What I See Along the River

A road runner, descendant of velociraptors,  scans the shoulder of the bike path for lizards or garbage --  hungry, wanting. Another road runner further back. A mate? A dark-haired dog lies in the middle of the dry river bed. It raises its head to look at me. I can't tell if it was a coyote or not. It sets its head back down on the hard pan of scoured sediment. A pair of homeless campers set their gear out to dry in the breeze after the cold rain last night. Others lay bundled in sleeping bags, blankets, tarps, on top of pallets. One is working on his camp down in the wash, dragging back furniture that had washed downstream during the storm. There are piles of debris; a child's pink plastic car, big enough to sit in, sits still, vacant, and incongruous in the middle of the wash. Chairs, tarps, coolers, buckets, clothing, a toilet seat lie scattered on the sand. A red-tailed hawk, wings retracted in the "W" of a fast descent, cruises along beside me, close enough that I can see his breast feathers ruffled by the breeze. He looks straight at me. I think he is racing me. No contest there. He swoops up onto a dead tamarisk. Another canine, coyote for sure, very dark, old, ready to die, slowly crosses the path, not caring if I come too close to him. He lopes toward the river. Another man swears to no one I can see beneath a copse of mesquite trees tangled near the bank. Graffiti I have never noticed before spreads up the arroyo away from the river. One large message reads simply "ME" in block, spray-painted letters. Now, one might say I see only what I want to see, that there is beauty amid the death and suffering and predation. Fair enough. But it is what I see on this cloudy, December day, breeze off the mountain dusted in fresh fallen snow.