Coyote America Quotes

The ugliest thing in America is greed, the lust for power and domination, the lunatic ideology of perpetual Growth - with a capital G. 'Progress' in our nation has for too long been confused with 'Growth'; I see the two as different, almost incompatible, since progress means, or should mean, change for the better - toward social justice, a livable and open world, equal opportunity and affirmative action for all forms of life. And I mean all forms, not merely the human. The grizzly, the wolf, the rattlesnake, the condor, the coyote, the crocodile, whatever, each and every species has as much right to be here as we do.

Coyote: A small canid (Canis latrans) native to western North America that is closely related to the American wolf and whose cry has often been compared to that of Sippie Wallace and Janis Joplin, amongst others.

Coyote power: surviving by one’s own intelligence and wits when others cannot; embracing existence in a mad, dancing, laughing, sympathetic expression of pure joy at evading the grimmest of fates; exulting in sheer aliveness; recognizing our shortcomings with rueful chagrin.

Zoom out and what you see is one species--us--struggling to keep all others in their appropriate places, or at least in the places we've decided they ought to stay. In some areas, we want cows but not bison, or mule deer but not coyotes, or cars but not elk. Or sheep but not elk. Or bighorn sheep but not aoudad sheep. Or else we'd like wolves and cows in the *same* place. Or natural gas tankers swimming harmoniously with whales. We are everywhere in the wilderness with white gloves on, directing traffic.

One day I was telling him that I thought that cars had replaced guns as phallic symbols for American men, and I thought it was interesting that he had one that was so small and fast. The next day he gave me the Datsun and went out and bought a Lincoln.

If one’s argument for civilization holds that wild predators should never roam in broad daylight through the boroughs of America’s largest, loudest, most radically urban metropolis, then, truly, the end of civilization had arrived on paw prints in the snow.

But for me, the true attraction of America is that it’s practically godless. When I was younger and dodging the Romans, I could hardly walk a mile in Europe without stepping on a stone sacred to some god or other. But out here in Arizona, all I have to worry about is the occasional encounter with Coyote, and I actually rather like him. (He’s nothing like Thor, for one thing, and that right there means we’re going to get along fine. The local college kids would describe Thor as a “major asshat” if they ever had the misfortune to meet him.)

I have heard African lions roar and the hacksaw cough of leopards just outside my safari tent, but neither of these is as haunting, as unsettling, as the savage symphony of gray wolves on a cold, still, northern night.

The spiders, honeybees, yellow jackets, and mud daubers: these insects still speak - a language that is older than humans. The buffalo, elk, wolf, coyote -they still talk too. It's we, the people, who have forgotten how to listen. [Osage Spider Story, an Osage Legend, told by Archie Mason, Jr]

The woods were full of peril—rattlesnakes and water moccasins and nests of copperheads; bobcats, bears, coyotes, wolves, and wild boar; loony hillbillies destabilized by gross quantities of impure corn liquor and generations of profoundly unbiblical sex; rabies-crazed skunks, raccoons, and squirrels; merciless fire ants and ravening blackfly; poison ivy, poison sumac, poison oak, and poison salamanders; even a scattering of moose lethally deranged by a parasitic worm that burrows a nest in their brains and befuddles them into chasing hapless hikers through remote, sunny meadows and into glacial lakes.

This was the very role of the bicycles that wheeled over this same topography Just as seawater defined the tidal lands, the bicycles revealed America's economic and social systems by floating though its bloodstream and coloring-with sparkling chrome, metallic paints, a whir of spokes and flicker of handlebar ribbons-the murkiest corners and furthest reaches.

as perfect in my memory as a circle.

Most animals stayed in the wilderness with Coyote. Not the ants, though. They wanted to make war with the humans, and they did, and they’re still at it.

See, this is what the United States of America is all about. You can wrestle a thousand bears and chew on a billion knives but in the end, you are only as good as the dude who stops you from dying of a gunshot while fucking a coyote.

Coyotes, it turns out, are also a kind of wolf. They shared a common ancestor with gray wolves down to about 3.2 million years ago, when coyote and gray wolf ancestors began to separate, first geographically, then, as distance increased, genetically.

Face-to-face, the vast prairie sweeps belie your instincts about such country. Their sublimity, I think, arises from their unfathomable boundaries and their self-confident grandness of scale, combined with an echoless, calm monotony of sensory affect.

