By T.A. Akimoff
Walking through the canyons of downtown Dallas on a cold-for-spring morning, I splash through obvious streams of runoff from the newly watered flower boxes, while dodging obviously yellow runoff from the guy in the hoody and camo pants who leans up against the wall like he has a migraine. The grackles mimic sirens as the besuited men are led into high towers to finance their dreams as the restaurants lie dormant mere hours after bustling with late-night crowds, the detritus of which is now blown away by an army of men with leaf blowers so the city sounds like a suburban neighborhood on a Saturday morning in June.
A security guard notices me and falls in beside me.
Tag Archives: Travel
High Attitude

After working a 15-hour day on Wednesday, I decided to spend Thursday morning taking a gondola to the top of Mt. Howard to get a better look at the Wallowa Mountains.
I usually see the range from my hotel room in Enterprise, and the jagged peaks known as the Oregon Alps always remind me of growing up in the little East-Austrian town of Richenau an der Rax.
Having been raised in an alpine town, I’m always intrigued by them. People living life at unforgiving altitudes yet surrounded by immense beauty that constantly makes you lift your head up to behold.
Continue reading High AttitudeThree-Thousand Miles, Thirty Hours and Three Audiobooks
September and October have been two of the heaviest travel months of my career in conservation so far. I have seen the sun rise in Washington D.C. and set in Portland on the same day. I’ve traveled to the political heartland, and I’ve driven thousands of miles around Oregon.
With the demise of creative music and extremely limited options among the mainstays of the music industry, I have been listening to books on tape, or, more correctly, audiobooks.
Continue reading Three-Thousand Miles, Thirty Hours and Three Audiobooks
Grief at Thirty Thousand Feet
Sadness leaks in like the cold. You bundle up, prepared for it. Ready for the onslaught. But it comes in wisps – icy fingers that make you shiver at first. Then you choke as they tighten around your throat.
I stare at the text message, the orange glow of my phone in the dark of a strange hotel room in the middle of the country. I can’t read the letters on the screen, but the message has pierced the sleepy shrouds, the covers over me on the bed, the t-shirt I’m wearing, the skin of my chest and my heart. Continue reading Grief at Thirty Thousand Feet
Traveling with Dad
Dads are interesting creatures.
You spend your lifetime trying to figure out what they are and simultaneously how to be one.
From that moment of discovery, that realization that dawns when you crawl out from under your mother’s caring arms and into the world of men, you will never fully understand it, but it will consume you for the rest of your life.
At least it has consumed me these past fourty four years. Continue reading Traveling with Dad
The Zumwalt in Spring
A flat, steel-gray ceiling hangs low over the town of Enterprise as we leave headed north into the Zumwalt Prairie.
It doesn’t bode well for seeing the menagerie of raptors the region is famous for.
As you ascend the ancient volcanic plateau that houses the 330,000-acre prairie, agricultural production gives way to Idaho Fescue and Bluebunch wheatgrass.
Small cliff faces of exposed Columbia River Basalt line the road, and before the rain begins to fall, we see several golden and bald eagles, a Swainson’s hawk and a dark-morph red-tailed hawk.
As we level out onto the Zumwalt, the Findley Buttes, three shield volcano cones that managed to force their way up through the Columbia River Basalts, rise before us and dominate the landscape. Continue reading The Zumwalt in Spring
Into the Desert: Alvord Basin
There is a small, cold desert east of here that I have seen in my dreams for decades.
It sits high up on a plateau created millions of years ago when basalts flowed over the area in giant, motlen floods .
It sits in the shadow of the snowy mountain, which catches the rain, leaving it parched and flat and featureless.
I had seen the Alvord Desert far below the East Rim Lookout on Steens Mountain the previous evening. The twelve-mile-long by seven-mile-wide playa looked exactly as I had seen it in my dreams, a vast, sandy nothingness stretching away to the south.
Into the Desert: Steens Mountain
I sipped hot green tea as I drove over the Santiam Pass at 6:30 a.m. on a Sunday morning.
The air was still night-cooled, and the tea felt good on my throat, raw as it was from so much smoke from a brutal summer of forest fires.
The familiar landscape of a pass I’ve driven maybe a hundred times gave way to the the suprising landscape of a big burn as I neared the top. The Whitewater fire had burned parts of the forest on either side of the road, and I noticed the mosaic pattern of the burn left swirls of green amidst the blackened earth.
Dropping down into the high desert, as I have called Central Oregon since I first visited there, is always exciting in the way it transitions from the deep green of the Cascades to the beige and sage of the high and dry country. Continue reading Into the Desert: Steens Mountain
Fidel
I looked up into the thick Havana air at the brightly-lit poster on the wall of an old, stone government building.
Viva Fidel 80
The old revolutionary was somewhere in this town in a compound contemplating his retirement announcement, which would happen just a few days later on my last day in Cuba.
The old man didn’t really even make it out for his 80th birthday celebration, and his thin and frail image on television barely registered in a country where his black-bearded and green fatigues image is as ubiquitous as the Cuban flag. Continue reading Fidel
evitcepsreP yM gnignahC
I’ve been coming at this from one angle since all hell broke loose on Tuesday night.
Finding the negatives lying around on the floor, picking them up, weighing them, and then moving on to the next one. Continue reading evitcepsreP yM gnignahC