thor progeny blog

Santa Ana Zoo

2010-08-18T15:33:00.000-07:00

In the left-hand pocket of Orange County's 5 and 55 freeways, a small, urban park conceals beneath rain-forest flora the Santa Ana Zoo, a blighted gem of cages and artificial rock, as dusty and frivolous as it is enticing to anyone with 4 bucks and some free time after 2 o'clock.

When founded 60 years ago, the zoo's main mission was to house at least 50 monkeys at all times. The many primate cages remain a highlight despite their unkempt manner, and the gardens, a meandering train and a new two-acre grassland, "Tierra de las Pampas," reveal the stops and starts of improvement. It is a city-owned park, after all, marked by the neglect and enthusiasm unique to government-run public projects.

While the zoo does not host the spectacle--or big animals--of nearby mega-zoos like those in San Diego and Los Angeles, it's still worth a visit, particularly to support its conservation efforts, including the breeding of endangered golden lion tamarins. These engaging creatures squeak to their audience as if attempting conversation, climb as if called to perform, and then--distracted by a questionable morsel or bored with their company--turn away with charming indifference.

Because of the zoo's proximity to major transportation corridors, the constant rush of traffic is unavoidable. The animals don't seem to mind the incessant white noise, except for the camels (wayward guests for the summer). They alone appeared nervous.

Mokelumne Melting

2010-07-02T09:43:00.000-07:00

Join me on a leisurely climb into the watershed ecosystem of Mokelumne Wilderness, high in the Stanislaus National Forest. We travel northward and upward from 7,000 to 9,000 feet above sea level with compass in hand, the reassuring rush of Silver Creek to our east. From the parking lot we fail to find the Woodchuck Basin Trailhead: A long winter has covered its path, and we make our way without an established guide, taking our careful steps, for the most part, atop the remaining resilient tufts of snowpack--even as willowy streams roil beneath them. Founts of cold water, only moments ago trapped in ice, burst forth from limitless sources above; a liquid earth descends from the alpine meadows, overseen by ancient volcanic peaks and broken here and there by remnants of basaltic mud. As the scene transforms from waning winter to the promise of summer, the impatient detritus of spring awaits on warmed snow to return to the earth it knew in autumn. Pine trees slough off the chill and embrace the afternoon sun, a handful of tiny shoots pick out spots in the brightness to arise from the mud, the trickle of a thousand springs descends, and all around us the seasons intermingle in a sensuous entanglement of life and death, of color and light.

Coachella Valley Preserve

2008-12-31T18:54:00.000-08:00

Thousand Palms, California.
A protected natural refuge in the burgeoning urban desert
features Washingtonia filifera, otherwise known as the
California fan palm.

Along the edges of the San Andreas Fault, impermeable
soil acts as a water trap and sustains these rare oases.

The six-mile Pushwalla trail ends at a large, thriving grove
of America's only native palm. It follows a steep climb along
the uplift of the Mission Creek fault, a fragment of the San
Andreas Fault System that cuts a diagonal line from Southern California toward San Francisco and beyond.

Click on the photograph to follow in sequence a late-afternoon hike.

2008-03-03T16:29:00.000-08:00

While cruising along the information superhighway, why not visit

It's more fun than a barrel o' gophers!
Crooked Corners Webside Stop

2008-01-15T15:55:00.000-08:00

In northeast New Mexico, as some of you know, there are several old volcano cones, but only one has trees; that is Capulin, which last erupted about 30,000 years ago (if I remember what the video said in the visitors center). For $5 you can drive up around the cone and then follow two or three trails, one that leads into the caldera, long inactive, another around the rim.

The caldera proved to be quite the amphitheater, and I heard a mom down below (unseen here) tell her children that she needed to climb back out because she had to "go potty." Why wait?

The snow on the trees is actually some kind of frost event unique to that elevation and ecosystem; the lichens can be up to 20,000 years old, they say, though I'd never heard of anything living quite that long. Perhaps the writers of such brochures exaggerate. Perhaps only the ancestry extends that far, like everybody else's. I imagine a long line of European immigrants (or their descendants) crossing through the grasslands and hillsides of the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles toward the Southwest and coming across this odd monument with a sort of relief: a sign from God in Heaven and all that, a precursor to the glory of the southern Rockies, a place to hide from savage Injuns still untended to by Washington.

A herd of pronghorn hung out on the boundary as I left, like smokers outside a high-rise. They and the cattle seemed both antagonistic and a bit skittish. Maybe it was the cold.

2007-10-24T12:02:00.000-07:00

The ecosystem does its thing. Oh, some buildings burn, a handful, on the dry flora fringes of this concrete scab we call civilization. The nation freaks out, as if this is New Orleans. Do we gym-toned, suntanned "victims" look like we're bloated, floating on our backs in a flood of sewage? You can go back to your regularly scheduled programming. Leave us alone. We'll handle it. We have day laborers out here to push windblown eucalyptus leaves from the sidewalks and gutters and more quasi-documented slaves to detail the ashes off our cars. We're good. Half a million people evacuated doesn't mean they'll scatter far. It just means some temporary camp-outs in the living rooms of friends or family a couple miles down the road. Well-stocked schools and stadiums cover the rest, and no burning embers rain down upon them, just good will, particulate matter and smoke-filtered sunshine. In case you hadn't noticed, and you wouldn't, the real disasters are elsewhere: Darfur and Iraq, the Congo and the Yangzte, not to mention Washington. Yep. No real crisis would get so much attention.

2007-10-22T13:28:00.000-07:00

The sky is orange, an apt color for this County of Orange, a place which long ago gave up the historical meaning of its name to suburban development and freeways, tollways, oh, and parkways, on which, coincidentally, you can drive 55. Not so on the 405, ever, and particularly when fire plays tag in the hills, and all the side roads north have closed down to keep lookey-loos (and naughty boys with matches) away from the windswept, combustible pre-developed landscape, staked out; its future high-end, luxury estates still in the planning stages. Not to worry, say the disembodied TV commentators, voices backed by the thrum of helicopters, their faces replaced by God's-eye images of His apocalypse: the fire in Irvine (an enormous swath of land, master-planned) lingers in an area only slated for growth; the flames skim over the top of concrete foundations, but nothing is built there--yet. For now, the natural disaster upstages the human disaster that has ravaged this poor land. None of us will ever live to see the recovery of that. For this landscape and its native ecosystem, this section of California, there is no recovery to come. We have zero containment on sprawl.

2007-10-03T12:44:00.000-07:00

I park, after some hesitation, twenty miles west of that artificial megalopolis, a street hyper-urbanized for its appeal to sin-seeking tourists (and not, as defenders claim, to clean, green living).

It takes me nearly an hour of suburban navigation, red-light, green-light, to get this far, and now a family of Spanish-speaking neocolonialists falls out of a Chevy beside me, with--of all clichés--an unleashed chihuahua and five children similarly free. The parents unload peekneek baskets, and a grandfather, viejo hombre renuente, takes his place in the back of the line, his thick fingers engaged in a tug-o-war with something lodged behind his molars.

