Rebecca Lawton

Introduction
Kathryn Wilder’s Desert Chrome: Water, a Woman, and Wild Horses in the West (Torrey House Press, 2021) explores a world few get to know and even fewer inhabit. In the pages of Wilder’s memoir, we find the richness of life on the high desert and a deeply observed sense of place by a longtime writer, outdoorswoman, rancher, and water lover. From the first pages, we know we’re in the company of an author well-versed in the cycles of seasons and wild nature. We learn how she’s suffer...

The Grand Canyon boating community — devoted to each other and to the Colorado River — was shocked to learn this fall that we’d lost two of our own.
Former river guides and rangers Mark O’Neill, 67, of Chimacum, Washington, and Kim Crumbo, 74, of Odgen, Utah, didn’t return home from a Sept. 13-17 canoe-packing trip in Yellowstone National Park.
Then on Sept. 20, Mark’s body and the boat were found on the shore of Shoshone Lake. He’d succumbed to hypothermia. Kim remains missing.
We who guided...

This spring marked the one hundred and eighty-third anniversary of the Battle of the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas. That grisly event saw the demise of some six hundred Mexican troops and two hundred Texians, including one David Crockett, the forty-nine-year-old backwoodsman and former congressman from Tennessee. To those of us who’d caught Davy Crockett fever as kids in the 1950s, the Alamo was above all the place where the “King of the Wild Frontier” met his fighting end. At that small missio...

By Rebecca Lawton
Women in boats have been in the news lately, for all the wrong reasons. Ugly reports of misogyny have surfaced from the Colorado River Unit of the National Park Service in Grand Canyon, and commercial boatwomen have stepped forward to complement the tales with some of them own. Today I’ll add a few more thoughts to the mix.
Much of the crappy stuff is true. I know, because I saw it and lived it. Not taking no for an answer from others was basically the approach that got many...

I had just finished digging an outhouse pit on a river in Colorado with a fellow National Park Service ranger when we saw the unexpected: a solo kayaker paddling the rapids that ran past our camp. A law-enforcement ranger who’d been leaning on a shovel had gotten a better look. He pulled out his two-way radio to call a backcountry station 45 miles downstream. ‘Lone kayaker passing Anderson Hole at 1930 hours,’ said the ranger-cop. ‘He’s headed your way.’
All boaters approved to launch that da...

When I was a young girl exploring the deserts of California and Arizona with my family, I learned about dry camping. Each night we had only a finite amount of water that we’d carried in by car or in our backpacks, limited stores not to be wasted by spilling or overuse. In those moments, guided with love by my outdoor-loving mother and father, I made a little go a long way. I felt the value of water as we measured portions out according to weight or volume. Using only what we needed taught me ...

Movie lore says that, in the 1942 movie Casablanca, the actors singing La Marseillaise to drown out the Nazis in Rick’s Café are shedding real tears. Die Wacht am Rhein, sung by officers of the Reich, and the French national anthem, the response of refugees headed for America, were performed chiefly by Hollywood’s extras of the day–European émigrés. Many were German Jews. Some had been leaders in the resistance back home. Singing Die Wacht at that time in French Morocco provoked both the film...

Rebecca Lawton, a fluvial geologist and former Grand Canyon whitewater guide, is the author of several books about rivers and the boating life. Today she writes about water, climate, and other environmental subjects for journals such as Aeon, Hakai, Orion, Sierra, and Sonoma County papers.

Her debut essay collection, Reading Water: Lessons from the River, was a San Francisco Bay Area bestseller and ForeWord Nature Book of the Year finalist. Her first novel, Junction, Utah, won a 2014 WILLA Aw...

A guest post, in black and white, from Rebecca Lawton:
I’ve long believed that many lines from the Casablanca screenplay (penned by Epstein, Epstein, and Koch) may come in handy to writers as comeback statements. Because I’ve seen the movie dozens of times, all within the last five years, I’m quite familiar with the valuable advice the script provides. Here I have ranked some of the classic film’s pithier statements from tenth to first place in terms of their relevance to us literary types.
1...

Owls. Owls. Owls keep me up at night.
Not in the way you might think, where mating calls and sudden screeches break the night into scudding dreams. Not because I fear some freak attack, where swooping wings and grasping talons are aimed inexplicably at me instead of at the usual gray squirrel or vole.
Instead it is the absence of the owl’s ghostly hoots—alone, in call and response, or in two-part harmony—that I lose sleep over.
When I first moved to my tree-lined neighborhood, owl calls were ...

Postage stamps are lessons in history, politics, science, or geography packed onto a small piece of gummed paper. They’re also beautiful works of art. In Stamped we’re going coastal, with postal.
The biblical story of Christmas brings together an extraordinary cast of characters in an unfamiliar land—Mary, Joseph, Jesus, and a few shepherds all crowded into a modest stable. Christmas Island—one of Australia’s island territories in the Indian Ocean—also assembles diverse company in a small spa...

Everything about them is beautiful. Martin Humphrey Moynihan’s field notes, illuminated with marvelous drawings and inventive symbols, leap off the page. Moynihan (1928-1996), an expert on animal behavior and founding director of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama, was known for his distinctive, original pencil sketches, and pen-and-ink renderings of birds, primates, and cephalopods. Portraying three disparate groups all known for their complex social interactions, s...

Messages in bottles are the stuff of romantic tales: last goodbyes from shipwrecks, schoolchildren’s notes, and castaways’ scribbled instructions have all been found on beaches around the globe. Scientists are less known for their tendency to cast bottles, but they have done it with Sisyphean persistence to work out complex patterns of upwelling and flow in the world’s oceans. Casting a bottle from Point A and waiting for a note or email with details on where the bottle was retrieved has been...

In the 1950s, when nuclear tensions were at an all-time high, the hands of the Doomsday Clock moved to 11:58 p.m., as close to midnight as they’ve ever been. The world had a brand-new obsession—how to live with the threat of the bomb. Hollywood responded by introducing moviegoers to a cast of misfit monsters released from polar ice and submarine canyons, and coolheaded scientists whose weapons were knowledge and reason. Today, with the threat of nuclear war only slightly reduced, Godzilla—the...