I took many pictures of this blue moon and kept getting a white moon on top and a blue moon on bottom. I tried to figure out why by looking up science on the internet, but then I decided I didn’t care. I just liked the images.

[Read more →]

Doors of the Southwest are unlike doors anywhere else. They can have wild colors so that you notice them. They can be in hiding so you have to discover them. Doors are powerful and mystical. If there were no doors, everything would be a hallway. The meaning of a door, Christopher Morley said, is to hide what lies inside.

[Read more →]

Today paranormal investigators and ghostbusters come to Bisbee, Arizona, from all over the world with their ghostbusting thermometers and proton packs, and they’re looking for spectres and ghosts of cheating card sharks, murdering cowboys, zombie miners, and dangerous women you don’t want to know. Scared yet?

[Read more →]

When I first moved out West, it was so hot and dry that I thought they needed a few good shade trees.Instead they had the saguaro, which did not even look like trees to me. They certainly don’t do much in the shade department.After a while, I began to respect them, even though I didn’t like them. You have to respect them because they are so heavy they can crush a car, and because they live in the hot desert without water. They swell up like watermelon the few times it rains. They make do in the heat.

[Read more →]

Tombstone, Arizona, is the town too tough to die. Part history and part Halloween, it’s where you can watch the Gunfight at OK Corral, drink a whiskey or intolerable water, walk around the graves at Boothill Cemetery where a cowboy got hanged by mistake, and see ghosts in a mirror at the Bird Cage Saloon. In fact, there are ghosts everywhere in Tombstone.

[Read more →]

Tucson Rodeo comes only once a year but it’s the biggest time of the year. Schools and businesses close, so everybody can cowboy up and go down to the arena.

[Read more →]

Cowboys sing about trusting your compadres as if your life depends on it because it does. They sing about how being dog tired at the end of the day makes you appreciate things other people look down on — like a mess of beans seasoned with coffee and chili peppers, a little whiskey and your bunk under the stars. They sing about a life led outdoors under the sun, in the rain and snow, under a sky too big to understand.

[Read more →]