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…
It’s a peculiar time to live in a tiny, isolated town on the prairie. Peculiar, firstly, because the town looks largely the same, despite the international pandemic that occupies every headline and every conversation. The roads are quiet, yes. But…
THANKS to Tom McCourt & the Tibbetts Family. For years, I have been watching Moab move farther and farther away from its roots, to the point where it seems few people even know the history of the place anymore. Some…
At first, it was just fear. We woke up at 2am to a wailing fire siren, knowing that two communities immediately to the west of us had been evacuated. We could see the glow of the massive fires in the…
On the first Saturday of May, Jim and I roused ourselves early and drove two hours to the Kansas Sampler Festival. It’s a curious festival—more a statewide meet-and-greet than your typical artsy-craftsy affair. I don’t know if they have festivals…
One frenzied afternoon in Moab, more than 20 years ago, the crush of tourists, the asphalt-enhanced desert heat, and the already disturbing first hints of a “New West” future driven by an ‘amenities economy” got the better of me. I…