A July day in Horse Canyon, northern Nevada. Cheatgrass was abundant, especially along the cattle trail. Barbed “florets” snagged my sneakers and socks and worked into the fabrics and stabbed. Dozens of them, and they were hard to dislodge. Lacking…
Yesterday I happened to be looking through the open back doorway of the cabin. A housefly’s flight came to an abrupt stop and there came the barn spider on its invisible line. Reaching the fly, the spider wrapped it…
Visions… Once in a while something very like a vision comes along. Those, as we all know, are not scheduled in advance. They happen in subways, tangled woods, high plains, classrooms, prisons, battlefields. There are many recipes, special behaviors,…
Last summer Jim Stiles and Bob Greenspan and I met in Jackson, Wyoming. Bob and I favored crossing the street to a cafe for coffee, but Jim led us to a shady outside bench and we sat there quite a…
It was deathly hot, 104 degrees, the day the four of us (Norah, Rose, Olivia and I) arrived at Delicate Arch trailhead to join other parties clustered at their vehicles, gathering cameras and stowing bottles of water, food, who knows,…
Our friend martin Murie left us in January, but with the permission and blessings of his family, we would like to re-print some of his best essays from the past decade. Here is one of Martin’s first contributions, a…
BACK TO JACKSON HOLE… Approaching my old home grounds, Jackson’s Hole, I start gearing down. Deep breathing, concentrating on traffic, letting all else blur by. But a parking place has to be found and by then I’ve remembered the sagebrush…
State Of Nature, II A few years ago Bruce Anderson printed a piece of mine, “State Of Nature,” in his fine paper, the Anderson Valley Advertiser. Well, the situation has gotten worse, much worse. The state of nature…