PDXpersky

The goal of Trail-A-Week was 52 essays. In August of 2015, I realized that I wouldn’t be a writer until I let my bones show. I’d already understood – gradually, after 24 years of …

It will be a long day indoors. Before the sun shakes out its hot wool blanket over the entire Northwest, I am risen to seek what fresh air may be found. In the 5am dark, we drive east on a faint bl…

At last, a summer that doesn’t blister the skin. We have our hot days, but they come and they go. A weekend prickly with white-blue heat, a few sweater-cool mornings, then a whole week of those bel…

We have journeyed to an island where the beauty of the visible – not small – is eclipsed by the enchantment of fragrance. I am safer than Odysseus ever was – and anyway my Penelop…

It’s far too hot to hike. Portland is having one of its moderately awful summer heat waves, and although it’s a perfectly good Wednesday afternoon and I’m restless, at least 15 Fahrenheit degrees b…

The idea was long walks. Really long ones, like the entire Wildwood trail in one day. Walks long enough they could reasonably be called longwalks, one word. Jeremiah and I have been talking about t…