This Train
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 life, not planning for a future. So at 53–lacking health insurance and dragging around a decades-old student loan–I went looking for a grown-up job. The unemployment rate stood...
read moreBoth Sides Now
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 blue U.S. Mail drop-box on the corner of 63rd and Broadway clutching two envelopes, feeling mildly sick, almost dizzy. One was addressed to my father, the other to my mom. It was October of...
read morePlay a Todd Song
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 Nashville is gone and I’ll admit it, I’m crying. It feels like I lost a friend. I never met Todd Snider, never even saw him play. But he’s been keeping me company on rainy nights...
read moreThe Lure of Spirit Pass
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 its actual name) is surrounded by a chain of summits that stretch north and south along the Continental Divide for nearly a hundred miles. If more beautiful mountains exist, they must be...
read moreTwo Lanes to Forever
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 backpack in the mountain ranges that stretch north-south across the Great Basin Desert. During spring or fall such a trip might have been lovely, but in the vicious heat of August it became...
read moreThe Waters of Home
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 hot dogs and dished up potato salad I would gaze at the river in a sort of kid-trance: chrome-green dragonflies zipped to and fro, trout dimpled the water’s glassy skin. The occasional...
read moreTrue Desert
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 branches, targeting a few pale yellow blossoms that cling to the tree. Webworms have gobbled every leaf, so photosynthesis will only occur this summer through the thin green bark. Clouds of...
read moreBreaking into Show Biz
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 in November 1988, I really needed the work. My last full-time job was nine months in the past, and the savings account was nearly empty. My girlfriend and I had just signed a lease....
read moreDown Deadman Wash
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, cream-colored, black-on-white, black-on-red. The worked clay is smooth-surfaced, coiled or scalloped, sometimes randomly imprinted by human fingertips. For two days I’ve been taking long...
read moreKids with Paint
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 is fit to print. In repressive countries it speaks truth to power. Writing or painting on a wall serves the innate human drive for self-expression, a trait that’s as ancient as rock...
read moreFirst Christmas
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 train at Penn Station with a leather bag trailing from my shoulder, I stopped on the sidewalk and laughed out loud: I am running to catch a train in New York City, with a leather bag trailing...
read moreThe Pine Tree Out Back
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 few years ago. I had planned to cut up the tree for firewood–pinyons make dense and fragrant fuel–but changed my mind. Why? Because I could only burn the thing once. After it had...
read moreSome Things Fade
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 searing days and 200 miserable miles later, I called my best friend in Flagstaff, pleading for a rescue. She obliged, and on the drive back from Nevada mentioned that the cabin next to hers...
read moreCreeping toward Coexistence
The 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, nonetheless, aggressive and disagreeable beasts with an impressive talent for creating misery. On hot summer nights they sneak around the window screens and into my off-grid shack near the South Rim,...
read morePledge
I 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 land – the commons. To village parks and to Central Park; to the Appalachians and the Rockies, the Sierra Nevada and the dark side of the moon. To everywhere that people call...
read morePracticing Resurrection
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 the nighttime chill. Outside, one of two neighborhood coyote packs announces itself, following its hunger toward unlucky mice and rabbits. The dog stretches on her bed by the stove and...
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