The odometer read 10,859.1 miles when I turned onto the cobblestones that mark the beginning of my street in Brooklyn. If I ignore the pile of reporter’s notebooks, the infinite hours of audio recordings that need to be transcribed, and the stack of books I’ve amassed in this two-month trip, the things that I’ve collected could fit in my hand. They rode with me in the little carpeted nook next to the gear shift. I started with a soapstone carving of Ganesh, a token of the gods I have carried with me for longer than I can remember. He’s led me along the ribbons of highway in safety; maybe it was his presence that kept me from sideswiping that guy in my blind spot in California, and being sideswiped by the lady whose blind spot I was in in Montana. The elephant god who, along with audio books, Radio Lab, This American Life and gallons of caffeinated beverages, kept me alert and mostly at the speed limit.

There is an acorn, small and dry enough that it rattles when you shake it, that Jim Weaver stopped his truck and got out to pluck from the dwarf desert oak plant. He waded through the waist-high grass to get it, handing it to me as he told me of the Indians that once roamed this New Mexico plateau, when a bumper crop of the acorns would “beat the hide off your shins,” the plants were so thick with them. “They say,” he told me looking across the endless stretch of flat land over the steering wheel of his truck, “that Bonnie and Clyde hid out here.” Burrowing owls stood like sentries among the sand sage as we bumped along in the ruts past them.

There is a shiny copper bullet that has been shot through ballistics gel, causing its tip to flare into an O’Keeffe-like flower, four-petaled and deeply grooved. Peter Jenny of the Peregrine Fund handed it to me as I sat with him and Tom Cade at the Fund’s World Center of Birds of Prey in Boise. It’s weight is solid and in it lies the hope that condors can fly free again in the places where men now hunt with lead ammunition, mushy and toxic and most unflower-like in its firing.

More copper. A penny, year 2005, found face up on the threshold of a Super 8 motel in Salt Lake City like some lucky charm telling me all was right with the world despite word of an economic collapse in some far-off place with tall buildings. In two months, I only needed or wanted to stay in a hotel less than seven days. I camped when I could, in my brother’s backyard, in the shadow of Mt. Shasta, overlooking the canyon of the Colorado River. To everyone who put a pillow under my head, fed me and let me use their washing machines and bathtubs, I thank you. The people who had to smell me after I visited you thank you also. The generosity was as boundless and welcome as the western skies I traveled under.

I took a bit of the earth with me. A rock from a dried up tributary that I ventured into with a friend as we climbed down to the edge of the Colorado River, wide and determined as it headed toward the Grand Canyon. I hold the image in my mind of our two shadows contoured to the red desert rock, two forms instead of one. We passed a couple returning, leaning heavily on their walking sticks as the shadows grew longer, who warned us that it was tough going ahead. We scrambled onward into the fading light, confirming our mutual belief that the idea of waiting until you retire, until age has leached the motion from your limbs, to see all the magnificent, magical and nearly inaccessible places in this world is a waste indeed. Every person I have interviewed, every friend I have visited with on this trip, seemed to me to hold this belief like some core guiding light.

Add a small bough of cedar to the dashboard.

Add a sprig of sage, pungent and hopeful.

Then there is the invisible, collected along the journey as well, the reason for the road, the stories of the people I had planned for months to see, and those who were an unexpected surprise. Their words filled in the blanks in my mind, their faces took shape in my memory, the way they held themselves, their reserve or openness when faced with my notebook and recorder and onslaught of questions. We talked of subspecies variation within Falco peregrinus, about migration and movement and breeding and believing, but we also talked about the books they read as boys that led them to go out and trap their first red-tailed hawk. The impact of a Disney movie or a National Geographic article. Scientists,  biologists, zoologists, geneticists, toxicologists, falconers, all people with questions that drive them forward in inquisition. They seek answers, but I think that more than that, they seek the next question. They make statements knowing they can shift. That it’s all a work-in-progress.

And intertwined in the travels were friends and family, precious and scattered across the continent, and the joy and despair in learning about the latest chapters in their lives. Of lives that are just beginning and others that are reaching their end.

I am now the keeper of these tales, and all I can do is try to pass them along, to share them with those who care to listen. In the stories we remain. In the stories life persists.

summer falls

I drove into autumn, leaving the warmth of Texas behind, seeing Arkansas for the first time, traversing the breadth of Tennessee and arriving in Roanoke, Virginia with the trees ablaze.

Columbia River gorge

A pang went through me as the sign hurtled by , stabbed into the roadside: Continental Divide. I was heading east, after coursing through the interstate veins of the western United States for more than a month. I’d traveled up the I-5 corridor and then veered in, passing from one flank to the next along the Columbia River gorge as I hummed Woody Guthrie all the way into Missoula. Roll on, Columbia, roll on… It was raptor country. Chris and Julie (along with a couple small kids and more than a few animals), were kind enough to put me up and put up with my comings-and-goings as I attended the Raptor Research Foundation annual conference, dedicated to John Craighead, of the Craighead brothers who forged a life and a name as naturalists of the highest order, writing about and studying everything from falconry to grizzlies to river ecosystems to widlflowers.

