Short Fiction:
If he had been walking the dog, she would not be lost. Paul was sure of it. But his wife had the leash in her hand, and when and a man and his dogs approached from the opposite direction—a Doberman mix and a poodle, he thought, though it was hard to tell in the dark—Poppy had planted her feet then back-pedaled. She slipped out of her collar, ran across the street and disappeared between two houses. “Oh, fuck,” his wife said and crossed the street, calling the dog and vanishing behind the houses. Paul turned back to the man with the dogs, who had commanded the animals to sit side by side at his feet and now held their leashes tight.
“He knew every detail of his life and his family’s. He just got frustrated with aging. With the way things once simple now took so long to do. They couldn’t hold it against him for getting upset about that.”
— Paul, in “Everything is fine”
Adventure & Travel Writing:
Photo by Alex Fenlon.
ON COLD WINTER nights, pinpoints of light float above the darkened ridges of Crested Butte Mountain, a 12,162-foot peak in central Colorado. When I moved to the town of Crested Butte, on the valley floor below, I thought they looked like angels or the northern lights of the West.
That the flickers came from snowcats—grooming machines that turn rutted, tumbled ski runs into neat stretches of corduroy—made them no less mysterious. I was fascinated by stories about snowcat drivers using winches to lower their machines down the resort's steepest runs so they could make it back to the top. I pictured Zambonis built for snow, boxcars on treads, balanced precariously on the mountain. I longed to see them for myself.
Read “Learning to Drive a Snowcat” at The Wall Street Journal→
“Under the pressure of remembering whether the green button controlled the blade or the tiller, I completely fell apart. I dug the plow so deep into the snow that chunks of dirt flew up toward the windshield.”
— “Learning to drive a snowcat”
Personal Essays:
Illustration by Rachael Davis
Glass jars of home-canned tomatoes fill the cupboard over my refrigerator, ’50s icons in a 21st century kitchen. If I could, I would pull one down, unscrew the gold metal band and pop off the lid underneath to release the fresh aroma of tomato. It would be a reminder of summer’s abundance, a buoy against the ice and snow covering the ground and the downward slide of the thermometer. But I have moved out of the house while my husband and I sort our belongings. I saw no room in transient living for fragile, glass jars.
“I think of the tomatoes collecting dust in their cupboard and of Chris living in a house too big for one person; I hope he is taking the time to eat.” — From “Naked tomatoes”
News & Feature Writing:
Photo from the Colorado State Forest Service
In 2005, Crested Butte resident Jeff Moffett sat in a wood-fired hot tub on his Gold Basin property several miles south of Hartman Rocks Recreation Area. Looking up at the Douglas fir trees surrounding the tub, he noticed a lot of brown needles. The trees appeared to be dying, but determining the cause took some time—one contact suggested lightning as the culprit. “I didn’t buy it,” Moffett said when he showed me around his property.
Known locally for his airline expertise (he has helped shape the local air program through a variety of roles), Moffett also has a background in forestry, including more than five years as a forest planning research assistant for the University of Washington. He believed that something else was at play on his property and ultimately determined that bark beetles had infested the Douglas fir.