Readers and writers blog

My latest brainstorm for surfing the Internet has blown to my shores a somewhat able seaman named Charles Robert Darwin.

The back story: After spending untold hours searching the Internet for well-written weblogs that aren’t similar to ones already on our blogroll — diversity is important to us — I came up with the idea of searching for blogs by occupation. Guess what? Wikipedia has a list of occupations, nearly 1,000 of them arranged alphabetically all the way to yak herder, zookeeper and zoologist. So I started at the beginning — able seaman — and my search for ‘able seaman blogs’ came up with the legendary English naturalist and father of the theory of evolution.

Ah, serendipity. Darwin’s seamanship is only one of the topics discussed at The Beagle Project Blog, a British weblog devoted to building and launching a replica of HMS Beagle by 2009, the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth. And, as only the Brits can do, the blog is extremely well written.

Now believers in creationism and intelligent design, take note: Our interest in the blog is its writing and history, but be warned that the Beagle bloggers do gore your oxen.

Even old Charles himself comes in for a jibe in the blog’s historical reportage, its Nov. 22 entry quoting shipmate Philip Gidley King’s memory of Darwin’s seamanship — described in the blog as moderate at best — as the Beagle slipped into port at Rio de Janeiro and wanted to make a snappy display of shortening its sails. The then-young Darwin was ordered to hold three sail ropes — one in each hand and one in his teeth, a comical posture that the crew and even Darwin seemed to enjoy.

Much of the rest of the blog also is written with a sense of humor, but with a serious devotion to Darwin and the tall ship replica that will celebrate him and his groundbreaking science:

An icon of scientific progress, she will circumnavigate the globe in Darwin’s wake, crewed by aspiring scientists and researchers. They will carry out original research both at sea and on land, updating Darwin’s observations, breaking new scientific ground and relating the adventure of science to enthuse a new generation of young students.

Darwin’s voyage, the Beagle’s second survey expedition, took place from December 1831 to October 1836 under Capt. Robert Fitzroy. Darwin did most of his scientific exploration on land, notably the Galapagos Islands off Ecuador. Then he spent a long time thinking about what he had found, finally publishing his theories jointly with a similar-minded naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace, in 1858. Darwin then went on to publish his landmark book, On the Origin of Species, in 1859.

The Beagle, a 10-gun brig launched May 11, 1820, at Woolwich Dockyard in London, was decommissioned and sold for scrap in 1870, apparently lost to posterity. But Beagle blogger Peter McGrath reports in a March 11 entry that a Scottish archaeologist has concluded from ground-penetrating radar tests that the vessel’s hulk probably lies beneath five meters of mud in the River Crouch in England’s Essex County.

And according to the blog’s first entry, Aug. 3, 2006, the Beagle’s lost anchors may have been located off Australia.

Recovery of the vessel and anchors are both causes espoused by the blog, but one of its main causes is recovering ground held over the years by, first, creationism and more recently by one of its spinoffs, intelligent design.

McGrath in an entry July 17 notes that 22 percent of Brits believe in creationism and another 17 percent in intelligent design:

I’ve forgotten how many reasons to build a replica HMS Beagle we’re up to now. But the fact that we have allowed 39% of the population to walk away from compulsory science education without having evolution taught to them in a compelling and comprehensible fashion is surely another to add to the reason pile.

Well, we take no stand. Because we must hurry off to No. 2 on the list — ‘accountant.’ Hmm, maybe not. But ‘acoustical scientist’ sounds interesting. And we can’t wait until ‘yak herder.’

– Sid Leavitt

In 20 years as a newspaper reporter, I covered a lot of court cases — mostly criminal but some civil, the latter by far the more complicated of the two — and I always appreciated finding a judge or lawyer who made civil litigation easier to follow. Well, I’ve found another one.

J. Craig Williams, a southern California attorney, writes a weblog called May It Please The Court, and he writes it so well that it should please not only the court but also his readers.

Just in case you think the details of courts and the law don’t matter to you, consider some of the subjects Williams has discussed in four years of blogging:

• Sports-related negligence: In one of his recent entries, July 16, Williams cites a case in which waivers of liability in sports or recreational programs or services were held not to be always valid. Specifically, a waiver you sign for a sports or recreational activity may not automatically deprive you of legal recourse against gross negligence. It’s a California case, but Williams expects it to “set a new benchmark in tort opinions across the country.”