In our twenty-first century world, the terms "genocide" and "ethnic cleansing" sit uneasily in the mind, associated with some of our darkest and most disturbing thoughts about human nature. They conjure Darfur, Serbia, Cambodia, and Pol Pot, and, most vividly of all for many of us, the horrors in Europe before and during World War II. "Species cleansing," on the other hand, is not a term that falls readily to hand, although we have engaged in it without much remorse for at least 10,000 years and probably more. Be it North American mammoths, driven to annihilation ten millennia ago by bands of a near-professional hunting culture known as Clovis ... to passenger pigeons and ivory-billed woodpeckers ... in twentieth century America, humans are ancient veterans of the art of species cleansing, ...

In America the vast spaces accentuate the vast spaces between people, deserts which stretch between human beings. It is a void which has to be spanned by the automobile. It takes an hour to reach a movie, two hours to reach a friend. So the coyotes howl and wail at the awful emptiness of mountains, deserts, hills.

Coyote power: surviving by one's intelligence and wits when others cannot; embracing existence in a mad, dancing, laughing, sympathetic expression of pure joy at evading the grimmest of fates; exulting in sheer aliveness; recognizing our shortcomings with rueful chagrin. These are the values Old Man America has embodied for thousands of years.

Years later, in America, I was told that Navajo Indians believed coyotes ushered in the Big Bang of the world with their song, stood on the rim of nothingness, before time, shoved their pointed muzzles in the air, and howled the world into existence at their feet. The Indians called them longdogs. The universe was etched with their howls, sound merging into sound, the beginning of all other songs.

happens when the Spiral is knocked out of balance. Earthmaker created the universe to have equal portions—Pain and Happiness, Birth and Death, Heat and Cold. That’s why the Spiral is so important. Its circles reach from the thinnest roots that dig into the ground to the perfect motions of the stars. Sometimes humans knock the Spiral out of kilter, sometimes animals do it. Every time a coyote runs through a flock of new lambs, killing for the sheer sport of it, without ever eating its prey … the Spiral tilts.

[Curtis Carley, first field coordinator for the Red Wolf Recovery Program] decided early in the project that there was only one possible way of saving red wolves from genetic swamping by coyotes. Biologists were going to have to capture every red wolf remaining in the wild for placement in a captive breeding program. In effect, preserving the red wolf's purity required first bringing about its extinction in the wild and turning its former range over to coyotes and hybrids until biologists could produce enough "pure" animals, then finding a suitable protected preserve for releasing a captive-bred population into the wild again. How difficult was that? After establishing a certified breeding program for red wolves at Point Defiance Zoo in Tacoma, Washington, in 1974 and 1975, the Red Wolf Recovery team decided to examine as breeding candidates some fifty red wolves held in almost twenty zoos across the country. Using the morphology-howl criteria they had established, out of those fifty they identified but a single red wolf, a female in the Oklahoma City Zoo. They were convinced all the rest, plus their pups, were actually either coyotes or hybrids, and in the latter case the team insisted they be destroyed. When some of the shocked zoo personnel refused such a draconian order, in the name of purity Curtis Carley carried out the death sentences himself.

I’ve put down half a pitcher of water by the time she comes to take my order. She fills another pitcher and sets it in front of me, standing with her pen in her hand, distracted, waiting for me to order. It’s early afternoon and well north of 100 degrees. Perusing the menu, I comment on the heat. “Man, it’s hot out there.” Setting her order pad down on the counter, crossing her arms, tapping the back of her pen against her lower lip, she looks out the window at my bike leaning there. Her eyes drift to mine with that look women can give men. You know the look, the one that says, “I’m wondering if you’re trying to act dumb, or if you really might be that dumb.” Not necessarily mean, just curious. I smile sheepishly beneath the pressure of the question behind her look. Every man reading these words knows exactly what I’m talking about here. You get the look, so you know you’ve said or done something really stupid, but you don’t have a clue what it is you’ve done or said that is so outrageously idiotic. Which just makes it worse. She sees all this wash across my face, and a small smile plays at the corners of her face. Still tapping the pen against her lower lip, she brings her elbows down to rest on the bar, leaning in a little closer to me, as if letting me in on her secret. “Honey, it’s June. It’s the hottest month in the Sonoran Desert.” Pausing, she looks again at my bicycle leaning against her window. “You’re riding a bicycle across the black asphalt in the hottest desert in the hottest month.” She pauses there, looking into my eyes, raising one eyebrow, letting me know a question is coming. “What, exactly, did you expect?” Hmmm. Good point. I might have heard those words whispered to me by the desert itself earlier today. “Right,” I say, closing the menu and handing it to her, keeping my eyes on hers. “I’ll take the burger.” We smile at each other as she takes the menu.

