Sometimes the Barbarian seems to be the Civilized Man. Sometimes the Civilized Man seems to be the Barbarian. —Benson J. Lossing, 1870 In late October, 1907, my great grandfather, John Wetherill, was making his way up the San Juan…
Oft in the stilly night, Ere Slumber’s chain has bound me, Fond Memory brings the light Of other days around me: The smiles, the years Of boyhood’s years, The words of love then spoken: The eyes that shone, Now dimmed…
NOTE: I first wrote this in the mid-1990s, when I thought there was a chance our little town of Moab might avoid–or at least try to avoid—the kind of fate that it has eventually been consumed by. It was also…
Editor’s Note: Sixteen years after this article was written, life for LGBT Utahns (and elsewhere in the United States) has changed for the better. As Stephen Clark, the ACLU legal director quoted extensively in the article, noted, “Progress goes basically…
“If you look in the mirror and don’t like what you see, don’t blame the mirror.” Tao Jones More or less full disclosure: This essay came into being thanks to my having perused Calvin Luther Martin’s The Way of…
“Progress” is a word that gets bandied about with increasing regularity. Its usefulness in describing movement toward a desirable goal is often clouded by proponents of various causes who use it without describing exactly what their proposed goal is…
The first time I went to Big Bend I drove all night. West of San Antonio on US 90 the land emptied into flat black space and one or two distant lights. After two hundred miles I crossed the wild…
