Yes, I get as anxious now as I did 20-something years ago when I faced my first composition students. Nervous because I know that the first minutes of a class are like the first sentences of an essay. If you don’t gain your audience’s attention then, chances are you never will. Of course my students […]
Will miss them—my students with whom I’ll begin a new semester tomorrow. Would like to tell them so, but that would sound corny. It’s too soon. We haven’t hung out together yet, which, in my class, means we haven’t read one another’s stuff yet. Yes, they read my things too. It’s how I teach. It […]
Can you imagine how Rip Van Winkle felt after his long nap? I thought about Irving’s protagonist today after visiting Red River with Bob and Craig. In the early ‘60s my dad bought a small grocery-store-ski-rental shop and a jeep touring company in Red River. Then, he sent Bob up to run the store and […]
I’m not going to name names, but one of us snores. Loudly. Not as though I didn’t plan ahead—Pandora on the smart phone and earphones. Tomorrow, I’ll buy bigger earphones. Had some of Santa Fe’s best Mexican fare tonight. Tomasita’s in the Depot District. A lady in line (a lengthy one by the way) said […]
The three of us haven’t taken a road trip together in over 50 years—since Craig (then 15) and I (13) traveled to see our brother Bobby (19) at his summer job in Arizona. Bob, who was working as a tour guide at Grand Canyon Caverns near Kingman, had invited us to see the caves and […]
Walked by my old house yesterday. The four-bedroom ranch structure that Sternenberg Lumber Company built for Bob Bellah in 1957 hasn’t been occupied by my family since 1968. It’s only a few blocks from where I now live, but I hardly ever pass it—one, because it’s not on the way anywhere and, two, because the […]
I knew it a week before the climb. But I didn’t tell the others until the night before. What I knew is that since we had settled on a smaller mountain, then we could get everyone to the top. Everyone—even those who told me they didn’t care to summit Wheeler—who were content to hang back, […]
Rising from the high desert plateau just north of Santa Fe, Atalaya Mountain culminates in a 9,121-foot peak that looks down on both New Mexico’s capitol and the rugged Rio Grande River Valley. The Atalaya Trail, which starts on the north perimeter of the city near St. John’s College, climbs over 1500 feet in under three […]
How do you prepare folks for their first peak climb? Turns out I’m not the person to ask. Seems I’m a better teacher than I am a coach. That’s what I told our Finishers hikers about a week ago when I confessed I had not prepared them for the trip up Wheeler. And I thought […]
Parnell, Texas—it’s a ghost town now—a collection of old concrete foundations, dilapidated lumber, some sheets of corrugated tin that once served as roofs, all barely visible above the tall weeds. It was April of 2006, and my buddy Clark and I were taking a final mountain-bike ride down the lower portion of the Caprock Canyon […]