Roadkill

Posted on May 12, 2003 in Creatures Photos Travels - So Cal

On Saturday, we found a lizard. On Sunday, a mouse. The lizard lived out its life in Whiting Ranch Wilderness, two blocks or a five minute walk from our condo. The mouse began and ended its days in Crystal Cove State Park, less than a mile from where I found a jade beetle beachcombing last summer.

The lizard died in a straight line on a slight slope that trail bikers used to enter Whiting Canyon from Concourse Park where they didn’t need to pay $2 to leave their cars. We found the mouse over to one side, on a stretch of path known variously as “West Cut-Across” or “Mach One”. Mach One consisted of four steep slopes with long plateaus between each one. The biker who suggested the route said that we’d find it “mellower” than “Poles” which split from El Moro Canyon Trail at the same point.

This man spoke truth. Poles followed a line of telephone poles which, in this country, observe no march passable to man. Mach One proved gentler on my legs and my lungs. The dirt road tunneled through patches of blonde-haired “black mustard”. Lynn got ahead of me while I photographed the dead mouse and stopped when she saw a rabbit sitting in the path. We followed it for an eighth of a mile or so. Then it found a bolthole in the grass. It jumped two feet into the meadow and disappeared by a path that we could not discern when we got to the spot.

Crickets clicked constantly wherever we went in the grassland. They went silent only if I stopped too near them or if that other sound — the sound of the wheeled locusts who are death to the mice, the snakes, the lizards, and the gleaming oil black bombadier beetles who try to cross these roads.

I saw two deaths in two days. And I wanted to throw logs across every trail after that, to discourage the spandex wearing weekenders on their aluminum murdering machines from traveling in these parts.