Baby Coyotes

No roadrunner or Acme slingshot in sight!

On this morning’s tour de hood we were surprised to encounter some urban wildlife: two baby coyotes. Their home was a drainage pipe right by a busy intersection, and without their mom around to tell them otherwise one little pup was curious enough to come out and take a closer look at us humans. As exciting as this was, we quickly cut the encounter short. We didn’t want the pups to get comfortable around humans; not all of us are friendly. We also didn’t want these young coyotes to lose their natural fear of humans – that could lead them as adult coyotes to view small humans (children) as potential prey.

Home Sweet Home

This is their den as seen from the sidewalk (where we stayed). If the pup hadn’t have come out we would never have known that drainage pipe was someone’s home. When mom gets back from her breakfast hunt she’ll no doubt have a few words with these two about security and defense.

I thought I told you to stay in your rooms!

The little one on the left was the more cautious of the two, and at the sight of us humans nearby he or she retreated further into the pipe. The little one on the right was the more adventurous of the two. These little bundles were about a foot long, and probably a couple of months old. Here in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona they are officially known as Canis latrans mearnsi or Mearns coyote. I’d be willing to bet they have a couple of names for us too.

Here’s some good information about coyotes and what to do if you see one.

Digging Ourselves Out of a Hole

Metal or glass straws are washable, re-usable, and using them helps keep plastic waste out of landfills.

If you’ve ever planted a tree you’ve dug a hole, filled it with water, then waited a few minutes while the water soaks in. You probably noticed that the water in the hole remained relatively clear near the top, was a little dirtier with mud in the middle, then became a thick muddy sludge near the bottom.

Now imagine having to get that water back out of the hole.

With a straw.

It sure wouldn’t taste good, but at least you’d have an easy job of it at first. The water near the top is simple – your straw could be struck in the hole nearly anywhere, and the water wouldn’t have a lot of dirt mixed in so would be quick and easy to suck out. To make it drinkable again the water would just need to be run through a filter. It’s an easy process at this point; the water is simple to get out of the ground and to filter, and you can’t even see the bottom of the hole. Maybe that means there’s a lot of water! Who knows, the hole might be bottomless!

How is all that tasting? Take a break for some mouthwash.

Now back to work. As you suck out more of the water you notice that that there’s more and more dirt mixed into it. This means that the water has become thicker, and it’s now a lot harder to suck up through your straw. And to process this dirty water back into drinking water sure is going to take a longer, more complicated filtering process.

Might want to brush your teeth at this point. Are your neighbors staring at you? Filming you? Don’t worry about them, get back to the task at hand.

At this point you’ve already extracted all the easy water and even the thicker dirty water, and now you’ve reached that thick muddy sludge near the bottom of the hole. The mud is still wet so you know there’s water, but the mud is simply so thick that your straw has become useless as an extraction tool. You’re forced to abandon it and instead use a garden trowel to dig out sloppy wet loads of the mud. It seems like there’s more dirt than water in this mud, but at least there’s a tiny bit of that precious water in there. The filtering process is lengthy, complicated, and expensive – in fact, the closest facility qualified to do this procedure is more than 2,000 miles away. They’ll filter out all the mud, then ship the water back to you.

This is the way getting petroleum from tar sands works.

The easy water was all our United States oil wells before 1973, when we hit peak oil. The thicker dirty water was our collective global oil production, which hit peak approximately eight years ago in 2005. And now humanity is left at the bottom of the hole, wondering in our corporate-sponsored desperation if we should use our spades to dig out the last of the wet mud in Alberta.

Forget the Tar Sands; they are merely a distraction from the bigger issue. The question that only a few people seem to be asking is: now that we’ve reached the bottom, what comes next? What do daily lives, food systems, governments, economies, and everything look like without petroleum? The scale of the change ahead will be like nothing we’ve ever experienced.

The Future of Scent

These cactus flowers are an ideal candidate for distillation.

