Columns

There are no dead cats in my freezer.

“Battle of the Books” events do not involve competitors ducking to avoid fast-moving hardcover volumes.

The internet has done for the spread of inane information what splitting the atom did for bombs.

I couldn’t recall how many months had elapsed since I last had dirt from my property packed under my fingernails, but my vertebrae were absolutely certain that it hadn’t been nearly long enough.

I have met very few people like Phyllis Badgley.

We deserve spring.

I stood in a hallway at Jordan Valley High School and the weight of history was palpable.

Augustus Gloop is not a real person but he was, in the fertile mind of his creator, novelist Roald Dahl, what we might once have called a “stout” boy.

Before masks, before the ubiquity of hand sanitizer and before I knew who Anthony Fauci was or how to pronounce his last name, there was basketball.

When I was in high school in the 1980s I don’t recall ever pondering whether, after graduating, I would do anything but go to college.

By the reckoning of one source, the area around Baker City is something of a focal point for UFO sightings.

“What even is ChatGPT? What does it do?” You may have asked yourself, seeing the terms “ChatGPT” and “AI” in headlines over and over, sometimes in surprising places. To some degree you’ve neve…

No one who possesses a shred of humanity can watch the video of five Memphis police officers beating Tyre Nichols to death and not feel anger or sadness or nausea.

During the week leading to the Super Bowl I happened to be reading a book about another football game, a game whose players weren’t famous and weren’t paid and many of whom were dead six month…

It might be the most frightening sentence I’ve read that doesn’t involve nuclear holocaust or the possible demise of the Twinkie.

Bill Schonely was a voice of my childhood.

I had never listened to a man confess to murdering his pregnant wife and their three children.

I’m grateful that a person’s choice of headwear does not suspend his First Amendment rights.

I caressed the fake coonskin cap and decided, as my fingers slid across the silky artificial fur, that I must have it.

My son, Max, was watching an episode of the Netflix series “Stranger Things” the other evening and he said to me, with the bemused pity for adults at which 11-year-old boys excel, that “TVs su…

When you read “distracted driving” you’re apt to think of a cellphone or a talkative passenger in the back seat or even a fast food hamburger that squirts ketchup on your lap with the first bite.

I walked away from my rig, dusk darkening the firs and pines to a shade more black than green, and I felt the loneliness peculiar to the woods on the cusp of a wintry twilight.

Mountain passes are my favorite landforms.

America is going back to the moon and I marvel, anew, at what our nation can accomplish when it sets for itself immensely difficult but straightforward goals.

I had forgotten how much fun a yard full of fallen leaves can be until I had an armful chucked in my face.

The slimy side of professional, high-stakes angling has at last been exposed.

I spent some time recently in the winter of 1971-72, moving between several high school gymnasiums, and I’m grateful to my tour guide, Andrew Kaza.

The Beatles made their last recording 52 years ago but the quartet continues to delight their fans in new ways, which is quite a feat considering two of them are dead.

I pressed the brake pedal and immediately wished I hadn’t.

My smoothest golf swing is the one aimed at my golf bag.

My wife texted me that she had killed a mosquito in our kitchen.

When I was a kid I solved the common childhood problem of a bedroom cluttered with dirty clothes and tattered magazines and cracked cassette tape cases by shoving the lot into a corner of the closet.

So far as I can tell, Wyatt Earp never visited Baker City.

One of my favorite moments in a sports movie happens during “We Are Marshall.”

The notion is in vogue these days that democracy in America is foundering and that “right-wing extremists” represent the treacherous, hull-splitting rocky shore that looms ahead.

I stepped as gently as I could into the dust, but even so I fancied that after a few strides I could feel every fine particle sifting through my socks and latching to the hairs on my lower legs.

I might well have been bored except for the half dozen Cub Scouts I shared the trail with.

My eyes began to fail me along about the second grade, which strikes me as an awfully premature deterioration for such vital organs, especially considering the rest of me was likely to stumble…

As a resident of Baker City, do you know where your water comes from? When you turn on the tap or faucet do you think about how cool and clean the water is, how many miles it traveled to get t…

The horns began to blare, and the blood rushed to my face.

College football is trying to drive me away but I cling to it, a besotted and slightly pathetic suitor who can justify all manner of betrayals.

I know where I came from, biologically speaking, but what if my DNA disagreed?

I can’t decide whether litterbugs or the purveyors of graffiti annoy me more.

The ways we think about the COVID-19 pandemic have evolved with the virus: In 2020, it was a potentially deadly threat we could avoid by being careful; in 2021, it was something that was likel…

The words “bear” and “golf course” clang in the ears when crammed into the same sentence.

I wonder how long it will take to train myself to plug in a car when I’m done with it for the day.

I watched in my rear-view mirror as the steel gray Oregon State Police car pulled a U-turn on Auburn Avenue and started heading toward me.

If Mount Adams were a Beatle it would be Ringo.