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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

London and the nature of kabooms

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Guide to California"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*National Wildlife, June/July 2005

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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?

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.

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. :(

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I hang my hat these days up the hill and across the street from Laguna Audubon, built by award-winning creekbed fillers and giant lego stackers. A headstrong corporate hodgepodge "preserved" half the land only because they could not glue condominiums to a 90-degree cliff. The houses and whatnot have an inch or two between them, crouched flat in the ravine or perched close together like beige pigeons on the mesa overhead. A wide swath of asphalt pours down from the top to the bottom; this is the north end of Aliso Creek Road, ending at El Toro. Anyway, the tiniest one-bedrooms sell for over $320 thousand; I know because I toured one last spring. It was about 600 square feet inside, looked like the shadowy lobby of a dentist's office and made my brain itch. All of Aliso Viejo, the master-planned community over yonder, is like this: "wilderness areas" scattered amidst cinched-up architecture, all light pastels and cream walls, SUVs, dog parks, adobe churches and towne centers (they add the "e") and, incredibly, bike lanes. I don't know who slipped those past the muckamucks, but thanks.