After a year, thor_progeny web log hasn't caught on, and it has become more of a burden than a privilege or something I enjoy. I write every day, but fiction is easier for me. So thanks for reading, to those who did.

NPR reports that the number of grizzlies in the Yellowstone area has "tripled" since they were placed on the endangered species list (as threatened), but neglects to mention that there are still only 600 of them when it talks of their removal from that maligned roll call of human folly. Time Magazine may place Mother Nature as its "Man of the Year," but not because of its beauty or shredded interconnectedness. Because of bad weather that destroyed some manmade things.

It would be encouraging if people took an interest in their environment, reached out to the world that surrounds them (or once did), but it may be too late. People walk around looking down into their cell phones, punching numbers, seeing if that pic worked, watching tv shows, listening to music instead of birds (instead of traffic); they are focused on the foreground of man and technology, and the intricacies of the wild are left to schoolchildren and field trips, rare geologists and biologists who inevitably schill for corporate donors (or bosses), even against their intentions: "Save this poor acreage here, and you can develop all the rest." The world is not about rare butterflies and snakes; but these are the details that in concert create a vivid orchestra; we are down to solos and not even complete sonatas, now...down to measures, notes, and one day, silence.

Quiet photographs of Yellowstone National Park in October. What's left.

Congress has once more scrapped "plans" to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It's the standard shampoo drill: Wait three months, propose ANWR exploration again, sneak it into some unrelated bill, raise hell to defeat it, repeat.

When the whole continent looked like this, before the attack of progress and colonialism and then of mass production, it seemed endless and immutable. Traveling this far took months or more, and by the time you got there, you had to go back or freeze your tuckus. And a lot of proponents of extracting the miniscule amount of petroleum under the ground use the area's remoteness as a cynical reason to chuck environmental studies. All these people making their phones ring off the hook will never live to see the place. What are they so upset about? In the 1800s, when a small group of crazy men tried to save sections of the West from exploitation, the "leaders" in Washington felt the same way. Who cares what happens way out there? It's not worth saving. They had to drag Presidents and dignitaries--in other words, people like you and me--all the way out into the wasteland to prove that it wasn't simply expendable, that it had true value and that protecting ecoysystems and monuments not only bestowed the inheritors of our country a stock of national treasures, but made the U.S. a truly benevolent country concerned about natural posterity.

It is true that the majority of Americans will never see the pristine Alaskan Arctic coast--that is, the small section that has been left undeveloped in the entire Arctic circle--and most will never hear its silence interrupted by the howl of wolves or the roar of grizzlies, a running herd of caribou. They won't feel the cool summer air, pure and clean as any on earth; they won't enjoy the flowers in August or feel the permafrost under their hiking shoes. I won't. But even if I were blind and deaf and unable to smell a skunk, I would know it was there. I would know that some small sliver of the Earth far from all this so-called civilization remained vibrant and open and that some day, maybe, it would inspire a revitalization of wilderness where I live. It existed once. It would be a shame to say the same thing of the entire world.

Update: They chose wisely.

Today in California, voters, meaning a scarce amount of people with time on their hands, will decide on issues in the "costliest election" in state history. Much of the ballot measures have to do with the speciously elected governor and his desire to gain control over how and where money is spent. Local measures include proposals to ban guns in San Francisco or, in Orange County, to shift a nickel from the police to the fire department -- things one would hope elected representatives could take care of on their own.

Another measure, however, could change the course of state geographical history by giving real estate developers a bold political precedent. This is how democracy works these days; a semi-educated populace, knowing it will lose the view it has grown accustomed to since it moved into its own new suburb, chooses whether to allow sprawl to continue up the hill. Developers pretend to care about the environment by cozying up to the cause--in appearance only--claiming that building a neighborhood run by solar power will "help" the state. Of course adding solar panels to existing communities would prove far more advantageous than breaking new ground on yet another abandoned "ranch," but that is not part of the argument.

These damned ranches in California, created by a so-called Mexican government that lasted less than 30 years, and by the Spanish land grants before that, divvied up by California settlers after 1850 and inherited for a century until the population began to exponentially devour every acre, have made urban planning a virtual impossibility. Only court fights and injunctions prevent the exploitation of every inch of available real estate, and the non-mountainous swaths John Muir didn't manage to save, owned by families-turned-corporations, get parceled off into the tiniest slivers so people can live out the American dream. Wise to this, voters in Livermore can choose whether to be conservationists for real...or in name only. To be sure, if they choose to prevent the development, they will be back next year putting a stop to it again.

It took about 100 years of industrialization in America to figure out that the cavalier attitude of miners and millers and loggers, et al, grouped with the belching pipes of their factories, had coarsely scored away most of what made this continent appealing in the first place. It was a realization that came so late as to make it almost irrelevant, and to this day--despite an overage of evidence--the money lenders and moneymakers argue to the contrary with the cynical line that humans are clever people who will figure out a way around the dearth of open space, oxygen and clean water that remains.

While the U.S. still struggles to define what is "resource" and what is in need of protection, our culture continues to consume far in excess of what we actually need or can even use. By moving almost all manufacturing and even some "extraction" offshore--much of it to our sort-of enemy/most-favored-trade partner, China--we have created a situation where we don't make our own mobile phones or even our own toothbrushes. And we have given a Communist dictatorship on the other side of the planet the opportunity to provide our government loans to pay off the interest on our exponentially accumulating debts.

Yet the up-and-coming Chinese say they remain thirsty. The 3,500-year-old nation's enormous human population is one part of the problem; but there is also the widely known but rarely mentioned scandalous shortsightedness of over-eager urban and economic growth without regard for the environment, a crisis egged on by American gluttony. Though in 2005 we rely on China to manufacture our socks and undies, our trinkets and toys, our batteries and armchairs--almost everything--we have yet to make arrangements for when that country's disorganized folly overdoses in, say, 2016, and collapses because of its defiant unrestraint. Despite large fears that America's "only" superpower status might give way to the Reds within a decade, where we go, they go... We can't buy Happy Meals forever. Nor can we ignore the ecological concerns of our providers, especially since we refuse to resolve our own.

creepy crawly things

On Friday's bicycle ride home, two gray, skinny coyotes stood beside each other, twins drawn out from the pack, and watched me from within a bushy outlet leading to, of course, a gated electrical transformer. Ah, wilderness.

These two could not have been alone, because unless he's solitary, a paired-off coyote has a family. So I did not pursue my curiosity. I've only seen lone coyotes in the past (at least up close) and so, in this case, I briefly entertained the idea of turning around and seeing what I could get myself into. But I know better than to approach wild animals. I could end up on the side of the road, ground up like a Manwich.

Strange to see something living and something eyeing me as potential Halloween candy. Most animals I encounter in Southern California appear in corpse form...well, mammal-wise...I suppose birds and bugs trump the dead ones. I trip over morning roadkill on walks; on the way to work, I see dead opossums and raccoons, I ride by murders of crows picking apart the remnants of some fattened rodent, a squirrel or a rat--by that point you can never tell. The night before last, a crow went into a low circular dive and tried to clip my ear; I think my being the only person walking outside made for an easy target, but he missed. A small brown bird slammed into me once, but I was wearing a sky-blue shirt that day, and he appeared as confused as I was when I felt that erroneous punch in the shoulder.

Yeah, and spiders continue to invade my apartment way past summer; they're welcome to hang out if they stay off the bed and away from my cereal. Mostly they just perambulate around the ceiling of the bathroom and walk gingerly across the living room floor. The balcony is a mess of webs one day, but all that construction disappears on its own, and the gnawing grasshoppers that like to get into my plants always go away the day after an arachnid invasion.

