Been a bit since I've posted, mostly because I was on the hunt that I talk about in this essay. I am submitting this as a writing sample for a job today. And though I think it could probably benefit...

Been a bit since I've posted, mostly because I was on the hunt that I talk about in this essay.  I am submitting this as a writing sample for a job today.  And though I think it could probably benefit from some more editing, I'm just so ready for somebody to give me something that I'm throwing it out there now.  Wish me luck.

Coues (adj.) - From the last name of Dr. Elliot Coues, a US Army surgeon and naturalist that collected and classified the Coues white-tailed deer.  This subspecies of white-tailed deer lives exclusively in the southwestern United States.

Brittlebrush (n.) - A common desert shrub, Encelia farinosa.

Catclaw (n.) - An acacia tree with cat-claw-shaped thorns, Acacia greggii.

Four days ago, I am sitting on volcanic soil in the desert hills between the Winchester and Galiuro Mountains, leaning against a yucca plant.  Below me stretches rolling country interspersed with sporadic rocky ridges, stretching to the feet of the ranges, where the vegetation finally changes with the elevation, shading in a steady gradient from the saffron grass and lime mesquite foliage into the deeper greens of juniper and oak at higher elevation.  We are looking for an animal which my father and his hunting partner have killed increasingly fewer of in recent years, Coues white-tailed deer. This is no accident.  In 2013, 1340 permits across four hunts were issued for the region in which my father and his two friends had tags, Unit 32 (2013-14 Regs.).  Official whitetail population statistics reported 33 bucks and a total population of 289 (Hunt Arizona 2012).  Even discounting that deer populations are pressured out of this ecosystem by cattle grazing, and the declining rate of fawns per one hundred does, this does not bode well for hunter success. We glass through binoculars from before dawn until ten in the morning.  By now the deer are no longer browsing and will be bedding beneath large trees for the heat of the day.  Given that we haven't seen any this morning, anyway, we judge it best to return to camp and process the small spike that one of the three hunters in camp killed the afternoon before.

That day, when we come upon the deer lying dead on the hillside, I am having a hard time justifying its death.  This is not because I am opposed to big game hunting.  In the absence of natural predators, extirpated by white settlers through the decades of migration, the waves of hunters that drown these hills each autumn are necessary to manage the population of grazers.  Yet when we get into the guts of the animal, spilling the steaming spleen onto the sand and skinning the animal to be cut and put into ice chests, I can't help but wonder at our tremendous waste. 

The energy flows just to make this hunt possible are astonishing.  There are three vehicles, each taking two tanks of gas to drive from Tucson, around the hillsides near the Muleshoe Ranch, and back.  Each consumes more gasoline than usual because they are loaded with a week's worth of camping equipment.  There is the energy to make the ice in the ice chests.  The propane for the stove and lantern.  All extracted and hauled from hundreds or thousands of miles away.  And I wonder at the contrast between our predation (because at least we are meat, not trophy, hunters) and that of the pumas or the wolves that might kill these deer if we had not so viciously culled their numbers.  There is no energy cost to transport them here.  They live here.  They don't freeze and preserve the meat.  They eat it in a couple of days before it spoils.  Further, this is a young deer.  It was most likely born last year, and it is strong.  Wolves or pumas likely wouldn't have killed it until it were older or frailer, so our killing a healthy breeding buck is a disservice to the deer population at large. Early white hunters would be elated by current predator populations in Western public lands states.  But of course, they didn't imagine the ecological disaster that their settlement was to create.  Aldo Leopold, who was later to become a vehement defender of wildlife and not just wild lands, initially came with this same mindset.  All large grazers were game.  Cougars, wolves, coyotes, any competitor to human consumption of this game, and of cattle, too, were to be exterminated.   Yet when Leopold had a lucid look at the West, after he'd spent enough time away from Yale and the East to realize that we needed native models of environmental management, his view changed drastically.  In his essay, "Thinking Like a Mountain," he writes about killing a wolf and her cubs in the Gila Wilderness.  "I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, no wolves would mean a hunter's paradise, but after seeing the green fire [in the mother wolf's eyes] die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.  Since then I have lived to see state after state extirpate its wolves.  I have watched the face of many a newly wolfless mountain, and seen the south-facing slopes wrinkle with a maze of new deer trails.  I have seen every edible bush and seedling browsed, first to anaemic desuetude, and then to death…I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer."

