Great Basin National Park
Great Basin National Park in Nevada is home to something so old, and yet so alive, we can’t help but feel awestruck. The bristlecone pine we can see in the park run from 4,700 and 5,000 years old. Trees alive at the birth of Minoan Civilization on Crete and the dawn...
Medimont, Idaho
Medimont, Idaho just might be the town that turned things around for him. But right now the middle of his back was ablaze. The doc spun out some thoracic mumbo jumbo. Clearly not a doc who graduated in the top half of his class. It was his own damned fault. If he...
Laguna Beach, California
Laguna Beach, California dozed under the late spring marine layer. Steep steps of peeling white brick lead down the bluff from the motel to the beach. Salt air assaulted the iron railings. They gave him a job painting, everything white. A stiff bristle wire brush...
Limon, Colorado
Limon, Colorado rattled in the savage wind for the seventh straight night. It was a cruel wind that sliced open the sky. Black gusts ripped apart rose bushes and ripped heirloom tomatoes off the vine. Then the wind was gone. But the soul had been torn out of the town...
Buffalo, Wyoming
Buffalo, Wyoming could have been a fine spot for Leon Trotsky. If Leon had wound up exiled in Wyoming rather than Mexico City, the man who more or less engineered the 1917 Russian Revolution may have tacked a few more years on to his convoluted life. Trotsky was...
Lone Pine, California
Lone Pine, California wound up being where he buried the metal ammo case lifted out of his stepfather’s garage. For the first time in ages, he no longer had anything to complain about. No worries at all. Stuffed inside that ammo case was his mom’s jewelry. She’d...
Reserve, New Mexico
Reserve, New Mexico is where the volcanoes are so well-mannered they erupt only once. She was an out of work geologist. She grasped both the science and the mystery of those volcanoes. She appreciated the formations, what the textbooks referred to as monogenetic...
Sidney, Montana
Sidney, Montana had the closest garage. The tow truck driver told him its proprietor was a former Egyptian Air Force mechanic who cut his chops working on F16s. It was a long drive back to town and the tow truck driver didn’t have much else to say except he no longer...
Felton, California
Felton, California was where she went to check out the redwoods. She sailed into town in a 1954 MG TF 1250, hastily borrowed from a neighbor after admiring it for months. The keys were in the ignition. She figured her neighbor wouldn’t mind being without his car for...
Glendive, Montana
Glendive, Montana was, without a doubt, her kind of town. She was the noisome mother of a pregnant teenage bride. Shortly after nine, she showed up at the poolhall. She had on a yellow sweatshirt from one of the casinos in West Wendover, Nevada. Her pool cue case...
Griffith Park
Griffith Park turned out to be so gorgeous, so improbable, that it bandaged the city’s wounds and fixed its faults. No matter how astonishing the extravagances, how grievous the troubles, how remarkable the achievements of the city surrounding it, nothing could ever...
National City, California
National City, California was lost in fog so thick front doors could not be opened and cars could not be driven. Seagulls took shelter under damp tarpaulins stretched across the invisible shipyard. She was stuck at the Starbucks on Highland Avenue. A few days before...
Reno, Nevada
Reno, Nevada back then was as good a town as any and likely better than most. Not a bad place to wind up when he came back home from the war. Things worked out fine for a while. But just as he figured, his flair for card playing began to fade. He thought about going...
Twin Falls, Idaho
Twin Falls, Idaho sidestepped the worst of the late spring snowstorm. It curled south at the last minute. The weather forecasters on TV said it was a big one. They were even on the verge of assigning the storm a particularly fearsome name. They pasted on their most...
Vernal, Utah
Vernal, Utah is where something as cryptic as love itself prompted her to turn on the car radio. This was something she had not done in years. She had drifted away from listening to the car radio, quite strange given how there had been a time she would not have...
Jerome, Idaho
Jerome, Idaho, the whole damned town, woke up on the wrong side of the bed. This included the woman who opened the Red Star Café in Jerome every morning at four-thirty. Driving in to work that morning, it dawned on her that intimacy was an impossibility, with him in...
Holbrook, Arizona
Holbrook, Arizona affected her in ways she was not expecting. It was as if she was familiar with every inch of town before she arrived. She was certain she would know the people she would run into, how cold it would feel at night and in the morning how the sunlight...
Riley, Oregon
Riley, Oregon stirred up a buried sadness that caught him off guard. It wasn’t the town but a lingering stain that scarred the sky. Months ago the forest fires raged. The smoke was gone but those stains were still there. He wanted to know why the fires were so much...
