Old School

I've been passing through the San Luis Valley on the way to somewhere for the last 42 years. And every time I traverse that vast, flat-bottomed space, ringed by the Sangres on one side and the San Juans on the other, I grow fonder of it. Recently, just after one of this winter's brutal cold spells had broke, I drove through on the way to Denver for a conference. Up on Wolf Creek Pass, it was sunny and relatively warm, at least for early January. But once I got down into the valley, the car thermometer started plummeting, and it was below zero by the time I got near Center. Saguache was a bit warmer, though, and I stopped to take a look around. Luckily for me, it was press day at the Saguache Crescent, where Dean Coombs puts out the paper each week on letterpress equipment, without the benefit of any digital computerized stuff.

I wrote about it for High Country News. And here's some photos.

When deer attack!

I was innocently working away in my office (living room) when the barking began. We live in a medium-sized town in southwestern Colorado, where owning a dog seems to be a prerequisite, and every canine in the neighborhood was going off about something, resulting in a cacophonous symphony. Our dog, Princess (no, we didn’t give her that name), joined the chorus with her incessant yapping. The barking had an urgent pitch to it -- the bear tone. December would arrive in just three days, so it would be pretty remarkable if we still had bears roaming around. It might even be some kind of record -- related to the drought and the wacky warm weather, no doubt -- and so worth noting.

A bear in our midst, for better or worse, has become a somewhat mundane occurrence. We live at the edge of the neighborhood, and our backyard is the wildland-urban dividing line. Not that creatures from either side of the line abide by it. Humans around these parts, often clad in spandex, swarm the hillsides like ants. Bears, raccoons, deer and coyotes roam the alleys like surly teenagers looking for some nutmeg to smoke. A mama bear and her cub spent a good portion of the summer lounging in our neighbor’s backyard, and the alley down the street has a permanent set of greasy bear tracks leading from the fast-food joint’s grease bin to trash can to wild plum to trash can.

Read more here

Mission Cemetery

Last month, in the hiatus between my time in Boulder and my return to Berlin, I traveled to the region I still consider my homeland: The Four Corners Country.

I was born and grew up in Durango, and spent a good portion of my youth riding around the region in the back of my parents' old, white International pickup truck with my older brother, Geoff. We'd chug along highways and back roads through the Reservation and public lands, the aroma of sage or pinon or juniper or exhaust our constant companions. My dad was a writer and a journalist, so these trips qualified as work for him. We were poor, so they were our only family vacations.

Later, as a teenager and then a college student, my friends and I continued our explorations of the canyons, mesas and mountains of the area.

My recent return was in part for work. I ended up writing for and editing a special travel issue for High Country News, which included a piece on the Four Corners Country. It was also for pleasure. It had been a long time since I had visited this beautiful and eerie place. Despite all my time spent in the area, I made some new discoveries. I had actually never hiked into the Bisti Wilderness, and I did on this trip. And I had also never noticed this cemetery, though I had driven past it many times. The light was just right this time, and I had to stop and caught a few images. It was beautiful but also haunting, a place where the dead have been forgotten, it seems, the grave markers toppled and decaying. I'll post more pictures from the journey soon.

The Stumbling Stones of Aldekerk

One of the reasons we moved to Germany in 2010 was because Wendy, my wife, and our daughters have German citizenship. They are citizens because Wendy's grandparents, Arthur and Margaret Mendel, fled the Nazis back in 1938, and German law says that those who lost their citizenship between 1933 and 1945, along with their descendants, can have it back.

The story of Wendy's grandparents and their families is heartbreaking and fascinating. It's a story I hope to write down someday. In the meantime, I made this short video about Wendy's grandfather's home town of Aldekerk, and the installation of Stolpersteine, or Stumbling Stones, in front of the family house there. The Stolpersteine, of which there are thousands throughout Germany and in some neighboring countries, are a project of the artist Gunther Demnig, who places the little brass sculptures in sidewalks in front of houses from which Jews and other victims of the Nazis were taken or where they were murdered. When we stumble upon them in Berlin, which is quite often, sadly, we always stop and read the inscriptions.

