A few preliminary updates before I start:
Preliminary Update the First: I’m on Google Plus, and the few minutes a day I spend these days conversing online are likely to be spent there rather than in Twitter/Facebook, which have increasingly become more work-only kinda places. Let me know if you would like a G+ invite. It’s so much easier to toss a short piece off there than it is here that It will likely be significantly quieter around here until Google releases an API which allows some one-click kinda coordination.
Preliminary Update the Second: The Zeke Book is in the Apple iBookstore book store. Those of you with eyePads and eyeFones and eyePods can now go crazy. Don’t forget to give the book some stars.
Preliminary Update the Third: I continue to write at KCET. This gig, which is a serious boon financially (though as the hero of the book mentioned above used to say to me on long hikes, we’re not out of the woods yet) has bumped up to two pieces a week. So far this onehas my favorite title. It does both me and KCET a favor if you hit the appropriate “like” “tweet” “buzz” “florp” or “zot” buttons for pieces you read, if you like them.
Preliminary Update the Fourth: I’ve resigned from the Mojave National Preserve Conservancy’s board of directors because what with my work search I have neither time nor funds necessary to provide the level of commitment a non-profit ought to require of its Board members. I still support their work and so should you. Here’s their Facebook page.
Preliminary Update the Last: I have some T-shirts with my very own designs on them for sale here. Check ‘em out. They’re desertpoliticalicious.
So.
Out last night to try to see some of the Perseid meteor shower, Annette and I pulled folding chairs into the middle of the desert off of Pinto Basin Road in Joshua Tree NP. It wasn’t the best night for meteor-watching. The moon was full and up early, and though the skies were clear there was a bit of a haze in the air, a percentage point or two more humidity than usual. Off near Landers giant thunderheads slowly dissolved — they’re back again today — and the moonlight refracted and reflected everywhere. I saw one shooting star all night. Annette saw a dozen or so, she claims.
The moon was bright enough that one could see almost well enough to walk barefoot through the desert, not that I tried, precisely. We talked of shadows cast by the moon and I remembered the first one I noticed, my own moon-shadow at age five or so, in the not-well-lit small town of Ovid, NY. We lived there for two years in a rented house across the street from my mother’s parents. It has been a long time since I’ve been there. My mother’s youngest sister, born two months after I was, still lives in town. She became a grandmother last month. That sank in a little more last night. Two generations along and I still relearn that the moon casts shadows.
I have been sad lately, phenomenally so at times, frustrated with the destruction in the desert and at the utter inconsequence my own efforts to slow that down, worried about what happens when Annette’s unemployment runs out, feeling the loss of an entire community of environmentalists as the landscape I love gets thrown under the bus, frustrated at my inability to find more work. I understand a couple large environmental groups have openings for which I am more or less qualified, helping to guide gigantic industrial solar project developers to sites that the four or five organizations that constitute Gang Green won’t object to privatizing and paving. If only I could stand to betray the tortoises, sell out the woodrats, I could get my teeth fixed and fill my prescriptions. I find myself sympathizing with the biologists who hate the projects, but survey the sites for tortoises anyway. Fifty an hour would come in handy right now. I haven’t been back to Ivanpah since they started construction. I couldn’t stand it. I find a creeping reluctance to get out of the house, a reluctance to learn to love yet another piece of the world lest they pave it too, all the financial advantage going to those who would hold the door open for the ecosociopaths.
But last night — an occasional car passing on the two-lane, evocative far-off engine noise fading — last night was good. Even the invaded sky, two unblinking satellites passing overhead in an hour, was good. A bat strafed us as we sat there. Somewhere in the moonlight a barn owl howled. I told Annette stories. The story of the time Zeke was a good boy and listened attentively to the campfire program at Lava Beds. The story of the time some years before that when the Medicine Lake volcano erupted and created the lava tubes. The time I gave up on any more rides coming and bedded down in the weeds outside Cheyenne, Wyoming. The time I saw my shadow in the moonlight.
By eleven o’clock the temperature had dropped below 80 and chilly, we got in the car and headed for the low desert part of the park. It was warmer in the Pinto Basin. and the moon glinted happily off the chollas. Three years ago we had an adventure in this spot. Annette remembered it well, but I told her the story anyway.
Mountains encircle the Pinto Basin, and a car radio set to “scan” will circle the FM bands until you tell it to stop. Delighted, I hit the “AM” button. Among a thousand fuzzy signals we found one clear one: a country station from the Navajo rez. It used to be like this everywhere n the West, I thought to myself. The station never played “I’m My Own Grandpa,” but it should have.
