Flagstaff Letter from Home recently posted its 500th column on the website FlagstaffLetterfromHome.com, where each column has been archived since late 2009. Ten Flagstaff writers, usually five at a time, have been rotating on a weekly basis since the column first appeared in May 2008. This week, two of the original writers – “homer”s – reflect on that...
Read More
Editor’s note: This column originally ran in the Nov. 18, 2010 issue of Flag Live. I confess, the natural disasters Flagstaff has experienced in the last year have honed my survival instincts. With Nov. 2 looming on the horizon I interpreted the low tea-colored clouds as an impending landslide of poor judgment and I headed toward the Mexican border before...
Read More
“Jan 4th snowing Today and Cold. 3 days work with team.” I have been reading my grandfather Henry New Year’s pocket calendar. It is about 4 inches by 6 inches and bound in red cloth. The cover reads Physician’s Memorandum for 1906, but grandpa’s entries span the following 20 years. The book is filled with testimonials for Gudes Pepto-Mangan, a patent...
Read More
Solstice morning breaks clear but for a few thin grey clouds on the eastern rim. They are stippled with a warm rosy light. The crisp air smells of snow to come and frosted sage. The patchwork of honey-colored grama grass, tufts of fuzzy-topped rabbit brush and small continents of wet-black cinders flare brightly in the first Jesus rays streaming across the...
Read More
I have been a performing musician for almost 50 years. I have enjoyed the variety of events I’ve played for; from river trips through the Grand Canyon to bat mitzvas, to groups of partying investment bankers, to wide-eyed kindergarteners. When I answered the ringing phone I didn’t recognize the name of the caller. “I’ve heard you do programs at the senior...
Read More
“Will the circle be unbroken/By and by, Lord, by and by/There’s a better home awaiting/In the sky Lord, in the sky.” — Lyrics from “Will the Circle Be Unbroken”, as performed by Johnny Cash Dark, rain-laden clouds boil up from the southeast horizon and roll overhead. The air is scented with pine and sage. Autumn temperatures have staked their claim...
Read More
My granddaughter came downstairs the other night long after the rest of the household had settled in for the evening. I was communing with my laptop. She works a couple of jobs and attends college. I’m awfully proud of her. “Grandpa, I need your help,” she said. “How do you address a letter?” I was startled. Don’t they teach that in school anymore? What...
Read More
This week, a legacy essay from Tony Norris. A few yards from my front door stands my favorite tree to pee under. It has ever been so. I imagine a delta rich in potash and nitrogen beneath the pine needles feeding the coyote gourd that twists and spreads downhill in a luxuriant profusion. From this sheltered vantage point I’ve surveyed many a...
Read More
“The North thinks it knows how to make cornbread, but this is gross superstition.” — Mark Twain My editor recently observed that I hadn’t written about corn in a while. He recognizes I’m obsessed with that commonest of vegetables. As the buffalo was to the Sioux prairie dwellers, so corn was to my ancestral culture. My forefathers hacked clearings in the...
Read More
Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy waterspouts: all thy waves and thy billows are gone over me. Psalm 42:7 (King James Version) The fingernail beach that welcomes the Sea of Cortez into Cantu Cove is about a mile long. During the final days of the old year I stood in the center of its arc and looked seaward. I sometimes get the startling sensation...
Read More
Texas 1960 My sister Kathy was trying her wings a little. She was dating a wild boy. Mama was concerned about her so she asked our elder brother Eldon to have a word. I was with Kathy in the park, an oak-shaded area near the well house where we spent summer hours. Eldon pulled up in his two-tone Desoto and took a moment to light a cigarette before he...
Read More
Los Indios who live high in the Sierras of Mexico tell a story about a contest between deer and frog. When deer insisted his eyesight was the sharpest, frog suggested a test. The first to see the sun’s rays in the morning would be the winner. “And the wager?” asked the deer. “Twenty heel flies,” said the frog. The proud deer snorted agreement. In the...
