Pieter Bruegel, Winter Landscape with Ice-skaters, 1565 Snow has yet to arrive here in the Rogue Valley. Instead, for the past two weeks, heavy fog has created a moody hush, lasting all day and obscuring most everything (maybe that’s a good thing these days). The fog has now given way to rain. No matter the weather, the arrival of the …

A month ago, newspapers from the New York Times and the Guardian to Underscore Native News broadcast a David vs. Goliath story about Indigenous teens conquering the Klamath River on the heels of the largest dam-removal project in U.S. history. “One year after a historic dam removal, teens inspire river restoration worldwide: ‘It turns out you can win,’” the Guardian headline …

I used to think that the question, ”What are you going to be for Halloween?” applied to kids, not grownups, and certainly not parents. In the 1950’s, when I was growing up in New Jersey, Halloween was not a family affair. I couldn’t imagine my mathematician father getting into the action, waddling down Princeton’s main street in an inflatable dinosaur costume or …

Central Oregon and Pacific train loading plywood at Weed, California lumber mill, bound for Roseburg Forest Products in Springfield, Oregon, 2019 Two years ago, I posted a story about my then three-year-old grandson’s passion for trains and how on a Thanksgiving visit to Ashland from Denver, his home, he had patiently sat along the empty train tracks that run through …

I’ve never been much of a stargazer. The urban northeast, where I lived for more than fifty years, offered scant prospecting beyond the Big and Little Dippers and the North Star, unless you had a telescope. My stargazing had been mostly limited to family trips to less populated parts of the country, from the Outer Banks in North Carolina to …

I lived in Ashland for several years before becoming involved in Southern Oregon University (SOU), two miles from our house. I first discovered the university’s Honors College with its remarkable students and faculty. I then became friends with the university’s new President, Rick Bailey, hired in 2022. The last three years, I’ve been a fellow-traveler as the university fights for …

A few days ago, I started re-reading Barbara Kingsolver’s 2002 novel, Small Wonder, a favorite of mine. I bathed in Kingsolver’s words as an antidote to an especially destructive week for our democracy — as if it hadn’t already been destroyed enough. Yesterday’s passage of the “Big Beautiful Bill” spurred me to spend today’s Independence Day harvesting some of Kingsolver’s …