“Red sky at morning, hunter take warning,” I told Jimmy Jack Mormon, as we stumbled along a frozen rutted road in the Montana dawn. “Ssshhh,” Jimmy ordered. “You’re warning the deer.” “Oh, they’ve already heard about me,” I whispered back. I’d missed two the evening before. Beautiful does, both, stepping carefully out of a willow […]
Essays
Posted inOctober 29, 2012: Red State Rising
Fire Wall: Escaping Four Mile Canyon
In the 18 minutes it took to evacuate my board-and-batten cabin in Colorado, I operated under a mountainous range of delusions, not least of which hinged upon my faulty understandings of metals, the flukiness of wildfires, and the persistence of history and memory. Danger, for one, didn’t seem imminent. When a neighborly deputy drove by […]
Posted inOctober 15, 2012: Are you a local?
Student essay: The view from the East
Editor’s note: This is the winning essay from our annual student essay contest. This year’s theme was “How I Became a Westerner.” Learn more about student subscription offers here. It took going East for me to understand my home in the West. Like the narrator of Steinbeck’s East of Eden, my thoughts were always drawn […]
Posted inOctober 15, 2012: Are you a local?
The soul in Suite 100: A ghost story
I am from, as they say, an “old” New Mexico Anglo family. I did not grow up in New Mexico, but have always thought myself from there — tied to the place by blood and property and predilection, and by the way the smell of sagebrush and cast of light remind me that I am […]
Posted inOctober 15, 2012: Are you a local?
The fossil record: How my family found a home in the West
When I was a kid, I sometimes wished that my family went on normal vacations. Normal was what my elementary and middle-school classmates did over spring and summer break, flying to wave-kissed beaches or hitting flashy amusement parks. Not my family: My parents would load my two half-sisters, my brother and me into a big […]
Posted inOctober 15, 2012: Are you a local?
Best of the West: Our favorite books
Western authors and HCN staffers share their most-loved writing about the region in this list of favorites. Isabella Bird and Katie Lee: two of my favorite Western women, tough, brave and eloquent. Bird, an Englishwoman, traveled from California to Colorado in the 1870s, often alone on horseback. Her richly descriptive letters became A Lady’s Life […]
Posted inOctober 15, 2012: Are you a local?
Student essay: How I became a Westerner and why it doesn’t matter
Editor’s note: This is a runner-up essay from our annual student essay contest. This year’s theme was “How I Became a Westerner.” Learn more about student subscription offers here. I grew up in Fircrest, Wash., population 6,497, a small suburb of Tacoma. There’s a house on our street with an unkempt front yard; the neighbors despise […]
Posted inOctober 15, 2012: Are you a local?
Student essay: Lost and found in the sagebrush
Editor’s note: This is a runner-up essay from our annual student essay contest. This year’s theme was “How I Became a Westerner.” Learn more about student subscription offers here. Artemisia tridentata. Commonly known as sagebrush, it’s seen as ugly, a terribly widespread eyesore — a dead-looking, twisted piece of scraggly shrubbery that fills the landscape […]
Posted inOctober 15, 2012: Are you a local?
Vagabond writer Craig Childs on 20,000 years of wanderlust
Savoonga is the place to be on the Fourth of July. The village is a cluster of roofs on the north side of St. Lawrence Island, a treeless hump of capes and dormant volcanoes rising out of the Bering Sea, battered by Arctic weather. The Native Yup’iks here celebrate the holiday with more gusto than […]
Posted inArticles
That familiar loneliness: a writer’s own relationship mirrors a Stegner novel
During my first full summer in the West, I participated in a rite of passage: I read Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose. The first character I fell in love with was the land. The stirrup-high grass near Leadville, Colorado, that “flowed and flawed in the wind, its motion revealed and hid and revealed again streaks […]
Posted inSeptember 17, 2012: Pallids in Purgatory
Storm on Lava Creek: A season in Yellowstone
By the second mile of my third hike during my first season in Yellowstone, thunder booms near. I wonder if we’ll have time to finish the hike. • • • Ten days ago, my best friend, Alison, and I began our new summer jobs as Xanterra lodging reservation agents at Mammoth Hot Springs, after a […]
Posted inSeptember 3, 2012: Identity Politics, Montana Style
Gathering strength from the Continental Divide
The Continental Divide of my childhood rises up the moment I spy the fractured, uplifted horizon formed by the Rocky Mountains. Ahead lies Longs Peak, and the log cabin my family has rented for the summer. Ahead lie weeks full of freedom and possibility. Left behind, so close to Missouri it barely qualifies as Kansas: […]
Posted inAugust 20, 2012: Troubled Taos
Love and tomatoes — a natural combination
When other women ask me how I proposed to my wife, the first thing I tell them is that Crissie doesn’t like diamonds. They look at me with either contempt or condescension — the former if they think I’m going to lecture them about African child armies, the latter if they think I’m fool enough […]
Posted inAugust 6, 2012: Of Birds and Men
Of balloons, littering and birthday parties
Here in the western Great Basin, the high desert is rough and remote. This topography tends to keep out the common detritus of the dominant endemic species, Hillbillicus Nevadensis (var. Redneckii). So while the dusty BLM roads in the sage-filled valley bottoms are beribboned with spent shell casings, Coors Light bottles and empty cans of […]
Posted inJuly 23, 2012: The Hardest Climb
In praise of ancient tree stumps
There used to be big trees here. Now, we have stumps. Weathered, rotting, mossy and huge, at least 20 are scattered across my family’s 14-acre farm in Snoqualmie, Wash. — hunched in the cow field and hidden in the tangles of blackberry and brushy woods. We don’t talk too much about them. Stumps are as […]
Posted inArticles
Following Dad down the road
I thank you for the music, and your stories of the road;I thank you for my freedom when it came my time to go;I thank you for your kindness, and the times that you got tough.And Papa, I don’t think I’ve said “I love you” near enough. –Dan Fogelberg, from his song “Leader of the […]
Posted inJune 25, 2012: Special travel issue
Tracking Ice Age people in Oregon
Wind-whipped rainclouds formed a low ceiling over the oceanic buttes and basins of south-central Oregon. The usually sundrenched sage darkened in the weather as I walked, my hood pulled up against the grass-bending tug of the northwest breeze. The air smelled richer than it usually does on the dry side of the Cascades, the sagebrush […]
Posted inJune 25, 2012: Special travel issue
Three days in the Four Corners
The Four Corners country — the point where sage plains, mesas and desert canyons radiate out from the intersection of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah — is a land of friction. The cultures of the Ute, Apache and Navajo tribes rub up against the Hispanic and Anglo cultures. The ancient rudely bumps into the […]
Posted inJune 25, 2012: Special travel issue
Three days in eastern Montana
The bull erupted from its pen, plunged toward the dirt, kicked its hooves into the air and sprayed grainy shit across my face. None of the bull-riders and cowboys winced like I did. Cow crap is as common in their lives as sunlight and coffee. “It’s just something you’ll have to experience for yourself,” the […]
Posted inJune 25, 2012: Special travel issue
The Quileute Reservation copes with tourists brought by “Twilight”
Five Quileute boys emerge from a phalanx of drummers. Barefoot and bare-chested, they wear black cloaks and wolf headdresses, and dance, crouch and crawl within the center of a large circle. On the outskirts, women and girls move rhythmically to a chant and steady drumbeat, several of them sporting red and black capes emblazoned with […]