This year, I was lucky enough to spend Thanksgiving back home with my parents in central Montana. Holidays at home usually include the traditional trappings of board games, gravy boats and hungry dogs making cute under the table, followed by food-induced snooze fests in the living room. But what I most look forward to when […]
Essays
Posted inWotr
The end is near — the end of 2011
To claim that the ancient Mayan culture of Mexico and Central America developed a nuanced conception of time is like saying the modern stock market is a complicated financial instrument. The Mayan calendars cover a multi-faceted collection of linear and cyclical measurements that go back almost 3,000 years as well as forward in time — […]
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A ski town contributes mightily to paleontology
One morning last July, as Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper looked on, scientists supervised the hoisting of a 10,000-pound cast of a Columbia mammoth skeleton — rocks included — onto a flatbed truck for shipment to the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. After 60 days of intense digging, the scientists and scores of volunteers attracted […]
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A frantic lion meets the border wall
I recently moved from Sasabe, Ariz., a tiny town located next to the border wall dividing the United States from Mexico. The wall was built of bars 15 feet tall and looked like a long prison cell. It ran four miles east until it hit an arroyo on the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, and […]
Posted inNovember 28, 2011: Growing a Revolution
Fighting the wind on a Montana camping trip
My wife does not like the wind. I know this because she says so. “I hate the wind!” Crissie hollers, doing her best to be heard above it. It’s late June, 7 p.m., the first night of a three-day float down the Marias River in northern Montana, 40-some miles from the Canadian border. We woke […]
Posted inNovember 28, 2011: Growing a Revolution
The burial of Elouise Cobell
Elouise Cobell filed her class action suit in 1996 and originally thought it would take only three years to resolve the issues. She joined Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Attorney General Eric Holder in making the settlement announcement. Tami A. Heilemann-DOI On Oct. 22, Elouise Cobell was buried on the Blacktail Ranch where she and […]
Posted inNovember 14, 2011: Possessing the Wild
Hunting deer on a mountain bike
In the tangle of gear in my daypack, the phone started ringing. It was a wholly inappropriate moment: My phone is pink, and its jaunty notes clashed with the traditional hunter’s world of blaze orange and camouflage. I sat on a rock by the trail and cringed. Everything about this — my first hunting trip […]
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Breathing clean air comes in second in Congress
Even in these politically polarized times, one might think that breathing clean air could muster some bipartisan support in Congress. A quick look at the bills the House of Representatives has been passing lately should dispel that naïve notion. Three bills aimed at delaying new air pollution rules on coal-fired power plants, cement kilns and […]
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Of marigolds and a day with the dead
Living close to the Mexican border, I’m often asked if I have problems with drug smugglers or “illegals” trekking across our land here in the mountains of southern Arizona. When I tell friends in the Midwest or New York or Oregon that my main worry is walking into a Safeway parking lot in Tucson and […]
Posted inOctober 31, 2011: Omens from a Vanished Sea
Wrestling with a destiny of dryness
When I was a teenager, I asked my father why we wasted our lives irrigating the desert. He wept because his only son didn’t get it. My father inherited his love of the desert from his father, who homesteaded in western Utah and once dug a two-mile ditch from a spring on Indian Mountain to […]
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Wolf on a picnic table
I once saw a wolf, or what I was told was one. It stood on a picnic table in Montana in the late evening sunshine, and 30 or so onlookers gathered around. The wolf was named Kaori. Clipped to a leash attached to her handler’s harness, she was part of an educational program and accustomed […]
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When the bear comes too close to home
It’s always seemed like a good idea to have chickens, especially if you live in a rural area. They turn compost into eggs. In the fall, they fill the freezer full of healthy meat at a reasonable price. They provide feathers for my dad’s fly-tying and my daughter’s hair. They eat the grasshoppers and fertilize […]
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Pulling an Everett Ruess
After six months without a job, I wonder how I will support myself. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, mummified inside a contorted blanket, my dog hunched over my right hip in the posture of a turkey vulture. In the dark it’s hard to tell if he’s watching over me or […]
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Military’s fly-by-night scheme raises lots of questions
Imagine how it would feel: You’re asleep in bed at midnight, when suddenly, the roar of a fighter plane flying just a few hundred feet above your head wakes you up with a bang. But not to worry, the plane is one of ours. Our military’s pilots simply need to practice their skill at flying […]
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Living the news, publishing every week
In the remote mountain valley where I live in northern Washington, people are talking about two members of a local family who have been indicted by the federal government and charged with killing as many as five endangered gray wolves. A third member of the family is charged with conspiracy to smuggle a wolf pelt […]
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At last, Yellowstone bison catch a break
Bison live to wander, but bison with the audacity to wander beyond the invisible northern boundary of Yellowstone National Park have long been chased back into the park, sent to the slaughterhouse or simply killed outright. Recently, Montana has been trying some new approaches, and this is a very good thing for North America’s only […]
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Elouise Cobell, rest in peace
updated Oct. 26, 2011 It is the rare person who gets to be enshrined in the pantheon of heroes. I remember the Herblock cartoon that came out the day after Dwight Eisenhower died. It showed acres of white crosses at Arlington National Cemetery, with the caption: “Pass the word, it’s Ike.” Across Indian Country this […]
Posted inOctober 17, 2011: A Burning Problem
Life as a fire lookout
Once upon a time, I had a pretty sweet gig at the Wall Street Journal, editing stories about sports, wine, theater, pop music, photography, painting and opera. Every month or so, I reviewed a novel or profiled a jazz musician. The daily “Leisure & Arts” page was a quiet, civilized little backwater, largely untouched by […]
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The foul air outside my window
I think it’s fair to say that most of the Washington, D.C., politicians attacking clean-air safeguards don’t have the same view out their front windows as the families in my small community of 300 people. We look out on four polluting smokestacks, a small mountain of coal ash, and seeping wastewater ponds. All are part […]
Posted inOctober 17, 2011: A Burning Problem
Killing for conservation in national parks
To work for the National Park Service is to undergo a kind of transformation. I wake up in boxers and an oversized T-shirt, and, 20 minutes later, I’m standing outside my cabin in pressed green jeans, a buttoned and tucked-in gray shirt, bulky brown belt and hiking boots. At 5 feet tall, 100 pounds, I’m […]