So I don't know... I don't know if I want to hang around here, at the end of a week of work away from home. I suffer a particular consternation when faced with large families and the crescendo of their jubilance, their indifference to the public space they occupy. But what choice do I have? This is the option afforded stubborn 21st-century American single men with day jobs. We can't get very far before we have to return, and we are too tired, too cynical, to take this kind of amateur exploration seriously anymore. Small wonder.

The mountains rise high toward the same blue sky that ceilings the Venetian and the new-and-absurd Caesars Palace, Mandalay Bay and Bellagio. These mountains, not supervised by engineers or even built by cheap labor--merely deposited, composited and then revealed, over time, by all the processes that continue on despite everything--will last longer, almost certainly, than that trash heap of metal and sewage down the hill.

I succeed in hightailing it away from our neighbors among us, and I follow a steep embankment equidistant from two rock climbers. They stop to unpack their clanking equipment, and I descend what appears to be the "designated trail" indicated by a small sign placed obscurely on a post beside a stunted Joshua tree. Boot prints seem concurrent, and the scarce vegetation not trampled elsewhere assures me, somewhat, that I won't defy the limited direction implied by fine print: "Area of Ecological Concern."

The east wing of Red Rock Canyon "National Conservation Area" has a name, too, "Calico Hills," and numerous other assignations historically significant to no one in particular--the Paiute and Patayan, the inestimable numbers of wanderers before that--people long dead. Lucky for them, they had the place to themselves and could whoop it up, they could chase around on the rocks and score pictures of fauna and flora into the desert varnish without the consequences of a misdemeanor charge or my irrelevant frown. But the prehistoric marks of man yield less fascination than the geological casualties I find: fallen pieces of uplift collected at the bottom of the cliff like soldiers thrown off a battlement, their contusions caused by eroded iron ore collected within the sandstone.

For at least a mile I wade through this carnage until the "trail" joins up with a dry wash, again designated only by the evidence of other hikers; the brand insignia of their heels in the sand, discarded wrappers, water-bottle caps. Then a stout, sturdy American Pit Bull Terrier, glistening brown, rises up and freezes on the jut of a white boulder ten yards ahead of me. That puts me at a standstill, too, until its owner calls out the beast's name and appears--a young man in camouflage shorts and a tan shirt, dog tags, with a lithe girl who says something; I can't remember the words. They grab hold of their pet's collar and hold it tight to their bare knees, but the animal still growls and barks something unintelligible that echoes like mortar fire; it flings pebbles from the pads of its strong feet and lurches, strains, a muscular mass of fury, made-to-order to mangle passersby.

I ask, "The trail continues on this way?" Internal alarms swirl and sound; external mechanisms remain somehow unresponsive. "Yeah, but you need to know the mountains." I take unexpressed offense at the boy's response, for this isn't his wilderness. To whom does it belong but everyone? Families out for lunch, enthusiasts who cling to the smooth cliff and gingerly hand each other ropes and metal pitons as they raise themselves higher toward the sun, soldiers on leave with their girlfriends, interrupted.

This place doesn't belong to me, anyway, not in the least. I continue on, and the trail, I think, disappears into a disarray of stones, none of which match, like a drawer full of buttons. I scrabble at my own pace and make it into a ravine of sorts, where I'm sure once or twice a year a good flash flood wells up and pours through like a jungle river. I see evidence of horrific torrents in the twisted cactus roots exposed, the way everything seems upside down and forced against will into an aggregate dump.

For now, all remains still, holds tight and crisp in the autumn heat and waits to see what I will do. The whole Earth waits.

2007-09-30T22:41:00.000-07:00

The high-rise shadow of megastructures protects me from the sun in the morning. I think of this as the only advantage to their incredible height and breadth and excess. Every year, four late Septembers in a row, I walk to work on this gaudy, tawdry strip. I dodge tourists with cameras pointed upwards. I wait for the dust behind a bulldozer to settle so I can cross with a crowd at the light. Each time I return, a new stack of several thousand more flights hangs within steel frames, erected by the same handful of developers, paid for by the wide game room at their base and the nickels of seniors, the desperate last bids of the poor, the blank checks of foreign high rollers, the fleeced wallets of the willing, dwindling middle class. And meanwhile, the imploded former icons of garish entertainment augur future projects that make Liberace's coat look like a mud flap.

Yet the people around me disagree in their numbers and in their smiles. They find this place wondrous and exciting, delighted by the giddy thrill of kids at a carnival for adults.

As usual the appeal escapes me. I don't know from popular. I imagine the spectacle of a desert basin left alone, of the green remnant that was "the marshes," "the fertile valley": las vegas, an oasis centered in a wide stretch of baked sand. I live in the wrong time, as the saying goes, but at any other time I would probably be dead. The thing is I live now, not in self-imposed exile but incredulous and pretty much on my own. The billions spent here to erect ever more elaborate houses of cards, expressions of ego and one-upsmanship, could eradicate urban blight, could clothe and house and educate millions, could rebuild Detroit and New Orleans and criss-cross the country with passenger trains, could discover cures or new sources of power, could re-ice the Arctic or figure out a way to replay time so we could witness Rome's ignominy and see in slow-motion the same process of its extremes in full flower here.

As I wander a little on Thursday night on the dark street under the monorail, a skinny fortyish woman in blue jeans and a long-sleeved striped shirt, either a size too large or no longer fitting, stands on the median of Paradise and Sahara. She sees me, her shock of grimy hair caught in the glare of headlights from an SUV, her body backlit by the sheen of the Hilton a couple blocks away. As I pass she raises her cupped hand to her mouth and forms a circle with her fingers, then jerks them quickly back and forth.

"No thanks," would be the answer to the question if she had asked it. I feel the same way about the whole sad, sick, pathological town that stretches out away from us, that hemorrhages, blinking, glittering toward the horizon, far and wide from this wayward and desperate moment.

2006-09-14T17:20:00.000-07:00

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"

2006-08-08T12:26:00.000-07:00

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

2006-07-25T23:05:00.000-07:00

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.

2006-01-17T13:38:00.000-08:00

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.

2005-11-16T10:40:00.000-08:00

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.

2005-11-11T12:12:00.000-08:00

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.

2005-11-09T11:38:00.000-08:00

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.

2005-11-02T12:28:00.000-08:00

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

2005-10-31T11:12:00.000-08:00

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.

2005-10-26T19:57:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-10-24T23:57:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-10-20T15:22:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-10-16T23:17:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-10-13T10:35:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-10-05T08:56:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-10-03T14:28:00.000-07:00

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'.

2005-09-24T00:46:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-09-20T09:51:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-09-15T10:20:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-12T22:26:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-09-07T13:28:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-09-03T18:14:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-08-31T13:41:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-08-29T15:02:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-08-22T09:32:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-08-17T22:58:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-08-15T14:47:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-08-10T12:23:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-08-07T12:51:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-08-04T12:02:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-08-01T14:59:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-07-29T12:23:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-25T14:36:00.000-07:00

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?

2005-07-21T15:15:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-07-18T13:50:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-07-14T13:45:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-07-11T17:27:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-07-09T00:01:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-07T11:47:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-07-05T21:12:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-07-01T18:43:00.000-07:00

"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.

