Dammed
There wasn’t a good place to be in the days after the election. For someone who believes that the candidate we’ve just elected disqualified himself years ago when he forsook his oath to defend the Constitution by choosing to watch TV while his supporters ransacked the Capitol, there was no escaping a sickening feeling of doom, or a feeling of uncanniness that tens of millions of fellow citizens somehow felt OK enough about that option to fill in that particular bubble on their ballot. And even some people I know who did so admitted to dismay...
read moreEarly
In August, the ticking of the world’s clocks grows ever louder. In part that’s due to the looming closeness of the school year, a tangled cliff that’s always been present at the edge of summer’s smooth plateau (and that through my lifetime has come to begin ever earlier). This is my fault: I have clearly exacerbated my sense of summer’s mortality by choosing a career at a university, where I get to experience over and over again the mingled stress and excitement, the do-I-really-want-to-be-here-again doubt, that comes of the ever-renewed and...
read moreHard Wear
This past week, toward the tail end of a backyard shed refurbishment project that had gotten a little out of hand, I found myself urgently in need of a simple box of nails. They had to be two inches long, a size I was freshly out of because I had used the last ones in the existing box to begin the process of putting up trim around the doors and windows. Does a backyard shed need trim on the inside? Well yes, sometimes. Anyway, this need, or perhaps it was more of a thneed, as Dr. Seuss would have put it in The Lorax, entailed one of my...
read moreTime to Water
Where I grew up, in the upper Midwest, summer evenings were long enough that as a young child I was often sent to bed before it was fully dark. It always seemed a cruel sentence to me, especially on the longest evenings in June when I could still catch the sounds of usually older kids shouting or riding their bikes or otherwise enjoying the mild evening air. But the sprinklers were a solace. My parents had bought a walking sprinkler that was shaped a bit like an old-fashioned steam locomotive, and through some magic of gearing and water...
read moreSeasonal Dysphoria
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 April storms rolled in with the regularity of weekend tourist crowds, with varied combinations of rain and snow and sleet and graupel. For anyone confined to Flagstaff, it was simply a long...
read morePuzzled: A Confession
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 other forum for the baring of my soul (plus, they pay me here). For today, my soul is preoccupied by a problem that might at first glance not seem too closely tied to demonic possession. It’s...
read moreFirst Snows
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 blond sprites, including me, bundled up in our winter coats and snowpants, pommeled hats and clumsy mittens, out for a walk with our parents like dutiful penguin chicks, or else gathered around...
read moreUnrecorded
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. Photographers were taciturn loners, mainly men, who roamed the world wearing rugged expressions and wearing complicated vests whose many pockets they actually needed to hold the many light meters,...
read moreElders
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 pinyon-juniper woodland and sunstruck sage slopes. And the pines, once you get up high enough. Try ten thousand feet, which means you’ve toiled up more than one iteration of winding mountain road...
read moreStuffed
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 home, in its poignant suggestion of the sort of where-the-hell-are-we-going-to-put-this-stuff scrambling that probably everyone who has ever moved residences has experienced, was the photo of...
read moreSpring Time
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 as the snow is melting, its slight flow coursing through the rocky channel people constructed for it long ago, then pooling in perennial mud just this side of the railroad tracks. But this...
read moreThe Freeze and the Thaw
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 drifts, lending a certain appeal to the notion of resurrecting the ancient Roman calendar that contained only ten months corresponding to our contemporary March through December. The other...
read moreMile Markers
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 some other Midwestern state—truck stop, rotgut coffee, pop another cassette mixtape into the player, return to the clean loneliness of the white dashed lines and the solitary bright lights...
read moreHow to write this column
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 plausible-sounding essays about most any topic. Need an essay on the connection between slavery and the American revolution, or an explanation of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle? No need...
read moreNormal
When 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 much else to see, it seemed, when my family drove south and west from the Chicago suburbs on some vacation or other, to Springfield or the Ozarks or, one warm spring break while alarms were...
read moreEmporiums
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 or do not move around in response to human needs and desires. Toilet paper shortages, a dearth of computer chips, ships anchored off Long Beach because they couldn’t be unloaded—the ripples...
read moreBeing Local
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 and cast the pine-oak woods around us into shrouded mystery. Even though we’d come from an unusually wet period in Arizona my skin and lips felt different in the presence of all that...
