Phase II of my 6,000 mile search for beauty took me on another road trip last week – to the Broughton Archipelago. This smattering of rocky islands between the west coast of British Columbia and Vancouver Island has been home to the Kwakwaka’wakw indigenous tribe for thousands of years. I was drawn to feel for […]
Landscapes
A Gypsy-sort-of-Garden
Some of you know that I have landed back in south-eastern B.C. after a winter of exploration across the west. Soon after I arrived, I was thrown a curve ball that resulted in the continuation of my gypsy life in a community I have called home for 22 years. While there have been challenges, I’ve […]
Finding the headwaters
I cross into Montana and head west, drawn by the allure of Headwaters State Park, about 30 miles west of Bozeman, Montana. The second-longest river in North America begins here, tucked into a wetland east of the Rocky Mountain divide. Every river begins differently. The Missouri’s alpha is actually the confluence of two rivers, the […]
Expansion into Sky
Nebraska shares a boundary with the state of my dreams: Wyoming. I say this not because of the side-by-side signs I saw in a town called Grey Bull (“Obama is a pile of excrement” said one. “Trump hats for sale,” said the other.) Wyoming is the state of my dreams because of its expansive, exhilarating […]
The Keepers of History
A seemingly innocent question posed by my sister led me to spend a day at the county records office in Stockville, Nebraska. “Do you think our grandfather was born in Frontier County, like his older brother?” Our maternal great-grandfather met his wife, married and started a family on a farm near Stockville in 1899. As […]
Missouri River Marshlands
The name Van Meter State Park in northwestern Missouri predicts nothing about the park’s remarkable gifts. I approached it on state road 122, rolling La Tortue through undulating farm fields that were broken only by occasional brush and trees gathered in wet draws. Mostly, this was engineered habitat for soybeans and corn. We had our […]