2005-06-28T22:18:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-06-25T15:31:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-06-21T23:23:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-06-18T00:01:00.000-07:00

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

2005-06-16T11:29:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-06-14T10:03:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-06-12T13:12:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-06-11T19:12:00.000-07:00

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!

2005-06-09T00:01:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-06-03T21:12:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-06-01T21:13:00.000-07:00

Someone typed "Elvis painting cries real rears" into Yahoo! and thor_progeny blog came up on the list. How someone "cries rears" I don't know. I don't want to know.

That is how I get readers, by the way: random words strewn throughout six months of unnecessary writing trigger a hit from a search engine.Yay! I wonder if this random person with such a random search and random typographical error was disappointed.

Meanwhile, such randomness on earth dwindles. Frankly, I worry about a world without fish. What will I turn up my nose to at the buffet? Will the only fish left be the ones pasted to the rear bumpers of superstitious suburbanites? Well, maybe the people with fish on their SUVs aren't too worried about it because, after all, you can divide a couple fish among a few thousand people. And if the few thousand divide theirs, why, there's no end to the number of mouths one could feed, were one so inclined or dedicated or idiotic.

At least Elvis had the decency to cry.

2005-05-30T22:38:00.000-07:00

Well, if you want to know the truth, I left the darned helmet at home yesterday. Living dangerously(?) except that I'd slapped on some sun block.

Nor did I mind the snakes along the way. They startle us because they're inert and snap into life so quickly--and to worsen things they wait until the last second to move. Saw two basking in the sun: a thin black one that did a quick reverse and slipped off into the sycamores, and later a grey-green lazy bones that stayed still as a discarded inner tube a few inches from my wheels.

I'm on a paved path someone was kind of enough to create; it wanders in and out of housing developments and golf courses, mini parks, random religious establishments, under two tollways and at both ends "nature." Here on the north end, all the big loud motorcycles and their big loud friends outside Cook's Corner seem not in the least menacing as I pedal slowly onto the street. The pathway ends here where the foothills climb into national forest land. I go about half a mile along Santiago Canyon, unconcerned that this is where cats eat people on bikes, and I'm a person on a bike.

A few of those machines roar by, both directions, their crackling engines echoing against Whiting Ranch Wilderness Area on one side, O'Neill Regional Park on the other. These men and their women wrapped around their backs seem so Californian to me--in fact historic--that they seem wild, too, part of the landscape that puts the words "ranch" and "wilderness" together and expects us to believe it.

I also see rabbits, squirrels, an old black raven with a beak like a rail spike. At one point a dark flying bug smacks into my eyelid (still hurts), somehow managing to go right over my glasses, but not into my eye... Anyway, I turn around finally, take it easy and coast most of the way home, kinda sorta watching out for killer bees.

2005-05-26T16:48:00.000-07:00

More overcast mornings have us in a funk, all weary and wobbly through the hours before noon. I'm surrounded by zombies at work, hungry for brains.

I admit to a sluggish desire to bury myself deep under blankets and sleep through this idle slab of the day, but it's not part of a viable economic system. We have to get up and shake off these clouds, pretend it's worth it, at least Monday through Friday.

Besides, I still prefer semi-darkness to that beam of summer sunlight in August that cuts through the heaviest drapes and scans across my room like a Xerox machine. I can get up, just give me a minute.

So I tug on my bicycle helmet (the boss has a fit if I don't), tighten my shoelaces. Fill my water bottle, carry the bike to the door. Turn off the radio (as NPR shifts into its second half hour) and step outside. Seconds later I'm squeezing the brakes, letting myself down the hill gently toward historic El Toro Road below--a paved six-to-eight-lane thoroughfare between two steep hillsides. I pedal this flat section of my route for a half a mile and maneuver right to face a gradual but imposing, loooong upward climb.

I go at it, lowering gears. The clouds aren't so bad where there is no shade. Smashed bottles glimmer like stones under water. An interesting roadside mosaic of glass, gaskets, pennies, squashed pine cones, whatever can stick to the ground and not roll downhill, distract me from the Cadillac Escalades and UPS trucks roaring past at 50 mph. Defensive steering is like a first cup of coffee. Objets d'art become more real. Clarity.

The pines beside the road, by the way, the bushes and flowers: all planted by man. Groomed urban landscaping on the top of a coastal scrub hill? Where are the sheep? Daffodils and street lamps, sign posts, stop lights, a golf course. Yeah, I know I'm waking up when I see these things I wouldn't dream about.

It's downhill from here.

2005-05-24T11:22:00.000-07:00

Southern California is bipolar in early summer. It can be as dark as the day of a funeral, the clouds as low as bowed heads, but it doesn't rain. Then sunlight punches holes in the gloom, and it separates like cotton matting. Ten minutes later, the sky gleams like the hood of a brand-new car. Our eyes flutter and we're awake.

I like the fog and stillness of a gray morning, when the day stirs into consciousness with the rest of us. Otherwise it's like that roommate or family member who hops out of bed at 5:30 and starts banging around in the kitchen all happy and energetic. We hate those people and they should know it! The sun should never shine before noon. Give me June Gloom or May Gray all year: a little time before the the day takes on its bright urgency, as if there won't be another tomorrow. There will be.

2005-05-21T22:24:00.000-07:00

The collected ice slips off the edges of the trail, squashed by the weight of spring sunlight. The bear tracks go with it, lost evidence, and before me the ground shows up intermittent, where the shade falls short this mid-afternoon, too slight to sustain any winter.

I've resigned I am not out to play or to answer some flicker of angst. All those drives and desires dropped off long ago, as ice into water, a dream that melts into river, downstream and washed clean from my mind.

Why, an arrow could cut past my ear and stab halfway through the red bark beside me; it could pluck a stark navy jay from the air. Would I duck? It is silly to imagine such absent adventures, with the highway buzzing nine miles away and the comet streak of an airplane dissipating in the cobalt sky.

The satiny mountains curve steep and heave from their imposing heights white gobs of snow in such slow motion it oozes like magma into the cup of a valley below. This disintegration of the earth, followed by its own rebirth, all sparkly dark gray granite on top, chopped up into canyons, channeled through depths to pour into washes that gush out green life; all this has contributed to the pellet of stone that has threaded its way into my shoe. And this dreadful walking everywhere I go! unbound by maps; with a failing floppy hat? Sad. I like to think I am alone--though to wander at leisure by a long-settled boulder or under the branches of an unkempt pine popping with finches, over ground crisscrossed with the patterns of otherwise invisible predators, I can only place solitude as an imagined illusion undone by the land.

2005-05-18T20:28:00.000-07:00

I liked back then the open parking lot at California's edge; a single triangular shack stood in the corner, kinda greenish blue, a visitor's center so bleak it made my beige four-door Cavalier look like a Lamborgini and high-rise Harrah's and the Horizon across the state line miracles of architecture. The countrified replacement took a few years to construct (it's quite gargantuan and rather overwhelming, so when you drive by you get that canyon feeling: faux cabinesque shops, a hotel made of hip Lincoln Logs and a neato gondola which you can ride for the price of a car payment or--if you know my friend Larry--for free).

I should check generalizations about Tahoe; the basin's somewhat protected, after all, being part of a national forest and also, some say, overregulated by a planning commision that favors the rich. But then again, what doesn't?

