I spend a lot of time alone. Most writers, if they are lucky, do. I’ve been fine-tuning a memoir, facing into truths about myself I would rather forget. As I turn to national newspapers and magazines in the deluded effort to unwind after too much time in my own company, I find myself wondering who […]
Communities
Posted inWotr
A dispatch from the New West battleground
Early in April 2000, I attended the auction of a ranch near my own, in a rural western South Dakota county that has resisted zoning. This is my report from the front lines where the real battle of the West is being fought — with money. The ranch was advertised as a single unit of […]
Posted inWotr
When whiteouts in winter seem like forever
Sometimes it can’t be helped, that long drive across the West, rolling the odometer like a slot machine that promises to pay off with just one more spin. The gas gauge hovers around “half” and it looks like you’ll get there without stopping again in the middle of who knows where. Home is all you […]
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Real men head for Alaska
There is the West, and then there is Alaska, a region so wild and isolated as to make Wyoming appear tame as a strip mall. Flying to Kodiak Island (“America’s second largest island”) is risky on a good day. The day I chose to travel to the island on business was not a good day. […]
Posted inDecember 23, 2002: In search of the Glory Days
Wild tiles
More than 25 years ago, a group of wildlife-film enthusiasts started the International Wildlife Film Festival in Missoula, Mont. This year, organizers for the event have reopened the historic Roxy Theater in downtown Missoula as a media center that will provide year-round screening of the festival’s films. To celebrate the purchase and renovation of the […]
Posted inDecember 23, 2002: In search of the Glory Days
A gilded wrinkle in time
In his first work of historical fiction, planetary scientist William K. Hartmann digs into the history of the American Southwest and finds a unique and compelling mystery. The main character in Cities of Gold is the 16th-century Spanish explorer and friar Marcos de Niza, who was accused of spreading fables about the Southwest’s “seven cities […]
Posted inDecember 23, 2002: In search of the Glory Days
Building off the grid
“If you’re reading these words, it’s because you’re a dreamer. You dream of living where you don’t, and doing things you’ve never done.” Rex and LaVonne Ewing, authors of Logs, Wind and Sun … Handcraft Your Own Log Home … Then Power it with Nature, have written the book they searched for when building their […]
Posted inDecember 23, 2002: In search of the Glory Days
Holding open the door to the good life up north
The hour was early, the high desert air was fall-frosty, and the coffee was, well, truly horrible. I’d arrived for my volunteer shift at a Catholic church in the western Colorado town of Delta, and I had a very bad feeling. Five hundred people were already waiting on the sidewalk outside, sipping the acrid coffee, […]
Posted inDecember 23, 2002: In search of the Glory Days
“They want the workers to be invisible”
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Bob Elder, a third-generation Leadville resident, worked at the Climax for 17 years as a mining engineer. He thinks the way people commute to resort jobs now is “exploitative.” Bob Elder: “I just have to wonder how these resort areas are going to sustain […]
Posted inDecember 23, 2002: In search of the Glory Days
Open space initiative offers hope
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. LEADVILLE, Colo. – Cross-country skier Mike LeVine strides by the rusted ore car and other mining relics that decorate the Mineral Belt Trail. LeVine moved to Leadville from Chicago five years ago, looking to retire in a mountain town that isn’t a glitzy resort. […]
Posted inDecember 23, 2002: In search of the Glory Days
Heard Around the West
Los Angeles Times columnist John Balzar says it’s no secret: The Bush administration “hates” environmentalists. “I cannot see another way to explain the endless string of one-sided decisions and the dripping condescension with which they are delivered,” Balzar writes. “In a feather-brained brief, the administration argued that conservationists should consider the upside of bird deaths […]
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Life on the border, where education gets lost
Before I started my job this year as librarian and English teacher on the Tohono O’odham reservation, I visited the campus. A teacher looked me over and said, “You better come in that library like a gangbuster.” A gangbuster? Having just turned 25, I must have looked as young as I felt. But I’d studied […]
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Medical use of marijuana is a states’ rights issue
Medical use of marijuana is a states’ rights issue By Seth Zuckerman Like the Democrats in the U.S. Senate, marijuana advocates suffered a setback at the polls last month. By a margin of 2 to 1, Nevada voters trounced a much-publicized proposal to legalize cannabis for personal use. B ut the Bush administration would be […]
Posted inDecember 9, 2002: Life in the wasteland
Like Butte, a lonely dog hangs on
BUTTE, Mont. – On the fringe of this faded mining town, at the core of one of the nation’s largest Superfund sites, lives an amazing paradox. Its genus is Canus, but its species would have to be called extraordinarius. I doubt there’s ever been another dog like this on the planet. The mysterious, mostly wild […]
Posted inDecember 9, 2002: Life in the wasteland
Farmers band together to stave off sprawl
In California’s Central Valley, a strategy for steering growth takes shape
Posted inDecember 9, 2002: Life in the wasteland
What Dick Cheney might have learned in Rock Springs, Wyoming
It’s too bad that Dick Cheney didn’t stick around longer in Rock Springs back when he was growing up in the deep West. He worked in the Wyoming city decades ago, in the early 1960s, after he flunked out of Yale. For Cheney, it was a bottom-of-the-heap job, stringing electrical lines as a “groundman.” It […]
Posted inDecember 9, 2002: Life in the wasteland
Heard Around the West
Cabela’s of Nebraska, the consumer bible for hunters, anglers and other rugged outdoor folk, offers a novel gift for Christmas in its new catalog: Camouflage bedding. Sheets come in elusive patterns of wetlands, hardwoods and mossy oak that bring “the look and feel of the outdoors to the bedroom.” Spouses who indulge in other products, […]
Posted inNovember 25, 2002: Planning's poster child grows up
A briny time capsule
In 1970, when artist Robert Smithson constructed his 1,500-ft-long spiral-shaped sculpture in the Great Salt Lake, he planned for the natural rise and fall of the water to deposit salt crystals on its black stone base. But “The Spiral Jetty,” which used more than 6,650 tons of basalt, disappeared entirely in 1972, submerged in the […]
Posted inNovember 25, 2002: Planning's poster child grows up
Putting green Portland on the map
Though Portland has earned a reputation as a green city, with its well-publicized parks, organic markets and light-rail lines, even savvy locals find it challenging to connect the city’s disparate venues. The search just got easier with the Portland Green Map, a map with 800 resources and points of interest for Portlanders who lean green. […]
Posted inNovember 25, 2002: Planning's poster child grows up
A slap of Western reality
“Piety, kitsch, self-importance, sentimentalism – these deadly literary sins seem to thrive on good clean country air,” writes William Finnegan in his foreword to William Gruber’s book, On All Sides Nowhere. Finnegan hails Gruber for avoiding these sins in his memoir of life in northern Idaho. In 1972, Gruber and his wife moved from Philadelphia […]