I listened to elders and medicine people from over a dozen tribes give testimony to Forest Service Supervisor Nora Rasure, explaining to her why snowmaking with treated wastewater was blasphemy (HCN, 9/17/07). I watched middle-aged men bow their heads as tears streaked their faces. None of that seemed to move Ms. Rasure. She told the […]
Mary Sojourner
Posted inJuly 23, 2007: Hydrogen Highway Revisited
Every picture tells a story
Thank you for the cover of the June 25 issue. The picture is worth far more than a thousand words. Here are four that sum it up: blood on his hands. The expression (what there is of an expression) on Kevin Smith’s face is the reason I don’t trust myself to own a gun. Mary […]
Posted inWotr
Selling peace on the street in Flagstaff, Arizona
I sat with a friend and her son outside the post office in Flagstaff, Ariz. The building has been there half a century; we felt as though we had been there eons. There was an icy mountain wind and an occasional icy stare. We were encouraging people to send George Bush a half-cup of rice […]
Posted inNovember 27, 2006: The West: A New Center of Power
Tender memories
Thank you for Diane Sylvain’s radiant essay, “The Memory of Mountains.” I am weary of wild-wo/man hiker goes solo into wilderness and has a Big Moment. Diane’s tender writing summed up for me the essence of the best of High Country News: the illuminating of the threads that connect us to each other, and to […]
Posted inSeptember 4, 2006: Blast from the Past
A life of brutal grace
Montana writer Swain Wolfe’s memoir, The Boy Who Invented Skiing, might be more aptly titled The Writer on His Way to Being An Alchemical Cartographer. Wolfe’s writing maps transformations, in a style both gritty and magical. Wolfe was born in the hardscrabble West of the late 1930s. His boyhood was spent in the Colorado Springs […]
Posted inMay 15, 2006: The Immigrant's Trail
We don’t need no stinkin’ GPS
I so hoped “Waypoints of the Heart” was part of your recent April Fools’ spoof (HCN, 4/3/06: Waypoints of the heart). I was chilled by the words, “the unwavering locating and decoding of geocaching is like finding a rubric for the universe …” Here, in the increasingly mapped, sanitized and sold Southwest, geocaching is on […]
Posted inOctober 31, 2005: The Public Lands' Big Cash Crop
Connections across time
I glanced at the recent cover blurb, “What Happened to the Anasazi?” and felt a familiar and weary irritation (HCN, 10/3/05: Out of the Four Corners). I continue to believe the only adequate response to that question is: “Ask the Hopi, the Paiute, the Havasupai, the Hualapi. They will tell you.” Then, I read the […]
Posted inWotr
Opposing Wal-Mart doesn’t make you a Nazi
I’m a radical, yes. An environmentalist, yes. A small-is-better zealot, yes. A feminist, a fierce supporter of independent bookstores, a rabble rouser. I’ve been called a Chicken Little who shrieks, “The sky is falling!” I admit to all those labels. What I am not, and this is the second time in a decade I’ve been […]
Posted inSeptember 13, 2004: When a Boom is a Bust
Occupying less
This excerpt from Solace by Mary Sojourner has been removed from High Country News Web Archives as the request of Scribner, the publisher. We are very sorry for any inconvenience this creates for our readers. If you need access to this essay, hard-copy back issues of High Country News are sometimes available. Email circulation@hcn.org to […]
Posted inWotr
To have and have not in Flagstaff, Arizona
I’m still appalled by the subject line of the e-mail I received a month ago. “Great news: we are homeless!” I didn’t know the address on the e-mail. Based on the subject line, I figured it was probably from a Democratic candidate informing me about a Bushite atrocity. I clicked open the e-mail to find […]
Posted inJune 9, 2003: How we see the West
Happy Sounds in Arizona
Yee ha. I picked up the new HCN and began making little inarticulate whimpers of sheer pleasure. The new design is wonderful, classy, befitting the amazing writers who grace its pages. Mary Sojourner Flagstaff, Arizona This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Happy Sounds in Arizona.
Posted inWotr
Why I do what I do, the way that I do it
I hate corpo-jargon, the trying-to-be hip phrases that aren’t. But the first words in my mind as I pull off Quartzite, Arizona’s main drag into the gritty parking lot of Reader’s Oasis are: “I am definitely working outside the box.” The big-box bookstores, that is. Reader’s Oasis is a metal shed, a half-dozen tables, a […]
Posted inWotr
Everybody’s a greenie now
Suddenly, everybody’s green: developers, who believe a golf course pond is good for wildlife, ski resort managers, who want to use recycled water to make artificial snow, absentee owners, who want to cut everything in sight in the name of fire prevention, though they spend a weekend a year in their Southwest trophy homes. Or […]
Posted inFebruary 3, 2003: The death of the Super Hopper
Light and love in Wyoming
Before I can review Mark Spragg’s new novel, The Fruit of Stone, I need to perform an exorcism — of a New York Times book review by a guy named Jonathan Miles, whose credentials include Books Columnist for Men’s Journal (one of those magazines that show men how to spend an hour in a fitness […]
Posted inWotr
Who are we?
I spend a lot of time alone. Most writers, if they are lucky, do. I’ve been fine-tuning a memoir, facing into truths about myself I would rather forget. As I turn to national newspapers and magazines in the deluded effort to unwind after too much time in my own company, I find myself wondering who […]
Posted inNovember 11, 2002: Behind the gate
Fenced out of Bush’s gated empire
It is deja vu all over again. And it isn’t. A president has come to a small Western fairgrounds to push his war agenda. I stand with 700 Flagstaff, Ariz., neighbors at the north entrance to the grounds, a hundred yards from the south entrance where the president’s motorcade will glide in. We hold hands […]
Posted inMay 13, 2002: Beyond ecology: Restoring a cultural landscape
The Old West went that-a-way
The East Coast editor wants me to tell her something new. Something nobody knows about the West. Something special. Something secret. I rack my brain. And my ethics. What we have left out here that’s special needs to stay special. Our secrets need to be kept. Here’s the piece I sent her. She turned it […]
Posted inMarch 4, 2002: Seed in the ground
You can call mine Mortgage Manor
Lupine Lodge. Del Mar at the Sea. Massive Mountain Manor. Harbor House at the Pines. I have changed the names to protect the ostentatious; to protect those who not only must own four luxury homes in four different places, but also pick and register names for them. I didn’t think I was capable of being […]
Posted inOctober 11, 1999: A home-grown Water War
A bittersweet victory in the New West
FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. – It is over. And, we have won. The Dry Lake ephemeral wetland and volcano crater outside Flagstaff, is safe from a golf course and million-dollar home development. The county supervisors close their thick notebooks. For a long instant, the big auditorium is silent. Then it is as though 200 people let out […]
Posted inJanuary 18, 1999: Desert sprawl
Squandering our kids’ inheritance
“This is our kids’ inheritance.” I saw the bumper sticker the first time on the back of a beat-up old Airstream in a Searchlight, Nev., casino parking lot, and I thought of one of my dad’s favorite sayings: “Enjoy your money and your kids while you’re alive.” He didn’t, and died with that regret. I’m […]