The largest black darkling beetle didn't bother to do a headstand when I neared it on Saturday, a short hike over the ridge, a trail so wet last year it has sprouted a crease of green grass where rainwater made a deep rivulet last spring. The leaves are changing very slowly this year, refusing to die. One sycamore had a single yellow leaf; all the rest remained green. So I killed them in that photograph.

Dusk wells up nostalgia; nostalgia, that false sense of a glistening past: the cool air and clouds of soft gray wool, the occasional puddle and all the fallen leaves swept off driveways into the street; strings of plastic pumpkin lights instead of carved jack-o-lanterns; I'm unfamiliar yet reminded, and some bluish patches beyond the cloudy sky have tiny stars still there from before, and every day they move. I don't like the shadows cast by street lights; or maybe I do. I just don't like the lamps themselves. Cars go by, one after another, but I think people are only going through the motions of running errands; nothing they need is all that immediate. They could walk, too.

And I would like to walk at this time of night more often, but this time of night will never come again. Every moment presents the next ridge of an ever unfolding fan; the view back is equally obscured by such creases, making memory equivocal, the past subjective and only unyeilding in its ambiguity. I wonder if to walk at night on this sad hillside 50 years ago made any sense at all. Where would one walk to? How many sheep would bleat as one passed? Did the birds then, confused as they are now, cry out to each other checking the time? Verifying day from night was easier, maybe; this was a pasture, and I don't know the old geography. I suppose the fog had meaning. A drunken ranch hand would know its significance; he couldn't drive back from the town on the oceanside; he would have to sleep it off in his truck. At this hour, the taverns over by the beach channeled all the revelers and tired laborers up and down a solitary highway; the paths out here had yet to be paved.

Anyway, I wasn't around.

From the "what the __?" file, a report that throws a little bleach onto the dark infection that is Wal-Mart. What sounds at first like enlightened corporate positioning leaves the almondy aftertaste of cynical marketing; otherwise why would we need to know? One would hope that civic responsibility comes with the territory of owning 10 percent of the retail market and controlling 2 percent of the American GDP. But that's the whole thing: being civil has never been profitable. Squashing small-town life and using cheap foreign labor to subvert all competition is the way to "win." Only the threat of lawsuits and visible protest compels the behemoth to shift. Because people who shop at Wal-Mart aren't worried about where things come from--they're worried about how much things cost and how many more things they can buy--the Davids in this Bibilical myth are competitive small business owners, eco-conscious rabble rousers and unionized hippies. We're gonna sell organic cotton shirts at Sam's Club. That should shut them up.

But you still shouldn't shop there. Check out Patagonia. Or other companies not trying to rule the world.

When the early autumn puddles dried here in southern California I remembered the calls for action to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers after the levees broke seven weeks ago in the other LA. Katrina even got the attention of those citizens previously (seemingly) inoculated to the facts: that gobs of money, for some reason, had flowed middle-eastward, clear across the globe, instead of toward an American community many suits had predicted would need it most if a natural disaster were to strike on target. It struck, and the cash that had not been spent helped create one big soggy septic tank of mankind meets destiny in the Big Easy.

In the Big Messy, meanwhile, since that's where the money--if not the water--has flowed, flooding is taking place on purpose. And, coincidentally, the ACE is in charge. This could be the bayou of southern Louisiana and the mouth of the Mississippi, but we have a city there, and people don't want to live in reed houses in America, much. It's ironic that what leads our politicians to feel umbrage at Saddam's ecological foibles does not extend to our own proclivity to channel nature as we see fit. Although the development of the largest river in North America began centuries ago, even a massive overflow of its banks a dozen years back didn't get the attention of civic planners south of St. Louis. If it did, it didn't extend to the federal level enough to raise the bar in those lower level river states to move people out of harm's way. So here we go again, rebuilding after the floods, draining water that, after all, is supposed to be there, and putting people on "dry" ground that doesn't stay that way. Maybe the Iraqis should count themselves lucky we dislike their former leader so much that we're doing the right thing.

Between the thunder overhead and the rain popping off the balcony, drowning potted plants and the minor earthquake almost masked by my perpetually stomping (downstairs) neighbors, it might be easy to forget that I left town for nearly three weeks and have only recently returned. It may be time for a mid-life crisis and a permanent departure from this uncivilized and insouciant place where every time lightning flickers, teenaged girls scream as if they're watching fireworks. Resting after a long weekend of city living is impossible. Smack! It would be domestic violence if I knew them, but since I don't, I can only be accused of hateful thoughts and unrequited loathing.

Human intrusions of an unnatural nature in conflict with the weather or the earth's machinations bring out the best of my bilious loner persona. When at Yellowstone awaiting Old Faithful to gradually wind up and erupt, the crowd could not sit still; some parents contained their children, most let them run loose between the cold mock-wooden plastic benches untethered, unfettered, undisciplined. Older folks, and national park visitors are mostly older folks and German tourists, spoke loudly of the days when they could still hear. And cell phones rang and car horns bleated like the elk on the other side of the caldera; competed with the crows that cawed in echoic condemnation of our being there at all.

The kids--bored, waiting for the production to begin, for the crowning event and the whole purpose of coming to this bizarre place--could not sit still. I could, and so reduced to solitary middle-aged crank, did my best to fuss with camera, distract myself with alternating thoughts of self-annihalation and mass homicide until, after a couple practice belches, the geyser lifted out of its sulphuric pit with a soft hiss and, because the sun had set and twilight had settled over us, evaporated into a steam cloud before it could rise as high as I think it can get, for roughly 20 seconds silenced the crowd by being unexpectedly benign and imperfect; not the awe-inspiring icon documented on postage stamps and PBS documentaries, but a quiet moment of the Earth sighing, and I along with it, as everyone packed up and left, drove away to go to their hotels to turn on the TV.

I remained behind a moment to pay my respects.

I missed the expanse before it collapsed, and in my 4,200-mile round trips, I find the historical wonder of old prophets corrupted: The flow of rivers through the plains altered beyond Whitman's recognition; the shapes of forests, even their makeup, long changed since Powell explored the great West; lands fenced in, squared off, gutted and culled. Every year the main street of small towns gets to look more like the one I passed through 800 miles back, billboards like shutters and bright corporate logos behind them. All that was once wild--even with man upon it--for unimaginable millennia, is gone. A square of national park is not wilderness. It is tourist haven. I'm glad for these spaces, but they are sad reminders of what is forever lost.

And John Muir would not call "wilderness" the U-shaped valleys filled with homes that took two minutes to erect; he advertised the furthest rim of the Great Basin, the Range of Light, saved it in an exponential leap of conservationist faith. But in doing so he made all else seem second-rate and therefore exploitable. I love the slick gray California ridgeline, the steep peeks that alternate between smooth glass and broken shards. The sun cannot imitate itself, and every day there is some new shadow, some new pathway for the light to follow. Last winter saw a lot more weather than usual; even in May the white wooly coat of so many storms had barely tattered on the Sierra's back. The summer was hot, very, and so autumn gives us golden aspens and glowing foothills, with their steep stony overseers bald of snow looking frankly dark and satisfied with power. These mountains are impossible not to respect and beatify. Their scale and sheer intimidation invite allusions to old myth, while relatively new legends of exploitation (Gold! and Timber!) have become intrinsic to our culture. Mountainsides remain in the form of protected federal land, long ago picked over for their minerals and subsurface resources. The ancient cathedral forests of the Shoshone and Washoe disappeared in a few short mining years; the giant woods of the Lake Tahoe basin exist as logs in underground, abandoned Nevada silver mines. Now sticks of lodgepole pines, a poor replacement, give people the illusion of nature when, in fact, what we have sesquicentennially is a substitute, weed trees that took advantage of the scoured landscape.

