Once upon a time, I had a pretty sweet gig at the Wall Street Journal, editing stories about sports, wine, theater, pop music, photography, painting and opera. Every month or so, I reviewed a novel or profiled a jazz musician. The daily “Leisure & Arts” page was a quiet, civilized little backwater, largely untouched by […]
Communities
Posted inGoat
Colorado ski town zombification
In the last two months, I have been to three different “ski towns” in Western Colorado: Crested Butte, Vail, and Aspen. Each visit was my first and I approached the towns not with delusions of community-rich grandeur but with half-formed preconceptions based on my experiences in Montana’s resort communities, which tend to embrace the summer with […]
Posted inRange
Rants from the Hill: How many bars in your cell?
“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of Nevada’s western Great Basin desert. The rural pocket of Silver Hills where we live is so remote as to be virtually uninhabited, though I am delighted to be among the virtual uninhabitants here. This status comes with some logistical […]
Posted inGoat
Return of the corn
The roads that wind across the Taos Pueblo reservation pass through a cultural and environmental mosaic of a type common in the rural West, where natural beauty and human poverty overlap and sometimes blend. Here is a thicket of wild plums growing up along a lush irrigation ditch, the Sangre de Cristo mountains rising up […]
Posted inOctober 17, 2011: A Burning Problem
A lovely and restless autumn
Art Director Cindy Wehling is taking a much-deserved sabbatical through the end of the year, after more than 20 years of HCN deadlines. (That’s more than 500 issues!) While Cindy’s traveling the West and working on an addition to the Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired house she and husband Don Olsen built, Denver freelance designer and editor […]
Posted inArticles
What we take and leave when wildfire comes
She had three dogs at her feet, and her girlfriend sat beside her on a motel lobby couch. The two cats were at a kennel. Their VW van was full of climbing gear, and their motel room had a couple changes of clothes. “I’ve been thinking a lot about impermanence,” Ashley Woods told me. That […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Of Segways and stickshifts
MONTANA There’s a new way for cops to enjoy their jobs while still looking out for bad guys. In Billings, Mont., Police Chief Rich St. John said that all of his officers who tried out two-wheeled Segways on their beats found the vehicles “fun,” though the men pictured in the Billings Gazette story looked just […]
Posted inWotr
Not all government programs need cutting
For much of our country’s history, chopping down forests and plowing up prairie were considered patriotic acts. Farming, which rid the earth of so-called non-productive land and transformed it into fields of grain, was a necessary nation-building activity. It took a few decades, but we finally realized that in our rush to control nature, we […]
Posted inWotr
For the love of garlic
Garlic: I can’t live without it. I’ve been growing this onion relative since the mid-1990s and have learned that good garlic is the product of both nature and nurture – good genes and good cultivation. Now is the best time to buy garlic for planting because it was just harvested in August, and the best […]
Posted inOctober 17, 2011: A Burning Problem
Phoenix remembered
Great essay by Aaron Gilbreath (HCN, 9/5/11)! I got to Phoenix in July of 1965, when there was still a real monsoon season that brought rain with the dust, and cooler evenings. The city didn’t have the wildlife that keep you company, but you knew you were in the desert during the dry times, too, […]
Posted inOctober 17, 2011: A Burning Problem
The violence of the open road
If you stand near the highway and listen to the trucks rip past at 85 to 90 miles per hour, you should be disturbed (HCN, 8/22/11). These speeds and the vehicle weights are lethal. The violence here is profound, and yet it has become normalized. It is absurd what we sacrifice for mobility: air, water, […]
Posted inSeptember 19, 2011: Redemption
The mirage of pristine wilderness
One summer day, I went with my father and daughter to Schmitz Park in West Seattle, famous for being among the only chunks of old-growth forest within city limits. A few urban noises penetrated the 50-acre park, mostly airplanes and boat horns. But it was markedly quiet — and beautiful. The turf was springy with […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
‘Never again’
WYOMING With the cutting of a ceremonial barbed wire fence, the Heart Mountain Interpretive Learning Center near Cody, Wyo., officially opened Aug. 20. It was a dramatic moment for the more than 250 Japanese Americans who were present: All had been imprisoned there during World War II. A crowd of nearly 1,200 other people joined […]
Posted inSeptember 19, 2011: Redemption
A part of something old: writer Kim Stafford’s storied places
In southwest Portland lies a strip of untamed land, bounded by busy roads in a dense, urban landscape. It is not a park, simply a tract of woods that developers missed. It is also not pristine nature, but it is what writer and Portland native Kim Stafford calls a “scattered Eden.” Those woods are just […]
Posted inWotr
Only one thing is certain: A grizzly got killed
As with most crime stories, the details of why Jeremy Hill killed a grizzly bear in northern Idaho were slow to emerge. The federal prosecutors who charged Hill with a misdemeanor in early August were stingy with information, beyond saying that he had killed the juvenile male on his property, thereby violating the Endangered Species […]
Posted inGoat
The middles of nowhere
Crossposted from the Last Word on Nothing As someone preoccupied with odd, mysterious places, I have a longstanding appreciation for an odd, mysterious organization called The Center for Land Use Interpretation. Equal parts arts organization, archive, and amateur detective agency, the Los Angeles-based CLUI (rhymes with gooey) has a particular interest in the forgotten spaces of the […]
Posted inSeptember 19, 2011: Redemption
Cody Cortez: A faux-file of the West’s most mysterious writer
As fiercely reclusive as he is enigmatic, Cody Cortez is probably the most compelling Western writer you’ve never heard of. He lives off the grid and loathes the trappings of the literary life, spurning bookstore readings and appearances on National Public Radio. Among devotees, though, the pages of his books-in-progress, especially his memoir-in-the-making, Cowboy Rinpoche, […]
Posted inGoat
The business of banking
Early this August, 12 branches of a bank serving rural Washington state — the Colfax-based Bank of Whitman — shuttered their doors for good. The closure is just one more in a long series of bank failures stemming from the financial crisis. The vast majority of banks are community banks, making up 98 percent of […]
Posted inSeptember 19, 2011: Redemption
Seeds of atonement: an interview with writer Shann Ray
The short stories in Shann Ray’s first book, American Masculine, reflect his lifelong interest in forgiveness and redemption, as well as in basketball and the American West. Ray’s characters struggle to live up to their families’ expectations and look up to those who are “more ready to give and forgive.” Ray, who grew up in […]
Posted inWotr
It’s time to kill my own food
I’m taking a hunter education class in Lander, Wyo., and at the first get-together, I share a table with Ridge, 9, and Dante, 10, cousins who’ve already hunted lots of deer and antelope with their dads and grandpa. They can’t get hunting licenses of their own until they turn 12, but they’re eager to learn […]