One forgets or ignores the easy slide of time; like a glacier, it seems so vast and inefficient, but it moves far and fast and does a lot of damage.

A few more rocks have tumbled down the granite walls, and some trees have toppled, split apart, disintegrated both by the crash and the critter aftermath. The wilderness is a majestic place of constant decomposition. It seems timeless, but as I kicked along the trail I viewed the permanence as an illusion, a drawn-out process of constant change. The only reality is change, after all. Isn't that what they say? It is the one thing you can count on and never predict. The Earth is like a perpetual drunk, faltering, reliably inconsistent.

Click here for some photographs if you have time to wait for the flash to download. It's over 5 mb. Such an extravagant waste of unnatural resources.

"to whit"

poor America,
its iconic landscape skin-damaged, scaly, it leans sideways
on its wobbly legs and collapses, heaving,
a sigh of greenhouse gasses,
huddled masses,
on its own, and in its own
way trying to prove an argument
to a world long past that--
one that has seen the beast
and now observes the wooly tufts
of its shedded fur, democracy,
as it settles across the polished globe.

On Wisconsin

The weather is the same there as everywhere else, lately, and the lawns have sinned against suburbia by turning yellow. The flowers in the garden struggle despite the hose, and even hornets haven't the energy to sting. Corn stalks remain stunted like withered bamboo bonsai, and the blood-red sun, when it sets, sits huge on the horizon for an hour, as if the earth is so dry it cannot sink.

This frightens deer out of the woods toward the bird bath, and crickets into the house, toads into the garage, all seeking something to drink. The crows battle yellow finches and hummingbirds. 80-year-old red pines rust and die, ever green no longer. Skittish foxes skirt the edge of the field, hoping to spot a cat or a mouse. And the mice, at night, munch on sun-dried husks of frog and beetles, neither of which can outlive these 99-degree days or the shrinking wilderness. So many developments: Meadow Estates. Larson's Landing. Hunter's Ridge. Condos instead of family farms. Freeway bypasses, Super Wal-Marts, and a fine crop of nothing.

But I exaggerate. I took this picture 60 miles north, along the National Scenic Ice Age Trail in Chippewa County. Where nature is left alone, it prospers.

The Arroyo Trabuco is a thin line of wilderness that cuts through the crust of suburbia, as if someone took his fingernail and scored it across a photograph. This deep ravine, often dry, a collected sandy mix of bluffs and sycamores and golden grasses, sends the water, if it rains, toward San Juan Creek, which in turn pours all that it collects into the wide, sad Pacific, the convex blue eyeball of the Earth.

You would never know it was there if you kept your focus on the road; the bridges, dated chronologically as sprawl expands, are anachronistic, modern-day structures that staple one new city to another. And if you look over to the side, you are likely to see a discarded couch, or worse, a bright green manicured golf course.

I know it doesn't matter much to people, that some land owners and stockholders capitulated and left this run-off ditch somewhat wild (actually it is buffered by cosmetically altered manmade marshes and collection tanks, water purification systems and garbage holds, and will never be "real" again). But almost all the land the arroyo served is absent--not gone, but altered with a veneer of plywood, plaster, stucco and asphalt, paint, parking lots, man. This kills all else, it makes the natural channels irrelevant. Why keep a skinny ragged seam of acreage, its tufts of yesteryear sticking out like some embarrassing tear in a brand-new pair of polyester slacks, why remember it, why preserve this strand of obsolete earth? You know why, even as it makes you sad: the land remains to remind you of your crime. You did this by existing.