We have to call some place home. I feel like a guest still, after 15 years of living here in California. But I feel like a guest everywhere else as well. I think we are all guests of a kind; some of us have the decency to leave the room clean when we leave. Some of us steal towels and tear up the sheets. Earth as bedraggled hotel. Needs a few billionaire investors for a facelift. Will never be the place it was, but we could at least return its dignity.

A cold front crawls toward the state, stirring up a thin soup of slow clouds on the horizon at 3 a.m., with ominous flashes that pop from south to north and back again like a line of '40s newspaper photographers. Above, the outstretched arm of our Milky Way adds its own speckled stripe to the already glittering black sky. But when will it start to rain? The temperature, thankfully, has dropped 15 degrees from yesterday and should drop another 15 by tomorrow. New snow on the distant mountains, too distant to know that by sight, may stay the winter--a welcome guest. Looking to the east, soybean fields already deconstructed by sturdy combines look like a striped brown rug on the floor of the earth. The sky at dawn is a wall with faded paint, crumbling white and gray, in need of a fresh coat. The wind continues, though; an endless white noise combs through the trees.

Yesterday, big--way-too-big--suburban houses built on this backdrop of farm country made me lean toward hating my fellow man; luckily they are impermanent, no matter how much destruction and stupidity they represent, the McMansions and their owners, too, will be whisked away some day, either by violent storm or by drifting, casual, indifferent weather.

Ah. Just now the first crack of thunder.

It's windy, and it's hot. The huge thudding hogs leave the slop near the barn and seek shelter beneath metal semi-circles held to the ground with spikes. Green combines harvesting soybeans stir up dust miles down the gravel road. It lands here, everywhere, sticks to window screens and plates. The farm dogs bark at the wind and the doors knock back and forth against their frames. Somehow the 100-year-old glass holds together. There are cats, too, but half of them are missing; the ducks, turkeys, geese and chickens seem to have allied in the coop, a treaty against a common enemy. Why is it 90 degrees in October? Where is the mud, and why all the dirt? The sheep kick up ground dry as stale crackers, bleating curiosity; like elderly cranks, they wander around the pen speaking their strange language of dependency and argument. And the trees have broken into brittle pieces, future firewood, stacked into heavy piles; and even fallen, their leaves remain green. Though it's autumn, the orange and red maple groves and deep merlot sumac bushes one expects beyond the golden corn, around homes and on the hills, hasn't appeared. It's the middle of July without the lemonade.

Yes, sir. Strange weather we're havin'.

How can I write with any seriousness about nature for two or three readers when centingenarians are blowing themselves up on idling buses in record-breaking traffic jams to escape the inevitable sea-borne storms of September? Rather than dying unattached to oxygen tanks that keep them alive well past their due date, rather than dying with the wind and the rain that come along as part of a cycle of the seasons, these children who became seniors so suddenly can only cling to their lives. I guess they can't help it. Humans are attached to themselves and to each other, to living forever, no matter how. This instinct may be due to an assembly of atoms, perhaps an ancillary to one of Newton's laws my mom recalled on the phone: "Objects in motion tend to stay in motion." If we are so used to living, how can we accept a cessation of that motion? It is natural to die, but everything living struggles to survive at all costs. In fact only man seems to have the capacity to move beyond this obsession, but acceptance takes its time. Sometimes we never get to that point. If anything, Hurricane Rita can teach us to take a deep breath and know that if we choose to live, we ultimately choose to die. Deciding how --if not when-- is the question.

A handful of neighbors, and there are so many of them, must have been either watching a sporting event in Asia or playing a visceral video game that made them holler like drunks last night, past 12. No different than usual, except that behind their backs, outside, an old, ragged phantom dragged its chains through the sky, causing sparks; every moment or so a new flash, sometimes a classic crooked finger, sometimes the flickering strobe of Pegasus flapping his wings followed by the crash of cymbals, a military drum salute. Even the loud bass boom overhead, a five-car-alarm deal that made horns sing like coyotes, didn't seem to distract these Monday night revelers. The power never went out.

The rain was intermittent, so I could leave the windows open. In fact the water that fell seemed an afterthought, as if shaken from an emptied bottle, the last remaining drops. And it was still hot, as it will be today when this dead Mexican hurricane disippates like fragile cheesecloth and scatters north and west. It was the most apoplectic storm I'd seen in years, seemingly more resentful in its tantrum because it could not find an audience. The vigorous crashing overhead surpassed the quota for thunder in Southern California. Most storms, like those of last spring, dump like waterfalls with a boom here and there; this was a sick monster dry heaving to no avail. How anyone could ignore its attempts to claim our attention, I don't know; I could not read or watch TV or turn away from the redolent ozone in the air, recalling wilderness and danger centuries old. In this new millennium, Nature can be turned away; it is, as I've mentioned before, a mere nuisance now, an afterthought unless it really breaks things up and becomes a spectacle worthy of being televised. And still people will leap to their mobile phones so they can laugh about it with their friends. Keep the booze flowing and the lights on, don't evacuate us from floods, don't shake the ground we walk on too violently, and we can go on with our lives pretty easily. Nature disrupts, but not much.

It isn't cheap to live on the Balboa Peninsula in Newport Beach (not that it is cheap anywhere in California), and residents there have little interest in making their community accessible to just anyone. It's a drag to park or even wind one's way through the stop lights and surf shops in order to get to the trucked-in sand.

I'm south of Newport by fifteen miles (an hour in drive-around-and-try-to-find-a-place-to-park time), and have only attempted to penetrate it twice. The land strangled by homes and "Fashion Island," the water gooped up with leisure boats and floating seafood restaurants; from the point of view of a window shopper, it's an exploded Nantucket trinket shop where rich people go shopping across the street. Even sea lions, indigenous but not endemic, are no longer welcome in these parts.

A lot of California cities revisit--a kind word--the architecture and lifestyle of other places. There is no more disingenuous a section of the nation in some respects. With its gold-country history long footnoted, the state remains a place to make money by recreating fiction and distraction. A housing development in Orange County resembles an Eastern Seaboard town, another is faux Italian; countless others are displaced from any main street in 1905. It's a realtime Disneyland, without Donald Duck or any store within walking distance. All boards and no resilience; closed doors, tiny lawns, groomed under committee bylaws.

Further north, Hollywood and Beverly Hills are still dotted with Old English office buildings and homes built by Charlie Chaplin (the inhabitants of which change over the years). Driving down the street in any neighborhood in LA, one home is Spanish-style bungalow, the next modern, the next French Colonial. In San Simeon, Hearst's paean to all things froufrou remains the quintessential Riviera ripoff. And Scotty's Castle in the middle of the desert defies even that excess. Then there are the miles of suburban development scattered all over the state, where cookie-cutter homes seem more like arms factories guarded by high gates.

No matter the scale of their endeavor, men with money build because they can, where they can. In the meantime, cultural landmarks, cities and neighborhoods overtake a place of natural beauty and wealth, not of the mineral, timber or acreage kind, but of wilderness and geography, of intangibles. Neighbor to countless bars, jazz clubs and millions of beachgoers, the Newport resident who claims the sea lions' bark "is far beyond normal-sounding sea life" has missed her calling as a true dramatic ironist.

LA in Lightness

I dunno about electricity blackouts or stuff like that or why they happen. But I do remember the darkness when the great natural disaster of 1994 struck Los Angeles (um, you may remember it as the most expensive of its time... I think it made headlines internationally, too, because it was so important) and how nobody could use candles for fear of gas explosions, and at 4:31 a.m. it suddenly became dark. I might have been able to sleep if it hadn't been for all the wreckage nearby and the poor people shouting at each other to grap their shit and get out! Well, I'm sorry, but that's the word they used.

