We were on the top deck of the ferry headed back to Key West, watching the big fort and tiny islands fade from view, when one of the people I met during three days in Dry Tortugas National Park summed up what we had just experienced.
Mark Freund, a deeply tanned 62-year-old basket weaver, has been living in the Keys for about 30 years. His home is a sailboat near Big Pine Key. So he already had plenty of stories to tell, many of them true. But his first visit to the Dry Tortugas, a camping trip with his son Kevin timed to coincide with the fullest of full moons — a sphere so big and bright...
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The chemo wasn't working. It was destroying a lot of things in Mom's body, just not the large tumor in her bile ducts. So a few weeks ago she made a decision, one that her pastor told her took more courage than fighting merely for the sake of fighting.
She began hospice care. She said she didn't want to be in hospital rooms. She wanted to be home, with her dog and loved ones, enjoying the beauty of the Tucson desert.
In many ways, this has been yet another gift to her three children.
When she stopped the chemo and began palliative care, her quality of life improved within days. How much...
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I know it has been a while since I updated the blog. I’m not sure where to begin. Arizona, I guess. That’s where I’ve been for most of the time since I last posted something and got, for better and worse, frequently detoured.
I’ve been fortunate, not only to see some amazing places, but to have some fascinating people show them to me. I’ve hung out with dozens of river guides in a remote warehouse near Marble Canyon; helped count and measure cacti in Saguaro NP as part of one of the park service’s longest-running vegetation studies; hiked to the top of the tallest...
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I went to Tucson, planning to spend a week with my mom in the desert, counting, measuring and pondering the saguaros. I ended up spending a week with my mom in a hospital, thinking about an oak. And a grapefruit.
The day after I arrived, her doctor had came into her room, sat down on a stool and started to explain why she hadn't been feeling quite right. At one point, he took a piece of paper full of her medical information, flipped it over and started drawing a picture.
“Think of a big oak tree,” he said to my mom, several others in the room and, via cell phones held in front of the doctor,...
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It wasn't wasn't the kind of sunrise that ends up on a postcard in one of the gifts shops in Bar Harbor. We couldn't see the Atlantic Ocean from atop Cadillac Mountain in Acadia National Park. For that matter, when the sun rose on another year in America, we couldn't see more than maybe a hundred feet.
There were about 40 people atop the mountain. With no snow on the ground this year, most hiked. Lili Pew and Carol Bult, my tour guides for the New Year's adventure, decided we should ride mountain bikes (with studded tires for the icy roads). When we left Carol's house at 5 a.m., the skies above...
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(Column published in The Florida Times-Union on Jan. 1, 2012)
If all went as planned last night, I passed out long before midnight. Passed out because I was tired from following some Maine residents up a mountain to watch the sun set on 2011.
And if all went as planned this morning, the alarm went off at shortly after 3, letting me know it was time to join Lili Pew, Carol Bult and some other hardy Mainers in the second part of their annual tradition: snowshoeing, cross-country skiing, hiking or mountain biking to the top of Cadillac Mountain in Acadia National...
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