Those who hear not the music think the dancers mad. Unknown “Either faster or slower,” Sammy said, “You’ll kill us at this speed.” I slowed down as the pickup throbbed across the curve, the tires jolting each bump in the washboard texture of the dirt road. The throbbing stopped and I regained control. Pulling his […]
Author Archives: stevetarlton
The young IRS auditor looked across at my dad’s client and said, “You’ve claimed drought losses here, but you had twelve inches of rain last year.” The old rancher’s West Texas place had been homesteaded by his grandfather, and ranched by succeeding generations. He looked at the youngster and replied, “Yes sir, that was one […]
Away out here they have a name for rain and wind and fire. The rain is Tess, the fire, Joe, and they call the wind, Maria. Alan J. Lerner and Frederick Loewe, Paint Your Wagon We had been in Flagstaff all day, and when we got back to Winslow it was dark. The wind had […]
The spiritual sons of the mountain men were the men of the next wave – the skin-and-scoot market hunters, the cut and get out lumbermen, the cattle barons whose herds grazed the plains bare. Stuart Udall, The Quiet Crisis As a boy growing up in Texas, I was constantly confronted by the collision of the […]
If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water. Loren Eiseley My family spent a lot of time in the water. My dad was a college swim star, and my uncle would have gone to the 1940 Olympics if it hadn’t been for Hitler. We swam and fished and generally fooled around […]
We never really knew whose idea it was, but once pronounced, it caught on like wildfire. My father and his sometime hunting buddy, Harry, figured that if they concentrated their efforts over the entire hunting season, they could shoot enough big ducks for a really fancy duck dinner. North Texas is on the Central Flyway […]
“Nowadays man finds himself to be a technical giant and an ethical child.” Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga “The amplification of our lives by technology grants us a power we can no longer afford to use.” George Monbiot, Feral It was a shiny, four-wheel drive, crew cab pickup and I expected to see the […]
There is pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society, where none intrudes, By the deep sea, and music in its roar: I love not man the less, but Nature more … LORD BYRON, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage It’s evident from even a cursory review of Facebook […]
I caught a wasp in the kitchen window with a glass and piece of cardboard, then let it go outside. I’m not much troubled by wasps and bees these days, although when I was a kid we used to be pretty terrified by yellow jackets. They were aggressive, could sting you repeatedly, and were pretty […]
We were walking on the short bluff above the Little Colorado River on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona, looking for archaeological sites. Though surrounded by empty desert, we scoured the surface and found plenty of evidence of past occupants. Pottery shards littered the ground among the greasewood wherever the sand had been blown off down […]
Writes of Nature 