Here, for those of you whose prurient interest may have piqued by the comment thread one door down, is a fine, very well-fed individual of the species Spermophilus variegatus, also known as the rock squirrel. This one happened to be working the crowd outside the El Tovar on the south rim of the Grand Canyon a couple weeks ago, but the species ranges throughout the Southwestern states and Mexico, edging just barely into that part of the state of California that fronts the Colorado River, for instance my neighborhood here.
The rock squirrel is one of 18 or so Spermophilus species in the western part of North America. There are currently 42 species worldwide. Spermophilus itself — the name means “seed lover” — is one of three genera of true ground squirrels, along with Ammospermophilus, the antelope squirrels of the desert Southwest, and Cynomys, popularly known as prairie dogs. Close relatives of the three genera include marmots and chipmunks. Taxonomists group ground squirrels, chipmunks and marmots into a…
I’ve heard from a few friends whose participation here I’d value that the password limitations in the Coyote Den kept them from taking part. So I’ve opened up comments on posts themselves, and we’ll find another way to incorporate the Den into our daily lives. I’m thinking about asking desert-based activists and other notables to sit in for public “town hall” interviews, for instance. Stay tuned for that, and say hello in this new comment thread if you like.
Readers who have been around here for a while will recall that I used to have a dog, a fine and patient and only a little bit neurotic dog, whose name was Zeke. I loved Zeke. Zeke loved me in return, and others who have loved me will attest to the fact that this required some work on his part.
Zeke died in February of 2007 after a long and occasionally agonizing decline.
I took increasingly attentive care of him for several months before he died. His daily walks a half-mile down to the local park and back began to require my carrying him back up the hill toward our house. Zeke was of a stature somewhere between Siberian husky and German shepherd. Though he was thinner than dogs of either of those breeds, it still took some doing to carry him a half mile.
I’ve just been notified that my sonnet cycle Trinity will be published in the upcoming issue of Camas, the environmental and literary journal of the University of Montana. I’m immensely grateful, of course, not to mention flattered at the company I’ll be keeping.
The issue will be going to press in December, and available shortly thereafter should you want one. Of course, if you subscribe now — and you should, as it’s a fine journal — you won’t have to track down a copy.
Coyotes sing just outside my window. I awake. It isn’t a dream. The dogs take off after them, singing joyous outrage. The sheep must be protected. Hazel the little goat has broken her leg somehow, and my host will cart her down to the vet in an hour or so. Last night we fretted whether she would die of shock, but she was alert and hungry at two-thirty in the morning.
They aren’t made of money, but what can you do? You take care of your animals. Better one doesn’t do the math, amortize the vet bill with each hoped-for pint of milk. Farmers know the value of a life better than most anyone, or at least to the greatest degree of accuracy.
The sun is not yet up. At this time of day, at this altitude, the air is pink; pink as the belly of…
The Bush Administration is determined to ram through a new wolf-killing plan before leaving office. This dangerous scheme could allow the Northern Rockies states to kill nearly 1,000 gray wolves in the first year alone. Please submit an Official Citizen Comment telling the Interior Department to maintain strong federal protection for wolves.
The plan, concocted in a year in which Yellowstone’s wolf population is seriously threatened by disease, could push the wolves to the edge of extirpation. Take action here.
The rough wood deck feels good against my thighs, sun-warmed in afternoon. A yellow leaf from a cottonwood lands on my knee. I let it stay. My old workboots look good against the duff. There’s motion across the toe of the left one: an elongated dark beetle with two diagonal orange stripes. A box elder bug, fitting as there are three tall box elders just down the hill.
Sweet piñon smoke has followed me all day. Two days ago in a parking lot in Española a muscle car pulled up, stopped in front of me, and a dark-tinted passenger window rolled down. A sullen-looking teenaged girl sized me up. “You wanna buy some piñones?”
The owners of the house are cordial. I’d walked across their front yard and startled them. “Can we help you?” I explained that I was there with my friend, on whom their…
“If you start off with a willingness to compromise, you’ve given up, you’ve lost. Even though the final result, in most cases, is a compromise, it’s a compromise that was reached between two sides, each of which was adamant, and was not going to give in. It was once said in a Sierra Club publication that the only way we’d ever accomplished anything was through compromise and accommodation. That’s exactly the opposite of the truth. The only way the Sierra Club ever won anything was by refusing to compromise — Grand Canyon dams, Redwood National Park — you can go right back through the whole list. When we compromised, we lost.”