• Insurance policy limitations (May 18, 2004): An auto insurance customer thought he had $250,000 in liability coverage, but when he loaned his car to someone else, he found his liability in that instance plummeted to $15,000, a fact that wasn’t listed on the declarations page of his policy by name but rather by endorsement number buried deep down in the policy — and in a single line. The customer eventually won before the California Supreme Court. But it should make the rest of us wonder what’s hidden in our insurance policies.

• Volunteer liability (Jan. 20, 2005): A materials testing company sued the volunteer fire company in Amityville, N.Y., for some cleanup costs after a fire, claiming the firefighters added to chemical contamination by the way they doused the fire and did some cleanup. The case was thrown out, but Williams concludes, “Now when fire departments rush to a fire, they’ll have to take their lawyer along.”

• Property valuations (March 20, 2006): A San Diego man purchased a property for $185,000 and got the local assessor to reduce its valuation from $300,000 to the purchase price based on the possibility of unexploded ordnance from a nearby Marine base. Then the owner discovered that the local gas-and-electric utility had an easement across the property that was recorded in 1972 but wasn’t listed on his title insurance policy. Now he sued to get his valuation down to $40,000, but he lost in court because he missed the four-year limitations period, even though he didn’t know about the easement until more recently.

• Judicial pay (July 9): The average partner in the nation’s top 100 law firms last year made more than $1 million — five times the salary of the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and seven times what most top federal and state judges get. How does that affect the quality of justice you may receive if you are hauled into court? More to the point, how does that affect the quality of legal representation you may receive if you can’t afford the top 100?

• Just plain good advice, legal and otherwise, to anyone dealing with the public (Aug. 4, 2003): “If you want to avoid getting sued, treat others fairly and solve their problems . . . If you provide more than you’re paid for, you create goodwill. Plus, it keeps you from having to hire a lawyer.”

Weblogs about the law — they’re called ‘blawgs’ in cyber-speak — abound on the Internet, but many of them are hard to follow for a layman, and some of them are, well, indecipherable. The law isn’t simple, so it’s good to find someone who writes knowledgeably and clearly about it.

Plus, Williams has a sense of humor. When he checked out his name on Avvo, a new website that ranks lawyers, he found to his surprise that he was “deceased after practicing law for some 56 years.” That would be quite a feat, he conceded, considering that he is only 50 years old.

– Sid Leavitt

EDITOR’S NOTE: Following is Chapter 11 of “Adrift in America: Diary of a Minimalist Mariner,” a work found in the nonfiction section:

Kingston, New York. December 27, 1989.

The man walking toward me is so large that he blots out nearly all the light coming with him through the door from the tool shop to the service bay. In his hand, he holds a four-way tire iron that looks like a cross. The image is timely because it is only two days after Christmas, although in this man’s hand, the cross looks like something he might have torn off the top of a church.

“They told me out front to ask for Paul,” I say.

He says nothing.

“Are you Paul?” I ask.

“Mmmm hmmm, whassaproblem, mista?” he says in a slurred, ponderous voice that comes from a place as hollow as the long concrete service bay. Royal Tire Service of Kingston advertises itself in the Yellow Pages as an outfitter of all trucks, large and small, but the service bay is bare. No lifts, no jacks. Driving into it is like entering a car wash from which all the cleaning equipment has been removed.

“Left rear inside tire. Flat. Road junk,” I say, bowing to his preference for unembellished conversation.

“Hmmmm,” he says. He glowers at the left rear dual wheel, which is now supported only by the outside tire. The tire seems to sag under his gaze.

He is a mountain of a man, 300 or more pounds bulging in a work uniform that once was blue or green but now, like his skin, has become a gray blanket of fresh and faded grease. On the high promontory of his head, his black eyebrows gather in thought.

In the Christmas spirit, I think of another Paul, described by some historians as a large man of intimidating demeanor and unpredictable seizures, maybe epilepsy, maybe just the Holy Ghost, that must have inspired as much fright as faith in the wayward Gentiles.

“Whassit weigh, mista?”