Now here it is 11 and a half years later and someone cut a cable or something. I can't get far into the articles about it, as I am not a superintellectual able to grasp the great ramifications of temporary power outages in the middle of the afternoon. But it appears that these days every glitch in the superfluous grid that has weaved its way over the surface of our earth is a catastrophe. We're so dependent on the inventions of 125 years ago that we can't imagine living without elevators or microwaves or these infernal blogs, which...I know, are not so old... I could live without those three things, I think, maybe. But then technology has its high points; modern medicine keeps us alive when we're too young to die (cough), though it's no fun being a consumptive in the 21st century... you can't milk it for sympathy at all, they just stick you with a needle and you're back to dancing the two-step or whatever it is you do, back to cyber chatting or watching DVDs in your car or lollygagging around the house with your iPod or mobile phone or Xbox (I haven't quite figured out what an Xbox is yet, but it sounds dirty).

An unintended problem with technology is the reverse of one of its purported salvations. In its attempts to make all men equal, especially as it becomes either affordable or universally institutionalized, technology strips us of freedom and liberty. All people regardless of wealth must stop at red lights. We can't just start and go as we feel. And we're not free from the noise and lights created by modern man's mechanization. No matter where we live--outside of, apparently, North Korea--someone else's noise is our noise, we share the incandescence of others and remain at their whim off-switch-wise. Worse, weak and frustrated men can now find a way to make bombs. There are disparities that remain, but these differences decrease as prices lower. More and more people have computers and TVs, but less have knowledge of how they work. Devices superfluous to natural survival carry great weight, but people need them to be user friendly.

Meanwhile, "looters," which I have to put in quotes because according to some it's the wrong word, felt the necessity in some cases over in NOLA to steal televisions, without concern that they would have to deep sea dive in order to plug them in. I personally would have looted, that is, "rescued," books and other precious artifacts worth holding onto historically, but then that's just me. I don't eat much.

As an entry in the vast Earth(TM) Encyclopedia, the geologically adolescent land east of the California coast has a chapter all its own, with multiple sidebars: the hills as fertile pasture, where cows and sheep can roam and graze year round; flowers in the spring, golden grass in the summertime, green sod in January. Home to indigenous wildlife that threatens livestock, a place of American wineries, of sleeping volcanoes and winding old roads, the story told of oak groves and endless golden acres has enticed many a reader to its pages.

But the essence of place, its "value", radically changes from creature to creature. A different reader, looking up the same hills, sees them not as naturally productive and helpful to her bottom line, but as an unfinished canvas, as the ground for her work. She alters the land and builds, layer upon layer, as investor and developer who suffers a parodoxical obsession with transforming paradise. Each stunning ridgeline presents engineering, legal, social and marketing puzzles worth billions if solved in a certain way. The real becomes illusion.

A third person, anachronistic as the Chumash, might find in the pages of this listing an aesthetic and sometimes spiritual escapism. He may view the open space as sanctuary, as friend, as a land still alive. He may wonder why others skip this section of Earth(TM)'s book altogether, why they speed-read the pastoral vista toward a cityscape of integrated developments, rooftops, driveways, intersections and traffic. The difference may not even register to these disinterested people, as they head home, focused more on destination than journey: a nice big house in the suburbs, nestled somewhere in these hills, or somewhere beyond them.

Having read and reread it, I may need to put down the book myself, just to spare myself the horror of knowing.

Meanwhile on the other side of the country, the grass which gives this state its nickname has dried crisp and turned golden. It shimmers brittle in the wind and heat with the rusty bramble and brown shrubs that were so green last spring--of course, only where threads of the ecosystem remain. The rest is a garden, constantly watered; the sudden phish-swish of sprinklers cranking up at night must cause heart palpitations in the brush rabbits that hop around on coastal golf courses.

Hungry masked raccoons had invaded the Dumpsters the other night when I got home from work, and they hesitated just a moment, made sure that I was not a cop and returned to their loot. Their paw prints, fossilized, remain along the dusty trail up here along the ridge, where only six months ago everything seemed under water and oozed with life; not that California dies once a year. It just becomes combustible. The flames both cull the old and create the new, but we call it a natural disaster when uncontained wildfires breech civilization and consume homes along the edge of where the world, beaten and battered, has some semblance of its old identity. Over in the heart of Napoleon's territorial giveaway, similar ethics apply; the natural world, so hidden beneath the unnatural, gains no friends by making an appearance. If we have fires out here this year (and we should, given the amount of rain last winter and how much non-human life the waters brought to fruition), our complaint will also be that due to the vagaries of nature, humans suffer all too much.

The mayor says "likely, thousands" referring to the death toll from Katrina in New Orleans. This is no "American Tsunami," and it's distressing to hear that phrase because the rest of the country (heck, the world) knew about the hurricane a day or so before it hit, and heard repeated warnings that it was necessary to leave. I think assumptions about stubborness on the victims' part are moot. Poverty, mental and physical illness probably contributed more to these people being trapped than their own recalcitrance. What do you do in the event that you don't have a car and when you're all alone in a city that has neglected you for decades? You can only climb onto the rooftop for so long before the water goes over it. The hurricane lasted a few hours and picked off a few dozen here and there, but it is the broken levees, designed by men in suits to hold back the inevitable, that have done in these victims. Civil engineering arrogance did nothing to stop the Mississippi floods 15 years ago, or to hold together the Bay Bridge in 1989 or the I-5/14 L.A. interchange in '94 or the incessant coastal mudslides of Southern California. We expect nature to submit to our whims when we build cities in places they have no business being (even Las Vegas, like preserved glass in the dry heat, can only last until the next Ice Age). Mostly, New Orleans has filled like the sink it is; its foolhardy pipes have backed up with sharks and sewage in the mix and its basin has overflown. Intransigent nature eventually trumps human stubborness, even if it takes 300 years.

What can ya do? Katrina's everything Lionel Barrymore described. But not quite. A couple months ago I mumbled some hurricane hummenah with the suggestion that interest in such catastrophes wanes (that word again) over summer. Well, not when one as cataclysmic as this comes along! Hoo-boy, we got us a category 5 coming right at ...wait, make that a category 4, category 2... shucks, it's getting smaller, and with it, all the excitement. Besides, all those people drove out of town. Dangummit, where's the high death count (apparently numbers are relative)? All that NPR and CNN, (well, Yahoo! News) wasted on nothin'. Meanwhile I'd like to know why they keep NOLA there in the first place. Shouldn't they hang their heads in shame?

Guess 300 years ago the French didn't think much about sea levels and such. They built their little slave port on that ugly ol' swamp as a gateway to the browner Americas and to ease trade with the West Indies. Not unprecedented. Where would Amsterdam be without drainage and reclaimed wetlands? "Reclamation," after all, implies that it belonged to the people in the first place, and engineers and city planners are just official repo men. All land belongs to us, and a hurricane is just another of nature's brutal tactics to wrestle it out of our hands, like a nighttime mugger going for our money. The city needed, economically, to remain even after it burned down, and so the occupying Spanish rebuilt it all pretty like. How can you sell kidnapped Africans without a place to do business? Need to carry the cargo on ships, gotta dock them ships somewhere nearby. Might as well have a lot of shiny hotels and entertainment so the buyers will feel generous at the auction. And after that, well, after a Civil War made the whole big-money reason irrelevant, there was no turning back. The town had so much old world charm.

