It's a beautiful valley in an unexpected place, south of Elko, Nevada, deep in the desert, and with the mist hanging in the air it looks like some primordial morning, suggestive of a time before Man. But it's not a time before Man and that's not mist. That's smoke, and…
The painting is by Vincent Van Gogh and depicts three sunflowers, arranged in a vase. It is twenty-four feet across, thirty-six feet high an it leans upon its easel some eighty feet in the air at the top. It is said to weigh 40,000 pounds. You can see the painting…
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 my oldest daughter at grad school), and then back. We spent over five weeks on the road…
I crossed America by car in the summer of 2017, looking for Trump. I looked for him in truck stops and restrooms, parking lots and malls. I looked for Trump in roadside signs and unplanted fields, in thrift stores and magazine racks. And I found him, though I had to…
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 my oldest daughter at grad school), and then back. We spent over five weeks on the road…
Writing this blog has proven so far to be rewarding in many ways but sometimes it can become a bit of a rabbit hole. This post, for example, was initially going to be a short post, sharing an odd public sculpture that we came across in Missouri. We were on…
I've driven across the United States dozens of times, usually a round trip every year for the past sixteen years, and before this year I've never had trouble finding things to do. The trips I take take time, usually two weeks from California to Ohio to visit family, then two…
He is lying there on his back, you see his resplendency, at least in your mind's eye, in the white conch shell beads he lies upon, the shells brought here to just outside modern-day St. Louis from the Gulf of Mexico. The blanket of beads--some twenty thousand of them—were once…
There are eleven UNESCO World Heritage cultural sites located in the United States, five of which are American Indian sites. Mesa Verde is by far the most famous with its cliff-dwellings, Taos Pueblo and Chaco not far behind, though Chaco is a bit a of a drive, three hours from…
It's two hours out of the way along small highways, heading directly south of Columbus. Despite growing up in Ohio, and coming back to visit every year, I'd never heard of the town of Peebles. That's not as surprising as it might sound--southern Ohio is a different state than northern…