Coyote Crossing

Slept on the ground last night in sub-freezing temperatures. Woke up surrounded by Joshua trees growing out of patches of snow. Drove with The Raven along Route 66. Ate lunch-dinner at the Bagdad Café.

Best Birthday Ever.

Also, please join me in wishing Coyote commenter Arvind and his beloved a happy first anniversary!

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I’m offline and sleeping on the cold, cold ground until my personal odometer clicks over. Enjoy the next few days, please.

In the meantime, I’m pleased and slightly befuddled to note that the RedBubble group American Southwest has named me a “featured artist” this week. Go check out the group, which includes works by photographers from whom I could clearly learn something.

And speaking of RedBubble and the desert, here’s a nice spot that the Las Vegas civic parents want to fill up with an airport. Looks like rain.

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Snow remains this afternoon, thin glazed patches underneath the junipers. Ravens fly in pairs through the Western Mojave sky. A pair approaches, not seeing us behind a stand of juniper and Joshua. First one and then the other double-takes, stumbles in mid-air.

Their wingbeats are loud enough to echo off the low Neenach hills. It’s not as quiet as I’ve gotten used to, but it will do. The ground is sodden. It must have been a few inches of snow fell here last week, drifting under the junipers, turning the alluvial silt and gravel to mud as it melted.

Juniper and Joshua on the valley floor: a taste of the Pleistocene Mojave. We passed the Gorman grove on our way here, burned to the ground a decade or so ago. Stump sprouts already studded that field when I stopped three years ago. That’s the westernmost stand of Joshua trees, and the story is they rode there on the San Andreas fault, escaped the confines of the Mojave Desert with sly, tectonic patience. Their closest fellows that I know of are fourteen miles east, about a 70,000-year trip along the fault. This seems wrong. I need to ramble in the…

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Connect the dots.

From a San Francisco Chronicle article published yesterday, written by the estimable Jane Kay.

The context:

The federal government is taking steps that may open California’s fabled coast to oil drilling in as few as three years, an action that could place dozens of platforms off the Sonoma, Mendocino and Humboldt coasts, and raises the specter of spills, air pollution and increased ship traffic into San Francisco Bay.

The nut graf:

President-elect Barack Obama hasn’t said whether he would overturn President Bush’s lifting last summer of the ban on drilling, as gas prices reached a historic high. Sen. Ken Salazar, D-Col., Obama’s pick as interior secretary and head of the nation’s ocean-drilling agency, hasn’t said what he would do in coastal waters.

Foreshadowing:

In Congress earlier this year, Salazar, Obama’s nominee for interior secretary, supported a bipartisan bill allowing exploration and production 50 miles out from the southern Atlantic coast with state approval.

The reveal:

“We’ve been encouraged that the president-elect has chosen Sen. Salazar,“ said Dan Naatz, vice president for federal resources with the Independent Petroleum Association of America, a group with 5,000 members that drill 90 percent of…

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There’s snow on Telescope Peak right now. We saw it from the spot we hiked to in Red Rock Canyon State Park this afternoon, my first visit in years. (The Raven and I sat for a time where Zeke and I sat one night long ago.) And then a few hours later on the road near Randsburg we saw it again, snow mantling the highest point in Death Valley National Park, eleven thousand feet and change. The peak looks down to the flat at Badwater, 282 feet below sea level.

The western Mojave is oddly green right now. Snow settled on the ground last week and melted slow, feeding the grasses and the exotic filaree, the tickseed. The snow on Telescope Peak may melt this week or not until March. Some of the meltwater will run down Hanaupah Canyon toward the floor of Death Valley, will mingle with the hypersaline groundwater there. And some will run off toward the Panamint Valley through Surprise Canyon, which holds one of just a few perennial streams in the DVNP.