In his rumbling voice, I can hear echoes of some far-off place and time. No, not biblical. Wait, could it be Memphis? Elvis?

“Whassit weigh?” he says louder.

“Huh. Oh, fifty-eight hundred.”

Is this man going to lift the truck himself?

He gestures with the tire iron toward the front office, which is where he presumably wants me to stay until his work is done.

Forty-five minutes later, I ask in the front office if I can return to the service bay. I want to tighten the lug nuts myself so I can get them loose again if I ever have to change a tire on the road. But I am worried about how Paul might take the intrusion.

“Naw, he’s OK,” the office manager says.

Paul has the rear of the truck up on a portable hydraulic jack he has slid beneath the rear axle, and the left rear wheel is on a bench in the tool room, but the tire hasn’t been replaced. The spare is still on its mounting beneath the rear of the truck.

“Couldn’t get underneath,” he says. “Gotta wait for Paul.”

“Aren’t you Paul?”

“I’m Big Paul. He’s Little Paul.”

In a few minutes, a short, slender man named Paul returns from lunch, slides beneath the truck and sets about dismounting the spare.

“Where are you from?” I ask Big Paul.

“Here,” he says.

“No, I mean born and brought up.”

“Here,” he says. “All my life.”

Kingston is the seat of Ulster County, a mostly rural county that sits on the west bank of the Hudson River between New York City and Albany. The county’s pastoral fields and forested hills, which to the west and north become the Catskill Mountains, have long been attractive to refugees from both metropolitan areas – everyone from actors to gangsters, Hindus to Hutterians. In my brief sojourns as a reporter for the Kingston-based Daily Freeman, I guess I haven’t come across Big Paul’s sect.

“Done,” he says. The repaired wheel is back on the truck.

“Listen, I wanted to hand-tighten the lug nuts myself,” I say. “Just in case.”

“Won’t do you no good,” he says. “Too much weight. Never lift it on the road.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

“One-ton truck. Loaded to three tons. What you got in there?”

“Everything I own,” I say.

“I guess the hell you do,” he rumbles.

“Good thing it has dual wheels,” I say. “Good thing Royal Tire Service has dual Pauls.”

He looks down at me blankly.

– Sid Leavitt

Despite living fairly close to New York City, I’m not a city guy — our two-room schoolhouse had vacant seats in all eight grades — so I’m not sure why I find the weblog New York Hack so appealing.

Well, for one thing, cab driver Melissa Plaut is a good writer. And she has an independent — actually, gutsy — attitude toward the people, places and situations she deals with. But I think it’s the way she has us deal with them that makes New York so accessible.

She gives us the city in small chunks — vignettes with passengers, descriptions of traffic, squabbles with other drivers, sometimes accompanied by photos that have a snapshot quality like someone’s family album.

Her entries often begin by telling us business was slow or routine — June 16, 2006, for example, after grousing mildly about Connecticut, Pennsylvania and New Jersey drivers being “either brain dead or meth heads,” she adds:

Oh, and around 2:30 am there was one crazy, possibly drunk, lady in a Nissan Maxima. She pulled up alongside me at a red light and started yelling at me. My window was up so I couldn’t really hear what she was saying . . . I just ignored her, but when the light changed, she veered directly into me, forcing me to swerve into the other lane to avoid getting hit by her. I still have no idea why she did that.

Or this past May 9:

Tonight was pretty good overall. I mean, it wasn’t perfect. I did indeed get my window punched by some stupid angry road raging bitch in Williamsburg (because I wouldn’t let her cut me off, mind you), but that’s so annoyingly typical, it barely merits mention at this point.

And it’s not all women drivers, as in an entry Jan. 23, 2006, accompanied by a photo of an SUV from New Jersey:

Seen above is yet another Jersey fuck who doesn’t know how to drive. This guy decided that, rather than pulling off to the side, he needed to stop dead in the middle of Bleecker St to ask a parked cab driver for directions . . . Only when he finally did start driving again did he decide to pull off to the side, but only for a second because apparently he wanted to get behind me so he could honk back at me . . . A lady standing on the sidewalk finally got so annoyed with him, she yelled, ‘Shut the fuck up and go back to Jersey!’

