Where the present is the past
When the older residents of the Hispanic land-grant village of Torreón, in the eastern foothills of the Manzano Mountains, grew up in the 1940s, the…
Wally Gordon
Colombia part 2: A beautiful wall
Colombia could teach Donald Trump a thing or two about building a beautiful wall. The Spanish colonists constructed one in Cartagena. After half a millennium,…
Colombia part 3: Andean Mountain High
Like much in Colombia, its mountains are deceptive. The country still has six glaciers in three ranges, but they are retreating dramatically and all are…
Boomtown Cerrillos
If you looked for the first time at Cerrillos’s dirt streets, collapsing adobes, empty buildings and abandoned mines, you might not notice that the village…
Me and My Mouse, Part 5
“You’ve been here before?” I asked Atith, the Cambodian police captain, as he led the way along an obscure path through the jungle to search…
Me and My Mouse, Part 4
“Seek and ye shall find,” Matthew advised us in the New Testament, but what he neglected to tell us is whether what we find will…
Me and My Mouse, Part 2
Having discovered that my wife seemed to have disappeared, without reason or cause or explanation, off the face of the Earth, or at least off…
Me and My Mouse, Part 1
It was one of our better days, maybe the best, until it wasn’t. Mouse and I awoke shortly after dawn. We took a long walk…
Manzano Mountains 9 years later
Nine years ago, the Manzano Mountains were swept by the worst fires in their history. Three blazes blackened 30,000 acres, almost entirely destroyed the small…
Going to the back of the beyond
Perhaps more than any other state, New Mexico is replete with places that feel like the end of the world. To get there, after driving…