Essays & Journalism
Work As A Burial Ground
This article was published in Men’s Health.
I recently turned my back on corporate life and moved my family down to rural Virginia to become a full-time writer. This was exceedingly foolish, as I was quick to discover after it was too late. For what seemed like months and months, I was unable to write at all. Instead, I found myself landscaping the yard in some sort of pyschoneurotic frenzy. Day after day I was out there in the thick heat, oozing sweat like Cro-Magnon man, stooping over little holes in the ground. Burying things.
The Youngest Place on Earth
This article was published in American Way.
Rumblerumblerumbleba-BOOEY!
Every time the volanco blows like that, I stop climbing and peer uneasily toward the summit. All around me, up the rust-colored moonscape of the mountain’s flank, I can see poltergeists of smoke rising from lava rubble. Here and there, little vents, or fumaroles, release pent-up gas in merry little puffs, like leaky radiators. And now, high above me, Arenal’s central crater lets loose a vast, gray, convoluted cloud of ash and smoke. Soundlessly expanding into the pale blue Costa Rican sky, it comes to resemble an enormous, floating brain.
Rapid Rites of Passage
This article was published in The Washington Post.
I’d come up here to the Canadian wilderness with the idea of inititiating my newly 13-year-old son, Adam, into manhood, and I was ready for something wild. If I’d wanted to play it safe I’d have stayed home. It’s a mother’s role to teach a boy to keep out of harm’s way, I reasoned; it’s a father’s job to show him how you play the game a little closer to the edge.
