A copy of the LA Times was near the register, and I was perusing the headlines when something caught my eye.

“Hmm,” I said. “Hey, check out at this picture.”

I held up the paper, pointing at a photo that accompanied the front-page story. I can’t remember the specific subject of the story, but it took place in Siberia. The photo showed a cabin, out in the woods amongst the trees. It was wintertime, the ground bare, the trees leafless grey-brown skeletons.

“Yeah? What about it?” asked the Dufus, scanning the page.

“Well, that’s Siberia.”

“Right. And …?”

“Well, it’s February.”

“Uh-huh?”

“There’s no snow.”

He stood there in shock. And then, sounding exactly like Keanu Reeves in the Matrix, he said:

“Whoa.”

“There’s global warming for you,” I said.

“Yeah really,” he said again, it still sinking in. “That’s heavy.”

“Whoa,” he said again.

He stared at the photo some more, then started into action. “They should do something!” he proclaimed.

“They are! I mean, I’m not sure who you mean by ‘they’, but sure, there are plenty of people trying to do something.”

“Well they need to show people! They should show everyone this picture! That’s what would really get through to people! Not all this confusing data, they need to show people this photo!”

“Uh … that’s exactly what they do, among other things. Surely you’ve seen those old photos of glaciers, next to current photos showing how the glaciers have receded … ?”

“Oh yeah, right.” He’d seen those clips from ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, just inconveniently temporarily forgotten. “Hmm. Well, yeah but they shouldn’t have Al Gore be the guy. No one trusts him.”

“Why is that?”

“Well you know! Because he … uh … you know .. he was the one who …” he stopped. He couldn’t think of any specific accusation to make, but it didn’t matter, his mind was made up on the subject of Al Gore.

“I’m not so sure anybody actually chose Al Gore, ” I answered, “I think Al Gore chose it. I mean, he took it upon himself to get involved in the issue. Doesn’t even matter. It’s the people trying to deny global warming you can’t trust. The oil companies, coal, all those guys, they’re the ones who have a reason to lie.”

This was enough information for Big D to take in all at once, I could tell by the consternation on his face. “Well, I gotta get going,” I said, making my way for the door. But I’m glad I left him with that one thought.

“They should do something!”

Legless Lizard (8 and counting)

One Hawk Eating a Pidgeon in a Tree

One Bearded Billy-Goat of Variable Temperament

Three Pregnant Jenna Goats

One Cutey-Pie Lamb-faced Goat

Beautiful Horses (many)

One Black Cat vs. White Cat Drama

One Visiting Grey Cat Youngster

Four One-Night Cactus Blooms

One Unbelievably Immense and Horrible Pile of Old Cat Food Cans

Harvesters of the Avocado-green Monstrosity (that was an old dishwasher we put out for the metal pickup – only to have it scavenged within minutes)

1 Wildfire (Only one. And far away. Fortunately)

1 Burnt Hillside

Thermometer reading 110 degrees. Too many times. Frickin’ Sun Valley …

Bad-ass Gopher (three) (My cat was startled to find that these guys are much tougher than rats from his old neighborhood. These guys fight back!)

One Complete and Undamaged Digestive System (Well, soon enough Kitty figured out how to kill them. He doesn’t like the stomach though)

1 Entire Regurgitated Gopher (And even the rest doesn’t always sit well in his stomach)

One 3-a.m. Street Drag-Racing Gang

One Dragonfly Coffee (yeah, that’ll wake you up in the morning – gulp down your coffee only to find a drowned dragonfly stuck to the inside of the cup)

One Hydrogen Tank Explosion

The Bomb Squad!

One Wall Mural Drawn in Poison Chalk (my roommate is just a little bit nuts)

One Midnight Walk-Accompanying Friendly Silly Large Red Curly-Haired Retriever (yes, I’m walking down the street in the wee hours, and suddenly notice this big canine goofball strolling along right beside me like he’s my own dog on a leash)

1 Rampaging Elephant (oh, wait. No. That one was only in my head)

The Bomb Squad … again!