— Martin Litton, to a meeting of Colorado River guides in Flagstaff, AZ, 1985
There were two trees here, once; twin and slender boles straining together toward the light, leaves feeding on sun and their branches broadening. Each bole bore a canopy of heart-shaped leaves brilliant yellow in October. Each canopy turned a hollow face toward the other, knitted and entwined twig fingers with the other at the margins, the seam imperceptible, two trees striving to become one.
The trees aged. They grew. Their trunks gained girth, began to press themselves each against the other, a mutual grafting. Each trunk flattened where the other touched it. Rough bark melted between them, turned to soil. Each season brought a new enfolding, trunk growing curved and folding inward against trunk until a common skin of rough gray bark enclosed them both to head height, then twice as high.
One day just one of the trunks still stood, the wrack of a blinding…
Last night, as some in the blog wannabe-pundit world blamed African-American voters for the passage of California’s Proposition 8, a couple of African-American guys struck up a conversation with me in front of CNN’s Los Angeles headquarters on Sunset Boulevard. (I’d walked there with The Raven and her daughter and about 700 other people outraged over the proposition’s passage.) One of the men had been explaining to his friend why he found the issue important. It’s about equal rights, he said. He had gay friends he cared about. His friend was clearly a little uncomfortable, covering up with exaggerated bonhomie. “I don’t have any gay friends,” he said. “Not that I have anything against all y’all. But I’m not gay. I don’t know any gay people. I’m interested in the soul sisters.” Not gay, not gay, not gay. I got the picture. His friend was clearly amused: we shared a…
Regardless of how one feels about the candidate - I myself am shelving my cynicism about centrism, for a couple of days, out of respect for the historical milestone we witness this week - the election was a stunning affirmation of the power of a people aroused, and there is nothing in that about which one can be cynical.
If the next President makes good on his promise to expand the use of nuclear power plants, the desert will pay.
The desert always pays.
Even if it’s the “safe nuclear power” that those of us in the extreme environmentalist community care about. When people talk about “safe nuclear power,” they’re talking about making one very short slice of the nuclear cycle safer: the part where the reactor is functioning. And you know what? I’m prepared to grant it might be possible to design a power-generating nuclear reactor that poses little risk to the environment in the course of normal operation. It certainly wouldn’t be hard to make them safer than the status quo, whether with pebble bed design or some other fourth-generation technology.
But the typical lifespan of a reactor is what, 20, 30 years? Let’s assume a hundred. Let’s grant, for the…
I want you to pick up your phone today and call California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger at (916) 445-2841. You may be on hold for a few minutes after you choose the voice mail option for “express your opinion on a hot issue.” You’ll talk to a human being after a short wait. Tell that human being that the Sunrise Powerlink transmission line routes now proposed for Imperial and San Diego counties are
1) destructive of desert wilderness in Anza Borrego State Park and nearby wildlands;
2) dangerous, given that the lines are expected to spark catastrophic wildfires in the backcountry every 15 years or so, and;
3) unnecessary, given that rooftop solar is a cheaper and more reliable way of providing southern California with electrical power.
You can also, if you choose, point out that Arnold has a good record on environmental…
This is my whole life: driving alone through the landscapes of the arid West. There is someone waiting for me at home, or there is no one waiting for me at home, or I am already home, watching the far horizon recede through the dust-spattered windshield. It doesn’t matter. My whole life. I have been single, and I have been in love, and I have been somewhere in between, mired in relationship, and driving alone in the land where rivers end their lives in sterile saline sumps.
I have made journeys in the company of others, and that company is fine as often as not. Conversation makes the miles pass more easily, stories to share and delicious arguments over trivia and then road’s end is reached and the prosaic story begins, travel forgotten. Driving alone my mind is untethered. Ideas float to the surface, pass, are forgotten. Resolutions…
[updated] Howdy, internets! Feel free to have a look around. I’m still working on making the place a little more navigation-friendly, an onerous task when you’re doing molasses-slow satellite internet from a laundromat in the desert. But here are links to a recent post on Sarah Palin, another political but arguably more prettily written post on development threats to the desert valley I live in, and an assortment of other desert writing on various & sundry desert topics, including what I wryly and privately call the site’s “mission statement.” Have fun!
