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.

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 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.

Curses. Every time I set a rule for myself, the heavens conspire to make me rationally and consciously decide to break it. So that thing I said about glow sticks…

After camping under the stars somewhere around Mt. Shasta (once covered with ice, but now bare rock), and moving up the spine of the I-5 corridor, I arrived in Eugene last night. The sun was still blazing hot upon this funky college town as the riff and the raff came to the  downtown mall area for the annual Eugene Celebration. Yes, there were glow sticks, but we went for the fire. My friend was spinning poi, great balls of fire that she twirled deftly on the ends of chain. She performed with Warning: Clowns Ahead, a ragamuffin group of fire-jugging, unicycle-riding, gravity-defying (well, most of the time), face-painted revelers. Children covered their mouths, gasping with delight, spotters caught wayward juggling torches as they veered towards the large crowd.

They did two shows and then we wandered through the melee. If New York City is a place where everyone is too cool to dance, Eugene is the exact opposite. A mobile disco ball was set up in one street intersection and one block down, Samba Ja — a twenty-odd piece marching band of sorts — filled another with their bass drums and multiple forms of percussion. Everyone was dancing, or at least bouncing, playing out a life of eternal childhood and silliness and fun, where self-consciousness is a forgotten concept and the body is built for movement and freedom.

San Francisco! Greg and I get chinese food at a place that Bill Clinton had take out – twice, they brag – and then climb up the hill to Bernal Hights Park. As we circle ’round the grassy knob, a falcon flashes across the sky. I grab Greg’s arm – friends of mine are getting used to this, maybe – look! The pointed wings, the fast movement. We stop to talk about the life stuff that friends with only a few hours try to squeeze in, at the top of the hill, where a chain link fence toped with a layer of barbed wire protects a cluster of antennae and a few scattered trees. A shadow catches my eye and I look up to see the kestrel fly to the fence not fifteen feet from us, bobbing its tail distinctively. Red tails ride thermals in the distance, the Golden Gate Bridge just emerging from some clouds beyond them. The sun is hot, and the air is cold, and my time in this city is limited. It’s time to head north, leaving summer and the south behind. Into the trees. Into the past, that has become the future.

Jersey has its shore. Here, in California, it’s the coast, and it’s rocky and wild, even in the most inhabited places. The rocks are monolithic boulders topped with a drizzle of bird guano like a sea sundae, cormorants as cherries. Pelicans move in groups aross grey skies with a movement neither clumsy nor graceful, but merely miraculous. Look out upon the water as waves crash in, the great breathing rhythm of an immortal earth, and see surfers and sea lions. The air is damp, the eucalyptus leaves falling from the trees as the west coast monarchs find their way to their wintering grounds. A friend has dove into the waters here and tells me of flying through underwater kelp forests with the sea lions. I am moving quickly, hardly in a place for more than a day or two on this trip, and I too feel like i am flying.

The angel, on the street where I stayed in Santa Fe. The poem, on the wall of the man I interviewed today here in Santa Cruz. He looked out of the window, his eyes focused on a point in time thirty years ago, as he recalled memories of falcons hunting and the impatience of young men eager to see the sleek form fill the sky once more. I looked up the poem when I got back to my friend Doug’s house, and we read it aloud, anew. Santa Fe, Santa Cruz, Saints abound….

The Stolen Child

by William Butler Yeats

Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats;
There we’ve hid our faery vats,
Full of berrys
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim gray sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scare could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

Away with us he’s going,
The solemn-eyed:
He’ll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than he can understand.

Here’s a rule to live by: avoid any event at which glow sticks are sold. My friend Matty, who hosted me in Santa Fe, and I were momentarily excited by the fact that the annual Zozobra event was happening while I was there. It seemed a lucky coincidence. A great mannequin had been erected in the center of town, and it would be burned, along with all the bad thoughts from the year, down to the ground that night. Until we started realizing that there would actually be a lot of people there. People. To quote Georgia O’Keeffe again, “I wish people were like trees and I think I could enjoy them.” Because if they were, then Zozobra would have been like being in a forest in downtown Santa Fe. Maybe it’s the fact that I live in New York City, but I find that when I leave, the last thing I want to do is surround myself with lots of people, no matter how empty their heads are of bad thoughts, or soon-to-be-excised bad thoughts.

“Aren’t there hot springs around here?’ I asked Matty. Next thing you knew, we were heading through the crowds, a flowing mass moving unidirectionally, glow sticks their guiding wands, as we traveled in the opposite direction, out of town to the hills and the Ten Thousand Waves Spa, where 20 bucks got us a good long soak in a hot tub under ten thousand stars. We leaned our heads back and watched the swath of the Milky Way, the glow of what we think was Jupiter, and shooting stars, one..two…three! Each streak of light would be enough of a taste to make me continue to stare up into the clear desert sky, waiting for the next one. The joy of celestial mechanics never ends.

The next day, I’m on the road again, crossing the blazing desert and heading to Tuba City, Arizona.