Read More
Author’s note: “From a live performance, best if read aloud.” Better than 100 years ago Flagstaff, my rough and tumble frontier town, had more saloons than churches. There was a young woman named Maria. Maria was probably the best looking girl in northern Arizona and she knew it. She would talk to her abuelita, her little grandmother:...
Read More
Almost 20 years ago Dr. Henry Poore sat across from me in the studio of KAFF Country 93.5 FM and allowed me to interview him about his early days in Flagstaff for the show Under Western Skies. He talked of waiting for a pack train of burros to cross Highway 89 on its way to restock a sheep camp on the peaks. He spoke of the Navajo families with horse-drawn wagons coming in from the reservation and camping in the town park for the big Pow Wows. Then he told a story about an old man living out his last days just a mile from where my home stood, who looked to the compassion of a dying country doctor to feed him through an old fashioned Flagstaff winter. Time stood still as a master storyteller held forth. Dr. Poore finished talking and I looked at the tape recorder to make sure it was rolling. It was not the first or the last time I had heard him relate an engaging tale, but I sensed there was something about this experience that was a landmark for him. I was hardly the first person to encourage him to write down his experiences to share with a wider audience and in 2006 Goose River Publishing released Lessons Remembered: Memoirs of an Audacious Country Doctor. Dr. Poore was generous enough to share this telling of “Two Men Named Charlie” from his book.
Read More
Stark white cumulonimbus clouds collide over the San Francisco Peaks and pile up like pins in the bowling alley. The crack of the lightning strike turns my head. For a moment the silver wire burns against the sky and then it dances behind my closed eyelids. The thunder rolls from beneath my feet and the black cinder hills toss it back to the towering...
Read More
I sat in the dim room with a group of early risers and watched my son’s performance. He had the first slot in the folk festival. On his knee rested a 1976 Gibson Heritage guitar. It had seen better days. Although it wasn’t visible to the audience, I knew there was the scar of a repaired crack where the peg head meets the neck. As my son worked his way...
Read More
Some of my ancestors on my Daddy’s side came out of Tennessee in the 1700s and for more than 50 years worked their way north across Kentucky to Illinois growing bloody butcher corn and Jacob’s beans in patches of rich soil they hacked from the endless forest. They ate game and hunted their own herds of half-wild pigs that ran free and fattened on...
Read More
As a child, I often found myself reading books I heard my sister Kathy talk about. She read aloud poems that moved her or passages that just demanded sharing. She guided me into The Harvester by Gene Stratton Porter at about age 10. There I first engaged a consuming romantic love that suffered greatly and played out against the world of medicinal herbs....
Read More
Time folded back upon itself recently and the fabric yielded and tore slightly beneath an unseen pressure. I had received a friend request on Facebook. I didn’t recognize the name so I did my usual private eye routine and began by looking at the profile picture. Thank god it wasn’t a kitten or cartoon avatar. I studied a photo of a bewhiskered...
Read More
The engineer lowered the needle to the record and a momentary scratch and pop was followed by the haunting guitar notes of the Ventures playing “Apache.” I spoke into the mike. “This is 1450 AM RADIO KENA Mena, Arkansas and you’re listening to … the Bearcat Prowl.” The year was 1967 and with several schoolmates I was hosting a weekly radio show of news and...
Read More
We sit around a desert fire; a few hardened sticks of ironwood are yielding a small steady flame and little smoke. The calm waters of the Sea of Cortez a few yards away are murmuring companionably. Orion has just careened from behind the shadow of El Morro and he flashes his Concho belt against the black velvet sky. A young coyote yips “I been to Austin”...
Read More
Greetings from the Global Warming Research Zone #10 where we received our first measurable snow since last May this past weekend. It was only a dusting but now the San Francisco Peaks look like the optimistic winter scenes that have been flocked on store windows since early November. Sue turned her chickens loose in the spent garden and they are faithfully...
