MONTANA Let’s get this straight: Was a unicorn behind the wheel of a truck that crashed in Billings? A deputy prosecutor told a judge that story in all seriousness, asking for a high bond because he thought the driver had claimed a unicorn was driving. But the prosecutor misunderstood a colleague’s e-mail using the term […]
Communities
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Down but not out in Missoula, Montana
The American dream is alive and well in Missoula, Mont., sort of. Not long after arriving here in the late 1990s, I found myself in the same conversation about real estate, hearing the same words and sharing the same sentiment. “You can’t eat the landscape,” someone would say, and everyone within earshot would laugh at […]
Posted inMarch 19, 2007: The Silence of the Bees
Mortal fear and a state of wild grace
“Grace” is not the first word that comes to mind when you picture two naked women running hell-bent through the desert night, fleeing from UFOs. “Fear” seems more apt — the primal kind that stems from being chased in the dark by a faceless predator while having numerous opportunities to impale tender flesh on ocotillo […]
Posted inMarch 19, 2007: The Silence of the Bees
Heard around the West
CALIFORNIA Sometimes you can be too vigilant. Someone who spotted a black bag on the side of a road in eastern California reported that it had a suspiciously “foul odor.” A sheriff’s deputy investigated, says the Grass Valley-Nevada City Union. Inside the bag, wrapped in a blue towel, was a dead fish. WASHINGTON AND […]
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The single women who homesteaded the West
The women who settled in the Old West defy stereotypes.
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Picture a town that celebrates its old businesses
We’ve heard the story so often we could tell it ourselves. And we do. Another family-owned business in another Western town closes. This time it’s Roedel Drug in Cheyenne, Wyo., dispensing medicine, greeting cards, lipstick, film, lavender soap, teapots and good fellowship for 118 years. When I moved here 15 years ago, Roedel’s employees […]
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Down the alleys and through the collectibles
The blue mountains are mottled with cloud shadows. Cottonwoods stir in the breeze, and that sizzling sound mixes with the tinkling of distant wind chimes. Birdsong also fills the ears. A clump of green grass grows luxuriantly next to a dumpster. Yes, a dumpster. I’ve been walking in the alleys lately. A century ago […]
Posted inMarch 5, 2007: Wish You Weren’t Here
A geography of the imagination
At first glance, Home Ground resembles a straightforward encyclopedia of geography. But crack the book open, and you find yourself in unexpected territory, a geography of the imagination that blends literature, science, folklore and history. Author and editor Barry Lopez got the idea for the book after a frustrating attempt to find a definition for […]
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The new pariahs
Walking by a tavern in the late evening, seeing smokers clumped outside the door, their shoulders hunched in the cold, puffing furtively, I’m not sure what to think. In the temper of our times, I suppose I should be pitying, maybe even scornful, looking down my nose at the wretches, slave to a demon weed, […]
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Selling peace on the street in Flagstaff, Arizona
I sat with a friend and her son outside the post office in Flagstaff, Ariz. The building has been there half a century; we felt as though we had been there eons. There was an icy mountain wind and an occasional icy stare. We were encouraging people to send George Bush a half-cup of rice […]
Posted inMarch 5, 2007: Wish You Weren’t Here
Heard around the West
THE NATION Pity Gail Kimbell, the first woman appointed chief of the U.S. Forest Service. On Feb. 5 — her first day of work — President Bush proposed cutting her budget by 2 percent and eliminating more than 2,100 Forest Service jobs. A week later, Kimbell’s job got even more uncomfortable when she had to […]
Posted inFebruary 19, 2007: One nation, under fire
Sans petrol
Grassroots efforts quietly lay the groundwork for a post-oil world
Posted inFebruary 19, 2007: One nation, under fire
A quest for the world’s finest pinot noir
This is no stodgy dissertation on wine and how it’s made. With the very first sentence of The Grail, Brian Doyle uncorks a full-bodied work of enthusiastic storytelling. The Grail delivers on the promise of its subtitle: A Year Ambling and Shambling Through an Oregon Vineyard in Pursuit of the Best Pinot Noir Wine in […]
Posted inFebruary 19, 2007: One nation, under fire
The Land of the Dry
Like many of us who have lived in the West for a long time, I think it’s the best place to be. We have more open space, grander vistas, cleaner air, purer water, more wildlife, and less traffic than those who live at lower elevations. The country itself — all that public land close to […]
Posted inFebruary 19, 2007: One nation, under fire
Heard around the West
THE NATION Molly Ivins, that passionate defender of the underdog, died recently from breast cancer at age 62, leaving behind hilarious books skewering the Texas Legislature and a Texas homeboy named George W. Bush. The word “scrappy” doesn’t begin to describe her style. John Nichols, in a tribute to Ivins in the Nation, called her […]
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Death of a New Westerner
Late on a Friday night last October, word came to me that my best friend, Bill Benge, had died suddenly of a massive heart attack in Moab, Utah. He was only 60. We had both come from large cities to Moab as young men, more than 30 years ago, and had chosen, for our own […]
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Snowbound
“The sun that brief December day rose cheerless over hill of gray…” I’ll never forget the grim smile on my father’s wind-burned face as he pulled back my bedroom curtains. Snow was falling so heavily outside that I couldn’t see the pump house 20 feet away. “Snow tracing down the thickening sky its mute and […]
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Enough winter already
While reading recently about Kit Carson’s role in the settling of the West, I was struck by how mountain men more than 150 years ago dealt with the elements, particularly winter weather. Amazingly, they rode horses huge distances over unknown terrain without wearing Gore-Tex, Thinsulate or other advanced “technical clothing.” They mostly ate bacon, beans […]
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What does a $155 million house reveal about us?
People have been talking about a plan to build the most expensive spec house in history in the exclusive Yellowstone Club near Big Sky, Mont. The ski resort-home will boast 53,000 square feet of living space, larger than the new public library in Bozeman. It will have a heated driveway, an enclosed chairlift for direct […]
Posted inFebruary 5, 2007: The Efficiency Paradox
A Western historian and a Western hero
Hal Rothman is dying. You can hear it in his voice — what’s left of it. The historian of the New West, defender of Las Vegas as the poster child for what the region will become as it continues to boom, fights a losing battle. Every day, says Lauralee Rothman, there’s something else her husband […]