“A Heavily Scented Saturday” deserves some explanation. It may sound counter-intuitive for someone who rallies around a simple, organic, locally-sourced lifestyle to be celebrating the world of niche perfumery.

After years of research, my view is that the conditions that make possible our world of consumerist luxuries are changing. Within our lifetimes many of those conditions will no longer exist. These changes are due to a number of factors, including energy descent, climate change, and the inevitable, often radical, shifts in lifestyles and economies that these changes will entail. All these things will change life as we know it in powerful and fundamental ways. One thing that has remained constant among humans though (and many other species) throughout the ages is grooming. The way we groom, and certainly most of the products we currently use to do so, will vanish over time. One of many remarkable aspects of human anatomy is the wiring of our nervous system and brain, which means our species has a particular predilection to grooming with scent. Grooming with scented oils and spices is a centuries-old tradition, and one that despite our changing world is likely to last for centuries more.

These changes are unprecedented, so exactly how grooming, and grooming with scent, will evolve is quite literally anyone’s guess. While no one can predict the future with certainty, we can and should take appropriate action based on the facts available to us. Those facts lead me to believe that importing scents (or anything else) will no longer be possible, forcing us to look to local production. Depending on how transportation options evolve, “local” could mean many different things – five miles, twenty miles, fifty miles, etc. It would be wise then to move away from the regional hub production and distribution model now used by corporations to reduce costs, and instead produce goods as locally as possible. I look forward to a related societal shift away from lowest sticker price and towards highest quality and utility.

With our new focus on locally-sourced goods also comes a required focus on locally-sourced raw ingredients. In terms of grooming with scent, this means creating the essential oils used in perfumes and colognes from locally grown plants. These need not necessarily be ones native to your area, but as weather conditions become increasingly challenging plants (and animals) that are not native to our areas may struggle. Climate change is slowly redrawing the map as far as what may be possible to grow, so when long term planning check  several climatological models to determine (as much as possible) future water, temperature, and other related conditions. This is particularly important when considering slower growing trees, or any plants susceptible to pests or frost / heat shock.

My goal at events such as Sniffapalooza, L.A. Scentsation, and FRAGments is to better educate myself on current tastes, trends, and techniques. With this information I hope to be one of the very few people who plant appropriately, distill and blend appropriately, and will therefore be prepared with locally-sourced, locally-produced scents to replace the imported, transported, chemical-laden ones to which we have all become accustomed. This is something like replacing McDonalds junk phood with home-cooked meals of foods grown in your own garden. The benefits are unmistakable; all we have to do is be willing to put the work into it.

A Heavily-Scented Saturday

Julian Bedel of Fueguia 1833 outside Scent Bar

If you’ve heard winemakers, sculptors, watercolorists, poets, or composers discuss their work you know there are layers of complexity, symbolism, and symbiosis that many of us may overlook until they’re explained to us. It’s also possible that in our own experience we may find layers of wonder and beauty perhaps unintended by the novelist or haute cuisine chef that nevertheless become personal and very meaningful to us. As strong an emotional impact as works of creativity and art may have on us, the only one of our five senses physically connected directly to the limbic system – the emotional control center of the brain – is our sense of smell. This means that scents, good and bad, can have an immediate and pronounced impact on us both physically and emotionally. Such was this weekend.

A small group of people from around the world met in Los Angeles on Saturday for what might be described as a perfume crawl. At 8 AM we converged on the sidewalk outside a coffee shop just north of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and waited for our tour bus to arrive. I was standing there meeting people, making my first impressions, about to spend all day smelling a variety of scents, when some voice in the back of my head decided this was the perfect moment for a nose bleed. I excused myself into the coffee shop bathroom, stared at its suddenly remarkable ceiling for several minutes, then walked back out. Luckily the bus had just arrived and the crowd was being happily distracted by one of the event’s hosts.

The bus was rather ironically run by a company called “OMG Express.” The driver was a very patient and friendly Chinese gentleman who pronounced his name like “Franca,” but over the course of the day he would be called Frank, Frankie, Fred, and a half dozen other on-the-spot nicknames.

