I took the trail to Shy Bear Pass, the same one in the Issaquah Alps I walked with Ginger last spring, before we moved to Germany. I looked down at my legs, the zip-off trekking pants and poles Eberhard had… Read More ›
pacific northwest
Advanced state of Frühling
SAMMAMISH, WA 29th IV 2016 Climbed the dead end road Beth lives on a half an hour before sunrise to walk and write. Our last night in Germany, mom, Eberhard and I laid out the drugs on the table for… Read More ›
‘Morgenstund hat Gold im Mund’
Some of the girls in the beer tent wear their hair braided Princess Leia style and some of them look like nymphs on a Led Zeppelin album cover crawling on rocks, or a Maxfield Parrish print lazing by the pool… Read More ›
How to look like an indie rocker without trying too hard
It’s 62° F in my mom’s kitchen and I’m 45, wearing a scarf and an apron, browning onions. I never wanted to look like an indie rocker which is why I’m so good at it — people stop me on… Read More ›
Rattle my bones all over the stones
Saturday, all of us on damp streets swaddled against the wind coming off Dublin Bay, wandering northeast from our flat past large churches, intersections where the asphalt’s painted LOOK RIGHT, LOOK LEFT, and the people have complexions that remind me… Read More ›
Made up dreams
The plastic hummingbirds that glow at night seem a lifetime ago since I gave them to my mother-in-law and she hung them on a hook off her deck. There’s even a sense of fall in the air, that dry rattle… Read More ›
Say goodbye to the Hoh
The sea spills its guts out to anyone who will listen, just hurls itself up and forgets it’s told the same story before: two black heads in the water floating that could be humans staring at us but they are seals,… Read More ›
Soft shoulders
I’d had them for a long time, but hadn’t worn them in a long time, the Vietnamese fishermen pants I used for Yoga in the studio at my gym at work, standing on my head with a wife beater, I… Read More ›
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 ›
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 ›
Bill Pearse 