CITY OF DUST

This is the last night you’ll ever drive these dirt roads. The sun sets behind you and the mountains are cooling, darkening to a deeper bl...

ANSWERING MACHINE, Pt. II - I call your answering machine just to hear your voice. Sometimes I call nine or ten times a day. Most of the t...

Well, I guess you can't accuse me of overdoing it with posts these days. But it's quality not quantity, right? Or something like ...

Yeah, posts are few and far between. Not much I can do about that except stop making promises and further alienate the three people that ...

We step out of the dusty S-10 at the end of an old logging road in Sequatchie County, Tennessee. The surrounding landscape is blasted, ju...

It’s hard to remain focused on blogging when one is busy making a mess out of one’s life. Or maybe I’m just letting it become a mess. So...

After losing one crew member to Lyme disease, the two of us are moving farther north through Hamilton County, to our third location. But ...

We’d been staying in a Ramada Inn off I-24. The help was surly and they fought loudly with each other in the hallway. All we wanted was ...

Aw, hell. I keep promising tales of blood, violence and near-death experiences--and they're all true--but I can't seem to get the t...

Despite having many more tales from the Cumberland Plateau I have clearly not been posting much lately. Sometimes life can get in the way o...

It is the end of May when somehow, miraculously, we finish surveying Aetna Mountain. For the last week we have had a four-person crew, bu...

Carl and I come to the edge of a thicket of raspberry brambles. It’s been rough going for the last couple hundred meters and we are covered...

It’s Jason’s second day on the job. We’re working lower on Aetna Mountain, skirting a neighborhood known as the “Devil’s Poket” (sic) in Wh...

We’ve added another member to the crew, Jason, and his first day is a tough one. The haul up the first mountain is long and steep. Then ...

“We’re drillin’”, the man says, and a jet of muddy tobacco juice spews from his crooked mouth and lands at his feet. The statement is wro...

“We can’t go forward! We can’t go down! We can’t go up! We can only go back!” My radio call to Carl captures our predicament fairly su...

We’ve misjudged our distances. Badly. Now it’s 7:30 PM and we’ve been out so long the high-tech rechargeable batteries in our GPS machine...

Untold tangles of catbriar, forests of poison ivy, and dozens of wood ticks conspire to convince Allison to wear long pants and boots. Bu...