We successfully eradicated the bright green and yellow Carolina parakeet, our only native parrot and one of America’s most beautiful birds (look at Audubon’s painting of them sometime) because, as with coyotes, agriculturalists thought they were pests whose lives weren’t worth the space the creatures were taking up. During this unique and

Often they are mentioned in the same breath as drugs that are smuggled across, or terrorists that might try to be. What crosses the border is dangerous; the Southwest is our 'exposed flank.' There is a nagging fear that we've gone to sleep with the back door unlocked. "In Mexico the migration is less imagined and more concrete. It's something people from the poorest and most remote corners of the republic have participated in for years -- at least as far back as 1848, when the United States, through the Mexican War and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, acquired nearly half of their country, stranding many Mexican nationals in a foreign land. Then, as now, migration has been recognized to be a two-way street, of people leaving home for a while, working, and then mainly returning home. The relatively fast pace of American industrialization, coupled with Mexico's economic and demographic crises, has accelerated the movement north. Today, if you are among the majority of Mexicans -- those with very little money -- working in the United States is not merely something you hear about, but something you might consider. It is one of life's few options.

But what, no moral code in these stories? No promise of eternal life, no salvation from death, knowledge of which forms the ancient and oppressive burden of our self awareness? Coyote stories offer up none of these things. They do proffer a firm nod to the “religion” of the wild coyote. Old Man America teaches delight in being alive in a world of wondrous possibilities.

Coyote America : A Natural and Supernatural History by Dan Flores, The Lost Art of Reading Nature’s Signs by Tristan Gooley, Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire, Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer, and The Thing with Feathers by Noah Strycker.

So think of the American Great Plains as one more reminder that we can find home again.

As with coyotes, as with most mammals, as with us. Epigenetics determine who we are; that mysterious interplay between our hardwired genetic selves and the experiences we have, which turn off some genes and dial up the gain on others, shapes the beings we become.

American policymakers have always needed enemies, and with wolves gone, the coyote stepped unsuspectingly into the glare

As Chuck Jones described his antihero’s appeal years later, “Humiliation and indifference—these are conditions everyone of us finds unbearable—this is why the Coyote when falling is more concerned with the audience’s opinion of him than he is with the inevitable result of too much gravity.” Wile

Resolving those questions—determining the essential character of the coyote—would take the entire second half of the nineteenth century and most of the twentieth. We’re still trying to figure out what we think about them even now. At

At mid-century, there was no emerging consensus. Various travelers to the West observed coyotes, often with fascination, and sometimes painted them, but they initially took no stand on the animal’s essential character. When

It certainly wasn’t based on science and sometimes looked suspiciously like the collateral damage of a puritanical loathing of our own animal natures.

We often express horror at animals that pursue and kill other animals, but such a response demonstrates a misunderstanding of our own evolutionary history. We have been a wildly successful speciesin part because of our predatory skills.

Aldo (Leopold) had argued ... for a revolutionary principle in human affairs: a recognition that other species in this world possess an innate right to existence.

A coyote's primary prey happens to be our close fellow travelers, the mice and rats that flourish around and among us in profusion.

In our twenty-first-century world, the terms "genocide" and "ethnic cleansing" sit uneasily in the mind, associated with some of our darkest and most disturbing thoughts about human nature. They conjure Darfur, Servia, Cambodia and Pol Pot, and most vividly of all for many of us, the horrors in Europe before and during World War II. "Spicies cleansing," on the other hand, is not a term that falls readily to hand, although we have engaged in it without much remorse for at least 10,000 years and probably more.

Coyotes may also attack cats for the same reason they attack small dogs: they perceive domestic cats and dogs as intraguild predators operating in their territories. When coyotes attack dogs or cats, they most often don't intend to eat them; they're simply ridding their territories of roaming predators.

But the most old-fashioned research topic of all - an idea Western culture had known since the time of Aristotle as "the balance of nature," the presence of a dynamic equilibrium in the natural world - began to push ecological sicence in the direction of understanding the role of predators. The Biological Survey's policies (the federal predator control agency) assumed the European fold position: predators were entirely disposable, and the banishment of wolves and cougards and coyotes from America would create a civilized paradise for deer and elk and ranchers and sheepmen.