Up until June 2012, there were no Stolpersteine in Aldekerk. Now there are two groups of them, one for each of the two Jewish families who called the small town their home until the Nazis took their homes and many of their lives away from them.

Sometimes the number of memorials to the Holocaust in Berlin can be overwhelming. And sometimes we might ask, Isn't it enough yet? The answer is clear: It will never be enough.


Music: Requiem for Victims of East Japan Earthquake (sanmi) / CC BY 3.0
and Brendan Kinsella playing  Bach - Aria Variata, BVW. 989 - Variation No. 3 from freemusicarchive.org under a public domain license.

Super Moon, Lightning & bye bye Boulder

I'm leaving Boulder this week, for good. It's bittersweet: The fellowship I've been doing is over, which is truly depressing, but I'll be able to go back and be with my wife and daughters in Berlin again, which makes me quite happy. We're planning on returning to the American West in July, where I'll work with High Country News, but probably not in Boulder.

So, when I heard about the Super Moon, I knew I had to take the opportunity to try to get some photos, taking advantage of the aesthetic opportunity that the collision of mountains and plains affords here. So some friends and I hiked a little ways up the lower slope of Flagstaff Mountain, found some rocks to sit on (and to use as a tripod, since mine is in storage somewhere), and waited.

The sky was particularly dramatic, as a storm was moving in. The yellowish smog was thick. Vultures soared over Boulder. And when a breeze kicked up, we watched pollen billow out of trees below like smoke. The moonrise wasn't as dramatic as some I've seen -- rather than a gelatinous red blob, it was more of a pale specter pushing its way through the Front Range smog. And then the thick clouds swallowed it up. No worries, though, that's about when the lightning started way off to the East. Nice.

Smog, storm and pollen. Yes, pollen.

Vultures and Valmont power plant.

Sky

Super moonrise and hwy 36.

Moon and big big house above Chautauqua.

Just before the cloud swallows the moon.

Boulder at night.

Notice the strange electric ghost in upper right of center.

Land Art, Altered Landscapes & the Sublime

When I started my time as a Ted Scripps Fellow in Environmental Journalism, I decided to focus on topics that I might not have paid much attention to, otherwise, and to look at familiar topics from unfamiliar angles. Now, the fellowship is coming to an end. Over the past 9 months, I've delved into: tribal energy development (not new for me, but I've found a focus that is both old/familiar, and new and fascinating); the unique economics of Utah and Mormon country (rather unexpected discoveries); the electrical grid (the "biggest machine on earth" is less a machine than a living organism or natural system); and, most surprisingly, as the title of this post notes, Land Art et. al.

It's a bit of a grab bag, yes, but I've always been a generalist. My favorite thing about being a journalist is the ability to throw specialization out the window and to delve into all kinds of different fields, and the fellowship has allowed me to indulge. In doing so, I've actually found all kinds of nodes (to borrow some language from the grid) where all of these topics connect or overlap. I've also found that the Land Art topic, which was originally assigned to me as sort of a light, travel story, has become rather involved, and far more connected to environmentalism than I anticipated. In writing that story, which should appear in High Country News this summer, I've ended up relying on the contemporary art class, the postmodern literature class and the environmental philosophy & law class that I took during my fellowship. I'm also making a connection between Land Art and conservation in the Anthropocene.

I hope it works. In the meantime, here are some photos I took while touring Land Art and while reporting on the economics in Mormon country story.

On the way to Double Negative, Mormon Mesa, Nevada.

Aptus Hazardous Waste Incinerator and sky. Near the Great Salt Lake, Utah.

The Power Grid. Eastern Nevada.

Cold sky in Boulder, March 2

Sometimes I forget how dynamic the sky can be here on the Front Range of Colorado. Boulder's a great town, but best of all is the melding of mountains and plains, and the way the wind plays with the sky and the sky and the light play with that big broad canvas stretching out to the East. Last night, from my perch up above my apartment in Chautauqua, the sky reminded me of a Stanton Englehart sky.