In 1944, a party of German prisoners-of-war escaped from a camp in Phoenix, armed with old maps and with the intention of stealing a boat and sailing to Mexico. When they saw the “pitiful trickle” that is the modern Gila, they began to hike downstream in despair and were soon rounded up. Their leader later...
I might say at the onset that I am usually not a big fan of anthologies, though I have edited one; most end up unwieldy grab bags of vaguely related material. This is emphatically not the case with Gregory McNamee’s Named in Stone and Sky, a collection of Southwestern material that marvelously coheres into a...
“Has anyone ever seen a clean cow?” —Anonymous It’s hard to know where to begin to respond to Jeremy Rifkin’s apocalyptic new book, Beyond Beef. You could start with Chesterton’s famous remark on “believing anything,” or some of the paleoconservative ruminations on “Gnosticism.” Perhaps in a time when Oliver Stone’s paranoid (and lucrative) fantasies pass...
As far as I know, my friend Sissy has never written anything, although she probably reads more widely than most people I know with graduate degrees. She’s at first and probably second glance an archetypical ranchwoman. That first glance would be the outsider’s. Sis is in her mid-30’s, tall, taller than I am, and strong,...
It was Saturday, the day before Earth Day in the Golden Spur Bar in Magdalena, and one of our always-informal meetings of DUCA and DUWA was in progress. That is, three cowboys (Drunken Underemployed Cowboys’ Association) and I (substitute “Writers'” for “Cowboys'”) were drinking tequila shots and Coors, and doing what, other than rewarding but...
“Some parrots are legale but why cage exotic birds at all?” —Chris Wille, NAS Don’t ask me, was my first thought. The last parrot I owned was—I swear—killed 10 years ago by an ex-friend who, with Joseph Krutch, believed that hunting was the ultimate evil. He left the bird loose in a room with my...