As a twelve-year-old boy the dusty canvas rucksack, a slightly faded grey/green, found long forgotten in the corner of the garage was an inspiration. Reason enough to plan an adventure with my brothers, perhaps bring along a couple neighborhood friends. In those days our street marked the tenuous edge of a ready-to-grow Biggest Little City. Excursions down to the wash or the nearby sagebrush steppe that covered the rolling bottom flanks of Peavine Mountain were a weekly activity. We were fortunately ignorant that our open space, the incubator of our nascent freedom, would someday be developed into tract homes, gas stations and strip malls filled with predictable corporate choices. Our horizon was almost literally infinite, close enough to be true in my adolescent mind, in a way that is still blessedly possible across of much of Northern Nevada.

Emblematic of untold stories in which one gathers a kit of provisions and navigational tools for important things, this newly discovered backpack insisted on a special adventure, something a bit more substantial than our typical makeshift wanderings. We all knew where we would go. At the top of our block, visible during any game of street whiffleball was a bigger foothill crowned with a rocky prominence that I can now identify as an igneous outcrop. However to the neighborhood kids it was a possible bandit hideout, a rocky castle with a hidden prospectors’ jackpot or the lair of a thousand rattlesnakes. It was our far northern horizon, a compelling destination.

Rucksack shaken out and loaded with a dented Boy Scout canteen, a few snacks and a pair of antique binoculars our expedition hit the sidewalk. The first leg of our journey took us through the familiar neighborhood landscape, up past the pizza parlor and laundromat where we’d often empty our pockets of quarters spent on video games. The open space was just past the small adjacent apartment complex and as the hill steepened our mission began in earnest. At the time my ecological eyes were underdeveloped. The open terrain was merely the setting, the rocky ground with sporadic ground hugging plants that desiccate in the summer sun, the evenly spaced sagebrush twisting our course with weaving gaps, scratching our bare knees and shins as we’d shimmy through. That same soil became boot-caking clay for days after a winter soaking or snowmelt saturation, but on this early summer day the ground was dusty dry and route finding as simple a lifting your gaze to the destination ahead.

I think that it’s probable that some of my companions were glad for getting out and expanding our boundaries but perhaps unimpressed with the rewards of our efforts. No strongbox of Comstock silver was uncovered and it was certainly a good thing that we didn’t trip over any of the rattlesnakes that undoubtedly inhabit the mountain. However, my sense of the possibilities was galvanized. I still find that when I set out on any walk, an urban meander, a forest hike or particularly when I find myself cross-country in the open desert, a part of my mind is triggered by subliminal expectations of hidden riches that will reveal themselves if I keep my senses sharp.

This is still the neighborhood my family calls home. After all the further wanderings of my life it’s a place I come back to wander. It is still a short five-minute bike ride from my mother’s house to the trailhead. The hillside, so exotic and undeveloped when I was a young boy is public land and access point to an invaluable reservoir of larger pubic space beyond, desired by so many and increasingly valuable to the inhabitants of a growing city that has extended itself to this very edge.

The increased sharpness of my ecological vision sees how in the intervening years things have changed. There is a wonderful network of trails, clearly showing the commitment of local volunteers engaged with the Forest Service that manages the land. Fair space is given to different users; mountain bikes, hikers, dog walkers and OHVs. The ad-hoc routes of old jeep roads and rocky ravines is no longer the only way to explore these hills. Another recent change that has caught my eye is a near uniform carpet a yellow that doesn’t match the mental picture ingrained into my imagination during my formative years. A fast growing grass inadvertently introduced to the Intermountain West has firmly established itself. The formula is simple; cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum) a plant from Eurasia is an annual, resprouting each year and growing quickly, smothering the more reserved locals. Being highly flammable and fond of burning, fire wipes out the established shrubs like rabbitbrush and big sage. Fire frequency has increased substantially and the natives don’t have the opportunity to come back easily when the cheatgrass returns first. This yellow carpet is what I encounter where was once a sporadic ground cover of subtle but interesting herbs and the maze of sagebrush that has largely vanished, remnants in areas not recently burned. This story is playing out throughout the Great Basin and beyond and the ecological consequences are heartbreaking. Habitat for threatened species like the greater sage grouse is diminishing and the overwhelming newcomer contributes precious little back to the ecosystem relative to the native plant community. Not even the rangy cattle raised in the region can eat the plant and many ranchers share the concern about its proliferation. The seminal conservationist Aldo Leopold said, “One of the consequences of an ecological education is that one lives in a world of wounds”. My blissfully ignorant adolescent self couldn’t see the havoc caused by our foibles, our carelessness or our greed the way I have no choice but to see it now.  However I would never trade the beauty that my engagements with nature and ecological stories have shown me, although I occasionally envy the willfully ignorant.

