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To His Coy Ote
Had we but stealth enough, and night,
To be Coyotes would be right
We would climb down and slink each way
To steal a lamb or two a day.
Thou by the western gorges’ side
Shouldst rodents find: I by the tide
Of suburbs would eat cats. I would
Love you as much as steak and blood,
And you’d fuck me with happy yelps
Till sanity came to Fred Phelps.
My carnivorous love would grow
As rank as creosote or crow
And myriad flies in desert craze
Would on your eyes and forehead graze.
10 comments on "To His Coy Ote"
It’s International Vulture Awareness Day
In celebration of International Vulture Awareness Day, here are some photos I’ve taken of the three vulture species native to the 48 contiguous United States.
A turkey vulture, Cathartes aura, flying past me four years ago on a narrow promontory above the Pacific Ocean.
A group of American black vultures, Coragyps atratus, perched in July 2006 on a buncha saguaros about twenty feet from the US-Mexico border (which I guess makes them International Vultures).
And last but decidedly un-least is this aloof beauty, a re-released California condor (Gymnogyps californianus) perching a few dozen feet below the South Rim of the Grand Canyon in November of 2008.
For much more on the condors at the Canyon in particular, and International Vulture Awareness Day and the plight of the birds in general, check out Madhusudan’s fine post at Reconciliation Ecology, a blog you should be reading anyway.
8 comments on "It’s International Vulture Awareness Day"
Fire
The largest fire in Los Angeles County history was apparently set on purpose.
Outside the fire zone itself, the result downwind is still dramatic and deadly. Even as far away as Northern Arizona, the results of the fire are what you might call rather incendiary themselves.
It isn’t uncommon for SoCal fires to fill the desert with smoke. I’m thinking of a 2003 visit to the desert this later post describes. I was sick for a long time after.
1 comment on "Fire"
In Search Of
It’s been a number of months — no, wait, almost two years — since I indulged in subjecting you all to the found poetry to be found in this site’s search strings.
Clearly this cannot stand.
I went through the top few hundred and picked out the ones that seemed to me for one reason or another to best sum up the spirit of the place. I left out a few that I wish would just go away. I mean, who on earth under the age of 70 remembers who B*nn*e Fr*nkl*n is, much less tries to find nude photos of her on the net? I mean, come on.
I have not corrected any spelling errors or other similar field marks of the random internet searcher. Technical flaws resulting from equipment failure as well as human overload are inevitable in an Internet of this size. Just as inevitably, some of them occur in the material included in this blog post. Consider them like scars in fine leather, proof of the origin and authenticity of the material in which they are found.
Search String Found Poetry
joshua tree extinction
white racist groups in buffalo ny
mojave mole
the bear missed the train
stephen hawking is stupid
i give up!
zeke storms whistleblower
vox clamantis in desierto
twentynine palms meth labs
i am not just a dog
strode wavelenth
we must imagine sisyphus is happy
tree octopus
what submersible discovered the java trench?
llama
raven
teasel mouse
when did crinoids come into being.
socially illiterate
how to make clothes invisible with gimpshop
coyote proof yard
what is sagebrush - steppe ecosystem of thar desert
the fish coyote
i am not a feminist
how to find joshua tree forest walker pass ca
bitch phd
every word is like an unnecessesary stain on silence and nothingness.
moon’s fault line
dangerous fictional characters
top 10 dangerous terrorists ever existed
stephen hawking is stupid
how to win giving up?
tlalpeno soup
walking in times of trouble
then coyote
when can you say that there’s a balance of nature
watching trains
population of the coyote in sonoran desert
argiope
wild wolves in el paso
moonbats
yucca dragon trees
wildlife crossings jaguars
a woman after my heart
the broken pillar of the wing jags from the clotted shoulder,
wrinkled up, feminest, old liberal
yucca brevifolia jaegeriana
chili pepper lights
growing chile de arbol
ananda dog fahrenheit 451
who is bitch phd
when do chenopods release pollen?
wellbutrin creativity
stratherian
timeline of the rapture
water problem ,coyote creek, az
i just split and divide my yuccas in august
mojave desert loners
i give up
i will now proceed to entangle the entire area
mojave desert river of gold
owens valley river video
teratorn myths
top 100 conservative fictional and non- fictional women
urban coyotes
what are the lizards you win at the carnivals
wildlife diorama for kids
what is minnetoba
small and dangerous fictyional characters used for stories
thai cannibalism black people
women stuck in deep mud
thylacine
where can i fucking camp around las vegas valley
i have purple kernels in my corn
timeline of grand canyon million of years ago
stubby elvis
what are baby bats called
where in the mojave desert is the best for seeing stars?
the slow fucking dog
caldo tlalpeno recipe
how to get rid of bat on porch
i want a job
idaho rodent pictures
mojave desert etchings
mojave desert jackrabbits winter starve
mojave desert trailer park meth lab
mojave river coyotes
moon beach coyote wolf
smell of redbuds
smurfette chooses to
solutions to dog nail noise on wood floors
star jasmine meaning
tim & eric you are a woman after my own heart.
when do coyotes emerge at night
where can you find pyrite in colorado?
where does stephen hawking get money
wolf population bush plan
trains go by
sentence with fodder
monterey pattern to fog
snails sex
who said “and still it moves”
why doesn’t anyone ever tell the truth about burning man?
i like running, photography, writing
who cannot delay further
the peppermint trolley company blog
missing hitcher eaten by the worlds largest bear
troll post
witticism
watching threw trinity
how many wives can a born again christian have
3 comments on "In Search Of"
Zeke has a Facebook page
For those of you on Facebook, consider checking out (and becoming a fan of) Walking With Zeke’s Facebook page. We’re sharing dog photos over there, and an excerpt from the book every few days.
