For the first time, I carried my binoculars while I ran. I carried them sidesaddle, like a woman’s purse with my right arm through the strap and the concave part of the binocs resting snuggly against the convex side of my ribs on the right. When I saw anything worth looking at, I just stopped, slid out my right arm, and pulled the binoculars up to my eyes. It’s a sequence of movements that I have repeated a thousand times, but never in the middle of a jog.
The first thing I saw was a western king bird perched on the bare end of a mesquite branch that was just beginning to leaf out (the mequite, not the king bird). I later saw a raven, flinching and buckling from a
n attack from above by a kingbird, perhaps by the same kingbird from the mesquite branch. I've witnessed this scenario many times before; each time the kingbird dive bombs him, the raven acts as if it has been shot, but then quickly recovers. I haven't yet seen a raven fall out of the sky nor have I seen any visible blood loss, so I figure that the kingbird is just another pesky annoyance that the raven has to put up with in his day-to-day travels.Scattered throughout the ground plane are native hedgehogs in full bloom with flowers the color of the inside of ripe prickly pear fruits. Surrounding all these is a three inch tall cover of Cryptantha and Plantago, all looking spritely and in full flower, obviously benefitting from the nearly one inch of rain we received this week and the four or five days of abnormally cool days that followed.
Bela followed her familiar pattern of keeping a hundred feet ahead of me, distracted more by invisible smells than by any visible movement. I generally walk in front of her and then whistle for her to catch up, cutting short whatever smell is distracting her. This time, it was a collection of colorless, tasteless molecules at the base of a what looked to me Iike a generic clump of snakeweed. She caught up to me at full gallup when I whistled and then she foraged ahead, looking for the next olfactory distraction. She is a pleasant and dependable hiking and running partner, never going too far ahead or lagging too far behind, and always ready to respond to a short whistle or a more insistent “let’s go!” when she’s pushing the boundaries of my comfort zone.
Today was clear with very little wind, a welcome change from the very windy last week with temperatures just perfect for a morning run with shorts and a tee shirt. As usual, I didn’t see another person on this little road and once again I inwardly reminded myself of the great unsung advantages of living in a small town on the edge my own personal mountain range. As long as a person is willing to hike during the work week, his luck w
ill hold in relative solitude with nothing but the familiar sound of distant cactus wrens, black-chinned sparrows, mourning doves, and the occasional whistle of the train as it passes through Globe.The banana yuccas are flowering too with drooping, ivory-colored flowers fully open on the lower part of the inflorescences with unopened flowers above, the unopened sepals streaked with stripes of deep, saturated reddish-brown ruunning up and down along the outside. I never noticed until today that the new flower buds are identical in shape to certain kinds of ripe chile peppers, albino-esque in color but undeniably similar to a long, slender jalepeno.
Some yucca flowers are edible though Peter Bigfoot once told me that after eating banana yucca flowers, he had an explosive bout of intestinal distress, something that he described quite visually as “carbonated poop.” The flowers are a soft contrast to the rigid leaves of the plant below; the leaves are as stiff and as potentially lethal as any plant out there. An errant parachute landing or mountain bike accident would likely result in a multiple impalement, requiring the assistance of at least two stout individuals to pry you out and a few units of blood to keep you alive.
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