Essays

Happy birthday, Justin. He turns 11 this week, thanks to our country’s great health-care system that saved his life. He can hope to live a long life, too, thanks to health-care reform that arrived as a welcome birthday present. “It is a big relief,” said his dad Joe, an old friend of mine who...
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It was a December day 68 years ago when Ralph Ball’s destiny changed. “We were playing touch football on the fraternity house lawn,” he once told me. “One of our classmates came down and said, ‘Hey boys, don’t worry about what you’re going to do next year. We’re going to be in the Army....
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Throw your weight forward. Lean into the abyss. Let go. My skis are turned parallel to the edge of the cornice. The ground drops away and plunges into steeps and gullies studded with snowdrifts, trees and tree wells. Hints of rocks and downed timber break through the surface. I stand on the cornice –...
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At the end of March, as spring began to crawl into the High Country, the radio transmissions from the collar fitted on a female wolf stopped moving. The stagnant signal emitted from a spot in western Colorado, and when state and federal wildlife investigators descended, they found her dead body. Her epic journey across some of the West’s wildest lands...
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In the evening a strange thing happened; the 20 families became one family, the children were the children of all. The loss of a home became one loss, and the golden time in the West was one dream. – John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath Long before Tom Joad and his family set out...
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Route 666 is fading in the distance. That stepson of the Mother Road –Route 66 –is headed toward oblivion. That’s a shame, because for me, like plenty of pavement pilgrims who arrived in the West over the last half-century in RVs, SUVs or astride Harleys, the Devil’s Highway was the road into God’s Country....
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