The readership of this waning experiment remains sporadic and disinterested: quick clicks from random searches, a faithful sister, occasional hits from a curious windy-city grad student who picked it up in the Crooked Corners Library, a pair who write their own exquisite blog in Greece and one bored co-worker. My own mother only thinks to read it after we talk on the phone, and my so-called best friend the psychic can't get into it--"too tricky," she says, which is fine. Why would she bother to read what she already knows via smoother supernatural channels? We foraging creatures on the move have very little time to waste. And after all, our friends and family have only low-interest stock in our aesthetic forays, knowing full well that a true investment would not pay off, much. I suspect most human relationships hinge on convenience of geographic or genetic happenstance despite the advances we have made in communication and transportation. Out of sight, out of mind, they say, and in this busy 21st century, techie doodads and clogged roadways limit loyalty to coincidental meetings or the stubborn effort of social holdouts like myself as much as deserts and broken telegraph wires did 150 years ago.

Following the line of that tangent, last night, opting against reruns or getting too far into a new book after having just finished Gore Vidal's illuminating Burr, I shoved myself out the door and into the car in order to drive the five miles canyon-wise to town...("to town" in this place where everything is a town sounds anachronistic, doesn't it, like foghorns or the bellow of tule elk). Town, of course, stops short of the water, and that was my true goal: to face out into the dark swell and contemplate absence. But some odd unknown barge of floodlights sat offshore and fine-lined my shadow, as if I had come onto a cabaret stage to sing. Nothing doing. Instead I walked away from salt and sand back up to the street, where someone I know, ancillary to someone else I know better, was checking his cell phone messages in the doorway of a restaurant.

Aaron, more than a little inebriated, said that he was in search of a cheeseburger, which he believed would make him less drunk so he could drive to LA. The restaurant was inconveniently closed, however, so he lured me another block, bought some Cheetos at a liquor store and ate them on our way back to the club where our mutual friend Jason lurked somewhere inside. I shared with Aaron the regret that I hadn't heard from Jason for a long time, since before I headed south into suburbia, and that all emails and phone calls, spaced far apart, had not received a reply. "Stay here," Aaron said, patting me on the back and wiping his cheese doodle fingers on my linen shirt. "I'll go get him." Half an hour later, the friend I've known for eight years finally wandered out, so far gone that he wouldn't recognize his own reflection, much less someone he hasn't seen for 20 months. So I tugged him over and kept our reaquaintance lecture free, discerned from his wide pupils and angry voice that his soapy life had endured predictable lumps as of late. Aaron scolded Jason for dwelling, but our friend shook his head and said, "Erik hasn't heard it."

Well, that's a shame.

The withdrawal of settlers from the rural Midwest proceeds and has sparked a number of controversial plans for the altered landscape. Should we hand it over to the descendents of early inhabitants, who might encourage bison herds to regroup at a legendary scale? I dunno. The tribal hunters and gatherers of yesteryear exterminated their share of good eats, mowing down mastadons and giant sloths like pheasants in October. How about establishing a new habitat for threatened animals whose own continent may no longer be able to support them? Better than your average drive-around zoo, I suppose, but kinda sad and dangerous. Just because we got all grabby in the nature pot early on doesn't mean we can make up for it by being randomly bulimic.

The introduction of (hu)man(s) to any environment has consequences readily observable by anthropologists and, these days, anyone with a TV. The construction of homes on an "uninhabited" strip of Mediterranean real estate not only brought about decades of war, but the population decline of many desert species. Homo homo sapiens started out intrinsic to the natural world, but once we spread out over the continents, other mammals and their non-furry allies lost territory left and right.

What remains behind, when properly abandoned, can probably with encouragement make a comeback. But it takes a lot of dollars, detail and progressive politics to return an ecosystem to the epoch of yore. Still, if it can be done in the Golden State, there's hope.

The diminutive elf causes mischief, misdirecting with its magic. It can be heroic, as Legolas in "The Lord of the Rings," and is often misunderstood, like Hermey the dentist, pal of Rudolph.

When a California Hummer dealership and some of its patrons found their trucks slightly molten as if by hail of anger in 2003, a news anchor(woman) led the story with the blurb "Domestic terrorism in the Southland!" Since the event had happened some time at night and only cameras witnessed the aggression, the report stood out as egregious hyperbole. Molotov cocktails differ from rolls of toilet paper, indeed, but not a single person suffered loss of life or limb.

Eventually, as expected, ELF was also, aptly, blamed. An acronym formed not out of irony, ELF finds itself on watchlists and in GOP spam equated with Osama, the Saudi, et al.

Should our lexicon co-opt "terrorism" (an attempt to elicit change by use of fear and the application of indiscriminate harm) to describe the boneheaded acts of petty vandals with a message? Of course the men and women who commit crimes in the name of their cause deserve contempt and maybe even airplay as shoddy anarchist amateurs wo go about things the wrong way. But as our society begins to equate Muslims with terrorism, as it does, it could also begin to equate environmentalism with the same misapplied word. And, as if to underscore the absence of logic that permeates our current ill-mannered war on terror, the damage done to the climate by voracious Hummers and their offroad cousins is labeled not as an act of stupidity or ignorance, greed or selfishness (or of terrorism), but of red-blooded American choice--of citizens celebrating freedom and their basic right to buy.

It's tiring, even deadening to hear the same words over and over again ("threatened," "endangered," "facing extinction") and not resent the stubborn stupidity of those who pretend deafness in order to go on breeding and imposing on the globe their gross superstition. Stewards of the earth, kicked out of the garden, resent the place from where they came. And twin to this selfish grudge is greed; that's why fishermen "with no other option" enjoy anti-conservationist notoriety--the Simon Peters of ecological ignorance (if only they would follow Jesus away from their boats). If God created the earth, they seem to believe, he made it for them to exploit. One current creationist conspiracy underway in the Galapagos pits disciple against evolution. Do men who worship fish intend to crush Darwin by eliminating the source of his epiphany? It isn't just geriatric tortoises that lose their beach property. The legendary uniqueness of the archipelago must fight two millenia of holier-than-thou fruitful excess, not to mention corrupt officials--the direct descendents of Catholicism's founders--with a sovereign entitlement to invade and pillage as usual. Is it something in the genes, passed down from generation to generation? I suppose not.

The fog doesn't sink low enough to comingle with degenerates. It hovers just above our heads as if to impede us from some blessed heaven that is, after all, imaginary. Beneath this bleak blockade of weather we forget the lie of eternal bliss above the grey, the hopeful myth that good behavior somehow manifests a reward of peace. Down here on the potholed pavement of an abandoned hotel, somewhere near the ocean shore, even parking has its dangers. The orange refinery casts cataclysmic light across the black ribbon of railroad tracks and complements the neo-gothic mise en scene. I hear the whistle and gathering gallop of a passing train, but see nothing. I feel that I have witnessed the appropriate wail of a ghost.

In the meantime a reunion of sorts takes place in one desperate corner of this darkened seaside dump. I "know" people here, but not well enough. Some I know more than others. Some, it seems, know each other. Some I wish I didn't know. Some I wish I knew, but have never met, and would probably regret knowing if I did. I feign oblivious enchantment with these vain, unsavory characters, the derivative cast of an 18th-century novel, complete with morose political and romantic intrigue. Yet they have corrupted and devolved, maintaining all the sensuality and sophistication of flies that need swatting. Is this self-contempt? Or simply cold observation and a hallucinogenic longing for the low clouds to open up and let me rise? Since I know that such glories do not happen, I linger in this seedy paradox and only dream of paradise.