The event was organized by a group of bloggers known as the Perfume Posse, and their goal was a festive day exploring perfumes, colognes, and related scents. They wanted to make it very clear to everyone that the day was meant to be fun: more laughter, less business; more conversation, less science. On that note, Portia Turbo boarded the bus and informally led the group the rest of the day. Portia could be accurately described as both the Master and Mistress of Ceremonies and entertained the crowd virtually non-stop.

The tour’s first stop was Scent Bar (AKA Lucky Scent). We’ve visited a number of times and always enjoyed the place. There were two speakers; a highly polished Jeffrey Dame who came with some nice giveaways, and the fascinating Julian Bedel of Fuegia 1833. Fuegia is a line from Argentina, Fueguia being the term used to describe things from Tierra Del Fuego in Patagonia. Julian, the perfumer, was full of excellent detail regarding the concept, design, and process behind their line, which includes a full FIFTY fragrances. We were lucky enough to sample about ten, and left with bottles of Xocoatl and Biblioteca de Babel. Julian was very friendly and shared with us that Fueguia scents are vegan – they contain no animal products or byproducts and are not animal tested. Fueguia also strive to use as high a percentage as possible of natural botanicals (instead of manmade synthetics). Their packaging is both beautiful and remarkable – the bottles are packaged in wooden boxes, which are made from reclaimed wood and assembled by schoolchildren who do so as a fundraiser for their school. It sounds as though Fueguia has both excellent products and a high degree of corporate responsibility. Seek them out.

I was lucky in Scent Bar to be randomly selected to win a bottle of Amouage Opus VII, a scent designed by Alberto Morillas and Pierre Negrin and released about a month ago. It is described as a “green, woody and leather fragrance” and on my skin has strong cumin and cardamom notes. I then also won a gift bag filled with a variety of samples after being crowned “third best shopper,” not something to be sneezed at in consumer-driven Los Angeles.

It’s always a surprise to find some truly wonderful breweries, distilleries, and wineries in industrial parks. So it was with our next stop, Beauty Habit. Beauty Habit is primarily an online store, and the space we visited serves as their warehouse and shipping facility.  This was easily the most nicely appointed warehouse I’ve ever seen though, and of course it was filled with olfactory pleasures. Of particular interest was a section in the back by their “sample bar” devoted to natural perfumes and colognes. It was nice to see both Miryana Babic (Profumi Di Firenze) and Sarah Horowitz there; we had met them at Sniffapalooza’s Los Angeles event several years ago. Surprisingly Sarah remembered us, perhaps because I had shot the photos of that event for Raphaella Barkley and the Karens. Sarah was gracious enough to recognize the desperation in everyone’s eyes and delayed her presentation while the hoards ate lunch.

While exploring the natural perfumes in Beauty Habit we mentioned to an event colleague that we were looking forward to another event called FRAGments, an event whose focus was entirely on natural perfumes. It just so happened that the person we were speaking to was Maggie Mahboubian of Parfums Lalun, the organizer of FRAGments. She was happy to hear we had signed up and was of course looking forward to the event too. We ended up chatting with Maggie several times through the day; it was nice to know that someone shared our interest in scents derived from the earth rather than the industrial chemical industry.

After Beauty Habit we headed back to town, stopping outside the Pygmy Hippo Shoppe only long enough for Brent Leonesio of Smell Bent fragrances to jump on the bus. The plan had been for the crowd to invade his store, but due to time constraints he invaded the bus instead and discussed his line while we slowly circled the neighborhood a few times. In keeping with the organizers’ stated goal of making this event less business-like, Portia encouraged Brent to discuss his dating life and his bright blue hair more than his perfumes.

