I unrolled the gravity-fed water filter bladder that still smelled like campfire from a year ago, collected a few liters of stream water and hung it from a tree by our camp while Brad finished a cigarette and started a… Read More ›
eastern washington
The Safeway in Chewelah, WA
On the drive back I make my kids listen to Townes Van Zandt since it feels like we could be in Texas it’s so hot, everything flat and beaten down by the sun. The songs about places he’d been in… Read More ›
Full moon over the swale
Brad’s friend Jim reminds me of a scarecrow that’s missing the stuffing around his waist he’s so thin, it makes his pants ride low, that’s the first thing you notice. The kids have gorged themselves on cheese puffs like the… Read More ›
A new path to the Lantern Tree
I’m driving my kids into the deserts of eastern Washington where it’s near wildfire season with no appreciable rain in 30 days, and we stop at a Texaco near the town Vantage, and I think surely that smoke in the… Read More ›
From the throat, a crow’s hand
We are several hours away in the hills, the desert steppe, a friend’s cabin, down a dead end road that leads to a lake, a quarry, so quiet you can hear the gravel on the shoulder when we pull over… Read More ›
Climbing cocks, steep peaks, dry tools (2)
Brad and I camp in the snow by an abandoned hunter’s cabin up Black Canyon with my dog Ginger, who puts her nose in Brad’s eye and causes it to swell up like a walnut because Brad’s convinced there’s foreign… Read More ›
Sister
He says Ginger was the same name of the dog who bit him, and gestures at scars around his mouth, on his cheek. He’s got a tattooed cross with his mom’s name, and the years she was alive, something about… Read More ›
Bill Pearse 