SmokeSound

I used to dread hearing Grandpa Jacobson ask me to pump water for the cows.  I should guess I was about ten at the time, and there were twenty or thirty cows and horses who needed water, who could drink it faster than I could pump it. It was a log trough, and the pump stood at one end, directly over a shallow well at the edge of the swampy field.  There was a plunger inside the "belly" of the pump, with a flap valve. Lifting the handle shoved the plunger down, lifting the flap valve, allowing water to flow up above the plunger.  Pushing down on the handle dragged the plunger up again, at the same time causing the flap valve to flop down, keeping the water from escaping back down:  out it ran, down a short run to the log trough, where the cows drank it faster than I could pump it. Worst, when the cows were satisfied, I had to keep pumping until the trough was full.  It was a big log; at that time of my life and size, possibly the biggest log in the world...

These four ducks--I am fairly certain that these are not hummingbirds, but I am not reluctant to admit that the niceties of birding elude me--have just heard Our Rumpled President has fired the head of the FBI for reasons most clear to the President alone.   The two ducks in the middle and the one on the Alt-right have no comment at the present time.  The hummingbird on the left. . . .   No, that is probably a duck, too, is not quite sure what to do.  

 The next morning we wriggled our way through town, across what was a waterless Sonoita Creek, to the Preserve, where large camera lenses congregated first at the little office itself, around which were staked hummingbird feeders just to prove that we were in the right place.   I am something of a birder myself, I suppose, confidently able to distinguish between a hummingbird and a duck, although I suppose that now-and-then I get it wrong.   The Preserve looks like a one-time farm field carved from the trees that grow back from the creek itself as it meanders west toward Nogales.  The creek, which does have water by the time if reaches the Preserve, shows evidence of the times when it really  shows its muscle.  Rough but comfortable trails have been carved out parallel to the creek to offer the birds a place to come and watch for birders.   On the day we visited the Preserve, migrating birders from as far away as France were sighted, allowing ...

Patagonia is a small town about an hour southeast of Tucson, named for the mountains south of town, themselves named after . . . perhaps the mountainous area at the tip of south America.  And that  Patagonia's name probably comes from the large footprints made by the native people there.  It means "Bigfoot", perhaps from the llama skins they used for shoes. Welsh miners were brought up from working in South America to work in what is now Arizona, so perhaps they introduced the name.  Or the name may have come from the large prints of the now-extinct Mexican grizzly bear:  bigfoot again! The present town of Patagonia was situated precisely where the now-also-extinct railroad crossed the Sonoita and Harshaw creeks. Another theory of the origin of the name, first found right here, is that a Caucasian angel from heaven came down to the creek because of its reputation for harboring migrating birds, and discovered that the Native name for the mountains was th...

At Silverbell Lake--I do not know if it is named Silverbell Lake, but it is alongside Silverbell Road, and it is a lake, of sorts, having been created by treated waste water--there are Great Blue Herons nesting in a Cottonwood tree growing on a small island.  Or perhaps it is a Eucalyptus tree. With wingspans of about six feet, watching a Great Blue Heron return to feed its noisy nestlings is a little like watching a large kite fly into a windmill or a willow tree.  But the Herons are serene.  They thread the needle as if there were no crosswind, and the control tower were not in a panic. Fishermen at the lake sit for hours, hoping for an occasional trout, scarce now that the water is warming, or a mud-bottom catfish, knowing, mostly, that they will catch nothing. Not the Great Blue Heron!  It sails to a shoreline, posts itself like a reed, and before long a fish or a frog or something edible finds itself impaled by the Heron's sudden and wicked beak. ...

There are mountains all around the city of Tucson; fairly substantial mountains, in some cases.  Mt. Lemmon, as an example, on whose south side the city is nestled, is more than 9,000 feet high.  The range itself is called the Santa Catalinas or, as my Scandinavian urges insist upon calling it, The Cat of Santa Lena. The north side of the Cat of Santa Lena is a regional park:  Catalina State Park.  It is a stunning location. Our reason for driving there yesterday was that we have a little Casita, and there are campgrounds there.  "It might be a nice place to stay for a couple of nights!", we agreed.  "Let's go see what it is like." We were a scouting party for ourselves, and it is only about 15 miles from home. We took our Purported Dog who is trying to learn civilization and manners, and he almost immediately cozied up to a sweet thang. Desertland, before cows and settlers is nothing like the bare dirt trails and roads we buil...

Perhaps because I have been watching, The Last Alaskans, perhaps because I live in Tucson, Arizona, perhaps because I have a camera, I have been paying attention to such a place as this is. It is prickly and beautiful.  It is impossible not to know that we share this space with plants and animals  long-since adapted to this Sonoran Desert, who define, more than we do, what it is to be here. That is probably true of all places.  I know that, born in Tacoma, Washington, and having grown up (more or less:  less) halfway between Puget Sound and Mt. Rainier, that graveled soil and a sea of Douglas fir trees were everywhere, and that there is a mountain always in my mind, and the incessant slap of water against stone. Here, while it is snowing in Minnesota, the saguaros are blooming.  It is the time of year when 100 degree days F. become ordinary, when the Tucson Old Timers baseball team starts playing ball an hour earlier in the day to avoid total desiccation...

This cougar's name is Cruz, a name suggested by what we call a river that occasionally runs through town:  the Santa Cruz.   I thought they should nave named the cat, Stevens.   All my life, I have known that there were cougars in the woods around, in Western Washington.  I never saw a cougar in the wild, and rarely even in captivity.  I do recall a pair of cougars (I think it was a pair) at Wilderness Trek on the slopes of Mt. Rainier.  Here in Tucson, at the foot of Mt. Lemmon, cougars are commonly called mountain lions.  Many-named, these large, close relatives of house cats, are also called pumas, catamounts, panthers, and more. Cruz was rescued, about five years ago, in California, and now lives at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. We have another, part-time, famous cat in our part of the State.  It is an area where a Canadian mining company proposes to dig a monstrous hole and extract copper ore.  Even though jaguar...

stack.com Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green, The night above the dingle starry, Time let me hail and climb Golden in the heydays of his eyes, And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns . . . Dylan Thomas wrote that, in Fern Hill. He might have written, "under the apple trellises", but he was born too early for that. Those days, trees were still trees, and technology had not yet put its cotton pickin' hands on apple trees. Born in Tacoma, in Western Washington, I was young and easy under Douglas fir boughs, and it was years before I realized that east of the Cascade Mountains, there were apple orchards and apple towns, and eastern farther than that, the State stretched into wheatland all the way to Idaho. But Idaho was forever far. Since, the apple towns have, in their hunger for calloused hands, become home to Hispanics who came to pick apples, and somet...