read moreCurrant Time
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 overachiever is Usain Bolt, Greta Garbo, Robert Johnson, all those with a seemingly magical ability that puts them in a league entirely their own. I’m looking at one of them—or lots of...
read moreThe Red Hot Blues
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 plains, in love with the sensations of experiencing new landscapes. But I had few of the tools needed to understand them, like swelling familiarity with maps, a comprehension of geology or...
read moreThe Road North
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 to bigger populations elsewhere, built to resemble any other interstate anywhere. Sure, there may be mountain and desert vistas in the distance, but the experience of driving those arterials...
read moreWhat’s Not There
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 the sky above unobstructed. We were grateful that the weather remained fairly warm for November. Above, the full moon glowed, but not with its usual pale intensity. That had shrunk to a...
read moreLong walks
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 to be able to walk 50 miles in no more than 20 hours. When a military commander showed the historic document to his commander in chief, John F. Kennedy, the president wondered whether the...
read moreThe Way Home
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 sightings of other people had a furtive quality—each person representing a possible threat to every other person—the buildings and grounds are back to running at full capacity again. There’s a...
read moreHeavy Topic
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 of the adventurous pursuits that are the fringe benefits, or perhaps the core, of a thousand mountain-town weekends and vacations: the skiing outings, whitewater splashfests by raft or...
read moreBenchmarks: The things that mark our lives
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 of the numerous sharp jogs in the trail. It stood out from the living trees around it, an exclamation point in a sward of green. “Once I get up there,” I thought, “I’ll know I’m most of the...
read moreMy Tuesday Evenings; Ink stains in my memories
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 them, even if that’s not what AP style would have me do. Tuesday Evenings, then and for many scattered years that followed, were production evenings for weekly newspapers that appeared late in...
read moreMiddle-aged guy gets up to take a leak
…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 the kidneys might help with getting back to sleep there is no way to stuff it back into the sack whence it came. Chalk this one up to the hard-won wisdom of age: there is no point in...
read moreFull Circle
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 night is dying. By the time I’ve walked the two blocks to the park, crunching across the frozen slush of tire tracks, slipping where meltwater from curbside snowbanks has trickled downhill...
read morePunctuating the Year That Was; The sense of an ending, and a beginning
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 that matter, when I can still recite verbatim lyrics like those that memorialized the German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, the developer of the V2 rocket who during Lehrer’s The Year...
read moreInflection Points; End of a Long Drought
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 latest, most definitive ones—and the month’s first winter storm blew in its with rain and sleet and snow. Joe Biden called...
read moreGhost Hikers; Fading marks on the land, and in the mind
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 for us in advance, like the Bright Angel Trail zippering its way down through the neatly cleaved cliffs of the Bright Angel Fault. The trails are there to get us from Point A to Point B, but...
read moreMonsoon Dreams: Wake me up when it rains
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 thoroughly many want not to be confronted with the reality of places where skins are darker, where people live closer to the bone, where the indecipherable languages are always going to sound...
read moreInto the Wild, Indeed; We’re all off the map now
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 the one that had served as a hunters’ shelter for many years and that for several months in the summer of 1992 housed Christopher McCandless, the itinerant 24-year-old self-styled “Supertramp”...
read moreAltitude Adjustment; Riding the winds of change
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 bandanna over my nose and mouth as if in a preview of a distant pandemic—but this was to keep out the billows of dust that tangoed over whatever stark desert tableland served as temporary...
read moreTravel Bug; Flying the pandemic skies
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 tow, massed tour groups speaking multiple languages, checking in to flights to the Emirates, Hong Kong, Singapore, Beijing, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Santiago, Auckland. It was the hub of a web, or...
read moreBorders; Ruptures in space and time
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 landscape, if not from the old pickup trucks, the small tiendas and tire-repair shops from which ranchero music played. Which side of the border were we on? At times it was hard to tell. The trees...
read moreWriting eagles: Birding within limits
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 ask, is this that constrains expression at the cost of form? Would-be poets who get irritated often enough, I suppose, turn to prose instead, where the rules are looser, or Twitter, where...
read moreC is for canyon; Spelling out the landscape
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 a backcountry arroyo to a bend where you are out of sight of everyone else in the surrounding terrain, which was always a general desire of ours when exploring near the border, and the shed...
read moreTaking the keys; Intergenerational conflict and comity
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 audience at the Orpheum, and moments later a surging crowd ranging in age from middle school through college and, well, let’s just say somewhat older was dancing and fist-pumping and...