In Denver coyotes had become an urban presence by the 1970s. Chicago, in the 1990's was next, and by roughly 200 almost every city in the united States and Canada, no matter how small and picturesque or sprawling and ear splitting, possessed a thriving population of coyotes as full-time residents.

Altogether, we kill about 500,000 of them (coyotes) a year in the United States.

The prime directive (in living safely with coyotes) is straightforward and delivered with an exclamation mark: For chrissake, do not feed coyotes and accustom them to associating food with humans! To avoid the most common human conflict with coyotes, don't let your cats or small dogs outside at night.

The ecological niche breakthrough was critical for understanding wild coyotes and appreciating predators generally. In nature a "niche," is analagous to an occupation in human culture.

From the time the bison slaughter commenced in the 1820s, it took little more than half a century to clear the Great Plains of that ancient population of animals, which during spans of good weather must have approached 25 to 30 million animals. One effect of that species cleansing was to open up the great grasslands to domesticated animals.

then went on to add the ultimate insult for the age (and a patriotic reason for shooting them anyway): the coyote, the writer avowed, was the “ORIGINAL BOLSHEVIK.

The ex acid-heads from the cities Converted to Guru or Swami, Do penance with shiny Dopey eyes, and quit eating meat. In the forests of North America, The land of Coyote and Eagle, They dream of India, of forever blissful sexless highs. And sleep in oil-heated Geodesic domes, that Were stuck like warts In the woods. And the Coyote singing is shut away for they fear the call of the wild. And they sold their virgin cedar trees, the tallest trees in miles, To a logger Who told them, “Trees are full of bugs.

Red wolves, like all wolves, develop and defend a home range, which is also known as a territory. You might think of a territory as a private hunting ground with specific boundaries. A territory might be patrolled by a single adult red wolf, but more often it is defended by a mated pair. The pair will attack, and even kill, other red wolves and coyotes that they find in their home range. They mark their boundaries with scent posts, which are basically spots where they squirt a little urine onto a tree or other object at sniffing height or on the ground; they also use scent from their anal glands or excrement placed where it will be noticed. A red wolf pack is usually a breeding male and female and often includes yearling wolves born the season before. But breeding pairs and pack territories are temporal. Pairs sometimes split up and bond with new mates. Territorial boundaries are fought over and redefined. The dynamics are ever changing. On average, today’s red wolf territories range in size from about thirty-seven to sixty-eight square miles. The amount of prey present in a given area, and the type of habitat within it, contribute to territory size - as do the energy requirements of the wolf maintaining it - so these numbers vary greatly. The East’s ecologically productive forests and swamps may be one reason why red wolves have smaller territories than gray wolves. Red wolves’ comparatively smaller stature, which equates to lower energy requirements, is another reason.

It is never certain for her that the wolves will answer each Wednesday. I wonder for a moment why they do. Surely they know that these are just a bunch of humans trying to speak wolf. Surely they smell us, a group of sixty people cloaked in lotions, colognes, insecticides, and deodorant - announcing our odiferous presence to an animal whose world is ordered by scent - standing in the woods a mere few hundred yards away. Surely they heard our engines as we arrived. Surely they could hear that our pitch is off, that we are an imitation. Yet they accept this and play along. Why? Wolves, it turns out, will howl to a variety of stimuli, including the sirens of emergency responder vehicles. In the late 1960s, when researchers discovered that the red wolf was nose-diving into extinction, they played electronic sirens in southeastern Texas coastal marshes and plains to elicit howls from wild canids. From the howls, they made probable identifications of red wolves and possible hybrids. Coyote vocalizations often have a series of broken yips and barns and emanate at a comparatively higher frequency, whereas red wolves will howl at lower frequencies that start “deep and mournful” but may break off into yapping like a coyote, according to a report authored in 1972 by two trappers, Glynn Riley and Roy McBride, who were employed by the federal government. Early surveyors noted, too, that the red wolves were more likely to howl in good weather and less likely to respond in rainy or overcast weather. Confined to their facility, perhaps the red wolves of Sandy Ridge howl to humans because it gives them a way to communicate with living beings outside their fence. Who knows: maybe they are simply telling us to bugger off and go away. Or, as frightened as they are of seeing a human, perhaps howling to a group of them on a dark night is more palatable since they do not have to look at us or be gawked at in turn. Perhaps howling is a way of reaching out on their own terms, in their own language, through which they can proclaim their space and their place on the land - their way of saying, “Even though I’m in here, behind this fence, I own this place.” Or maybe they just want to remind us that this land had been theirs for millennia before we invaded and claimed it. In the dark of night, I fantasize that their howls are calling out: “All this was ours. This was ours.

