Year That Was. The year referred to was 1965, at which time I was barely toddling and certainly too young to appreciate satire. But the witty songs by one of America’s greatest satirists stood the test of time into the 1970s—and clear through today, for...
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Sometimes it seems like one sentence is enough for an essay. No, I don’t mean that one. Or this one. I mean one like this: Yesterday morning, Saturday morning, I went outside on the patio and it had sprinkled a bit in the night and the air felt so much more alive than it has in many weeks, and within the next hours the election results were announced—the...
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There are stories all across the land, and when we choose to tell one we set a course and decide which path to follow and which ones to walk past. We call that set of choices a narrative. Sometimes the possible paths are practically infinite, like the myriad ways to pick a route through the streets of downtown Chicago. Sometimes the land chooses the route...
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It’s the second year in a row the monsoon has gone largely missing, which leads me to a dire if irrational thought: maybe the wall is working. Because the purpose of the wall has always been more than the practical matter of deflecting people from crossing on foot. It’s been more about deflecting the whole idea of the South. It has been a symbol of how...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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Let’s begin with A. A for arroyo, also often known as wash: “often steep-walled . . . flat-bottomed or laden with boulders and gravel,” an attribute that comes in handy if you have an old Willys jeep, as my friend Jim has, and a need for a winter camp out of the way of the chilly wind, as we did more than once back when I lived in Tucson. You can drive up...
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The hip-hop artist and climate activist Xiuhtezcatl Martinez was in Flagstaff late last week for an address at NAU’s Climate 2020 summit and an evening performance at the Orpheum Theater. He made it clear up front that the rules of engagement for the two events were not the same. “I need you all right in front, in the mosh pit!” he commanded the sitting...
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The first time I glimpsed it, the Big Stump from a distance loomed vaguely ahead like some oversized vacationer, perhaps some former football player out on the coast for a weekend of casual fun. But no. As I got closer I saw that it was taller and more wide-shouldered than even the biggest linebacker. It looked like a massive, solid block of dark wet wood...
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September has always been complicated. Other months were easily defined in the Upper Midwest when I was growing up. February: Frigid, brutal, a sharp razor of a month that couldn’t cut its way out of town too soon. July: A saunter cut through with the scent of freshly mown grass and the whip-whip of lawn sprinklers hissing their way into the late dusk....
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A few mornings after returning home I wake up from a dream of Spanish. Not in Spanish, which is an idealistic beginner’s aspiration, but of: the entire language had become a dense tangled mass of plants, a vegetative riot rich with exclamations, scraps of conversations and whispers, and though most of the sense remained murky to me, here and there I could...
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In the hubbub over the Women’s World Cup it has been easy to overlook, in the U.S. at least, that there’s been another major soccer tournament underway. I heard about it on a plane to Paraguay. In the only announcement that didn’t have to do with routine matters of timing, altitude or weather, the pilot reported the results of two first-round matches to...
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Back in the old days, most rivers gathered water from a wide area and delivered it to one place; they were gatherers rather than distributors. That seems profoundly old-fashioned now, at least in the hydraulically engineered West. That’s what I was thinking to myself earlier this spring as I stood in a field down in Eloy, in Pinal County. The field grew...
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My initial exposure to America’s great national parks came as a perk with my first magazine subscription. Thanks to an inspired second-grade teacher who worked to instill a love of nature in her students, I became an avid reader of Ranger Rick magazine. As a subscription bonus I received a set of national parks color-by-number drawings, to be completed not...
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Like good Christians, most thoughtful Americans have readily admitted that our current state is always one subject to improvement. Why else would the preamble to the Constitution underscore that the document’s purpose is to establish the arc of our shared journey toward “a more perfect union”—or, for that matter, why would so many voters believe the...
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For the second time since the onset of cold weather, on the same morning walk with my son to the bus stop, a dead raven lies immobile down in the next block in the strip of gravel between the street and the sidewalk—the utilitarian zone that many people call, appropriately enough, the “death strip.” The lightest possible dusting of snow encrusts the...
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The dark-eyed juncos have moved in in force, hopping around on the bare dirt beneath the bird feeder. They tend to have a greater fondness to feeding on the ground than the finches and chickadees and house sparrows that perch up high. Or maybe it’s just that the latter species—full-time locals—are more brash and don’t make way for the more diffident...
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I well remember standing down at Imperial Dam all those years ago, a budding journalist, and thinking: this is going to be interesting. I meant Arizona. I meant the Southwest. I meant me, in the Southwest. But deep down what I really meant was that I wanted to live in a story. It was winter, and the camping was perfect. My friend Tim and I went for a fast...
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A tourist descending the Kaibab Plateau toward Marble Canyon on Sept. 22 could have been forgiven for thinking there was a rock concert taking place somewhere down in the House Rock Valley, or maybe some sort of Colorado Plateau Burning Man knock-off, for the line of cars raising dust along the Wire Pass road was of a magnitude that had rarely, if ever,...
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It is a fascinating fact, albeit one that perhaps leans in the direction of TMI, that the manna from heaven which the Israelites relied upon for sustenance in their flight from Egypt was, according to some entomologists, the sweet gathered secretions of a scale insect that congregates in large numbers on tamarisk trees in the Middle East. It’s similar to...
