Month: August 2017

We started late. The clouds hung low and threatened rain. I was tired and grumpy after a restless night. The things we’d done and seen the evening before had made me happy, but now I felt like we were on a fifteen-cities-in-fourteen-days tour. Only this time, we were on a…

News got you down? Things in the nation and city aren’t on the track that satisfies you? I was a newsman in one of my careers and here’s what I know: Taking a vacation from the news (and social media) soothes, relaxes, and widens a person’s perspective. I don’t pine…

The poor kid asked me outside the classroom shortly before class started. He shifted on his feet and plunged his hands into his pockets and back out. He himmed and hawed, cough nervously and called me “sir.” “I’m going to drop the class after we get done today,” he said.…

The trek from Rawlins, Wyoming, to Lander took through an eerie, rolling landscape of sand hills and sagebrush. Coming down into Lander and Popo Agie River Valley, the scene turned green with irrigated hay and alfalfa fields and cottonwoods and willow on the snaking river bank. Somewhere in Lander we…

Over the last 25 years, Laramie has grown around its edges. Where before, it was a three-mile drive down Grand Avenue off of I-80 before you ran into anything—a bar, restaurant, the university. About the furthest thing from town was a Walmart that I never used, though, Lord knows, I…