Some nature slips past the human gridlock and redevelopment: snowflakes in mid-May, rain on the golf course, invisible bears at night. Steller's jays build their nest and care for their young inches from the door into Donna and Larry's house. Jays are skittish, but they've warmed up to that spot over the years and get to stay as long as they want. I'm so jealous.

2005-05-16T21:15:00.000-07:00

Upstairs in the great attic of California crowded with antiques, prehistory edges toward oblivion, like the early entries of a blog, long buried under new stuff. Remember when rustic meant a real log cabin chopped down with your bare hands and packed upright with mud? These poor retirees with their surround sound, green lawns and hot tubs have to live all civilized-like, as if they haven't settled in the woods at all. There's little magic or adventure that isn't pre-designed playground: ski, ride, speed, bet, fore! with limited parking.

I know the silver barons sent armies to the basin to raid the stores a century and a half ago, and like a fleet of semi trucks the ancient felled trees skied down the mountains toward Nevada (much of the old forest rots in the crypts of long-abandoned silver mines underneath Virginia City). The same steep hillside now is furrowed with trails and concrete switchbacks. In addition the Carson Valley has transformed and continues to fill at a brisk pace; before the end of my lifetime it should look something like the San Fernando Valley, and as aging California emigrants slowly peter out, their grandchildren and the offspring of foreign casino workers will clutter those tracts with a hyper-urban post-history I can only imagine... and probably should not.

2005-05-09T18:57:00.000-07:00

Instead I walk downhill through the thick flowers, neck-high and all thin green stalks, the tiniest yellow tops like bees. They're Catholic invaders, sticky and close together as thatch, something one could basketize or tighten into a noose even though they're weeds (and they sound like bees, too--the whole park buzzes with hidden hives). Tiny paintbrushes and forlorn poppies wait underneath with hopes to get a glimpse of sunlight. Down below I know there is an oak grove with sycamore partners and water running through it, all the way to Emerald Bay (there's more than one!?!), but I have to turn back because this wilderness preserve closes at four, and it's almost three already. Next day, another hike ends abruptly, just after the start; the trail splits about a quarter mile in, the two cliffs about a dozen feet apart, facing each other with awkward longing. Could probably climb down and back up again, but the signs say not to, and I'm so lawful it's disgusting.

The frogs are mostly silent, rocks and sand look up from down below, embarrassed to have fallen so far. Whatever bridge that had connected these two parts washed down the ravine into the open sea approximately two months ago, and with rain an ongoing Southland event, the peeps in charge aren't likely to repair said damage any time soon. This one's about six or seven miles from home, where the busy PCH traffic and parked cars make it impossible to ride a bike, so my waste of gas at first frustrates, then I remember I wouldn't have seen that ancient pelican, grey as basement cobwebs, riding the breeze, arthritic span stretched wide as a 747, with a tiny adopted grandson, probably a swallow, chasing close behind, furiously beating its tiny wings to keep up.

2005-05-06T12:24:00.000-07:00

The tunnel only gets darker. You think things are okay, that they can't do that anymore. Then the faint light so far off in the distance disappears, an illusion after all, a trick of the mind. Because the game is only a game, it isn't close to real. What's real is money, and its appeal never wanes. It far outweighs any other argument.

In this case, money grows on trees, but you have to get to those trees first, so you carve into the wild with your mechanized, temp-job supplying, oil-gulping yeller monsters & you pluck, one by one, the flowers of your wealth, chop off the heads and the roots, strip off the bark, whittle down the trunks into logs and boards and mash the rest into pulp. You ship it to Mexico or China or wherever the labor's cheapest. The kids there turn the wood into sagging DVD cabinets, futons, wobbly coffee tables. They even make the boxes to store pre-constructed wares at Ikea or Wal-Mart, repositories that stretch over what used to be farm fields, formerly prairie. Employed by this for a brief time, some happy poor people buy booze, cartons of smokes and psychic readings, Happy Meals and give some money to the church. In China, the job doesn't matter, there's more work to come along because Americans, heads turned by that flickering box on their brand-new media cabinet, haven't noticed that their whole founding identity, the wild, the great expanse that was once America, is...

2005-05-02T22:17:00.000-07:00

Like hidden volcanoes, towns founded one day cracked and exploded the next. Chunks of city dropped a hundred miles away, and then from that crater and over the century the development oozed and spread, filled in the empty spaces with pre-fab homes and 7-11s, nail parlors, donut shops, sushi joints. Friday night I counted twelve of the latter on Ventura Boulevard between Coldwater Canyon and Lankershim (I wasn't trying to count--they were just that obvious). That's more fad than socio-geological phenomenon; yet still urban, porous and bubbles of a magmatic growth.

This gradual spill escalates at times and in different places, and that is what we find now, where the United States, poor thing, is the only Western country losing "empty" space; Europe complains of immigration, but its overall population is dropping. Japan's also, as the East goes, is steadying, and they, too, find their citizenry changing faces. This appears horrendous and felonious and unfair to many of us; perhaps in legal terms it is wrong; but one thing money does is make people less fertile. Maybe this migration, this spread of cities outward into the most distant intemperate desert cracks--with everyone working and leading lives so prosperous they can afford to eat raw fish--will lead to the reduction of the world's overstock. That's what we can hope for, anyway, despite pension fears and other nonsensical whatnot. Too bad we'll all be dead when it happens.

2005-04-28T14:36:00.000-07:00

There are frogs nearby singing the last chorus of a wild rap, channeled down the canyon creek between the roads and tracts; I hear them less this year by half. Traffic has increased at night, the bump of manmade hip-hop rises and re-echoes with an argument for show. There's no real fight, it's just a tact to sell to more stuff, to make the noise that people make; expressions of rage corrupted, packaged, replacing anger at the world with bling. The suburban consumer doesn't know the origin, doesn't care, right or wrong, it hears that beat and lets it mask the sounds of earth, that dying gasp of how we lived before, that sweet soft music of amphibian spring.

2005-04-25T21:21:00.000-07:00

I have more to say, but I get to repeatin' myself, like an old bum in a tan overcoat and bright red socks mumbling on a street corner, face all black from sleeping on creosote, fingernails a half inch long. "It's the end of the world, you know, it's the end of the world. Did you know it's the end of the world? Well, it's the end of the world."

There are some TV shows poppin' up that won't do any good cuz even though the hosts are young and hip (well, youngish and hippish), they say the shows ain't no good, and that Elvis would shoot the TV set, if they hadn't taken his gun away when he died.

I got flubbermigasted t'other day watching another hot show when the host laughed himself non-green at the jokes of a contemporary doing a guest turn, riffing on his old schtick that 1.8 degrees a century doesn't make any difference at all, you can't even set that on your thermostat, or some lame gag that made John Stewart haw-haw and act all giddy and obsequious. Anyway, Dennis Miller was--in his inimitibly smarmy "I know better" way--dead wrong. It does make a difference.

By the way it's the end of the world.

