Coyote Crossing

Harrison Solow, interviewed at Working Writers:

In your opinion, what’s the measure of a successful writer?

My opinion is very conventional and very American. The measure of a successful writer is a published writer who gets paid for her/his work. A writer of “prosperous achievement.”I know there are other opinions, but this is mine. When I was teaching a course called Writing to Pay the Rent which I created and developed to help my students answer the question “What can you do with an English Degree?”, I heard from my students that there was a local poet in the area who kept advising students not to take it! It was hailed by the Head of Department as the single most innovative course the department had ever taught; it brought attention to the university from the external assessors during their examination of the department and the university that was extremely positive; (I was told by them that the university was being given extra positive reviews as a result of my course and that they wanted to make it a model for other universities in Great Britain); the students loved it – it was oversubscribed when it was first offered and the students asked for an extra class every week, in addition to the two classes already scheduled just because they loved it; and this crackpot (not even a member of the university) decided to launch a little mini-campaign against it.

It seems, as it turns out that she encourages her half dozen or so followers not to get paid for their work, because, she purports, if one is paid for one’s work, one cannot possibly be any good, which is really too idiotic to be believable, condemning, as it does, the judgment and professional evaluation of every book, magazine, journal, chapbook editor, agent, publisher, critic, on the entire planet, with the exception of the “poet” herself. Not to mention every writer who has ever been compensated in the history of letters. But there is that attitude out there apparently. I suspect the rationale is that as long as you keep your work to yourself and a few misguided local groupies, you will be assured of a very high self regard no matter what rubbish you turn out and will never have to face public or professional opinion.

3 comments on "Harrison Solow on writing and payment therefor"

1) I have been reminded (via a Facebook post by the Center for Biological Diversity’s Great Basin guy Rob Mrowka) that I’ve been meaning to point you all in the direction of Chance of Rain, a wonderful blog on western water and related politics by writer Emily Green. Of recent note there are Emily’s update on a suit over Las Vegas’ attempt to siphon water from the Snake Valley (mentioned here before) and a fascinating look at how biologists and land managers are rethinking tamarisk, an invasive plant long the bane of western ecologists that has nonetheless become crucial habitat for the southwestern willow flycatcher.

2) I’m finishing up reading Colossus: Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century, which I heard flogged on NPR’s Fresh Air last week. It’s a fascinating read, authoritatively researched, and made very personal by author Michael Hiltzik, who tells stories of the personalities involved in the dam construction project, from Presidents to wage laborers. There’s a problem, though. Hiltzik seems to make absolutely no mention of the environmental impact of the dam and reservoir, aside from mentioning two towns and some archaeological resources flooded as Lake Mead filled. I don’t usually like to criticize books for what the author didn’t write, but in this case Hiltzik seems to underline the omission by repeatedly referring to the desert landscape as “barren,” devoid of life and notable only as a blank slate on which humans create their profitable projects. There is no mention of the free-flowing river’s native fisheries driven toward extinction by the dam’s construction. There is no description of the old-growth desert drowned by the rising waters, no description of the effect on the estuary at the river’s mouth on the Sea of Cortez. The only mention I’ve found in the entire book of environmental effects other than earthquakes due to the weight of the impounded water is this passage, on page 400, in a discussion of the dam’s chances of being built today:

The environmental impact statements mandated today for large-scale public and private developments by the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 and subsequent legislation certainly would have consumed years, if not decades, of study and debate, and surely would not have become final without several rounds of litigation. Under the Endangered Species Act of 1973, a further assessment of the dam’s impact on wildlife habitats in the reservoir zone and downstream would be required prior to construction. America’s unconcern with those issues in the 1920s and 1930s facilitated the construction of the dam, but also led, doubtlessly, to the eradication of undiscovered, unrecorded, and unrecoverable habitats and the extermination of untold species of flora and fauna.

An apt turn of phrase, that: “untold species of flora and fauna.” Their stories remain untold by Hiltzik. It’s about like writing about the engineering efforts that went into building Apollo 13 and the deadly drama of the crew’s struggle to cope with equipment failure, reserving for one short passage on page 400 of your 408-page book any mention that the whole thing took place in outer space. The desert environment isn’t just a backdrop. We know many of the the changes in the desert since the dam was built and they are staggering. We know the species lost and damaged. They have names: the bonytail and humpback chubs, Colorado pikeminnow, and razorback sucker near extirpated from the river below Hoover Dam; the Colorado Delta clam, once so abundant that its shells formed miles-long ridges throughout the delta, now endangered and found in only a few spots; the desert tortoise, threatened for the most part by human development of the “barren desert” that would not have been possible without Hoover Dam.

That, given any kind of objective point of view, is the story of the building of Hoover Dam. In omitting it, Hiltzik relegated his book to the realm of political and engineering minutiae. It is entertaining, informative, and extremely well-written, but an entertaining, informative, well-written book of trivia is still, when you get down to it, a book of trivia. And that’s a damned shame.