While species like black bears and foxes can migrate inland, red wolves face a continent’s worth of coyotes to their west, north, and south. Red wolves that stay on the peninsula will be squeezed within the recovery area as the coastal habitat around them degrades. They will have nowhere left to run. Since it is unlikely that red wolves will evolve blowholes or fins by the century’s close, they will need additional reintroduction sites in the coming decades.

We only have red wolves here at Sandy Ridge now,” Ryan says. “Summer is our slow season. But by fall, this place will be packed with wolves and coyotes.” “Why do you hold coyotes here?” I ask. “If we know one is holding a territory, we trap it, sterilize it and put a radio collar on it,” Ryan explains. “They stay here at Sandy Ridge while they recover, and then we release them back to their territory.” By sterilizing coyotes that set up territories in the red wolf recovery area and then tracking them, the red wolf biologists protect the red wolf’s unique genome from hybridization with coyotes. But a sterile coyote doesn’t solve the red wolf’s propensity for running with and mating with coyotes. It only prevents conception. It is an elaborate birth-control scheme to ensure the survival of an endangered species. One of the quirks of the genus Canis is that the various species within it can interbreed and produce fertile offspring. Historically, hybridization of the last wild red wolves with coyotes was the single biggest threat that prompted the FWS to begin capturing the last wolves for breeding in captivity. When the first red wolves were reintroduced to Alligator River in 1987, the nearest coyotes were 500 miles west. Experts thought it would take them eight to ten years to pad their way to the coast - plenty of time, they thought, for red wolves to build up a big population and keep the invading coyotes at bay. But coyotes soon infiltrated the red wolf’s recovery area in the early 1990s. Suddenly, the Red Wolf Recovery Program had a problem on its hands: red wolves were once again hybridizing with coyotes. “Why don’t you just trap all the coyotes out of the recovery area?” I ask. “Even if we could remove them all, then more coyotes would likely just come in and take their territories,” Ryan replies. Plus, the team simply doesn’t have the manpower to trap all of the coyotes off the peninsula, though they put significant effort into patrolling certain areas to keep coyotes out. Coyotes are too adaptive and elusive for a large-scale trapping program to work permanently. In one of their biological quirks, coyotes are known to have more offspring survive to adulthood when their population is persecuted through lethal control efforts. The rascals can live on practically nothing, and they are prolific breeders to boot.

We drive the captured animals to the red wolf health-care facility for processing and treatment. Inside, a large cage with metal bars holds a seventy-pound male red wolf in the workshop area. He lies stretched out against the back wall, his head resting on straw. No matter how nonchalant he poses, no matter the disinterest he feigns, he keeps tabs on the exact movement of each person in the room. He’s easily the largest red wolf I’ve yet seen, and if I happened upon him in the woods, there is no chance I’d mistake him for a needle-nosed coyote.

Despite years of inquiry, the origins of Canis rufus remain elusive. According to Fain and his coauthors, although hybridization has influenced gray wolves around the Great Lakes, eastern wolves, and red wolves, it is the red wolf that has been the most deeply affected by it. In addition, its extreme population bottleneck, and the artificial process of selecting the founders for the captive-breeding program based on morphology, further altered its genetic makeup. The lack of consensus over what a red wolf is versus what it once may have been exacerbates its conservation “purgatory” of being officially listed as an endangered species but perpetually accused of being unworthy. Was there a diminutive southeastern wolf that evolved in North America independently from gray wolves? Do red and eastern wolves share an evolutionary lineage with coyotes? We know without a doubt that when Europeans arrived in the New World, the eastern woods held howling, chorusing wolves. But the not-so-simple question remains: what were they?

Was there a diminutive southeastern wolf that evolved in North America independently from gray wolves? Do red and eastern wolves share an evolutionary lineage with coyotes? We know without a doubt that when Europeans arrived in the New World, the eastern woods held howling, chorusing wolves. But the not-so-simple question remains: what were they?

