My favorite kind of road trip usually devolves into a series of decisions about what direction I’m going to take that day. I wake up and check the weather to see if there is anything I need to avoid. I…
NOTE: After 2 1/2 months of this, I’d almost rather eat Brussel Sprouts than write about COVID-19. Like many of you, I am conflicted and tired and frustrated and scared and angry. Sometimes I even think that God is just…
When the swamp gas clears…and the weather balloons are safe in their weather-station beds …and all the super-secret spy planes have spun their alley-oops and jittered their non-ballistic shuffles through the clouds for the night…and you’re on some wide stretch…
My grandfather, Hayden, was a soft-spoken Baptist who grew up in south Texas during a period when converts were taken to a muddy creek and, well, dunked “in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.”…
I woke up today and made a cup of tea. It’s a little after 4:30 AM when I do this. It’s dark outside, but I look anyway. In another couple of months the sun will be shining through my kitchen…
We are particular to preserve the buildings, but fear, unless the Gov’t sees proper to make a national park of the Cañons, including Mesa Verde, that the tourists will destroy them. B. K. Wetherill, 1890 Into the silent stone building…
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 was going to write about “quiet.” It’s a subject close to…
You’re either a person who can sit still or a person who can’t. A person who loves what you can already see, or one who wonders what you might see around the bend. Probably the former type lives the more…
“I ain’t got no quarrel with the Viet Congs” Muhammad Ali 1967 Required by law, I registered for the draft in 1968 when I was 18 years old. I had done enough homework and was frightened enough to know that…
Note: In the essay that follows, I continue to write about my early days of learning to fly fish. Uncle Lloyd still lived in Dove Creek, and I was on the way west again with my family. We were moving…