[photo, left: Dead porcupine, Los Angeles]

One thing about the home I left this year, the SF Bay Area: The science museums there will spoil you but good. The flagship is the California Academy of Sciences, for whose erstwhile publication I actually did a little writing back in the day. Anything I can write about CAS is outdated, as they’ve opened up a brand new facility in Golden Gate Park that I haven’t seen, but the pre-move facility was damn impressive, aquarium-cum-planetarium-cum-paleoecological reconstruction done right.

Across the Bay is the Oakland Museum, quite possibly my favorite natural history museum, though Tucson’s Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum offers some serious competition. Oakland Museum’s natural history section is a mere third of the museum, but of all the places I’ve been to, again possibly excepting the ASDM, the Oakland Museum does the best job of contextualizing natural history. OM has the usual dioramas of taxidermied dead things arranged artfully, but rather than sticking all of them in wall sconces…

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Eric has an gift or two he’s planning to return this week, including:

... Ken Salazar. But then, we actually pay attention to Interior. Its one of those “Indian Things”, like siting in circles talking to rocks, or watching the revolving doors at DoJ and Interior and K Street as the Savages of Wyoming move billions out of the MMS and into the coffers of corporations that love the RNC more than butter.

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Dayumn.

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[Update: If I believed in ghosts, I know who I’d think did this.]

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It all fell apart this year, the affected exoskeleton I’d thought of as my life: the garden and the art, the home, the writing. There was a moment this summer it all sank in. I had been Becky’s husband, the one who walked with Zeke out of the house painted orange with the agaves out front, the one who hiked in the East Bay hills and wrote facile snark and tossed-off poetry on his blog, and all of it gone.

All of it, and I spent the summer taking that in, cowering beneath the creosote, wincing at each incoming phone call.

Nabokov said that “transformation from larva to pupa or from pupa to butterfly is not a particularly pleasant process for the subject involved.“ The caterpillar at least has the consolation of eventual flight.

It is not all bleakness, by any means. I am loved and I love. I have redressed past wrongs, made amends long overdue. And even in bleakness there is solace, the honesty of stony ground and cholla.

The problem is distinguishing between the honest bleak and the bleakness driven by inward illness, in me and in others. I have sought out those who would…

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This is very, very hard to watch.

Do it anyway.

Go to http://www.SaveThePolarBear.org. Sign the petition. Spread the word.

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[This post was at first a comment on the Vilsack thread, and after a couple requests to promote it to post status I am doing just that, after correcting a couple of typos. Hope someone finds it useful.]

Unlike a lot of environmentalists I don’t have an across the board objection to the notion of altering an organism’s genome. There is a lot of uninformed and alarmist commentary on GMOs, and it can be hard to separate out objections to the current implementations of GMO technology from more non-specific gut-level opposition.

My objection to GMOs as they are being implemented is that the basic motivation for almost every introduction thus far is profit-driven rather than need-driven.

Probably the best-known example is that of Roundup-Ready crops, developed by Monsanto to withstand applications of Monsanto’s patented herbicide Roundup. Theoretical benefits to the farmer include the ability to grow crops without tilling the soil to control weeds. In actuality, weeds develop resistance to Roundup and yields have been shown not to exceed conventional crops reliably. In the meantime, Monsanto not only gets more income from crop-driven sales of Roundup, but from sales of its proprietary seed, and…

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I miss the certainty I had back then.
I miss the knowing all of it, the keen,
the ardent hewing to my heart’s clear path.
Old men slow-shamble in the liquor aisle,
sigh Russian imprecations baleful, soft
under their smog-choked breath. This shortest day
ends soon, the sun resigned. This is the life
I have these days, the slow awakening
and tethered dreams, heart tied to ghosts and soul
enervated, searching these tawny hills
for beating hearts there, under the chamise.
I saw a hawk above Elysian Park,
two hundred feet or more, and all the world
below it scurried heedless to some end.

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Via Tee Poole, an astronomer’s sky cam in New Mexico catches something unexpected.

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