read moreStumped; Time travel on an Oregon beach, and in Arizona
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 and in the feathered mist only slowly resolved itself into a rounded and battlement-topped shape that was—or had been—a tree, a great cylinder now hollowed out after all these years. I’d...
read moreIt’s complicated; In a September state of mind
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. October: The rustle of fallen leaves skidding with the wind across sidewalks, pumpkins and fresh apple cider, all somehow redolent of some nostalgic Abe Lincoln past just as the leaves pointed...
read moreSwamped: On not knowing the language of place
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 clearly identify words or phrases, leaving me with a passing sense of accomplishment and a hunger for more. It was no wonder, because one of the most memorable moments of my trip to South...
read moreFeeling tense; Expanding beyond the present
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 scattered applause. It’s the Copa America, which pits national teams from South America against one another and which gets close attention across the continent. My reasons for traveling to...
read morePinal County blues; Many ends, and endings, on the Colorado River
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 alfalfa, and it was one of the ones that’s visible to thousands of drivers a day passing by on I-10. Most of them never notice. I find it safe to say that because I used to be one of them....
read moreStill America’s best idea; Coloring in the national parks
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 with paint but with a set of colored pencils, easier for children to manage. The national parks in this depiction were of course idyllic: towering trees to be completed in forest green,...
read moreMore perfect: Since when did so many trivial encounters become so ideal?
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 nation’s future could be again turned to a condition as great as some idealized past? Like Navajo weavers who always put a deliberate slip-up into the making of a handmade rug, our public life has...
read moreNarrative arc; Lessons in writing, from the sidewalk
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 feathers, producing a textural effect almost impossible to look away from, and same feeling that sometimes comes from a sudden glimpse of a painting, or a spring leaf, or the skin of a beloved—the...
read moreMigrants; Season of movement
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 juncos. Fortunately for the juncos, most of the other birds tend to be messy eaters that scatter some of the sunflower seeds onto the ground, so that the system works for these different feeding...
read moreInteresting times; May you live in…something else
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 run through the tumbled and bare Mordor hills near the Colorado. The marsh reeds spat out the ridiculous cacophonies of coots and grackles. It was pleasant to be living outdoors in February,...
read moreThe carnival atmosphere; Two species come together to find a new home
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, been seen in that remote place. Hundreds of cars were parked along both sides of the gravel road. Spectators toted camp chairs, coolers, dogs on leashes. Wide-brimmed hats were ubiquitous as...
read moreNot something for nothing; The price of free food
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 the stuff I find under the box elder trees in early summer, the sticky, glittery honeydew of thousands of aphids all busy sucking sap from the leaves. I haven’t gone so far as to try to...
read moreBuilding tensions; New stories show up in town—or over it
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 can add some insulation and warm up those old floors. And some just surprised us, like looking out one of the windows and finding that we could spot the Monte Vista Hotel sign through the...
read moreOn the edge; Celebrating the in betweens
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 that this is the best habitat for people, the mixing zone between: between the cultivated and the wild, between the planned and the spontaneous, between ways of seeing and living in the...
read moreThe beginning of the end; Nothing but potential
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 chick, the insistent screechings for food, the white splashes of feces and ultimate death, whether untimely or long put off. An egg is pure potential, life compressed into compact form and ready...
read moreThe story in patina; Valuing the old and cracked
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 the sand, and if it was the right shape, then we wanted it. The project was a fort—what else would 10-year-old boys build? We started it at the base of the neighbors’ bluff, where an open...
read moreRecounting loss; Finding words for the unthinkable
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 glockenspiel of animated figures who danced around several times a day; here was a Baroque church tucked away on a side street whose dim interior was so densely stippled with gold angels and...
read moreDispersal; Moving out into a dangerous world
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 on and on and they are rich with the tracks and scents of deer and elk and rabbits. The going is not difficult and it’s easy to find places to hide in rocky outcrops, thickets, copses of...
read moreAn everyday dispute or death; Another week, another shooting
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 Viola Awards showcase, an empowering celebration of the arts in Flagstaff. Fans of rock, of drama, of the visual arts all mingled, viscerally demonstrating how involvement with the arts...
read moreInside the forest of change; “Prone to Collapse” rises in Flagstaff
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 anyone anytime ought to be able to feel with whatever their tree neighbors were. The trees, some trees, would surely always be there. I thought back to those childhood afternoons on a recent...