          Artemisia tridentata, commonly referred to as big sagebrush or my preferred Great Basin sagebrush is the fitting choice as Nevada’s state flower. Many of the one thousand wide valleys of the Great Basin were filled with inland seas 12,000 years ago. Now many of them have waves of the softest green leaves, evenly spaced sage stretching beyond the curvature of the globe. Don’t expect a dramatic showy inflorescence. Like much about the desert there is some subtlety that demands our attention, the clusters of small yellow flowers stretch upwards in the late summer enough to shift the tone of a whole basin to those with sensitive eyes. What is not subtle is the smell of the volatile leaves combined with the floral aroma when a September thunderstorm sweeps the Nevada rangeland stirring the countryside. Each season as cheatgrass fire cycle is creeping across the landscape we will have less of this joyous experience and fewer of the delicate flowers. A fire maybe twice in a century was once typical, more than twice a decade is common now. The loss of a billion plants might be a gross understatement. Each of those innumerable plants that remain may produce a million tiny black seeds. Mostly borne on the wind they may not be long lived, succumbing to the frequent fires or struggling to compete when they do sprout. Nature provides infinite opportunities for redemption. I can hope the land holds the memories of my favorite plants encapsulated in the seedbank.

Meditative riches or quirky ecological surprises are the expected and welcomed reward of my rambles. This afternoon I took advantage of the mild January we’re experiencing to go for a mountain bike ride, the winter mud and clay that would encrust my tires tamped down by dry air and unseasonably sunny skies. My mind predictably wandered to hidden treasures stimulated by glimpses of 100 year old mine shafts and adits clustered around ridges of andesite. Mysterious lodes were removed the forgotten value and content possibly to be rediscovered by digging into the archives of the University Nevada Reno, Mackey School of Mines. The trail traversing the modest tailings piles produced my mule power and individual sweat reflecting long forgotten desires. However the land does hold a buried treasure far beyond my 12-year-old imagination. Countless seeds representing the vegetative history of the land are stored beneath the surface hoping for the opportunity the return.

To my mind, the pinnacle of human engineering was realized in the classic bicycle frame; the standard diamond shape, archaically referred to as a “safely bicycle”. It is still the most common frame design and a modern bike would be immediately recognizable to the first cyclists of the 19th century. After being around for roughly 150 years it is still the most efficient mode of personal transportation and is impressively versatile. By tweaking the geometry the basic design can be made to fit any person and nearly any kind of terrain from smooth pavement to rocky slopes or even snow and sand. I personally prefer a bike constructed of high quality steel for the durability and suppleness, but bicycles have been made out of all kinds of material from iron to plastic. Bamboo is even being used to make inexpensive, reliable bike frames that can be built and repaired with a renewable material on the cheap.

As a long time advocate for fossil fuel free mobility what I’m about to say is a bit of personal heresy, but here goes: The inline 4 cylinder internal combustion engine is also a wonder of transportation engineering. Like the bicycle it has a basic form that is largely unchanged and has an elegant simplicity. The motor in a Model T could be identified in the structure of the motor in many contemporary compact cars, if the owner bothered to open the hood and could see past all the computer controlled emission components, wiring, hoses and other gizmos crammed under the hood. All that clutter has created the trade off of making it far more difficult for the driveway tinkerer to wrench on her own car but has also given us far cleaner and efficient vehicles. The forty year old “4 banger’” in Lil’ Squatch is mid way on this spectrum. The uncluttered engine compartment houses a modest Toyota 20R engine that can be approached with the typical tool box stashed in your closet and having been influenced by the 1970s gas crunch gets better milage than the average soccer mom SUV (not bad for a house). However the tail pipe could give off a fair bit more toxins when idling alongside a comparable modern vehicle.