I had always thought of such outlying areas as places the losers settled after all the good spots were already taken. Why else live in one of the hottest, driest, most uncomfortable parts of LA, far from everything that is interesting and useful, and in a wash to boot. A wash – a sandy, rocky expanse of dense, lifeless soil, sunk low and flat, seared by the sun, blasted by the wind, flooded by the rain.

I was wrong about one thing though – Sun Valley is not one of these new outer-edge ultra-sprawl locales, it is actually a quite old community, settled in the earliest days of Los Angeles, where homesteaders built themselves houses out of the plentiful stones they found on the hard desert floor, and did a lot of riding around on horses.

Currently the major industries in my immediate vicinity are metal recycling, plastic recycling, car pick-a-part, pawn shops, and Public Storage. A surprising number of horses remain, however. Riding appears to be a main pastime in the area, along with illegal midnight street drag racing and dumpster-diving for recyclables.

The city’s one claim to fame that isn’t either utterly depressing or completely uncool is that back in the ’80s Sun Valley was the home of the punk club Godzilla’s, a short-lived but well-known venue during the early punk rock heyday in the 1980′s.  Godzilla’s was bad-ass and hard-core, as the definitions for bad-ass and hard-core applied for that time.

There are some good things about my strange new abode, however, actually a number of good things. Number one of these: Animals. Next door they’ve got horses – beautiful horses, fine, well-groomed horses for showing and cutting and roping and walking down the street with the high-stepping fancy gait. And goats, goats are also next door – not Third World dog-like alley-rat goats, but cute, friendly, healthy well-fed goats. Foremost among them is a distinguished gentleman of the billy-goat persuasion, strawberry blonde with impressive curved horns, a curling beard, and pale yellow eyes.

And he is a happy mister goat, with three charming girlfriends, all of whom will soon be giving birth to little goats.

And so I settle in, with the Kinks song “Animal Farm” playing every day in my head. I bring my cat, my birds, my musical instruments and my currently dead motorcycle, which joins the other dusty non-running vehicles in our front yard. I try to start up once again my urban garden, which was bountiful and lovely at my last abode in beautiful South Los Angeles (the ‘Hood, yes, thank you very much), where collards, tomatoes, cauliflower, peppers and cukes grew with abandon in my little makeshift backyard plot. I know it won’t be as easy here, with the winds, dry air, and the infamous Valley heat, but I hadn’t expected it quite like this. A murderous sun that burns the leaves of even the African succulents, temperatures plunging to frost at night, wild rabbits that nibble any greenery that might arise, and gophers that attack them from below. My roommate swears she once saw a head-high weed sucked into the ground before her very eyes, shivering and shaking as the gophers ate at the roots and pulled the whole thing down into their hole. The worst though is the soil, a dusty yet heavy sand, too loose to hold roots, too dense to allow drainage. The landlord watches my valiant start at a compost heap, not wanting to discourage my plans to fix the soil with organic matter and some horse leavings from next door. “The sand is bad, but, hey, it’s better than clay,” he muses. “You add manure to clay, and you get bricks.”

Well, those early settlers who laid out these long rectangular housing parcels, with pastureland out back and barn-like houses must have grown something, right? Citrus, like in Orange County, or Meditteranean crops like wine-grapes or olives, they grow all over Southern California, right? I check Wikipedia for the history of the city, and found that yes, they had indeed pulled a living out of the ground. With what is absolutely, indubitably and indisputably the most hardy of crops.

Stone.

Yup, before the junk recycling and Auto-Pawn it was quarries that paid the bills here in Sun Valley, churning out enough sand, stone, and gravel to build the whole county (see for yourself the Wikipedia article about Sun Valley). Good luck with that garden, Syl. Ha!

The Cactus Garden Begins