We planted and tended an apple orchard in the central New Mexico mountains while I was growing up. It was on the far side of the Manzano Mountains, made famous recently as one of the recurring backdrops in the TV series “Breaking Bad”. Not famous by name but by their unmistakable profile, filmed so many…
The dreams of my youth were of wilderness and searching for its heart. Getting to the edge of wilderness where you could jump off and out of civilization usually involved a vehicle of some kind. The irony was that the wilderness was more accessible because of that car. My grandfather and his friends rode horseback great distances…
As children we often visited our grandparents in southern Arizona where they worked a ranch about 25 miles southeast of Tucson. The trips always started with an announcement posed as a question. How would we like to go visit Nana and Grandpa? At that point our excitement would burst as we raced about the house…
When Shepherds keeping watch, saw a great sight As a child I was versed in stories of Wise Men whose learning of stars and planets revealed a great child would be born. These early stories taught that learning the night sky could lead to knowledge and even wisdom beyond the ordinary. And it was very…
Wildness does not go away because we bring it indoors. This is especially true of animals. Tom had two Malamutes, Neshka and Ashi, named for Eskimo heroes he had read about. He lived with them in a one room cabin up Coal Creek Canyon. The cabin was part of a string of sagging structures lining…