But today the situation is even more complicated.  Another import, cattle, on which neither humans nor other predators are permitted to prey in the wild, has done the work of denuding the slopes that deer unchecked by wolves and pumas would have done in their absence.  On this most recent hunting trip I carefully documented areas where cattle had recently grazed and by contrast where they had not.  The difference was astounding.  Tree populations were similar in both places, but the diversity of ground covering plants couldn't have been more different.  On hillsides free of cattle for some time, I counted six species of grasses, along with brittlebrush shrubs and cacti and seedling hardwoods.  Where cattle had recently grazed, most of the ground was bare brown dirt, sprouting mesquites or catclaw, and the only ground covering plant, in sparse patches, was a yellowed grass with spiny seeds. Eastern models of settlement and resource exploitation, codified in the Homestead Act, the Desert Lands Act, the Newlands Act [forming the Bureau of Reclamation], ad nauseum, made it very easy for ranches and then stock farms to reap immense profit from these lands.  So, too, did the pioneer mindset toward the West, the idea of "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way."  Yet they also led to astonishing mismanagement, as in the case of the 125% allocated Colorado River, dry in the sands of its delta before it ever reaches the sea, precisely because they were ideas and policies developed elsewhere.  No native would ever propose to divert immense amounts of that river to irrigate the California desert.  Emigrants from the East looked upon the West as, in Wallace Stegner's words, "The Garden of the World."  But the defining feature of the West, no matter what real estate speculators duped generations of settlers into believing (and still do) is aridity, not well-watered foliage.  Blossoming exists, and is spectacular, but it is as sparse as it is isolated, as in the Sky Islands of Arizona.  Accordingly, the settlers who actually became rich off of the land were few and far between. 

Criticisms of this exploitation are not novel.  John Wesley Powell, who advocated in Report on the Lands of the Arid Region in 1978 for 80 acre irrigable agrarian homesteads and 2,560 acre ranches, would have had a much lower population density than we see today.  Mary Austin wondered in The Land of Little Rain if it were not "better to be bitten by the little horned snake of the desert that goes sidewise and strikes without coiling, than by the tradition of the lost mine" and said of humans blundering in the Western woods that "no wild thing leaves a like disfigurement on the forest floor."  And of course Edward Abbey, Earth First!er, park ranger, and author of vehement environmental polemics, made the daydream of dynamiting the Glen Canyon Dam seem not just logical but fun.  

And yet, many of the West's best known authors and advocates: Powell and Austin, Abbey and Van Dyke, Leopold and Zwinger, were all migrants from east of the 98th meridian.  They came and had to recant aesthetic standards and policy traditions learned in another environment entirely.  As earlier indicated with Leopold, for some this was a drastic change of direction.  For others, it was as simple as adapting to a new standard of beauty, following Stegner's famous admonition that "You have to get over the color green; you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns; you have to get used to an inhuman scale; you have to understand geological time."  But the difference is merely one of scale.  All of them, regardless of the ease of reform, were non-natives.  As such, whether they liked it or not, they carried Eastern prejudices, unconscious preferences for wetter lands formed as infants, and though they may have later regretted it, to some extent they created the same destruction that they criticized cattle ranchers, river dammers, and mining operations for wreaking. I realize that this is a stringent standard to apply even to allies in the battle for the West.  But I apply it because I am convinced that if the West is ever to sustain human civilization, our population must recognize that "the land will not be lived in except in its own fashion."    And while, as Mary Austin demonstrated in the quote that I just used, people from elsewhere may develop deep insight about the character of the place, those best equipped from birth to do so are native dwellers.  I never had to "get over the color green" to find the desert beautiful.  Buffs and sandstone reds, tans and even the green of palo verde always struck me as more beautiful than the colors in a Manet.  I learned which plants to eat and which to leave be almost as soon as I could perambulate the arroyos here.  And, perhaps most importantly, I do not prefer it anywhere else.   But the West, most specifically the Sonoran desert, into which I was born is not as it once was.  Much as I may love it, I can only know the desert before European settlement through the stories of the cultures first here.  In that light, I am glad of programs like the reintroduction of the Mexican gray wolf.  I will not see the West as it was, but perhaps, participating in such programs, I will live to see healthier populations of the flora and fauna that our activities until now have prevented from flourishing.  It is high time, I think, to see greater numbers of our native species, both the grazers that we may eat, and the predators that check them when we don't. Yesterday, I am sitting in my house reading when I hear a frantic clucking erupt in the chicken coop out back.  I rush outside.  At the coop, I find no sign of struggle, and no feathers on the ground in great enough concentration to have been ripped off.  Sure enough, though, I count only four chickens.  This morning there were five.  I search all over the yard and out front in case the bird got out, but see nothing.  Behind the back fence, in the floodplain between our property and the arroyo, I finally find a sign that corroborates the suspicion I have held since I heard the first burst of distress.  A light brown feather, then another, and finally a collage of them spread over the brittlebrush.  Ten feet away, under an immense mesquite, I find a bobcat chewing through the chicken's chest cavity. When my mother returns home, she is livid.  I go out a second time to see the bobcat again, because it quickly loped away when I first approached.  She asks if I am going to shoot it, and I simply laugh, and say no.  The truth is, I am happy that the wild cat found and killed our poultry.  It may be a small act of subterfuge, but to me it is symbolic.  It lends me hope that native creatures, both human and not, will always find a sustainable way to live here.

