Coyote Crossing

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 marriage unravel as we discuss the fate of what we once used to call “our rabbit.” I grow back the thickness of skin I had flensed from me last year. The Raven’s patience with me is endless-seeming, and I begin to feel as though I might actually be capable of being loved.

Last year it took the whole Mojave to contain me, though there were days I didn’t leave my house. Dust devils swirled on the dry lake five miles west and I watched them through the shades, thought of walking into one to be stripped clean of my grieving flesh, subsumed into the dry Ivanpah sky. They swirled violently, subsided in an eyeblink leaving nothing there but patterns on my retinas.

Days spent mostly alone in the middle of the forsaken desert and still there was not enough space between me and my old life. I am not ashamed to tell you all that I was shattered, the loss of Zeke and the loss of home and the loss of everything I thought I knew about myself within the space of a very few months, and yet still I persisted in the damnable world. I spent a few hours a week in anguished phone calls across a continent, a doomed friendship on which I had pinned what hope I had left, and when she told me that she met more talented, less narcissistic writers than me hanging out at the donut shop on a typical morning I believed her. I took the criticism to heart, or what was left of it.

When even that was over I spent a few days just breathing.

I still hear her voice each time I try to write. It is fading. It has faded almost to silence. But I still hear it.

Not long ago I found an old friend online, a woman with whom I shared a dust devil of a love a generation ago. We planned to marry but never did, each of us suddenly thinking the other had lost interest. What would our lives have been like had we asked? But we were 22, and stupidly afraid, and neither of us felt worthy of the other.

She asked what I’d been up to. It had been 25 years. I may have left out one or two things.

What have I been up to?

The Raven and I went to the farmers’ market in Hollywood this morning, bought some bison and tarragon, some herbs. Drummers on one corner, a frenetic hipster swing band on another, passersby startlingly beautiful enough to seem of an entirely different species from the likes of me. We ate pupusas with plastic forks, drank perfect coffee, and I wondered at the lightness in my heart. It has been growing these days, that lightness. Troubles enough to eat my stomach lining still, conversations tying up old rabbity loose ends in which I strain to be my better self, death and penury and bankrupting illnesses all there on the horizon to haunt me, and yet I felt light dodging the random beautiful amid the produce today, the most beautiful woman there walking with me, talking happily about our move back to the desert.

I have been thinking about love these days. I have been thinking about the pain and pull of it. I have been thinking that a love who tells you the worst things about yourself is irresistable, if the worst things about yourself are what you long to hear. I have been thinking about what it is like to have lived long enough to turn my life story on its head, to lose soulmate after soulmate and then find each one again. I have lived long enough to grieve secretly for one love of my life and in the glare of public sympathy for another. 

I been thinking about how a quiet, happy hour walking each morning with an ailing dog outweighs subsequent months of rancid grief, of love curdled sour. I would go through all of this again just to have had those moments with him. Pain in the lead-up to them and pain in their wake, and I would do everything all over again just to have had those walks with him, even just as memory.

I have been thinking, finally, about how rare and wonderful it is to be loved by one from whom I need keep none of this.

5 comments on "Dodging the random beautiful"

A note comes from the dear ex: the rabbit is very sick and she faces a difficult decision.

Thank you, Thistle, for bringing me joy and occasional bites.

Thank you, Becky, for tending him.

2 comments on "Hang in there, Thistle"

Could you read this in two years at the URL http://www.coyotecrossing.y!sctp?

Imagine a top-level domain (TLD) reserved for independent bloggers, possibly reserved for independent and progressive bloggers, possibly reserved for independent and progressive bloggers who are without major mainstream outlets for their writing.

Eric says it’s possible, and a feeble in-joke I made in his comments has provided a working handle that would almost certainly be changed in an actual proposal to something people could pronounce aloud.

Eric is an ICANN old hand, having shepherded the technical end of the .cat TLD through ICANN on behalf of Catalunya, and he says:

I’m traveling to the ICANN meeting in Seoul in a week. In my parfleche there will be two dozen applications, and adding one for blogtopia is a simple matter for me. If it were 2003 or even 2005, it would be a simple matter for blogtopia too.
Here are the fundamental rules. Terms first: “open” means without restriction, other than the unstated restriction of making enough to pay costs, like Verisign’s .com, and “community”, sometimes called “closed” means something else, a cut-out created to protect tribes and similar cultural affiliations, like .cat, for users who write and read in Catalan.

if the application is “open”, then if the string has value, and “blog” does, though “b!sctp” does not, overlooking the awkwardness of the exclamation point, then the deepest pocket wins, via auction, else
if “community”, then the “community” must be bounded, and large enough to support a registry, else
the string must be inobvious and hidden until the application is filed to escape the greed interest of speculators, which exist, and
it always costs $185,000, just to file the application.
not “in the rules”, but wicked obvious, the applicant has to pass on offers of easy living lying under the trees their eyes closed, skimming direct, or indirect revenue from the abusers of the net, who also exist.