2005-04-22T09:00:00.000-07:00

Oh, yeah. Earth Day. That one day a year when we give props to the planet. I knew it was coming but I kept putting off buying a card; they're so treacly, and I just couldn't figure out what I wanted to say. The Earth never writes back anyway. Makes me feel kinda rejected, if not outright alone on this speckled, crowded middle-aged globe, only geologically young in spots, so old otherwise, getting up there anyway, ready to go when the sun does but for now in want of a transplant because what used to be on top is going fast. They're working on flying in ice from Titan or possibly Pluto, though that procedure is expensive and according to some...unnecessary. Polar bears can move to Tuscon like everybody else.

2005-04-20T22:11:00.000-07:00

Ping-ponging at a full stop over 36 years I rolled to the edge of this master planned community, and another year later I still don't get it; I mouse into Ralph's to buy milk and silently feel disdain for sparkly fish stickers on the cashier's lapel pin; I moved out of the Bible Belt, not to get away from that superstitious craziness, mind, but happy about it as a side benefit. This is California, and I know Ronald Reagan stumped against Reds in Orange, but those days of baron heirs and nervous farmhands are over. In Aliso Viejo, founded 1989, nonsense swings fully. It's suburbia hot-glued onto former rangeland (aka wilderness) and though somehow a few people got hold of the corporate heads/churchgoers and squeezed some earth from their grasp, it's all hodgepodge; nature and city vistas intertwined, so much clutter. Stop lights and speed limits, Wal-Mart (small version), The Home Depot once a mile, every conceivable stockholder's dream in form of a restaurant, $2.63 minimum for gas. And churches, by god, churches, temples, chapels, cathedrals, mosques everywhere. Pope pushers and other smiters distract the sinners from the sin, corralled in this gated pen. You get fries with that.

2005-04-17T14:23:00.000-07:00

Scrounged around in the old junk pile yesterday and found nothing of value. Nearly got bitten by a few rats. A lot of running around, not much payoff, a small challenge to propriety or dignity or somethin'. Survived of course, except for a few scratches, nicks, bruises, mostly avoidable by...not scrounging around in junk piles. So there ya have it.

See the writing on the wall but read it anyway,
face the other way and there's a reflection,
run and you return.

This place is yesterday's
less than a minute earlier,
the earth nudged slightly left
or right in its orbit.

2005-04-14T08:56:00.000-07:00

Human excretions collect around us, and of course sometimes it can't be helped. While surfing (cyberwise) I coast onto this terlet, which makes me laugh. They're as low as $1,550, unless you buy one before the 25th. Until then you can get a 15 percent discount. So hurry up!

Here in south O.C., laminated purple signs on the groomed hills read "Do Not Drink," meaning, well, that the "water" that just sprayed on you as you walked by is recycled.

Should one compost one's own? Urf. Used to be we kept our privacy out back--far back--where our jakes consisted of trenches or deeply dug wells. I guess it was, in a way, more natural to bury it and hope nothing leaked into the nearby crick, lessin' of course it was downstream from where we bathed.

Anyway it's impossible now. Most of us don't have back yards, and those of us who do would not want that there. We'd rather have it in a room of its own a few feet from the kitchen. Thomas Crapper, the British sanitary engineer who developed the ball and suction thingy in the tank, actually saved the world billions of gallons in fresh water (and so billions of dollars in utility bills). Indeed, were it not for Mr. Crapper, we might still be going out back in the winter, except that there are so many of us now, we'd never have a moment to ourselves.I think the ultimate can will evaporate all waste or beam it into outer space. Tourists on journeys through the solar system will simply have to look the other way. That is when they're not busy.

Now what to do with the waste we don't really need to make.

2005-04-12T00:36:00.000-07:00

"Commute"

Returning to work, walking,
I wind between cars in leaf-strewn shadows
stuck to the edges of the hot parking lot.
The lost dusty route of Junipero Serra
scratched a thin bloody line
across this spot,but I am not accountable
for the zeal of a madman,
an obsessive or driven self-martyr possessed
by desire to reroute geography,
to harness the wild and end its authority,
to gather and squeeze the life out of people
who wandered these similar hills.

I think of these moments in panic.
Up and down the land and particularly along it,
accelerators wait; they wait because the brakes
get so much attention,

and though I know a river sometimes washed along this way,
I could not show you water--only grouted banks.

2005-04-08T11:54:00.000-07:00

No clear reason to keep this up. One struggles to be heard in a cacophany that has no melody. Speech made humans evolve and now causes society to devolve. TV news, talk radio; everybody is listening but nobody really hears. By "nobody" I mean, well, hardly anybody. I mean, there are a lot of people in the world--so many that we are eating our own tail. And yet, nobody reads this blog for instance. Millions of blogs, by their nature self-involved proselytizing, preaching to a choir of one, linked to a larger world of unread things, are abandoned by their authors and their readers for a distracting ball of string called "news." There is nothing important about an old man dying. Do you know how many old men die? All of them! Meanwhile nature cries out, but no one answers. Do you know that I have tried? I'm over here! Do you hear?

2005-04-03T19:31:00.000-07:00

I don't know the names of flowers and I don't care to. There sure are a lot of them around. Clouds came in around 5 o'clock (which a day ago was 4 o'clock) so I had more light but less sun. Purple what-look-like-poppies shooting out of the high green grass, tiny yellow-white blossoms low to the ground, red bells, webby orange moss, miniature blue poker-uppers in that classic floral pattern a child draws: five or six elliptical petals around a circle in the middle. Clouds and flowers all around me as I trek the ridgeline with a cold; no special post-demise reports on NPR to overwhelm me (some dogmatic inelegant icon done returned to his maker).

The strange and wild winter rains have turned up sand, quenched thirsty seeds and made a paradise for bugs. There isn't a flower without an insect climbing around inside of it; lady bugs, ants, tiny flies. So much life. Beetles crossing paths, lizards jumping rock to rock, snakes slipping over boulders; bigger, sleepier creatures just waking. My stomach grumbles and something behind that oak growls back! This is my church.

2005-03-31T18:40:00.000-08:00

Some chick dies--finally--and that's the news. That's the news? Meanwhile, desperate prognostications that we are all in for it, that the earth's feeding tube is about to be unplugged, woosh by unnoticed, like that flock of birds that should be gliding overhead, but isn't, because the species went extinct.

Mother nature--our mother--what is the phrase? She isn't quite herself today. We've ripped her apart, stuffed her full of sawdust and stitched her back together, propped her up in a chair. She looks pretty bad, and it's hard to pretend anymore. Maybe once she has become totally dessicated and...well, she has smelled really bad for a long time now, but we stopped noticing... but maybe when her head falls off and rolls past our feet, we will think... huh... we killed her... and then we watched her rot... Prolly shouldn'ta done that. :(

2005-03-29T08:56:00.000-08:00

Nature again rears its hideous head with scythes for teeth and takes a bite out of humanity's side. Though, frankly, earthquakes don't kill that many people. I mean, really, let's blame the manmade objects that fall on top of them, okay? Ouch.

What can one do about this business? According to the news, offer condolences. That's what Americans do best: offer condolences and canned creamed corn, a little pocket change. Oh, and prayers. Prayers are the glue that bind the sticks together that make a house in Indonesia. Of course they use other materials; you can see, too, they live just like us! Crap everywhere.

