Monthly Archives: March 2019

The airplane taxied across the water slowly, the wakes of the twin pontoons even.  It was aimed at a predetermined point where the takeoff would begin. It turned, paused, and the pilot advanced the throttle, the engine rattling to a … Continue reading →

Aldo Leopold wrote a 1935 essay, the year I was born: “the trout  streams ran clear, deep, narrow,  and full.” Then came the cows.  Farmers cut down the forests on the ridges and overgrazed the meadows.  Now, Leopold wrote that … Continue reading →

Aldo Leopold wrote an essay in 1924 titled “The River of the Mother of God.”  He submitted it to the Yale Review and they rejected it.  It sat in his desk drawer, yellowing,  for decades. In that essay he wrote, “long … Continue reading →

In the coffee shop it’s Johnny Cash on the overhead music,  “I Walk the Line.”  I first heard that song at the Plumas County Fair in the Sierras: Rollie Ellison, Steve Walker, Bruce Ellis and some other guy whose name … Continue reading →

I spent hours under the Victorian house we owned in Eureka, digging down around the pier blocks, pouring concrete, embedding steel ties in that concrete and tying the posts to the floor joists to prevent the house from jumping off … Continue reading →

Tom Wittenberg, my editor at Houghton Mifflin Company moved to Bonita Springs, Florida after he retired.I visited him there.The plane landed at a tiny field and I took a taxi into town where I waited for Tom and Maddy at … Continue reading →

Another Nordic thriller, and I am caught up in the lives of detectives in a country that clings to the far north, riding with them in their car as they navigate frozen roads, watching them board ferries to cross icy … Continue reading →

My father became the cook for weekday meals.  His menus were ordinary:  spaghetti  and meatballs, casseroles with tuna and cream of mushroom soup.  And chicken that he cooked in a pressure cooker.  It was a heavy pot that had a … Continue reading →

Tom Wittenberg asked me to come to Boston for six weeks.  John Bigby, the primary author of an avant-garde set of books for junior college English had done a runner and Tom wanted me to finish it up. I would … Continue reading →

My mother worked at the Elgin Watch factory.  Elgin switched over from making fine watches to making navigational instruments and bomb sights for World War Two bombers.  My father was a draftsman at the Chicago Steel and Iron Works Seneca shipyard … Continue reading →