When we got the notion of trekking to Washington DC to join the March for Science we had assumed that, of course, we would be traveling in our spirit animal/home/(relatively) trusty conveyance. A quick calculation of time available versus average velocity, not to mention leeway for unforeseen contingencies plus travel expenses meant that our window of opportunity was not ample enough and our budget a little too tight. Lil Squatch couldn’t make the journey, but I did have a new appreciation for the math necessary to get a probe to one of our neighboring planets. We needed another option and that’s how we came to choose a railroad excursion across the continent.

One thing that has been reinforced in my experience is the truth that it is not the destination, but rather the journey that is most important. You might say the journey itself is the destination, they are one and the same, that we live in the moment and that the future is an illusion. This might be a good thing to keep in mind if you ever think about taking a 3 day (each way) Amtrak ride in coach class. It’s kind of a long trip. It’s a great one though, and in many ways the most appropriate way to get to our nation’s capital in order to join thousands of others in an exercise of our democracy. The landscape rolls by in a literal cross section of it’s natural beauty and a fair sampling of small town citizenry, bookended by a few of the best, most cosmopolitan cities in the world. This mode was also, by far, the greenest method to get us there. Lil’ Squatch is best used for patient, contemplative travel where your home is where you park it. The gas burned and money spent for a quick out-and-back across the continent would have been hard to justify.

I maintain my ambivalence about driving and the ever increasing negative side-effects of car culture. I have similar, though less acute ambivalence about science. Technology has wrought destruction in myriad ways, it can serve to concentrate wealth as the benefits are rarely distributed equitably. Science, as a reflection of our intellectual capacity can also reflect our best nature. It’s all in how we chose to use our hands and minds. For me the March for Science might just as easily been called the March Against Willful Ignorance, or the March for Critical Thinking. How about a March for Indigenous Knowledge? The best science is a collective endeavor of many minds building, thought by thought, going all the way back to capturing fire and teaching each other new ways to chip a stone into a finer spear point than the one before, to the ever more complex theories on the nature of the universe. I might declare that we hit our apex in a beautifully crafted bicycle frame, hand built in the 21st century, the familiar design, constructed with care so that it becomes a joy to ride. Yesterday at a cultural event in Sequoia Nation Park I had the privilege to learn from a local American Indian how to craft a duck decoy from tule reeds. A transfer of knowledge across millennia given with generosity. Mine has a novice’s character but it is still elegant in its simplicity and I expect it would function in the same way it would have a thousand years ago, a testament to its good engineering.

Sometimes the answer is right in front of your face. That answer might come in the form of a trio of 3rd graders taking turns shaking a concoction of plaster “rocks” that you just put in a jar half filled with water before handing it to them and telling them to pretend that they are the nearby Truckee river, raging with springtime runoff after a winter of bountiful snowfall. I’ve been struggling for a couple weeks to come up with some erudite words about science and why the hell I feel compelled to join a big march advocating for it. Then Rachael and I found ourselves volunteering for a science expo in a gymnasium full of 9-year-old scientists and they don’t seem to need any convincing of its value. They’ve noticed the local rivers and have skipped rounded stones across them. After two minutes of their enthusiastic rock tumbling, my jeans and black Vans are speckled with gypsum-laced water droplets and the kids get see the results of weathering. Dumping the easily worn and polished test objects into a colander their tired arms intuitively understand the cause and effect of being a force of nature and they are happy and full of wonder about it. Too many adults are criminally blasé about these things as if cynical disinterest were superior to getting stoked about rocks. This is clearly learned behavior. Does it take any less effort to learn that cynicism? To my mind the feedback loop of questioning and seeking answers creates enough momentum to compete with the cop-out of cultured, self-absorbed ignorance.

