Rusty Ring

(This passage, drawn from my manuscript Rough Around the Edges: A Journey Through Washington's Borderlands , refers to the Sinlahekin ...

The late hour kept me running a brisk 50 mph (the maximum controllable speed on gravel), so that an apparent chunk of slate in the ...

(This is an excerpt from a manuscript about an epic outbacking trek I took six years before I became a monk. As you can see in the p...

Travelling so far so long in isolated country produces a kind of elation. The muttering millions bugger off, leaving you in boundless ...

The instant I start an outbacking trek, I'm looking for postcards. I define as backward those towns that sell corny postcards, s...

If you'd told me when I was 22 that the day would come when I would cherish my ex-girlfriends, I would have called you mad. As a y...

These Okanogan Forest Service roads are punctuated by the weathered husks of farmhouses, their glass and paint long departed, their...

(The following is a passage from Rough Around the Edges , a manuscript I began 20 years ago. Though my Zen practice was still about si...

Pullman is improbable. Even from a distance, the town looks, not out of place, but out of epoch. In theory it's a typical prairie ...

I always massage a broken heart with danger. Once, in college, I memorialised a girlfriend's abrupt adieu by riding my bike a hundred...

By the time I reached Alan's apartment -- six hours of rainy interstate blockaded by accidents -- I was exhausted, disgusted, and k...

From birth, a great wall screens the Greensider from an uncomfortable reality. We live with our backs to it, like riverboat gamblers, indi...

I started the engine and continued the climb to Banker Pass. In the far distance the rugged peaks rounded, and a suspicion of sage on...

I'm currently writing three books, any one of which is likely to show up on this blog from time to time. For the benefit of readers ...

"Where to now?" I leaned on the truck's hood and stared at the back of the ram's head, but my chromed companion rem...

(The following is an excerpt from "Rough Around the Edges: A Journey Through Washington's Borderlands." Copyright ...

(The following is an excerpt from "Rough Around the Edges: A Journey Through Washington's Borderlands." Copyright RK Henderson...