give me moonlight when I’m leaving

Hawks here, hawks there, hawks everywhere. Accipeters, Buteos. Alive and dead. 2025 has been a year of hawk sightings for me. I tried to remember what my first bird sighting of 2025 was and I couldn’t remember, which means it was nothing memorable. A Scrubjay, a Junco. I welcomed the new year at my desk in my home office working 36 hours straight, and those are the usual sightings from my home office.

These days there’s always a red-shouldered hawk perched wherever I go. The yard, my office by the river, the road I’m driving on. I’m listening. Because right now I really need all the help I can get leaving a bad situation finally forever.

Give me moonlight when I’m leaving

You were my friend, and I was the same
Riding that hope was like catching some train
Now, I just walk, well, I don’t mind the rain
Singing so much softer than I did back then

“I’m ready to dream a different dream,” I texted in the middle of the night before disappearing for the last time.

‘Cause I’ve been driving like a trucker, I’ve been wearin’ through the gears
I’ve been training like a soldier, I’ve been burnin’ through this sorrow
And the only talkin’ lately is that background radio

I sit for hours with the hawks, until they get hungry and swoop down on their prey and I thank them for keeping an eye on me and I let their medicine wash over me.

Give me darkness when I’m dreaming, give me moonlight when I’m leaving
Give me mustang horse and muscle, I won’t be going gentle
Give me slant-eye looks when I’m lying, give me fingers when I’m crying
And I ain’t out there to cheat you, see, I killed that damn coyote in me.

~Lyrics from 3 A.M by G.A.I

we’ve ridden beyond where we could safely touch down

I told you I needed you more and you wouldn’t even turn around.

The hot cowboy sees me coming to the grocery store doors and moves over for me, “after you.”

He’s been hard at work too, cowboy boots covered in mud and a twelve-pack. “Thank you.” I say smiling.

He’s done for me more in five seconds, than my lover of a thousand years has done for me in a thousand. For the hundredth time that week, I am reminded of my friend The Night’s words to me recently, “Beck, you gotta get rid of old dreams to make room for new ones.” I know he’s right.

And we’ve ridden beyond where we could safely touch down
And we’re out in the void, past where we could’ve had turned around
I tried my feet on the floor, tried to beat on the door
But it didn’t even make a sound.

I’ve had a good couple of weeks to sort out my sadness and accept my fate.

It’s easy to go, babe
It’s just an easy yes or no, babe
It’s just an easy way to throw away what we have
I don’t need a letter
I don’t need anybody better
I don’t need anybody ever, I never have

At least on this night, I’ll dream of the cowboy instead. I’m so tired of the same heartache again and again, brought on by the same misleading dream, which had no intention of ever manifesting itself, happy in the safety of its shadows.

But I stand in the yard and watch the evening come down
And I shuffle the cards when all the idiots come around
Hey, I told you before, I needed you more
But you didn’t even turn around
Got my heart open wide
But the city been shut down

It’s just like the rodeo cowboy used to say to me in his infinite cowboy wisdom, “BB, it ain’t what it ain’t.”

~Lyrics: Phosphorescent ‘Revelator’

Why We Will Always Quote Joan Didion When LA Is On Fire

The morning the fires started, a Turkey Vulture carrying a big rat in its beak flew right by me almost hitting me. The rat was so heavy in the vulture’s mouth, the vulture was having trouble keeping altitude and that’s when it almost collided with me. It flew a little further past me and dropped the rat into the Sacramento River with a silent splash. I didn’t understand what had just happened. Turkey Vultures are scavengers, not hunters. Very, very, very rarely will they take an animal alive but then why drop it in the river? Maybe the vulture decided it was too heavy and not worth its trouble? Why take it at all, there’s plenty of roadkill and carrion here. Nothing about that moment made sense. I had just witnessed a random act of nature on that poor rat.

As that day went on, the news started coming in. The flames were spreading fast and the Getty Villa was in the line of fire. I texted my firefighter friend who was on his way to the fires, “Please save the Getty Villa!”

From that moment on, I was a mess. Fires make me crazy. And to see so much loss and destruction to the place and people I still consider home, was devastating. Of course I remembered Joan Didion’s “The Santa Ana” at that moment. What Angeleno, native or transplant, who has ever read Joan Didion does not think of her when the winds pick up. Or of Raymond Chandler. But I didn’t let myself revisit the essay. I didn’t think I needed it to, I have read it a hundred times, it’s etched in my subconscious like the Santa Ana winds are.

