The Flies

When the flies arrive in the Colestin, campers, we know that cattle have been grazing along the creek. It’s August, the creek is low, the grass is dead, the cows are ranging far in search of forage and Musca domestica season is upon us. Jean-Paul Sartre reimagined Aeschylus’s Furies as flies pursuing Orestes across the universe for his primal crime. Our flies certainly feel like punishment for something, but I don’t ascribe cosmic significance to them. It’s just another season on Cottonwood Creek and, as that great Zen master the author of Ecclesiastes said so beautifully, “to everything there is a season.”

(btw, if you ever have a hankering to re-examine the Bible as literature instead of the received word of God, I highly recommend starting with Ecclesiastes. Its Hebrew patriarchy crossed with Buddhist detachment is remarkably enlightened. All is vanity, indeed.)

We had our season of heaven, that brief period between Mud and Dust when the mock orange is in bloom and our world is green and fragrant. It’s now the season of the flies, when the flowers wither, the grass dies and the topsoil blows away. We’re left with smoke, stickers, snakes and bugs in abundance, but they all have their purpose. Soon it will be "fly season" of another kind, when the helicopters begin their harrying. The only purpose they have is sinister. Give me the Muscas any day.

Sequoia and I drove home from Ashland late on Saturday night. As we crested the Siskiyou Summit, we could see a patch of wildfire glowing on a ridgetop to the southwest. No telling how far away, but too close for comfort; put the fear of god into us, that's for sure. This is what late summer is like in west, my friends. Meandering green threads mark the dwindling watercourses. Everything else is dead, and much of it is on fire. We live in a desert, we just refuse to acknowledge it.