You might say that I don’t do science. At least not fancy lab coat science in an expensive facility full of high precision equipment. I do observe. I can watch a Clark’s Nutcracker obsessively bury pine nuts and guess that saving these seeds to eat later may also help spread new trees around. A friend may point out that certain trees have unique mushrooms that pop up from the soil around their trunks and we can wonder that the fungus and the tree likely have a relationship. Mysterious nocturnal sounds give rise to the imagination of unfamiliar beasts before I settle on the likelihood of a resident screech owl.  I can hypothesize, let my imagination play with the possibilities, tease out a list of whys or why nots. Curiosity is our birthright; this habit starts in us before we are self-aware. It is undoubtedly a key component of the mental and emotional toolkit that has helped us survive and has shaped our place in the universe.

Science as we practice it today is simply a formalization of humanity’s inherent curiosity and passion for knowledge. As such it is an idea, a method that belongs to anyone who chooses to pick it up. Our alienation from science as some partitioned “other” is indicative of our alienation in general; our unfortunate prejudices of different people or ideas and our widespread inability to connect with the natural systems and the earth from which we were manifested. It is frightening to me how quickly we can give away the very talents that kept us alive in our Paleolithic days. Humans are a social animal that survives by shared efforts and shared knowledge. Ignorance of one’s surroundings is not a luxury a subsistence society could afford. Yet we willingly hand over our observational skills and abdicate our critical thinking, choosing instead a short hand of biases and superficial binary choices. There is a whole world of color and nuance we can participate in; that we can chose not to reduce to black and white.

The cumulative and collective endeavor of learning and passing along information has not simply given us better gadgets to play with and a deep list of trivia. It has continuously raised the baseline of human thought. Unfortunately our conscientiousness lags perpetually behind our cleverness. Atom bombs, global warming and online trolling are evidence of that. A better informed society is crucial and can come from having broader ownership of the basic process of science, can come from the truth that knowledge and lifelong learning are not burdens but part of the joy of being human. Currently there is a cadre of belief in our nation that happily takes the smart bombs and internal combustion, that buys and sells the baubles of a industrialized technological nightmare, that expects the best pharmaceuticals and medical techniques to cure the side effects of their bad habits, so long as they don’t have to chip in for anybody else’s welfare. However, god forbid, we learn evolution and the definition of Theory or make evidence based decisions about our society and environment or fund research that doesn’t immediately line a benefactor’s pocket.

Sometimes the answer is beer. Most of the crowd we found ourselves with last Friday night didn’t need beer to be inspired by the lecture of a German paleontologist, but the beer was a nice touch. Nevada has some rich fossil beds dating back roughly 250 million years when it was the edge of the supercontinent Pangea and was much closer to the equator. An inland sea harbored a wide variety of ancient creatures including many forms of Ichthyosaur (Fish-lizards). A local brewery has long celebrated the State Fossil, Shonisaurus, possibly the largest of the Ichthyosaurs, with a popular IPA and we were at their production facility for an event to share the discovery of a new fossil and to raise funds for further research. This crowd was clearly stoked about rocks. Of course it was swimming dinosaurs that time and pressure had turned into rocks, and there was beer, but this group didn’t need much convincing that science brings value to our lives that can’t be measured in just dollars.

The Coriolis Effect can be small. On our spinning orb of a home the equator moves fastest and speed drops as you move towards the poles. Stare at a record turntable for a few minutes (if you can find one) and you’ll understand. This difference in speed has an influence on motion in the water and atmosphere. Air masses and water currents are dragged along at these different rates as they move across the planet. Because of this we once liked to say that our toilet bowls and showers drained clockwise in the Northern hemisphere, anticlockwise in the South. An old Simpsons episode had a gag about expensive toilets in the US embassy in Australia that reverse the flow for the psychological comfort of American citizens down under.

The truth is that the alignment of your faucet or the imperceptible imperfections in your porcelain will have far more influence on the way the water swirls. On such a small scale, the width of a sink, the Coriolis Effect is swamped by other local forces. Is this a truth that matters? Is our urban legend about drains worth the fantasy? When was the last time you paid attention to the spinning in your sink drain?

