Coyote Crossing

Tonight I ran, and cursed this aging frame
each mile run cursing harder than the last
each breath more labored, every pace the same
and sorry degradation, milestones passed
chained to my ankles. Streetlit sky a sieve,
the sodden city noise damping my ears,
I ran halting, frustrated, tentative.
Each draught of burning lung betrayed my years.
What point is there to this? This city but
a straitjacket, a hundred yards of gauze
I’ve wrapped me in, like xylocaine for thought
that swells uncomfortably against what was.

2 comments on "Sonnet uncompleted"

Just learned that this afternoon.

11 comments on "Barn Owls Giggle When They’re Happy"

Technorati seems to have munged this blog’s account, and in order to repair things they insist I publish some code in a new blog post.

Why this can’t take place in a sidebar or as a piece of invisible code I have no idea.

Anyway, that explains the following senseless para. Enjoy your evenings.

TEKF2UX973UJ

4 comments on "Pointless annoying detail"

I’m sad today: Kathy Flake has lost her familiar.

When Bailey developed cancer, I finally accepted that our walks would be numbered, our explorations circumscribed by her illness. But I didn’t expect to lose her so soon.

We took her in for surgery on Wednesday, thinking we’d see her again that evening, or possibly the next day. But while she made it through the surgery, she likely developed a blood clot that stopped her heart, once, twice, and finally forever.

Bailey had such a big heart, it must have taken a lot to stop it beating.

Good girl, Bailey. Rest well.

7 comments on "Bailey, RIP"

Zeke inspects a seriously dead cow, Burro Creek, Arizona. January 2 2004

Something must be in the air: the time of year, perhaps, or a regular geist asking the zeitgeist for a walk around the block, but I’ve had him on my mind for a few days, and yesterday I got a text from the ex- saying she’d been feeling the same way. We reminisced a bit on the phone. Of course that only made it worse, but in kind of a good way.

Maybe it was the snow in the Bay Area yesterday. He loved it so, the snow, and one of the things I’ll always regret is that we didn’t get him to places more often where he could be out in it.

I think one of the reasons I was able to cope with life in a city was having him there: I didn’t feel the thoroughgoing lack of connection with the real world that I do these days. Being my conduit to the real was a big job, and he did it as long as he could.

Ironically, he kind of hated the desert. At least the Mojave, and the Sonoran was a bit spiny and hot for him as well. He did love the Great Basin desert, cool and soft and sparsely saged as it is. He fit that landscape well. Well enough that I always meant to get him a blaze orange vest so as not to be mistaken for a coyote by some gun-toting yahoo.

Ah, love.

5 comments on "Something must be in the air"

If you wondered whether I might have been indulging in hyperbole of late in describing the solar energy barons’ plans with phrases like “paving the desert with mirrors,”  I wouldn’t exactly blame you. Certainly it’s not the whole desert, you might reasonably have thought. A few thousand acres here, another few thousand there? There’s plenty of land in between. Surely the desert landscape would remain in the main unpaved, far less altered than the plowed and furrowed cotton lands of the Central Valley, or the terra-cotta-tiled carcinoma that is your typical southern California suburb.

Take a look at this map, courtesy the BLM’s “geocommunicator” website.

This map is of the northern half of the Ivanpah Valley, north of Nipton and of the Mojave National Preserve, between the south end of Ivanpah Dry Lake and the long hill between Jean and Sloan, which is essentially the southernmost edge of Las Vegas.

The orange crosshatching indicates land covered under pending applications for building industrial solar power generating stations. Not “study areas” — pending projects.

That’s a majority of the land in the Ivanpah Valley right there slated for blading, paving, and heavy industrial development. It would be an uninterrupted swath of industrial facilities leading from the south end of the Strip to the verge of the Mojave National Preserve.

That southernmost orange splotch is the project closest to implementation: the Brightsource project. The rest of them — on the other side of the Nevada Line, east of the Dry Lake and northwest toward Goodsprings — are distinct and additional.

What would those giant mirrors displace? We don’t know, exactly. We know, because the site has been partially surveyed since the project was announced, that Brightsource’s Ivanpah project would pave the habitat of 70% of the known California occurrences of the rare plant Asclepias nyctaginifolia, the Mojave milkweed. There are ten other taxa on the site named in the The California Native Plant Society’s Inventory of Rare and Endangered Plants.

The Mojave, it turns out, is at least as biodiverse as a redwood forest. Here’s a slide from a recent slideshow put together by Jim Andre, desert botanist and director of the Sweeney Granite Mountains Desert Research Center:

A typical undisturbed Mojave landscape has about as many taxa — species, subspecies, and so forth — per hectare as a forest of mature Coast Redwoods. And we know less about the Mojave than we do about the redwood forests. There are many places in the Mojave that have hardly been botanized at all. There are plants that show up only after infrequent summer rains, and few botanists make a habit of collecting and cataloguing species when temperatures reach 110F. It’s a big country and many of the unknown plant species are going to be inconspicuous. Andre noted in the Winter 2008 issue of the Desert Report [PDF] that a new manzanita species was recently discovered growing on a ridge above his Desert Research Center. In our rush to pave the desert we will obliterate things we don’t even know are there, consign species to extinction before we realize they exist at all.

4 comments on "Solar strip mining"

Near Primm, NV. If they ever get around to building the Ivanpah Airport — and who knows if they will, with Vegas’ economy still tanking — this will become satellite long-term parking or a Sbarros or something equally valuable.

Incidentally, that’s some good news about the Dubai debt collapse, though it translates to lost jobs for some innocent folks in Vegas: Dubai World owns a lot of MGM Mirage, and had about $8 billion in development in progress on The Strip. If that falters, the impetus for building a superfluous airport up against the Mojave National Preserve slackens.

It’s been a strange few months in my adopted and temporarily estranged home. A speculation-addicted emirate collapses and the Ivanpah Valley is affected. Antonin Scalia debates the future of the place where I camp. It’s enough to make a guy a solipsist.

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