Apologies for the immense delay in rolling out this post. Ive been working on it for the last few days, and the end remains ghastly, but I am mixing things up and posting fiction inspired by the word...

Apologies for the immense delay in rolling out this post.  I've been working on it for the last few days, and the end remains ghastly, but I am mixing things up and posting fiction inspired by the word "vaquero."  This word refers to a mounted livestock herder, and through Spanish is what became the basis for that most insidious of American mythical figures, the cowboy.

Animism (n.) - A religious viewpoint that holds that natural phenomena, although most commonly animals and plants, have spirits (Latin animus - spirit) or are elements of a deity or pantheon of...

Animism (n.) - A religious viewpoint that holds that natural phenomena, although most commonly animals and plants, have spirits (Latin animus - spirit) or are elements of a deity or pantheon of deities composed of all of these natural phenomena in sum. For years I didn't speak openly about religion or spirituality.  I had driven myself to madness in reaction against my Catholic upbringing (I think that all Catholic writers do this) and there was a period where any reference to the almighty, particularly if veiled behind a self-righteous parroting of some dogma to deride a sinner, enraged me.   Fair warning.  To some extent this post, however brief, is about how I found god again, but I know enough about how cloying these can be to know to keep it concise and nebulous. As a child I couldn't really feel it when I prayed after a certain age.  There was a long stretch where I went on bended knee every night and read bible passages twice a week in church and in catechism class.  But it became toneless mouthing to me.  In the chapel, the drone of the voices reciting the eucharistic prayer, or the various calls and responses of the Catholic liturgy, were accompanied by the sharp breathy wheezes of oxygen tanks or the creaking of walkers.  That dirge made me dread what I came to convince myself Catholicism represented: death by stagnation.  While for many, that is actually true, I know that there have always been rogue practitioners and priests, and it was this history of the church that, in my twenties, quenched the ire that I had held on to since I was twelve years old. When my friend invited me to her confirmation I agreed, but I was apprehensive approaching the church.  It had been about two years since I had even been inside a chapel, so you couldn't even call me a Christmas Catholic.  But Christianity is fond of sheep returning to the fold, and I leant on that notion when I went.  I can't say that the ceremony held an epiphany for me.  It didn't.  I sat with her family and we watched the priest transubstantiate the eucharist and it all felt very familiar.  When she walked up to the altar, I cringed thinking of my own confirmation ceremony, the dull mumble that dribbled out of my mouth when I told the minister that I rejected Satan and all his works.

Just about how I felt.  Same as baptism.

