The road over the Cascades cut between steep slopes of evergreens—here healthy, there snags, trunks scorched with fire. Turkey vultures circled overhead as Snoqualmie Pass (during blizzard season, basically the Pass of Caradhras) went by like a radar blip. Abruptly the land flattened, the mountains gave way to steppe—the desert of Eastern Washington, thorn scrub […]
A monolith towering over the town of Squamish, the Stawamus Chief formed in the subterranean volcanic chaos of the Cretaceous Period. One hundred million years of erosion brought The Chief to the earth’s surface, and the retreat of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet (which met the Laurentide Ice Sheet at the Rocky Mountains) left its granite slopes […]
On a bay of Lake Michigan, there’s a city where it snows in May, one week before the streets bloom pink with cherry blossoms. The masts of a hundred sailboats line its marinas; its every other building is a brewpub. This sounds like somewhere “all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, […]
After the OSU course, I ride north—Corvallis to Portland, Portland to Seattle. I was last here eight years ago, with teenage angst and a stupid earring. That was the summer I did construction work (i.e., cleaned up after construction workers), and wrote a fantasy novel at 826 Seattle (now known as the Bureau of Fearless Ideas). […]
The trees are so tall out here. I know this is because of the fog and the moderating effects of the California Current, as well as the lack of a need for those energy-intensive winter survival mechanisms (like polyol production and extracellular freezing) born of a longer growing season with milder temperature extremes. But in […]
My first flight from Traverse City to Chicago is canceled. I am not informed of this by American Airlines, but rather by my mother, who takes it upon herself to check, then calls me—frantic—a couple hours before the flight. I’m on hold with the airline for an hour, during which time the dog is quiet. The dog […]
20,000 years ago, the Laurentide Ice Sheet pulled the last of its frozen fingers back into the north. The glacier left basins in its wake, and those basins filled, 12,500 years later, with the Nipissing Great Lakes. The waters of Nipissing would become Lakes Superior, Michigan, and Huron, and on Mackinac Island, those waters would […]
A mother bear and her two cubs, the Ojibwe story goes, were driven by fire or famine—different tellings offer different reasons—to swim the 118 miles from Wisconsin to Michigan. The mother made it across Lake Michigan; her cubs did not. Gitche Manitou (the Great Spirit), seeing the bears’ love for each other, raised up the […]
Sometimes, I do this thing. In the evening, I go to a body of water (a bay is preferable) and I sit, cross-legged, on its edge—as far out over the water as I can get. I take my notebook and a pen, and I write. I write from the moment I sit until there’s no […]
Old Mission Peninsula, which splits the west and east arms of Grand Traverse Bay, is covered in cherry trees—their white flowers in full bloom like a seagull-feather coat upon the land. Grape vines, also common here but not as pervasive as the cherries, are barren this early in the spring. At the tip of the […]
