Longer days become languid days. By the coolness of dawn in the Fernhill wetlands of Forest Grove, Oregon, before the heat melts night’s calm, the superlative colors of sky break across morning. Alive with a swelling chorus of avian songs, the marshes embrace another day. ♨
San Antonio, Texas, boasts a magnificent World Heritage treasure in their Spanish colonial missions. These places serve both religious purposes and tourist pleasures. Which raises the question, are the San Antonio missions sacred or secular? ♨
In recent years the National Park Service has begun engaging the diverse peoples of America to tell a more inclusive story of our national heritage. This more inclusive tale allows us to envision a nation that honors the strength and wisdom of our differences. ♨
The Rio Grande divides two lands, two tongues, two ways of seeing and believing. It occupies a borderland where the living, the dead, and the river’s watery sustenance follow a winding course to distant seas.
San Antonio’s Spanish colonial missions attract local residents, tourists, and others. As the Alamo City approaches its tri-centennial celebration, this may be an apt time for some collective reflection on the importance and value of the historic missions. New possibilities are in the making in this place once called Yanaguana, a place that has become a busy modern city in an uncertain world. ♨
Warren Angus Ferris visited Yellowstone in 1834 as the first tourist to experience the thermal features, and the first person known to use the Icelandic word “geyser” to describe them.
I recently let go of a tent trailer that had come to me from my father. This trailer had been a special sort of place for me, a mobile habitation invested of nostalgia, memory, and hope. But too little time spent inside its canvas walls, too few miles pulling it along the memorable highways of scenic lands, had left me…
