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In the morning I took my visiting parents just past the limits of the northwest suburbs for a nature walk. The place we went is a wildlife refuge carved from old ranches to protect two endangered species of songbirds who rely on this very specific habitat threatened by encroaching subdivisions.  The drive took about forty-five minutes as we passed through a series of landscapes—urban freeway, frontage road, suburban chain sprawl, county road, and finally an old ranch road that followed the course of a gorgeous creek flowing clear and full over denuded limestone. A sanctuary of ecological recovery, where even the invasive ash juniper trees whose noxious spores fill the winter skies were finally being cleared out.

We walked a trail that followed a beautiful stream lined with cottonwoods and live oaks and dotted with the long-haired muelys we have growing on our roof but which I had never seen in their native riparian habitat. My mother, who lives in the woods up north, is more interested in mushrooms than people, and does not own a mobile phone, found a spot that I would have walked right past where there was a small redbud tree with the first fresh fuchsia blooms of spring. She sat down on a rock and watched the different butterflies come and visit the tree, slowing the walk into a long stillness that required no spoken language to communally summon.

I looked at my phone as I was taking pictures and noticed I had no signal, after hours of nonstop breaking news bulletins while the regime drama of the day unfolded. And I realized the butterflies had momentarily replaced the phone alerts, and the only thing streaming was the burbling creek. Some kind of pointer in how to secure liberated territory in the age of atemporality.

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Fedspotting

The other day I found a military helicopter hovering over my house. We live in the flightpath—the ancient avian flightpath and VFR aid of the Lower Colorado River, and the approach to the airport—so passing helicopters are a daily experience. But you could hear how close this one was, and you could hear the distinct chop, that heavy and slow Nam vintage sound of a Bell Huey. Apocalypse Now. When I stepped out of the old trailer I use as my front yard office, there it was, close enough that if you were on the roof you could probably jump and grab the rails. And as soon as I got my phone out to film it, it peeled off as if caught snooping.

We see all sorts of curious things in the sky over here. An abundance of raptors live in the woods between the highway and the river. This time of year, when the trees are still naked, the hawks lord over the forest floor and the big barred owls come out at dusk. In the morning the osprey cruise over the river, dive-bombing the fat fish when they come up close to the surface. Sometimes you will see a northern caracara, the rugged crested eagle of the Mexican flag, sitting on the rocky beach gnawing on fresh kill. The belted kingfishers buzz around in pairs, their rattling calls like machine reels. If you walk back around the old wetland remnant behind the dairy plant, chances are one of the big herons will lift up into the foggy air before you like the last pterodactyl.

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Under skies like this, it’s easy to become both a birder and a planespotter. If you pay attention, you start to notice weird stuff passing over. I saw a Mitsubishi Zero once, Tora Tora Tora all the way, the first of many warbirds, usually old fighters flown by the outfit that used to call itself the Confederate Air Force, and sometimes a big bomber. Once in a while the fighter jets will come screaming over at a low altitude, presumably trainers from one of the USAF bases in San Antonio. The Austin airport used to be an Air Force base, with B-52s pointed at our southern border. Wolverines!

I started using one of those flight tracker apps on my phone to augment the silhouettes I see in the sky, pulling up flight plans and call sign info. They don’t show military aircraft, but they show everything else, and I am sure at some point I will have a Trevor Paglen-worthy revelation of some dark traffic beyond the corporate jets headed out to the oil patch and the mysterious windowless cargo planes lumbering off to faraway shores. Last fall I saw an eastbound jumbo jet at around 20,000 feet with an escort of five fighters in tight formation. The app didn’t show the 747 or whatever it was, but said the fighters were registered to NASA. I watched their avatar on the screen, supposedly en route to Ellington base in Houston, but then they headed out over the Gulf and suddenly disappeared. The truth is out there.

Seeing signs of the military-industrial power of the federal state used to be a curiosity more than a threat. Little moments of wonder, manifestations of the technothriller fantastic in the mundane fabric of everyday life. They feel different now, under the dark mien of the new jefe and his scowling barons. When I posted the video of the chopper over my house a friend joked that I must have provoked such attention with my writing. I should be so lucky, I said, knowing that the likely explanation was the curious design of our house, a buried modernist bungalow camouflaged by a shaggy green roof, and the natural proclivity of all pilots to gawk at interesting sights. But there’s no question that the everyday projections of federal force are now infused with fresh fear, because that’s how they want us to feel. Especially, it seems, how they want some of our neighbors to feel, here under the Six Flags.