Pedestrians, April 17, 2006:

The only real asshole I encountered was some guy who was strolling across the street against the light with his family. As I was bearing down on them, I tapped my horn . . . The women of the group quickened their step but the man slowed down . . . I understand getting angry at a driver because you got scared, even if you were the one in the wrong, but the above type of behavior is . . . dangerous, completely unnecessary, and utterly stupid. This guy wanted to prove something, and boy did he — he proved that he is a total idiot.

The NYPD, Jan. 20, 2006:

Later, while on the FDR going towards the Brooklyn Bridge, I got stuck in this fucked up traffic. What annoys me most about this is it’s a totally unnecessary backup. For whatever reason, the NYPD seems to think that placing two cop cars in the left lane at the beginning of the bridge will act as a deterrent to terrorism . . . It’s not like they ever pull anyone over to make sure they’re not terrorists, and besides, how could they possibly know? Meanwhile, anyone who has to go to Brooklyn at night is completely terrorized by the traffic.

Plaut, 31, a native of the New York suburbs, began driving a yellow cab three years ago and about a year later began blogging about it. Her weblog attracted so many readers that it led to a book, “Hack: How I stopped worrying about what to do with my life and started driving a yellow cab,” coming out this August.

All I know is that on my trips to New York, the city has been too big for my digestion. Plaut cuts it down to size and makes it, well, like oysters. Appetizing if you don’t mind a little grit.

– Sid Leavitt

This weblog is barely four months old and I’m already breaking a second rule, this time not about maintaining the diversity of our blogroll but about staying within the universe of blogs itself.

Art-spirit, a website of aesthetics and spirituality maintained by New York artist Ted Knerr, isn’t a weblog in the strictest sense. (On the other hand, what is strict about blogging, anyway?) The entries are mostly visual — art by Knerr and more than two dozen of his associates ranging from realism to abstractionism — and they change more slowly than do words in a blog.

But there are words, and what words they are. What caught my eye was Knerr’s description of abstract art, a more articulate and succinct description you will not find:

Avoiding pictures of people, things and their stories, abstraction allows spirit to be directly embodied in the art, not added to what is at least partly a narrative.

As examples, Knerr cites Wassily Kandinski, the Russian-born artist considered the father of modern abstract art, and Piet Mondrian, a Dutch artist whose work ranged through a variety of genres but was particularly noted for abstraction built on rectangular forms and lines:

(They) were drawn to abstraction to express their spirit more fully than traditional art encourages . . . Instead of illustrating spiritual ideas, their abstract paintings were direct manifestations of spiritual energy; sharply clear, splendid and joyous.

If you are puzzled by abstract art, or even if you hate it, or especially if you love it (put me in the first category), check out Knerr’s works — certainly the ones in acrylics and watercolors but particularly the digital art that he has generated on a computer.

It’s this last group of works, the digital art, that I find fascinating, not because I’m especially knowledgeable about art but because I’m drawn to their translucent, metallic quality and brilliant, kaleidoscopic colors. (Yes, I’m sure I could be hypnotized by a shiny object.)

I’m also impressed by Knerr’s apparent facility with a computer and the fact that his site has been up for eight years, a lifetime in the cyberworld.

Art-spirit also features Knerr’s photographs, which are as stunning to me as his digital art. But in the end, for me, it’s his words.

Knerr talks about art that “can gradually change your life and bring you a sense of the mystery, joy and profundity of life.” He quotes the 13th century Persian poet Rumi: “Do you think I know what I am doing? … As much as a pen knows what it is writing.” And the late writer Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk: “The true symbol does not merely point to something else. It contains in itself a structure which awakens our consciousness to a new awareness of the inner meaning of life and of reality itself.”

Knerr saw something of Merton in a friend, Sam Avierett, a Columbia-trained journalist who over the years descended into homelessness and in February 2006 died in the streets:

(H)e was very much like one of the holy men in India or a monk in Burma or Tibet. Except that Sam made his spiritual contribution without being given the public recognition of holiness. He wore no robes and didn’t approach people for donations or even carry a beggar’s bowl or coffee cup . . . I think Sam’s homelessness and poverty had become the vehicle of his deep purpose in life, to nudge us all a small step toward enlightenment.

