Home Work

Although the title of this blog* bows to the influence of the urban, my efforts skew toward accounts of the wild. This is by design, since the preoccupations of everyday life have a way of steering our attention toward human (aka urban, in my scheme of things) concerns: social interactions, commerce, politics, and all the…

Fast Forward

The break has been as overextended as it was unintended. Life intervenes; the necessary asserts itself over the preferred and chosen. It’s an old story, familiar and not particularly interesting. It would be easy enough to disregard the time elapsed, but in place of that, I offer a visual retrospective, a sampling of images to…

Fire and Ice

The thing about the world as we’re coming to know it now—a world in the process of changing at timescales we can perceive from the relatively puny span of a human adulthood—isn’t just that extremes pile up. No, the thing is that these extremes cozy up to one another in bizarre and frankly disturbing ways.…

Last Call

As fall color, the caution-yellow flowers of rabbitbrush tend to flare early. They bloomed here, this year, weeks before the aspen or the scrub oak got around to changing. As a wildflower, though, rabbitbrush blooms late, which is why plantswoman Lauren Springer Ogden refers to it as the “last bar open”: a destination where insects gather for one final slug of nectar before the season shuts down.