June 2006
Neighbors
Buddhists and nudists, Peace Corps volunteers, Quakers spinning in their graves
Sunbeams
If you see a whole thing — it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives. . . . But up close a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern.
Against The Current
Barry Lopez On Writing About Nature And The Nature Of Writing
I’ve become acutely aware of the political danger the country is in. The champions of material wealth, the acolytes of technology, and the religious extremists are so loud, so bellicose, so uncompromising. Who will rein them in? Who’s not afraid to criticize their notions of “progress”?
Waiting For Salmon
How global warming will affect the fate of chinook salmon, and all that’s tied to them, is one of the many Gordian knots in natural history blithely dismissed by Americans still trying to pull Charles Darwin’s pants down.
Diagnostic Tools
They breathe deeply and put their hot hands on me. I lie on their padded massage table, on their soft sheets. Light slants across the room and into the kitchen, illuminating the place where my seventeen-year-old dog lies on his bed, unable to move without human hands to hoist his hind end up, a human voice to encourage him on his journey into the leaf-covered yard.
Red Politics And Blue In Wyoming
I’ve spent many years repairing windmills with my father-in-law at his Four Mile Ranch. The mills pump water to the surface for cattle and sheep to drink. There are nineteen of these windmills on this broken patch of land, which looks west to the Bighorn Mountains and east to Powder River.
Men Who Make Houses
I know the life story of every man who has so much as hammered in a nail at my house. This is not my doing. I’m disinclined to delve too deeply into the depths of anybody else’s dire experience. I’ve got my hands full with my own.
Where The Water Is
One of the uncomfortable things about living with a person who suffers from Alzheimer’s is that it makes you confront your own character flaws.
Sweethearts Of The Rodeo
We tore across the back field, our heels digging into their sides. We pulled them up short and did somersaults off their backs, or handstands in the saddle. We turned on a dime. We jumped the coop, the wall, the ditch. We were fearless. It was the summer we smoked our first cigarettes, the summer you broke your arm. It was the last summer, the last one, before boys.
