The Squat Feed

From the Backcountry Squatters Story Night: by Noelle Coniglio My close friend Brooke was the first person to call me a badass and at the time, I did not deserve the title. To paint the picture of adolescent me, I was tall and chubby with braces, glasses, and a scoliosis backbrace. Needless to say, I was a vision. Besides being a physical specimen, I was more bookworm than mountain goat and so my outdoor endeavors were far from falling under classification as badassery.             Regardless, Brooke gave me the title after a conversation that went something like:             Me: “Yesterday, my family and I hiked up Arctic Valley and when we got to the top, we just kept going. Someday, I want to put on a backpack and hike and never stop.”             Brooke: “Wow, you’re such a badass.”    ...

From the Backcountry Squatters Story Night: by Eliza Donahue Where are you from? It may seem like a simple question, but it rarely has a simple answer. When I moved to Amherst, Massachusetts to attend college, I would tell people that I was from Santa Fe, New Mexico. What I didn’t tell them was that when I was a young child we lived in a pink adobe house with blue trim, a vegetable garden out back and a single aspen tree out front, surrounded by dead and dying grass and weeds. The railroad tracks ran past our neighborhood, and at night the train would shake the walls gently. Sometimes we would walk through the alley and out to those tracks where fine dust swirled in lazy circles at our feet. Tall trees stood guard over that alley; in the fall their leaves softened our steps and I imagined myself in a secret passageway.  Later, we moved to a different house near those same tracks. Out front there is a stunted peach tree, a remnant of a peach on a distant day just afte...