For bighorns, topography is memory, enhanced by acute vision. They can anticipate the land's every contour--when to leap, where to climb, when to turn, which footholds will support their muscular bodi...
The gyre that pulls this sunrise ocean moves west from Africa across the equator then caresses this thumb of land on Mexico’s flank. The Gulf Stream carries the warm waters farther north. Like the oce...
Each of us possesses five fundamental, enthralling maps to the natural world: sight, touch, taste, hearing, smell. As we unravel the threads that bind us to nature, as denizens of data and artifice, a...
The complex human eye harvests light. It perceives seven to ten million colors through a synaptic flash: one-tenth of a second from retina to brain. Homo sapiens gangs up to 70 percent of its sense re...
In the hallowed tradition of squishy doughball liberals, I believe that science, reason, kindness, and understanding—maybe a little food—can set the world right. B
Sometimes the desert exhilarates me to the point of soaring. Other times I am so heartsick I cannot bear up against the despair, a palpable, aching longing. Longing for this wild beauty to last and fo...
My geography savors a delicious paradox: Home - a grounding - found in unearthly beauty. The predominant colors are blue, emerald, and terra-cotta. Every day, every season, I taste these colors and th...
A cavalry of sweaty but righteous blond gods chased pesky, unkempt people across an annoyingly leaky Mexican border. A grimy cowboy with a headdress of scrawny vultures lay facedown in fiery sands at...
This deranged jungle of ironies coinhabits my skull like feathers and fireworks. My heart fills with stones. I am the mad aunt who laughs her head off at the funeral. There rises in me the most inappr...
In genealogy you might say that interest lies in the eye of the gene holder. The actual descendants are far more intrigued with it all than the listeners, who quickly sink into a narcoleptic coma afte...
Everyone will tell you that genealogy serves two purposes: self-knowledge and social status, some sort of pedigree divined from names, locations, and achievements of eminence. However, there is nothin...
It has come quickly, this crushing, industrial love of paradise. The pervert-free, less-trammeled, hundred-mile-view days were little more than two decades past, not so very long ago. Yet already my o...
Of all the things I wondered about on this land, I wondered the hardest about the seduction of certain geographies that feel like home — not by story or blood but merely by their forms and colors. How...
Breathing, it seemed to me, was a proper attribute for the mountains... mountains that quietly functioned as a single thing with a rhythmic inhale-exhale I could feel...
How do I stop this misery? I groaned, scanning the shelves for a cure.Don’t go out there, he said flatly.I contemplated this reasonable observation for about sixteen seconds. Move to town. Hang out at...
Have left themselves few places and scant ways to witness other species in their own worlds, an estrangement that leaves us hungry and lonely. In this famished state, it is no wonder that when we do f...
I was a lowly puddle of plasma, trading I am alive for a vague I tend to exist and weeping for joy over the sheer revelation.
Its beauty stirs the imagination, and I wonder if the last refuge of all that is truly wild lies not on earth but in light.
A map, it is said, organizes wonder.
I would like to do whatever it is that presses the essence from the hour.