Read More
She considereth a field and buyeth it, with the fruit of her hands she planteth a vineyard. She looketh well to the ways of her household and eateth not the bread of idleness. Her children arise up and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her. — Proverbs 31:16, 27, 28 I dream. I’m sitting on wicker furniture with a friend in an apple...
Read More
The storm clouds boil up the eastern sky until a wall of gunmetal gray curls over and above me. A westering sun fires up the corn and pole beans and the tall shaggy pines that border the over-achieving garden. They stand like cardboard cutouts against the backdrop of the approaching monsoon storm. Blunt fingers strum the strings of my pensive heart. I get...
Read More
It was a hunt to remember. Ken Ralston and I had muzzle loader permits for elk on the North Rim. Ken had been my companion for many adventures through the years and I looked forward to his company and the scenery almost as much as the hunt. I was not familiar with this territory, but Ken assured me he knew the deep canyons and ridges like his own mama’s...
Read More
My mug of coffee steams like a sentient being and hums between my palms. The clerk smiles when I place a dollar tip in the jar. She has a purple streak in her hair. I wait my turn at the fixings table. The woman in front of me adds one Sweet’N Low and a shake of non-dairy chemicals to her cup and selects a wooden stirring stick from the open container....
Read More
I threaded my way out of Doney Park along dusty roads lined with lush patches of feral rye grass heavy with seed heads. The trim coopers hawk watched from its perch above on the phone wire for the mice gathering for the harvest. Plump prairie dogs stood at alert as I passed. They are too big for the coopers hawk to manage, but red tails and northern...
Read More
April is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers. – From The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot If you were to sit on the small limestone hill in back of my childhood home on an April morn...
Read More
“There’s a friendly tie of some sort between music and eating.” – Thomas Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree I’m doing a ride along with Emma Kate, my eldest granddaughter, as we shop for dinner supplies in sleepy San Felipe. She’s very focused on the task at hand. She has had her learner’s permit for about a week and we’ve planned some serious windshield time...
Read More
Follow me down a dirt road bordered by barbed wire fences under a 1950s blue sky. My feet are bare and I’m shirtless and I sing with great feeling, “Where have all the flowers gone long time passing? Where have all the flowers gone long time ago?” A deep ravine cuts across the widow Blanton’s pecan grove and goes under the farm road by our mailbox. In the...
Read MoreThere was a time after the Civil War when a person might leave the country on short order with no explanation. Folks would often say they had “Gone to Texas.” When my grandfather left Crane Creek, Ill. he did go to Texas. I feel as though 2013 grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and shook me like a terrier shakes a rat. Health problems and issues beyond...
Read MoreIn my childhood home there were not two matching pieces of furniture. There was a random assortment of straight back wooden chairs and shapeless overstuffed chairs covered with large floral patterns. There was a stout table of dark wood joined to an under shelf with narrow uprights like a picket fence on three sides. It had been made by my...
Read MoreOn the wall of my sunroom hang two portraits. In one a small girl leans forward and raven hair cascades forward in heavy ropes to frame her face. She is about 6 years old. She clutches a circular disk of beadwork to her breast and her eyes are closed as though she were praying. The coarse woven blanket that forms the background is patterned with bold...
Read MoreRoute 66 has a million stories to tell, some funny some poignant. My first real road trip was hitchhiking from Baltimore to L.A. in 1969. Most of those miles I logged on Route 66, the Mother Road. It was an education of the first order. I just walked out to the highway with an army surplus pack on my back and stuck my thumb in the air. For years after, in...
Read MoreThis may look easy, but it’s not. It’s hard. Coming up with a fresh new subject for the old “Letter from Home” column … I start writing and I get a few paragraphs into it and it’s looking really promising then a small voice says, “You wrote about that in 2008.” Or, I start with a flourish and then fade quickly with nary a point or conclusion in sight. The...
