Creek Running North

Ten things you could do instead of reading this

2008-05-06T15:26:00Z

1) Go for a walk.
2) Call someone you haven’t talked to in a while.
3) Search the back of your refrigerator for items you’d forgotten you had back there, take the ones that are still good, cook something inventive, and invite a friend over.
4) Read a book, whether it’s by me or someone else.
5) Take a nap.
6) Find a nearby wilderness, arboretum, botanic garden, commercial nursery, hardware store bedding plant section, or unkempt vacant lot and consider the lilies.
7) Go to a local café, diner, donut shop, or the equivalent, get something to drink, and people watch.
8) Take a notepad along on #7. Write or sketch something. If you’re better at writing, draw. If you’re better at drawing, write. If you excel at both, sing.
9) Buy a bag of dog biscuits and take them to the animal shelter. Tell them ”Zeke sent me.”
10) Do something that will actually make a difference in the world.

Because Zeke isn’t here, this task now falls to me

2008-05-05T04:22:00Z

That’s machine oil all over the two-week old kitten’s body.

He was so cold when I touched it that I thought “dead for an hour at least.” And then I picked him up and he yelled at me.

I figure his mother, a feral, couldn’t pick him up what with the oil on him. Must have tasted evil.

There was another, healthier, bigger kitten right there, who’d apparently fallen out of a shelf the (not very sensible) mother had put him in, and I grabbed ~~him~~ her. “Your brother needs a heating pad, and you’re the lucky winner.”

Three baths, and some homemade kitten glop, and a session with the blowdryer, and a couple of ruined towels later, they’re snoozing on a low heating pad.

(This, incidentally, is not a good idea for newborns: they can’t move around, and they get burned, and don’t try this at home. These guys are able to roll, and the healthier one is actually tottering around unpredictably. Besides, it’s a high-tech heating pad I bought to sleep on when my back goes out, and it’d be hard to burn yourself on it if you tried. Still, as soon as the little guy was warm, into the box they went.)

More photos here.

On topics other than kitten rescue: I’ll be living in Nipton from July through September, looks like, in an artist’s residence type house, a fifteen-minute drive from my campsite at Cima Dome.

Me and Freda Katz

2008-05-02T18:08:00Z

Autumn 1989.

The Wily And Elusive Desert Bighorn Sheep

2008-05-02T03:31:00Z

Found it! This is both one of my favorite photos of me and one of the most troubling. Bright Angel Trail, October 1992. People were feeding her M&Ms.

Going through the photos

2008-05-02T01:04:00Z

Delight like this was a Zeke expression I didn’t often capture on film, as he usually got kinda annoyed with the camera. But his girlfriend Spirit, on left, was a force to be reckoned with. And there was SNOW.

Going through boxes of photos before the move: pulled out some arguably meaningful shots and put them on Flickr.

Sigh

2008-05-01T19:30:00Z

Part of me hopes it doesn’t sell.

Bear joke

2008-05-01T15:14:00Z

Bear Joke, by Robert Caputo.

hat tip: Hank Fox.

Some housekeeping

2008-04-29T14:39:00Z

[Update: 0) A few people will be arriving at this page in the next couple days because I’ve suggested they look here for samples of my writing. The desert writing can be found here, and the pieces that I’ve decided best represent what I can do in general are sorted here.]

1) In a month I move out. I don’t know where I’m moving to. There’s a good chance I’ll actually be homeless in the month of June, except that I will call it “camping.” I’m tracking down writer-in-residence gigs, volunteer opportunities with housing involved, rental of desert shacks and the like, but since I don’t know where I’m moving to, I don’t know whether I’ll have internet access on any kind of reliable basis.

This will make running a blog difficult. I’ve been thinking about how to address this: the community here has been so valuable to me, and there’s a little income from the blog ads that it would be a shame, though not fatal, to forsake.

If I can be assured of regular internet access, on the order of once a week, I can upload a week’s worth of short posts and set them to publish one at a time. This doesn’t allow, though, for comment moderation, and I’m not willing to let abusive or spammy or troll comments stand for a week. And shutting off comments, or moderating them with a week’s wait, would squelch the good conversations.

2) In a month I move out, and I have a household to split up and packing and giving away and sorting and address change forms and house search and truck rental and Jeep registration and smog inspections and long serious conversations to accomplish, and that’s not gonna allow for much blogging time, even if I ignore getting any book writing done.