Now in his 70s, Knerr was trained as a mechanical engineer and industrial designer following in the footsteps of his father, a pioneer metallurgist and industrial innovator who must have been a nice man to know. Such as when he was told his company was required to have an additional fire reservoir:

My father loved swimming and created a free-form concrete pool and bathhouse in a corner of (the company’s) recreation field . . . This was a great favorite with employees, friends and family.

When was the last time your boss did something like that?

– Sid Leavitt

EDITOR’S NOTE: Following is Chapter 12 of “Adrift in America: Diary of a Minimalist Mariner,” a work found in the nonfiction section:

Biddeford, Maine. May 31, 1986.

The most basic characteristic of a dwelling is not the materials it is made from but the fact that they form an envelope between the occupant and the outside world.

That’s the first thing I learn after I move from an 11-room house into a four-cylinder truck that looks ridiculously small in the circular driveway of the old mansion. This house, with double-bricked walls so thick you can sit sideways in the window sills and a granite cellar that can hold a February chill prisoner until August, makes the daily changes of weather a silent phenomenon to be observed with aristocratic indifference through the panes of the heavy casements. The truck, on the other hand, turns out to be reptilian in its comforts. The air temperature inside a truck, I realize as soon as I have to think about it, is never more than a few minutes from the temperature outside, and the elements are never more than a few millimeters of steel, fiberglass or plastic from entering the cabin. You don’t appreciate just how much velocity raindrops can develop in an eight-mile plunge from thunderhead to earth until they explode in mushrooms three inches above your head as you try to crank the roof vent shut.

But that’s OK. The envelope performs its function. The fiercest rainstorm in the world is no match for a truck, which simply imposes its contour into the downpour and turns the clattering pellets of water aside in obedient rivulets. That’s just the way metals and polymers are. And I will learn in a few short months that when those materials enclose a relatively small air space, even the most insidious chill – in Maine, it likes to slither around at 20 or 30 below for a while every winter – can be banished from that space, given some simple insulation, by an electric space heater or gas stove burner in the same few minutes that it took the warmth to escape.

The envelope’s function goes beyond the physical. I can sit in a supermarket parking lot so close to people that I can hear the key sliding into the lock of their car door, yet the walls of the truck keep me as anonymous as the boy helping my temporary neighbors empty their grocery carriages. If passersby do notice me sitting at a window, they would no more intrude with as much as a stare than they would expect me to get out and slide into their back seat.

The envelope can be any size. In one sense, it can be so compact that it can be folded and put away in a pocket, provided the denominations of the currency in the billfold are large enough. A more common envelope is carried on the back and pitched at night.

Traveling south out of Denver one day, about eight months before I get my truck, I meet a guy named Steve Lutes who wears his envelope.

– Sid Leavitt

When I read that two kinds of patients are frustrating — those who are confused and those who are difficult to please — and that both deserve treatment that is caring and professional, I knew I would like the weblog about a nurse and the woman behind it.

The woman is not a hospital administrator who makes facile policy statements about patient care. The woman is a registered nurse named May who came from the Philippines a few years ago to work in a California hospital. And she works — 12-hour shifts, frequently short-staffed, rarely short-tempered.

Unlike many bloggers, May does not question her world as much as she questions herself. And we learn a lot about caring for sick people through her thoughts.

An example of a confused patient: “I want to get out of here because the fire is getting closer and and the fu#*ing priests are coming.”

An example of a patient difficult to please: “I am going out for a smoke and nobody can stop me! I cannot just sit here all day and wait for the fu#*ing (certified nursing assistant) to take me downstairs. Just watch.”

That is the difference, and every nurse knows that. Only the heartless will accuse or treat a real confused patient with disgust and hostility. And only those who are unprofessional will treat the difficult-to-please patients with rudeness and contempt. Those who listen to their hearts treat the confused patients with respect and compassion. At the same time, those who are difficult to please, they treat with skillful professionalism. (June 5)

May doesn’t always succeed in fulfilling her expectations of herself. For example, an April 30 entry about a dying AIDS patient whose anger at life wouldn’t let her make his remaining days a little better — arguing, refusing to cooperate, complaining about everything, insulting her, day after day:

He has every right to be angry, I told myself . . . (but) should I just shrug my shoulders and say, ‘Well, he wants to be miserable, that’s his choice, not mine’ . . . I don’t know. I just know that’s what I (eventually) did. At that time, nothing else felt more appropriate. I rationalized over and over that I was only giving him what he was asking for, and that it was right. Yet . . . why does everything feel so wrong? Maybe because it is. Maybe because being coldhearted is always wrong. And I was coldhearted, and I was wrong.

