[Written in January 2008 for a literary website, devoted to self-portrait and writing, that would seem to have gone offline. Putting it here.]
Nine flights of stairs through the parking garage and out into wind-swept streets. Two thirds of a mile
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One day melds into the next. I sleep fitfully, wake late, write nothing for days on end. I stare at the screen, get up, get more coffee, fall asleep drinking coffee.
We walked into the hills three days ago, my gaze turned sullen inward. Ceanothus
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Snow remains this afternoon, thin glazed patches underneath the junipers. Ravens fly in pairs through the Western Mojave sky. A pair approaches, not seeing us behind a stand of juniper and Joshua. First one and then the other double-takes, stumbles
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In the evening of October 1, two days before the deadline for public comment on the Draft Alternatives Working Paper for the Southern Nevada Supplemental Airport Environmental Impact Statement, I left the little house I am renting in the Ivanpah
… (continues)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.
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.
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