The next year I went to a mass with this same set of people at school.  But this time, I didn't feel welcomed back.  The new Roman Missal had gone into effect in 2011, and all around me, people with clean, smiling faces were reciting in bright tones the new versions of prayers which I caught snippets of, but lost when an altered phrasing turned the prayer into something I'd never heard before.  I didn't feel guilty, which would have been an appropriate Catholic response, but I did feel jealous, like somehow the Catholic church had discovered drums and weed and happiness in my absence and now I wasn't allowed in on the fun.  Of course, this made me reconsider what it was that I thought made me happy, and I realized that, smiling face or not, it wasn't Catholicism. When I would come back to the Arizona desert during college, I would feel cleansed.  I meandered barefoot among the cholla, skipping when the sand scalded my soles.  At first I simply thought that it was because I was away from the stress at school.  But it was deeper than that.  Nearly every afternoon during high school, up until my senior year, I would go for a walk in the desert as soon as I got home.  Those were, too, the days of the most protracted fights between my parents and myself, often over religion, and of my muddling and grumbling about my religious upbringing even though I hadn't read the philosophy and scripture to make an intelligent decision.  I did this thinking out in the desert sand.  Then it hit me. I'd been having an appropriately Christian religious experience every day for years, and then I went to college and suddenly I wasn't.  So I wondered if it was simply the natural world which roused that old awe in me reserved mostly for children.  If that were the case, though, then stress-relieving strolls through the quad and tree-lined streets surrounding campus should have done the trick.  But they didn't.  Trips to the woods came close, though, so long as I was far off the beaten track, and this made me think that maybe my spiritual ardor was directly proportional to how "wild" the nature was.   This presents a number of complex issues on how we address nature and writing about it, but I don't have time to cover them here.  For now, whether my inclination was valuable or not, let's take it at face value.  This insight was critical.  It explained why the Arizona Cactus Garden on campus didn't serve to remind me of home, but merely to enrage me.  Towering succulents and thorny cacti were trapped behind stones, and regularly pruned to make sure they stayed that way.  The desert, the free life of wild things, I realized, was what I worshipped. Senior year brought around a number of modifications to this kernel of animism, including a serious dive into Daoist philosophy, but essentially it stayed the same.  I unironically lit Virgen de Guadalupe candles in my room and placed a fetish of twigs at her feet.  When I came back again to the desert, and felt the spirit of things blowing through me in the bitter heat, my conviction was corroborated absolutely.  Even as I rationally analyzed the environment as any ecologist would, I still felt wrapped in the wonder that I like to call god. David Foster Wallace, much maligned in a lot of literature discussion I see, nevertheless had a knack for phrasing eloquently some thoughts that I agree with.  In his 2005 Kenyon commencement address, known by the video "This Is Water," he asserts that everybody worships, and that there is no true atheism in the world.  And, he says, a compelling reason for adopting a major religion is because every other thing that you can worship will "eat you alive."  So I found mine, a syncretic animism and Catholicism, with the folklore of the Tohono O'Odham, more pertinent to the ecosystems that I love than any European folk tales, to narrate it. I'll leave off with a prayer that I say when I burn my candles and mesquite wood, sitting cross-legged on a carpet decorated with cacti, when my sheer insignificance overwhelms me and I need to appeal to some collective force larger than myself to help me shape a better world.  The original was on the back of a Virgen candle, but I modified it, and since I can publish it here freely, I am grateful for the fact that there is no copyright on prayers.  The point is for them to spread freely, to crescendo into a symphony of millions of voices, and to compel all living things to start to live more harmoniously, and even though that animistic conception of the power of prayer is the physical manifestation of what Christians would deem God's work, we're doing the same thing, so I don't give a fuck what you call it. Piadosísima Virgen Maria del desierto, muestra tu clemencia amorosa y tu compasión a los que te amamos y buscamos tu protección.  Que la dulce fragrancia de hediondilla alcance a tu divino Hijo, nuestro Señor del Desierto, que Él escuche nuestras oraciones, seque nuestras lágrimas, ofrezca lluvia al arroyo, y nos de ayuda y alivio.

Caltrain (n.) - A commuter rail line that runs between Gilroy and San Francisco, California. I love airports. Once I wrote in greater detail about why. In sum, I said, redacting the figurative...

Caltrain (n.) - A commuter rail line that runs between Gilroy and San Francisco, California.     I love airports.  Once I wrote in greater detail about why.  In sum, I said, redacting the figurative language - enjoyable or turgid, depending on your perspective - I enjoy airports because I love to watch people and guess where they're going.  There are other, more personal reasons, but this is the most important.  People look a certain way when they're traveling, and it is only the rare traveler that is entirely stoic (an emotional message in itself), or utterly calm, which is the closer to inscrutable of the two.  Most people are anxious.  Maybe they are returning home to settle their parents' estate.  Perhaps they are excited to be reunited with a sister, friend, or lover.       And it is more than just the people watching.  You can people watch anywhere, so there has to be something about airports.  For me, it is the idea of being in transit.       Caltrain imitates this experience, but with two critical differences.  The first is that you are generally in closer proximity to other passengers on Caltrain than you are inside the airport terminal.  You could argue that the fuselage of the 747 is the appropriate analog for the inside of a train car, but I disagree, if only because you never stay on train platforms for very long, and because the inside of an aircraft in flight is a unique and sacred space unrivaled elsewhere.  The second important difference (now that I've established that train car is more similar to airport than train platform) is the nature of travel.  The last time that somebody told me that they intended to take a leisure vacation by train, I almost laughed at the cuteness of the anachronism.  Lots of folks can't afford plane flights, so they take buses or trains, and I am not deriding or laughing at this subset of humanity, but to willingly choose to take a train to your destination when you have the option of flying seems preposterous to me.  That is, unless you hate getting your 4th Amendment rights (I'm speaking of Americans now) violated as the TSA agent sticks the magic wand in your asscrack.

