“Where the water touches this soil of disintegrated granite, it acts like the wand of the Enchanter, and it may with truth be said that these Indians (Owens River Valley Paiute) have made some portions of their Country, which otherwise were Desert, to bloom and blossom as a rose.” –Capt. J.W. Davidson, US Cavalry, [...]

For maybe the fourth time since our first child was born back in 1978, my wife and I are on the road alone together. Out to visit my big sister and her family at Lake Arrowhead in the San Berdo Mountains, we figured on our way we’d spin by the Alabama Hills in Owens Valley. [...]

Did you hear that the blond oil cartel lady that’s always on TV—“the deeper you go,” says she, “the more good things you learn”—isn’t a real human being? Yup, that’s true. The news is all over the internet and, I don’t mind saying, I’d already suspected as much in my own wicked mind. I mean, [...]

About a month before my second book came out, I received a form email from my publisher’s Manager of Marketing and Publicity. At the ripe old age of 29, I was informed, worn down by the workaday grind and determined to follow her heart, she was quitting her job so she could devote herself to [...]

A while back in the nearby woods a large gaggle of wild turkeys started raising a ruckus to the high heavens. A veritable convention of agitated gobblers, it was, them being in their tribal mood. By and by a bunch of the turkeys came running out the tree line, hopped the pasture fence and started [...]

The whole country was scandalized. And the more the National Network focused its hungry eyes and teething puppy tenacity on the sequence of events and the personalities involved—within 48 hours they’d chewed that rawhide strap into the texture of a waterlogged washcloth and they weren’t even getting started yet—the more scandalized everybody became. One of [...]

By the time His Holiest Mas Daum finally found the precise power point of the earth’s Harmonic Convergence up in the center of the topographical tuning fork made by California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains, folks back home in Mississippi had long judged him crazy. For what did it profit a boy to gain the Key to [...]

A while back I found myself alone in a room with four elderly female ex-hippies. A friend of mine had just come out with a picture book about Mendocino County’s old dog hole seaports, and I was showing it around. One of the women, you could call her an Alpha she wolf if you wanted [...]

“When steam first began to puff. . .the wild child humanity was caught and put in a harness. What we call business habits were invented to make the life of man harmonious with the steam engine, and his movements rival the train in punctuality. The factory system was invented and it was an instantaneous success. [...]

I’d driven down this particular beaver slide twice already this year, but never with a full trailer during a cloudburst. My brand-new, one-ton diesel, company pickup truck’s full blast windshield wipers were allowing me flickering peeks of the straight-shot clay road down below, the distant bottomlands seemingly as flat as a pond, and the road [...]