Steve Cotler Steve Cotler

Tag: Wyoming

Road Trip 2015: Sonoma County to Trinity Center

— 10:27 pm · One comment

Blue HighwaysIn 1982, I read Blue Highways, a bestseller written by William Least Heat-Moon. It chronicled a journey by car taken entirely on the small roads—the mapmakers’ blue highways. An English instructor as a small Missouri college, Least Heat-Moon, disoriented by a fracturing marriage, chose to look for himself by choosing, as Paul Simon put it, to “look for America.”

Buoyed by Least Heat-Moon’s adventures and observations, I have, whenever practicable, chosen those blue highways for my travels: a two-laner and small towns versus hurtling through interchangeable Interstate spaces at 70 mph.

So, for our road trip to Ann’s high school reunion in Casper, WY, I planned to include back roads whenever possible.

Day #1 was to begin at our home in Sonoma County’s Wine Country and end  Continue reading “Road Trip 2015: Sonoma County to Trinity Center” →

Two Lives in a Small Town

— 6:22 pm · One comment

The following, in Shonnie Brown’s “Neighbors” column, appeared in The Healdsburg Tribune, our local weekly, on February 9, 2012. [Most of the images were not in the original.]

*     *     *     *     *

Ann, born and raised in Casper, Wyoming, has the dubious distinction of attending high school with both Dick and Lynne Cheney and participating in student government with Dick. Dick, who Ann recalls as being “good looking” back then, wrote “I’ll be your friend forever” in Ann’s yearbook.

Ann attended a Catholic college in Denver and then got married — resulting in a breakup and three kids. She returned to college, putting herself through law school, and then became a New Jersey prosecutor. She moved to the Bay Area in 1984 and Continue reading “Two Lives in a Small Town” →

Verlyn Klinkenborg’s “February Traces”

— 9:49 am · Comments Off on Verlyn Klinkenborg’s “February Traces”

This short piece, from the Opinion page of The New York Times (2/2/09), is unpretentious, evocative writing. Read it aloud…slowly.

Up here in the country, the world gets a used-up look a day or two after a February snowfall. Dust drifts over the fields from the dry roads, the corn stubble begins to poke through, and the plows have left a margin of gritty slush and knocked down a mailbox or two. All the more reason to look for those moments just after a snowfall, when the snow is not yet public, when it has only been tracked by an animal or two out on the ice and in the fields.

I never see a truly straight track. There is always a bend in it, as if curiosity was a kind of lateral gravity, always Continue reading “Verlyn Klinkenborg’s “February Traces”” →

Steve with students at an author event

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