A Safe Harbor
Back to the land, back to the sea
A naturalist cavorts with seals
The tide is slack, the water so still it seems it might shatter. Seals float, suspended, in the shallows, two dozen pairs of dark eyes looking towards land. I feel a kinship with these animals, a relationship, or I want one, anyway. Their gaze is towards me. Do they recognize me, from far back in time, as one with whom they share history? Do they consider me at all?
Shorebirds amble among the rocks — here a fling of dunlins, there a pair of oystercatchers, red beaks and eyes bright among the intertidal murk. Cormorants and gulls roost offshore, on little Goose Island. There are more seals there, too, indistinct lumps on the sandy shore. Ducks and geese float by on the water, which is now showing the barest of ripples.
Soon enough, the tide flows faster, and there are eddies and waves and chop. The sounds of surf mingle with the bellowing of sea lions from distant outcroppings, a sound like the …
On Falconry
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. reveals life-long love affair with birds of prey
Hunts from the sky, partners with predators
Atavistic hobby fuels Dem. Presidential run
Bobby Kennedy Jr. is the first environmental activist with a legitimate shot at winning a major-party nomination for President. He has made preserving and cleaning up the environment his life’s work, rescuing the Hudson River from polluters and turning it into the centerpiece of the country’s healthiest watershed and winning billions of dollars in fines from corporate polluters in hundreds of lawsuits that have served as a powerful counterweight to avarice and greed.
Kennedy’s emergence this summer as a dark-horse challenger to Biden only surprised people who make a habit of not paying attention. To them, Kennedy was a marginal weirdo and probably a nut, an aging Prince Hal who had disqualified himself from serious politics by tilting at too many windmills to count. Most recently, Kennedy had made a name for himself as an “anti-vaxxer,” a designation that signifies a worrying inclination to question large …
Son of Joshua Tree
Coachella Babies Overrun Desert Paradise
Airbnb Schemers Displace Weirdos and Freaks
Mysterious Energies Remain
About an hour before the sun starts to abandon this wild expanse of the high desert, the owner of the six-acre homestead that I’m renting for the weekend issues a dire warning:
“Be careful of the energy vortexes around here. They reflect back at you,” he says, picking up a shard of broken glass off the dirt road. For the purposes of this story, let’s call him Ez, a recent emigre from Venice Beach, a wiry bundle of neuroses and long black corkscrew hair in his mid-40s. “Everything is exaggerated here. If you dwell in negativity, the spirals will be made much worse.”
A couple of years ago, when everyone was losing their minds, Ez forfeited a career in festival logistics and luxury brand marketing to move his wife and young son onto this cactus and creosote-covered tract of the Mojave. Remote tech work was plentiful, so he took a job managing an Uber-like network of manufacturers who made rocket parts …