After that the bus made its way to Rodeo Drive, where everyone was dropped off and given an hour to play. This was nothing special; we could do this at home. Most people chose to go to Barney’s, a department store that carries some unusual lines. After having been to Scent Bar and Beauty Habit though, Barney’s came in a very distant third place. A rep from L’Artisan attempted to entertain with samples of individual notes from a recent release, but no one was intrigued with the final product, making the exercise uninspiring. Everyone was getting tired and was happy to leave Barney’s.

The final stop of the day was made at Opus Oils, the home of independent perfumer Kedra Hart. Her scents are very different, very surprising, and this perked everyone up. We came out with her limited edition M’Eau Joe No. 3, a “Hollywood whiskey fragrance.” While there we met Donato Crowley of Glam Monster and bought some of the EDP he and Kedra had created. Unfortunately there was a pox on his iPhone and the network stalled his log-in for several minutes before he could process our transaction. The “M’Eau Joe” must have helped; the order was finally processed, and the scent came safely home.

The bus finally dropped us all back at the coffee shop at 8 PM, and fifteen minutes later we were at Crossroads, tired, smelling of a hundred things, and ready for dinner and drinks. All in all it was a fun day, though we would have happily traded the stop on Rodeo Drive for a stop instead at Santa Maria Novella, Apothia, or a number of other places that come to mind. By 8 A.M. the next day we had awoken to a perfect L.A. morning… a kitchen mishap set off the hotel’s fire alarm and woke us up very rudely. We grumbled a bit, inspected our stash from the previous day, then headed to Real Foods Daily for a Mothers Day brunch. True to L.A.’s celebrity-spotting nature we were seated across from Ellen Degeneres and a woman I suppose was her mom. I’m not sure what she might have smelled like, but I suspect it was something like the same vegan pancake platter I had. Yum.

Happy Birthday Peek!

Delia “Peek” Octavia Baker Vaiden was born May 11, 1883 so today marks her 130th birthday. A birthday cake big enough for 130 candles would be big, so big you might need to bake ten cakes with thirteen candles each and serve them together. That would allow for a nice variety of flavors, and could feed dozens of people. Peek was born just in time for the emerging trend of birthday cakes with candles, so we can thank her generation for popularizing the tradition we enjoy today.

Peek was my “great grand aunt,” the term used to describe a great-grandmother’s sister, and I’m sure she would have liked being called both great and grand. To her brother she was “Peeky” and to my grandfather she was “Aunt Peek.” She was known affectionately as “Peek” all her life, but family records don’t show why.

The photo above is pocket-sized and glued to cardboard. On the back of the cardboard someone had written the following:

Miss Delia Baker  
104 4th Ave
Chestnut Hill

My only love
and last love
for a woman

That was hard to decipher. Pencil on a black background, a hundred years of wear, low contrast, and an old handwriting style, but I found that by holding the cardboard at a certain angle the light would catch the graphite pencil marks just enough that the contrast popped a bit. Peek would have been about 22 years old here, and these words were probably written by her future husband, Isaac Butler Vaiden.

Have you ever finished a book or movie and been left wondering whatever happened to a little-mentioned side character? Such is my fascination with my great grand aunt Peek. She must have loved hats; she’s wearing an enormous and elaborate hat in many of the photos I have of her. Other than that I know very little about her. To correct that I’ve made up this completely fictitious bio:

Peek was well known for her distillations of local wildflowers. She created many popular perfumes using blue star, wild geranium, eastern rosemallow, and other plants native to her area. A distillation using sneezeweed (Helenium autumnale) proved popular among jokers, and President Woodrow Wilson asked her to develop a highly concentrated version for use as a chemical weapon during World War One (she respectfully declined). Her talents weren’t wasted during prohibition, when a few slight changes in her product line lead to previously unimaginable profits. Before prohibition was repealed by the twenty-first amendment in 1933 Peek was forced to flee, leaving all her distillation equipment behind. With the help of a friend though she had been wiring her fortune for years to an account in Piana, Corsica where she had planned to retire. Her Virginia death in 1935 was faked, leaving her free to spend the rest of her life enjoying one of Europe’s most beautiful villages. It was widely suspected but never proven that in France she used the name Delia Picqué.

