Coyote Crossing

The Oblivion Bridge

We got Thistle’s ashes back today. Included in the little package the vets handed me were a cedar box containing his cremains, a plaster of Paris medallion with his footprint, and a certificate avowing that the crematory had handled him gently and

Posted without comment.

Received this morning after financial stress made for a sleepless night, and 2) after having the conversation linked to in the tweet here.

Okay, so maybe that’s implied comment.

The email:

Subject: Need free copies of Walking With Zeke ASAP

10 random things I remember

1) When he was clean his forehead always smelled like corn chips. So did the pads of his feet.

2) He hated any sharp cracking sound. This limited our use of the fireplace we had for four years in Richmond. Our next-door neighbor there had a

I hate anniversaries

Five years on Friday. Jesus Fucking … (continues)

Walking With Zeke price adjustment

As it turns out, I’m kind of taking a bath on offering shipping for free when people buy the Zeke book here at the cover price. Once I sat down and did the actual math, I figured out that I make a few cents on each copy that way, not including the

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

Don’t buy Walking With Zeke from Amazon

[Updated: Well, that was fast. Guess we scared ‘em. Amazon Agrees to Collect State Tax in California]

I just posted the below-quoted as a review on the Amazon page for my book Walking With Zeke. If you have a moment to click through and mark it

Pinto Basin

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

On My Mind This Week

But then what else is new?

Days like today I feel like a loose-knit sweater with a stray bit of yarn tied to him. The farther away we get, second by second, the more I … (continues)

The economics of self-publishing: anecdata

In March 2008 I self-published Walking with Zeke, an anthology of blog posts and a few other pieces of writing about my late dog.

It has since sold just under 300 copies, if you don’t count the ones I bought. I get a pretty good-sized percentage

Conservatives respect property unless it doesn’t belong to them

[Update: it’s gone now. Amazing how much it bothered me that Zeke’s image was featured on that pile of mendacity they call a website.]

A guest poster at Anthony Watts’ harebrained climate denial site didn’t even ask permission before stealing

Now selling signed copies of the Zeke book

Really, it’s kind of embarrassing that it took this long to set something up. But if you’ve been holding out on buying the Zeke book because you really wanted a signed copy, you can now order that signed copy here. It’s 20th century book ordering

1,461 days

Day after tomorrow we move the boys to the new place. It’s an auspicious day, kind of. Or at least one in which making new happy memories is appropriate and fitting.

I can still feel him leaning against my chest to say hello to this Black Hills

An old one

… (continues)

The Rainbow Bridge ain’t nothing but a hunk of rock in Utah

PZ has a brief item up with a one-sentence review of books about how pets go to heaven, and Orac has a sad anniversary today, and both got me thinking about something I wrote that until now lived on only in the Wayback Machine Archive, which is

Googling Carl Buell

I was looking for a particular image by my friend Carl Buell so I Googlimaged him, and was slyly happy that his painting of me and my dog was in the first page of results.

And I then realized it’s been almost five years since Carl painted it and

Metaphor du jour of the day

I went to all the trouble to write an entire book describing my relationship with my dog Zeke, and now it turns out someone did a much better job capturing all the important parts in a two-minute video.

… (continues)

A very generous review

By Chris Clarke on 2010 05 26 at 3:42:24 pm | 2 comments | Shorter URL: http://coyot.es/x0n

Elizabeth Eslami has written an extraordinarily generous review of Walking With Zeke.

Just the one line about Ed Abbey, Rick Bass and Barry Lopez will I think keep me grinning for the next week or so:

He’s a less prickly Ed Abbey, a tougher Rick

… (continues)

Emergency Walking With Zeke sale to benefit Berkeley Humane Society

By Chris Clarke on 2010 05 20 at 6:02:52 pm | 0 comments | Shorter URL: http://coyot.es/x5g

Last night a terrible thing happened at the Berkeley-East Bay Humane Society:

Breaking News:  In the early morning of May 20, a major fire destroyed a large section of our shelter.  We lost our entire cat sheltering area as well as laundry

… (continues)

Almost five years ago

By Chris Clarke on 2010 05 04 at 10:40:49 pm | 2 comments

It was late when I took this, after a day of temperatures in the mid-100s, and the temperature had fallen down into the double digits. Matthew and I watched one thunderstorm after another track past. One of them lit a small fire on the north

… (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.