The Plight of the Coyote

This morning as I was driving to campus I saw a coyote. In the middle of Sacramento. He was just kind of slinking along the road pretending real hard to act like he belonged there, but clearly uncomfortable with having been caught out in the open and in a city, no less. Luckily for me traffic was slow and I was able to watch him for probably half a mile as he trotted along, occasionally looking over at the line of cars next to him on the highway with the head-ducked shame of someone who knows he doesn't belong.

(Remember, I was driving while taking these pictures. Please forgive their blurriness and lack of focus.)

For a moment I felt a hint of sympathy for him because he was very clearly aware that most people, when they think of coyotes, imagine them prowling around in the wild, hunting and scavenging and generally living the idyllic life that Mark Twain spelled out:

"The cayote lives chiefly in the most desolate and forbidding desert, along with the lizard, the jackass-rabbit and the raven, and gets an uncertain and precarious living, and earns it."

My friend here probably wakes up every morning with dreams of returning to the wildlands of his ancestors. Everyday he thinks he'll actually do it. He'll leave this urban wasteland and get back to his roots. Sure, his grandparents had made to the move to the city because they were sick and tired of being the "living, breathing allegory of Want," but was life really any better in the city? Even with the lights and glamour of city life, he was still "a long, slim, sick and sorry-looking skeleton, with a gray wolf-skin stretched over it." He still had that "tolerably bushy tail that forever sags down with a despairing expression of forsakenness and misery, a furtive and evil eye, and a long, sharp face, with slightly lifted lip and exposed teeth." If life was just going to continue on in this vein, he might as well live it somewhere a little less populated and a little less noisy.

This urban coyote probably got a late start this morning after a late night of carousing with his friends, and, after briefly giving in to these hopes and dreams of his life as it could be in the wild, went off in search of breakfast scavenged from last night's restaurant refuse. As he set off with a headache and a loathing for the sun that was beating much too intensely for an October morning, he happened to turn down a road that was unexpectedly full of commuters, and now he was being forced to acknowledge openly and to the world that his life was little better than that of a common raccoon, but without the added glamour of opposable thumbs or a bandit mask.

Maybe today will be the day he actually does it. Maybe today he'll finally leave his mangy little den in the park and light out for the open skies and dead grasses of the desert. But first he'll half to stop off at his most reliable breakfast spot (the StarbucksChipotle dumpster) so he can think clearly enough to actually make some plans.