Boing, boing, boing … Ridgway, Colo., sculptor Clifton Barr looked up from work in his metal and wood studio and saw a large, antlered deer “jumping like a bucking horse” in the neighbor’s yard, reports the Ouray County Plaindealer. Barr did a double take and took off his glasses just to make sure, but when […]
Betsy Marston
Posted inMarch 12, 2001: Divided Waters
Heard around the West
As far as anyone knows, the dead explorer William Clark did not use a ouija board, or e-mail, or teleport a petition to the White House in the final flurry of Bill Clinton’s presidency. Still, after a couple of centuries, Clark found the president receptive, as did guide Sacajawea and slave York, the first black […]
Posted inFebruary 26, 2001: Return of the natives
Heard around the West
When the mighty stumble, satirists have a field day. California, the sixth-largest economy in the world, became an easy target once its halfway deregulation of electricity triggered billion-dollar deficits.A commentator on the Web site F–kedCom- pany.Com chortled, “All this whining and complaining that there’s no juice to run the Jacuzzis and there’s no way to […]
Posted inFebruary 12, 2001: Mr. Babbitt's wild ride
Men without women
“How sad life is, but the saddest thing is to sleep alone even though one has a wife, Luis.”– A tree carving, translated from Spanish in Speaking Through the Aspens You’re walking through an aspen forest and suddenly you see it on a tree trunk – a carving of a woman’s body or a bird, […]
Posted inFebruary 12, 2001: Mr. Babbitt's wild ride
Heard around the West
California’s rolling blackouts have marooned people in elevators and left hundreds of cows bellowing for their milking machines. Yet high prices and scarce supply won’t affect everyone in the state: not, for instance, residents of the 1970s-era “Eco-House” in Arcata, north of San Francisco. For 21 years, three students at a time from Humboldt State […]
Posted inJanuary 29, 2001: Power on the loose
X-rated on the rocks
“I am glad I have seen yournakedness;it is beautiful;it will rain from now on.” — Talashimtiwa Hopi Indian from Oraibi, 1920from The Serpent and the Sacred Fire: Fertility Images in Southwest Rock Art The record on rock left by the Southwest’s early people is mostly mystifying. What do those galaxy-like clusters really represent? What are […]
Posted inJanuary 29, 2001: Power on the loose
Heard around the West
“One of the reasons environmental protection is so hard is that it is so embarrassing,” says Oliver Houck, a law professor at Tulane Law School in Louisiana. It’s one thing to say you got ticketed for speeding, but another to confess “that you are using the Boise River as a sewer,” which explains why the […]
Posted inJanuary 21, 2002: Finding the words
Heard around the West
Perhaps the Washington Post Magazine’s editors chuckled in anticipation as they assigned reporter Gene Weingarten the important task of finding a town that measured down as the “armpit of America.” Of course, it would not be the District of Columbia, home base of the daily, where more people are murdered in a year than anywhere […]
Posted inJanuary 15, 2001: Plains sense
Heard around the West
Cattle have always enjoyed right of way in the West. If the road is suddenly filled with mooing and manuring animals, it’s up to a motorist to slow down and enjoy the passing herd. If you’re unlucky enough to crest a hill and crash into a 2,000-pound cow, the animal is legally innocent; it’s the […]
Posted inDecember 18, 2000: Still here: Can humans help other species defy extinction?
Bring back towns
Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream makes the buzzwords “new urbanism” come alive. The authors, who are community planners, have written and designed an easily accessible and smartly illustrated book, which is not surprising, since Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Jeff Speck believe that what works to build […]
Posted inDecember 18, 2000: Still here: Can humans help other species defy extinction?
Heard around the West
Oh, to be a stray in San Francisco, where a software billionaire’s gift has made animal homelessness a Cinderella experience. Once picked up from the streets, cats, for example, move to a loft where they can choose to watch mice run on television or loll on top of a six-foot climbing tree. Piped-in air to […]
Posted inDecember 4, 2000: Road Block
A botanical El Dorado
A new quarterly journal from the Siskiyou Field Institute in Cave Junction, Ore., devotes itself to “trees, rocks, critters, creeks, humans, snakes” – the list goes on to include little-known but wonderfully named species like “chalcedon checkerspots” and “hooded ladies tresses.” All inhabit a landscape that ecologists call the Klamath-Siskiyou Ecoregion. It includes the Pacific […]
Posted inDecember 4, 2000: Road Block
Dear friends
Stop the presses! Sometimes the forces of sprawl get beaten by determined community opposition. That rare story about a small town’s successful campaign to stay small is reported in this issue by associate editor Greg Hanscom. What was almost as startling was the timing: This issue was 99 percent finished, and as far as we […]
Posted inDecember 4, 2000: Road Block
Heard around the West
Think about writing an almost minute-by-minute record of your life: documenting the shoes you’re wearing, rating brands of snack food and occasionally taping to your notes samples of recently harvested toenail clippings. Would anyone bother reading or even handling this intimate minutia? Sure they would, said octogenarian Robert Shields in Dayton, Wash., who obsessively noted […]
Posted inNovember 20, 2000: Water pressure
Heard around the West
Tired of basting and babysitting that big bird for Thanksgiving? Why not try SPAM, the pressed pink concoction that does not signify, as rumor has it, “something posing as meat.” No, SPAM is smooshed pork shoulder and ham in a can along with sugar, salt, water and sodium nitrate, reports the Santa Fe New Mexican. […]
Posted inNovember 6, 2000: 'Re-inhabitation' revisited
News battle emerges in Utah
UTAH Thanks to a petition to higher-ups from editorial staffers at the Salt Lake Tribune, a news story involving the paper itself reached the light of day. In mid-October, the Wall Street Journal and other national newspapers picked up details of a struggle between the Tribune, an independent daily with about 135,000 readers, and the […]
Posted inNovember 6, 2000: 'Re-inhabitation' revisited
Dear Friends
A forest history award On March 29, 1999, High Country News published Lynne Bama‘s story about public-land exchanges and the turn-of-the-century politics that led to checkerboarded lands in the West. Her story vividly outlined how private land came to dot public lands, and how attempts by federal agencies to consolidate their holdings led to controversy […]
Posted inNovember 6, 2000: 'Re-inhabitation' revisited
Heard around the West
Is this a tale for Ripley’s Believe It or Not? A moose in Whitefish, Mont., threw itself at a car driven by a woman who loves moose so much her license plates read moosie1 and moosie2. The suicidal moose, probably a victim of raging hormones during the rutting season, “really shook up the driver,” reports […]
Posted inOctober 23, 2000: Stalking Slade
Dear Friends
Our election issue If there’s a theme for this year’s election issue, it’s that Old West politicians are under increasing attack: Our cover story reports on Washington Sen. Slade Gorton’s tough re-election battle, and Todd Wilkinson writes on p. 5 that several of Montana’s statewide races remain neck-and-neck. Western citizens are demanding more power in […]
Posted inOctober 23, 2000: Stalking Slade
Heard around the West
The Seattle-Post Intelligencer tries to be conscientious during election season, interviewing by its count more than 100 candidates. Perhaps surreptitiously, the staff of the daily also write down the silliest comments from would-be public servants. Among the paper’s top 10: I was born into leadership – period. Give the Indians Food Stamps to buy salmon. […]