Two years ago, on a cool October evening at Santa Fe’s Institute of American Indian Arts, Native author Eddie Chuculate read his story “Dear Shorty” aloud. He spoke with a rolling rhythm, peppered by alliteration. With his head cocked, glasses in one hand and the book almost touching his nose, Chuculate held his listeners entranced. […]
The West in my blood: A profile of Eddie Chuculate
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BLM looks for balance
“We need to be smart. The future of how public lands are going to be managed is going to be based upon how they’re being used today.” — Retired Bureau of Land Management chief Bob Abbey, who stepped down in May, speaking to HCN in a recent interview. Judging by the way much BLM land […]
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 […]
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TransCanada expects your stall tactic
The environmentalist style of warfare is to stall the enemy into submission. Climb up in a tree, stand in front of feller bunchers, block traffic, throw stink bombs on whaling ships, etc. It’s worked, and it hasn’t. Last January, environmentalists claimed a victory when the State Department denied construction of the Keystone XL pipeline pending […]
Posted inOctober 15, 2012: Are you a local?
Western literary journals give voice to story and place
“We are out loud and proud as a regional journal,” says poet Maria Melendez, publisher of Pilgrimage, a literary magazine based in the former steel-mill city of Pueblo, Colo. “Our mission is to nurture the voices of the Southwest — and beyond.” Literary journals like Pilgrimage are devoted to publishing inspiring and innovative fiction, nonfiction […]
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 inOctober 15, 2012: Are you a local?
The wild without and within: A review of Wilderness
Wilderness pulls no punches. The novel’s descriptions are so visceral, the main character’s struggles so gut wrenching, that it demands an equally full-bodied response from its reader. Within the book’s pages are violence, yes, and death, sickness and guilt –– all the hard things. But the most powerfully moving moments are those in which dark […]
Posted inOctober 15, 2012: Are you a local?
The place where you are
In 2007, I heard a radio interview with a Chinese author who talked about visiting the mountain village where his ancestors had lived for thousands of years. When he stepped onto that soil, he knew instinctively that he was home, felt in his bones that he was where he belonged. At the time, I’d been […]
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?
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?
On Science and dogma
As a former resident of Colorado’s Front Range, I found Emily Guerin’s fire-science story, about forest ecologists’ disagreement about whether all dry Western forests are to be considered overly-dense and in need of restoration, to be fascinating (“Fire fights,” HCN, 9/17/12). While the article interprets the “controversy” as a lack of consensus among forest ecologists, […]
Posted inOctober 15, 2012: Are you a local?
Keep what’s public public
Hats off to Neil LaRubbio and HCN for the quality article on federal land exchanges, which beamed some welcome sunlight into dark corners (“Big Timber games for better ground in Idaho,” HCN, 9/3/12). There is fierce and widespread opposition to the fatally flawed proposed Northern Idaho Lochsa Land Exchange. Friends of the Clearwater, Alliance for […]
Posted inOctober 15, 2012: Are you a local?
Finding funk in Western Colorado, sadistic races, corrections
The mornings are getting chilly; local harvests are at their peak. Up in the mountains, the aspens have changed color early and winter is tapping at the door. As the color moved down the mountains, many visitors came with it, taking advantage of this lovely time of year to drop by Paonia. Susan Nunn visited […]
Posted inOctober 15, 2012: Are you a local?
Fall books offer journeys of the mind
Here in western Colorado, most days unfold under azure skies and stubbornly brilliant sunshine. When rains do visit, they’re usually brief — an hour, or maybe two. So when autumn unexpectedly shrouds our valleys under thick gray clouds that dribble for days on end, our world feels utterly transformed — the pillowy, unfamiliar heavens almost […]
Posted inOctober 15, 2012: Are you a local?
Suffering and freedom in a microcosm: A review of San Miguel
California writer T.C. Boyle’s 14th novel, San Miguel, continues his exploration of the Channel Islands, off the coast of Santa Barbara, Calif., which began with last year’s When The Killing’s Done. This time, Boyle focuses on windswept San Miguel Island and the histories of two very different families who inhabit it between 1888 and 1945. […]
Posted inOctober 15, 2012: Are you a local?
Collaborative conservation
In a July 18 High Country News article, Luther Propst explained the Sonoran Institute’s approach to collaborative conservation and referred to the proposed Resolution copper mine near Superior, Arizona as an example of that philosophy (“Beyond the politics of no“). After all, the location of that mine is in a well-established mining district. Luther qualified […]
Posted inOctober 15, 2012: Are you a local?
Celebrating what remains: A review of The Dog Stars
Award-winning adventure writer Peter Heller sets his debut novel, The Dog Stars, in an apocalypse-stricken Colorado, where Hig, one of the planet’s few survivors, flies around in an antique plane with a dog as his copilot. To this compelling frame, Heller adds adrenaline-pumping adventure, deep philosophical undercurrents … and a bit of love. In the […]
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?
An epic tale of true crime in the West: A review of Hard Twisted
In 1994, during a hiking trip in southeast Utah, a Pasadena trial lawyer named C. Joseph Greaves and his wife stumbled on two human skulls in a remote red-rock canyon. Each skull had what looked like a bullet hole through the back. Greaves became obsessed with untangling the story behind those skulls, spending more than […]
Posted inOctober 15, 2012: Are you a local?
A tribute to solitude and community: A review of Tributary
Clair Martin is marked, not only by the “purple-red stain” that spreads across her left cheek and on down her neck, but by being an orphan with a preference for solitude — inconceivable to the Mormons of Brigham City in 19th-century Utah Territory, where she’s deposited at just 6 years old. Valued only as a […]