I suggest a non-profit or a workers cooperative as the legal vehicle to propose .mumble, and come up with the policy, whether “open” (and undetected) or “community” (and defended by broad community support likely to (a) prevail when the “community” claim of the application is tested, and (b) repel speculative or simply other-oriented competitors), and become the contracting entity.
It is simpler than it looks, but to dance one must put one’s feet on the earth and push. I can dot tees and cross eyes, but more hands than one must hold the pen.

 

Repost, link, discuss.

1 comment on "A TLD for the rest of us?"

It’s not all that often you see your favorite desert campsite being discussed by the Supreme Court and the nation’s media. But mine is, this week, if for reasons not directly related to desert conservation.

In other words, the case of the 75-year-old Sunrise Rock war memorial cross on Cima Dome in Mojave National Preserve has made it to the nation’s highest court this week. The media has taken notice, to the point where the LA Times is running a serial dialogue on the topic.

At issue, roughly speaking, are First-Amendment protections against government support for religion on the one hand, versus preservation of local historical sites on the other. One version or another of the Sunrise Rock cross has stood on Cima Road for a double-digit percentage of the Mojave Desert’s Anglo history, since the 1930s. For decades, World War One veterans and their families gathered for Easter services at the base of the cross.

Shortly after the land became part of the Mojave National Preserve, then-Assistant Superintendent Frank Buono joined forces with the ACLU to sue for removal of the cross, arguing that its presence on land administered by the National Park Service constituted endorsement of a religion by the federal government. Since then, a land swap has been engineered which would trade the acre of land surrounding the cross for five other acres of inholdings in the Preserve, with the idea that giving the land to the VFW makes the federal case moot. Others aren’t buying that argument, as the cross would remain a prominent feature of the landscape with nothing to indicate it’s not part of the Preserve. So far the courts have agreed with that latter argument and blocked the land transfer.

SCOTUS is hearing arguments this week not about the constitutionality of the cross itself, but over Buono’s standing to sue and the legality of the land transfer. I have my own nuanced opinions about the cross, which in any event aren’t particularly relevant to the protection of the desert landscape.

The carving out of a chunk of property in the middle of the Preserve for political reasons, whatever those reasons may be, is far more troubling. The Preserve, like a lot of protected land, is already checkerboarded and cherrystemmed far beyond the degree to which it should be, and poking another hole in that Swiss cheese is just a bad idea.

Which is why Garrison Keillor’s “focus on the important shit” editorial in the New York Times pissed me off. From that editorial:

The so-called cultural wars over abortion and prayer in the schools and pornography and gays, most of it instigated by shrieking ninnies and pompous blowhards, did nothing about anything, except elect dullards to office who brought a certain nihilistic approach to governance that helped bring about the disaster in the banking industry that ate up a lot of 401(k)s, and all thanks to high-flyers in shirts like cheap wallpaper who never learned enough to let it discourage them from believing that they had magical powers over the laws of economics and could hand out mortgages by the fistful to people with no assets and somehow the sun would come out tomorrow. The anti-regulation conservatives enabled those people. We’re still waiting for an apology.
And now here comes the Supreme Court, about to rule in the case of a little plywood cross erected, as it turns out, on federal land in the Mojave Desert as a memorial to war dead — could there be anything less pressing right now? But we shall have great legal minds wrangling over something that doesn’t make a dime’s worth of difference to anybody whomsoever.

Keillor is a skilled writer: you’d have to be to make a fortune writing the same story over and over again once a week for decades. Since that one endlessly-repeated story is set in a fictitious landscape, however, he may have forgotten something about actual landscapes, to wit: it’s risky to pull little colorful details about those landscapes out of your ass, because they may turn out not to be precisely true. for instance, that little plywood cross he finds so unimportant is actually a seven-foot welded steel-pipe cross drilled permanently into a giant granite boulder. And the issue the Supreme Court is considering is, as I said above, a bit more wide-reaching than Keillor implies, having to do with the carving up of units of the National Park Service to suit the wingnuts’ cause du jour.

The point of Keillor’s editorial was to bemoan shallowness in the body politic, but it turns out there isn’t a whole lot of depth to the creator of Lake Wobegon, either. Maybe he’s like one a them Dry Lakes we have in the Mojave. You know: crusty, a bit salty, and generally irritating.

Anyway, what’s most striking me about this issue is the way people are talking about the land itself. Take this introductory piece from the Riverside Press-Enterprise:

“For three quarters of a century, a cross has stood high atop an outcropping of rocks in a far-flung and sun-blasted expanse of San Bernardino County’s High Desert.”

