Black smoke. Armored vehicles. Pepper spray. 300 helmeted police in riot gear. Helicopters. Nightsticks. Snipers. Bean bags. Rubber bullets. Sound cannons. Cell phone jamming. Drums. Sage. Prayers. 300 unarmed peaceful water protectors. Tobacco. Tribal elders. Song. Blockade. Crossing Minnesota, I don’t yet realize what I am driving into. The [...]
I climb the starboard ratlins and ease out onto the yard to unfurl the mains’l. My feet swing back and forth on a single footline. Working with my hands free, I am balanced on my stomach over the yard, making me wish I had a prehensile tail. The sail [...]
Cradled between three birch trees is where they will find me. I look at my rifle. A bolt action 30.06 manufactured by the Savage Arms Company of Connecticut. It has a Redfield 4x telescopic sight and is accurate to 200 yards. It can kill anything from prairie dogs to [...]
When you are twenty, you go into the desert to find yourself. When you are seventy, you go to see what’s coming. South of Island in the Sky, north of the Needles and west of the Maze. The canyon lands of the west are desert. I spend the morning [...]
It’s called the basement of time. I am eight miles and five-thousand feet down the South Kaibab trail at mid-day. The temperature hovers close to 105 °F. My knees ache, and my body is tired. There is a rest house on the trail at this point, but it’s at [...]
I am on a journey through the Southwest. Looking for a little solitude in the desert. The solitude is offset by my conversations with strangers. Where are you from? Isn’t the earth amazing? Which eventually leads to… How do you see the environment? Today, I met Ranger Pete. I [...]
What’s the life of a single golden eagle worth? It’s an unfair question, but the one I ask, Steve Slater, director of Hawk Watch International (HWI) in Salt Lake City. There are two answers he says. The first, is that there is value in all life. The second, is a [...]
Passing through a door in the rock, Walking on ancient seas, Down through the basement of time, Following a desert wren. The canyons are painted by gods, Small hand prints here or there. Now I am the sun, the wind, the earth, A single grace note, in a world without [...]
I am in Donley County, Texas. The panhandle. As sparse as the spelling of its name. Flat, dry to the edge of the earth, and bucking a headwind. But something’s going on here. My eye catches a white wind turbine, then another and another. As I look, dozens fade [...]
Half of who we are is what we remember. The other half is what we forget. The first is made sweeter or more valuable when we remember what we forgot. I remember the crack of a branch. I am camped on the side of mountain near Lake Manyara. The [...]
