Yesterday I was risking sunburn and drinking gin and tonics. Today a chain law was in effect.
In the spring of 1990 an intruder tried to kill our family. Well, not our family exactly, but the pair of phoebes who nested under our second-story deck each year, and their family – two shell-bound chicks. We’d watched these little grey fly-catchers for three consecutive springs, our faces pressed so close to the deck slats above, Read More
When I was 9 years old, my family moved from Williamsburg, Virginia to Salt Lake City, Utah. This would upend my world in more ways than I then understood – rural to urban, southern to western, near kin to distant. But on saying goodbye to my friends, and the best neighborhood I would ever, Read More
Balance. Lift. Swing. Extend. Accelerate. Thwack. Repeat. The bounty of autumn is a backhanded blessing. There’s so much to do… but there’s so much to do. And winter is coming. The satisfying soreness that follows a day in the hills after elk, deer, antelope or chukar; the easy fit of old waders as water, Read More
They called him Deadeye Dan, although that was before I came along. He was a great shot. Dropping whitetails on the run as they darted between cottonwoods, elk in the fog at three hundred yards. Always just one shot. By the time I was able to tag along on hunts those days were long, Read More
My uncle always said that elk were a staple and everything else was an appetizer. I guess we liked appetizers because as a kid we would always shoot a couple of whitetail does for the freezer. We had tons of them on our family ranch and they tasted delicious. Now, I have almost no access, Read More
Kids are born hunters. “Can I go catch a grasshopper?” asks my son at dawn. “Sure” we tell him, and off he goes through the dog-door, clad in cape and undies, to creep around the dewy lawn with his jar. The jar rarely comes home empty. “You have to be quiet.” he tells me, Read More
It’s a park now, mown green-space and graveled paths owned by the city of Williamsburg Virginia. But when I was a boy, not so much older than my son is now, “Government Property” was a tangle of tidewater forest and marshland where earthen battlements – remnants of the civil war – lay hidden in, Read More
We were boys, 16 maybe 17, and newly possessed of ancient desires. Our ill-defined hungers for something slippery, pulsing, and mysterious were poorly met by the confines of our asphalt and strip-mall world, confines erected by sensible elders to keep us in the navigable middle channel and away from the rapids. But being boys,, Read More