My brother died in 2000. He was 51 years old. We had been estranged for over 20 years. We had lived much different lives. When…
Posts published in “Essays”
It appears that Native Americans are currently part of the national cultural conversation and I — well, wait. I should probably qualify that by saying…
It's a funny mood around Peggy Templer's house in the northern California woods, a mixture of dread, relief and fear. Shock waves are still in…
The Fourth of July has always been a mixed bag for me. As a boy, I loved the barbecue and fireworks party in our neighbors’ backyard. My friends and I ran around in the dark with sparklers, ate potato salad and burgers and corn and watermelon, and a man smoking a cigarette and drinking a martini set off spectacular fireworks smuggled into California from Montana.
Fort Bragg is only ten miles from Mendocino as the crow flies. But a lot further by feel. Caspar bridge is like a Mason-Dixon line…
The other day I was working the crossword puzzle and the clue was boxer Griffith and I thought of Emile and my heart froze for…
Stories of spat-on veterans began proliferating in the US media in 1990 as the country ramped up for the first Persian Gulf War. Anti-war activists…
As I was walking home from town today, it occurred to me that nothing can prepare us for what is going to happen very soon in California, because nothing like what is about to happen has ever happened before. Forty million people did not live in California the last time, if there ever was a last time, so little water flowed in our rivers. Millions of cows were not being raised here, and millions of acres of water-hungry crops, including alfalfa to feed those millions of cows, were not being grown here during previous mega-droughts. Yes, there have been a few longish droughts in the last century and a half, but nothing like the current drought.
“The whole landscape appears to have been formed by some mighty convulsion of the earth that has thrown up numerous spurs or broken ranges of…