I catch fish with my hands. In the Wyoming Rockies, where I have spent my best summers, the high meadow streams are thick with brookies, cutthroats and rainbows. I hide behind willows and boulders, spying, greedy to catch, kill and eat them. The fish hang suspended in liquid moments then shear off like startled birds, crowding […]
michaelwolcott
Posted inRange
Birdwatching in the desert
Lightning flares in the bruised afternoon sky over the Arizona-New Mexico line. Wind scrapes across the grey-green flats from the west, flinging a fistful of gray birds through the air. Purple rags of cloud stream ahead of the storm. A chill strikes the desert. Thunder claps. I take cover under the overhung cut bank of […]
Posted inRange
Necessary Journeys
Yesterday my friend C. crossed into Nogales to help deported immigrants deal with their staggering doses of bad luck. A river runner and wilderness guide, she possesses advanced first-aid skills that come in handy along the border. While coyotes and drug runners circled the open-air humanitarian aid station looking for new recruits, C. wrapped ankle […]
Posted inGoat
Crossroad at the foot of a mountain
Lilacs bloomed on the corner next to the hostel. A freight train rumbled through the little downtown, the third one in the past hour; the swirling clouds of railroad noise carried echoes of Hank Williams and Woody Guthrie. A block south of the tracks, a black Irish beauty from New York stood in front of a coffee shop, […]
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Blue horses: riding on moonlight
I step out of my shack beneath a waxing half moon. Milky light pours down on northern Arizona. Scattered ponderosas march across the bunchgrasses of Government Prairie, casting oval shadows to the west of each tree. As usual, my walk takes me along the fence line. A cloud shutters the moon. Across the barb-wire, two huge silhouettes emerge […]
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Mountain people
Let’s start with this: mountain people do not curse the weather. They have slept out in the rain and know that the weather will change. They know that just to be around—under any sort of sky—is good luck enough. Mountain people have crooked grins and broken hearts and dirt under their fingernails. They are unimpressed […]
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An end to the “Snow War”?
Thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court, Arizona skiers may soon be spared the inconvenience of living in one of the Union’s warmest and driest states. Last week the high court removed the final legal hurdle blocking Arizona Snowbowl from making artificial snow with reclaimed sewage effluent on the San Francisco Peaks—a plan which 13 southwestern tribes […]
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Is humanitarian aid really “littering”?
In summer, the southern Arizona desert is among the most merciless environments on earth. Temperatures spike at 120 degrees. Shade is scarce. Each year hundreds of undocumented migrants die trying to walk north from Mexico. The grisly accounts of survivors and the quickly-mummified evidence on the ground suggest that a cooked brain and water-starved sensory neurons […]
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BLM’s unheroic response to civil disobedience
“One day the South will recognize its real heroes.” – Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail In the Alabama of the mid-nineteen sixties, Martin Luther King could see the arc of history bending before him. He knew that the South’s real heroes were people like Rosa Parks, who defied the law because […]
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Snowbowl Redux: The Question of Balance
Every journalist is biased. Scribes-for-hire have opinions, just like anybody else. However most readers expect some approximation of fairness and balance. The reporter’s job is to lock his personal views in a cage until press time. This professional obligation was very much on my mind last winter when I wrote “The Snow War,” a summary […]
Posted inGoat
Notes from el Mundo Nuevo
We are not talking about border policy here. This is about Planet Desert. The hungers grow. Fewer crumbs reach the global economy’s bottom-dwellers, so they abandon the slums and failing campos to take their best shots at something more. For this, they must be hunted. I am in the Altar Valley to look at the […]