One evening’s program of the raptor conference was a showing of Life with an Indian Prince, and I walked through the broad quiet streets of Missoula to get to the theater. John Craighead was there. He is 92, his brother Frank now dead. He will go also, sooner – most likely – than the other 150 of us gathered in the Missoula Children’s Theater on Broadway to watch the film the Craighead brothers made in 1940-41.

K. S. Dharmakumarsinjhi, an Indian prince known to them as Bapu who had a great love for birds of prey, had read about the Craighead’s falconry and written to them, a letter that must have taken weeks for them to receive. The correspondence continued, the young men both inviting the other to come visit, until finally, surprisingly, the prince showed up in America. The Craighead brothers showed them life of a young man in America. There is mention of roller coasters and milkshakes and the mysteries of co-ed college dormitories. But also hunting and fishing and the sport – or art – that had brought them together, falconry.

In 1940, the Craigheads bordered a steamer in San Francisco and set sail for India to return the visit. The film we watched is the virtually uncut footage from the trip. The three men are in their prime, strapping sexy outdoor men enjoying adventure and the privileged life of a prince, although that entitlement would come to an end seven years later as India gained its independence from Brits and Indian royalty alike.

I watch the images pass in front of me, wrestle with the incongruity of Indian custom — a stork is left in peace as the raptors are flown on their hunt, while later a massive Asiatic lion is gunned down. The royal shot was a poor one, but two staff quickly made up for the miss and then emphatically patted him on the back in congratulations. The narrator informed us that there were only 200 of these lions left.

I left the theater as people gathered around John, small and leaning over at the table they’ve set up for him, deaf to the actions around him despite the large hearing aid. They come to have their books signed, their photos taken, capturing this person who has done so much for the natural world, often amidst controversy, through a combination of passion and power. If I had more time I would write more about the magic of getting older, of the unfolding of a life and then the return to something slower and more dreamlike, where the memories of our lives play out in an untold drama within our heads. But right now, the sun is setting and I seem to be running out of time. Somehow, that seems appropriate.

John Craighead

Katie & Molly wielding weapons of the artist

Don’t even try to figure out where I am by this blog, since I seem to be at least a week behind, but just pretend I’m still in Portland. I’ve just had a long leisurely breakfast at one of Portland’s hip little restaurants with some girlfriends – beautiful women I admire and am proud to know – and we were wandering aimlessly down NE Alberta in hopes of delaying our departure from one another. At the corner of 17th, we’re assaulted by a blast of color. Two artists were setting up tarps and paints to do some touch-up on a huge detailed mural designed by Robin Corbo that was on the wall of the Community Cycling building. Apparently, a car had driven into the wall…ooops…and the two women were going to repair the damage.

It was cool but sunny that morning, but then again, when I returned to Portland the next afternoon – after going to a wedding that included dancing, food and fire in the woods near Alsea in the Coast Range – this is what I returned to. Oh yeah, I remember this, the deluge, the reason for all the green, the arrival, around this time of year, of…The Rains. I love these rains when nestled inside on the couch with a cat and cup of tea. Not so fun on the highway, when youre creeping along at 35 mph, squinting thorugh the windshield. But of course, there was also a rainbow, and for one fleeting moment, all was right in the world.

Waldo Lake, Oregon

Waldo Lake is east of Eugene, Oregon, out Highway 58, past the dammed up waters of Dexter Reservoir, beyond the forlorn former logging town of Oakridge. We are celebrating Mary’s birthday, a dozen of us moving across the still waters in a flotilla of canoes and kayaks, paddling across the surface where we can look down fifty feet and see the clear shape of rocks and the ripples in the sand as though they were an arm’s length away. The waters are the color of cobalt, of the disappearing glaciers, of Mexican blown glass, absorbing the hue of the half-dome of sky above. The waters are deep and pure, some of the purest in the world. Ultraoligotrophic is the word that scientists use to describe this type of water that borders on sterile, unable to support much life because of its lack of organic material. A bit of plant life clings to the rocks, but aside from that there are only trout that are stocked every other year and a few gulls, one lone grebe floating in the a life-size Zen painting we have stepped into, through.

We stop along one bank on the far side of the lake to take our second swim of the day in the ice cold waters that make us yelp into the silence. Along the shore, a swath of forest burned more than a decade ago at first appears as a cluster of gray-washed trunks of dead trees. But I walk up into the trees to pee, going farther than i need to just to soak in the solitary silence, and up close, the land is bursting back into being. Green plants reach up from the black coal remains and life begins again.

The water I can see through the dead trees is beautiful, achingly beautiful, but it is also in some way empty. Life depends on an organic mess to survive, on fire and muck to create the breeding ground for resurrection.