Quotes from Craig Childs

It is as true as breath. It is as important as the words of children.

This is the yin and yang of the earth, an energetic feedback. What happens below relates directly to what is happening on the surface and in the atmosphere and vice versa. Tectonics does not end at the ground beneath your feet. It is a dynamic system from the earth's interior all the way into the sky and back.

Mountain lions are psychological animals, preying on the mind with secret eyes. They know that they still dominate, that they cannot be cornered without ripping their way out. They know that they are still the heart of firceness. Being pack animals ourselves, we humans have some alliance with other pack animals, like wolves or coyotes. When I see a free wolf, I feel as if we could sit down and talk, given that the details have been worked out. Not so with the cat. The cat speaks in symbols.

We guard our bodies until they are old and tasteless, when we could have fed ourselves to claw and fur, been literally reincarnated in the cells of a lion sleeping in the sun, the wall of muscle that is a bear crashing through a rotten log in search of ant eggs. Why not return again and again, glistening, gilded every time?

There seemed to be a pattern to the drips from each seep, a pattern I had heard before, wondering each time if there might be a sort of specific timing.... The sounds were predisposed, unaware of anything more important than their own syncopation.

They may not become extinct immediately, but being pushed out of decaying or destroyed habitats eventually takes its toll. The concept is known as extinction debt, the delay between the stress on species and the final dwindling of the last survivors until the organisms disappear and are never seen again.

The moon is the better storyteller for this event. Our ancient craters are smoothed over by erosion and tectonic motion. With no erosion, no wind, and no liquid water on the moon, craters can remain perfectly visible for billions of years, an orbiting catalog of impacts.

I've often thought that a planet without water would be a dull, sad place. Most, if not all, water on this planet came from countless small comets thumping against the atmosphere (which continues at about ten thousand comets or pieces of comets per day, enough to add a twenty-five-foot depth of water across the entire globe every half a million years). That it comes from space suggests why it is so peculiar and fascinating here on earth. It is a substance from far beyond our reach.

One small cloud had passed while we were out walking earlier in the day. It had dragged a quarter acre of shade across the desert, and we had set off chasing it, sprinting to catch up so we could get under its shade. Before we got there, the cloud lifted its skirt and sailed off, evaporating into nothing. We were left empty-handed, my oiled hat brim wilted in the sun.

The sound of slapping water, the deep swallows made only by large masses of liquid, was almost too much to bear. I stood at the edge of the waterpocket, where much of the desert dropped off below, showing pockets of even greater size, and lifted my arms straight into the sky. Beads came down my body. This was abundance.

DNA reconstruction from prehistoric C. familiaris remains in America indicates that the animals derived from a common Asian population. They were not domesticated from American wolves. They came with the people.

Sidewinder tracks lifted off the dunes and flew around us.

Getting a fly around in here is difficult. Every metaphor of frustration can be held taut on a line caught twenty feet up in an oak tree.

A wind started up. It began scouring our cheeks, and we lifted hands, blocking our faces from a gauze of blowing sand. So much wind came that it was hard to breathe without covering our noses and mouths. We stood and shouldered our packs to keep going. Sidewinder tracks lifted off the dunes and flew around us.

Dark, closed places like this make me uneasy. It is not the wild beasts or the idea of a lunatic with an ax. It is not facing my dreaded interior self. It is the informality, the thoughtlessness, the brooding wisdom, the endlessness, the closure of darkness. More than that, it is the thing in darkness I cannot name.