Spring seems to have successfully encroached upon winter's territory this time around. Our grass is thriving dark green thanks to all the chicken manure, and I doubt we'll have to mow much this season thanks…
Posts published in “Essays”
Met Chuck at Klamath Falls airport per plan. We walked to Denny’s, had dinner, then went over to the yards. Arrived about midnight. Slept there for a few hours and then got 173 out at daybreak. We had the only open boxcar on the train. Each of us slept for several hours as we headed toward Bend. The train stopped for only a minute in Bend then headed toward Maupin and the Deschutes river valley. Nice ride – beautiful day. Saw a coyote and a number of deer along the way. Arrived at the Columbia River about 6 PM. We walked through a long dark tunnel and then to the bridge. As we crossed there was a strong wind blowing up river. We had dinner in the Wishram Lunch room; four beers in the bar then slept that night along the tracks.
We’ve had quite a series of storms this past week and the rain is continuing to fall. Several huge branches came down from the giant redwoods near our house, and we are fortunate none of those branches struck home. We’ve had two power outages, one lasting an hour, another five hours. In the absence of electricity to power our kitchen stove, we cooked an evening meal on our woodstove, and with our computers and lights kaput, I wrote a few letters by candlelight and Marcia practiced her cello.
When I was a boy of 10, I got into a fight with a French kid on a playground in Paris. It started over a line dispute at a playground installation. See, France, at least…
The creativity and craft of George Martin, the celebrated Beatles producer who died this week at the age of 90, is to be heard nowhere more radically and radiantly than on the band’s 1967 single,…
Early sunny morning, probably a school day; we are about 15 years old. You walk a few doors down and knock on my bedroom window, wearing just swim trunks, t-shirt, flip-flops, carrying swim fins. "C'mon, there's a good south swell and nobody's around and we can go get some waves." Well why not, I say, and join you with exact same attire and my fins. We walk a few blocks down towards the beach, me figuring we're just going to hit the nearby Coves, our semi-private paradise, but at the coast highway you stick out your thumb, heading south.
My hometown, Portland, Oregon, has a homelessness problem. Portland is often called the City of Bridges—more than a dozen cross the Willamette and Columbia Rivers—and beneath almost all, at one time or another, one sees…
After twenty-four years at the helm of the institution that he has radically transformed, Sonoma State University President, Ruben Armiñana, will retire on July 1, 2016. But first he has to run a kind of…
What I really wanted was a spicy bloody Mary. I don't know what it is about the bloody Mary, as it really doesn't matter how it's made, but where it's made. The bloody Mary is…