A Life in the Day of a Desert Museum

Since Jao was with us for the day, and since we were trapped in a cold snap--the temperature scarcely getting into the eighties--and since the

Desert Museum can be very much like a Sonoran desert when it is hot, we decided to spend a few hours there, and a delightful few hours they were, too. Jao loves the biology more than the botany of the Museum, even when the animals are mineral.

The Bighorn sheep family has been in a family way, so their generations are showing.

One of the advantages of the river otter and other water exhibits is that there is a small ice cream shop just around the corner.

We saw Mexican Gray wolves, a pacing bear, and almost saw a young Mountain Lion taking a mid-day nap. Not all of the prairie dogs were dozing: some were on sentinel duty.

Sentinels were everywhere.

The humming bird house, or aviary, particularly fascinated Jao, not because of the birds, but because the entry and exit was secured with a curtain wall of lightweight plastic chains to discourage birds from using the doorways. One can always finds birds: a chain-link doorway is hard to ignore.

We saw a very large collection of Galloping Tourists: "Where is the next stop? Old Tucson? What is Old Tucson?" "It's where they used to make old west movies, up the road to the right." "Which way is right?"

"That way."

There were more birds outside than inside the aviary. That was only fair.

It is Spring, and the small rains of recent seasons go further than they do in what used to be the wet places. We will have to get used to that: maybe use less ice in our tonics.

Jao stayed overnight, so that his Dad could meet some friends for dinner. Jao has gone home now, and Mari is taking a nap. (There is probably a cause-and-effect story in there, somewhere.)

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The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer. We do have an answer. We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...

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