Read MoreLook! There along the shoulder of Silver Saddle Road, growing in golden abundance between the brome grass and rabbit brush, are feral fingers of rye, reaching from Doney Park’s past into today’s drier reality. It’s been 50 years since rye was planted as a cover crop for dry-farmed corn, bean and potato fields to keep the soil from blowing away in the...
Read MoreAt the end of my day it’s the little stories that collect and twist into the shawl of sleep. They replay sometimes at a more appreciative pace. Time slows down a little and the focal area widens and suddenly takes into view the cacophony, color, caresses and odors of the day I just dashed through. I catch the significance of a sideward glance or a...
Read MoreDear Sam, I hope this finds you well, tucked away there in West Virginia’s sheltering hollers. I confess, I keep picturing you in your old trailer, although I’ve visited you twice since you’ve been in your new handmade house. I loved the closeness of the trailer to the creek. I’m sure you don’t take the creek for granted, but streams of water out...
Read MoreMy older brother Homer told me about our Cherokee grandma walking with her people from Missouri alongside an oxcart that carried a few household goods and precious seeds into Texas about 1900. Our grandpa was a one-armed schoolteacher who saw the raven-haired beauty pass and declared he would “marry that woman.” Homer explored the prairies around Aledo,...
Read More“Why do you bob your hair, girls?/It’s not the thing to do/Just wear it, always wear it/And to the Lord be true/And when before the judgment/You meet the Lord up there/He’ll say, ‘Well done, for one thing/You never bobbed your hair.’” –Blind Alfred Reed, 1927 The pickup truck carves the ranch road like a broken beer bottle through scattered mesquite...
Read MoreI’m headed north to the Grand Canyon to interview Eric Guisse, who began carving a homestead on the parks border more than 40 years ago. Greg Hales, my pardner in crime and videographer extraordinaire pilots his truck north through ponderosa and piñon scrub. As we pass through a clearing in the forest I glimpse a large white owl perched on a branch beside...
Read MoreI think I may have briefly found the Christmas spirit in South Dakota in 1974. I had just talked myself into the first real job of my life. And about time, too: at the age of 24, I had a wife and two boys. We’d spent the previous years living in Appalachia’s backwoods trying our hand at homesteading. My job duties had included ploughing with a team of...
Read MoreA few yards from my front door stands my favorite tree to pee under. It has ever been so. I imagine a delta rich in potash and nitrogen beneath the pine needles feeding the coyote gourd that twists and spreads downhill in a luxuriant profusion. From this sheltered vantage point I’ve surveyed many a sunrise and moonrise over the ragged edge of the forest a...
Read More“Somebody said, ‘That’s a strange tattoo you have on the side of your head.’ I said, ‘That’s the blueprint left by the coal. A little more and I’d been dead.’” –“Coal Tattoo” by Billy Ed Wheeler I’m driving north along Highway 89 in the shadow of the San Francisco Peaks. The October sun threads the air with amber. It picks out the new straw color of...
Read MoreMy father’s legacy to me was complex. It didn’t include land and investments or stocks and vehicles. He was a skilled craftsman with wood and iron but there was almost no material evidence of his life passed on to me. A story his older brother, my Uncle Hattler, told me more than 50 years ago helped me to understand his endowment to me of a love of music...
Read MoreMy father’s double-barrel 12-gauge shotgun hung above the mantle of our fireplace. He told me about the summer he was 12 and worked with a wheat threshing crew and earned 50 cents a day. The two purchases he made with his summer’s wages were a winter coat for his mother and a shotgun. I grew up in the gun culture. My early memories include a single-shot...
Read More“Where the bluebonnets roll/And the white clouds sail slowly by/Where the little grey hawk/Pauses and hangs in the sky/I’m the lone shooting star/The sweet whip-poor-will’s cry/And the summer’s full moon/Where the bluebonnets roll.” –“Where Bluebonnets Roll By,” by Tony Norris Abilene is close. We glide through the short grass prairie of the...
