How to describe the light that erupts along the central coast of California? From the oak-studded ranch land around Pozo, where my mother grew up in the shadows of the Los Padres National Forest, I climbed over the Cuesta Grade through the Santa Lucia mountain range and dropped down to the Pacific shore. There, I […]
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Pockets of Agates
The El Nino storms hit Klamath, California hard on Thursday. La Tortue trembled in the force of the wind. Rain pounded on the roof, waking me in the dead of the night. Miraculously, I lay warm and dry. (Thank goodness I am getting too old for tent camping.) For the next several days, I watched […]
Redwood Majesty
I parked La Tortue beside the pristine Smith River in Jedediah Smith State Park last night, a preserve of old and second-growth redwood trees. Today, I walked in a grove where fire had swept through hundreds of years ago; many of the oldest trees were scarred by the flames, but continued to adapt and even […]
Reaching (for) the Pacific Ocean
January 19, 2016: I woke this morning to rain pelting on the roof of the Rialta van — thankfully, I was dry as a bone inside. A powerful El Nino storm has swept in from the Pacific Ocean. Given my location at Bullard’s Beach State Park in coastal Oregon, nothing stands in the way of […]
Have dog, will travel
A golden afternoon on the Slocan River in late June, paddling a prototype of the traditional Sinixt sturgeon-nosed canoe with my dog Dellie in pursuit. In the evening, I spoke to a bi-national group of students from Hamilton College in upstate New York and our local Selkirk College about the Columbia River Treaty. They are […]
A summer office beside Kootenay Lake
I sit here in early morning, watching the swallows dance across the water’s surface, dipping close to harvest bugs, rising up again to deliver them into a waiting nest of young.