—for TS— T.S. Eliot wrote in The Waste Land, “April is the cruelest month,” and in the poem, “Home-Thoughts, from Abroad,” Robert Browning penned, “Oh, to be in England/Now that April’s there.” I don’t know that I find April crueler…
I’m stopped at a traffic light at 210th Street and the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, the northernmost borough of New York City. The young woman in the driver’s seat of the car next to me is holding up a…
During my career as a mass communications/journalism professor, I spent many years also teaching a section of English composition. Students were required to write a weekly 500-word essay using various styles of academic writing. One of those assigned categories was…
During 1973, I worked for the National Park Service at Natural Bridges National Monument, first as a volunteer and then as a paid seasonal ranger. Lucky for me, the BLM had been gearing up to hire four rangers at nearby…
Most Zephyr readers are probably aware of Interior Secretary Haaland’s ongoing review of the two large national monuments in southern Utah. A proper betting line would probably set the 1.9-million acre, ITC-proffered monument map as the odds-on favorite to be…
Peaceful Uprising is a grassroots environmental group based in Utah that was founded by activists Tim DeChristopher and Ashley Anderson. DeChristopher received world-wide media attention when he disrupted a federal BLM oil and gas lease auction in December 2008. DeChristopher,…
I was an engineering student at UC Berkeley in the early 1960s. The student body was much smaller and campus quieter before free speech and Vietnam came along. There was no admission charge for California residents, just a $150 admin…
Here at the Zephyr, we’re pretty proud of the articles we publish each issue. We’ve said this before, but we think we’ve assembled the best collection of writers we’ve ever had, all of whom are writing at a level that…
Our regular readers know that we began a new project at the Zephyr last year–called “Zephyr America.” We’ve been slowly wading through the massive Zephyr archives of historic photos and digitizing them to share with our readers. To keep up…
HERB RINGER and his parents, Sadie and Joseph, traveled across the American West and into the Canadian Rockies on numerous trips, from the 40s through the 70s. Herb was devoted to rail history, and was particularly fond of the historic…
July 21st, 1941 Travel this month, 494 Travel to date, 2881 Weather The usual brand of hot summer weather has been our lot, with a few days of high temperatures and occasional rainstorms. Fortunately the evenings are nearly always cool…
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In this Issue… Take it or Leave it: A Personal Postscript to Bill Davis’ DOXOL FIRE Story …by Jim Stiles Safe at Home: Learning to Love Baseball …by Tonya Audyn Stiles “(Still) ‘Enough Rope’”: (A Reporter’s Moab Memories. 1978-1984) #7…
Regular Zephyr contributor Bill Davis sent us an extraordinary detailed account of one of Moab’s worst disasters, the Doxol explosion and fire on July 31, 1981. Bill was the chief reporter for the Times-Independent and his story in this issue is the…
Either you learn to love baseball as a kid or else you don’t learn to love it. Right? It’s just too big. It’s like any other behemoth cultural institution—Catholicism, for example. I can speak to this as a Catholic. That…
Author’s note: One of the major “news values”—factors that generate media attention—is “impact”: How much of your audience is affected, and to what extent? A low-impact story, such as a flood of sewage into the basement of a single home,…
A year ago, I wrote about the development of the Little Valley area of St. George in southwest Utah. What I tried to do in that piece was use words, pictures and numbers to provide a specific example of what…
While sheer numbers of tourists can overwhelm the most patient of park rangers, even I would acknowledge that among those masses could be found some of the best people on the planet. I haven’t worn a badge and a smoky…
# # # # # I would like to say that my whole photography career began with shooting motel signs, but that would be a lie on a few counts. First, it’s not really a career. Not a paying one,…
Here we are at the end of March, and I am thinking about December. Well, not really December. I am thinking about town and how I sometimes go there to write. Town can be a location and an idea. In…
The most inaccessible, least known, and roughest portion of the Navajo Reservation is bounded by the Navajo, Colorado, San Juan, and Piute canyons. […] Buttes, mesas, and small domes predominate and are so tightly packed that the base of one…