by Darin Boville
by Darin Boville
Well, twenty-nine of them, at least. This post is from a series of articles chronicling a 2020 cross-country trip with my wife and two daughters and a boyfriend, from California to Ohio (to visit family) and Pennsylvania (to drop off…
You don’t see them at the mall because you only go to certain malls, if you go to malls at all. You don’t see them at work, if you go to work, because you do a certain kind of work.…
He was all but done for the day when we pulled into the gas station just outside of Spearfish, South Dakota, his “Trump Shop” bus all closed up for the night. Written on the bus were the words “not affiliated…
When I was twelve I saw Close Encounters of the Third Kind in a theater and I was amazed by the spaceships and by the musical tones and light display at the end. I was amazed as well afterward when…
When we came down out of the mountains in July of 2004 we had no real idea of where we were. This was before the iPhone and navigation systems in cars. We were traveling across country, moving from the Washington,…
One family went all out and each of them, dad, mom, and two kids, wore full on industrial painting masks, black rubber face part with two large filter cartridges, looking like something from Word War I. They wore these as they walked the boardwalks around the geyser basins. You could only see their eyes and the parents' eyes looked out wide open, terrified.
It could be worse. A few thousand years ago lava splashed and bubbled up out of the ground in what is now Idaho and spread out over six hundred and eighteen square miles. One single lava flow running about thirty miles long.
I pull off at an overlook in the mountains of northern Wyoming, my wife and youngest daughter in my FJ Cruiser, my oldest daughter and her boyfriend pulling in ahead of me in their Honda Element. As we are standing,…
A first visit to the John Day Fossil Beds, in the dried-out hills in eastern Oregon, is a surprise, the hills of banded red and yellow and black, pulp science fiction book covers made real. But another surprise awaits in…
When people think of Oregon they tend to think of rain, a sort of never-ending rain, over forty inches a year on average. But eastern Oregon is all but a desert, receiving a third of Portland’s average, and some of…