There's a lot of junk off the freeway near quaint Granada Hills, where middle class housewives hate to wake up knowing that while they were dreaming of the next American Idol, LA's garbage depository doubled in size. They would have this trash heaped somewhere else, while mindlessly, I suspect, contributing to it every time they get the chance. Vaguely enlightened by asthma and cancer, Los Angeles recycles roughly 60 percent of its throw-outables and strives, mostly by lack of storage space, to push that number higher. The low-grade century-long real estate explosion that hisses and bubbles in fits and starts continues, and developers could fill those canyons with condos if the acreage wasn't already slated for last year's computer and yesterday's Evian bottle. Perhaps decades from now when all is paved and parked, the land's extra layer of human refuse will prove a techie benefaction. Companies that profit in 2005 from divvying up the ecosystem can later reap funds for stitching it back together. Buy stock in these high-tech companies and then wait. Your investment will pay off.

Behind the crunch of wine-and-cheese galleries, art shows ad nauseum, and the summer festivals that clog the only eastbound route out of town with headlights and anglo seniors, a forgotten artifact known as the Pacific stretches grey and white into a misty haze. It might be dark except for the Edison-induced eternal daylight of the coast, and the waves, I gather, would be black without a moon.

During sunny hours the beach serves as playground to chimp descendents and their detractors. Volleyball and surfing, a little swimming, people sunning lizardesque. Snorklers and their mechanized SCUBA cousins raise their goggled heads beside submerged rocks, then dive back under, while children casually risk giant waves and death while their mommies tap dance with them over the cramped tide pools, cautiously approaching anything pink, unworried about the undertow that at any moment could suck them out into the hungry abyss.

But this is night, lit haphazardly with white beams that protect porches and balconies from that which lurks. Confused birds swoop across the water and glean the surface. Cargo pallets and fishing wire tangle at the water's edge. Couples make out on square black blankets until the waves crash over them and contribute to their love life a natural mixture of salt, sand and kelp.

I stand alone, why not, watching all this and wondering if there is a fish, by instinct used to darkness, struck as I am by the electric lights where his environment ends and another begins, where the wall of the continent blocks egress like so many shuttle buses and elderly fans of manmade art.

And one day I would like to live so remotely from civilization that the moon blocks my view of it. It would make it very difficult to order out, so all nutrition, circulation, elimination, sanitization would have to be integrated into a system of recycling pumps and technological doodads. Or if people would just SHUT UP then maybe I could live a little closer. But in space, it is very quiet. I could live there in a pod, tube-fed, tube-bled, watching the stars shine and the earth rise as it gets less green and more brown, more blue and less white. Can you imagine being launched away from everything, to have your troubles reduced to a spec in the distance, where all you had to do to wipe that spec from view is hit the left thrusters and turn around? Gaze at Mars and Jupiter for a while, dodge asteroids with your robomatic magnetic field bumpers? And when no longer interested in the firmament or the disintegrating organic matter/energy on the surface of the Earth (all that creepy crawly crud on our planet's crust which is so erroneous and random anyway), let the soft drift of elliptical orbit lull you into a deep sleep? Nothing would matter after that.

what reigns supreme

There are low-grade rumblin's that the new SPOTUS nominee has no regard for environmental law. Of course no regard and ill regard are two different things. One is the witness who stands still and allows the crime to go on without interfering; the other is the criminal, usually directed by some hidden oversight committee of mafia-like bosses in it for the money. For now, and for possibly a long time coming, the three branches ("branches," for lack of a better word) of the federal government ain't got nature's back. So we can hope the ecological, biological and geological victims of this betrayal figure out some way to delay the inescapable. Conservation is, after all, just a way of staving off a manmade crescendo of the timeless cycle. Arguments that we humans, as part of this world, have a right to influence our natural surroundings on our own terms play into this inevitability. We may discount the harm we cause to our own species because Darwin's law of survival of the fittest clears up such ethical messes. What is "bad," anyway, except a naysayer's definition of good? Certainly we can do no more damage than the sun exploding, and who are we to say we're more important than that?

Well, it's 96 degrees, but the Weather Channel says it "feels like 97." This seemingly meaningless difference has a huge psychological impact on people eager to suffer more. But one degree is also the stuff of controversy. Precision is everything in nature, and the slightest fluctuation can have aeonic results that scientists can't live long enough to study. Comics and pundits argue the consequences, but a drop in the bucket can cause the bucket to overflow. Personally I would hate to have any involvement in unwanted flooding.

A fine line of variability extends to all matter and energy. A slight twist of the genetic string, for example, tricked our brains into forming a frontal lobe; and because of this sudden humanity we developed the ability to peel away these gradations like onion skins, to explore how the tiniest bump in the road can cause cataclysm or delight. In fact, there may be no missing link between man and beast, just a shift in the code, and though in a larger sense we can't map the future, we can see the signs and collect some evidence. Tusks disappear from elephants, frogs stop singing, plankton fades from the sea. And of course we have humans who, by some mutation or interference in their personal growth, don't relate or act in the least bit related to the rest of us.

The high curbs remain, stamped with the year of their creation: 1927. A walk up the path behind my former apartment is actually a concrete hike along this four-score-old street, and on a lark I sometimes go back to the old 'hood just for nostalgic aerobic exercise.

Although from all the lights and mailboxes you might not know it, the peaks of the Santa Monica mountains--three or four miles west of where the range ends--still hover above the city. When Rudolf Schindler built his home in the beanfields west of Hollywood, one could trek up those cliffs without having to sidestep hip-hop Hummers or even ah-ooga Model T's. 85 years later, homes fill in the canyon like a flock of resting pigeons. Besides the vertiginous weedy cliffs (sometimes reinforced and covered in a Dada/Christo fusion of plastic and wire to lessen mudslides), nothing remains to resemble pre-development history except the precipitous angle at which these fault-induced hills give a northern boundary to the L.A. basin. At the La Brea Tar Pits, a museum's mural shows the very same outline unmarred, without stilts to prop up stars' balconies and the ruthlessly eclectic architecture. The silent film era captured the last images of wild (and early 20th century) Los Angeles before the city crawled into every nook and cranny. Though the residents change, and the land may shift and move an inch or two every millennium, the iconic horizon remains the same.

The air compacts, and the high heat squeezes the light. The distant ridges look as sharp as cut metal, as if visible through the pinhole of my fist. But this impressive, oppressive temperature that reveals the horizon beyond the usual smog deceives; "good photo days" come at the onset of 100-degree months or when the sky is scrubbed clean by the winter rain afterward. Now approaches the half year of asthma attacks and crud: our ordinary air, a mix of noxious particulates and detritus (soot, really), that collects like a black coat of paint on bookshelves and the carpet and on plants--on everything in Los Angeles County. Shaken from there by a random fault-slip of life, I now live where at least the dust is white and somewhat manageable. It's worse in the Inland Empire and into San Bernardino where the mustard haze wears out lungs like the padded feet of a geriatric bobcat. Out there, smog is the envy of every first-rate illusionist, the way it makes the mountains disappear.

From my brother, word of cleaning up the farm after a storm in Iowa. I hadn't heard about any inclemency there, since the middle part of the country gets little play against the cyclones and earthquakes at the nation's edges, much less when in competition with that whole mass transit/mass murder thingy across the pond.

I vaguely recall such phenomena from my disippating youth (fading into a twinkling blur like the bright trail of a comet, the imposing combustible part being the future). Thunderstorms were those things that we knew were coming, but about which we hesitated. Do we go into the basement? How does the sky look? What does the weather man say?

(Back then it was "the weather man," and we didn't have cable, and usually the power went out so you couldn't watch the storm approach on the news; you had to listen to the battery-operated radio in a box encased in red leather with a metal retractable antenna that you had to point in different directions to pick up whatever signals were out there.)

