AS I PLEASE XIII: NATURE CALLS

Nature is not a place to visit, it is home. -- Gary Snyder

Today is Wednesday, and nothing says Wednesday like a series of rambling observations delivered in the As I Please format. I am overdue for a really deep, insightful, well-organized blog which requires a lot of time, energy, thought and research, and perhaps come Saturday I will have such a thing ready for your reading pleasure, but in the mean time you're stuck with more stream of consciousness scribbling from a man whose brain not only can't stay on track, it often seems to lack the very existence of a track. Today said rambling is inspired by my walks in the woods -- specifically the living things I encounter during same.

* Today, on my after-work hike, I spied two foxes some yards down the wooded path. I went fifty years without seeing a live fox, and in the last week I have spied no less than four. I don't know if this means the fox population in Pennsylvania is enjoying a resurgence, or whether it is simply luck of the draw, but I am enjoying catching glimpses of these elusive, beautiful beasts.

* Encountering the foxes reminded me of how, in Los Angeles, I went ages without seeing a lynx (bobcat), and then, in a relatively short period, saw three or four, including one of startling size at the Hollywood reservoir. It also reminded me of a story my mother likes to tell, about how my brother saw a silver fox in the front yard of their Evanston, Illinois home, and shouted at her to come running, but she thought he was lying and yelled at him instead.

* Whenever the subject of foxes comes up, I am reminded that Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's nickname was "The Desert Fox." It is not widely known, but when he was a young lieutenant serving in the First World War, Rommel kept a fox as a pet. I sometimes wonder if this is just a meaningless coincidence, or if the natural slyness of foxes rubbed off on him.

* The tail of a fox is long, stiff, and bottlebrush in texture. It is precisely the opposite of a bobcat's tail, which is bobbed just like its ears, and even more opposite than the tightly curled, frizzy tail of a coyote.

* I saw my first coyote in Arizona about fifteen years ago, running over an airport access road in a red flash. I saw many more once I moved to California, and what struck me about the beasts was how remarkably narrow they are. I mean they are slat-thin. A coyote looks almost two-dimensional. Coyotes are scruffy, mangy looking animals but they are incredibly intelligent and extremely agile. They also kill racoons. Prior to the coyote invasion of Burbank, raccoons were everywhere: they traveled in literal packs, like gangs complete with Old West style eye-masks. Once the coyotes started hunting our streets at night, I rarely saw a racoon again.

* When the gang of raccoons that lived up in the palm trees in the alley behind my house was still operating, they were bold rascals indeed. One morning, a fellow make up effects artist and I were gearing up to go to work when the entire possee thundered down out of the palms and ran down the alley in formation into the mist. We stared at each other and burst out laughing. If they'd had six guns and little cowboy hats they could not have looked more like small, furry criminals.

* The gang's boldest robbery was of my neighbor's chicken coop. One night they scaled the fence, forced open the chain-link enclosure and attacked the hens my neighbors kept to lay eggs. I have never heard such a commotion, such God-awful screaming, as I heard that night. It was about three in the morning and rest assured, my 9mm pistol was in my hand when I went to the window to find out what the hell was happening. The coons managed to kill and eat several of the hens before they made good their escape.

* Depending on where I go hiking, and when, I have some idea of the wildlife I'll encounter on my travels. The Old Field trail has a healthy turtle population (in the pond, of course), and abounds with rabbits and deer. I see white cranes there sometimes as well, and believe me, you don't want those things to yell at you -- it sounds like a madman screaming bloody murder. The Rail Trail, on the other hand, has a family of feral cats (in the scrapyard), a wandering clan of enormous and very noisy wild geese (the kind with the knobs on top of their their beaks), and remarkably fat groundhogs. One thing I seldom see is snakes. Wrong climate, I suppose.

* In California, snakes abound. At Pico Canyon and Cahuenga Peak, I saw rattlesnakes on a regular basis, including some truly large specimens who let me know they weren't too terribly pleased to see me. Rattlers are not scary in person, because they come with their own alarm systems to let you know where they are and what mood they are in, but damn, if you hear that rattle and you can't see the snake, you're in some trouble.

