Bill Whaley died the other day. Cited with the reservation that anything one says about another person’s life is inevitably biased and incomplete, here’s what the local paper published. I’ve written about him before—and he about me about me once—but on the occasion of his passing, I was looking for this brief piece and found [...]
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I’ve been posting a few selected chapters from my ebooks on Goddamn Buffalo. This is one of them.
The spiders were still hibernating. The cobwebs on the ceiling quivered in the drafts. Juan del Llano scrunched over far enough to squint at the clock: 7:57 glowed green through the dust. The old black Sony she gave him for Christmas 15 years ago. Did people really used to wake up to the radio? He [...]
In the back yard in Austin
That’s my sister Teresa in the center with her husband on the right. And yes, those are what you think they are—I still have a baggie full of seeds and wonder if they’re any good. She died of liver cancer in 2010 and hardly a day goes by without my thinking of her. A lifelong [...]
The Mountains Do Not Care
The wind was roaring at 45 to 50 mph across the plateau late May a year ago. It wasn’t cold so much as flensing, as the truck door flew out of my grip in search of bones to break. That kind of wind. I reached the spot you see above by driving west of town, [...]
Some men are like that, though. The ones who “prune” a tree by cutting all the branches like they’re dealing with asparagus and not a being with inherent grace, a form, a destiny. I don’t know how we get that way. It’s just not possible for me. Every weed and flower has a soul. When we lived in Maryland, I’d walk past a field of barley waving in the wind and feel the power like the tramp-tramp-tramp of marching armies. And a tree, my God. You have to ask permission of a thing like that. It wants to live, it has a purpose. Just ask the birds, if you can find one.
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