Hurricane Dean is thrashing Jamaica. Courageous firefighters lost their life in a raging blaze near Ground Zero. The news is full of scary events, full of murder and mayhem and politicians pounding their chests. But life goes on, surprises us, delights us, hands us moments mundane, precious, even in the midst of the most unsettling news.







A young man I know fell off an outcropping of granite this summer, fell eight vertical feet, fell into a six-week land of cast and crutch and exotic metal pins. Shattered tibia. Surgery. June plans as broken, as painful as his swollen skin. I wanted to sign his cast, the blue sheath that hid the parallel scars, but he refused my pen.
The clouds that blanket the Plains of San Augustin rarely notice the science traveler, the Mescalero Apache, the patchwork family with a bag of marshmallows and one unused match. The clouds push from Arizona toward Texas, push across the reservation, the dried lake flats, push past the twenty-seven radio antennas without a second glance. Every time I drive past the installation, I feel those wandering jewels mock me, tell me I don't belong in this wilderness.