Call me humorless, but I was disturbed when I read Michael Branch’s essay about the boulder he and his buddies sent smashing downhill (HCN, 5/2/11). His joyous description of the event, in which he channels Ed Abbey’s ribald style perfectly, strikes my sober ear as just another chapter of the bad old story of humans […]
Communities
Posted inMay 30, 2011: Wolf Whiplash
Watts of memories
Paul Larmer’s comments about his early years in D.C., and how many lobbyists stayed connected with the West through High Country News, brought to mind my early years with the Bureau of Land Management (HCN, 5/2/11). In the early ’80s, as James Watt ascended to the position of Interior secretary, I got my first taste […]
Posted inWotr
It’s a bird, it’s a plane, its a contrail
When we moved to the Colorado Plateau 20 years ago, I thought I’d be trading an ocean coast for a pristine Western sky. Instead, I was greeted by a nonstop parade of thundering jets roaring along one of the main air-transportation routes in the country, linking the East Coast to San Francisco. Congratulations, I told […]
Posted inMay 16, 2011: Ripple Effects
Walking in the body of being
In 1656, 23-year-old Baruch Spinoza, a Portuguese Jew in Amsterdam, was excommunicated by his community and formally cursed to the end of his days. The young man’s supposed heresies were likely related to a burgeoning pantheism, which he would later develop more fully — the idea of God as an infinite being who contains everything […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Lady Liberty v the Statue of Libertines
MONTANA So far in the West, Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer is the only one who kills bad bills by whipping out his custom branding iron, which spells out VETO. The latest Tea Party proposals that have flamed out include a bill making it harder for people to register to vote, another to permit the use […]
Posted inBlog
Freedom Ride West
Editor’s note: James Mills is journeying around the West, exploring issues of diversity in Western national parks. In 1961, a long bus ride from Washington D.C. to New Orleans changed the world forever. The PBS American Experience documentary “The Freedom Riders” documents this journey. As you watch it, I hope that it will open As […]
Posted inGoat
While Non-Believers Punked the Rapture, the West was Punked
When Christian fundamentalists opened their eyes last Saturday evening, only to find that nothing, (at least there in their living rooms,) had changed, non-believers felt suddenly and gleefully exalted. In an unexpected twist, the sinners had been enraptured — at least metaphorically speaking — while their devout counterparts had kept their feet planted firmly on […]
Posted inMay 30, 2011: Wolf Whiplash
All in not-so-good taste
This is my first time writing in to comment on an HCN story and what finally prompted me was not the contentious, passionate piece that I figured would inspire me to put fingers to keyboard. Instead, it was the slightly naughty, indulgent, but thoroughly invigorating essay about rock rolling (HCN, 5/2/11). I read the story […]
Posted inMay 16, 2011: Ripple Effects
Three Tribes, a Dam and a Diabetes Epidemic
Herbert Wilson came to North Dakota’s Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in 1954, to a tiny town called Elbowoods, tucked above the Missouri River in a bucolic patchwork of riverside willows, cottonwoods and fields. A Vermont-bred 33-year-old, fresh from Harvard and a tour as a WWII bombardier, Wilson was the new, sole doctor for the reservation’s […]
Posted inWotr
Me and my SUV
I love my purple 4Runner. She’s a 1998 stick-shift with 177,000 miles on the odometer, and her name is Jesse. She’s been all over the West, camping on dirt roads and shuttling for river trips. Once, in the high desert of central Oregon, I hit a patch of ice going fast on a cold, bluebird […]
Posted inRange
Rants from the Hill: A visit from the Mary Kay lady
I find it unfortunate that we English speakers have so few words for “mud,” a substance that varies so greatly by location and conditions that it would be handier to have a hundred terms for it, as the indigenous Nordic Sami people do for “snow.” If a useless neologism like “ginormous” can make the Oxford […]
Posted inMay 16, 2011: Ripple Effects
Are you an Indian?
Navajos Wear Nikes: A Reservation LifeJim Kristofic256 pages, hardcover: $26.95. University of New Mexico Press, 2011. Despite his light-brown curls and pale face, Jim Kristofic gets asked this question all the time, even though he no longer lives on the Navajo Reservation. Now 29 and back in his native Pennsylvania, he teaches and tells stories […]
Posted inMay 16, 2011: Ripple Effects
Thanks, Michael!
I have had the unique opportunity to work under Dr. Michael Ceballos at the Native American Research lab at the University of Montana for three years (HCN, 5/2/11). I am half Puerto Rican and half Native American (enrolled). I grew up very much immersed in both of my cultural backgrounds. Being Native American is more […]
Posted inMay 16, 2011: Ripple Effects
The painful beauty of love
In This Light: New and Selected StoriesMelanie Rae Thon256 pages, softcover: $15.Graywolf Press, 2011. Utah author Melanie Rae Thon maintains a seat beside fellow literary powerhouses Annie Proulx and Maile Meloy as she paints a portrait of a West that is at once desolate and tender. Written in fierce and unflinching prose, the stories in […]
Posted inMay 16, 2011: Ripple Effects
Viva la independent press!
High Country News was just nominated for two of the 22nd Annual Utne Independent Press awards. Utne, which curates the best of the alternative and independent press in its bimonthly magazine and website, has put us in the running in the General Excellence and Environmental Coverage categories. The awards, notes Utne‘s press release, are “designed […]
Posted inWotr
Three Cups of Tea, the sequel
One of the speakers at last year’s Telluride Mountainfilm Festival in western Colorado was convicted this March of federal felonies. But Tim DeChristopher will be back again this year to talk about his disruption of federal gas leasing at an auction in Utah. Not so Greg Mortenson, the embattled former mountain climber who has been […]
Posted inWotr
Big Sky country, bigger abuse
We seem to have a morbid fascination with news stories and photographs of dead, dying or distressed animals — something Montana has provided plenty of in the past two years. The number of animals involved has been staggering, the evidence of abuse extreme. The first news of abuse on a grand scale came last February, […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Plans foiled
CALIFORNIA Never at a loss for novel ideas, the animal rights folks at PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, want the mayor of San Francisco and other city leaders to change the name of the city’s Tenderloin District to the “Tempeh District.” Tempeh, for those who prefer hamburgers and are unfamiliar with it, […]
Posted inWotr
Disaster traveling is my specialty
People who know me refuse to travel with me. I don’t understand this. I think I am the perfect travel companion — curious, unflappable, knowledgeable, cheerful, seasoned, undemanding, prepared. But friends claim that I don’t go on vacations; I go on disasters. People travel for a lot of reasons — to lounge around and do […]