“No services next 81 miles,” the road sign warned.  “No exits, no water, little human life” it could have continued. In early August, Tony and I packed our Subaru, said goodbye to the Rogue Valley, and headed out on a 1,400-mile road trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where we were joining our Brooklyn and Denver-based families and grandkids for a …

If everybody had an oceanAcross the U. S. A.Then everybody’d be surfin’Like Californi-aYou’d seem ’em wearing their baggiesHuarache sandals tooA bushy bushy blonde hairdo.– “Surfin’ USA “ On a recent flight to Denver to visit our son and his young family, I did what I rarely do: I watched a movie. The documentary Long Promised Road about The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson was …

College? Where I come from that’s another planet,” said Chyna Rodriquez, a rising senior at Southern Oregon University here in Ashland. “There wasn’t a person in my world who’d gone to college. Jail, yes. College, no. The first time I heard the word ‘college’ was in elementary school. I raised my hand and asked the teacher ‘What’s that?’” We hear …

One’s sense of powerlessness these days can stretch wide and deep, from Washington to Uvalde, around the world and back. By comparison, the struggles of a small citizen’s group in Southern Oregon to hold a reckless farmer accountable seem tiny. For those of us caught in the fray, though, they have been consuming. When I moved from Brooklyn to Ashland …

Image from NASA’s Worldview software of actively burning fires.  “Reports of our inadequate response to the climate emergency roll in as regularly as the tides,” David Remnick writes in this week’s New Yorker. The latest came from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), telling us that the crisis is getting worse even faster than we’d imagined. It’s hard to envision …

“Alone in my Oregon studio, the world rushes in and I have a compelling need to give form to the local and global events reshaping our lives,” Ashland artist Betty LaDuke says in the introduction to the catalog of her newest work. Her exhibit, Fires, Fury & Resilience, opens this week at the Grants Pass Museum of Art north of …

On March 12th, Oregon’s mask mandate ends. In a world at war—in Ukraine, in our own democracy, in a planet of rising seas and burning forests—dropping our pandemic masks raises a sigh of relief, though our hearts are broken still. For years I have turned to poetry, as some of you may too, for perspective on darkness and resilience. Sometimes, …