Coyote Crossing

Ever have the experience of thinking you know someone fairly well and all of a sudden they pull out a talent you didn’t know they had and display it and it’s obvious they have this whole side of their life you knew nothing about, and it’s like a curtain pulling aside and suddenly your world is bigger?

I had no idea Amanda French could do this.

• Comments (5)
• Read More

At Puerco Ruins, Petrified Forest National Park, November 2008

• Buy a print
• Comments (0)
• Read More

Because a guy can’t always be arid-minded. At the confluence of the Tuolumne River’s Lyell and Dana forks, Tuolumne Meadows, Yosemite National Park, Thanksgiving weekend 2007.

• Buy a print
• Comments (3)
• Read More

It’s a mysterious thing, and no one seems to be talking about it online, but account holders with the Amazon Honor System got a note this week in their email, saying, in part:

Beginning December 11, 2008, the Amazon Honor System will be discontinued. This means that PayBoxes on member websites and PayPages on Amazon.com will no longer function.
Amazon Honor System members should make plans now to remove Honor System PayBoxes from their websites. This can be done by simply removing the HTML code originally provided for PayBoxes from your page code document.

We will provide access to disbursement information through December 30, 2008, to allow all transactions to be settled. After that date, Amazon Honor System account pages will be removed from the Amazon.com website. We urge members to create file copies of necessary financial information before account pages are removed.

Anyone here have any idea why this might be happening?

This is a bit of a shame. It leaves those of us who absolutely hate PayPal with no entry-level alternative for online currency exchange. And even if you don’t hate PayPal, this move essentially makes PayPal a monopoly.

While Amazon Honor System had its detractors,…

• Comments (6)
• Read More

At the Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area, just west of Las Vegas in the Spring Mountains. The origin and significance of these handprints is, so far as I can determine, unknown, but they were almost certainly made by the Southern Paiute people who have lived in the area since A.D. 900 or so.

• Buy a print
• Comments (2)
• Read More

For those of you planning to schedule anything in the coming year, please consider doing so by way of writing the relevant scheduling info on a 2009 Coyote Crossing calendar, available to you now for only $24.95. Take a look here!

• Comments (0)
• Read More

At a party in the early 1960s someone handed Kirk Douglas a copy of Ed Abbey’s novel The Brave Cowboy, recommending Douglas read it. Douglas liked the book enough to option it, and hired Dalton Trumbo to write the screenplay of what became the 1962 sleeper western Lonely Are the Brave.

It’s a sweet movie that could never be made today for a number of reasons, probably chief among them the root idealism of the flawed main character Jack Burns. The ending is an ambiguous downer. A significant subplot involves the principled stand one of the major characters takes to aid undocumented border-crossers. The one cop possessed of any competence or virtue (played by Walter Matthau) is hamstrung by the thugs and buffoons that make up his subordinates. Modern audiences unaccustomed to points of view that don’t include smirks might find the movie a bit naive. Burns, a character who appeared in several of Abbey’s subsequent novels, rides into “Duke City” (a thinly veiled Albuquerque) to help a friend who’s been arrested for helping “illegals.“ (That was Trumbo’s…

• Comments (2)
• Read More

• Buy a print
• Comments (8)
• Read More

Found via Nez. Read the review, then watch this.

• Comments (4)
• Read More

Left out of my discussion yesterday of the big solar thermal proposal for the Ivanpah Valley—because I didn’t find out about it until just now—was the fact that the site that would be bulldozed for construction of the Ivanpah Solar Generating Station is of significant botanical importance.

As James M. Andre, Director of the University of California’s Granite Mountains Desert Research Center, says in his article “Will We Know What We Lost?“, in the December 2008 issue of Desert Report:

The nearly 10,000-acre Ivanpah solar energy development project, located in San Bernardino County near the California-Nevada Border, is (at the time of this article) close to approval and implementation. Prior to project surveys at Ivanpah Valley, there existed no database or herbarium records of rare plants in the footprint of the project. Results of project surveys there, however, documented 11 CNPS-listed rare plant taxa, including 80% of the known California occurrences of Asclepias nyctaginifolia.