Read MoreSpring is firmly fixed in the bungee pattern I like to call bipolar. Whiteout conditions on Saturday bring a foot of serious snow to town and Monday sees short-sleeved skateboarders dodging the rosy crab apple trees in the parks. These very conditions make it hard for fruit trees to fulfill their duty in our little mountain town. Just about the time the...
Read More“You betcha grandma, sure as you’re born. I’ll have some more potatoes and a thunderstorm.” –“Canned Goods” by Greg Brown The Russian olive branches are whipping the hillside to a brisk fandango beat. A delicate pink froth of blossom on the Nanking cherry hedge dips and bobs in the dance celebrating the return of spring to Doney Park. Tender...
Read More“You’re travelin’ through a world that you can use, though you shall never own. Your little fire makes it seem like home.” –“Little Fires” by K. W. Boyd A winter storm washed the sandy fields and black oak thickets along the Brazos. I watched the clouds thin and stretch and give way to glorious sweeps of amber colored light. I headed out to the...
Read MoreI’m in Shonto Begay’s studio above the Downtown Diner. The floor-to-ceiling windows overlook the town square and flood the narrow room with bright illumination. Much of the time I’m speaking to a backlit silhouette surrounded by flares of light—a traveler in time. He is seated before a canvas the size of a sports bar flat screen. A series of figures are...
Read MoreOur Royal Palm turkey tom and his hen were intended for the Thanksgiving table. Each afternoon as they were released with the chickens to free-range and eat bugs and weed seeds, they didn’t miss an opportunity to display their magnificent crisp formal white plumage tipped in fretted inky black. The tom jumped up on chair or bench to be at eye level with...
Read More“In Apache Pass, Prince Rupert, Indian Jack puts a pistol to my head says, ‘How do you like your blue-eyed boy Mr. Dead?’” –“Criminology” by Tom Russell Ever been scared? I mean really scared—not scared that the eighth grade boys are gonna beat the crap out of you after World History. Not scared that your husband caught you checking out the hunky...
Read MoreI came to the Arizona deserts from the generously watered coves and hollers of the Kentucky hills where songbirds flew across dewy, fern-clad hillsides. A single square mile of forest there might yield a 125 varieties of trees. My first job in my new home required me to crisscross the state. I drove over a thousand miles a week from the New Mexico...
Read More“The goal of feng shui as practiced today is to situate the human built environment on spots with good qi. The ‘perfect spot’ is a location and an axis in time.” –Wikipedia The new Bookmans may have lost something in the translation. When five feet of snow claimed its roof, it took a full year for the doors to reopen. I had played in the...
Read More“How much for the whetstone and the old pocket knife?” I was indulging in my Saturday morning yard-sale therapy. I was only interested in the worn gray sharpening stone but I could see that the blades of the cheap jackknife had been carefully whetted until they would shave hair from your forearm. “They were my granddad’s. How does 2 dollars for the stone...
Read More“In the dead of the night/In the still and the quiet/I slip away like a bird in flight/Back to those hills/A place that I call home.” –“West Virginia,” Hazel Dickens The battered convertible hurtled between cut rock walls covered with matted honeysuckle vines whose sweetness covered me like a benediction. Barn swallows scissored the sky above me as...
Read More“Pancho Villa crossed the border in the year of ought 16/The people of Columbus still hear him riding through their dreams/He killed 17 civilians you could hear the women scream/Blackjack Pershing on a dancing horse was waiting in the wings/Tonight we ride, tonight we ride/We’ll skin ol’ Pancho Villa, make chaps out of his hide/Shoot his horse,...
Read MoreDaddy was a connoisseur of objects. Some might say junk. Some came from the salvage yard on the old White Settlement Road. He would take a load of rusty iron, copper wire salvaged from electric motors and brass plumbing fittings to sell by the pound, and then spend hours going through wooden boxes filled with dusty tools, screws, bolts and nails. He would...
