Creek Running North

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.

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.


Autumn 1989.

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.

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.