* Startling wild animals can be entertaining. I would never do it on purpose, but accidents happen. I once blundered into a huge red-tailed hawk reposing in a six-foot sapling just a yard or two away. The bird took wing, and its talons missed my scalp by a few inches. Otherwise I wouldn't have one. That was one pissed-off bird, and I'm just glad she wasn't guarding a nest. A few months ago here in PA, I was nearly run over by a large doe who somehow didn't hear me coming until I was a few feet away: hidden from me by thick green bushes, she burst forth and missed me by about a yard. I'd have had a tough time explaining those bruises.

* People do not associate Hollywood with deer, but I have seen many a deer around the Hollywood reservoir, actually entire families of them at a time. I once even saw a doe and a buck grazing on a steep hillside, crowned with mansions, in front of the 101 Freeway. Probably the lack of vegetation keeps the deer population in SoCal down more or less naturally, so you don't see Angelinos opening fire on them with Uzis from the windows of their Teslas. In Pennsylvania they are shot in huge numbers. 442,960 white-tailed deer were shot in the 2022-2023 hunting season. That is a fuck-ton of venison.

* I recently worked a criminal case in which several people of astonishing stupidity jacklighted (illegally shot) three or four large deer, backstrapped them (harvested the choicest meat only, running along the spine, and left the rest), dragged the corpses a few yards off their property into the woods, and left them to rot, without even bothering to wash the blood off their pickup trucks parked nearby. The game warden did not have to overexert himself cracking this case. It's always comforting to know people with two-digit IQs can own high-powered rifles.

* When I visit my mom in Maryland, I occasionally revisit the C & O Canal trail, where I spent much time as a boy. That is a very wild place. It was there I was chased by my first goose (they hiss when angry, and they are easily angered), saw my first turkey vulture (seldom has so formiddable a bird from below the neck been so ridiculous above: they have tiny heads that look exactly like those of old, bald men), and encountered a snapping turtle of such monstrous size (larger than a toilet seat) that its tail looked crocodilian. I also see a lot of cranes fishing patiently on the banks, as the canal positively teems with fish, some of them up to about eighteen inches in length or even better.

* I know very little about birds, but today I saw a woodpecker in full glory, complete with mohawk, and even better, some jet-black birds with gorgeous fire-engine red plumage on their wings, rather like the national markings you see on military aircraft. In Burbank, about once a year, there would appear masses of gorgeous pale green birds with yellow-and-red flame-like markings on their wings and tails, birds so exotic they looked as if they might have flown from South America. There were also two very fat, black-eyed birds with stiff tufts above their skulls, like spiked hair, who made a nest in the eaves of my neighbor's garage. My cat took great interest in these two, but they were not having it: one day they dive bombed him so relentlessly that he soon gave up all pretense of fighting back and made a cowardly retreat back into my home, where he was mocked and shamed for not standing his ground.

* My cat is not wild, but in my yard you'd never have known it. He attacked anything and everything, killing small garden lizards by the score, fighting skinks, punching one of the neighbor's unfortunate hens right in its beak, swatting another neighbor's German shepherd puppy on the nose, battling trespassing cats, murdering a large brown rat, and even terrorizing a possum into playing dead. It is often said that human beings are the only animals who kill for pleasure rather than necessity, but anyone who saw ole Spike in action in that yard between 2013 - 2020 might argue differently.

As you can see, I am an outdoorsy type, but not exactly an expert on nature. I grew up in a leafy suburb on the edge of a swamp, and spent most of my childhood with mud on my knees and under my fingernails: but the wildest things I generally saw as a boy were generally squirrels. I will always find animal encounters of any kind to be worthy of note, and also a source of some pleasure. For when I spy tadpoles swarming in clear and shallow water, dime-sized toads with beautiful gray-green camouflage trembling upon leaves at edge of a pond, deer families munching grass on the edge of a farmer's field, comically porky hedgehogs power-waddling across country lanes, or flocks of geese strutting and honking by train tracks, I feel a great sense of relief that we haven't yet exterminated all forms of life around us, nor paved everything over, nor cut everything down. We may yet get to that point within my lifetime, but if my hikes and walks and rambles through woods, hills and mountains have taught me anything, it's that nature is incredibly resilient, and given a quarter of a chance, will return to full verdancy with astonishing speed. Whether its lively moss growing over a knocked-down tree, or green shoots springing forth from fire-blackened stumps, life tends to find a way. I just hope to hell we go along for the ride.