The days progressed and the destruction continued, I was no better. All I wanted to do was doom scroll and cry while I texted back an forth will all my friends and neighbors in LA. LA is the only place I have friends and family left. My friend, The Hurricane, told me the birds were acting real weird the day before the fires.

“They got real quiet.” She said.

Birds always know. I thought of that quote in Patti Smit’s book “M Train”:

” …like the birds of Iraq before shock and awe in the first day of spring. It was said that the sparrows and songbirds stopped singing, their silence heralding the dropping of bombs.”

Birds know.

Looking for the quote in Patti Smith’s book I remembered she even talks about the LA weather in a chapter called, “Tempest Air Demons.” Any writer who has ever lived in LA writes about the winds. I found that reading the “M Train” chapter made me feel at peace like I hadn’t felt since the fires started. So I found myself picking up “The Santa Ana” for the nteenth time in my life. And perhaps every other time in my life I had gone to it was to feel some sort of resignation about what the weather was doing, I can’t be sure. As I reread it, I was able to release some of the pain and anguish I had been carrying around all week. “The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself.” I also reread Nathanael West, Raymond Chandler, Octavia Butler. Having the luxury of not having had my home burn down to the ground, I was able to let go. Once again, literature had helped me process, grieve and heal. I even regretted not revisiting these writings earlier in the week for fear of being cliché.

Then a Los Angeles Times column piece titled, “Column: Literary types see L.A. as apocalypse hiding under shallowness and excess. Don’t let them define us — especially now” was published. It is criticizing us for always quoting the same quotes whenever a fire breaks out in LA because of the winds:

“For decades, I’ve seen journalists and other folks share those four works and more every time a fire starts or it’s Santa Ana season — “Gathering heat from the distant desert, enraged it invades the city, creating the season of heat and fire” (John Rechy), “Hills are filled with fire” (Jim Morrison in the Doors classic “L.A. Woman”). And then there’s “Beverly Hills 90210” — eh, you can go find the infamous Santa Anas episode on YouTube.”

Then he goes on to say about Didion and others:

“I don’t tire of reading them, because they’re well-crafted thoughts that few writers can ever hope to top. This time around, though, so many folks have posted the same quotes to the point that the brilliant is becoming banal.

In the face of so much suffering, why do so many regurgitate the regurgitated?”

‘He doesn’t get it one bit’, I thought. I like the writer, read his column pieces all the time, but he didn’t get it this time.

In the face of so much suffering, to regurgitate the regurgitated is prayer.

Comfort. Normalcy. Familiarity. Even resignation when reminded that LA is a city of fire after all. It has always been. The city wasn’t singled out in an out-of-character, random act of nature–like the live rat being taken by the turkey vulture. Apocalyptic weather and fires are something we know and understand living in LA, even playing into its mystique we love so much. Los Angeles, the city, demands to be a character of our LA stories. As Wildfires of another kind are the protagonist of all my stories here now that I live in rural Northern California in the ashes of the Carr Fire, having left LA during the pandemic.

Mr. Arellanos recognizes the need to read and re read these quotes when he quotes English Professor Liza Alvarez:

“She doesn’t mind seeing the canonical quotes passed around every time Santa Anas and fires flare up, “because I’m a Californian,” she joked. “There’s a comfort in sharing what we know. You want to be a part of a moment. Fire is an old story. Fire in California is a very old story.’”

The column finishes by suggesting we adopt Octavia Butler’s quote instead if we are going to adopt any:

“’In order to rise From its own ashes,” she wrote in the sentence I’m seeing bandied about the most, “A phoenix First Must Burn.”

With all respect to Didion, Davis and the other literary legends who have written about our devil winds and fires, that’s the quote Southern Californians should take to heart right now.”

And we will, we will take that quote from “Parable of the Sower” to heart, and like a phoenix LA will rise from its own ashes. But not yet, right now we are grieving, and healing and quoting those canonical phrases we know, in prayer.

land of the sky so blue

You’re in the kitchen when the dogs start barking at the front door. You know no one is here, or the cameras in the front of the property, the driveway or the front door would have gone off. But you trust your dogs so you go look out the window from the guest bedroom. You see nothing, but you get the feeling something just happened. Then you spot it in a far away branch of that interior oak PG&E is going to fell because it’s too close to the power line. A hawk.

