“I was never lost, but bewildered once for about three days.” -Daniel Boone

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We’ve seen a coyote twice this week. Just after daybreak, on the green hillside expanse just across the street from us in Daly City.

Pretty close, too: close enough, and coyote well-fed enough, to think for an instant it was a neighbor’s dog.

Coyote, just sitting there on the grassy hillside which looks empty to us, but is actually teeming with life, a gopher/ vole buffet.

The coyote is watching us drive by. We’re going to be late for the train. For us, it’s 8 am.

That hill is a salient feature with a commanding view of routes to open space oceanside bluffs and the lake; to San Bruno Mountain and the bay.

If you walk up to the top you see all the way to the Golden Gate, Marin Headlands, the ancient escarpment washed by rolling surf.

You can see too Lake Merced tucked away in a wrinkle of low marsh. It’s a natural lake, so preceded colonization and looks like silver in the fog.

This coyote is not scrawny, not lanky, not mottled. He’s got a nice coat, imperial, and looks lupine, like a full- grown wolf.

Coyote is late for nothin’.

I wonder about consciousness sometimes.

I try to imagine what he senses, the map so internalized, every smell heightened and every sound keen in a silence of total participation.

He knows more than we know.

It’s a quiet morning, very little human activity. I’d love to sit there on that hill too.

But the train is in five minutes so we leave the natural world behind.

Longing. For what?

There is a story about Daniel Boone when he was out in the wilderness alone for long periods of time- months to years- he’d hang out on a rock and it’s said from a great distance a wild sound like a howling could be heard and astonished hunters found it wasn’t the sound of coyote or wolf, that was Boone singing.

Just sayin’.

Or:

When hopeful biographers came to call for interviews in his old age, they were told to wait.

After a long time they’d look about and realize he’d left. Boone, wilderness scout, now almost 90 years old, in 1820, was making his way down the back path to escape.

Just sayin’.

I hear you, coyote. I see you.

I’m declaring September “Redwood Tree Appreciation Month.”

Did you know redwood trees are aware of your presence and your thoughts?

If you breathe, a redwood tree is, on some level, aware of it.

The redwood can handle it. It’s part of the fog and climate and spiders and critters of every moment.

Redwoods remember everything. And then immediately forget it. In an endless cycle, like the tides.

There is a full moon nigh. For a redwood, moonlight tickles.

Remember the fires? Some still raging. These bring back a lovely memory of a funny thing that happened 20 thousand years ago.

So redwoods are chuckling with the ravens.

Hilarious.

Don’t get too close to redwoods. They like everything just the way it is.

Did you know that a redwood tree actually can hug you? The awe you feel is the redwood’s ancient way of greeting.

My sister has a dawn redwood by her back fence. My sister calls her tree Dawn, in a familiar, fond way. Dawn is in the back garden, a few feet west of the garden spider’s web. My sister will not permit the spider to be disturbed, so tread carefully.

Dawn is from China, originally. That is, the dawn redwood differs significantly from our California Coast Redwood and Sequoia, and the dawn redwood predominates in China.

There’s even a dawn redwood back home in Ohio. I know: coincidence. It’s a young tree but already tall, commmanding a quiet street corner in Broadview Heights. My twin walks her yellow lab Echo around that block. The crisp air must smell of autumn; other leaves, but not those needles of the dawn redwood, are turning, changing color.

Redwood and fern represent the most conservative picture of what this vast continental environment once was. The trees remember. The deer look back at you, too.

Remember: if you don’t like this redwood news go out and make some of your own,
as Scoop Nisker used to say.