Evolution

You don’t have to travel to get here.

I walked out onto the porch last night with a container of bird seed, leaving a trail of seed where the birds congregate each morning for their breakfast. It was nice to imagine the dawn’s cooing and chirping and fluttering, the bustling among one another, and the boisterous synchronized departure. I’m always especially proud of the one or two birds who remain, not following the crowd.

Yesterday’s temperature reached 100 degrees, which meant that last night the darkness on the porch was still deliciously warm. A gentle breeze blew through the trees and bushes, and as it brushed my skin I imagined the birds feeling that same breeze brushing their feathers. I wondered for a moment how many other plants and animals and insects also felt that very same breath of earth. There was something very unifying in that thought.

I walked past the wonderfully intoxicating scent of a heavily blooming jasmine bush and made my way out to our fig tree. I stayed there for a moment, enjoying the air, the darkness, the stars, and the companionship and connection with everything around me.

While I stood there enjoying the warm night air it occurred to me that the air inside our home had been artificially chilled. The machines that performed this task for us use an enormous amount of energy, despite being “efficient” models, and their use means that my family is less acclimated to the climate that we falsely believe we live in. Our house is truly the one acclimated to the desert; we are merely acclimated to the house. We spend the majority of our lives in a variety of temperature-regulated, humidity-controlled, air-filtered environments which are very often quite different than those outdoors. Rather than living with nature we shield ourselves from it. Without realizing it we have literally ended millennia of climate-related adaptation and evolution.

I wonder what people will do as water becomes more scarce, temperatures continue to rise, storms become more intense, and petroleum and natural gas become more expensive? Perhaps laws will be passed regulating how we use resources, and new shelters might be built, but that would amount to little more than shielding ourselves from a changing world that is simply asking us to adapt.

We adapt to other changes all the time, and of course we can adapt to a changing climate too. Like other things we adapt to, like a new child or a new job, changes in lifestyle need to be made. These adaptations don’t make our lives worse, they make our lives different. And as with so many other things we’ve already adapted to, we often find that adapting opens new doors in our lives – new happiness, new opportunities, new dreams, new directions. In this way, we could look at climate change as a huge gift, a chance to re-assess our priorities, adjust our actions, and begin setting things right in each of our corners of the world.

Keystone Gives America Bitter Beer Face

Environmental group 350.org reports “A new report shows that Keystone XL would carry 181 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, equal to 51 coal plants worth of carbon. Another way to put it: that’s as much CO2 as 37.7 million cars to the road — more cars than are currently driving in California, Oregon, Washington, Michigan, New York and Florida combined. But the State Department’s initial report on the pipeline says it would have negligible climate impacts. Can you send a message to the State Department to tell them that we can’t afford this pipeline?” They have a petition for the State Department that you can sign here. I signed and replaced their verbiage (except the last two sentences) with my own:

“Completion of the Keystone XL pipeline would merely delay the inevitable and looming end of affordable petroleum. Such a pipeline would only provide a remarkably short delay, and in the process would tragically pollute our atmosphere – making the environmental problems we will face in the near future even worse.

Americans are not scared of change; as a nation we are change-makers. We welcome and embrace change, leading the world in myriad new directions. The next new direction we must face, right now, is a post-petroleum America. Some of the best things in life are scary: childbirth, speaking to a crowd, changing our business models, changing our lives. And yet we face those challenges with courage, knowing that the road that lays ahead, even if our fear makes that path unclear, is far better than the road behind us.

A post-petroleum America will remain a nation of great resources, of great strength, and most of all, of great people. For centuries we have faced challenges and overcome them, and the American people will overcome our reliance on petroleum. We will change our lives, we will change our businesses, we will change our country, and we will lead the way.

The Keystone XL pipeline is not in our national interest, nor in the planet’s interest. I urge you to reject the pipeline.”

Click here to sign the petition!