One a bigger scale this effect is meaningful. It is one of many factors that influence our largest storms. In fact they would likely not build into spinning masses without it. The chaos and destruction, the regeneration and dynamism of our biosphere is dependent on the rotation of our planet and the entire surface of Earth would be unrecognizable without it. Over wide ocean spaces and with continuous input of energy, a smidge of extra warmth that to a swimmer would go unnoticed, a swirling mass is created that can cover a whole sea or engulf a large portion of a continent. It will spin a perfectly reliable anticlockwise in our Northern hemisphere or clockwise in the Southern. Cyclones are a powerful realization of innumerable tiny actions persistently combined into a common force. On this scale facts matter. Observations and measurements, work by untold thousands of researchers working over the recent centuries have given us the ability to know these storms well enough that people have some chance at preparation and there is plenty still left to learn.

Perhaps there is no such thing as bad weather, there is just better or worse adaptation. We should be asking if building homes on sandy barrier islands or draining wetlands and estuaries or filling flood basins with tract homes is wise for long term dwelling. While in Louisiana, we witnessed properties rebuilt along the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina. Many were simple structures to accommodate a trailer or fifth wheel, something that could be quickly evacuated. Others were status quo homes, raised a bit, but still built right up to the a sandy beach waiting to bear the brunt of the next storm surge. I don’t live in the most water resistant home so I know which approach I’d take.

Here in California we might have been careful what we asked for. After years of deepening drought we have been deluged by record rains causing widespread issues with landslides and localized flooding, undercutting roads and bridges or covering them in debris. Sinkholes have swallowed cars and the water storage infrastructure is strained, such as the the nation’s tallest dam at Oroville. The snowpack does not reach down to particularly low elevations but it is thick and moisture ladened in the high country hitting record depths in the Lake Tahoe Basin as I write. Those swirling winds driven by the Coriolis like a bicycle chain cranking these rivers of warm moisture right into the West Coast. California’s wet winters and dry summers created a rich diversity of ecosystems and allowed for one one the most fertile agricultural regions the world has ever seen. These are reliant on a particular climate, one that created an irreplaceable frozen reservoir in the High Sierra that releases abundant water when the the dry lands below need it most. This is most likely changing to a significantly different mode, one that we’ll need all hands on deck to prepare for.

It is hard to be prepared for something if you don’t want to see it coming. A social climate of deliberate obfuscation, denial of facts, a glorification of ignorance as a virtue will leave us naked and underprepared. This dystopian phenomenon is the center of gravity that I’ve found nearly all my recent conversations circling towards, like so much waste crowding toward the sewer, like a hard black stone in the pit of my stomach. Maybe this is part of the process of exorcism, releasing the bile, clearing space to fill with healthier fare. I can hope for an effective flushing process. I may now be paying closer attention the swirls in my drains. I’m definitely interested the sea changes on the streets and in our hearts. I sense a flourishing of inputs collecting and new directions of movement. Something far more substantial than an uninterrupted stream of asthmatic and vitriolic, bluster. Enough voices coming together that when those in its path choose put their heads in the sand they’ll eventually look up to see their beachhead washed away.

We still have our hands with which to write, we still have our senses with which to observe, our minds with which to interpret, imagine and share. Most of all we have the most incredible community of family and friends to nurture us in ever inspiring and surprising ways.

What we don’t have are nearly all the the tools we’ve been scraping together to work on our ever evolving project and to tell our stories. While on a long overdue visit with our wonderful community of old friends in the SF Bay Area our car was broken into. In one moment of letting our guard down we lost nearly all the equipment, nature journals and camping gear we’ve been using for the creative project that has been driving our vagabonding. Not to mention some of of favorite clothing and underwear. I’ve spent enough fruitless hours wondering how after being so prudent and watchful throughout any number of vulnerable locations the one time we felt it necessary to let our guard down in a reasonably safe place was exactly the wrong time. We intend to come out of this crisis stronger and more focused. As dedicated naturalists we feel inspired and to compelled to join the March for Science in Washington taking place April 22, 2017. We intend to continue to share our story and have no doubt that we can add value to the work being done and contribute.

Because of that surprising community there ended up being a couple ways that folks can contribute, if inspired, to our rebound effort:

• We started a Gofundme page here.

• And some sneaky friends surprised us with a Paypal fundraiser at vagabondnaturalistfund@gmail.com If you have Paypal account, this option incures no fees if you use the “send money” feature.

