without a refrigerated semi-trailer in sight on the sidestreets of Gerlach nor even a burning
Sheriff’s office, we rolled through on our way to Wall Spring…
Not shown; 6 burrowing owls,
the somebody’s somethings* nesting for their third year on the porch,
fallen tree dispatched by Seth & AAA, magpies, heard but not seen.
Perfect May weather, nonstop Covid Radio, our Vancouver connections downsized to phone size since the monthly allotment of digits depleted inexplicably wildly as soon as we hooked up
the internet and somehow although the News from the North went on for hours the news from here, once we were established, bore not the slightest resemblance to the News from Outside.
Ever more of the same, right out of the gate…
mud and snakes
clouds and shadows,
“Refugium” and “Gray Matter”;
The house became an immediate Doggie Disaster as as soon as the creatures arrived, swamped into the ponds and rolled in the dirt we were toast. I covered everything with packing blankets…which were forthwith inundated in mudballs, grasses, seedheads and furballs.
Ordinary days; L. in studio…
the Chairs
the trains.
The Chev ignominiously ended its second trip to the burnpile halfway there; fuel pump failure. I called AAA, aka James, who came out, said he’d get one and be back with it.
…days in, days out, trees on the upper Smoke Creek Desert all planted years ago.
After Memorial Day the weather promised [and delivered] a heat wave as the dogs
enthusiastically threw themselves into field [and stream] days. Of detritus for them we have
an unlimited supply with no end in sight; reptiles are better adapted.
There was also a magical morning of owls at breakfast, undocumented but not forgotten.
Anyway, life presently proceeds remarkably distanced** from the traumas of the world although a background drumbeat of extreme unease reminiscent of the sixties and early seventies sounds through the long sunshiny days; fiftieth anniversaries of the Kent and Jackson State shootings were just last month…time to cue up a tune from that no more hopeful but equally disturbed moment in a nation founded, like so many others, on Slavery and Genocide. For my privileged generation to have thought they could effect positive change in retrospect appears hopelessly naive*** as half a century later we are in a situation much much worse for the planet while at home [the “homeland”, so to speak] things are ever the same; as any public defender will attest the police always lie and their enablers never fail to provide them with cop-sucking lawyers to make sure, no matter what, that they walk no matter how many businesses burn or protesters are shot.
*Say’s Phoebe, named for Thomas Say, said to have discovered it and probably, given their
lifespan, one of the descendants of the very bird present for Lefty’s Last Morning two years ago.
**So it was in Benicia as well; we remain fortunate, physically unaffected, and grateful. But extremely uneasy.
***We thought Richard Nixon was a “bad” president? What could possibly make the present one look good? I tremble to think…