Purists say thatched works best. Thatch crushes less people. There's a rat problem though. Rats like old thatch. They like barbecues on balconies in south OC, too, my friend Robert says. He could use an owl. Should we send owls to poor and impoverished Sumatra? Won't help prevent an earthquake, you're right. Wasn't thinking. Just tossing out ideas.

2005-03-28T23:57:00.000-08:00

Too much work. No time. Besides, very few--two--readers last week.

Rode last night under an irrelevant moon and the perpetual day that exists in southern California anyway. Have a bicycle headlight, but what fer? The rule, essentially. Won't get run over, and if I did, who would notice...no one right away, except the boss. I watch the rings of the soft light smooth out the pavement in front of me, as the orange lamps make my bike into a crisp silhoutte for traffic to squash.

Then it took a long time to drive to LA today, what they call a looooong time. Sixty miles is relative; I think I could have traveled it by horseback long ago and camped under that moon. It hasn't changed much except for some 35-year-old footprints and a flag, and maybe a few more dings and dents from meteors opening their doors too carelessly.

But I don't have that option of traveling slowly and under the moonlight now; everything is rush-rush at a slug's pace, no matter what time of night or day. Price of gas? No problem. Just waste money. Go. I had to; I'm down here and doing crazy things like riding my bike at night. Gotta go back to the city once in a while and eat Thai.

2005-03-21T16:14:00.000-08:00

Out of town a few days along the (rainy) Central Valley, over a couple blossoming hills, through a few muddy canyons, beside topped-off lakes, along flooded orchards. Banners say "Food grows where water flows." Water is flowing.

At the base of the mountains, acres of purple flowers look like a tilted pond in the near-drowned sun; on the way back, cattle swims in the clover. The water in San Luis Reservoir is as choppy as broken glass churning in a tumbler. A tornado hit south SF, but missed me by an hour or two. I was already east of Gilroy, a garlic town seemingly owned by Con-Agra nowadays (based on the signs beside old farms) following an RV through Pacheco Pass. All this open space to the untrained eye looks undeveloped, but it's being worked: migrant workers, stored water, wine and cows. Some is "saved." Early last fall if I remember right I stopped at Pinnacles and hiked; one day I'd also like to visit a mysterious place quite a bit south, and possibly Henry Coe St. Pk. higher up...all by myself.

In the City Friday morning to kill an hour I got soaked walking from my parking space to the book shop to Mission Dolores, which I guess is a religious establishment. I only wanted to see it because of its relevant history. It was, coincidentally, built at the base of a bunch of empty hillsides, too.

2005-03-14T11:19:00.001-08:00

No, really, that's okay, no fish, please. Too smelly. Oil prices are NOT sky high. A gallon is still cheaper than other stuff, and if we'd stop driving so much, we could save enough Lincolns to buy another DVD or make some more cell phone calls while stuck in traffic. I have a novel idea; move closer to work. In another kinda non-sequitor, China sucks. Or does it? I don't care. Used to be my stuff was made in Japan. It was a little sleeker, maybe. Can't remember. I love oil, like to scramble eggs with it instead of butter fat. Also it's good in lip balm and plastic bags, cuz ya know they don't even axe if I wants paper or plastic no mo', just load everythin' up in plastic; takes the worry out of it, saves me about three seconds so I can wait at the stop light a little longer and burn some more of that expensive petroleum distillate I love to read about. Oh, it's all just too much.

2005-03-10T12:00:00.000-08:00

Our Chancellor and his oil Nazis want to go Krystalnacht on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and plan to propose a final solution next week. Undeveloped wilderness is forever the put-upon minority, but in this case America will not be there to fight the war in its defense. In fact, nature is an unwilling ally, part of the coalition of the willing strong-armed into the fight against terrorism, Iraq and all things great and Arab.

The so-called elite du jour made much of their money by sucking up oil like a mosquito on the frontier's neck. If you found it in your backyard you became rich overnight, bought more land and kept on drilling. If you never found anything, God didn't like you. Tough beans!

Texas, the Germany of America, dried up years ago, and OPEC has had a one-up on the oil lottery by being in the right place and the right time for far too long, says our President, friend and whipped slave of Herr Moneybags. Backdoor deals in the stealth of night and roundabout politics make for interesting history, but for now they mean gobs and gobs of gooey cash for guys already living in more than one mansion.

This leads us to the essay question part of the exam:

1) Why do people complain about gas prices when they drive trucks three times the size of anything they reasonably need?

2) Why are people willing to listen to anyone with a quick fix to their diminished McBudget when the plan is neither quick nor a fix?

3) Why do people blame foreigners and environmentalists when they themselves have increased demand and decreased supply?

4) Do people seriously think they can solve their "problem" by allowing the Bush-Cheney cabal to tear off a piece of Alaska's coastal plain merely to polish its pride?

5) How much of the money we've spent "supporting our troops" and "rebuilding Iraq" has gone directly into the pockets of the same investors hoping to tap into ANWR?

6) Does the promise of short-term "energy independence" mean we have to go to war with China now because it supplies everything else we consume?

More ranting later; I'm sure you're tired. Or, if not, here's some counter propaganda. Don't be offended; it's pro-business.

2005-03-07T11:01:00.000-08:00

On the beach there are more people than gulls; waves filled with human flotsam, not kelp, surfboards hide the sharks. Everywhere I go someone else is already there. We have a dearth of empty places, open spaces; climb a mountain, someone's up there on her mobile telling her husband how, like, beautiful it is and that maybe later he should pick up something to eat from Baja Fresh or should they order out from Papa John's? Nowadays something that seemed inaccessible even 20 years ago is not; you can go there if you want to and you're totally entitled; you can fly there, rent an SUV, drive up to it, climb with high-tech shoes and a squeeze bottle and chatter about how great an accomplishment it is the whole time. You don't have to be serious and plan ahead much; National Geographic Adventure spells it out for you and with precision. Besides, you can't get lost, you have your GPS and you could always call and ask for help if you trip and knock your head against a rock (but that will never happen because nature is so feng shui). Wilderness as sport has made the only way to get away the Kevorkian way, and that's no fun, who wants to do that? Hmm.

2005-03-03T10:15:00.000-08:00

My brother wants me to write about seeds. I don't know about seeds. I think most people don't. That's why they can take seeds out of our hands. They shouldn't, but they want to. Who are "they"? I don't know. Aren't all seeds genetically modified? Not in a lab, but by breeding and select cultivation? For thousands of years people altered plants and animals (chihuahuas and Granny Smiths aren't exactly nature's way), but suddenly a company can patent a gene. Explain.

My friend Marie sent an email that supports a petition to warn Warner Bros. against bastardizing decades-old cartoon characters that by all logic should have become part of the public domain years ago (their creators having all died by now). But in this case, the "they" still exists in corporate form and so "it" can do whatever the heck it wants. Frankly, I don't see why the WB shouldn't be allowed to devil-up already devlish characters. I think we should all have access to Bugs Bunny and do whatever we want with him because he shouldn't belong to anyone. Maybe secretly Time-Warner is adapting because eventually it will lose ownership of the original. Of course, that eventuality is upwards of 120 years from when Bugs was born, so maybe around 2050 we can start putting him in a suit instead of a dress.

