This blog is closed
Back
I am back, and readjusting. Abundant thanks to Paul for blogsitting.
Nine chapters of the Joshua tree book drafted, and only fourteen more to go! Or thereabouts. Some of you will be getting the drafts. Lucky people, they.
I woke each morning two hours before my housemates, made coffee, and watched a pair of Bewick’s wrens bringing insects to their brood. Every two or three minutes they would come to the little birdhouse on the back deck, bearing the spoils of the hunt: a moth, a cranefly, a caterpillar gleaming like jade from the rose hedge. They would scold me for watching, white eyebrows bobbing as they clucked.
I slept in the same room, in the same bed, as did Ellen Meloy when she was there. Her handwriting in the Room Journal made my blood run cold, then hot. Her shade haunted me a bit. I fervently hoped she would help my desert words come clear and true, and as sparse as possible. I re-read The Last Cheater’s Waltz when I could write no longer, and then Refuge and then Desert Solitaire and then A Sand County Almanac and then the oh so poetic Packrat Middens: 40,000 Years of Biotic Change.
In between all that, I somehow edged up close to 20,000 words written, which means about 38,000 words typed and 18,000 deleted. And the ten minute walk to town each morning, ravens and quail and turkey vultures. I kept forgetting to bring the bird guide, so the identity of the great, blue, heronlike bird I saw each day on Jon Rowe’s lawn will remain a mystery. I had to pull my blinds in the writer’s shed to get any work done. Out the window, Lagunitas Creek rolled past the Giacomini’s cows into Tomales Bay. On Inverness Ridge, where tule elk avoid all the tourists save one and the iris braves the wind, the fog rubbed up against the scorched bishop pines of the 1995 Vision Fire.
My own Vision Fire has been stoked.
Posted by: Chris Clarke
Comments are closed
Categories:
Wildlife