read moreLooking for J.A. Bostwick; Simple scene, complicated backstory
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 vocabulary for describing what the artist did, choosing colors whose names I don’t know from what was obviously a pretty extensive palette, or using brush strokes in different ways to represent...
read moreSpooning; Running my mind over the smooth shape of the past
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 Town lot, to plant a shrub or root out a tenacious elm or put in a chicken run, and often as not we encounter low-rent buried treasure: an antique bottle once full of Thedford’s Syrup of...
read moreDanielle Stephen’s Crusade; Downwind and uncovered in Mohave County
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 came on school days and in that case the teachers ushered the kids out to watch the incandescent pink flash in the sky. But on this day, she and her dad, uncle and brother were out early, in...
read morePaint it black; Waiting for the big moment
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, there was no reason not to proceed closer to the center, where the total eclipse would last longer. The young waitresses were working hard, hustling back and forth with omelets, sandwiches,...
read moreNight hike; At night, the outer and inner landscapes are different
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 way down but up. Traversing the Peaks, alone, at night, had seemed a good idea back in town. Why do the same thing as all the day hikers from Phoenix? I wanted the night to turn a familiar...
read moreMonumental; A legacy that is more than local
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 than working in an office. And I took a perverse pleasure in trying to figure out how to convey a sentence such as “Eons of uplift, with most of the rock layers staying more or less...
read moreTrue grit; It’s the season of dust again
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. Nothing is more ubiquitous. Ask around, though, and you find out that it’s maddeningly hard to say exactly what it is. A few years ago I asked a scientist who’d been studying it for 40 years for...
read moreRereading; New words, same meaning
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 his black leather jacket wafting lighting of exhaust. We were reading Henry David Thoreau in those weeks, hacking our way through the thickets of Walden and the famous essay on civil...
read moreTending fire; Keeping the flames going in a cold time
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 around the neighborhood, entirely unsupervised as far as I could tell, and never had to report dutifully back home at six. We used to play under the bridge spanning the ravine that neighbored...
read moreJust a trim; Time to lower the ears once again
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 enforced slowdown, the imperative to do pretty much nothing for a spell. I was still just a kid really when I lived in London for a while after college graduation, squatting in some...
read moreMucking around; Slipping and sliding in the in between
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 could take on any texture, from iron-hard to sloppy pudding puddles to perfect modeling clay. These days, Flagstaff being a generally tidied-up sort of place long on tourists to impress and...
read morePaint it black; Finding the melody that grows from destruction
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 said he’d lost count. For now they were arrayed at random in the corners of the hall. But the artist, who creates much of his work from materials culled from nature, was planning to spend...
read moreWhat runs off, and what comes in; Looking for the constructive in water—and in us
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 call Rotkohl, a hearty dish for a fall evening, but also because I love the way they look, with the outer leaves cupping in protectively, almost maternally, around the growing head. In common...
read moreThe same campsite, twice; Because sometimes the best choice is obvious
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 before, and that had been half a lifetime earlier, when I was new to the Southwest and had scarcely any frame of reference for its complicated landscapes, its extreme moods, its three...
read moreTemporary news; Ready for lining the birdcage, thank God
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 a while the plastic bag is soaked through with spring rains and I have to separate the pages and hang them by the stove, or periodically there has been one of those printing or folding...
read moreThe work of the hands; The sound of many hands clapping, for Tony
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 house finches are building a nest on a small platform under the eaves—a square of plywood that I attached there years ago when we were first fixing up the outside. It seemed a hospitable...
read moreRiding America’s rails; On the Southwest Chief, it’s time that stretches out
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 later there it comes, the two laboring diesels—assuming they’re both working, even in this era of chronic budget cuts—and the streak of cars behind, a blur of lights that always reminds me...
read moreSnow job; Clearing the walk, clearing the mind
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 driveway. Which was long—the lots and lawns were big back there, our house set particularly far back from the street, and we had one of those elaborate semicircular driveways that ensured...
read moreReading tracks; All the prints that fit the news
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 patience and slowing down. But once in a while conditions are just right and the show is irresistible. Like this week: 8 inches of snow during one day, and then that night as the sky was...
read moreInto the Great Unknown; The pursuit of mystery in a shared future
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 like so many other vows of celibacy mine was too easily broken. In my case the lure was a base one: simple finances. As a struggling freelance journalist new to the state I was in no...
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