You don’t know when or how you got so good at spotting hawks from hundreds of feet away.

Easy momma, you can close your eyes,

it’s a good thing now and the sun’s gonna rise real soon

It’s not very close and he’s facing the other way and he seems wet and ruffled from days of rain so you can’t really tell what kind of hawk it is. He must have flown low, scaring all the birds and your dogs. You get your binoculars and you case the hawk, which by now you have decided is a Cooper’s Hawk. You don’t have much to go by but size, side-profile and the silhouette of a longish tail. The tail is what you’re going on. That longer tail of accipiter hawks vs Buteo hawks. But you still can’t be sure so you want to see it in flight. Your dog wants your attention about something and you look down to tell him to hold on a sec. When you look up, the hawk is gone. That’s all it took. One second of distraction to miss it all. You look at the time and you’ve spent almost an hour still and silent watching the hawk with hopes of being able to identify it.

You don’t know when or how it became so easy to sit still for so long looking at a bird perched on a dead oak branch.

Easy does it, we can compromise

in land of the sky so blue

You and the dogs don’t want to waste the one beautiful clear day you have so you go outside to inspect the property for fallen trees, clogged gutters to the French drain and other possible mishaps. Everyone is feeling bad for you because you’re spending the holidays alone, but you don’t feel one bit bad or lonely. But how do you convince others that what they fear the most, is what you most enjoy. Solitude.

You don’t know when it became more than enough with the land and its birds and your pets.

In my mind she’s running circles round a life she used to call her very own

Easy does it, we can just slow down in the land of the sky so blue

Land of the sky so blue

So blue

~Lyrics from “Easy Does It” by Briscoe

In that tiny kinda scary house by the woods, by the woods, by the woods…

She never let on how insane it was

in that tiny kinda scary house

by the woods, by the woods, by the woods, by the woods.

You don’t need a spaceship

they don’t know you’ve already lived

on the other side of the galaxy. ~T.Amos

I have gotten no more real interest on my house after that terrible offer I declined. Someone saw it yesterday and loved it. “But she’s scared.” my agent said.

“Scared of fires?” I asked.

“Yes. Her house burned down in the Carr Fire.”

I know everyone loves my house but the fear of fires is a legitimate concern. As I tossed and turned last night stressing over everything going on with me, I thought, ‘maybe the Park Fire is too recent.’

The Park Fire was finally 100% contained on Friday after three months and 329K acres and hundreds of homes burned. Maybe after people put some distance between them and the Park Fire, my house may get a good offer. Or maybe I just stay and send my pets to my parents’ for the next fire season. I don’t know. But I can’t spend anymore time thinking about it. And I mean, what kind of narrative would I hold on to if it wasn’t the one of living alone in the woods. The one of living in a subdivision in Redding isn’t a very exciting narrative at all.

This morning over coffee, I recorded 15 different bird species. And a first in the yard, I had a red-breasted sapsucker! It really is a treat to have a front seat to all this nature. We even had a snake incident last week. Fortunately, it was only a gopher snake. But I understand why someone would be scared to live here, it has recovered so fast from the Carr Fire. I didn’t think we’d have anything that could burn for another 10 years, yet merely six years later, here we are, and all the pines are coming back all over the hills, and at 4 feet tall, it looks like a giant Christmas tree farm because they are all growing that perfect and uniform.

I will keep the house on the market and stop thinking about it, I have too much birding and work stuff going on. I am about to make a three year commitment in the birding world. More to come on that.

Screenshot

The Lower Fire

Honey, tell me how your love runs true

and I can always count on you

to be there when the bullets fly

I’d run across the river just to hold you tonight

You had eleven minutes to grab what’s most important in your life and get the fuck out, and as you hung out in the In N Out parking lot trying to figure out where you and your animals should spend the night, a jeep pulled up next to you with the stereo blaring. You were so confused. The song which you had been playing on repeat for days, maybe weeks was coming from the radio in the Jeep. You looked at the driver and passengers, young cowboys not more than 22, and why where they listening to this song, it’s from 2017, and now? When this song has meant everything to you?

The Jeep drove away and you were still confused as to whether that had really happened. You took it as a sign that everything would be alright.