Meanwhile the President in his ad nauseum way talks about an "ownership" society where people "own" their own money (in contrast to social security where the government, "belonging to the people," watches our money for us, which, in a sense, turns out to be "us" watching our own money). But we can't "own" anything unless we have tons and tons of $, which we don't. We have a few thousand dollars culled from our paycheck over the years, and the money still won't be ours--it will be invested for us, into the very corporations that don't want us to own anything. We can't buy land and protect it from them; if we do wrestle a parcel away from agribusiness or real estate developers, we won't be able to plant with "their" seeds, and if we turn on the TV in the afternoon--which we shouldn't--we will only see what they think we want them to think we want to see.

Seeds of confusion.

2005-02-27T22:02:00.000-08:00

On parole in L.A. my feet find their way. I know I'm not really missed (I made no impression while I wandered here for 10 years or so), but it is still a comfort as my shoes greet the sidewalks all friendly-like.

The city is a blanket that curls up around me for a hundred miles. Out there in neosuburbia, my feet stick out. I like the trails, the sea, but I get cold toes.

Here in the center of my old home I'm all warm and cozy. I know it's tattered and smelly and threadbare, it's stained with spots and needs to be stitched up in a lot of places, maybe even thrown out. But how do I rid myself of something so comfortable? Its patches of exotic cloth may clash, but they exist at a known intersection, they somehow belong. They are like my memories of living here, of all the walks along the boulevards and avenues in the baddest moods, seeing the same homeless faces every day, hearing all the noise, smelling all the funk. I am selfishly fond of these moments.

Maybe if I didn't know the history, it wouldn't mean as much. But I'm aware that Cherokee, a street where I used to live, is inaccessible today, near the nucleus of that wide circle protecting the Oscar ceremony from the lower classes. A few years ago they wouldn't have thought they'd come back to this filthy place, but the stars, such as they are, have returned. I can't blame them.

2005-02-22T09:03:00.000-08:00

I could sense by the volume and duration of Friday night's 12-hour downpour that a lake had formed over Laguna Canyon Road again. And sho nuff some time before dawn one of those stealth divisions of local government had snuck orange cones across both ends, redirecting mindless drivers who thought they could carry on as if the sun was shining Saturday morn. A deluge is a deluge, folks. Stagecoach needs to rest a while.

People have so much faith in their own survival and in the infallibility of their plans. They can't wrap their mind around this nuisance known to the rest of the world as weather. Southern California is designed for the sun. If it rained like this every year, a lot of people would pack up and move on to Mars.

It's Tuesday morning now; still coming down. It's disappointing when the curtain of water rises and it quiets for a spell. I don't know what to do, I feel like the popcorn bag is empty, there's nothing to watch on the screen, only static on the radio and a blank canvas on the wall. It's all so post-modern, until I remember those lovely words: "scattered showers." Ah, here comes the rain again.

2005-02-18T12:04:00.000-08:00

So this is sorta pointless, like I said before. Who's gonna read it besides so and so and what's his face, familial familiarity and some people who click with curiosity and flee quick finding no nekkid pix and nothin' to needle the needy neurochemicals of noodles all dry and gasping from too much prattle on the TV. I am this close to dropping away from the cliff, no catcher to intercept me from the field of rye; that field long gone since roundabout 1975 they mowed it down and made it into a subdivision, addition, development, community what have you, and called it Cuesta Verde or Quail Oaks or Ho-Hum Estates. Gotta woods behind my house with a fort; we build an igloo in the winter, no plans, but it works, it's nice and cozy but kinda small near the swingset, though it melts so fast; winter is always over really quick. You hate it too long to start to love it when it's gone.

2005-02-13T18:18:00.000-08:00

Back and forth a few times on that wide wet street (raining again), circling parking lots, getting out of the way of countless Ford F-150s, chasing street names that change east to west. Finally I find the numbers outside a high-rise by the airport, follow the "P" into the innocuous pale garage, "P" my car up a level, walk down, cross a paved walk and push, then pull, a glass door. An old guard at a desk says something, but I'm not sure what at first, until I see another set of glass doors to my right. He has greeted me with the words "Welcome to the museum." It is much more like entering a bank.

The exhibit opened today; small works by an adept California Impressionist, the victim of an incapacitating automobile accident who had lots of time on his hands afterward. He painted the coast near Monterey and up to San Jose, sometimes further, over and over again, demarcating familiar place names on board and paper. You can see the seasons and the years change, you know old from new. The hues range from purple to green to gold, as they do here in California. The foreground is flowers or grasses or rocks, a twisted cypress or a crashing wave in the middle. The horizon alters from hazy to crisp as the edge of a dime.

This is my favorite kind of art, even though it makes me furious. William Wendt got me hooked with a giant canvas at LACMA. He painted in full detail what lies beneath the last century of incorrigible growth. It isn't just that the past has been recorded so accessibly (and then used to thwart its own subject). It is that one cannot really access it at all. What is there is so strikingly realistic but unreal, so frustratingly close to what we know but so far from where we actually live.

There's a 24-inch painting by Wendt available at a gallery in Laguna Beach, sort of where I live, but it's $145, 000. That's a good $400,000 cheaper than the average price of a house out here. Somebody loan me the money.

2005-02-09T11:05:00.000-08:00

It's another of those classic 75-degree, gorgeous, preturnatural days in Southern California that makes you realize why 20 million people live here, over 10,000 on Skid Row alone. The constancy of freeway traffic--its never-ceasing blur of noise filling the valleys like a perpetual locust cloud--whispers into our ears with the familiarity of an old friend. Discarded fast-food detritus chases itself playfully across the streets, meets at corners, rushes off to other parts of town. Advertisements scroll across the horizon leashed to biplanes, a fine linear aesthetic parallel to the waste-capped waves on the oily ocean below, always rolling, never at rest. Palpitating helicopters, private jets and whispy industry clouds seem content to linger in the rain-washed sky, blue for at least a day. I love to see the mountains and the sea at once, I love the gleam of semi-trucks hauling their wares to Wal-Mart and beyond (the smaller ones to Chinatown, its scent of ancient grease, its sidewalks scuffed and pocked). Ah, nature! I love to shield my forehead from the sun, to stand still in the breeze, to feel an ant meander across my hand.

2005-02-05T18:30:00.000-08:00

Black and slippery birds continue to bubble up onto the beaches of southern California. The cause, some think: abandoned wells and pipelines in Ventura County that leaked a little, jogged loose by last month's rain. That's north of L.A., where the previous century meets suburbia and an influx of people has induced industry flight. Corporations not only hit the road when families show up, they help build houses. Even the military has to tiptoe around suburbia. Dried up factories can't pollute carte blanche, and petroleum companies, eyes on Arabia, choose whether to do the right thing or run for the hills -- or out of them, leaving the land to fend for itself. I wish we could place bets on the latter.

