Early morning in Clarendon, Texas, ten days after spring equinox. I’m up hours before dawn and thirty minutes later I’m riding US Highway 287 south and east off the Llano Estacado, one of the largest mesas in North America, 38,000 square miles of empty High Plains sky and flat-earth sprawl. The early morning darkness is […]

Whatever the reasons—advancing age, the continuing Covid-craziness and political trauma (Marjorie Taylor Greene, anyone?), or the onrushing spring term—I am pulled by what Lisel Mueller calls “The Need to Hold Still.” And in my desire I have adopted a nearby wetland. Fortunately no formalities or approvals are required: no paperwork or financial commitments, no wetland […]

 I’ve been thinking a lot about running recently—and doing a fair amount of it along the way. It’s helped keep the Covid-craziness and my restlessness at bay, provided some normalcy and pleasure at a time when I desperately need them. (Electoral angst, anyone?) To paraphrase from a song by Wye Oak: “I have to run / […]

Lately, my mind has been wandering. (Okay, just more than it usually does.) Physically constrained as I’ve been by Covid-19, the restlessness that haunts my every spring trends exponential. On those rare days when the Brockport air is leavened by a gentle southwestern wind and the sky glows blue as robin’s eggs, the urge to […]

Recently, I had occasion to spend some time at Vicksburg National Military Park in Mississippi. I visited mostly in the early mornings and evenings, to escape the press of sight-seers and the worst of the summer heat. In those quiet and (slightly) cooler hours, I tracked the park’s concrete roadways through the loess hills above the city, […]