Where I live, it gets hot in the summer. Very hot. And when the summer sun bakes the Arizona deserts, that hot, light air rises high above the saguaro and the creosote, above the Catalinas and the Superstitions, and births a low pressure system that sucks wind from south. With that wind comes moisture from …
Christmas has come and gone - but there are lots of pretty packages left to open.
We were sitting on the stone wall when the storm hit. It wasn't surprising. We had spent many hours sitting on that particular stone wall that particular summer. And when you spend the summer sitting on a wall in northern Arizona, smack in the middle of the Monsoon …
It was in the summer, when the days were warm and empty and the nights were brimming with June bugs and jasmine, that my brother and I dug a hole. There was nothing practical about our hole. We simply wanted to know what was down there, what fabulous treasure …
The rain flew like bullets, cratering the sandy soil as we cowered beneath the wind-tossed tamarisk. The lightning flared and, right on its white-hot heels, the thunder exploded. Our boats, three small inflatable kayaks that we had dragged ashore when this summer tempest attacked, shivered in the wind. We …
Continue reading Moonbeams and Muddy Dreams -Running A Ghost River
Several years ago, I produced a short-lived podcast I called - you guessed it - Natural Wonders. Now and then, I'll be sharing episodes from that series. Here's one about a favorite insect of mine. As you'll hear, we go back a long ways.
John Muir, the great naturalist, conservationist, and father of our national parks, called sunset “The jewel of the day”. Here’s a gem I snapped from my own backyard in Tucson, Arizona.
There was something growing in the yard. The snail that was clinging to it knew what it was - it was an amorphous, dark glob in a world of light and dark globs. The bee that paused to investigate knew what it was, too - it was a …
The first time I saw him, he was perched on the barrel of Mickey Mantle’s big, 36-ounce bat. But Fred didn’t stay there long; Fred never stayed anywhere very long. With a deft felicity he rose into the air, darted about the room in expeditious zigs and zags, and finally settled …
Natural Wonders 