It’s been a year since the mighty AVA shut down the print edition and reverted to digital only, here’s how my interaction with it has changed as a reader and writer. My M O for…
Posts published in “Essays”
“The idea that we’re the greatest people in the world because we have the most money in the world is ridiculous. Wait until this wave of prosperity is over! Wait ten or fifteen years! Wait…
Today a casual traveler driving east from the Comptche Store would never imagine the busy logging scene along the valley floor that went one 140 years ago. The headwaters of the Albion River in our…
Mushrooming population, developers’ zeal, pressure for more housing, agricultural subsidies, pesticides, and other forms of pollution only partially explain the persistence of environmentally destructive water practices. The entire body of water law itself has been—and…
I’m not sure when I first listened to George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” which premiered 100 years ago this week, from start to finish. Snippets had played throughout the soundtrack of my life as a…
I was born with control. I take two awful hot baths a day. I keep movin’ all the time on the diamond — and I eat nothin’ but fried food. Why does my arm last…
Cactus Smuggling and Other Adventures… I stood alongside two Mexican tourists looking through a chainlink fence at an enormous hole in the ground. Somewhere near the New Mexico/Arizona line it was maybe half a mile…