Spirits of the Rutting Moon

No. 188

November was the season of the rut, when the stags become a more common sight in the urban woods, looking for mates and more inclined to do crazy shit. I’ve been walking our terrier puppy down in the floodplain and along the riverbank, watching her energetic strategies for navigating the obstacles that bushwhacking present when your legs are less than six inches long. I keep her on a long lead, which further complicates the exercise, but the wildlife seem to appreciate it. And we made it through the season without any dangerous encounters, despite walking into the middle of some exceptionally frisky mixed groups of whitetail.

The puffed-up poise with which the males presented themselves during this was striking, turning and trotting like regal specters, maybe headed back to whatever other world it is where the most majestic ones spend the rest of the year.

My friend Henry emailed from his Monday commute into Manhattan to share this image of the rut as it occurs in New Jersey:

this morning a stark sight at the commuter train station, the picture of which I do not send,

a young sixpointer white-tailed buck, renversé, impaled

impaled in left posterior haunch following a failed traverse of the spiked railway palisse or fence

I am not superstitious but it seems a grim portent, or anyway a data point in the proposed Montclair deer census. It is the deer equivalent of teenage dare in overcrowded suburbia

I told him I may steal that dark winter vignette for a story, about the uptown rare book dealer who can’t get the scene out of his head, and makes the unwise decision to go back on foot and see if he can give the animal a more dignified eternal rest. I’ve had my own share of similar encounters, which provoke something different than the usual impulse of stewardship.

The rut seems to have mostly wound down here this week, a little on the early side. The week before Thanksgiving brought us rain, and late bloomers. The most notable, if not the most colorful, was the frost weed, which seems extra thick this season, and well matched with the cold moon of December.

When the really cold nights come, the frost weed sweats extravagant vents of ice from its stems, often in surreal formations. The plant roots most readily in places where a lot of water collects. Its abundance may in part reflect the fact that the deer apparently don’t like it, and the fact that it has such an effective way of finding wet spots in a dry land. A winter bloom that comes with an enigmatic promise. In part, for me, a sign of the brief but expansive refuge year-end can provide from the treadmill of Capital, in the same way it signals the cold season’s incubation of spring.

The Wednesday after Thanksgiving, I snuck away from the office early to say a death bed goodbye to a dear friend. Daniel Llanes was someone I worked closely with over the past dozen years on urban conservation issues, a neighbor who became an ally and a mentor of sorts. I chronicled some of our work together in A Natural History of Empty Lots, but I only hinted at his unique character and personality. Daniel was a rare type, a unicorn among men—one of the grooviest people you could ever meet, at the same time as he was one of the most effective I’ve ever seen at driving people crazy. The latter because he was so persistent and unvarnished in his commitment to calling out injustice when he saw it, and in his refusal to accept it as the way the world must be.

In a way, I didn’t really know the whole guy—just the one from the last 15 years of his life, working together on projects where we were so focused on the matter at hand that we didn’t talk much about personal pasts. He was a striking fellow, even in his elder years, with shoulder-length curly hair, a simultaneously extravagant and humble 70s sartorial style, and a big smile. He lived in a house he had made from an old body shop, with a view of an industrial corridor outside his front door and the wild river and woods as his backyard.

A San Antonio kid of Indigenous heritage who loved to dance, sing and make music, and managed to get himself into Juilliard (if I remember the story right), he returned to Texas to be one of the first non-white members of the Austin Ballet, and there learned some of the ways in which Austin was (and is) not as progressive and inclusive as it likes to convince itself. He developed an independent career as a multi-instrumental singer-songwriter who also worked as a healer and occasionally produced lovely works of visual art (including macro photography of flowers), and dedicated much of his adult life to advocating for environmental and social justice in East Austin. He made a huge impact during his life, and nurtured the seeds for an awakening I can feel beginning to emerge as the new generation takes the mantle.

He passed peacefully Thursday evening, as the last full moon of the year was rising in the eastern sky.

It was a drizzly week, and it wasn't until Saturday morning that the sky cleared and the sun came back out. The puppy and I went back down to the river, maybe thinking a bit about our friend’s passage into the spirit world.

It was chilly, and a little foggy, but more alive than this stretch has seemed in a while. The river was thick with gadwalls in the water and birdwatchers on the opposite bluff. A pair of white ibis flew past us, into the sun, followed by a kingfisher, and then a big osprey came over low, from shadow into sun. The sandy stretches of the banks were thick with tracks of raccoons, herons, and coyotes, the latter a less frequent sight around here lately.

The river was reshaped by the summer’s floods, so we had to find a new path to the east, one that took us through the trash-strewn woods just over the banks. When we made it back out to the edge, where the river stretches out right before the bridge, there were a half-dozen young deer cavorting in the shallows. We even managed to catch one pair playing at combat on their hindlegs:

It was a scene of restoration and peace, even as you could hear the piledrivers banging away in the near distance, building the pump station that will channel all the drainage from the expanded Interstate 35 into the river just past the stretch pictured above. With luck, we will be able to turn that project into an opportunity for ecological uplift, and maintain this little pocket of rewilded river our departed friend worked so hard to protect.

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Extra credit

More about the work of Daniel Llanes, including links to performance videos, here at his website.

My Empty Lots editor at Timber Press, Makenna Goodman, had a wonderful piece at the NYT this week, on the idea of magic as an alternative to therapy.

You may have seen the report about the raccoon in Virginia who got into a liquor store and got into the product:

In Boerne, Texas, on the western road from here to San Antonio, they have opened a new Predator-themed bar:

In homage to the original 1987 action movie thriller, Darkside After Dark is draped in lush jungle greenery with the skeleton of a pilot dangling from an actual helicopter stuck in a massive tree behind the bar. High up in a corner near walls that resemble treacherous rock cliffs, the Predator himself lurks, looking out over the crowd.

This is the same place where, twenty years ago, a group of locals got busted while recreating scenes from Mad Movies on the highways.

Crazy ant season is back.

And in Anthropocene evolutionary news, the WSJ confirms the suspicions reported earlier here that the self-driving Jaguars now hunting local streets in Austin, San Francisco and elsewhere in four-wheeled packs really are becoming more aggressive.

Apologies for taking a month between posts. I’ve been busy working on some new longform projects, thinking about how to take the newsletter in fresh directions—and taking our daughter camping. Here’s Inks Lake, upriver from us an hour, as it looked the night in November when the rain finally cleared, and the burn ban was lifted with it:

Have a safe week.