As we pulled up into the driveway tonight, pink and orange skies ablaze, I opened the door to the truck and heard a long, throaty, haunting howl. Much lower than any coyote I’ve ever heard, but I looked around, and motion by the road up ahead caught my eye. And there he was, trotting out into the middle of the road, in the middle of all that evening color, where he threw his head back and let out one more howl, a little shorter and with a higher pitch, and then stood there, ears perked, until a faint, long howl in the distance reached us, and off he went in its direction.

That’s the first time I’ve ever watched a coyote howl. The moment was absolutely spectacular.

After he was gone I turned around to head to the back of the truck, and five deer - two doe and three bucks - were trotting up the side of the road on the other side, single file, like a saturday night suburban jogging club.

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I’ve been alone for most of the afternoon and, once again, did in two hours what I’d been working for three full days on. Clearly I need a new approach.

We’ve been battered and whipped all day by a fierce dust storm that’s covered the entire valley and most of the mountains since shortly before noon. At times even this big, heavy house swayed and creaked in the blasts. Dust storms remind me of what I love about the desert. They bring everyday objects back into focus. They’re ancient. If a spring day is three flutes and a fall day is a lone violin, an afternoon dust storm is a girl with leg hair and birkenstocks on a pedestal in a bar with a guitar and no deodorant. Full of grit and raw, natural harmony. The round world, for a moment, a cappella.

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Condensed from a back-and-forth email conversation between Shane and I, he working downstairs, me working upstairs:

me: “What time do you wanna have lunch, then?”
him: “Anytime now. I’m getting hungary..”
me: “Ok, I’ll get Romania.”
him: “Just no Frankfurt(ers), please.”
me: “… and take it easy on the Greece.”
him: “Yeah, and on the Vienna Sausages.”
me: “French fries?”
him: “Bologna?”
me: “No thanks, I’ll just stick with the Swiss cheese..”

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In the middle of the night last night the dogs jolted us awake, whining and carrying on at the door to the bedroom deck. I got up and calmed them, then looked outside. There in a very bright and silvery moonlight was a large animal, I couldn’t say what, lumbering leisurely down our driveway and out across the road. I was hoping it was a coyote, but it was too big and moved far too slow. I thought maybe a deer but it seemed too filled out for that, and deer rarely travel solo and there was no other living thing on the landscape in any direction. A mountain lion?When it wandered out of sight, I went back to bed. Maybe twenty minutes later the dogs were up there again, cuffing and whining, and I got up to see if it had come back. No. This time it was a coyote, trotting down the very same path the other animal had taken, tail swathing back and forth against the juniper. So perfectly visible in that light, the silver bouncing off his thick, frosty coat.

Nanook let out a bark, and the coyote, now just at the edge of our driveway and the road, stopped and turned back to look up at us. He stood there for the longest time looking up while I looked down. Despite that coyotes are rarely predators of anything larger than a rabbit, I wondered if he was tracking whatever it was that had come before him. But seemed in no hurry and, if he meant to be following, was woefully behind.

After a few minutes he trotted off again, stopping once more near the end of the street to look back again, I could barely make out the shift of his tail in the light to know it. Then he was gone.

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“I get up every morning determined both to change the world and to have one hell of a good time. Sometimes this makes planning the day difficult.”

— E.B. White

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