NEVADA Debbie Rivenburgh is the general manager of a bordello in Pahrump, Nev., 60 miles from Las Vegas — one of 27 legal brothels in the state. In 21 years, she says, no college has ever called to request an intimate tour of her desert establishment. Then Randolph College in Virginia, a private liberal arts […]
Communities
Posted inArticles
When choosing a house, think past a lifetime
We’ve had some minor flooding lately in the Gallatin Valley in southwestern Montana, the consequence of a good mountain snowpack and a two-day heat wave, followed by a big rain. It reminded everyone of the way things used to work. Some local landowners, however, were “shocked,” I read in the paper. “I’ve lived here 12 […]
Posted inJune 9, 2008: Why the West needs Mythic Cowboys
Why the West needs Mythic Cowboys
The first Great Truth of contemporary life is that the West is changing. And the second Great Truth is that the Cowboy Myth is an anachronistic view that denies the first truth and assures that we will become a socioeconomic backwater. What we need to do, or so we are told by those who purport […]
Posted inJune 9, 2008: Why the West needs Mythic Cowboys
Two weeks in the West
One toy “screams down the trails” and “tackles mud, rocks, and anything else nature throws its way.” The other “dances over everything from muddy single track to boulder fields.” With their grippy rubber treads and bomber construction, both may sound like fun to outdoorsy gearheads of all stripes. But the difference between the two underscores […]
Posted inJune 9, 2008: Why the West needs Mythic Cowboys
Warp, weft and Wal-Mart
Name Marie Begay Age Late 60s Vocation Traditional hand-weaving Number of sheep owned 80 Where Marie gets her wool Most of her wool comes from her own sheep, though she trades wool with family members to broaden her color choices. Yarn needed for a typical rug Marie’s rugs approach “tapestry” quality, running 50 to 60 […]
Posted inJune 9, 2008: Why the West needs Mythic Cowboys
Easing into development
A backdoor agreement between the Forest Service and a timber company cuts out counties
Posted inJune 9, 2008: Why the West needs Mythic Cowboys
Conservation groups come and go. Why?
Over the past 20 years or so, I’ve been affiliated with at least a dozen environmental groups, and I’ve seen it happen several times. So has everyone who’s been involved in the movement. I’m talking about professionalization. It begins when a group of grassroots activists begins to feel overwhelmed. They can’t keep up with the […]
Posted inJune 9, 2008: Why the West needs Mythic Cowboys
Heard Around the West
CALIFORNIA Thanks to skyrocketing prices for gas, a new breed of criminal has begun preying on restaurants, reports The Associated Press. “It’s like a war zone going on right now over grease,” says David Levenson, who owns a grease-hauling business in San Francisco. Levenson pumps used cooking oil from 400 restaurants, but recently he’s found […]
Posted inMay 26, 2008: On Cancer’s Trail
On Cancer’s Trail
The women in Stefanie Raymond-Whish’s family have a history of breast cancer. Now the young Navajo biologist is asking why.
Posted inMay 26, 2008: On Cancer’s Trail
Cowgirl meets lawsuit
Jackalope Dreams, Mary Clearman Blew’s fifth book and first novel, depicts the head-on collision of the Old West and the New. There are cattle, and meth labs; ranches lost to real estate developers and young people gone to cities; the end of cowboying as a lifelong verb and the rise of cowboy tourism. Corey Henry, […]
Posted inMay 26, 2008: On Cancer’s Trail
Two weeks in the West
With oil prices spiking past $120 a barrel, earthquakes and cyclones killing tens of thousands in Asia, and food prices spurring riots abroad and wrestling matches in the grocery line at home, the morning news is beginning to sound more than a little bit apocalyptic. In the West, you might expect the survivalists to cry […]
Posted inMay 26, 2008: On Cancer’s Trail
Population’s Paul Revere?
NAME Frosty Wooldridge AGE 61 KNOWN FOR His e-mails, blogs, letters and books about overpopulation, and by extension, immigration. HE SAYS “You can ignore reality, but at some point reality will not ignore you. In the U.S., we’re now on track to add 100 million people in the next 30 years. We can bring about […]
Posted inMay 26, 2008: On Cancer’s Trail
Rural West going to the dogs
Feral and free-roaming canines wreak havoc on wildlife and livestock
Posted inMay 26, 2008: On Cancer’s Trail
The amphibian heart
The road was covered with toads. Crouched on the two-lane mountain blacktop, posed like speckled sphinxes on the yellow line. I saved as many as I could, leaping from my idling car to scoop up their warm dimpled bodies and deposit them in adjacent Sonoran Desert. But too many were already belly-up or smeared across […]
Posted inMay 26, 2008: On Cancer’s Trail
Heard Around the West
ARIZONA For sheer excitement, read the current issue of boatman’s quarterly review, published “more or less quarterly” by that elite group, Grand Canyon River Guides. A special 25-page section revisits the dangerous spring of 1983, when an unusually snowy winter was followed by a May snowstorm and suddenly warming temperatures. Roaring like a freight train, […]
Posted inWotr
When you’re rich, you can dream
The last great boom that lit up Wyoming’s economy happened 25 years ago. The predictable bust followed, and it was the mid-1980s when oil prices crashed, nationwide demand for energy plummeted, interest rates soared and, overall, many get-rich dreams that had been hatched during the heady days turned to nightmares. Now, we are in the […]
Posted inMay 12, 2008: Boom! Boom!
Small-town struggle in a big land
The Enders Hotel, winner of the 2007 River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize, chronicles a childhood and coming of age in Soda Springs, Idaho, amid the beauty of the high desert and the rampant alcoholism of a Western “company”town. After stints elsewhere in Idaho and in Washington, young Brandon Schrand, his mother, and stepfather settle in […]
Posted inWotr
All Westerners are stalwart (and other tall tales)
Western humor is all about adversity, braving the elements, surviving the landscape and stretching the truth. Call it polished prevarication. Not lies, exactly; more like embellishments. Stories that should be true, even if they’re not. Pioneers came West, and over time each group told its own jokes — cowboys, loggers, Lycra-clad bicyclists – and everyone […]
Posted inMay 12, 2008: Boom! Boom!
Heard Around the West
WASHINGTON John Slemp, a 52-year-old UPS driver from Portland, recently snowmobiled to the top of Mount St. Helens with his son, Jared, who is just back from serving a year in Iraq, reports the Seattle Times. In the cold, crisp air, the men decided to do something risky: They crawled onto a cornice overlooking the […]