The crash and grumble of the grumpy sky sometimes came along at the darkest hours, when we watched the ceiling, flat on our backs, still as bunnies in the brush. A flicker of lightning became an all-encompasing white strobe and the resultant slam of clouds overhead made the house jump and our hearts with it. Thunder can be that loud, lightning that fierce. It would split trees in the woods, the ones we'd just climbed the day before. We didn't have toys out there for the wind to scatter, for the rain to ruin. Our world was our playground, and hearing it endure this spanking welled up merciless fear in our dreams.

Spiraling over there on the edge of the map, the white whirl of a massive storm Blutos its way across the Caribbean. The scramble to shore up fragile manmade structures seems familiar, and by October such extensive evacuations have the word "rerun" printed next to them in the TV listings.

Yet early on, the public gathers for this annual event and fondly watches the hurricanes bloom. Something compels us to observe and even celebrate meteorological disasters in all their guilty, visceral glory. What dot on our charted DNA focuses this fascination? What biological routes line up our gaze?

Perhaps facing someone else's strife may help us glance indirectly at our own abyss whenever it comes along. Granted, I make this claim by way of an impromptu hypothesis. Could our common chemical root structure drive us anthroprogenically to seek a united bond through The Weather Channel? Sorry about the big words.

Humanity regroups--reassembling as a single entity--during catastrophe. We seek this out, this prior oneness, whenever blood spills unexpectedly. When we throw the punches, when we drop the bombs, we anticipate the damage, and we pay less attention to the suffering of our complex organism. But when a slight against our fellow man seems unjustified or comes as a shock, we can't help but participate by proxy. I'm not sure if it's just to enjoy the alluring aesthetic spectacle of nature. We may actually care.

London and the nature of kabooms

I've little to add directly to that particular subject which will be served up like brain pudding the next few days by our media and nearly every other blog on the net. Trifling punditry and thinly veiled get-back-ism and finger-pointography will spice up this inelegant meal. But that doesn't mean I can't briefly juggle philosophical idears, if anyone cares to read them.

A series of conflicts, like waves of light, bends and refracts throughout our existence; without reflection we have no view, and the more shattered the glass, the more views we have. I weave through my days subtly, as some do, with an attempt to limit the scale of such disasters personally, but I can't avoid them. No one can avoid bad things happening to them, and societies resemble organisms in that they, too, must suffer in order to exist.

History, from geological to political to deeply human, involves a series of large and small moments that, while cataclysmic or tranformative, compel us forward like the series of explosions in the engine of a rocket. We want a world at peace, but we must fight to get there. We would like to live freely, but we must make laws to do so. Despite our attempts to ease our lives, we have no pure defense.

London is a big town and has seen far worse disasters; the plague, the blitzkrieg, '60s fashion. Three dozen people get blown up in Iraq every day. It appears stuck in a quagmire, so we sort of ignore the flailing limbs of its semi-sinking "democracy." It's only when the booms catch us off guard (after all, we expect ka-splosions in the Middle East), that we open our eyes.

Good is the nothingness between the bad things that happen. Sadly, it's how we react that matters, and we usually manage to make things worse. When you are drowning in quicksand, if you take it easy and put your feet up, you might float. Screaming and flailing around will only make you sink. So relax.

The canyon's acoustics, put to the test, triggered car alarms and cat ears, and all around the darkened hills a red glow flickered for half an hour. Every few miles a crowd had gathered; I imagined from past experience men and women and lookalike children in t-shirts decaled with the stars and stripes (and sometimes the words, "we will not forget!" stenciled across the back). I could not see the commotion, just hear it, as if a war were happening in a border country; and I, at peace with my spider collection on the balcony, stood and listened. At nine-thirty the cacophony intensified for about a minute, and the very tip of the fireworks--like the glistening shock of wavy hair atop a giant's head--became visible over the hillsides. Then it was all smoke. And the crickets, for a short while silenced, smoothed out their wings and began, haltingly, to sing again.

"Guide to California"

Rolling hills of roofing tiles, pink and salmon,
with darker shades of older growth,
with squares of deck and “drives” for parking,
thrive along clear concrete channels, lush and thick,
awaiting rain that falls as often as a holiday.

Nearby, a fecund stand of glass and steel
stretches toward the sun;
these ever-reaching monuments give shade
and offer habitat to countless, heedless life;
they teem, busy with the business of existence.

And in amongst the rushes, if one is patient
and inclined to natural observation,
one may sight a rare delight:
evidence of a sea-to-mountain tapestry
reduced to remnants of its former range.

What’s left are ragged patches of this golden quilt.
Its stitches long exposed and routed,
few seams of wildlife, primordial, remain:
the buggy haze above a spray of shimmering grass,
an aged oak who has long outlived his children.

A foreshortened hike into the wilderness due to "mountain lion country" signs at the trailhead had me contemplating all the things my friend could fear instead. But rather than list them each aloud, I squeaked out the obvious anytime-anywhere traffic accident possibility and left it at that.

If quietly my brain ticked off a quick list of the real dangers we face every day, I couldn't help it. But it was time to move on, as a squirrel ran through some brush and we had to git. I must admit some high anxiety myself: if I laughed again, I might get jumped on--not by puma, but by Sue-ma.

Lions and tigers and sharks, oh, my! Last week when Robert stabbed his thumb with a pen cap, he said he might have to sit out surfing that evening because sharks smell blood. Well, they do, turns out, but I would have suggested staying out of the water for other reasons involving human waste and the inherent bacteria. A few days later, the red tide came in, and Laguna's shoreline looked as rusty as, well, blood.

In Florida, the teenager vs. shark horror story has many worried. No wonder. But I do think people could temper that scare with the statistical likelihood of getting chomped on by "man's best friend." I petted a shark on Friday (with two fingers, as required by aquarium law), and I suppose it could have whipped around and taken my hand off if it felt like it. I felt terribly safe touching the back of an unknown shark. I don't think I could do that with somebody's idiot pooch.

To view such odd abstractions from below the sea in the brightest of modern aquariums is like being inside a lava lamp and feeling remote and connected at the same time. I put solitary wilderness on my list of natural highs, of course, but this crowded museum of captured wild things really does play with the mind.

Sue enjoyed the sea dragons best: thin, drifting fish with wriggling fins (I think) that branch up from their long bodies like oak leaves. I savored standing at the base of the floor-to-ceiling kelp forest, filled with life that thrives five miles from this desk; it is lit from above by the sun, and I've been up there looking down, but never down there looking up.

It's much cleaner in that titanic jar than any spot along the Southern California coast. They mention that in writing somewhere along the wall in the lobby, but unless it's moving, people don't look. The kids are so excited to see parachuting luminescent jellyfish and schools of silver-dagger herring chase around in circles as if competing in some ichthyological grand prix that they miss the obvious point--that this is the gallery of a vanishing ecosystem. Of course we adults already know all about this sadness. Sort of.

Ferried out to Catalina from Dana Point to see if we could hike a little; not likely, it turns out, with only six hours before the return. While "88 percent" conservancy-owned, the island's start-off point is the small town of Avalon, a compact but cleanly Californian resort which does not serve up trailheads easily. We found one after lunch and the museum and after a trolley ride to the Wrigley Memorial and Botanical Garden (spotted with endemic species including Catalina Mahogany: "only seven of these small shrubs or trees occur naturally in a single canyon").

It was too late to start a hike that would take us far enough inland to have any real sense of scale. Had a brief chat with the shirtless, shoeless trailhead nametaker who quenched his crippled feral pig's thirst with a bottle of beer and told us stories of rattler comebacks, but we explained we just didn't have enough time to head up that steep switchback behind his tent-slash-home.