Read MoreThe therapist works her elbow along my breastbone and with an audible pop my rib moves back to its proper place. I had tripped over a space heater’s power cord that morning and wind-milled across the room catching myself on the door jam and painfully tweaking my back and ribs. I hobbled to Nicci, possibly the world’s best massage therapist for healing....
Read More“I had an old hen she had a wooden foot/She made her nest by a mulberry root/Laid more eggs than any hen around the farm/A whole wooden leg wouldn’t do her any harm.” —“Cluck Ol’ Hen” The pounding autumn rains that followed this summer’s fires scoured the topsoil of centuries from the sides of the peaks. The bare bedrock gleaming bone white between...
Read MoreI confess, the natural disasters Flagstaff has experienced in the last year have honed my survival instincts. With Nov. 2 looming on the horizon I interpreted the low tea-colored clouds as an impending landslide of poor judgment and I headed toward the Mexican border before they closed it. Desperate to breathe air untainted by negative campaign adds I...
Read MoreTony: I’m in the planning stages for a new CD of lullabies, those songs intended to calm the fretful child and persuade him to fall fast asleep. It seems all my younger friends have babies and toddlers. Having raised five of my own and boasting eight grandchildren, I want to record a collection of soothing tunes that might make bedtime a little easier for...
Read MoreThe stems of the amaranth in my yard have turned a deep embarrassed purple in just the last week. They were just part of the background of an unusually lush tangle of knee-high greens, but the shortening hours of sunlight and almost freezing temps have triggered a chemical color shout-out that makes them tremble and vibrate. It hasn’t been cold enough to...
Read MoreSometimes the real show is not the one we showed up for. I’m always delighted when the hidden and serendipitous performance unfolds and I am there—the accidental audience looking on at the unscheduled dance. It was an evening some 20 years ago at the Coconino Center for the Arts. The Bluegrass Cardinals were playing! It was one of the first shows Dick...
Read More“Like our travels, our workdays burned upon the world/lifting its inwards up in fire. Veiled in that power/our minds gave up the endless cycle of growth and decay/and took the unreturning way, the breathless distance of iron.” –Wendell Berry, “Horses” The lightning has been pitchforking across the eastern sky for 45 minutes. I breathe deeply of the moist,...
Read MoreThe plume of smoke is robust. Deep white—like God’s own puffball mushroom—twisting and alive with the effort of rising from behind Mt. Elden. My home lies over there. It’s Father’s Day Sunday and we’re having a BBQ at my daughter’s house on Cherry Hill. Our first fire of the season started at the edge of town just three days ago. The radio confirms that...
Read MoreThe morning sun backlit the new leaves of the elm and oak trees along the stream, and they glowed with an emerald fire to rival that of some fat bishop’s jewels. The church’s marble spire stood against the skyline. A skinny boy in ragged overalls belly crawled through a tangle of fox grape and cat briar to the edge of a sandy cut bank and surveyed the...
Read More“Inch by inch/Row by row/Gonna make this garden grow/All it takes is a rake and a hoe/And a piece of fertile ground/Inch by inch/Row by row/Someone bless these seeds I sow/Someone keep them safe below/Till the rains come a-tumblin’ down.” –”The Garden Song,” by David Mallett Shanti and Corey Rade Whipstone Farm, Paulden, Ariz. Dear Shanti and Corey,...
Read MoreA musician’s life is a shared life, sometimes with an audience but always with his instrument. Performers often develop an intimate love-hate relationship with their guitar—naming them after sweethearts and mythic champions—and sacrificing to be with them. In 1949 BB King was playing a dance hall in Twist, Arkansas. Two drunks got in a fight over a women...
Read MoreIn my youth I was a humble working cowboy riding for the CO Bar—that’s the Babbit Ranch. One day the Old Man came to me and said, “My prize broodmare has run off. Track her down and bring her back.” He was boss so I saddled up my pony and set out to find that runaway horse. All day I rode through the golden aspens under a bright blue sky and it was a...
Read More