Occupation of Independence

In the field you do have to struggle to see the yellow breast of some birds, which Bobbie and Dixxe helped me identify as a western kingbird. Soon the migrating birds, of both wing and wheel, will start coming through. I hope the performance is as much fun as last year. Northern flickers were the first invaders.

In the Southwest a few years ago. 'Love at first sight' is a principle that doesn't seem to apply to geologic layers, at least for me. It fails in both directions. When I saw red-rock Utah for the first time I drooled over it like anyone would. But once the brain has seen red rock and admitted it as a possibility, it ceases to be interesting. And yet I know RVers who make a big deal of it, long term. Red sandstone cliffs decompose into loose red sand which is impassable to a mountain bike. Conversely I was none too crazy about granite at first. It was crumbly and ignoble. Eventually though, the eroded hoodoos and gargoyles win you over. Soon you appreciate the sure-footedness that you have while scrambling over granite rocks, but it's the dry washes that are the most fun. They are filled with granite decomposed into coarse sand. Granite sand can be sharp-edged; under the shearing pressure of your shoe it locks up and makes for easy walking. My little poodl

The movies of the Coen Brothers, such as Fargo, Barton Fink, Raising Arizona, O Brother Where Art Thou, and Intolerable Cruelty, have given me a lot of kicks over the years. No doubt they will have other successes in the future. There is something they could do to ensure that, and it ties in with writing in general, not just movies. Critics praise the scripts of Coen Brothers movies for being quirky, offbeat, or for breaking Hollywood formulas with surprises. But these things are both good and bad. A movie is interesting because the viewer is caught up in the dilemmas and conflicts of characters that the viewer cares about. If a speech or a plot twist becomes too offbeat, the viewer can no longer believe it. "Witty" dialogue can be so overdone that it seems contrived. Surprises become ends in themselves. The writing ceases to be about a character and becomes a character itself.  In other words their scripts are examples of what Strunk and White, in the "Elements of St

Every now and then I listen to some Jimmy Buffett songs while taking a snooze. The song with the refrain about "pacin' the cage" made quite an impact. RVs started pulling out of this park early on Labor Day, headed back to the torrid, ghastly conurbation of lower Arizona. They did no harm and I really feel kind of bad about being so glad to see them go. Maybe they are just reminding me of missing the autumn migration, which usually started in September. The autumn migration always seemed twice as dramatic as the spring. Maybe that's an ancestral grudge against winter. I used to study DeLorme and Benchmark atlases for weeks while anticipating it and feeling nervous about it. I did my share of constant travel in an RV, but it never really seemed necessary or even desirable. It's probably lazy to fall back on the old buzzword, natural, but it does seem like snowbirding -- seasonal migration -- is more natural than the endless running around that some RVers do. Anim

Just imagine a guy like me running an art gallery of the photographic kind, especially in a high rent district like Sedona or Bisbee. I'd put a photograph like this on the wall and some well-heeled dowager or matron would look at it and say, "Huh? How does this make the wall in our new retirement McMansion look more upscale?" My art gallery would go broke in three months. This is my favorite season, when monsoonal humidity meets cooler night air, and the result is torrential dew that decorates and honors the finely-textured grasses that I love. My eyes hunt for these dew-clusters, while my dog runs between them or sometimes through them, as she chases her varmints. She comes out of the field soaked and happy.

When I'm out walking the dogs near sunset I walk by a patch of tall heliotropic sunflowers. Maybe butterflies hang out there at that time of the day, or maybe the low sun presents their wings to advantage. I must have looked silly chasing camera-shy butterflies around the patch, with a rather confused dog attached to me. They certainly are good at escaping just a second before you get a good photograph. The eye and brain flutter over the sunflowers as well as the butterflies, and at some point in the confusion, they all seem like the same species. This is great fun, and I was lucky to get such a close-up. And yet it looks like a standard postcard or Olan Mills studio portrait of a butterfly. How dreadful it must be to be a professional photographer! The customer looks at his end result; the subjective experience of taking the photograph means nothing. How unfair: the experience was living. The end result of work is dead; it's what gets pinned to the page. But I guess any ki

Arkansas River Valley, Colorado, a couple summers ago. Believe it or not, I will say something nice about motor-crazed yahoos today. First off, should I use a new name, such as "motorsports enthusiasts?" Actually ATVs aren't that noisy and tend to be operated by responsible adults, which the dogs and I are friendly to, on the trail. But those young guys on their dirt bikes! Growl. On Friday night they arrived in force, with all the usual commotion and anticipation. They have finished their drive from a population center and to celebrate the occasion they serenade the nearest square mile with ugly, raucous music. One of the cretins camped fifty yards away from me. The next day they buzzed around like insect pests. I kept to short hikes in the dry washes of decomposed granite so I wouldn't have to overlap with them.  On Sunday morning I played a game with myself, guessing which group of louts would leave first. What a joy it is to see the ramps get put in

The friendly fingers of cholla at sunrise.

This is my favorite time of year. The grasslands are turgid, full of seeds, and besotted with dew. I never really appreciated texture until the last couple years, and have no idea why it started.