I'm glad they saved this island as much as they could and are working to put it back together after ranches (bison, Arabian horses, Cubs training) and wild pirate nights, both Spanish and Chinese. After you boat in for 90 minutes dodging the loose elbows of wobbly teenagers reeling from the swell and chop, the first part of Santa Catalina is a shaved vertical cliff, with cranes and other mechanical contraptions at its base. Looks like a quarry, and it turns out it is. Only as the ferry turns do you see the distinctly bright town and then beyond that, a magnificent open-space preserve of canyons and steep hillsides spreckled with variances of the coastal scrub oak found on the mainland here and indigenous poppies and succulents. In fact it looks almost the same as California does in Wendt's paintings, from a distance. Avalon, tasty treats and all, is not this wilderness. One day I will go there and stay overnight so I can explore the real thing.

Hey, the earth has to breathe, or it would quickly die. Sometimes upon exhalation a slight palsy shivers across the land, which in turn causes us to hold our own breath.

Well, we can breathe easy. All this fear of the end is silly. After all, we're not salamanders. They're done for.

"Scientists monitoring stable populations of 49 amphibian species listened and watched as they crashed in just two years, with 20 native species disappearing completely."*

I noticed this with my own sophisticated tracking system a couple months ago--and I'm not even a biologist. The mysterious saga of the vanishing ingredient of stews and brews has lasted a couple decades, now, so we've had time to get used to the doomsday chatter on the radio and in the Sunday garden section. But when I realized I couldn't hear them anymore...

Well, no worries. Aside from a handful of chin thrummers like me, most people are much more concerned about those China-made figurines not glued down to the top of the TV set. As the things we cherish edge closer and closer to shattering on the floor when the big one finally arrives, we shift our survival instincts to material goods. And that makes sense: Out of the roughly 37 million people living in California, nobody's dead from an earthquake this week. So why worry?

*National Wildlife, June/July 2005

A catastrophic intellectual laziness dams the minds of energy industry players; although frankly I suspect cunning--not unawareness. Electricity costs money, and overweight felines enjoy crisp Benjamins with their fish. They want to obscure "moderation" (a synonym for "off switch") by affirming our "need" for unlimited power. It is our god-given right to plug things in!

The NWF and its American Indian allies win a small battle to protect a gasping species that not long ago teemed backwards from the sea. The barons cry war crime and promise to raise the rates with the roof. Investors who prefer a steady profit stream to an uninterrupted river would prefer their customers forget that they really don't need to have the lamps on in every room. Nor do empty parking lots have to be lit up like baseball stadiums at night. In fact, even if people left to their own devices decided to leave those devices running, we could power down power use by huge percentages just by shutting things off at work.

A hundred years ago, no one would have suspected such a battle was necessary. In another hundred, they may not remember it at all.

The diaphanous burden of humidity, stirred and spurred by traffic, copulates with the thick-necked grunt of noise to produce this greasy growling monster that chases after me with shattering footfalls and Dolby screams. The endless braying of countless engines, one after another, like a herd of mechanized bulls; the caterwalling of electronics with their chipper alarms, construction drills, the unrestrained voices of Americans with a broken volume knob; these distractions strip my nerves to a coarse stretched twine. I am something akin to a fitful edgy predator trying to get some rest, every moment or so awakened by another yip and yowl from the jungle, tired of the hunt and fight, waiting for the moment when, for the first time since birth, silence prevails.

But silence cannot prevail. It is inherent with coexistence and an absence of conflict. Noise dominates, noise reigns.

To show disdain for this artificial contamination, to want to escape anything industrial or technological in America or the world, even that desire, makes one a mad, insular and sociopathic recluse with apparent multiple anxiety disorders. (The Internet with the speakers off is such sweet hypocrisy.) While years ago, quiet was the norm, or at least acoustic peace, we have now become so accustomed to the fracas of industry versus wilderness that we hardly notice, at least most of us. And we contribute to it ourselves: a honk of the horn here, a T-Mobile rendition of "Claire de Lune" in the line for Mickey D's, the artillery fire of a motorcycle there.

The world is at war. Stillness is the obsolete adversary of human progress. Every day we design new weaponry against the opponent, crank it up and see if it works.

Earthquake? Oh, yeah, that's right, I did feel that, sort of. As usual I figured it was just my loud neighbors, cuz every time they walk it feels like the San Andreas has finally let loose. When the walls wobbled more than five seconds, I realized it was prolly best to roll out of bed if not onto the floor. But then it stopped.

I got up and looked around: a few tripped trinkets, nothing moving, so I went back to bed. Now I've been up for hours and had forgotten all about it. So why is it in the news? Grr. A pebble rolls down the mountain and it's news. Steal the mountain, nobody says anything. Carve it into woodchips and marble countertops, serve it up as real estate, turn it into a slip & slide park, that's ok. Just don't shake it. Or do, please, or we won't have anything to keep us properly scared.

It rained stallion tater tots on Tulsa this week, when creationists won the right to put their monkeyshines on display. This bizarre phenomenon is nothing new for Okies, a proud people who relish such Biblical moments and welcome them with game zeal. The farmer and the zoo hand should be friends!

The intelligent design hypothesis, as opposed to the theory of evolution, negates nature and instead puts blinders on the horse, with the afterlife as carrot stick. Science cannot do-si-do with superstition because life itself--"itself" not "himself," um, otherwise known as "reality"--has no motivational power. Even I bow my head to that.

Yea, but if ye could only step outside for a moment, ignoring the asphalt and telephone wires, the jets and the freeways and the tracts of endless mattress warehouses...Why, there is life that goes on despite that lack of inspiration, that evolves (!) despite its having no reason to do so! And this is no miracle. One need not search far to bear witness to these struggling creatures of suspect morality, hiking up their bootstraps in the cracks of that vast parking lot known as America. They don't have time for religion or smoke and mirrors. But for the grace of nature itself, they're too busy surviving the onslaught of mankind. Testify!

Guess it's rotten politics and not-so-rotten science that keeps us from pulling back. Must those silly soothsayers remind us that everything rotten is not cheese? Is it our fault the earth is spontaneously combusting and that the expense will be chocolate, polar bears and fine wine? Ack! And an increase in tropical ailments will travel the heatwave; good for the farms that sell us eggs and good for settling bets with those crazed prognosticators of overpopulation. Heck, if we all die from malaria and its cousins, how can we blame ourselves?

Had one of those miscellaneous mini-non-life forms flatten me out Monday night, a little mortality reminder that worries the parents more than me. I wouldn'ta said nothin' 'cept my voice is quieter, which means it's the quietest voice on earth, softer than the whisper of a snowflake. Won't be seeing too many of those much longer; they're headed to the graveyard faster'n me, so while they're around, best take pictures.

Hey, snowflakes and viruses sorta look alike... Maybe it's not so bad after all.

The world will not stir for one sad voice. It may dream of a quiet song, like the low-pitched whistle of the winter wind through an empty house, host to a flock of blackbirds and a foot of white snow in the attic. It may awaken wistfully and stretch with a yawn, this world; but it drifts quietly back to sleep, so unthreatened by the white noise of mankind, even unaware. It revolves as it evolves, it has no concerns.

Meanwhile all is in motion, a microbial circus, the exchange and interchange of atomic combinations so rapid and continuous and so loud--but furtively silent, so quick--that when the world does awaken, it will not recognize itself.

We help a lot with this. We shift how things have fallen into how we would have them stand. Our goals and desires seem in direct contrast to this docile dozing globe beneath our feet, but also to the incessant biological processes at work on its surface. We reconstruct its deconstruction, burn its history in our engines, rewire its systems, cast off its elements here, consume them there. A few of us sniff and whine a bit over some superficial damage (I'm one of those), while the rest hustle nature into oblivion, not only failing to pay back what we've taken (how could we) but sending more cronies out to club the world's knees and ultimately have it whacked.

Sleep, gentle world. We will join you in a minute.