Some of my favorites over the years, in no particular order.
The woods line the frozen pond in my sister’s backyard in Northern Wisconsin.
The family cabin: A fading Idaho tradition?
Soaring property values may evict middle-class Idahoans from their popular rural retreats Published by The Idaho Statesman on Sept. 16, 2007 As a child, Kathy Bozman carried water up from the creek to her family’s half-finished A-frame cabin on the mountainside west of Lake Cascade. Vivianne Knight remembers her children getting up on water skis…
Walking a tightrope between life and death
Published in The Idaho Statesman as part of a series on health care costs on Jan. 28, 2007 Robert Mathie lies on a table at St. Luke’s Meridian Medical Center, his knees up and his feet bound together. The hospital’s 4-year-old linear accelerator aims at a target drawn directly onto Mathie’s chest. The therapists leave…
Young farmworker speaks out
Published in The Idaho Statesman on Aug. 8, 2000. Leobardo Morales grew up too quickly. It happened the year he left Santa Maria Tindu, the small town in Oaxaca, Mexico, where he was born. It was the year he left behind his few American-made toy trucks, when he first saw the lights and bustle of…
Small communities that once defined America now need new roles, relevance in global economy
Published in The Idaho Statesman on Oct. 15, 2001 This was the second story in a series on how rural economies were changing and how that affected Idaho families. I led a team of reporters from four papers and two TV stations in the project, which Pew helped pay for. It was a shared byline…
No medal, but the day belongs to Picabo
Published in The Idaho Statesman on Feb. 2, 2002 SALT LAKE CITY — Picabo Street and her mother, Dee, hugged at the base of Snowbasin on Tuesday like there weren’t dozens of journalists and thousands of fans clamoring to get a quote, a look or a wave after the last race of one of America’s…
Pond Culture
Published by The Idaho Statesman on Aug. 8, 2003 NAMPA — There´s something in the water on Diamond Ridge Way. Often, that something is a goldfish, or a lily pad. Or an ancient Japanese carp. But there´s something else. Something that makes folks like Tom and J.J. Waskow dig a series of five ponds in…
The peculiar behavior of animal behaviorists
Published in The Idaho Statesman on Aug. 7, 2003 We first came across the animal behaviorists in one of their natural environments: the zoo. Sue Margulis was visiting Zoo Boise and explaining how she introduces her students to the subject. “Really, the best way to learn animal behavior is to observe animals,” said Margulis, behavior…
Blood Relations: On Love and Basque Sausage
Published in the Boise Weekly in March 2015 (and delightfully written about on this Basque site) In the first photograph I ever saw of the woman who would become my wife, she is grinning ear to ear with her arm elbow-deep in a bowl of blood. She was making mortzilla — a traditional Basque sausage…
The meandering Snake River shapes Idaho’s past, future
Published in The Idaho Statesman, Oct. 21, 2015, as part of the “Seven Wonders of Idaho” series. Riverboat captain Rob Baker grew up on the banks of the Snake River. He has spent his entire life there. He delivers the mail to 18 boxes accessible only by boat — on a postal route run on…
Pete Bowcut has stunned Burley and torn his family apart
Published in the Idaho Statesman on Aug. 25, 2002 BURLEY — Esther Bowcut is living a nightmare that started with a simple search on her family´s desktop computer. Looking for a picture of her young daughter, she found one so sexually depraved that she told police later it made her sick. Her husband had taken…
Follow My Blog
Get new content delivered directly to your inbox.
Gregory Hahn 