3) The personal life blogging has proven to be a bit of a negative issue these days, and perhaps fittingly, I will not go into details here except to say that the number of times the word “div*rce” has popped up in the search logs for this site is kinda ooky. I know I brought that on myself, but it is not just myself onto which it has been brought. And at some point I hope to have a social life, and a social life free of ook is a thing worth having. So this paragraph is very likely the last Relationship item that will be appearing here. Thanks for understanding.

4) I’m trying to get work published in non-self-published dead tree form. Some of the work I want to try that with has appeared here. This is an impediment to publication in many journals. So there will be an increasing number of 404s here as I turn posts off and take them down. I apologize for the inconvenience.

5) In a month I move out, and I am not taking the creek with me. I am still mulling over the whole “blog name” issue as a result.

6) Given all of the above and my resolve to get book writing done, big changes are in store here, with continuing publication of short science essays, nature observation, poetry, and occasional political pieces limited to environmental politics — which is what I do best and is thus probably the most effective politics I can indulge in online — at the “continuing” end of the spectrum, and reformatting of faultline.org into a writer’s portfolio and book sales links and updates on the Joshua tree book’s progress at the “ending the blog” end of the spectrum, with resolution likely by July. In between, there’s gonna be a lot of crickets here, and you may want to avail yourself of the RSS feed so you can avoid fruitless mouse clicks.

7) Some of those desert observation naturey pieces will also show up at DesertBlog, which you should check out.

8) Anyone know of a shack for rent in the Mojave? Wi-fi would be a plus but not necessary.

Commute

2008-04-28T17:14:00Z

The tracks come up out of the earth at Peralta, rise above the houses on brutal concrete pylons. Metal wheel scrapes metal rail as the train heads north. For a few blocks the tracks run above a linear park, an old right-of-way. The old Key Route took this path before the oil and auto companies bought up rail lines across the country, plowed them under.

At Solano the old right-of-way narrows. Houses press their backs up against the verge. From there north you can look down from your seat into the backyards of a thousand neighbors.

If I lived in one of these houses I would imagine my privacy uninvaded. The trains pass quickly, the passengers near-anonymous blurs in the windows preoccupied with newspapers. A whoosh of engine and a scrape of wheel on rail, and we are gone and the residents enjoy their yards in peace. I have been riding this line, though, for a quarter century, and a quarter century of daily four-second glimpses adds up. My time riding this train has been a reel of film, each pass by each yard a still frame.

I have watched the neighbors’ lives through the train’s lens. The new plastic toy tricycle left in different corners of the yard fades in the sun, is supplanted by a series of bicycles of increasing size. Trees are planted, grow, bear flowers and fruit, are pruned, succumb to blight. Roofs deteriorate in each winter’s storms. The signs go up, the house is sold, the paint goes on and fades and the grass grows unkempt and brown and possessions are removed in separate trucks and the signs go up. A second story is framed and roofed and finished and then I forget there was a time it wasn’t there.

An odd intimacy, this, a knowledge of people whose shadow on the earth I have not once seen. An odd affection, this, for the yellow-leaved lemon tree people, the pile of old lumber people, the purple stucco and peace sign people, the turquoise ‘67 Malibu under a tarp people. Their lives flit past as flickers on a screen, and though they are immediately and warmly familiar the train rounds a curve and slows for my station, and they pass out of my mind until the next commute.

Soon

2008-04-26T07:36:00Z

the wind will shift, run fingertips
through the long grasses, combing them
in feathered, cat’s-pawed fields.
I will plant trees, an orchard
at the forest verge, will feed the deer
on mast, will prune the watersprouts
for kindling. A cultivated wild,
a sweet disorder carefully distilled
and in spring the wind will shift,
will drive fallen plum blossoms
before the livid dawn.

Dandelions on tree fern trunk

2008-04-22T22:32:05Z

Quick question

2008-04-22T14:08:00Z

Can someone here please define “love”? Thanks.

Lichen on pallid manzanita

2008-04-21T16:59:00Z

There are two places in the world to which this manzanita, Arctostaphylos pallida, is native. One is a small part of the Oakland hills in and near the Huckleberry Regional Botanic Preserve. The other is where Matthew and I hiked yesterday, on Sobrante Ridge.

I haven’t been there in so long.

