The State Champs from the Beginning of the World
This post originally appeared in bioStories The girls from way out on the Makah reservation who won the 2023 Washington state 1B high school basketball championship may be, on average, half a foot shorter and two years younger than every team they beat on the way. But first year Head Coach Cherish Moss—the twenty-nine-year-old with […]
The Bones of 800 Horses
In the mid-1850s, out on the high desert plateau of what is now eastern Washington state, the highly mobile horse nations of the Yakama, Spokane, Paulouse and Coeur d’Alene successfully defended their homeland against an invading army for nearly two years. Their ability to evade capture so frustrated US Army Col. George Wright that he […]
Coming Home: A Sacred Ritual in the Shadow of Uytaahkoo [Mt Shasta]
A fictional representation of the solemn, sacred ceremony used by Native peoples in the American West to welcome home and finally lay to rest to remains of ancestors stolen during colonization and imprisoned in museums and other institutions. From my novel, That Golden Shore. As I walk down to the lake, the mountain beyond looming […]
You Cannot Surf Away Your Demons: Surfing’s Lost Boys Grow Up in Momentum Generation
“All these problems were happening in my life, and the only time I felt really good was when I was surfing,” Shane Dorian says in the somber opening solo interviews that kick off Momentum Generation. The HBO Films documentary, made by Jeff & Michael Zimbalist and released at the end of 2018, gained new life […]
The Drowned Coast: Review of RC Shaw’s Louisbourg or Bust
Hot off the presses. My review of RC Shaw’s surf memoir, Lousibourg or Bust, is in the reviews section in the back, page 123. And because this is a glossy, high-end, old-school, quarterly journal, I can’t provide a link, because these guys don’t do that. So — go old school and buy a copy! The […]
Remembering Kurt Cobain, Remembering Everything
Three days short of twenty-five years ago, I was working late as usual, so I didn’t hear the news until I got into my truck and turned on the radio to WHFS, Maryland’s indie rock station. There was an odd silence, dead air, then the sound of muffled sobs. Was the DJ crying? I turned […]
The G-Word: A Review of Jaimal Yogis’ All Our Waves are Water
The full-length version of J.D. Kleinke’s review in the current print edition of The Surfers Journal(Oct 2018) Name-dropping in the lineup is always a risky move, especially if the name is “God.” Given the weaponization of God’s name – throughout all history, of course, but with a growing ferocity in the current American civil war […]
There’s No Crying in Surfing
There’s No Crying in Surfing: New Film Revisits the Complicated Legacy of Andy Irons One of the now standard shots in adventure film is to start with a solitary skier or snowboarder working a chute or a powder field, and then slowly pull back – way, waaay back – to reveal the massive, dizzying scale […]
Andy Irons Kissed by God: TGR’s Tribute to the Vincent Van Gogh of Surfing
My Andy Irons piece just went live on The Inertia, at https://tinyurl.com/ydcu5x2d If you’re curious for more, here’s the trailer … https://www.tetongravity.com/films/andy-irons-kissed-by-god Fourteen weeks after seeing the movie, this feels a little overwrought. But I was completely wiped out — sorry for the pun — by the movie . . . so the next morning, I […]
Western Swing
The American West is a blank canvas. It is a vault of sky, an infinity of light, a sun-blanched stage bounded by horizon stretching wide enough to show the earth’s curve. Crossing the great empty middle of the country, your first glimpse of the mountains is more hallucination than hard fact, a haze of gray […]
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