Helping us to our goal will cover travel expenses and re-investing in the equipment that allows us to create. Our goal is likely much less than the cost to replace our our material possessions, but we try to be frugal people and enjoy improvising with our toolkit. So we’ll work with what we’ve got.

The intention is to flip our luck around and use this momentum to carry into another year or fruitful reciprocity. Together over the past 2 years we’ve put in well over 1500 hours of volunteer time, traveled a significant portion of North America and lived and worked in two National Parks. In that time we’ve had an invaluable education on the land and all the life that inhabits it, including us humans. Science is the backbone to all of our knowledge about the world around us and has brought living things into sharper focus. It is the firm ground on which to structure our narratives and the soil from which our imaginations can flourish. The well-being of all life depends on good science and the will to use that knowledge wisely. Science is an inherently neutral, non-partisan concept; a method to seek the truth. However it is indisputable that we are living in a moment of widespread insecurity about what is fact and a climate of selective bashing of scientific thought. We wish to be part of the effort to create an inclusive atmosphere that strengthens the connections between people and the tools that contribute to our collective knowledge. There is always so much still to learn and curiosity belongs to everyone. You can learn more about the March for Science here.

            I live in a little shack that is currently parked in a hidden hollow in the woods. It is, for the most part a beautiful place surrounded by healthy trees, shrubs, birds and other mysterious creatures that skitter and poo but are rarely seen. Nearby I hear a small mountain river when the air is still and it is relatively quiet, which is frequent. It has been a great place to delve deeper into the naturalist writing and other creations that Rachael and I have taken up and it’s tempting to feel as if I’m isolated and shielded from the larger fray that is the current state of human civilization. This is, of course, an illusion; the electronic connections that bring our affirming voices together also bring in the less admirable voices that seem to get an inordinate share of the bandwidth. There is no “outside world”; we’re all in this together. The worst air pollution in the country daily spills upward form the Central Valley into my lungs and the pores of all the guiltless life around me. The resilient Big Trees above me are monitored for the adverse affects. Even the nighttime stars are no escape. When we were living in the sparsely inhabited Mojave the deep rich darkness of space was intruded on from two sides by the glow of urban lights. The collective emissions of our civilization have triggered a global, cascading succession of a scope we can scarcely fathom. If I were a dispassionate biologist, which I am not, this would be an exciting time to study the evolution and extinctions. No less real are the efforts to take these public spaces, the buffers for biological adaptation, space that I and millions of others rely on for spiritual nourishment, out of our shared possession and put them in the hands of a myopic few. Avarice and self-interest are having their day. It is necessary that common good and generosity, for all life, become empowered to supplant them.

            This metaphorical space we vagabonds have created is meant to acknowledge wonder and beauty, primarily of wild and natural things, but also in our relationship to them. It’s the basis of my compassion for all the living things around me for I know that social justice, ecological consciousness and a vision for the better ways in which we can live together are all intertwined, just as the critters and plants around my little home have sorted themselves out over millennia and will continue to re-negotiate new balances for millennia to come. Implicit in these endeavors is the awareness of the challenges, that there is no room to take anything for granted, and that following our hearts will be more fruitful than succumbing to our fears.

            Speaking of fears to overcome, I’ve found talking out loud to the empty universe can be surprisingly intimidating. We’re jumping into the audio realm and I’ve put together a few podcasts. So far it’s my voice, but as in all things Vagabond these are inherently collaborative and Rachael can take some credit for any success here and I’ll take the blame for any shortcomings. Our latest episode is here on our Nature Walk page and it goes back to tell a bit of how we hit the road. For us it’s a story that reminds us that it is not always easy, but that anything worthwhile rarely is.

