Starting in January, you can get paid to ride your bicycle to work. It’s all thanks to the $700 billion bailout passed by Congress to goose our failing economy back to productivity. Workers who use their bikes as primary transportation to and from their jobs will be eligible for $20 a month from their employers. […]
Communities
Posted inWotr
How to survive the lean times
In 1976, circumstances beyond my control forced me into temporary homelessness. For six months, I alternated between relying on the couches of friends and camping out in my car. With the proper gear, it’s surprising how well you can fend for yourself. Of course, it helps to live in a region of the country with […]
Posted inNovember 21, 2008: Ultimate solution?
Real work
Depending on your perspective, my partner Laurie’s resume is either impressive or disturbing. In her 20s, she worked as a wilderness ranger, hiking miles with a too-heavy pack, digging drain dips and toilet holes. In her 30s, she worked on a trail crew, chopping roots, sawing logs, clearing brush. Nowadays she works in an historic […]
Posted inGoat
Dirt poor, dirt rich
When I was in high school, my history teacher assigned each member of my class to interview someone who had lived through the Great Depression to better understand how life had changed during that time. I chose to interview my grandmother, who was 20 in 1929 when the stock market crashed. I anticipated tales of […]
Posted inDecember 8, 2008: Out in the cold
Kitsching the West
Regarding the “Weekend Westerner” article, the hyper-romanticized version of the American West’s history by Germans is well known (HCN, 11/24/08). Being Arthur Kruse’s age, I well remember my older brother reading Karl May novels, and playing Indians-and-Cowboys in the mid-’40s. We grew up during the war near Darmstadt, Germany, a city 85 percent destroyed during […]
Posted inWotr
We’re in this together
There is a house in Rawlins, Wyo., that won’t sell. It’s a bargain, too, at $135,000. In fact, there are 43 houses in Rawlins selling for under $150,000. This is a booming energy town with a housing shortage. People in Rawlins have money. Wyoming has, in fact, the fastest growing median household income of any […]
Posted inNovember 21, 2008: Ultimate solution?
Weekend Westerner
Name Arthur KruseAge 69Hometown Munich, GermanyOccupation Consultant to the high-pressure compressor company where he was sales manager for 32 years.Still mourned “Flites Gentleman,” Kruse’s quarter horse, who had to be put down after a bad fall on ice just before Christmas Eve four years ago. Other club members About 50 men and 35 women — […]
Posted inNovember 21, 2008: Ultimate solution?
Bearing witness on the border
Exodus/ExodoCharles Bowden, Julian Cardona312 pages, 115 black-and-white photos, hardcover: $50.University of Texas Press, 2008. There are many ways to write about illegal immigration. One way is to shuffle through Immigration and Customs Enforcement reports, cherry-pick the latest data and file an article from a safe distance. Another way is to step into the fray, boots-on-the-ground, […]
Posted inNovember 21, 2008: Ultimate solution?
Welcome, new board members
HCN is happy to announce that Wayne Hare and Jane Ellen Stevens recently joined our board of directors. A long-ago transplant from the East, Wayne became a “native Westerner” while working as a ranger with the Bureau of Land Management in western Colorado, patrolling the Colorado River and McInnis Canyons National Conservation Area. Prior to […]
Posted inArticles
Slideshow: The waiting game
When Los Amigos del Parque was founded seven years go, about 20 immigrants waited for work every day near the New Mexico Department of Labor in Santa Fe. Now the human rights outreach group counts 60 or so immigrants from Mexico and Guatemala daily. As the economy weakens and construction lags, these laborers find more […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Gun owners take revenge
MONTANA. Dan Cooper, the co-founder and president of Cooper Firearms of Montana, a small gun manufacturing company in Stevensville, was forced to resign recently after stirred-up gun advocates called him a traitor and threatened reprisals against his business. Cooper’s blunder? He told USA Today that he supported Barack Obama for president and had donated to […]
Posted inWotr
Everybody wants to move to my town
Kiplinger’s Personal Finance was hardly telling Boiseans anything new last summer when it ranked the city fourth among the nation’s 10 best places to live, work and play. Over the last few years, we’ve gotten pretty used to being at or near the top of such lists: Forbes, Money, National Geographic Adventure, Inc.com, MSN BestLife, […]
Posted inNovember 21, 2008: Ultimate solution?
“Homosexuals are not some cabal”
As a gay former Mormon who grew up in Idaho Falls, “Prophets and Politics” perfectly articulates why this issue is just as important outside of California (HCN, 10/27/08). It pains me to see my childhood friends who attend BYU-Idaho spending so much time and money on this issue with the endorsement of the LDS church. […]
Posted inNovember 21, 2008: Ultimate solution?
Welcome to hard times
First, there’s the dark cloud: The economy of the Mountain West is going into the tank for a few years, and there’s not much that anybody — including the Democratic Congress and President Barack Obama — can do about it. But then there’s the silver lining: As our regional economy tanks, the West will become […]
Posted inNovember 10, 2008: Still Howling Wolf
The Doc is in
Rural folks find common ground at the vet’s office
Posted inArticles
Slideshow: The unflappable Doc Vincent
Please wait while the player loads. Note: you must have javascript enabled and the Adobe Flash Player installed.
Posted inNovember 10, 2008: Still Howling Wolf
Let it mellow
One does not expect to learn about conservation via the sight of one’s 85-year- old great-grandmother hunkered down bare-bottomed under the rosebushes, but there it is. In my formative years, “Grandmary” taught me to reduce, reuse and recycle everything from bacon grease to urine. “Pee makes the roses bloom bigger,” she told me when I […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
No greater love
As the Bible says, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” A football player in his senior year at Mesa State College in western Colorado didn’t die for his teammates, but he willingly sacrificed his right pinky finger. After offensive lineman Trevor Wikre broke the […]
Posted inNovember 10, 2008: Still Howling Wolf
From the Beltway to the mountains
His close-cropped hair, aviator shades and straight-backed bearing hint at his Navy past, but the silver hoop in his left ear and baggy bike shorts give Keith Baker a twist of hip outdoorsy-ness. He stands in the HCN office with his wife, Evelyn, also in bike garb, and their dog, a sleek weimaraner named Prana. […]
Posted inNovember 10, 2008: Still Howling Wolf
Throwing off the yoke
Where the Ox Does Not Plow: A Mexican American BalladManuel Peña235 pages, hardcover: $24.95.University of New Mexico Press, 2008. An alcoholic father, a patient, long-suffering mother, a history of anxiety and depression, and a blinding desire to escape a troubled childhood. If that sounds like every other memoir you’ve read in the past decade, you’d […]