• Dancing in the Streets Crested Butte Style

    From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.                                                                                     – T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”               In a strange mix of grace and craziness, a group of costumed women doing the stately Morris-dance lead down Elk Avenue a much less stately…

  • Sawmill I: Working the Gate between Worlds

      First published in High Country News, Sept. 16, 1985; the sawmill job had been in the late 1970s.   Sawmill I: Working the Gate between Worlds   In the realm of interesting things that confuse me and confusing things that interest me, the relationships between trees and humans are high on my list.  As…

  • Desert Empire

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    ‘The Desert Empire’ is a long essay Sibley wrote for Harper’s magazine in 1977, a drought year throughout the American West, and one of the five driest years in the recorded history of Colorado River flows. It is part celebration of the accomplishments that enabled the Colorado River Basin to survive that year on close…