1970 JUAN Ruperto and his first son Juan head into town from their home at the west edge of Rising River. It's a step up from boxcar...

MARCH 2012 DAVID There are two roads into town—Highway 39 and Ferry Butte Road, each with a bridge over the Snake. The first, a State...

2012 DAVID Eight years old, I had herded the cows to milking for a couple years, morning and night in the summer, in the evenings during...

DAVID In all my extensive attention to dust devils (a brief obsession I had as a boy) I never saw the genesis of a single one....

MARCH 2012 DAVID Their encounter is brief, Doyle needing to do further chores and Temple work—baptism for the dead. David has lived in...

PART FOUR DAVID  MARCH 2012 DAVID Entrusted with three year old David, his two sisters walk him through the ten acre wasteland where...

1962 HENRY AND DAVID Disrepair comes quickly. The cinderblock building in Pingree, erected two years ago to take advantage of re-routed...

1958 HENRY The chest uncovered, Henry sets to putting the new lid on it. With a hand drill he bores small holes to thread wire through...

1958 HENRY Henry espies Delos Wells' pickup. He owns the land on the hill a half mile away, is heading north up his lane. When he...

1959 DANIEL Blossom shouldn't be driving. Lines appear wavy, have done so for a couple years now, and there are two big black areas of...

1958 DANIEL A Spanish radio station plays. Doi-ink, doi-ink, doi-ink. Daniel enjoys listening to it for a very short time, and then his...

JUNE 1956 DANIEL Daniel compares what he sees—the crops going in, the sagebrush areas nearly gone—to John Garrison's words as he...

1948 DANIEL John Vitale was a young man when I first met him. In his late teens. Before the Rockford Canal was finished. He knew hardly...

1935 DANIEL Daniel gets his mail at Pingree. He parks at the canal—he's just gotten used to driving a pickup, rather than riding a...

1920 DANIEL Past forty years old now, I'm not so much a catch as I once was unless a woman compares me with the failed farmers, failed...

1920 DANIEL Three, four times a year Daniel has passed through this part of the desert, ever since he came in '04 and rode the Mackay...

1918 DANIEL You can get so you think a Mormon is a Mormon, one like the next like the next, but scratch one like you'd scratch a rock...

1910 NORA "Temperature?" Dick Buffi asked, as he passed Jake leaving the canal company office. "Pretty frosty, Dick. Blossom's in."...

1909 NORA Nora kicks her horse and very shortly she is at full speed, on a beeline for the stage road. Her head swirls. A well-versed...

LATE JULY 1910 DANIEL Garrison's lecture, filled with hyperbole about the West's beauty, lured me out here, visions of something besides...