Coyote Crossing

Yesterday, around 3:00 PM. Driving on Park Boulevard, Joshua Tree National Park. We drive past a sign that says “Sheep Pass Campground.”

Me: You know, I bet you could get a really good night’s sleep there.
The Raven: [near-silent groan]
Me: You know, because of the sheep passing…
The Raven [interrupting]: Uh-huh.
[pause of 45 seconds or so]
Me: See, it’s hilarious because you could count…
The Raven [interrupting, a bit more emphatically]: Right. Got it.

2 comments on "Sheep Pass"

5 comments on "Pinto Basin Road"

For your Judaeo-Xtian culture-enjoyment. Have a good 25th.

0 comments on "A musical concession to the season"

Yesterday a blue-eyed storm blew through Los Angeles. The wind had been out of the desert for some days, calm and a bit warm, and then Tuesday morning we were buffeted. It got cold, for Los Angeles, and the wind reached 30 miles an hour at times.

The wind stripped dead fronds from all the streetside palms. They formed drifts at the curbs. Piles of tire-shredded mulch built up between the lanes.

A few nights ago I ran the same route, saw Orion and Canis promenading across the sky, saw a bright Geminid meteor outshine the smoggy night. A barn owl screamed at me as I ran, block after block. The nest in palms, come out to hunt the rats and squirrels.

Tonight it was still cold, for Los Angeles. I ran anyway. Today the air was filthy, and reaffirmed my desire to leave before the next year is out, but tonight was clear: a dozen stars glinted feebly above the sodium vapor lamps. I ran headed for Rigel, for Sirius bright in the south, then south of Santa Monica Boulevard I turned west.

A moon one day shy of first quarter was setting, orange-tinted, at the end of the street. I ran toward that for a while, through piles of spent and shattered palm fronds.

0 comments on "Stripped clean"

There’s a cultural document with which you are almost certainly familiar that for most of my life has occupied a place central to my cosmogony — the nature aesthetic, the trickster worship, the sharp inhalation of joy that each new moment in life brings. I’ve held this work dear since I was, oh, three or four. And yet there has always been a mystery at the very core of this work, a stream-of-consciousness flow of unintelligible information that informs the text of the work. It is interpreted within the work itself, if a bit unreliably. You can enjoy this work for years — you can understand it very well indeed, for Pete’s sake — without deciphering the mystery.

But the mystery is there, and prominent, and I have puzzled over it almost since I first encountered it. I have tried to work it out myself for years. I have taken my share of lumps in the process.

The other day I realized I had the key I needed to unlock the mystery, right here on my desk.

Here it is, complete with a flaw the authors placed there, expecting no one would ever notice. Feel free to — as they say in the large predator business — help yourself.

2 comments on "Arcane and mysterious texts, deciphered"

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.
I wish that I had never found
myself enmired in talking late.
I wish I’d been more tightly wound,
my basal metabolic rate
less prone to fluctuation when
her silence took that certain tone
and I would tread eggshells again,
dallying desperately alone.
I wish I had avoided all
our shoulder-hollow-knotting trysts
that etched away my stomach’s wall
and made me want to slash my wrists.
I wish that I had been the one
to call it ended, when it seemed
her fantasy had come undone
and I was not the man she’d dreamed.
But I was me, for ill or good.
I rode it out until the end,
when finally I understood
what failed in love would fail as friends.
I wish I never knew her, yet
there isn’t much real there to mourn;
trivial pleasures I forget,
the chaff blown off of last year’s corn.

8 comments on "A sweet little wistful nostalgic love poem"

From the California Desert Protection Act of 2010:

‘‘SEC. 1702. MOJAVE NATIONAL PRESERVE.
‘‘(a) IN GENERAL.—The boundary of the Mojave National Preserve is adjusted to include—
‘‘(1) the 29,221 acres of Bureau of Land Management land that is surrounded by the Mojave National Preserve to the northwest, west, southwest, south, and southeast and by the Nevada State line on the northeast boundary, as depicted on the map entitled ‘Proposed Castle Mountain Addition to the Mojave National Preserve’, numbered 170/100,075, and dated August 2009; and
‘‘(2) the 25 acres of Bureau of Land Management land in Baker, California, as depicted on the map entitled ‘Mojave National Preserve–Proposed Boundary Addition’, numbered 170/100,199, and dated August 2009.

The photo here is of the Castle Peaks area. It’s obviously of National Park stature with regard to scenic beauty, and though I did frame the shot to exclude a small powerline and fencepost here and there it’s wild enough land as well. Privately owned land in Nevada runs along the northeastern boundary of the parcel, but said landowner is not particularly hostile to the Park Service.

This is one provision of the CDPA2010 I support without reservation. If they tossed in the Wee Thump wilderness, just across the Nevada line, I’d support it even harder.

3 comments on "Castle Peaks area would be added to Mojave Preserve"