Your likely reaction upon reading that last sentence

    The nature of travel on Caltrain is much more quotidian than the jetsetting that starts and ends (usually) in airports.  People take the train to work.  The SF Giants are playing a game so a group of rowdy friends is flipping a flask between their seats and jabbering about the World Series.  Trains are where I have seen people scrawl on their faces the agonies of their daily lives.  Stress is the most common slide shuttering across countenances, but I see some hope, and determination, even dread.       But observing Bay Area commuters kicking off their days still isn't what continues to draw my interest when I ride the Caltrain.  I ride the Caltrain quite infrequently.  This isn't because I'm hauling ass in a Hummer on the 101 and the 280 every day just to spite the public transit advocates in the Bay.  Rather, it's because, in all the time I lived at Stanford, it took the yanking of a crane to haul me out of place.  When I had enough fuel to break out of campus' orbit, it usually was because of something momentous.  And so, every time I rode the train, I had the mentality of a traveler in an airport (or was on my way to one), but was surrounded by people generally just traveling between the places where they spent most of their lives.  The dissonance was astounding.     Four years I have exhausted at Stanford so far, and only once did I visit my aunt in SF at her apartment during that period.  I feel remiss.  She takes my liberal proclivities and transforms them into do-or-die convictions, which can be jarring, but of course it isn't so grating that I actively avoided contact.  We'd bat an email back and forth here or there, but generally I had my head too far up my own academic ass to follow through and set a date to see her.  But one day freshman year we set a date, and I took the train up.     That ride wasn't so memorable.  After I got to the King Street station, I hopped two buses to her place by the Presidio, and we cooked a delicious meal and conversed in her sitting room for half the night.  In lieu of furniture, she often used piles of books to construct coffee-tables, end-tables, etc.  Almost needless to say, it was a fucking grotto in paradise for me.  The next morning, I took the first train out of the city, yawning and rubbing my eyes which were sore in that way eyes are when you don't sleep enough, and pounding a travel mug of black coffee that burned my tongue as I eagerly lapped it up.  But although I was hustling to get back to Stanford, the train felt like it was traveling slower than I'd ever seen it roll.  It pattered steadily down the peninsula, creaking at each foggy stop, and I had plenty of time to consider all that I had yet to learn that only spending time with somebody older than you can reveal.

My sophomore year I took the train to go skiing with a friend.  Only the first leg was on Caltrain, because in San Jose we transferred onto an Amtrak to Davis.  Yet the experience was much the same.  She had managed to dominate my petty vacillations, grabbing the pendulum and telling me, in no uncertain terms, that I needed to get the fuck away from school for a while.  I'd almost dropped out of the trip.  But there I was, bundled against the cold, a black duffel bloated full of wool, and the simple distance, less than three miles from my house on campus, was enough to start to make me feel better.  I shivered with excitement at the thought of shredding down bowls of powder, and Tahoe didn't disappoint.  But the best that I felt on that trip was giggling gleefully with my friend as we sped toward something new.     Immediately after her wedding, my sister came to see me at Stanford.  Since her husband was in training, a honeymoon was out of the question, so California was a consolation prize.  You couldn't have picked a worse one.  Much of the time she was there, I was either sleep-deprived, work-crazed, or high, and not a single one of those is excusable.  I was sleep-deprived because I procrastinated, and work-crazed because of both of the above, and high because I was stressed about all three of the above, but more importantly because I was being an inconsiderate ass.  Frankly, I don't think I'll be able to write with any nuance or self-sympathy about that time right now, although I have identified that moment, that critical stretch of four or five days, as the nadir of my life so far.  There wasn't as much stress or trauma as other times, but what was there was a selfish and willful irresponsibility toward anybody else, and I am ashamed of it.  Give me a few more years and I'll deliver you a real solid story about it, but for now, suffice to say I sucked.  Now, back to what was important, and what you are probably asking if you're observant, which is, how was my sister feeling during all of this?