SingleWriter(s)

Anyone who does not think that the desert is beautiful has most certainly not seen it at sunrise or at sunset. They have not seen the delicate gold of a young morning tinting golden Rabbitbush blossoms, or burnishing twisted fingers of dead Greasewood, mottled with rusty patches of lichen. Perhaps they have never listened to the [...]

Two weeks ago I drove across Oregon’s Cascade range to find myself out in the eerie sagebrush wilds of Lake county. In a sandy, sagebrush dotted valley, there stands a large volcanic monument known as Fort Rock. Within the shadow of this immense horse-shoe shaped cliff lays the small Pioneer Cemetery. It is a spooky place [...]

There is a place I have come to know , where the sun shines hot in summertime and the winds are bitterly cold in winter. A place where dust devils silently whisper across vast plains of sagebrush and arid alkali sands. It is a place where birds of prey wing their way across intense blue skies and [...]

FROM THE PERSONAL DIARIES OF CAPTAIN WAYNE P. CHRISTENSEN In those early times soon after I acquired our magnificent starship , the Snutch Society became so drunk with wonder and the fever of exploration that we zipped around the galaxy with no organized plan. We dashed off in this direction and another to look at the cosmic sights [...]

Rarer and rarer come the times when I pause to thumb through the pages of my memory. The book is yellow and the pages cracked. But if I turn them slowly and read carefully, the light comes back. I see again the warm summer days of childhood and adolescence. With some coaxing the memories will start [...]

High up in a remote region somewhere near the Oregon town of Tiller , if you can call it a town, my friend Scott turns off his ignition and we get out of his silver Saturn. A strange choice of vehicles for exploring wilderness logging roads, the car nonetheless got us safely to our destination. On the [...]

I walked from my room about an hour before sunset with wind whipping savagely at my collar. It was the last week of June in southern Nevada and I wore a heavy winter coat to ward off the cold. I could not help wondering how many years will pass before it would be this cold, in [...]

Even as a very young boy I can remember being gripped by the compelling desire to explore mysterious, far away places. by age seven I was reading adventure novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs, novels with titles like “Tarzan of the apes” “John Carter Warlord of Mars” “The land that time forgot” etc. Filled with colorful imaginings [...]

We live in a story with no end in sight , we experience a being with no clear beginning. With an astonishing plurality of thought and emotion we try to make sense of the multiplicity of wonders that surround us in this existence. We, as a symptom of our humanity, seek answers to all that makes up [...]

Bruce and I wound our way alternatively through shafts of sunlight and dark forest shade as we traveled along the narrow trail with our gear in our hands. Within a few minutes we came to our spot. The sun shone brightly through leafy Alders to reflect upon the dancing waters of a clear, sandy bottomed stream. [...]

It was cool on the evening of November 27th 1976 . My mother and I stood in line at the University of Oregon’s MacArthur court in Eugene. Eleven thousand others also waited in multiple lines for the show which was scheduled to begin at eight. This was where people would usually be waiting to get in to [...]

A haze has filled the air in my tiny town . There is a strange purplish color to it and the southern sky has become a fathomless purple immensity where great thunderheads nestle over the hilltops in a line of billowing light blue cotton, like the foaming crest of some tremendous wave on it’s way to obliterate [...]

Lightning flashes in the evening sky at Logan, New Mexico . I inquire about a motel room and hand some money to a red-cheeked man who has a bag of potato chips in one hand. Through the door he came out of, I can hear a television blaring in the back room. “Got wireless Internet?” I ask. [...]

The first faint wisps of spring are a time that brings tiny hints of a warm and pleasant summer to come. Mountain wildflowers struggle to break through the crust of snow that blankets them and all of nature seems to become restless. This is a time when I am usually about half crazy with the urge [...]

There was a time in my life when I worked as an orderly in a nursing home. That time is lost in the past and I am older, perhaps wiser, but memories of certain experiences from that era remain indelibly etched upon my consciousness like the spider web tracery of frost on a winter windowpane. Whenever [...]

On a distant night, now vanished down the long river of time , I sat at a friends house laughing and playing my guitar. Blaze’s talented fingers flew up and down the frets of his instrument like magic while I struggled to keep up with my clumsy bar chording. His eyes twinkled in his bearded face, lit [...]

It must have been close to four when I pulled over at the Winnemucca dunes. There were no clouds in the sky, but smoke from a raging prairie fire to the east combined with dust from a sandstorm off of the western dunes to give the desert valley a melancholy overcast appearance. The Great Basin is [...]

I had been out in eastern Oregon on one of my many desert excursions . This one was in early march, a time when the weather of Sagebrush country is unpredictable at best, going from blazing heat to wintery blizzard conditions or vice versa in hours or less. After a weekend of solitary wandering, I was ready to [...]