Letter from Home appears weekly in Flagstaff Live! each Thursday, and is written by a rotating cast of Flagstaff-based writers, including Tony Norris, Shonto Begay, Jean Rukkila, Peter Friederici, Darcy Falk, Laura Kelly, Kate Watters, Margaret Erhart, Allison Gruber, Stacy Murison, and an occasional guest writer. Click the Read More button below any of these posts to read the full version and view any images that the authors have shared.
The Peculiarities of Our Time
For a long time everything was colored by the public violence of that death. We saw it: Jackie, her pink suit splattered with blood, crawling across the back of the convertible. We saw it in photographs in the pages of Life magazine, and later on television, and we were children. When Vietnam became the first televised war, the precedent had been set: We were going to see our tragedies unfold in what we now called real-time. I won’t say we were used to it, used to seeing people, young men, killed thousands of miles away, killed right on the...
read moreInterstate Vignettes
I suppose the great majority of Americans in the modern era have grown up in relationship with the interstates. With the exception of those living in extremely urban or extremely rural places, residents of the Lower 48 are seldom truly far from a tie-in to the seemingly endless web of superhighways that ties the country together, with its accompanying membrane of Super 8 motels, super truck stops and tourist traps, and super-sized soda dispensers. Before the World Wide Web, there was the Nationwide Web, approved and funded in the Eisenhower...
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 moreRectangle Reasoning
Over the past year, I have lived in several homes. Some were house sits, some were borrowed guest rooms. Each had a different layout, a different style of couch, and a different set of rules about how to care for pots and pans, fancier than I could ever afford. But as the doors revolved, I found myself drawn to rectangles that reassembled my emotional world. For once, straight lines felt more comforting than curves, and rectangles felt oddly restorative. One was on a ranch in the New Mexico desert, a large open window that turned the desert...
read moreThe Edge of Our World
Stephen Eginoire is a small man with abundant hair and a rock climber’s sense of fashion. He seems uncomfortable around the microphone, as if it might turn and devour him. It is Thursday evening at the Museum of Northern Arizona and Stephen is at the podium, leading us down into a world beneath the world, a photographic journey into the caves and aquifers of the Grand Canyon. Far beneath the surface of the Kaibab plateau exists a system of caves carved over millions of years throughout the Redwall limestone. Inside some of these caves runs...
read moreRepresentation without representatives
By the time you read this, it will have been 30 days since the federal government shut down. I’d like to say that by now, something has changed—but this is America, where optimism goes to die in a subcommittee. Despite protests, strongly worded letters from federal employee unions, and a lawsuit from twenty-five states (including Arizona) demanding the continuation of SNAP, I’m feeling confident—perhaps too confident—that nothing will happen again this week. The House of Representatives met for three minutes and two seconds today. In that...
read moreAmong the Mathematicians
The small university where I teach has about 1300 students. We break Hollywood typecasting and look more like a suburban apartment complex than the stately collection of neoclassical buildings favored by filmmakers. Because of our small size, the professors here aren’t grouped by discipline and siloed into separate buildings. We are all together in two buildings of classrooms and offices. So, we have a history professor with an office beside an economics professor and across the hall from a political science professor. But that random...
read moreLanguage Power
As someone who has transitioned from reading a paper copy of the Arizona Daily Sun to the wan substitute of flipping its pages on my laptop while drinking my morning coffee, I was interested a couple of weeks ago to note that two entire virtual pages were taken up by a text-heavy announcement from our friendly local electricity provider. Arizona Public Service, it appeared, is angling for a rate increase, which if approved would become the fourth in ten years. At first I was alarmed, because the wording clearly specifies that APS is...
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 morePublic Islands
I’m partial to snails and envy them in times of stressful decision-making. Desert snails can aestivate (a kind of hibernation) for years, sealing themselves in their shells with a layer of mucus until rain returns. It is a radical decision to pause life, guided only by tiny environmental cues like humidity. Sounds kinda nice. This was a week when science was even more present in Flagstaff. It made me wonder: what does science tell us about how nature makes decisions? I have had plenty of my own to wrestle with lately, and I found myself...
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