I was a little kid when I first saw Shiprock, the great volcanic neck on the northeastern edge of Navajo country, and I’ve been staring at it from all conceivable angles, in fascination, ever since. Most days you can see it through the distant haze from Mesa Verde, the plateau to the north, but …
Our friend Sybil has a particularly nice backyard fountain.
I wasn’t close enough to hear what they were talking about, but the turtle looked pissed.
The Desert Sands Motor Hotel on old Route 66 in Albuquerque has all the modern amenities. If you look closely, you’ll see a small television satellite dish.
This is my favorite border picture from my trip last month to Arizona-California-Sonora-Baja. You can see the old border fence on the right, one of those repurposed metal landing strip things, which as near as I can tell is where the actual border is. The big new fence is pulled back 50 yards or so …
Disclosure: I digitally altered the original. The moon was moved.
I’ve quoted before Don DeLillo’s great description of how, at a night baseball game, under the lights, “the players seem completely separate from the night around them.” At our Albuquerque Isotopes’ home opener this evening, the players’ home whites seemed impossibly white, the grass seemed impossibly green, the sky behind the lights impossibly inky black. In …
Back in Albuquerque after dark last night, cleaning out the car this morning after a week down in the Colorado River borderlands, I realized these water bottles may pose a legal problem. I filled them in Yuma, which means this is Lower Basin water. Have I just violated the Colorado River Compact? My bad, sorry.
HOLBROOK, AZ – Driving on Interstate 40 in western New Mexico, the continental divide feels like a geographic afterthought. When I was a boy, I remember the Continental Divide as high mountain passes in the Rockies, deserving of capitalization, a thing of great import. I was mesmerized by the concept. If I stood here and …