A 15-foot-high, rust-colored steel wall snakes across the scrubby desert landscape, dividing the twin border cities of Nogales, Ariz., and Nogales, Sonora. On the Arizona side, Border Patrol agents sit at the ready while reconnaissance airplanes drone overhead. On the Mexican side, border crossers driven by poverty lie in wait for nightfall. Then they will […]
Communities
Posted inGoat
A pleasing discovery
In general, I think it is no coincidence that the words “travel” and “travail” have the same root — the Latin word “tripalium,” a three-pronged instrument of torture. But on occasion, there are pleasant surprises. It was time for Martha and me to visit our daughters (and grandson) in Oregon. In the past, […]
Posted inWotr
Backcountry lessons from the Lost Forest of Oregon
The Scout we were driving across the treeless landscape was coated with dust so thick you couldn’t read the decal identifying us as scientists from a Forest Service Research Station. Had the decal been legible, an observer might have thought we were lost. We weren’t, but the forest that my work-partner, Doug, and I were […]
Posted inJuly 27, 2009: The Most Cooked-Up Catch
The bare bones of life
The Southwest reminds one writer of Mars
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, […]
Posted inWotr
Great Plains aura
Not long ago, I revisited the long-abandoned farm in south-central South Dakota where my grandparents farmed for over 30 years. Nothing could induce any of their children or grandchildren to copy their commitment to this lonely land, but it took a nasty cancer to get grandpa Lyle off the place. Standing at the farm’s highest […]
Posted inWotr
Coming home to roost
Like a lot of other Westerners, I recently added chickens to my suburban back yard. I didn’t plan on raising fryers; I envisioned only fresh eggs, grasshopper control and free entertainment. What I hadn’t anticipated was how attached I’d become. I began with nine, 2-month-old chicks. Town ordinance allows only six hens, but I figured […]
Posted inGoat
Social justice hits the road
For three months, Chloe Noble and Jill Hardman have been living out of backpacks and sleeping on the streets of Seattle, Portland and San Francisco. They walk miles every day, and depend on the kindness of strangers. These women aren’t actually homeless — but they very well could be. Noble and Hardman are the creators […]
Posted inGoat
Honoring the forgotten
Today the remains of three African-American soldiers will be buried at Santa Fe National Cemetery, more than 130 years after their deaths. Army Pvts. David Ford, Levi Morris and Thomas Smith were among the famous “Buffalo Soldiers,” African-American men who served in the military during the Civil War and later guarded the farthest reaches of […]
Posted inJuly 27, 2009: The Most Cooked-Up Catch
Nirvana on a backhoe
Habitat restorer Kim Erion’s heartfelt connection to her work
Posted inWotr
In pothunter country, a small effort at healing
Two people are dead, and a lot of the living are furious. After an early-morning FBI raid last month in the Utah town of Blanding, which ended with 19 residents hauled in for trafficking in ancient artifacts, one of those indicted, a local doctor, sat in his Jeep and breathed in poisonous carbon monoxide. The […]
Posted inJuly 20, 2009: Thinking Outside the Timber Box
Mixed greens
Ever since the scraggly mountain-roaming John Muir joined other Californians to found the Sierra Club in 1892, that state has led the country in protecting the environment. California began regulating pesticides back in the horse-and-buggy era. Beginning in the 1950s, it passed comprehensive laws for air and water quality, regulation of toxic substances, tougher emissions […]
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 inGoat
End of an exodus?
As the debate rages on over border fence construction and the environmental and population impacts of immigration, a report released yesterday by the Pew Hispanic Center showed a marked decrease in Mexican migrants entering the U.S. Migration rates into the U.S. from Mexico dropped almost 40 percent between 2006 and 2009, while migration back to […]
Posted inGoat
Twilight bites into Forks
Forks, Wash., just isn’t what it used to be. I have fond memories of the once-sleepy little town. When I was a child, my family would camp out on the Pacific Coast and then make a leisurely stop in Forks to eat and shower. Restaurants like Sully’s Drive-In and the Smokehouse have been around forever. […]
Posted inJuly 20, 2009: Thinking Outside the Timber Box
The stories we believe
Madewell BrownRick Collignon213 pages, hardcover: $23.95.Unbridled Books, 2009. Madewell Brown is the fourth novel in Rick Collignon’s “Guadalupe” series, which is set in an imaginary village in northern New Mexico. But it reads as a stand-alone, even while spiraling back to explore the fate of a character introduced in Perdido, the second in the series. […]
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A dismal future for tourism?
Back in 1997, I ventured to Boulder for a conference about tourism put on by the Center of the American West. Easily the most provocative speaker was the late Hal Rothman, professor of history at the University of Las Vegas. It’s easy to bash Vegas as a greedy place of contrived attractions, he […]
Posted inWotr
Great Old Broads celebrate 20 years of hiking and advocacy
Where in Durango, in southern Colorado, can you spot a lavender size-40D bra hanging in an office window? Why, the national office of a group called the Great Old Broads for Wilderness, of course. It’s one sign that this organization, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, is not an ordinary organization. “We’re the junkyard […]
Posted inJuly 20, 2009: Thinking Outside the Timber Box
A tenderfoot in Taos
An exhausted mother. A lively baby. A compassionate drunkard.
Posted inWotr
Nostalgia for the front lines
This spring on a warm May afternoon, an electric line went down a few miles east of where I live in Homer, Alaska. Sparks from the live wire ignited dry grasses, and the flames, fanned by wind, traveled quickly to a forest of beetle-killed trees. In two days, the Seventeen Mile Fire, named for its […]