Never in my life had I seen so many stars as I did that night camped out at Indian Gardens, perched midway between the Colorado River and the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. As usual, I couldn’t sleep. A handful of loud Aussie college kids and a large Chinese family kept the noise level […]
Author: mikejust
Redwood Gothic
Walking through the immense quiet of a redwood forest just outside Crescent City, California. I’d been camped out on the coast for days. It was hard getting the sound of the surf from my head. The sway and moan of the canopy was the pitch and roll of ocean, for awhile. But soon, the echoes […]
Glacier Aspen
Glacier National Park, Montana. Frothing water fresh from the tongues of glaciers rushing down a mountainside in June. Mile high peaks with snow drifts the same as on a Midwestern farm, but 20 times the size. Snow fields in 70 degree sunlight. Lodge pole pines with aspen understories. And always the sweet pine needle beds […]
The Ground of Oaks
Hiking through Sangcrhis State Park, lost somewhere in the potbelly of Illinois. Larch. Elm. Maple. No oaks, but signs of this favorite tree of mine from a few decayed leaves. In the middle of my hike down Cottonwood Trail, a burgeoning trunk thicker than any else around. Big daddy oak. But as I walked away […]
It Took a Tree for Me to Love but the Crookedness in Thee
Although it’s difficult to hunt out a straight line in nature, the trunks of trees come close. We rely on their strength, their integrity, their closeness to the heavens as they grow like our elders in the forest or the backyard, carrying the wisdom and the witness of many seasons more than we have seen. […]
Dying the Moment It’s Born
In a rain forest on the Alaskan panhandle, a fallen Sitka Spruce centuries in age, dwarfed only by its redwood cousin, can take as long to decompose as it did to grow. This seems to be how it is with empires, too. And people. For a human begins to die as soon as she is […]
Lives of a Stone
Navigating a field of stones ‘longside a stand of redwoods, I noticed that each rock had its own shape and size. No two had the same color or texture. And some were strikingly different, one splashed with burning auburn, another glimmering ebony with marbleized turquoise veins. I fingered one, ran my dusty fingers over its […]
Y’all Sprawl
Outskirts of Prescott, AZ. So much sprawl, even out in the middle of desert nowhere. String cities can go on for miles and what seems like hours. Places can lose population, yet the sprawl only seems to gobble up more of nowhere. Part of it’s this damn automobile I drive and the Interstate culture built […]
Love Flat
I grew up in Chicago. One thing about Chicago. You can draw a line straight to the North Pole and not run into any mountains. You can drive to the Gulf of Mexico and it gets flatter and lower, if that’s possible. You can trek east through most of another time zone before you hit […]
Dancing my Way Through Canyon de Chelley (or Wriggling my Belly Through Canyon de Chelley)
Trails have reminded me to let each step fully absorb my attention, to look where I’m walking. Every step. When I’m hiking, it’s the small steps I’m not paying attention to that could turn the ankle, not the more dangerous negotiations. In The Art of War, Sun Tzu counsels that a warrior needs to treat […]