Or this from PBS:

“If you ever wondered where the middle of nowhere really is, it just might be right here: the Mojave Preserve in southern California.”

Some of you desert rats might have the same reaction to this that I do: a sense of surprise at hearing your favorite places referred to as “desolate.”  Sunrise Rock, to me, is a lush and welcoming environment: full of shade and green, familiar and comfortable, with butterflies and rabbits and — as often as not — quiet pools of water among the rocks.

It comes as a bit of a shock to hear this idyllic landscape described as “sun-blasted,” “desolate,” or “barren.”

I remember, a dozen years ago, getting stuck in traffic on I-15 along The Strip in Vegas on my way from the Arizona Strip to the Preserve. There had been a very bad accident in front of us. We didn’t move at all for an hour or so. After ten minutes or so, people started getting out of their cars to stretch their legs. I started talking with the guy whose truck was right in front of mine. He’d spent the previous week enjoying himself in a cheap hotel off The Strip, taking in a show or two, and dropping a significant amount of money at the gaming tables. I told him what I’d been doing — sleeping under the stars thirty miles off the pavement — and was surprised when he expressed the same reaction to my activities that I’d kept to myself about his: wondering why anyone would enjoy spending that kind of time in what was obviously a wasteland.

The conservative groups rallying to support the cross make a desolation-related argument. If people are going to object to a seven-foot cross out in this desolate stretch of barren and sun-blasted uselessness, they argue, then why not object to a cross four times its height at Arlington National Cemetery?

That argument is a bit of an affront to my own religious beliefs, to tell you the truth. I’ve lived a few minutes from the Arlington National Cemetery, and I’ve lived a few minutes from Sunrise Rock, and only one of those two landscapes is sacred enough on its own that adding a cross to it is beside the point, and the tame, well-manicured graveyard in suburban Northern Virginia isn’t it.

6 comments on "Keillor Crosses Chris"

It’s the same old story: a raucous gang of leather-clad toughs invades a small town, wreaks havoc.

“What are you rubbing against?”
“Whattaya got?”

2 comments on "The Wild Ones"

[Speaking of slurry lines. From around 1996.]

An overhead slurry line from the giant strip mine on Black Mesa crosses the road midway between Kayenta and Tuba City, Arizona. This pipeline takes coal from the heart of the Navajo reservation, mixed with fossil aquifer water from Hopiland, and transmutes it into gold in the Peabody Coal Company’s coffers.

She parks on the shoulder beneath the slurry line. Leaning against the passenger door of her dusty Toyota, she looks at the moon just setting on the tilted horizon. Snow dusts the brim of her hat, a brown felt fedora given her by a friend a while back. She pretends, sometimes, that she can still smell his scalp through the felt.

It’s cold. Reaching into her pocket, she pulls out a new pack of Drum, rolls herself a smoke. The wind cuts through her sheepskin coat. Her skin contracts against the chill. It takes a few tries to light the cigarette, a few matches on the ground at her feet. She draws smoke deep into her lungs. Faces flash before her eyes, memories unbidden distracting her from the moment.

The pipeline hums, miscible solid memory of long-dead times flowing past for someone else’s profit. Of what use the giant seed ferns, the dragonflies with three-foot wingspans, the herbivorous scorpions? They died long ago, their essences preserved in this combustible form. Locked away, deep in the earth, they served their purpose well enough. Erosion would bring them to the surface one bit at a time, enough carbon for a man to mine to keep his family warm. But to what end this wholesale excavation of memory, of pain?

She checks the horizon. The moon’s last arc winks out behind her rear-view dream catcher. Glass and gravel crunch beneath her soles. A few days, a few hundred miles, and she could be in his arms. Or his. The forces that pushed her out, away, seem distant now. Maybe she should go back, but to whom?

A thin, wry smile flits across her lips. She pulls a wisp of tobacco from the pack, holds it aloft, lets the wind take it. Imagines the pipe-line spilling its cargo all over the ground. Takes the hat off, shaking off the snow, and holds it to her face and breathes deeply. Some of his words come to her. They catch her breath in her throat. She smiles again, walks to the line’s support pylon near her truck. She pats the package fastened to the struts. This should be enough. Holding the hat before the wind, she brings lit cigarette to fuse. Puffs, hard: it catches. She walks away from the sputtering spark, gets in her truck, U-turns and heads off toward Kayenta. She tries to remember how many hours’ drive it is to Denver.

0 comments on "Flash fiction, as it were"

May 2005. That’s the High Sierra in the background, somewhere around Mount Whitney.

0 comments on "Centennial Flat"