The ICE raids started yesterday. Forty-four people rounded up here on the first day. At the bar last night, two friends who teach grade school told us about their terrified students sharing the viral news, wondering if they would go home to find their parents gone. We heard from people we know worried about how they might be affected, asking us how we might help. The newspaper says the raids are focused only on “criminal aliens,” but you know it is also about generating fear, about actively destabilizing community. You know it’s about retribution and discipline, in a “sanctuary city” whose leaders have the temerity to express defiance. And when you see the armed representatives of the federal state now, rolling out into the streets, you realize that Texas and Yemen are not so far apart.

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Fiber hawk

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We live at the end of the road in an industrial part of East Austin, but the road used to continue on, following the course of the Lower Colorado downriver to what used to be the bigger towns like Bastrop.  While the old road is now an empty lot that abuts the woodland floodplain, it’s still right of way that’s used by telecom infrastructure, the line of poles marching off along the trail of the past.  I read last year in Tung-Hui Hu‘s amazing book A Prehistory of the Cloud how something like 90 percent of the Internet traffic in the U.S. travels over fiber optic cable laid in old railroad right of way, and I’m sure there are plenty of other spots where data travels along the path of pioneer trails, many of which were Indian trails and before that animal trails.  Google Fiber has been coming out here lately in their big cherry pickers, hanging new line on these poles, which they share with TimeWarner and probably AT&T and the local power company.  The ethereal future is anchored in the deep memory of the land, and sometimes even makes inadvertent habitat for the wildlife it might otherwise displace.

The hawks that live in these woods love those telecom poles, and you find them up there most mornings from daybreak until the beginning of the work day.  Their favorites are back in there past the door factory, where the right of way runs along the fenceline of the dairy plant. Between the plant and the woods are ten acres or so of empty fields, bulldozed thirty years ago for the industrial park but never developed. Dudes come in and mow those fields twice a year, keeping the baby mesquites and retama from taking over.  Most of the year, there is just enough cover for small mammals to think they can probably make it through, but always patchy. And so the hawks watch, and wait, and feast, while the trucks and planes come and go in the near background of the human space on the other side of the fence.  They never let a dude with dogs get too close, but close enough that you can usually make out the silhouette of what they may be holding in their talons—usually mouse, rat, or vole.

The pole in this picture is right by my front yard, visible from the door to the 1978 Airstream trailer that serves as my home office.  So I often see whoever may be perched up there, and usually have ready access to my real camera, the one with better zoom than my phone.  I have yet to succeed in getting my shot without causing the raptor to fly off after a second, but I’ll get there.  It’s been raining all week, a freak occurrence for Central Texas in August, so I was hoping the downpour would better mask my simian stumbling.  It did, but not enough.

The empty lot next to that pole sold last year, and the construction supply warehouse back in there just got listed for $11.6 million.  Just west of here, Oracle is building a gigantic new campus.  The economics are finally approaching the point where the numbers will work for a gigantic dairy plant to get relocated to make room for offices or apartments.  Some of us work on protecting these little pockets of wild urban habitat, and we’ve had good success, but even if you keep the buildings back along the road you can’t really do anything to limit the human bustle—indeed, those of us who live back in here are the most permanent human presence, even if we try to make our own yards into better habitat.  So some of the species will move on, like the barred owls that hang out in tall trees just below this pole, where the city drainage culverts empty out into an Anthropocene lagoon that nourishes the thirsty cottonwoods.  Maybe we should see if Google and Oracle want to chip in for the conservation efforts.

Yesterday afternoon when I got up from my desk and the downpour had settled into a light rain, I heard a coyote howling back there in near-perfect sync with a police siren hurtling down the nearby highway.  I guess that is as close as we are going to get to talking to each other, for now.  But our Anthropocene future is going to require us to learn how to make better home for wild nature in the city.  We could start by remembering that there is no such thing as an empty lot.