2005-02-01T19:07:00.000-08:00

A gruesome gray lesion on the earth's soft skin, the cancer of the angels stubbornly grows. The east-west range of the Santa Monica mountains remains green, protected by a hurried '70's mandate and today completely surrounded by festering sprawl. Compelled by liberal wealth in Malibu, the protection of that acreage stands in odd contrast to the south end of this metropolis, where a land baron's inheritors have stopped to think--sometimes at legal gunpoint--and tossed portions of their loaf to the starving wild, making it corporate earnings policy without Federal intervention (except that their old ranch happens to house a few species covered by the threatened ESA). Then between the thickening edge of L.A.'s five counties and the tip of San Diego's burgeoning 'burbs, the thumbprint of a Marine Corps base provides evidence of the past. Camp Pendleton is the only chunk of truly undeveloped land outside of the Southland's impossibly craggy national forests. Thank Allah we're at war.

2005-01-28T19:30:00.000-08:00

Bald, black-cloaked, he hunches over and ignores the circling crows, who tease and chatter insults as he unwraps a rodent sandwich. Gone when I return, next afternoon he roosts on the sidewalk as if waiting for the bus: blinking, silent, passive. A neighbor says they used to hang out in Nellie Gail, where you have to be a member of the homeowner's association to ride the horse trails or at least pay up; but the wealthy denizens of that former ranch didn't like the bad element and pushed them out of the neighborhood.

On Point Reyes 500 miles north, say, 13 years ago, I saw a flock perched noiselessly over a sea cliff. As I gingerly stepped across the rain-charged grass, they remained suspiciously still, as if I'd stumbled upon a drug deal. Though it's likely he has simply come down from the wintery mountain to vacation in warm suburbia, this stranger on the street corner seems similarly up to no good. He's the first I've witnessed since that sketchy encounter in '92.

I'm not sure why we assign human attributes to animals; maybe we're so related that we see ourselves in their behavior. But it's a bummer buzzards get such a bad rap. The California condor, an older cousin of the turkey vulture, remains mostly behind bars. Estranged family members down south have had trouble, too -- though it was nice to learn they saw a little freedom yesterday.

2005-01-24T12:07:00.000-08:00

The Pacific from here to Santa Barbara has lately spit out oiled birds. Perplexed scientists offer the survivors a free bath and a return ticket offshore. At the same time, giant squid have slopped onto the sand DOA in Orange County, and public dissections in Dana Point reveal few clues. These may be separate mysteries or one combined. Those in the know have eliminated "natural seepage" from possible postulations. What a relief! All nature needs is another black mark on its sketchy rap sheet, even if lately the whole thing's a frame.

The squid, some think, have traveled from South America to replace a predator paucity in local waters. Sharks and the like have little space between nets and kayaks to do their thing, and poachers have helped push down populations cuz jaws look cool on the wall and shark fin soup is dee-licious. Why the squid have lately turned belly up is anyone's guess at this point.

The oil sludge has a source either undiscovered or unreported by a slippery conglomerate. Men have dug down into the primordial muck to suck up dinosaur guts and run them through internal combustion engines for so long -- and in so many places -- that we can't even figure out which pipe has burst. Well, we gotta drive, ya know. And often.

The tsunami human toll now tops 225,000, an enormous blow to millions of families. Still it's increasingly clear people could have avoided most of those deaths by not covering every island half a foot above sea level with hotels and trinket stands. Also heeding well-documented precedent and getting the heck back from suddenly water-absent beaches might have helped. Nobody rightly deserves to be washed out to sea, but, really, how embarrassing.

Meanwhile the California super storm a couple weeks ago takes the blame for broken sewage lines, and raging rivers of filthy city flotsam have turned the ocean into a bacterial porridge. Surfers ride in peril, children risk life wading, but it's not overpopulation's fault, or non-existent urban planning. It's all that rain.

Sad, huh.

2005-01-19T04:55:00.000-08:00

Wait, the sun's about an hour from the sea, but still the scraps of wild stitched and mottled seep with rain. The trail has narrowed at its pit and grows so steep I run along, shifting weight from stone to clay. Beyond the city's patchwork, snow deflects the afternoon: mountains here? And underneath a half-lit moon, high above the wires in a long-forgotten sky, the white turns pink. Puddles left from yesterday draw brazen bugs and skittish prey (I can only wave the flying ones away). And then I stop to keep from sliding, since the path has evened out; eye-level with a raven: black back shining, circle widening, underneath, returning to the canyon, he settles in the brush. Preserved, reclaimed; limestone segues into sage, cactus, crippled oak, this narrow snag of nature, wrong shade of an old frayed thread, retouched. See.

2005-01-13T21:14:00.000-08:00

Where I drive to get out of here, rumor has it catfish roam above the asphalt, deposited in the middle of the street by swollen lakes. Helicopters hover overhead now that the rain has stopped, to capture footage of the vast mud puddle forcing people to drive three miles out of their way. The news brief before "The Simpsons" claims that Laguna Canyon Road is under water, but it's not true. That section of the fabled route leading Charlie Chaplin and Bette Davis to their cottages by the sea -- a narrow byway lined by sky-brushing eucalyptus groves and California oak -- no longer exists. Last summer I watched orange-vested men break it into pieces and build a wide replacement somewhat higher off the ground. This improvement isn't finished, but it is --more accurately-- what has flooded: the brand-new four-lane highway connecting the twelve-lane freeway to the eight-lane toll road. The former, 20th-century Laguna Canyon Road sits in a big pile, gray chunks of history forming a temporary dumpsite. But it's not as bad as it sounds. The new design, they say, is better all around.

2005-01-09T13:31:00.000-08:00

Roughly 30 years ago when rainwater cascaded and leaped from the roof gutter, in heavy white drops that splat on the driveway and melted away, I called it popcorn. The way it bounced and arced in all directions would have, I guess, reminded a child of the sight and sound of popcorn's slow-motion spectacle, back in days pre-microwave.

I hear the same sound outside my bedroom window now. The low accompanying strings of wind above my high ceiling are like the afterthought of a master furiously conducting the percussion of his winter symphony. I don't watch the local news and don't know the width or length of this storm. Should I? Above this hillside acreage of apartment homes, the backbone of a coastal ridge could, conceivably, crumble into pieces. Who knows? Maybe mud is moving my way. A seven-year-old wouldn't know the difference, he wouldn't care; he would only delight in the energy a storm infuses into his small world.

In Southern California, rain like this is so infrequent I can remember specifically the last time -- eight years ago this month -- when bewildered businessmen built sandbag levees on Santa Monica Boulevard, and BMWs floated down the same river as shopping carts.

That may be happening now. I should find a link or two.

2005-01-05T16:36:00.000-08:00

I think about all that money pouring toward the region like a steady rush of water. As it collects in pools and reservoirs, some overflows and relocates where it doesn't belong, spills into places not meant to have so much. I wonder what will happen to all this liquid cash? I guess what doesn't saturate the bank accounts of governors will backwash into the abysmal sea and dissolve. This area has needed money before, but it took a rare -- though not unprecedented -- natural "disaster" to tap that deep and profligate well. The snap and spectacle of this endless news flash distracts from countless thirsty causes unreported by the popular press. With charity earmarked to help out people who linger in a perpetual self-inflicted crisis, nothing will go to those who need it most. I used to see a shaggy, skittish expatriate of this region living in Los Angeles years ago; she moved to Cincinnati and managed to have a child, the first birth of a Sumatran rhino in captivity in 112 years. This makes our country home to four members of this dwindling family, lonely representatives of a species drowning not under waves of water, but under a tide of human ignorance.