Mounting a coastal mountain on the central Oregon coast, through clouds that wrap everything in humid scents. A huge bigleaf maple stands on its hind legs, gaping roots forming a tunnel. I pass under the roots, past giant lady ferns and flowering dogwoods, spilling out onto a magnificent headland.
The cliffside cloaked in flowers, ringed by […]
Zion. I step out of my cabin after a late dinner. A new moon burnishes the canyon floor. One cliff shadow falls against the next. The bright moon, rising over the peaks to my back. A loan tree atop the canyon wall occults the moon, like a spider in the light. The white teases out […]
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 […]
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 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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