           Not being able to see anything has been surprisingly informative. Every night, when the quietude of bedtime has settled in, Cricket Hollow, the comfortable cove that Lil’ Squatch is nestled into, produces a regular sequence of mysterious sounds. The forest floor, completely covered in dried leaves, allows that not even the stealthiest creatures can move without leaving a trail of sound. The substantial and crisp California Sycamore leaves amplify, turning the skittering of a vole into a hefty animal. So far out of the dozens of times we’ve picked up a flashlight, inspired by a burst of raucousness or the snapping of a branch, we’ve seen almost nothing but the textured ground fading into the shadowed brambles. I have once caught the glistening eyeshine staring back at me from murky blackness, an animal of indefinite size, bigger than a squirrel, smaller than a coyote. Another night Rachael and I crept slowly, vainly attempting to avoid the crunch underfoot, to the base of a nearby tree. Something had shuffled up there and our light caught the fluffy orb of our local Western Screech Owl, not terribly happy to be spotlighted but otherwise disinterested in us. This put a face to a voice and settled a question we had about what had been making a deep, trilling call long into the night.

            Our daytime neighbors are communicative as well. No animal better represents the oak woodlands that are the true California landscape than the Acorn Woodpecker. Boisterous, gregarious, laughing at me all day as they gather acorns and peck holes into any and all wooden surfaces, a stump, a snag, fenceposts, telephone poles, the Park housing and outbuildings. A communal bird, they work in multi-generational groups sharing the work of collecting acorns, making caches and raising the young. Another family, a covey of California Quail pass through our yard daily, tisking nervously to each other, cooing, kicking leaves in search of bugs, taking dust baths before fussing into a nearby roost for the evening. At this point the crickets for which I assume our hollow is named kick in and if the temperature is optimum their chorus can hit decibels that drown out everybody else singing into the night.

            We didn’t need to hear or see one of our nocturnal neighbors to know he lived here. “Do you smell something?” Rachael asked. “No, …wait a minute” Not a sound or sign other than a musky scent wafting through the air. The unmistakable odor a skunk visitor was thankfully mild and short-lived. The smells of the Sierra Foothills where we live have been otherwise a pleasure. Our first walks through the sun-warmed grass and oaks of early September were filled with an evocative dry-sweet scent, dusty and vegetal. This became saturated to a deep earthy richness with the first light rains of October. The air is infused and the crispness of autumn is complimented by this hint of fragrant moisture.

            This is a dry and scratchy land in September and October, the tail end of our Mediterranean summer. The scramble trail down to the Middle Fork of the Kaweah River can leave me with scratches earned while avoiding the more troublesome poison oak. It is well worth it. I’ve never had the pleasure of living five minutes from my choice of a half dozen perfect late summer swimming holes. Boulders of tortured metamorphic rock polished smooth by high, snow-fed, spring runoff, surround deep, dark pools of clear water. The trail dust and detritus is washed away, the temperature a perfect balance, cold enough to be exhilarating, warm enough to linger, the water enveloping the skin. I glide, High Sierra granite in the distance, multicolored woodland ridges surrounding, sand, gravel and stones at my feet.  This becomes a daily ritual, a compulsion. I haven’t been this well washed in years. Pausing, waist-deep, my feet on algae covered riverbed I feel a curious sensation. Looking down I see a school of minnows aggressively nibbling at the bits swirling around my legs, taking investigative bites of my skin and ample leg hair. This ticklish exfoliation becomes a reliable part of my routine, odd enough to keep me swimming away from the shallows.

            Once, returning home from my swim, I catch sight of another elusive neighbor. He already knows me, though we haven’t met yet. I’ve seen his scat on the abandoned trail 40 yards above our RV. He lives by his nose. With an olfactory system seven times as sensitive as a bloodhound he probably knows that I prefer dark roasted coffee and have been experimenting with homemade seitan. Fortunately he’s focused on his native food right now. Seeing me he effortlessly takes his 250 pounds to the top of a 40 foot oak tree and balanced on branches I wouldn’t trust with my weight, he is heartily feasting on the same crop of Blue Oak acorns that our woodpeckers gather. There are other neighbors we are unlikely to meet. We’re told that a Mountain Lion den is just up the drainage from our spot. If so it also knows I’m here but I’ll probably have better luck with my lottery ticket than with being able to catch sight of her. Ringtails, Badgers and Bobcats are likely out there. I know we have local foxes by their promiscuous pooping habits. It is satisfying enough to sense these presences in other ways. Getting any rare glimpse would only be a bonus.

Here’s a Video of our friend in the tree: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUMq6oSC7GM