‘Goodbye to All That’

Joan Didion opens her famous essay on her New York years with this: “It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.” She arrived in the city at age 20, from Sacramento, intending to stay six months and left eight years later. We came to western Colorado in our twenties expecting what? We didn’t know, beyond a new ski area and jobs with a new ski school. Now, 38 years later, I agree with Didion that seeing beginnings is easier than puzzling through endings, their tangles of reasons and meaning.

Solving the Hot Dog Problem

It wasn’t that Vince Kontny was being impolite. He was just busy solving the hot dog problem.

Rowing Uphill

The red canoe out in the middle of West Passage was not making headway. It had an outboard motor – we could hear it buzzing away – but the little craft and its single occupant struggled mightily against the incoming tide. At times, it looked as if he was actually going backward.