Coyote Crossing

Cactus wren call and the smell of blackbrush. Four months since I woke in the Joshua tree forest. Sage sparrows and wind through pointed leaves. Four months ago I awoke after sleeping little. Patches of snow in the shade of Joshua trees.

There are mornings so cold they hurt. In January I could not tie my boots and the coffee was frozen. These days the sun creeps up slow and lingering behind Avikwame, behind the Castle Peaks, behind Kessler Peak in the Ivanpah Range, and though the first direct shards of sunlight may throw themselves down against sleeping forms I am not one of them.

Cactus wrens and the whir of grasshoppers. On warm mornings there is the temptation to linger. The ground is hard and first night’s sleep comes reluctantly. I awake a hundred times, glance blurrily up at the reassuring stars, pull the sleeping bag up over my face. Even in April there would be chill at 5,500 feet and three in the morning. Glasses stuck away in my left boot against the possibility that I will step on them, or worse that a woodrat will haul them deep into a midden somewhere, and now and then I will take them out, compel the blurry stars to resolve. Hard sleep comes at last an hour before first light. Each morning in the desert an ache, a slow procession of black rock becoming deep burnt russet, sky black then indigo then red, and the cactus wrens drill their songs into my head.

The sun will break free of the earth, surmount these peaks incarnadine. In a few hours it will drive all shadow from the forest floor, feed the swelling cells of the Yucca and Menodora. The Uta and the Xantusia will bask their lizard bodies in it, but I will not see them.

It has been too long since I have been home.

1 comment on "Morning"

I was gonna photoshop a keyboard and trackball under his fingers there, but I’m too tired.

1 comment on "How I feel after the last week of coding"

I’ve literally been pulling 20-hour workdays getting The Clade up, so not much in the way of writing from me here. (It’s not self-sacrifice: I can use the site as a piece of my web site building portfolio.) Even before launch, contributors have jumped on board and we’ve got some great stuff already live over there. Check it out. And jump on board yourself!

3 comments on "Pointer"

Rainstorm clearing, evening, just west of Tucson.

5 comments on "A little bit of Earth Day green"

Erica caught the above photo of me taking this photo of a snake. If the snake has a photo of Erica taking this shot, then, um, it’ll bite its tail or… something.

4 comments on "Metaunderfoot"

Coyote Crossing has been honored with “Featured Blog” status at the Nature Blog Network’s blog. Check it out, and then crawl the links to other Nature Blog Network sites!

5 comments on "I’ve been interviewed"

Hiking pal Erica and I found this cute little guy in the Verdugo Hills, between Burbank and La Cañada Flintridge. We’d been warned about his (?) presence by a mountain biker with a golden lab puppy, who apparently tossed rocks at it to get it to move off the trail. The mountain biker tossed rocks at it, I mean. Presumably the dog did not. Golden lab puppies in my experience tend toward a view of snakes that falls somewhere on the plane defined by the three points “stick,” “friend,” and “meat,” and interactions based on this worldview can easily end badly for both puppy and snake, so I didn’t begrudge the guy the stone-throwing, though I did wince to hear of it.

“It’s a big one,” the biker said. “Three feet long!” He was holding his hands four feet apart.

I was kind of hoping we’d find a rattler this morning. Larry Hogue and I saw a coltish 12-inch juvenile in Runyon Canyon a couple of weeks ago, as meek and inoffensive a deadly venomous creature as you’d ever hope to see, trying to cross the fire road as joggers and bicyclists bore down on it, looking for all the world like a hemotoxic version of Frogger. I’d neglected to take the long lens on our walk that day, and missed getting a photo. I took the camera today, long lens attached.

A strange thing: after a half century of trying to shed the snake-fear Dear Old Mom layered over her toddler’s innate herpetophilia, I seemed to have finally done so with that Runyon Canyon snake: I felt only joy in seeing it there, mere inches from my boots.  This one today was mere inches from Erica’s low-cut running-shoe-style hikers. Fortunately for both Erica and the snake, she noticed him at the last moment and levitated nicely. The snake didn’t flinch at all, nor did it rattle or in any way behave as though it felt threatened or beleaguered, despite the previous rock-throwing. As I suspected, the snake wasn’t anywhere near three or four feet long: the well-documented phenomenon of crotalid linear folkloric inflation had increased his putative length by the usual factor of two.

I took the above and a few other photos and we walked a little ways out to a promontory with a view of the San Gabriel and San Fernando Valleys.

When we doubled back I didn’t see the snake. “He seems to have taken off,” I said, to which Erica replied “no, he’s just coiled under that plant.” I’d walked past his face, well within striking distance. He could easily have ruined my day, and yet he didn’t.

My affection for rattlesnakes grows. What sweet and noble animals they are.

9 comments on "Underfoot"