The Journal

The Currency of Being Local

Part Five

There is a joke people used to make in Colorado, especially the people that lived up in the rural mountain valleys. People in Colorado take a certain sense of s…

The Water and the Well

Part Four

Our second day in town, I was standing on a porch talking with a neighbor. I was doing what a person does on his second day somewhere. Introducing myself. Expla…

The Equilibrium

Part Three

There is a county in Colorado whose land use regulations, until recently, contained exactly one definition of a distillery. It described a fuel operation: the k…

How You Tell Them Apart

Part Two

In the last piece I made an argument I still believe: that the weight you feel about a place you've lived a long time is not disappointment, it's information; a…

On Blue Wings

My mom passed away four years ago, and there still isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t talk to her—or to my dad, who has been gone much longer. But there is o…

The Burden of Discovery

Part One

Seventy-two degrees in the Gallatin canyon on a Saturday in August. Partly cloudy. The river running green on the left, the highway bending along with it, the f…

Finding God in the Original Words

Something changes when you stop treating the Bible as a finished document. It’s a translation of a translation of an interpretation. That’s not cynicism — that’…