Recently, my cousin called me with a problem. Her two grown daughters are sharing an apartment. One of them has a 3-year-old cat; the other is allergic to cats. It isn’t working out. The cat has to go. Naturally, the first impulse is to call me. I never intended to become a “cat lady.” In […]
Communities
Posted inWotr
Blame it all on my crazy biology teacher
With fall in the air, I get this funny feeling that my homework isn’t done. It is true I was one of “those” students who tested patience, strained policies, broke rules and spent quality time on a chair in the hallway. I guess it was a natural aptitude, like yodeling. My parents urged me to […]
Posted inWotr
Libby is not what you think
Libby, Mont., is a strange place. In the morning, the Cabinet Mountains sparkle, sporting new snow way up on the highest peaks. Folks arrive at work, open the front doors of their businesses and shout out “Mornin’” from across the street. Joggers pass by my house, dodging a stray doe that lingers after a night […]
Posted inWotr
Con: The cult of canning exposed
I hate this time of year. The leaves crackle underfoot like the bones of tiny children. And the light takes on a certain harshness that reminds me that, even as I grow closer to death, I have gotten no closer to realizing my dreams. Most of that is made tolerable with a dose of self-medication, […]
Posted inSeptember 14, 2009: Home
When reverence isn’t enough
A visit with philosopher and writer Kathleen Dean Moore
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Pro: Gold in a canning jar
All weekend it was food, food and more food. Digging beets, cooking beets, pickling beets, canning pears and peaches, blanching and skinning and freezing tomatoes. I made food until my back ached from standing slightly stooped, at the cutting board. I worked until the Ball jars stood in neat rows, each packed with product — […]
Posted inRange
HCN reader photo: Dead television
This week, we’re featuring a photo by Flickr user VexingArt. It’s not only a nice shot, with plenty of depth and character and that cool old photo look, but it also captures one of those common features of so many Western landscapes: The shot out appliance. To see more High Country News Reader photos, or […]
Posted inSeptember 14, 2009: Home
Fall break
We publish 22 issues a year, and our next publishing break is in mid-September. Look for the next installment of HCN around Oct. 12. ROMPIN’ READER POTLUCK… in Paonia. We’re bringing back an old favorite: the High Country News community potluck at Paonia Town Park! This year, our fall board meeting takes place in HCN‘s […]
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Solace among the Crazies
I’ve always gone to the woods to calm or rejuvenate a spirit too easily rubbed raw by modern life. It shouldn’t have surprised me that this continued into chemotherapy. Cockeyed from surgery and early treatments for ovarian cancer, I thought I was too tired or too sick to feel alive in the woods, but found […]
Posted inGoat
Is the Pioneer doomed?
What a pleasure it was to ride Amtrak’s Pioneer route, which ran from Salt Lake City to Boise, through Oregon to Portland and north to Seattle. The route operated from 1977 to 1997, hooking up with the California Zephyr to service riders in Colorado. I remember one fabulous trip to LaGrande, Oregon, getting off at […]
Posted inSeptember 14, 2009: Home
Bicycles, books and beer
How a man with no plan built a community around literature and social activism
Posted inGoat
Relocation is a loaded term
There has been little noise made about the EPA’s relocation of seven Navajo families living near the former Church Rock uranium mine in northwestern New Mexico. Scouring the Internet, I could only find one brief article in the Gallup Independent. The news was brought to my attention last week, when Cally Carswell and I met […]
Posted inRange
Exempting Native Americans from the mandate
There is growing consensus about a key element of health care reform: a requirement that you must buy health insurance. The idea is that the insurance pools would be less expensive if every American were included – especially younger, healthier workers who for a variety of reasons decide not to buy insurance. The reform proposals […]
Posted inSeptember 14, 2009: Home
The sky is a crowded attic
An interview with novelist Andrew Sean Greer
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Back to the future: Public Health hospitals
Seattle-based Amazon.com, the world’s largest online retailer, will move into its new headquarters near Lake Union next year. Then Amazon will leave an old Art Deco building, once known as the U.S. Marine Hospital. What if we took this empty building and turned it into a hospital? What if we staffed it with federal employees? […]
Posted inSeptember 14, 2009: Home
Bordering on injustice
A Glass of WaterJimmy Santiago Baca240 pages, hardcover: $23.Grove Press, 2009. The largest kindnesses sometimes come in the smallest forms. The title of Jimmy Santiago Baca’s first novel, A Glass of Water, is a nod to one such kindness. “Thirst (is) master,” he writes of the parching conditions migrant farmworkers endure. Baca, an Apache/Chicano memoirist, […]
Posted inSeptember 14, 2009: Home
Confronting life’s essentials
Every so often, I long to relocate to a metropolis far from my sleepy Oregon hometown and my third of an acre of Douglas firs and screech owls. “Oh, Melissa,” chides a friend used to these yearnings. “Just take a vacation and move your couch.” The desire for change entices us. Those who live in […]
Posted inSeptember 14, 2009: Home
Why some men are the way they are
Nine Ten AgainPhil Condon200 pages, softcover: $17.Elixir Press, 2009. Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want ItMaile Meloy240 pages, hardcover: $25.95.Riverhead, 2009. Where The Money WentKevin Canty208 pages, hardcover: $25.Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2009. Three recent books of short stories feature complex but credible characters in relationships tingling with tension. Even as they play on […]