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You could say I settled into Flagstaff for good a decade and a half ago, when we bought our house. It was a beat-up old place. “Lots of potential here,” the sellers told us. They were right. Some was readily apparent—scuffed wood floors, southern light, a sizable yard with an outdoor fireplace. Some of it we wouldn’t see for a long time—yes, you actually...
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It’s always the edges that are most interesting, the half-shadowed interface that’s not quite field and not quite forest, the crust where the dough crisps and takes on its own new texture, the border area where people mix two otherwise separate languages and cultures and foods. Just as sunrise and sunset are the most beautiful times of day, I like to think...
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An egg is perfect: The flawless curve of its nacreous horizon, the shimmering gloss, so like the Earth’s atmosphere seen in photos from space, of a rounded surface that never ends but is always beginning. An egg holds all the makings for life without any of the messiness to come: The blood, the hunger, the scraggly and wet down feathers of the newborn...
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Almost as regularly as cold fronts the driftwood used to come in to the beach. It was a wild mix of shapes and sizes, from sticks to logs and everything in between. Much of it was waterlogged, so heavy that as it bobbed in the frigid lake water you could scarcely spot it. But if it washed ashore on a day of waves, and if it didn’t get buried too firmly in...
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During the year in which I turned 21 I lived in Germany, in Munich. Ostensibly I was taking classes at the university but in reality this was a pretty light load and so I spent as much time as I could walking the streets, marveling at how different it all was than the Suburbia Americana I knew from home. Here was the filigreed city hall, with a...
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The story begins with a wolf standing by the side of the road. This isn’t the story you might think. There’s no helpless girl, no feckless pigs, no trickery. What there is, is hunger. Hunger for food, as always, and a hunger to roam. The woods are broad. Even though they are cross-stitched with fences and pocked with houses that must be avoided they extend...
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We were away when the shooting happened. We were perhaps listening to Annette McGivney read from her fine new book about a murder in Havasu Canyon, Pure Land or hearing Four Cornered Room play sweet melodies or watching a funny feminist-liberation scene from the Flagstaff Shakespeare Festival’s production of The Merry Wives of Windsor. It was lively at the...
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Time was when a bunch of trees waving their branches overhead was enough. I’d lie on my back, on the lawn, and watch the clouds catch in and release from their branches. That was enough to pass a summer afternoon. The trees, in my case, were Midwestern oaks, ashes, maples, but that didn’t really matter; it was a timeless occupation, a fullness that...
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This much is true: it was another year when the world was going to hell. 1939. Over in Europe, the Nazis were buzzing like a nest of stirred-up hornets soon to boil over their neighbors. In the Pacific, the Japanese were off on their own adventures in conquest. But in Flagstaff, J.A. Bostwick was rendering a peaceful landscape. I don’t have the full...
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In our family, spoons have come handed down through earth and air. The first is easier to explain, as I’m sure the cupboards or other reliquaries of many have been enriched by the addition of silverware from long-dead grandmothers and great-aunts. As have ours. But we have also literally unearthed a few. Every year there is occasion to dig in our rocky Old...
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Danielle Stephens can vividly recall the bomb’s early light, the brilliant early-morning flash seen on horseback from ranch country up in the Aquarius Mountains. Everyone knew it was coming. The bomb tests were always announced in advance and planned for days when the wind was blowing eastrather than west toward populous California. Sometimes the tests...
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The day before the eclipse, the Middle Fork Cafe in Lander, Wyo., was bustling at lunchtime, the usual crowd of Sunday locals and Yellowstone-bound tourists vastly swelled by twosomes and families of eclipse chasers. They were on their way somewhere else: Lander was right on the edge of totality. If you’d already traveled hours or days to get there,...
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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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When I was a boy haircuts were tears compensated with lollipops, a reward that seemed adequate only afterward when the whole ordeal was done for another couple of months. I can’t say I’ve changed that much. But like many things first approached with a bit of trepidation, haircuts have provided me with some of the most memorable of moments. Maybe it’s the...
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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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Letter by letter, word by word, a story expands from the smallest of kernels into something more, reminding me when the work is hard and grinding of that annoyingly perky gardening song: inch by inch, row by row, gonna make my garden grow. And it is springtime, the time of year when every element of life seems attuned to new purpose: through the window the...
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Toot—toooot goes the whistle every night, a clean repeat that after you’ve heard it a few times ever after has to be a pair, just like Romeo and Juliet, or peanut butter and jelly. The twin tones echo a few times off Cherry Hill and Mars Hill, fading into the background hum of the city just before the sound of the train itself comes into earshot. A minute...
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Snow was as appealing to me as to any kid growing up in the Chicago suburbs. In those pre-Internet days we huddled eagerly around the radio, listening to the long list of school districts that had canceled classes. In memory, at least, ours closed down only rarely, but when it did, that was occasion for celebration. And then we’d have to go shovel the damn...
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Usually I skip the nightly news. It’s not out of lack of interest, but because there are too many other things to do: work to catch up on, a kitchen to clean, lunch to prepare. Or it’s because it’s too cold out, or because once I do decide to pay attention the signs on grass and hard-packed dirt and sidewalk are simply too hard to catch, demanding too much...
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This week’s guest columnist is Peter Friederici. When I first moved to Arizona I vowed I would practice restraint. I won’t go there, I thought. Everyone does; it’s too easy, too obvious. Besides, there were any number of other canyons and peaks and desert vistas and high-mountain vales to explore, many of them spectacular, full of adventure, grand-ish. But...
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