May is a familiar person to me. Over the years, I’ve known a number of doctors and nurses on a personal basis, and it seems that it’s mostly the nurses who are always questioning themselves. Or maybe they’re just more willing to express their self-doubts publicly. I don’t know. I just know that reading May’s weblog from its beginnings in April 2005 brought back a lot of familiar faces to me.

I should note that many of May’s entries are long, and all are written in a lower-case, stream-of-consciousness style that occasionally mixes verb tenses, but it is still easy reading. And good reading, which is why her weblog is the latest addition to our blogroll of well-written sites.

I found about a nurse on the blogroll of a site suggested by a reader and fellow blogger, Gwen. Her recommendation was Tales of a Bohemian Road Nurse, a freewheeling and often funny blog about a home health nurse who tools around rural Texas in a Jeep. Gwen’s blog, also excellent, is Small Scars, a chronicle of knitting, reading and home life by a public health nurse in the Bay Area of northern California.

By the way, one of the more unusual sites I found on the Bohemian road nurse’s blogroll was Addicted to Medblogs, whose author describes herself as “a bored attorney who spends too much time reading (medical blogs) at work.”

Now there’s a derivative website.

– Sid Leavitt

Robert Lashley, a young black writer, calls himself a ‘literary thug.’ I bumped into him in one of those narrow streets of the blogosphere where you’re lost and can’t remember how you got there. All to my good fortune.

Lashley is no thug, although he grew up in a neighborhood in Tacoma, Wash., where there were plenty of them. But he definitely is literary — in his interests, his outlook and his writing. And so The literary thug is the latest addition to our blogroll of well-written sites.

If you visit him and do nothing else, read the entry I saw first at the top of his site — his June 13 post titled ‘In The Kingdom Of Crack Rap.’ Walking through the pleasant neighborhood where he now lives in a suburb of Bellingham, Wash., Lashley spots a Cadillac Escalade carrying two youths — one black, one white — and belching a mixtape of crack rap. He explains the musical genre:

Led by Young Jeezy, T.I, Lil Wayne, The Clipse, Rick Ross, Cam’ron and various members of the Dipset, it is a form of rap where MCs brag about doing gruesome things to other black people and make it seem shiny and attractive to suburban teenage boys.

In fact, Lashley says, white teens from comfortable homes are the major market for crack rappers:

Their gruesome tales get little play in majority black radio stations, and they are often referred to by black intellectuals — and even many black hip hop fans — as social lepers for their tales of black-on-black violence.To the boys who listen to them, however, the random corpses that these rappers brag about going over — the snitches that they brag about destroying, the women they viciously dispatch in multivarious forms, or the mother or wife tormented over losing a son or a husband — have absolutely no consequence. To these young men, crack rappers are businessmen, successes in their field, and to quote Jeezy himself ‘go getta(s)’ . . .

This, along with numerous other things, is the reason that millions of black people want to throw Young Jeezy through a brick wall.

In the end, he wonders, “why is this horror on wax the only thing that black men and white men can bond over?”

Lashley describes himself as a devotee of classic literature, classic soul and moderate politics, and he writes intelligently about a wide range of topics in those areas — writers from Emily Dickinson to W.E.B. DuBois to John Updike to Rita Dove, singers from Kelly Price and Mary J. Blige to Stevie Wonder, Teddy Pendergrass and Michael Jackson and social issues like affirmative action and reparations. Not to mention his own tough childhood — ‘The ethics of making it without a father,’ Dec. 31 — and the stepgrandfather who became a central male figure in his life:

His feat — to overlook the misery that his stepson had caused in his life to try and heal my own — is proof in my eyes that there is a god. And although I have health issues and the road with me is sometimes still a bumpy one — ask anyone who knows me or has corresponded with me, I am no day at the beach — I am a student at Western Washington University and my GPA is a 3.0 (a 3.8 since I went back to school), I am trying to be the man my grandfather is, and if you read me, sometimes I fail. However, I must say that I have come a long ways since he took me in and I know where I need to go as well as how to get there.

