Creeping toward Coexistence
The flying ants showed up in mid-July, as usual. Each summer they whir into my life, unbidden and unwelcome, like the airborne monkeys in The Wizard of Oz–creepy and scary, highly motivated, seemingly guided by a dark force. These are red ants, good-sized, as ants go. Though not exactly warlike–I have never been bitten–they are, nonetheless, aggressive and disagreeable beasts with an impressive talent for creating misery. On hot summer nights they sneak around the window screens and into my off-grid shack near the South Rim,...
read morePledge
I pledge allegiance. To the pinyon jays at the feeders and the coyotes that woke me up at dawn, yipping at the moon. To the local ravens, jackrabbits and pronghorn antelope. Even to the black Angus cattle in my neighborhood, slow and stupid though they are. I pledge allegiance to the land, all of it: forests, meadows, deserts and bogs. Especially to public land – the commons. To village parks and to Central Park; to the Appalachians and the Rockies, the Sierra Nevada and the dark side of the moon. To everywhere that people call...
read morePracticing Resurrection
The house is tiny, 40 miles from town, off the grid. It sits on the high plateau south of Grand Canyon, on desert grasslands dotted with pygmy junipers and pinyon pines. This morning, warm orange light from an oil lamp washes over the death’s-head painting on the wall, and seeps out the windows into the last hour of blackness. A wood stove chases off the nighttime chill. Outside, one of two neighborhood coyote packs announces itself, following its hunger toward unlucky mice and rabbits. The dog stretches on her bed by the stove and...
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