The drive from Salt Lake City to the Nevada border feels like a ride in a not-too-seaworthy sailboat. Long-haul rigs blast past me, leaving my rickety little four-door swaying in their wakes. The flat, briny waters of the Great Salt Lake reach south toward the highway, threatening to rise up and reclaim their ancient territory. […]
Communities
Posted inFebruary 7, 2005: The Asphalt Graveyard
Heard around the West
THE WEST Hunting is coming to the Internet. A Texas entrepreneur plans to offer online hunting that isn’t virtual — it will have real impact. John Underwood, an auto body estimator, wants to import exotic animals, including wild pigs, Barbary sheep and Indian blackbuck antelopes, to his 330-acre ranch. There, he’ll set up Web cams […]
Posted inJanuary 24, 2005: Written in the Rings
A Place to Stand
A Place to Stand Jimmy Santiago Baca 264 pages, hardcover $24. Grove Press, 2004. If you think your own busy life offers challenges, open Baca’s latest book and be very grateful. Baca is not only New Mexico’s finest poet and homegrown writer, but an ex-con whose memoir will stun those of us who think we […]
Posted inWotr
Jackalope hops into the heady world of official myth
The Wyoming Legislature is coming close to declaring the jackalope the state’s official mythical creature. A ferocious jackrabbit with horns, the jackalope was first portrayed by taxidermist Douglas Herrick in 1939, and now adorns gift shops and tacky postcards all over the state. An eight-foot jackalope statue greets entrants to the Wyoming State Fair, and […]
Posted inJanuary 24, 2005: Written in the Rings
Seattle’s rural neighbors rise up
Emboldened by a recently passed ballot initiative requiring Oregon’s state and local governments to pay for land-use regulations, residents in Seattle’s King County are whipping up a property-rights revolt of their own (HCN, 11/22/04: Election Day Surprises in the Schizophrenic West). In October, the Democrat-led county council adopted new land-use ordinances meant to protect “critical […]
Posted inJanuary 24, 2005: Written in the Rings
Graves halt a highway project
A recent decision in Washington state protects the largest prehistoric village ever discovered in the state, but puts a $284 million highway construction project on hold. To repair the 40-year-old Hood Canal Bridge, which connects the cities of the northern Olympic Peninsula with the Seattle area, the Washington State Department of Transportation needed to build […]
Posted inJanuary 24, 2005: Written in the Rings
The wind eternal
I’m often asked by relatives and friends back East how I stand the winters in northwestern Wyoming. I put on a stoic facade and tell them: It’s tough, but we Cody folks can suck it up. What I don’t mention is that an average of 300 days of sunshine annually isn’t hard to take, nor […]
Posted inJanuary 24, 2005: Written in the Rings
Heard around the West
NEW MEXICO How embarrassing for the Los Alamos National Laboratory! Despite being a hush-hush facility for nuclear weapons research, the lab harbored a squatter who lived in a furnished cave on the premises for approximately four years. Roy Michael Moore, 56, didn’t exactly live rough. The Albuquerque Journal reports that he’d equipped his pied-á-terre at […]
Posted inJanuary 24, 2005: Written in the Rings
Wyoming wildlife faces twin threats
Drill rigs and houses gobble habitat and sever migration routes
Posted inWotr
Soaking in Idaho in the healing waters
The early Shoshone called this the land of healing waters. Soaking here with my 9-year-old twins beneath gray skies at the Lava Hot Springs in eastern Idaho, I try to imagine the earth opening, get flashes of my children running, terrified; I am terrified as well. The death toll from the tsunami had risen to […]
Posted inWotr
Breaking for freedom in the New West
My neighbor owns a horse. I see it standing in the field across from my house every morning as I leave for work, and when I come home the horse is still waiting there, like a picture of grace and power that has no place to go. My neighbor rides the horse up the road […]
Posted inWotr
Once again, California leads the way
It irks me no end. California, and more specifically, San Francisco, is once again ahead of the cultural curve. The state that brought us hippies, gay marriage and the “governator” is proposing a revolutionary, albeit pragmatic and simple, answer to the paper vs. plastic-bag quandary at check-out counters. “Paper or plastic?” It’s the fundamental question […]
Posted inDecember 20, 2004: Stand Your Ground
City slaps back at property-rights measure
Residents of Bend, Ore., might want to think twice about where they put that new pig farm or high-rise condo. A provision in a recently approved ordinance in the central Oregon city of 62,900 allows people to sue their neighbors if nearby development reduces property values. Adopted on Dec. 1, the new rule is a […]
Posted inDecember 20, 2004: Stand Your Ground
Crimes against workers
Environmental crimes are among the hardest to prosecute. That’s the message authors Joseph Hilldorfer and Robert Dugoni dramatically deliver in The Cyanide Canary, the true story of chemical contamination in southeastern Idaho. In the summer of 1996, 20-year-old Scott Dominguez, an employee at Evergreen Resources — a company that produced fertilizer from mining waste — […]
Posted inWotr
Growing up is hard to do
While teaching a class in Gardiner, Mont., I asked the teenagers for adjectives to describe their lives. “Boring,” one called out, because I sensed the kid knew that teenagers were supposed to be jaded. It was a cloak he could easily don, and by pretending to be bored he wouldn’t have to work very hard. […]
Posted inWotr
Give a child the gift of a strenuous life
It was late fall, and my 8-year-old daughter and I stood at the bottom of a brushy, 300-foot cliff and talus slope overlooking Blue Lake in southern Oregon’s Sky Lakes Wilderness. For me, it was a short climb. For a little girl much smaller than me, the hill looked downright colossal. But I knew something […]
Posted inDecember 20, 2004: Stand Your Ground
An artist’s residency, unplugged
The Aspen Guard Station is a log cabin in an aspen grove in the San Juan National Forest, 12 miles north of Mancos in southern Colorado. Built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s, the guard station once housed fire crews. Today, the cabin is home to another kind of seasonal worker: writers and […]
Posted inDecember 20, 2004: Stand Your Ground
Heard around the West
NEVADA AND THE WEST Some call it pork, the 11,000 or so local projects stuffed into the $388 billion spending bill just passed by Congress. Others, such as the Democrats’ new minority leader, Nevada Sen. Harry Reid, call it money well spent and brag about it. Thanks to Reid’s clout, Nevada was awarded nearly $200 […]
Posted inWotr
How to write a Christmas card — or not
There has to be something in between the kind of Christmas card that is merely signed “Happy Holidays, Carol and Frank and The Whole Funk Family,” and the five-page Christmas monograph from Jane and Bob, who express so many detailed success and so much pride in their family accomplishments that you want to stab yourself […]
Posted inWotr
Bewitched and bewildered near Moab, Utah
If there’s a doubt in anyone’s mind about the rapidly changing rural West, look no further than the latest controversy to grip Moab, Utah. It doesn’t get much stranger than this. A few months ago, Robbie Levin, owner of Sorrel River Ranch, a luxury lodge north of Moab, applied for a cabaret license from the […]