3) Also heard on that NPR show, last night, an interview with the wonderful Mark Moffett, who is to ants what Roy Chapman Andrews was to Mongolian fossils. Moffett’s got a new book out, which I’ll be reading, entitled Adventures among Ants: A Global Safari with a Cast of Trillions. The book includes new science on superorganisms, supercolonies, and behavior and ecology, as well as what promise to be hilarious stories by Moffett. For examples of said hilarity, check out Moffett’s blog.

3 comments on "A few things on Friday"

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.

5 comments on "Metaphor du jour of the day"

The verges of Cima Road are lined with penstemon flowers just past their peak, with desert milkweed and evening primrose, datura full open despite it being midday. The Teutonia Peak trail winds past mainly spent desert bloom. Mojave mound and hedgehog cacti hold withered flowers tightly closed, protecting a new season’s developing fruit. Bright green seedpods grow on the Joshua trees, the banana yuccas. Rabbitbrush blooms yellow, aster and fleabane in pale violet, four-o-clocks clasped shut after the previous day’s effusion. The whole desert seems to be waking up after a few days’ carouse, greeting the bleary sunlit aftermath.

There is still revelry in progress. A few Opuntia flowers are open wide to the sun and enticing beetles into mad, pollen-drunk orgies.

Most of the cactus blossoms are eaten away, spent, petals wrinkled and drooping, shards of prom dress on the morning’s motel floor.

I sit halfway up Teutonia Peak. The road a mile away through the Joshua tree forest, I can almost forget it’s there until the occasional car comes rolling up toward Sunrise Rock, slows briefly at the scene of the crime, then heads on south toward Cima. Far enough uphill that I could see the whole of the broad saddle between Teutonia and Kessler Peaks, I relax in the shade of a juniper. The air smells of gin.

The sky is full of cheerful white clouds, and now and then one rolls between the sun and me, chilling the sweat in my hair, on the back of my neck. I watch their shadows track across the base of Kessler Peak two miles east.

I’d filled my Camelback “canteen” in my pack at the trailhead, but neglected to screw the lid back on as tightly as I should have. I got the pack six years ago, and one of the features that recommended it to me was its mesh interior pocket designed to hold a drinking bladder, and the conveniently sited hole through which the thirsty hiker might thread the accompanying drinking tube. The thought of being able to drink without taking off my pack appealed to me. I probably drink too much water on desert hikes as a result — when I remember to bring water. About half a mile into today’s little hike I felt something wet bumping into my left hip: there was a quarter inch of water in the bottom of the pack. Good thing I’d kept my camera in my hand. I’ve found that rattlesnakes and bighorns don’t usually wait around for you to dig your camera out of your pack. That behavioral quirk saved me about a thousand bucks in camera replacement costs this past weekend. I’d retightened the lid on the bladder before hiking any farther. Sitting up by the juniper I rummage in the pack’s moist entrails. Nothing lost except a cup of water. Even the whole wheat crackers are tolerably dry in their paper wrapper. I prop the pack open and set it in the cool desert sun to dry out.

I feel like I’ve hiked this trail a hundred times, though lately it’s just been short jaunts of a few minutes from the road. The last time I got as far as Teutonia’s “foothills” was two years ago and the time before that was in 2005. It’s been a while. The boulders around me glisten in the sun, then fade as each cloud passes overhead.

Striped Mountain far downhill to the northeast, Clark Mountain beyond it on the other side of the interstate. That must be Kokoweef over there in front of them, the bright white outcrop with its mythical deep caves. Due east is a low pass in the Ivanpah Mountains. I hiked to it some years ago, gazed down onto the Ivanpah Valley as a pair of juvenile golden eagles soared a few hundred feet below me.

I know this place as well as I know anyplace, and yet on each visit I see something I’d missed before: a dramatic clump of cacti in a spot I’ve passed a hundred times, a dike of microcrystalline granite running through an outcrop with the usual dime-sized salt and pepper crystals, a juniper twisted into a corkscrew, a memory, an idea, a resolution. I sat up here with Matthew once with snow still holding on in the shady spots, all that was left of the two inches that fell on us the night before. It had been raining when we got into the tent. We’d sat under a tarp for hours that night passing a bottle of rye back and forth. We woke the next morning to a quiet winter scene.

That was a long time ago. Children born that February are these days clicking “it’s complicated” on their Facebook relationship statuses. I suddenly wish I had some rye. Half an hour ago as I was hiking toward Teutonia the air got very hot for a moment, and very still, and the air was full of solvents exuded by the junipers around me, and the smell hit me without warning. It takes me by surprise every single time, even when I remind myself to expect it.

2 comments on "On Teutonia"

It looks better this way.

5 comments on "Sunrise Rock without the Mojave Cross"

Dave Bonta is in fine form:

There’s the sadness of 100-year-old postcards that were written on but never sent, the sadness of an alarm clock that was turned off three minutes before it was due to throb, the sadness of countries too small or crowded to accommodate wilderness

Read the rest.

1 comment on "Notes Toward A Taxonomy of Sadness"

4 comments on "Saturday night on Cima Dome"