Coyote Crossing

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"

1 comment on "Self portrait"

That’s a California striped racer, Masticophus lateralis lateralis. I saw one an hour or so ago hiking in Runyon Canyon, which is just up the hill from the apartment. The one I saw was gorgeous, charcoal with pale yellow racing stripe, in great form at the very end of a shed, and a bit more than three feet long. It was gliding and entwining itself through the brush along the uphill side of the fireroad, waiting rather impatiently for a moment in which the human and canine foot traffic ebbed.

Why? To get to the other side. Come on, people. We’ve gone over this already.

Admittedly part of the snake’s problem as I stood there at what was clearly an insufficiently respectful distance, I nonetheless spent a little time gawking hungrily. It was just so goddamned beautiful with its sleek form, its innocent demeanor. I stood staring stupidly, the not quite as snakelike spandex-clad hardbodies giving me the hairy eyeball as they passed, or running past clodlike and unaware.

It’s a common phemonenon in Runyon, and for that matter everywhere else. People don’t see. Earlier this week I watched ravens mobbing a red-tailed hawk, and the hawk had someone in its talons — a ground squirrel, probably — whose legs hung limp and defeated. It was all happening right there in front of us, a passion play a thousand feet above the Hollywood Bowl, and yet no one else seemed to think it more worth watching than the enspandiced asses of various passersby. A forty-inch snake having a moment of panic significantly less than forty inches from your running shoes and you don’t see it?

Maybe that’s just as well, seeing what can happen when the pretty people of Los Angeles do notice a perfectly harmless snake. I’m not one to hold people’s unreasoning and uncontrollable fears against them. I have phobias of my own, after all. But I will say that my decades-long appreciation of Salma Hayek notwithstanding, if she acted that way in the vicinity of my acquaintance in Runyon Canyon I would almost certainly tell her to get the hell away from me and stop scaring the snake.

6 comments on "Beauty, standards of, changes therein"

Francis B. Sumner (1874-1945) — shown above lounging in the Mojave Desert in a 1914 photo by Joseph Grinnell — was a professor of biology at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. He served as vice president of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, a member of the National Academy of Science, and a joint chair of the Ecological Society of America’s Committee on the Preservation of Natural Conditions in the United States. The paper from which the below passage is excerpted, published in the Scientific Monthly in 1920 under the title “The Need for a More Serious Effort to Rescue a Few Fragments of Vanishing Nature,” came from a speech Sumner presented to the California Academy of Sciences in 1919. The bulk of the speech exhorted biologists to work to preserve America’s wildlands.

“Even the desert, which has long furnished interesting problems to the naturalist, as well as inspiration to the poet and the painter, seems doomed to wholesale invasion and exploitation. To make the desert “blossom as the rose” has for ages been looked upon as typical of man’s conquest over nature, and the wonderful achievements in our own Southwest stand in the front rank of such efforts. But we can not overlook the tragic side of the picture. The limitless vistas of picturesque desolation lose much of their mystery when we find that they are threaded in all directions by automobile roads, and when the eye is everywhere confronted by scattered rectangular clearings, due to the fruitless efforts of would-be desert farmers. The highly interesting and picturesque plant associations in the western portion of the Mojave Desert are rapidly being destroyed by so-called “settlers” who are probably not getting enough out of the land, in most cases, to pay expenses. The weird and beautiful tree-yucca, a plant so typical of our California desert landscape, is now being largely used for various commercial purposes. I know of at least one company, organized with the particular object of exploiting these yucca products. As this is a tree of extremely slow growth, we may expect its practical extinction within large areas in the near future.”

6 comments on "The more things change"

Via.

2 comments on "Oh, the irony"