The species’ habitat is mostly protected from development, though some of the Oakland Hills stand is on private land, and a few got cut down to the ground by utility right-of-way brush clearers in 1992. (I found the amputated limbs lying by the roadside a day later. I don’t think anyone ever paid for that particular crime.) But a couple good fires with bad recovery conditions following, or a five degree increase in average temperature combined with more summer precipitation (a strong possibility on the coast) and these plants could be in serious trouble.

Those are possibilities, though. We sat beneath the current reality yesterday:

Seeing new growth and a new potential generation on an endangered species: a good feeling.

Demons

2008-04-20T16:36:00Z

Running is wrestling.

Running brings the demons to the surface, the doubt, the defeatist self-loathing. It reveals them more quickly, more reliably, than weeks of the most skilled therapy.

I ran fairly well last night, an unathletic 5K for those of us who quantify such things, and a fifth of the way along I had already persuaded myself twice to keep going. A demon manifests and points out the sore knee, the stitch in the side, the sudden hungers literal and metaphoric, the likelihood of something better happening somewhere else. They suggest, rather pointedly, that I stop.

They are angry bees. Stop to address them and you feel their stings, but if you keep running they will only follow you a little way. I pick a landmark a hundred feet ahead, a hundred yards. I tell myself to run at least to that lamppost ahead, to the bridge over the creek where the swallows build their nests, to make it at least that far and then decide whether to continue. If I stop there, it is a victory of sorts.

More usually, I remember hundreds of yards past the mark that I was supposed to make a decision of some kind. At least in this one way I can make the attention deficit work for me.

Distraction is armor against the demons. Last night, rumination on a friend’s recent note about the notion of “redemptive grief” got me much of the way up two kilometers of hill. What is “closure,” after all, but the expectation of conclusive redemption? Crating Zeke between book covers did nothing to prevent the muddy paw prints tracked across my mind, the claw scratches at the back on my neck as he asks to be let in. It was a night like this 18 months ago that the inevitability of that loss sank all the way in, and the Futility Demon suddenly sucked all the oxygen out of the bay-side air as I ran. I stopped short that evening without conscious thought. Any path I choose to run leads back to the demons eventually.

The hilltop is only three blocks away. Make it that far, 2.5K, and then decide.

At one block from the top I meet the end boss, the demon most difficult to beat. My ankle starts to ache, and I think without intending to of that time in 1997 when I ran on a sore ankle and limped afterward for months. This demon is suave, a fighter native to my internal territory. He knows the terrain well. His voice is comforting, nurturing. “Are you overtraining, Chris? You shouldn’t be forcing yourself to run if it hurts.” He plays all the angles. “What’s with the ridiculous stoicism, the macho? You’ve done great already. There’s no shame in stopping here.”

I tell him to get back to me in a hundred yards. A hundred yards won’t make all that much difference to an overtrained ankle unless I twist it, which I could do just as easily walking home.

Twenty yards on, as I run down a narrow walk cloaked in overgrown oat and mustard, a rustle comes from my left. This is skunk country. I am hypervigilant these days. Every hair stands on end and then I see the source of the noise: a black-tailed deer.

We run together for a hundred yards, my pace feeling the way hers looks, a long series of slow, buoyant arcs.

I am demon-free for another mile or so.

Divorce is looming, though, and displacement, dislocation as of bone from socket. This is a perfect run, I think, even running into this tree-shattering wind, even running into this North wind driving tall whitecaps on flat San Pablo Bay, and after June when wilI I see the Bay again? My laps through this neighborhood are numbered.

I stop running then, without even thinking about stopping, at around 3.5K. I walk a little.

I turn around and walk past the spot where I stopped, about a hundred yards past, and turn again, and when I am ten feet from the demon spot I begin running again, a hundred yards at a time. Again I approach the swallow bridge, a quarter mile away. I will stop there, I promise the demons. Let me make it there and I will stop. That’s 4.5K. I can live with 4.5K. Let me get that far and I’ll let you win.

At the far end of the bridge I turn, ready to stop.

An enormous red moon is rising. It hangs low over the hills only eight hours before it’s full. The wind shifts a little, blows my hair off my back and over my shoulder. It streams in front of me.

I force myself to stop at 5K.

Scentless

2008-04-20T14:39:00Z

I’ve got a piece up today at Comment Is Free, the Guardian’s blog, on the phenomenon of flowers losing their scent. Go check it out, along with the very perceptive literary criticism in the comments.