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Mountains, ardent
It was somewhere around Mendota that I saw the hawks, a dozen of them, in a mixed flight of ravens around a stand of eucalyptus. The hills to the west were glowing, their sculpted structure plain in the slanted light. The Raven asked why the hills looked the way they did. “It rains here,” I said. “Softens the edges.”
She knows the way the mountains look in Southern California. Here they are brash and abrupt, scraped out of the depths by the grind of crustal plates along the San Andreas Fault only last week, it would seem, just long enough to have grown a stubble of resinous pines and absurd houses.
That same process builds the Coast Ranges, it’s true. And yet the Coast Ranges are softer somehow. Even where they rise to relatively prodigious heights, in the Yolla Bollys or around Clear Lake, they still seem cuddlier than the mountains in Southern California, as if you might hike into them and lose yourself in comfortable folds of fabric.
A few days ago I sat on the Oakland Waterfront, watching a drunk fool ineptly hit on The Raven and her daughter at once, and thinking about the mountains a few miles east. Longing for them. I lost myself in the little side canyons up there, a lifetime ago, when I was younger than The Raven’s daughter is now and before she was born. I had lost everything except the redwoods in those side canyons, themselves an echo of an echo of the forests that once grew there. The ancestral trunks were torn down to build cities, then their stump sprouts were cut and milled after the cities burned. They had lost everything but the place they lived in.
I thought we’d shared that, back then, when I thought I was weathering the worst blow imaginable. I was a fool. I had no idea how much a person could lose and still keep breathing.
It is a sweet and accidental family in which we find ourselves, The Raven and The Raven’s Daughter and I, and we laughed to ourselves at each person who presumed me The Raven’s Daughter’s Father. We did not worry about correcting them. She is a creative and an eccentric, Coyote with hair the color of a Steller’s jay, with a fascination for bird skeletons and Peru and sun-bleached wood, and so the presumptions made a kind of sense as she clearly got all that from me.
Leaving Oakland was thus a bit more wrenching than it might have been: one more thing there to miss from afar.
How odd a feeling. How unusual and unfamiliar. I have been on my guard, with the missing the place I lived for so long. And of course the place I lived is fading, dissolving with each day spent and each bit of wildland plowed under, paved over. The Bay Area I left last year mixes in my mind with the Bay Area of 1982, and more of that Bay Area is gone than remains. Even that that remains has changed. “There,” I told myself driving south, “is the Pleasanton Ridge. I always meant to climb that.” I could still, but it would be different, no longer a newly explored aspect of home, now fraught with wistfulness about lives left behind and self-deprecation about what I wasted my time doing instead of hiking there. A quarter century and I only stood on Diablo’s summit thirty times or so?
Traffic slowed at Livermore. I repeated the process with Morgan Territory, though I had to amend my lament from “never got around to it” to “didn’t get there often enough.” “There’s a cliff there,” I told The Raven, “where you can stand and peer down at vultures soaring a hundred feet below.”
“Mm-hm,” she said, preoccupied by the influenza she was in the process of contracting.
“I have a photo from that cliff,” I continued, “of Zeke gazing out into the distance, with Mount Diablo sitting prettily on the horizon.”
“We need to go,” she said, sensibly enough despite my privately laying down my sodden freight upon the prospect.
We need to go is good advice. A year I’ve been here meaning to take a few hours, to drive Route 2 from where it passes our house two blocks south of here and up into the sharp, unsoftened mountains. Twice the altitude of anywhere I hiked in the Coast Ranges, pines and false firs and granite an hour from home. I needed to go! And two days ago we drove home past it as it burned, an image for which “hellish” is the only apt descriptor and not nearly strong enough, angry orange spread across two dozen miles of mountain range front. I needed to go there and I did not, and now what was there is changed forever.
2 comments on "Mountains, ardent"
This is different from Obama putting your grandmother on an ice floe.
I told Grrlscientist that I’d have a post up today encouraging you all to go vote for her so that she can get a free trip to Antarctica. This isn’t the post I’d hoped to write about that, but it’s been a hell of a day. So let me just say this: If you go through the admittedly byzantine process of registering with a valid email address* and vote for Devorah, and she wins, we’ll get some damned good blogging as a result. And it costs you nothing. NOTHING!
*arguably intended to make this a fair contest, with none of the ballot stuffing and multiple voting that characterizes certain other Science Bloggers’ participation in online polling.