Lashley’s writing has a grammatical problem here and there and an occasional malaprop, but none of that detracts from the power of his narrative.

By the way, before I stumbled into his weblog, I skimmed through some other sites by African-American writers that I found notable — Raw Dawg Buffalo, Blogdangit and She’s Just Not Feeling You — but their occasional lapses into colloquial language made them less accessible to me than Lashley’s. But that’s just because I’m an old white dude.

All of them are worth a visit.

– Sid Leavitt

EDITOR’S NOTE: Following is an abridged version of Chapter 13 of “Adrift in America: Diary of a Minimalist Mariner,” a work found in the nonfiction section:

Denver, Colorado. September 1985.

I don’t notice him in the shadows until I have driven nearly through the underpass, so by the time I pull over to the side of the road, there is a fair distance between us. As I back up, it appears to me that he is too old and heavy to be jogging as easily as he is toward the car.

When he gets in, I can see that the heaviness of his torso doesn’t match his slender face and hands. He isn’t old, either – mid-20s at the most.

Has he been waiting long?

“Since last night,” he says.

In the warmth of the car, he starts unbuttoning his shirt – I should say shirts. Three, maybe four of them, all different plaids. Between layers two and three, he wears a broad white wrapping around his stomach and lower rib cage.

“Injury?” I ask.

“Sheet,” he says. “That’s what I slept under last night.”

Why has he been waiting in the underpass instead of out in the open where he could be more easily seen?

“The weather,” he says. “It comes on you quick up here.”

The day is crisp and bright, the kind of day mountain resorts wait for to have their brochure photos shot.

Steve Lutes is a good-looking young man with pale features that look delicate within their frame of shaggy black hair. Given a shave, a haircut and a three-piece suit, he would fit right in on Wall Street. And that is a depressing thought. His manner of speech also is delicate – quiet, slow, deliberate – and I let him take his time.

Steve follows the seasons. Spring and summer in Denver. Fall and winter in Tucson. Since he doesn’t work in either place, his only means of transportation is his thumb. His parents live in Tucson, but they don’t like him around. Something about his being a bad influence on a younger sister. Instead, he hangs out at a church where he rakes leaves and does other chores in exchange for a bed and an occasional meal.

In both places, because of his predominantly outdoor lifestyle, Steve occasionally runs into the police, who just as occasionally lock him up for the night. Although he has no church for a haven in Denver as he does in Tucson, he says he likes the police in Denver better.

“Why’s that?” I ask.

“The Denver cops don’t step on your fingers.”

He turns out to be right about the weather. We are traveling along an eastern rib of the Rockies, and while the road is doing only gentle ups and downs, it isn’t so obvious that the downs are bottoming out at more than 4,000 feet. In New Hampshire, where I come from, Mount Washington is the highest peak in the Northeast at only 6,000 feet. I have no experience with weather that starts at that altitude.

We are headed up a rise between two ridges when the stars go out like someone has pulled a black sheet across the sky, and from the darkest part of it, a pitchfork of lightning comes down in three prongs. I roll down my window and stick my face into the air to see if it is cold enough to freeze. Probably not, I decide, but without much resolution. It is, after all, September, and we are in the mountains.

Now I know that lightning doesn’t always descend from sky to earth. Lightning also can rise from earth to sky. But I learn in Colorado that when the earth is in the sky to begin with, lightning can go all over the place. What has been a quiet alpine landscape turns into a drive-through electric arcade, lights flashing from every direction, long spikes of incandescence arching across the sky, touching down in bony fingers that leave faint scratches on your vision as they disappear.

I look over at Steve. He is sitting stock still, his right foot pulled to the seat so that his right knee is higher than the left, both arms straight out with the elbows bent so that his hands are lined up vertically at his face, one hand in front of the other as if he is about to give the world a solemn nose-thumbing.

“It’s a karate position,” he says secretively, his lips barely moving. “It protects you from everything.”

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