A previously unknown type of manzanita, for instance, was recently discovered growing on a ridge above Andre’s Desert Studies Center sitting there unnoticed despite the presence of generations of botanists working below. Andre points out that this…

• Comments (2)
• Read More

The Bureau of Land Management reports that it has received applications for large solar electrical generating projects, around 80 of them, that would cover 689,910 acres of California, almost all of it in the desert.

689,910 acres is a big number, and it’s hard to put into perspective. Past a certain size, land area stats are a little hard to grasp. Two acres, the size of the piece of land my parents had when I was small, that’s an easier area to grasp, mentally: if it was all lawn, you could cover it with a walk-behind power mower, figuring a 12-inch wide swath mown at about three feet per second, in four hours or so.

At that speed, assuming you never took breaks to eat or sleep or stretch your lower back, if you started today you’d get 689,910 acres of lawn mowed sometime in June or July of 2165.

That’s still hard to imagine, and besides there is precious little lawn in the desert. How about comparing the 689,910 acres with familiar places of known area? 689,910 acres, about 1,078 square miles, is more than three times the size of New York…

• Comments (10)
• Read More

Those of you buying gifts this month may, he reminded everyone sidelong, want to consider the Zeke Book for dog-loving recipients. Or for animal-loving recipients in general. Especially for those with older pets. I’ve heard from a lot of people that the writing there helped them cope with the stresses involved in loving aging pets, and with the grief of pet loss. But it’s not all down, by any means: Zeke was an engaging and silly and loving guy, and I think that comes across in the book.

If you’ve read and enjoyed the book, or any of my writing about Zeke over the years, please feel free to mention the book on your websites, blogs, livejournals or twitter feeds, or even (gasp!) offline, to friends and family.

And with that said, back to the job search. Thanks!

• Comments (2)
• Read More

Via the comment thread on this post over at Michael’s place, I found myself clicking over to a thought-provoking essay in The American Scholar on the disadvantages of an elite education. Written by literary critic and former Yale prof. William Deresiewicz, it is a well-argued—if sometimes slightly off the mark—criticism of the increasingly shallow nature of education to be had in the Ivy League.

Deresiewicz argues, among other things, that those who value learning for learning’s sake often find themselves ill at ease in the US’s top-tier schools. He says:

...Yale students think for themselves, but only because they know we want them to. I’ve had many wonderful students at Yale and Columbia, bright, thoughtful, creative kids whom it’s been a pleasure to talk with and learn from. But most of them have seemed content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them. Only a small minority have seen their education as part of a larger intellectual journey, have approached the work of the mind with a pilgrim soul.

I don’t know whether this is a fair criticism. If it is, it isn’t a phenomenon limited to the elite…

• Comments (6)
• Read More

The Raven had come up to spend Thanksgiving in the desert, and we did. Rather than feasting, we whiled away that holiday with a long walk in the rainy creosote, watching dark winter storms trail through the Ivanpah Valley. Friday was taken up with moving belongings to my storage locker in Barstow.

Saturday was my last full day in Nipton. So, of course The Raven and I spent most of the day not in Nipton. Instead, we headed for the Mitchell Caverns in the Providence Mountains, a visit to which I’d been promising her since she started spending time with me in the Mojave.

We stopped en route at my mailbox. The Post Office staff person was there, greeted us kindly, and asked again whether I was interested in her job. She’d offered it to me some time before, and I was tempted, but it would have been six days a week and four hours a day and less than ten bucks an hour to start and when I did the math the rosy romantic glow at the thought of becoming Cima’s postmaster faded in my mind. I told her I’d decided against it. Her attempt at PR thus…

• Comments (17)
• Read More

I’ve found a spot of connectivity and time to put together a couple of link lists, including an updated version of the blogroll from my former blog, Creek Running North. You’ll see them in the right column here. (If you’re using a screenreader, you’ll find them at the end of the page.)

I’ve broken the list into sections for desert writers, other desert/coyote links (the “dogroll”), and the basic blogroll. Feel free to suggest additions in comments. What have you been reading lately that’s good? Have I missed any obvious desert writers or constructive, well-written, non-obnoxious blogs?

• Comments (7)
• Read More