“Cannery Row in Monterey California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, … Read More
Caribbean Sunset. 35,000 feet
It was a cosmic gift in this season of giving. Aruba sent us home through a holiday light show. A circus parade of cloudtops roostertailing through shadows and light pointing to the outer membrane of this space bubble as one … Read More
Fly Fishing
Montana’s Madison River valley opened up like a Georgia O’Keefe flower. Big sky. Just past the cowgirl whose boyfriend lost his head, we spied a shotgun shack, a fixer upper we agreed would make a fine one-lane bowling alley. Helena … Read More
Big Ol’ Tetons
We expected to see bison, bear, maybe a moose. Not a bee. We waved at a dozen Buffalo Bill visages in Cody, Wyoming, and cruised into Yellowstone. Crossing the park, the traffic was sparse. The wildlife hid from us. Turning … Read More
Sturgis Surrounded
It was a butt-clenching rollercoaster ride on the Black Hills backroad to a park named for a man best-known for getting slaughtered. Halfway up the twisting mountain road to the park, our journey became a Custerfluck of swollen rain clouds … Read More
Road to Nowhere
Dare I drive the old road? Dismissed by a superhighway, this stretch of pavement beckons for diesel vibrations and the familiar feel of rubber. Brittle and crumbling, its most persistent passengers move up through the cracks, wave at the sun, … Read More
Return to the scene of the crime
This is a peek at a Missouri Life Magazine cover coming together. I’m at the helm of the second boat. The day before, that boat was damn near sideways in a thirty-knot wind. The story was fun, sanitized a bit … Read More
Aerial Ballet
She was young and impressionable. So I talked her off her limb and she demonstrated that she knew how to fish. She danced and dove, swerved and tumbled, and relished in her onlooker’s delight. Or so I believe. Her parents … Read More
Warp Speed.
Back before the Civil War, cattle had to get used to a new sound. Every day a four-horse stagecoach ran the fertile Missouri river bottoms, clattering along a bit of modern technology for the time: an oak plank road. This … Read More