Among my most sulfurous and vitriolic Rants–those far too profane to grace this page–are those inspired by my family’s housecat, Lucy. Those of you who follow these Rants know that I live in wild country, at high elevation, with terrible weather, and surrounded by a spate of voracious predators of every stripe. This is hardly […]
Michael Branch
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Rants from the Hill: A visit from the Mary Kay lady
I find it unfortunate that we English speakers have so few words for “mud,” a substance that varies so greatly by location and conditions that it would be handier to have a hundred terms for it, as the indigenous Nordic Sami people do for “snow.” If a useless neologism like “ginormous” can make the Oxford […]
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Rants from the Hill: What would Edward Abbey do?
“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of Nevada’s western Great Basin desert. One crisp, blue day late last fall I dodged work in order to climb my home mountain with three friends who were also shirking their adult responsibilities that day. My Silver Hills buddy Steve […]
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Rants from the Hill: Running into winter
“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of Nevada’s western Great Basin desert. When my father-in-law’s sixtieth rolled around we got together as a family and asked him what he wanted for his birthday. Without hesitating he replied, “I want you all to run a half marathon […]
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Rants from the Hill: The Ghost of Silver Hills
“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of Nevada’s western Great Basin desert. A decade ago, when we first scouted the rural high country where we ultimately bought land and built our home, there weren’t many folks out here from whom to get stories of whatever might […]
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Rants from the Hill: In Defense of Missiles
“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of Nevada’s western Great Basin desert. The hill from which I rant is good for many things: to hold our house up high into the teeth of the desert wind and generate an updraft on which harriers kite; to give […]
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Rants from the Hill: Walking to California
“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of Nevada’s western Great Basin desert. If you’ve ever driven I-5 through northern California and up into southern Oregon, you may have seen the memorable bumper sticker that Oregonians use to welcome their California neighbors over the state line: “Welcome […]
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Rants from the Hill: Customer Cranky
“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of Nevada’s western Great Basin desert. Some of you may remember the novelist William Faulkner’s famous Yoknapatawpha County, which, though fictional, was based upon the Mississippi town in which Faulkner lived. Well, I’m now ready to give a fictional name […]
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Rants from the Hill: Them! and Us
“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of Nevada’s western Great Basin desert. Some of you may be fortunate—or perhaps unfortunate—enough to recall the 1954 science fiction film Them!, which, much like Earth First!, had the audacity to include the exclamation point in its title. A classic […]
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Rants from the Hill: Guests in the house of fire
“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of Nevada’s western Great Basin desert. For once, fire has remained absent from our home landscape this summer. Winter was so long and wet as to have repressed fire season, and it seems strange that our home mountain, valley, and […]
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Rants from the Hill: A thousand-mile walk to home
“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of Nevada’s western Great Basin desert. Three summers ago I blew out a lumbar disc while running a jackhammer in the desert near my house—an accident that was the result of simple bad luck, with the odds perhaps skewed by […]
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Rants from the Hill: Greetings from Nevada
“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly reflections on life in the high country of Nevada’s western Great Basin desert. I live with my wife and two young daughters in the high desert of the western Great Basin, at 6,000 feet on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada, on a desiccated hilltop so […]