Coyote Crossing

Goodbye.

Thistle – rabbit, lover, hero.
2001(?) – March 22, … (continues)

Holding the rabbit

When I first met him he was in a hutch, in the middle of a large chain pet food store doing their part to help the local shelter adopt out animals. He was locked in there, so I found a staff person with a key. The lid rose, he looked at me a bit

Months, years, and days

The news from the Bay Area is full of remembrances this past week. Twenty years has passed since the big Oakland Hills fire. A lifetime, really.

More than a lifetime.

It doesn’t seem that long ago. I was working a dead-end job answering a phone

Chuckwalla Valley

I went out today to see a landscape before it’s completely altered. My camera is on its last legs after only 6 years, but I squeezed a few more washed-out shots from its unwilling frame.

It was in the Chuckwalla Valley, site of the Desert

Spent

Wednesday marked the occasion of my first visit to the Ivanpah Valley since construction began in earnest. I’d been there in October during the Spirit Run to protest the project, but they’d just barely gotten started at that point — putting fences

The Curious Case of The Peanut Butter Sandwich in The Night-Time

After I moved out of Zeke’s house, divorce papers filed and storage locker crammed full of the leavings of what had been my life, I flew elsewhere for three weeks, to a moist green place that was not the desert. A friend met me at the airport. We

How will I know when it’s time?

One of the results of having written about Zeke, on the old blog and in the book, is that on occasion, people come to me as their dogs reach the end of their lives, in search of a sympathetic ear.

A lot of times they’re just looking to vent with

Zeke

Three years ago today I said goodbye to the best friend I’ve ever had.

A week or so later, around what would have been his 16th birthday, I wrote what I’ve pasted below.

It appears as the final piece of my book Walking With Zeke.

What blithe

A sweet little wistful nostalgic love poem

I wish that I had never met
the one who set my heart aflame.
All the decisions I regret
I made after I learned her name,
excepting those I’d made before.
I used to long to hear her voice.
I never do that anymore,
which seems to be the wiser choice. … (continues)

Bibliomancy

Running these days through the comfortable neighborhoods of West Hollywood has made me nostalgic for the garden I left last year. During the divorce and subsequent dislocation, I didn’t let myself miss my garden much. My enthusiasm for the garden

Dodging the random beautiful

I have been thinking about love these days.

This is of course nothing new.

Relationships end and they begin, relationships maintain themselves and they wither. These days I am both buoyed by love and burdened by it. The last vestiges of my

Trinity

A draft of this fourteen-sonnet cycle was on the old blog. I took it down and fiddled with it, then submitted it to Camas, the environmental and literary journal of the University of Montana, whose site seems to be down at the moment. It ran in

Lunch Tuesday

This was for the best, you said, and I think
you were a little disappointed I agreed,
nodding against your shoulder in the parking lot.

A year since we met last, that day I loaded
a few last boxes into the Jeep, kitchen things
and what camping

A year ago

Starflower was beginning to bloom near the beaver marsh. The remains of lady’s slipper blossoms rustled against their pedicels, fluttering as yet another rainstorm approached.

We came together and the skies opened up. My hand took hers and roads

About love

I have often wondered whether this love for the landscape, this ardent longing I feel for dissolution into the wild is not a symptom of some ancient hurt, a way to salve wounds that should have healed long ago.

I speak of kinship, of the shared

Storage Locker in Barstow

In this box, a set of dishes wrapped in shirts I’d forgotten I had.

In this box, stacks of books.

In this box, a set of screwdrivers, a circular saw still covered in sawdust. When was the last time I used it? Building the garden beds. Six years

Stargazing

Under this vault of stars I am content.
Stuck fast to this small rock I am at ease.
Minuscule, ego fading by degrees
and what remains of little consequence.
Only the wind and stars, and nighttime shades
of loves abandoned, fire going cold
as in the

Waking just now from a dream

… (continues)

A moment for Oolie

Our pal Sherwood has lost a good friend.

Based on what Sherwood’s shared of Oolie’s spirit over the years, I suspect this is how he’d want to be remembered.

… (continues)

2008

By Chris Clarke on 2008 12 23 at 12:18:47 pm | 11 comments

It all fell apart this year, the affected exoskeleton I’d thought of as my life: the garden and the art, the home, the writing. There was a moment this summer it all sank in. I had been Becky’s husband, the one who walked with Zeke out of the house

… (continues)

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About me

I'm a natural history and environmental writer, an editor and photographer. I've lived in upstate New York, the SF Bay Area, Washington, DC, the Mojave Desert, and Los Angeles. My writing has appeared in publications ranging from Camas and Orion to Bay Nature, California Wild, the Boston Globe, and about thirty daily papers nationwide when I was a syndicated garden writer for the Knight-Ridder chain. No, I never got to meet the talking car.

I've traveled extensively in the Mojave, Great Basin and Sonoran deserts, as well as in the steppes and slickrock country of the Colorado Plateau.

About Coyote Crossing

This blog has existed in one form or another since 2003. At first it was called Creek Running North, after Pinole Creek, near where I lived back then. I moved in 2008 and renamed the site Coyote Crossing, but about a thousand people* still link here under the old name.

My publicist tells me I should mention that my writing here has frequently been called the best on the Internet.

* May not actually equal 1000

All content Copyright © 2011 Chris Clarke. All Rights Reserved.

Banner painting by Carl S. Buell.