LONG X DIVIDE, N.D. – The green Forest Service rig pants like a winded dog on the rim of this canyon. The two-track ahead is washed out; I’ve taken the vehicle as far as it will go. But the view from the edge is breathtaking. On the horizon, a dusky cerise sky. Below lie rugged […]
Essays
Posted inOctober 11, 1999: A home-grown Water War
A bittersweet victory in the New West
FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. – It is over. And, we have won. The Dry Lake ephemeral wetland and volcano crater outside Flagstaff, is safe from a golf course and million-dollar home development. The county supervisors close their thick notebooks. For a long instant, the big auditorium is silent. Then it is as though 200 people let out […]
Posted inOctober 11, 1999: A home-grown Water War
All our backs are a bit wet
RIO RICO, Ariz. – While driving to the supermarket, I spotted a border-crosser trudging north. He clearly was an illegal Mexican National. He looked weary, but I resisted an impulse to ask if he needed help. On my way home, I saw the man slumped alongside an unmarked Ford Taurus, nabbed by a plainclothes police […]
Posted inSeptember 27, 1999: The Millworker and the Forest
The Red Desert: Wyoming’s endangered country
RED DESERT, Wyo. – Fossils of tree limbs were all around, most the size of my fingers, a few the size of horse troughs. Prehistoric bits of turtle shell, horse bones and arrowhead chippings also lay scattered, testimony to the diverse inhabitants who once frequented this ocean-turned-desert. I suddenly looked up. Our group had flushed […]
Posted inSeptember 13, 1999: Troubled Oasis
Isn’t it about time for a New West celebration?
This summer, every town big enough to boast a high school, and more than a few that have trouble keeping a post office in business, hosted a festival. Even though these small-town celebrations go by different names – Wild West Days, Gold Rush Days, Pioneer Weekend, Founders’ Day, Old West Festival – they hold much […]
Posted inSeptember 13, 1999: Troubled Oasis
Save the Earth! (Drop dead)
I have a plan to get us out of this environmental mess we’re in. But first I’ll need some volunteers. I’m looking for anyone who thinks there are too many of us, that our consumptive tendencies are squeezing the life out of this planet and that our very presence is a cancer. Environmentalists and zero […]
Posted inAugust 16, 1999: Standing up for the underdog
An ugly message marches down an Idaho street
COEUR D’ALENE, Idaho – The teenage kid standing next to me at the start of the July 10 Aryan Nations parade here had worked hard on his anti-Nazi sign. Using a variety of colors, he had painstakingly drawn the leader of the north Idaho neo-Nazis – Richard Butler – having, let’s say, non-missionary intercourse with […]
Posted inAugust 2, 1999: Jon Marvel vs. the Marlboro Man
The river comes last
Deep in the Wyoming wilderness and high above tree line, glacial cirques collect and funnel pure alpine waters from Cloud Peak’s 13,000-foot summit down to the muddy torrent of the Bighorn River. Draining north into Montana, the river transects the Crow Indian reservation, where it is joined by the Little Bighorn, famous as the site […]
Posted inAugust 2, 1999: Jon Marvel vs. the Marlboro Man
Tom Chapman: A small-town boy who made good
PAONIA, Colo. – Many Westerners see Tom Chapman as a scourge who extracts millions from taxpayers by threatening to develop private land within national parks and wilderness areas. To me, he is just a local Paonia boy who made good. Starting in the 1980s with nothing more than a real estate broker’s license, an ability […]
Posted inJune 21, 1999: The disappearing farm
Happy campers we shall always be
Every summer, my husband and I head for the woods, flushed with optimism and giddy with anticipation. The maps are crisp, the fuel cans are full and the road is open. And every summer, I forget that the reality of camping is different than that pictured in Dodge Dakota commercials and my mind. I imagine […]
Posted inMay 24, 1999: The last weird place
Walking the path between light and dark
Good guys. Bad guys. It used to be pretty clear which side was which. When I was a kid back in the straight-arrow ’50s, I knew that the Lone Ranger wore the white hat. He was on the side of justice, law and order. In the topsy-turvy ’60s, as I learned how the West was […]
Posted inMay 10, 1999: My beautiful ranchette
My beautiful ranchette
My name is Susan; I live on a ranchette. In the growth-pained West, this is as serious a confession as alcoholism or cruelty to animals. A year and a half ago, I picked up my local newspaper in Bozeman, Mont., and there under the headline TRACKING SPRAWL was an aerial photo of the Bridger Mountain […]
Posted inMay 10, 1999: My beautiful ranchette
Enough nature writing already!
In a column by Anne Lamott in the online magazine “Salon,” she made the following proposal: “Rather than make perfectly good writers crank out new books every few years because they need income and are otherwise unemployable, what if we gave them subsidies not to write any more books, like they give to tobacco growers?” […]
Posted inMay 10, 1999: My beautiful ranchette
Why I’m a poor writer
For almost a month now I’ve been trying to collect $55 that a national environmental magazine owes me for a 400-word book review. That’s two 20s, a 10, and a five. Three polite e-mails have yielded the following one response: “Thanks for reminding me. I’ll look into it.” This proves my first rule about free-lance […]
Posted inMay 10, 1999: My beautiful ranchette
Hoping for river magic on a trip with Dad
What do you feel when you stick your parents in the river? I have in my office an 11-by-14-inch photo of my dad and me in Lava Falls on the Colorado River. It’s a fine river photo: just heads and oar tips visible in the V-wave. It’s printed off a Polaroid. My father clutched it […]
Posted inMay 10, 1999: My beautiful ranchette
When you’re alone on the open road
During the winter, I live in the southeastern corner of Wyoming, in the capital city of Cheyenne. In summer, and in any weather when the roads are passable, I spend as much time as I can on my ranch in the southwestern corner of South Dakota. My two homes are about 280 miles apart, but […]
Posted inMay 10, 1999: My beautiful ranchette
The fall of an Arizona saguaro
In the dead of a late winter night in Arizona, my wife, Joyce, awakened me. “I think I heard the cactus die,” she whispered. So, we dressed, found the flashlight and trekked down the driveway to the road at 2 a.m. It had fallen. About four feet up from the ground the trunk had splintered. […]
Posted inMay 10, 1999: My beautiful ranchette
The East Rosebud Trip
Far past road signs local paranoia claimed would signal the Russians’ attack from Montana (numbers I’d thought were Highway Department codes mass produced in Chicago maybe to identify routes and mileage, lo and behold turned out to be signals for the New World Order’s global hegemony – so clutch your rifle); past all that the […]
Posted inMay 10, 1999: My beautiful ranchette
Spinning back the bison
The trouble with being a handspinner is that people are always giving me bags of fiber: a plastic bag full of hair from their ever-shedding malemute; a paper sack containing coarse waxy hanks of hair from a pet Angora goat. I never turn them down. Most handspinners are hoarders by nature; we go to fiber […]
Posted inApril 26, 1999: Visionaries or dreamers?
Nostalgic for the Pleistocene
“We are space-needing, wild-country Pleistocene beings, trapped in overdense numbers in devastated, simplified ecosystems.” – Paul Shepard (1925-1996) How’s this for a statement of opinion: In this century and a whole lot of others, no other thinker has been anywhere near so visionary, prophetic, revolutionary and important as Paul Shepard. Yet, if you know about […]