TAKE IT OR LEAVE IT…Jim Stiles The ‘Negro Bill’ Debate—What Isn’t Racism, and what IS (Flashbacks #1) Progress v development SOWING Clover…Tonya Stiles The End of Work BEFORE & AFTER—Moab, Utah…then and now The Meador House on Main Street GROUND…
Zephyr Extra: NOTE: This is a followup to a story that appeared in the Aug/Sept issue of The Zephyr. Read that story here. On August 4, Grand County Councilwoman Mary McGann proposed to change the name of Negro Bill Canyon…
For the last couple of years, a ‘place name’ debate has raged in Moab, mostly via the letters column in the weekly Times-Independent. Some Grand County citizens think the name ‘Negro Bill Canyon,’ is racist and offensive and should be…
Consider, for a moment, the horse. Your average horse is still a romantic figure, evoking a rich historical relationship of labor, war, and transport. Horses made the journey across the Oregon Trail. Horses marched into battle, and lay among the…
NOTE: I first wrote this in the mid-1990s, when I thought there was a chance our little town of Moab might avoid–or at least try to avoid—the kind of fate that it has eventually been consumed by. It was also…
THANKS to Tom McCourt & the Tibbetts Family. For years, I have been watching Moab move farther and farther away from its roots, to the point where it seems few people even know the history of the place anymore. Some…
Paul Vlachos is a New Yorker who understands The West. And he is a New Yorker who understands New York. Wherever Paul goes, he finds signs of life… I have been in a funk for a while, so I’m going…
I grow plants in the desert for planting in yards and in unirrigated revegetation project areas in SE and Central Utah. Almost every day from February through October I talk with people about how to water plants – how much,…
Editor’s Note: Sixteen years after this article was written, life for LGBT Utahns (and elsewhere in the United States) has changed for the better. As Stephen Clark, the ACLU legal director quoted extensively in the article, noted, “Progress goes basically…
Former County Councilman and Allen Memorial Hospital nurse Peter Haney swears that what follows is true… It was 12:20 am on Thanksgiving Day 1986…I had just finished my midnight rounds at the hospital. I went to an empty patient room…