desert solitaire

First morning - awoke at 6am to a beautiful cool crisp morning in the high desert. Made some camp coffee and am catching up on some loose ends before digging into my proposal, first chapter. I walked around and shot some photos in the early morning hour, the sunrise, the way the light dances off the hills and the quaint little polka-dot shrubs that grow scattered on the landscape. You'd think nothing could live here but we know wildlife abounds in desert places. Last night I heard coyotes singing and yapping to one another - I love their noises, they are hauntingly beautiful. I remember when I was a child at my dad's log cabin and having to go outside in the night to go to the bathroom in the outhouse (or in the yard...) and hearing the coyotes. As I write this something dog-like is walking by my window... it must be a fox? It was black though - how weird. Maybe a wild dog? I have never seen a black coyote... And it was too small for a coyote. Many birds alight in the juniper trees and sup from the bird feeder outside my window. Notice the 3/4 wedge moon in the first photo here...

You know as much as everyone loves Edward Abbey and I am now living in his world, I have never read Desert Solitaire. I will have to read it sometime soon. It reminds me of one summer during college when I lived in Nevada and worked doing field research on the Nevada Test Site - where they used to test nuclear bombs above ground... my mom and her twin as children would watch from Las Vegas....now they do the testing underground. During my summer there, I trapped small mammals (a nice name for rats and squirrels and mice... which I must say I absolutely adore, call me weird), and did vegetation sampling (picking all the teeny tiny leaves off of creosote bushes, identifying species, etc.) and trapped reptiles and invertebrates in pitfall traps and traversed the desert in search of endangered wildflowers among other things - oh we also did radio telemetry on desert tortoises. It was a wonderful summer. Very hot. I was in great shape! I still keep in touch with some of my friends from there but I have not seen them since... we will have to change that - David and Tracey!!

I've had some insights into what I would write about for my book. It's scary and intimidating because I want it to be the best book it can be and I impose insane expectations on myself. But though I know I can do it, I have to convince someone else (agent/publisher etc) I can do it and that is a harder task altogether. That requires both shameless self-promotion and genuine humility at the same time, a difficult combination. Well I better get to what I came here for...