By: Richard Sutton – Posted: July 5, 2011
Corrales, New Mexico is a narrow, meandering patchwork of a village lying low in the Rio Grande Valley. It consists of horse paddocks, orchards, skinny vegetable gardens, slightly jarring retail strips and ancient adobe buildings jammed into the space between the river bosque and the mesas to the West. Its citizens are a mix of artists, craftsmen, farmers, shop keepers and upscale business types longing to find an escape. Tall, spreading forms of gnarly old Cottonwood trees seem to stand guard and protect the village from the incursion of too much reality.
A lack of such incursions led us, a few years back, into the New Mexican Handmade Furniture business and meeting Mike. We’d heard he made tortilla tables and wanted to see one.
By: Tom Sheehan – Posted: July 1, 2010
They considered themselves midnight adventurers, coming off the hill they so lovingly called Henshit Mountain, to cross the pond in the dead of winter with sleds to “borrow” lumber from Artie Donolan who had ”borrowed” it from Breakheart Reservation, a state park. The park, at its deepest end, bordered on land that the Donolans had worked for years, including timber they ripped out of the state park as long as a few eyes stayed closed. To the boys from Henshit Mountain, the Donolan rape was not unknown, not to these teenagers, who were only enacting their own form of justice, borrowing enough lumber to build themselves a clubhouse at the thickly-treed section of the mountain. With various spurts of energy, even in summer when they floated rafts of lumber across the same pond from the same lumberyard, rooms were added to the clubhouse. The building rose majestically, they all agreed, they who had to a man become proficient carpenters and finish men.
By: Ryan Sparks – Posted: October 15, 2009
All bad things must come to an end.
We know what we smell like, okay? Hours and hours under the sun or smothered by night heat have us sweating coffee, sweating Red Bull. The clench of old cigarette smoke. Fast food and soda breath. We are covered in pet hair or the sticky evidence of children’s fingerprints. We ceased to smell like travelers [...]
Cue the music. We’re going for a ride. It’s hot as Labor Day weekend should be, summer’s last holiday, last chance to boil. We have our windows down and the music is passing between cars and mixing in the space between, pidgin notes and lyrics. The few radio stations not on a constant bulletin loop, [...]
As Hurricane Gustav bore down on the Gulf states in August of 2008, memories of the Katrina disaster triggered the largest evacuation in US history. Three million fled the oncoming hurricane. Most of the refugees were from the Louisiana south coast. Author, New Orleans resident, and Katrina veteran Ryan Sparks was among them. The following [...]
At noon I head out to Beaverton, an unfamiliar suburb on the outskirts of Portland, to teach yet another driving lesson. I need some fun after this morning’s travails, and I get a pleasant break. I have three kids in the car, which can be entertaining if the human dynamics work. If they’re in a [...]
by Gabriella Herkert There are so many cool ways to knock people off. You have to have a natural bent toward the dark side, of course, but the methodology appeals to the airier, more creative brain cells. Since I didn’t want to get famous under the heading stupid criminals, I knew I’d have to carefully [...]
I don’t like Thursdays: Why Thanksgiving is for Turkeys by Amy Czechorosky
by Amy Czechorosky Last weekend the little flyers started coming with my deliveries of the Los Angeles Times. They all say the same thing: ‘There is no Thanksgiving in Tijuana.’ That’s right. ‘There is no Thanksgiving in Tijuana.’ Well, that’s just great. Now not only do I have to feel sad for the people in [...]