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| Wild Boar. Barcelona Street |
Animal Dreams
This morning the radio came on while I was still half asleep, so that I dreamed the news: a mountain lion was walking on Channel Street, just a few yards from my boat, tied up next to the Fourth Street bridge. But I didn't live on my boat any more. What could be happening?
Locked down for months, cities like San Francisco are welcoming animals. Or, if not welcomed, the animals, at least, are probing, sometimes sauntering down empty streets.
I half dreamed the coyotes that made a den under the massive fig that grew in the orange grove around the house at the foot of the mountains where I grew up. They kept to themselves under there, especially when the pups were small, but sometimes the mother or the father would prance up the long driveway, have a look at the big white house, turn around and go back to the fig. Coyotes have long been sighted in San Francisco, but they now appear with displays of ownership. They may stretch along the Embarcadero with the bridge looming like a virtual Zoom background. Or they are right in North Beach, among the Italian cafes and Larry Ferlinghetti's City Lights. Maybe they cross the Golden Gate at night.
Monkeys. Near Bangkok
Sea Lion. Mar de Plata Street. Argentina
Silk Deer. Nara, Japan
How thin the line is between civilization and nature, still, even now, and how wonderful that is. Maybe we will not kill the planet.
The lockdown gives me hope.
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| Wild Goat, Wales |
