Although writing has only been an avocation for me, it has been a serious one, and over the course of my adult life I’ve devoted considerable time and energy to it. My articles and essays have appeared in Sports Illustrated, The Sun, High Plains Literary Review, and the Daily Iowan. In 1995 Johnson Books of Boulder, Colorado, published a collection of my essays titled The Lightning Field: Travels in and around New Mexico; that book was out of print for a number of years, but in September 2023 I reprinted it through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing and IngramSpark, and it is now available in various formats from Amazon.com at https://www.amazon.com/Lightning-Field-Travels-around-Mexico-ebook/dp/B0CHQVV8YH/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2A9ZDDQV69BJG&keywords=eaton%2C+lightning+ield&qid=1694712343&sprefix=eaton%2C+lightning+field%2Caps%2C97&sr=8-1; from IngramSpark at https://shop.ingramspark.com/b/084?hgbwsd53rp58hncoYWTUqSIk7xp7ps6L3ePOJFmrwGU (hardcover) or https://shop.ingramspark.com/b/084?H7mYe299UMayQol39YzXEbWx3D0fqtMeU9gppYsa8Mb (paperback); or from other online or brick-and-mortar booksellers.
I also recently published through KDP and IngramSpark a second collection of essays titled Circling the Wolf’s Head: Travels and Encounters around Lake Superior, which is available in various formats from Amazon.com at https://www.amazon.com/Circling-Wolfs-Head-Encounters-Superior-ebook/dp/B0CHPR15R2/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3GY3ZE4L6Y9ZJ&keywords=eaton%2C+circling+wolf&qid=1694712038&sprefix=eaton%2C+circling+wolf%2Caps%2C84&sr=8-1; from IngramSpark at https://shop.ingramspark.com/b/084?AfaHDtKG5UIFzLmSGR3dbJ9s9T3m8yFmWC0DTOXKxWI (hardcover) or https://shop.ingramspark.com/b/084?FCrUyxAIXsX1NWLHU5MyGXP1hcMqqfYwqTdFTjdrPqZ (paperback); or from other online or brick-and-mortar booksellers.
As for my personal history, I was born in 1954 in Colón, Republic of Panama, into a U.S. Navy family. I have no childhood traumas to reveal. My father and mother were wonderful parents, and my older brother and sister tolerated (and occasionally even protected) the bratty little kid in the house. I once told a friend that my childhood was golden, and in most respects it was. But because my father was in the military, we moved every few years, and as I grew older, I found those changes increasingly difficult. By high school I had established a defensive perimeter around myself and was keeping what I considered a safe distance from people I didn’t know well. That wariness has persisted and, I think, contributes to a certain writerly attitude on my part. Like many writers, I feel more comfortable on the edge of a group than in the middle of it—“off to the side,” as Jim Harrison put it—which, in any case, is a better vantage point from which to observe and comment on what’s happening in the world.
My early adult life was also peripatetic. I graduated from Vanderbilt University in 1976 with a B.A. in philosophy. After a brief and unsuccessful foray in graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin in the late 1970s, I migrated to more remote areas of the American Southwest, where I worked for a total of ten seasons as a ranger for the National Park Service at Canyonlands National Park, Utah; Guadalupe Mountains National Park, Texas; Chaco Culture National Historical Park, New Mexico; and Navajo National Monument, Arizona. Toward the end of that time I returned to school at the University of Iowa, earning an M.A. in nonfiction writing in 1985. Unable to find a teaching or editing job that would both pay the bills and allow me to indulge my idiosyncratic interests, I then returned to the Southwest and enrolled, somewhat reluctantly, in law school at the University of New Mexico.
After a difficult first semester I settled into law school in Albuquerque, and by the time I graduated in 1988, my trepidation about becoming a lawyer had (mostly) disappeared. Shortly after graduation I moved to Phoenix to take the bar exam and work for a large law firm that specialized in intellectual property and Indian law. I enjoyed the large-law-firm experience more than I expected. Although the firm exacted its pound of flesh, the work was interesting and the pay was good (especially compared to that of a seasonal park ranger). But after I had been working there for only about a year, a friend sent me an advertisement for a job with the Office of the Solicitor of the U.S. Department of the Interior in Santa Fe—a job that seemed to suit me perfectly. I hemmed and hawed but at the last minute applied for the job; was offered it; and moved back to New Mexico. I worked in the Office of the Solicitor for the rest of my legal career, first in the field office in Santa Fe; then in the headquarters office in Washington, DC; then in the Rocky Mountain regional office in Lakewood, Colorado; and finally from a “remote” duty station in Charlottesville, Virginia. I retired in 2023, having outlasted most of my peers (not necessarily a good thing).
The practice of law proved to be more interesting (and demanding) than I ever imagined it would be. I feel lucky to have spent most of my career working in areas that had long interested me, particularly natural-resource and Indian law. My legal training taught me to read and write more carefully, to think more critically, and to exercise a healthy skepticism about what people know or say they know. All good things. At the same time, “thinking like a lawyer” tends to constrain one’s view of the world. Although I’m a relative newbie to retirement, it already seems to be fostering in me a less structured mode of thinking and being. More free form. As when I was younger, however, I am finding that I can understand my subjective experience of the world only by capturing it (or trying to capture it) in words. For me, words remain the coin of the realm. And so I am rediscovering the always-difficult, often-frustrating, and occasionally joyful process of drafting and editing (and editing again, seemingly ad infinitum) essays, articles, sketches, and vignettes about things in the world that matter to me or catch my attention. It’s good to be back.
One more thing: For many years, beginning in high school, I was a competitive runner, and I still try to run a couple of times a week, although my activity is now limited by aging, arthritic joints. My former teammates and running buddies remain some of my closest friends, and several of the pieces posted on this site concern our experiences in the sport, when, as one put it, our goal was to “move as swiftly as possible across the surface of the earth.”