July 2015

A Long Time On The Colorado Plateau

July 27, 2015 April 10, 2023 / Category Archives: Southwest / 1 Comment

Without planning it that way, I have spent a lifetime looking for the Anasazi. In books. In clefts in cliffs, as Gary Snyder put it.

Crestone Conglomerate is the unique kind of rock found in the cluster of 14,000-foot peaks above the San Luis Valley at Crestone, CO, where I live. Elsewhere in the world conglomerates are easily breakable, but not here. Hammering will not extract the embedded stones of all colors and size, often sheered smooth.

My writing on this site is a conglomeration of essays on Zen, church religion, politics, Southeast Asia and the Rio Grande West. I have lived in the upper basin of this great if not large river for most of my adult life, and I have seen it run in bosques, gorges, canyons and city channels from Colorado to Texas.

I was born on the Wyoming-Montana border grew up in Denver. I wrote 15 years for the news wire services (UPI and AP) in Helena, Salt Lake City, Denver, Topeka and finally Santa Fe, where I created and edited Journal North for the Albuquerque Journal, retiring as a political columnist.

I built an adobe house in the mountains of Santa Fe and helped raise two daughters in a marriage that ended in divorce. I traveled in Asia, Europe, South America and most of the United States, often with my longtime partner (now wife), Patricia Kvill. I studied at CU-Boulder (BA), Stanford (journalism fellowship), and St. John’s College (MA in Eastern classics).

Most of these essays are from my work as a journalist. They form a conglomerate, but unlike the local rock of that name, they are breakable. Like news.

—Larry Joseph Calloway