HOUSTON, TX

Eulogy for the Hazard Street Bridge

I miss my bridge. Okay, so it wasn't "my" bridge, technically, but I felt like we were friends, at least. I've lived on or near Highway 59 the entire time I've lived in Houston...

IOWA AND MICHIGAN

News

The Iowa River flood of the late 1980s took us all by surprise. It shouldn't have. During a pleasantly hot summer weekend in Iowa City, my wife Susan and I stepped out of the Comfort Inn, where our friends from Illinois were staying, into one of the most intense gully-washers we had ever seen...

NEW YORK, NY

The Frontiersmen

PETE: Gentrification is the story of my life. As soon as I was an adult, I was cast out of the neighborhood I grew up in. This was the Upper West Side in the 1980s, which during the Reagan boom became the co-op and condo bedroom community to the first wave of Wall Street types who bum-rushed the city...

DREAMLAND

Even My Dreams Are Political

9/3/97: I was hanging out in a department store with a friend, who suggested to me that even though the Pentagon seemed like an impenetrable fortress, it could be disrupted in a small way. I went there and, after walking through the front doors, placed an obstacle in the floor to block the passage and escaped through the bathroom window...

PALUXY RIVER, TX

Gray Water Rafting

Our camp on the Paluxy river is amid the live oaks on a bluff about fifty feet high, looking over the brink of the muddy and enervating. We called ahead to reserve the site...

BLACKSBURG, VA

The Earth Beneath My Feet

Compost makes me homesick. Not just any compost. Alan's compost. He sent me a picture of it over the Internet: two rich piles of Virginia dirt mixed with garbage, neatly contained in a pallet fence he built himself...

THE MINISINK

High Water Mark

Where Sussex County Route 580 tumbles down off the New Jersey ridgeline, it encounters a sudden band of forest. Here the trees are packed tight, taller and dense and foresty in a way unlike anything along the roadsides on the two-hour drive from the city. This, on the long, fast decline, is a good place to keep an eye peeled for white-tailed deer....

NEW YORK, NY

Downstream: An Interview With Sandra Steingraber

When you look at a farm field with untrained eyes, you might see some cows, a barn, perhaps a few drab brown Ho-Hos of hay. It's the dull, pastoral scene that fills the broad expanse of Middle America, conveying flatness and hominess as you zip past on the endless interstate...

GRAND FORKS, ND

Egret Hash

SUNDAY: Deep green and blue sparkles in the house where it's always okay to sleep late. Sky huge and blue, land stretched endlessly sun baked fields and fields of green. My hips Ð rose hips, skin perfumed by sweetgrass air, nipples harden in the soft fresh breeze, bliss alone in wide spaces. Prairie enters me, brings itself home...

BROOKLYN, NY

President Street

On President Street, we could tell it was spring when Miles Riley came out of 913 with a broomstick and a cut-in-half Spaldeen for a stickball...

BROOKLYN, NY

Forgotten

"See that alley?" says Kevin Walsh. "That's called Sea Place. But as you can see, it's just about gone."...

SEATTLE, WA

WTO

The first major protest against the World Trade Organization in Seattle happened on my street, Broadway, the major shopping artery of the yuppie-gay-boho-student enclave known as Capitol Hill...

NEW YORK, NY

None of Your Business

Washington Square Park is one of those diminished neighborhood places I try not to think about. A curfew and police surveillance have not fulfilled their original purpose of discouraging pot dealers...

BROOKLYN, NY

The Battle of Brooklyn

In Brooklyn's Prospect Park, down in the basement of the building called the Picnic House, under a desk in a nondescript office at the end of a nondescript corridor, there's a box of fake turf...

ARLINGTON, TX

Getting The Mail

"There was no possibility of going for a walk that day," begins Jane Eyre. She would really have hated living in Arlington, Texas...

ROUTE 91 WEST, CA

Freeway

I'm pretty sure that Los Angeles is to blame. I try to avoid Los Angeles County at all costs. I mean, I don't have any reason to go there: they don't have anything up there that we don't have here in Orange County, except for thicker smog...

GRAND FORKS, ND

North of North Dakota

The drive from Fargo to Grand Forks is much like the drive from Minneapolis to Fargo, especially in winter. Except on the northern ride there are no hills. The total trip takes six to seven hours, less if you drive at L.A. speed, like my sister does...

NORTH BENNINGTON, VT

Sidewalks

This morning, as I do nearly every day, I walked to the post office pushing my year-old daughter in her stroller. I love this ritual any time of year, but in summertime when the air is sweet, the trees full green and the sky blue, I feel as if I live in paradise...

BROOKLYN, NY

Our House

The windows over the doorways in our apartment -- little wood-framed panes of glass, some now painted over -- are called "transoms." They tell a story...

MELBOURNE, VICTORIA, AUSTRALIA

On The Move

Optus Oval sits quietly in the middle of leafy Princes Park in inner suburban Melbourne. A tranquil, pleasant place. From Monday to Friday, anyway...

RIVERHEAD, NY

Trouble In Riverhead

I still remember vividly one of the first times I met Terri Scofield. It was a chilly November weekend in 1995, before "welfare reform" became a household word, and...

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