Creatures

My childhood was a happy one, in which I was encouraged to look with great scrutiny at the living things surrounding me, great and small. One of my favorite photo series (taken by my mom, who kept a camera at the ready on the kitchen table for 15 years) is 4-year-old me in overalls, on a picnic table with green tempera paint and a miserable lizard. I remember dip-netting bullfrogs, making June bug "kites" with dental floss, squeezing Bess beetles just enough to hear them squeak, and an unfortunate incident with a brilliant green ground beetle--the kind that sprays hot acid out its butt as a defense mechanism. *I* was the miserable creature that time!

I've been reading E. O. Wilson's Naturalist, in which he explains how he became the appreciator of ecology that he is. Every time I see a new ant, I think of him, because he was an ant guy.

 

Red harvester ants on one of our favorite trails.

While I haven't set up a light sheet for moths yet--it's just now getting warm enough at night for there to be anything at the porch light--I've been keeping my eyes peeled for beetles and crawling things. We get a kick out of the Eleodes genus of darkling beetles, which we see frequently along hiking paths and the driveway. People around here call them stink bugs, because their defense mechanism is to stand on their heads and squirt a peroxide-based defense spray from their rears. It's pretty funny. Nature is pretty funny...except when it's not.

Western Diamondback, the king of the desert, and I'm not disputing the title.

After a delightful day in the Sonoran desert, where I was primarily looking out for big dangerous things--mountain lions, people--this fella brought me down to earth in a split second with an impressive show of hissing and rattling. You bet I hadn't seen it until it did, which I took as a welcome reminder to not be so lax about my surroundings.

So there it is, the first of a no-particular-order show-and-tell of my big zoo here! While I say that my childhood was happy, really it is happy, because I'm still in it. Go do something childlike today!

Some side notes about Flagstaff...

Win a game of trivia with these new and exciting tidbits about our new town!

--Americana! Historic Route 66 runs through the middle of town.Which means cute little cafes, classic cars, and toooo many people using "get your kicks" as a tagline (it's in your head now...sorry.)

--Science! The Lowell Observatory (which we promptly joined, 'cause the cosmos is cool), home to The Discovery Channel Telescope, is where Pluto was identified. They definitely sell t-shirts that say "When I was your age, Pluto was a planet" in the gift shop. AND Flagstaff was named the first International Dark-Sky City after developing codes to minimize light, maximizing awesome night sky views.

--More Science! There's a string of volcanos in our backyard. Cool!

Robinson Crater, one of the lesser volcanos in the San Francisco range.

--Entertainment! The scene in Forrest Gump where he steps in dog crap and coins the phrase "shit happens?" Filmed in Flagstaff.

--Tradition! On New Year's Eve, kiss your sweetie and make a wish as the Weatherford Hotel drops a huge metal pinecone to ring in the new year.


In conclusion, now you have (some?) power--use it wisely.

At laaaaaaaast, our bloooog has come aloooong

So we're out here! It's great. Let me get you caught up.

After a couple years of deciding what the Next Big Thing would be, our mutual wanderlust (and the sense that we're not getting any younger, and *might* be getting older) was tugging us toward a more mobile life. We're in a great situation--Bryan can work from anywhere there's internet access, and being an RN means that there are jobs all over the place! Temporary ones! I didn't even have to commit for long! Knowing we wanted to be somewhere totally different, B loving the southwest as he does, and me unleashing my pioneer spirit, we set our sights on the four corners area and narrowed our search to Arizona.

So on March 9, we stuffed the truck with guitars and sleeping bags, a few books, and a dizzying array of electronics, and pulled the Wildwood away from our cozy home in Asheville. We were Flagstaff bound! A whirlwind drive later, with a long pit stop for some much-needed RV maintenance in Knoxville, we were 1,700 miles from home, and I was flipping out over every new bird, tree, and sunset view. On the way through Oklahoma, I saw great-tailed grackles (which sound as much like birds of the apocalypse as anything could--their calls are electronic, digital, like someone took a robot's inner workings and stuffed them into a sleek, iridescent-black bird.) We drove through vast fields of wind turbines in the plains of Texas, where I also saw my first greater roadrunners. At our KOA stop in Holbrook, AZ, the calls of white-winged doves woke us up in the morning, and the last thrilling streaks of western sunsets put us to bed at night. We became exposed to traditions of the southwest--including Navajo tacos and blue corn enchiladas at the kachina-muraled roadside Kiva Cafe in Milan, NM (with red or green chile? The question of the century out here.) An exhilarating, suddenly-cold thunderstorm in the Petrified Forest's blue mesa badlands gave me the first notion of how drastically the weather changes out here. I would need to change my expectations after the soft green Smokies and WNC's temperate and forgiving climate.

At the end of our journey, we landed in a new nest--a sweet little 400-square-foot garage apartment in Flagstaff, smack dab in the middle of a REAL LIVE PRAIRIE DOG TOWN. Legit. 

Hey look, a Gunnison's prairie dog!