You spent the night at a co-worker’s who took you and your animals in, you tossed and turned wondering the fate of your house. By morning evacuation orders had been lifted and the wind had taken the fire away from your house. You were then convinced the song had been a prayer, sending the wind northeast, exactly away from your house.

Well, my hart is sweating bullets

From the circles, it has raced

Like a little feathered Indian

Calling out the clouds for rain

A casual match in a very dry field

My mother hadn’t forgotten. So when I showed up with my animals in the middle of the night, having driven ten hours to get away from the fire, she didn’t question it. She said, “fire has always been your biggest fear.”

And it’s not just that one thing which makes a fire burn in such a catastrophic way, just how it wasn’t just that one thing which sent me running. It’s an accumulation of circumstances, and at that moment, I, too, was that dry terrain with high winds and low humidity through land which hadn’t burned in centuries, just waiting for one asshole to burn it all to hell. In my case, I am always that asshole.

But all things eventually shift and come to an end, even historic fires which can’t be controlled. And the ashes will make for fertilizer and everything will one day come back. So after 7 days and 6 nights, I drove back home towards the fire which still seems unending. I drove through an evacuated Lassen National Park with smoke filling my lungs even with all the windows closed, the sun, a blinding red dot in the sky amidst the pines still standing. While I was gone, the seeds from my bird feeder grew two big sunflowers as if to say, ‘we’ve been waiting for you.’

I got home, unpacked and was back to fine. The dogs were back to chasing quail and the cat to chasing frogs.

And who by fire

Just last week, I was on the 6:30 news interviewed on what the effects of wildfire smoke are on birds in Northern California, then the Park Fire broke and I’m a hot mess. Watching everyone around me get evacuated, losing their homes is too much to bare. To see those trees I’ve birded and owled at go up in flames breaks my heart to no end. And I haven’t even began to unpack what I’m feeling for my ex-lover, who is most likely at the fire. I can’t allow myself to think about him. Maybe I’m feeling my house’s pain of when it burned to the ground six years ago exactly in the Carr Fire, or maybe I can’t stop crying because I know what the Park Fire means for me: I’m going to have to move. And who by fire is going to buy a house in Fire Country after this, and who by water will be able to afford the insurance in Fire Country after this. I can’t. And because I’m a hot mess and I can’t stop crying and I’ve had a headache for three days from the smoke, I’m leaving for some days. I’m going to pack the car up, load up my animals and head to Vegas with my family.

I’m sad that I won’t be here for my birds, but right now I need to get right and I cannot be here right now. Maybe then will I be able to decide what to do with my life next. The Park Fire has changed everything.

Horse Intervention

Maybe it was the horses, or the California race tracks, the passion for the sport and maybe even the young love. But something about this 20-year old, cheesy series I stumbled upon in the middle of a sleepless night, has me missing my old life like nothing has. I guess I never realized how many memories I have of going to the track. And for years, Del Mar was a summer tradition. Back then I had friends, I had a life. And now this show has made me wonder how much longer I can stay here. His name was Wildfire no less. When I finished the show with its long 4 seasons, I couldn’t get out of bed for an entire day and replayed it all over again. I wanted the thrill of the track and the young love all over again. I felt so off, so awful, so alone. I wanted to cry, but couldn’t and the only thing which brought me calm was watching the birds in the front yard. There were families of quail with their little ones. A family of Goldfinches and several Western Bluebirds. The poor birds were panting with their beaks open. The three-digit heat won’t stop. And then at the bird bath I saw them!! The two Western Bluebird fledglings which were born in one of the nesting boxes. The only two which survived out of 4 nesting attempts and 20 eggs. It was good to see they were alive and had stuck around and were cooling off in the water I put out for the birds everyday. ‘Where did I go so wrong’ I wondered. Then I thought of Isabel Archer and perhaps that book is to blame for the way I turned out. Whether it was or it wasn’t, it’s too late now, I ain’t about to go straight.

Sure, Horse is my spirit animal, but I never thought in a million years that it would be the memory of the horse races which would make me question just what the hell I’m doing here. In my Shamanistic Journeys it is Horse who carries me on his back out of bad situations. I can feel him galloping under me as he takes me away. Maybe this Horse intervention is no different than the ones I’ve had in the other realms. Except here, it is thoroughbreds we’re talking about.