Notes from Westwater

The voice of the cottonwood

Recently, one of my friends told me that when she and her husband drove up on Blue Mountain to view the fall colors, they wended their way along an aspen-lined road. “The leaves seemed illuminated from within,” she said. “The light didn’t come from the sun because it was a cloudy day.” Ted and I...

The gleaming White Sands of New Mexico

Years ago, with our wedding date approaching, Ted and I planned our honeymoon in the great Southwest. Because it sounded romantic, I said, “Let’s go someplace with white sand.” I pictured an area with pure white sand glittering in the sunlight and a rich blue sky arching overhead. Oddly enough, I...

Hall of the giants – an underground basilica

The discovery and continued exploration of Carlsbad Caverns and other caves in the Guadalupe Mountains seems every bit as dangerous and awe-inspiring as the recent ventures into space. Like most people, I’d heard about the caverns for a long time, but never had a chance to visit them until this...

Space: The final frontier

On August 21, 2021, Ted, Oggie, and I left Layton, UT with a U-Haul full of our oldest grandson’s belongings and headed for Harlingen, TX, a border town near the Gulf Coast where he had accepted a job as a new nurse. In years past, we’d traveled through the panhandle on the way to or from Kansas...

Elegant, powerful child of the wind

Once, while visiting Santa Fe, we toured a gallery that featured the paintings of Albert Scharf, a skyscape artist. His powerful images of Southwestern clouds have since prompted me to look up at heaven’s landscape, especially this last July when beautiful cumulous clouds towered over San Juan...

Uncommon compassion in Silverton, CO Part II

Since our 1991 pickup wouldn’t start, we left it at Cunningham Gulch and bumped down the road to Silverton in Ron Blackburn’s truck. Strangely, we soon spotted a tow truck coming toward us with lights flashing. Ron slowed. “Do you want to talk to him?” “Sure,” Ted said. “What are the chances of...

Uncommon compassion in Silverton, Colorado

My mother died on May 16, 2014 in the San Juan Medical Center in Farmington, NM. Her three-week stay there for renal failure had been a roller coaster of hope and despair with the doctors bringing her back from death several times. But after they put her on the ventilator the last time, they...

Tuning our mental wireless to be more loving

Today Oggie and I walked down to the Westwater stream, stopping to listen as a bird sang five distinct tunes over and over. Something about her beautiful voice silvering the air brought me joy, but because the foliage was so thick, I couldn’t see her. Leaving Oggie on the trail, I climbed some...

A San Juan County prayer for rain

Years ago, in the middle of a severe Utah drought, I wrote a prayer for San Juan rain modeled after William Lindsay White’s prayer first printed in the Emporia Gazette in 1935. In his petition, he writes, in part, “O Lord, in thy mercy grant us rain, and by that we don’t mean a shower. “O Lord...

A search for self and the potential of humanity

Last November Ted, Oggie, and I drove to Beef Basin hoping to find a petroglyph panel which was an extraordinary collage of ancient images. Beef Basin is an earthen bowl with Canyonlands to the north, Sweet Alice Hills to the south, Horse Mountain to the east, and the Henry and Boulder Mountains...