I drifted around the rural West and country for decades. Until I reached a small corner of Colorado.
Diane Sylvain
Posted inMarch 6, 2017: Uncomfortable Corners
An expedition through the Edgelands
This landscape isn’t always beautiful — but that’s what makes it loveable.
Posted inWotr
This July 4th, take a gander at the phone book
Like most Americans, I’m a mutt, and proud of it.
Posted inArticles
Following Dad down the road
I thank you for the music, and your stories of the road;I thank you for my freedom when it came my time to go;I thank you for your kindness, and the times that you got tough.And Papa, I don’t think I’ve said “I love you” near enough. –Dan Fogelberg, from his song “Leader of the […]
Posted inWotr
The light is changing… summer is ending
Suddenly it’s the end of August, and everything is different: The light has started to tilt and deepen, and the landscape has that burnished look, as if it’s been drenched in honey and ripened by sun. The world seems balanced; we stand at the brink of September, at the edge of the turn of the […]
Posted inDecember 6, 2010: Toxic Past, Toxic Present
Poetry in motion
I was walking down the sidewalk the other day, talking to myself, when I heard a person come up behind me, making the kind of polite noises that a person makes so as not to startle the person ahead into doing something violent. It was a young coworker. We smiled and chatted and I explained […]
Posted inWotr
I liked it better when being born here was enough
If the 14th Amendment is repealed, how do we know we’re citizens at all?
Posted inJuly 20, 2009: Thinking Outside the Timber Box
Welcome, new interns!
Three new interns have arrived for six months of “journalism boot camp” at our Paonia, Colo., office. (For more on the internship program, see hcn.org/about/internships.) Editorial intern Ariana Brocious is thrilled to be embarking on her first full-time journalism job. Last year, she reported on climate change in Argentina for the Arizona Daily Star. A […]
Posted inJune 1, 2009: Voyage of the Dammed
Visitors from underground
VISITORS FROM UNDERGROUNDPat Jablonsky and Bill Yett of nearby Delta stopped in to our Paonia, Colo., office to renew their subscription and tell us about their recent trip to New Mexico’s Fort Stanton-Snowy River Cave National Conservation Area. They showed us astonishing photos of the Snowy River passage, named for the miles-long formation of bright […]
Posted inArticles
Surviving a friend’s suicide
‘I know something about black holes now—because there was one inside of him.’
Posted inWotr
The memory of a mountain
A long time ago, I climbed a mountain with my mother. It was back in the early ’80s, when she was only slightly older than I am now — hard for me to believe, even though I’ve done the math and know it’s true. The mountain was Pikes Peak in Colorado. We climbed it from […]
Posted inSeptember 18, 2006: Going Big
The memory of mountains
A long time ago, I climbed a mountain with my mother. It was back in the early ’80s, when she was only slightly older than I am now — hard for me to believe, even though I’ve done the math and know it’s true. The mountain was Pikes Peak in Colorado. We climbed it from […]
Posted inJune 9, 2003: How we see the West
Seeing the mysterious in the everyday
Someday, everything is gonna be different / When I paint my masterpiece. — Bob Dylan It’s late at night in the green springtime, and I’m wide awake in the studio, Van Morrison on the CD player and a pastel painting slowly coming to life on the easel before me. Hayfields and a line of cottonwoods, […]
Posted inDecember 23, 2002: In search of the Glory Days
The canyon between us
We set out in his truck on the day after Christmas, the man I loved and I, winding our way west from Colorado into Utah. We took the highway to Gateway, then the road to Paradox. The road took us through canyons where nobody else seemed to be awake, the occasional ranch as empty and […]
Posted inMarch 26, 2001: Teach the children well
Time Warp
Shoot, the enviros haven’t won the battle for the West’s public lands after all Back in the 1980s, the West was cut and dried. Ronald Reagan and James Watt were there to protect us from soft-on-Communism redwoods, while environmentalists climbed tripods and lay down on the statehouse steps in protest. There were good guys and […]
Posted inApril 28, 1997: Evangelical Christians preach a green gospel
Coyote vigils
At 3 on a December morning in a high cold mountain valley I am crunching through deep snow on my way to a monastery chapel. It is so cold that the air crackles and burns; the hairs in my nose are icicles, biting me as I breathe. I am swathed in so many layers of […]
Posted inSeptember 30, 1996: Can this man break the right's grip on Idaho?
A harsh and priceless gift to the world
“There was a hardness of stone,” Theodore Roethke starts a poem, “an uncertain glory … Between cliffs of light / We strayed like children.” The Harsh Country, the poem is called. I’m miles away from what I think of as the harsh country, the cliffs of light, the country of bright stone. It has a […]
Posted inMarch 8, 1993: A famous skeleton returns to the earth
Ask for me tomorrow, and you will find me a grave man
Photographs from ‘Scoring in Heaven: Gravestones and Cemetery Art of the American Sunbelt States’. To read this article, download this HCN issue in PDF format. This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Ask for me tomorrow, and you will find me a grave man.