By the early 1900s, the remaining beleaguered red wolves interbred on a large scale with coyotes in the extreme southwestern portions of their range in central Texas and the Ozarks. These interspecies couplings were the metaphorical last gasp of their survival instinct. Some researchers think that it was only after red wolves had been largely eliminated from their historic range that coyotes crept eastward and claimed the transformed landscape, now empty of wolves, for their own. Coyotes proved much more resilient and adaptable by living near farms and even within towns and cities. In short, they tolerated and even thrived in close proximity to people, a habit that red wolves simply never acquired. By the time scientists noticed, there were nearly as many, if not more, red wolf-coyote hybrids on the landscape than there were pure red wolves. Yet, a few red wolves remained. They held the physical characteristics of the species, as far as we are able to determine them to have been. These animals retreated to the swamps and no-man’s-lands of far southeastern Texas and southwestern Louisiana. The last of their kind, they were pushed up against the Gulf of Mexico in coastal habitat too bug- and tick-laced for people to desire. Enough survived to give the species a new start, with the guiding hands of humans and science. But the rest - nearly a quarter or a continent’s worth of wolves and their pups - were lost to poisons, wolf hounds, traps, bullets, and dynamite. It’s mind-boggling to imagine how a large mammal that was once so widespread could be lost to near extinction in such a short time.

You ready to see some wolves?” Ryan asks. He sounds like a proud parent. I nod. The only live red wolves I’d seen previously were display animals on exhibit at the Museum of Life and Science in Durham, North Carolina, and the North Carolina Zoo in Asheboro. I hope up and we stroll to a nearby pen, where two male red wolves pace nervously. It is hard to look at a leggy red wolf and not escape the thought that these animals are built to run. Their legs appear proportionally longer than those of a gray wolf. The brothers before me are about five feet long, if you include the tail. Burnt-umber red spreads out from their ears to their shoulders. Their muzzles look long and strong, their chest and waist are less heavyset than a gray wolf’s, and their tail is less bushy. “They look like they’re all legs,” I say. “They are a little more leggy than a coyote is, in comparison to their frame,” Ryan says. “Especially in summer, when their coat is shorter. It makes them look a lot longer and leaner.” Even though the brothers run along the fence in repetitive circles, they barely make a sound. I stand five feet away and yet can’t hear them pant. The sound of leaves stirring under their paws barely registers. Their movements are anxious, yet silent. We move on to the next pen, which holds a breeding pair and a three-month-old pup. We tiptoe around a corner to a break in the privacy screen. I peek through and see a male jammed against the back corner. He presses his body against the fence’s metal weave. The female paces furiously about ten feet in front of him. They stare at us. She paces back and forth, back and forth. Their pup spots us and then bolts along the far wall. He scrambles with his chest low to the ground, like a spooked house cat. He wriggles nose first between the fence and his dad, his ears pressed back. The little guy clasps his tail against his anus. “I can’t believe they’re so afraid of us,” I say. “Yeah, even the ones that grow up in captivity often do not ever lose their fear of people,” Ryan says. “It’s just some basic wild instinct that they maintain, that they haven’t lost.” Even though these animals are fed three times a week by human hands, they still get agitated when a person approaches. As I watch, the three-month-old puppy pushes deeper into his dad’s side. I feel guilty that our presence is causing such unease; then Ryan, along with the biting deer flies, prods us to move on.

... coyotes enjoy no governmental protection against being killed.

Meanwhile, the economic gulf between us and our southern neighbors drove hundreds of thousands of people to illegally cross the 1,933-mile U.S.-Mexico border each year, searching for work and a better life. Congress had spent billions to harden the border, with fencing, cameras, drones, and an expanded and increasingly militarized border patrol. But rather than stop the flow of immigrants, these steps had spurred an industry of smugglers—coyotes—who made big money transporting human cargo in barbaric and sometimes deadly fashion. And although border crossings by poor Mexican and Central American migrants received most of the attention from politicians and the press, about 40 percent of America’s unauthorized immigrants arrived through airports or other legal ports of entry and then overstayed their visas.

Yet in 2012, as Fernandez was ushered through a new eighteen-foot-tall steel gate that had been erected around Pat Nixon’s park, a Mexican looking through the fence said to her, “Hey, who do you think is more free? You in America, or me over here? You are being guarded by men with guns. I just walked over here from the taco cart.” (p. 70)

Meanwhile, the Internet is abuzz for a few days in 2012 with another story (it turns out to be true) from the Pacific side of the country. A California couple, cruising along at freeway speeds in the early morning on the Utah-Nevada border, drive through a pack of coyotes crossing I-80. Six hundred miles and ten hours later, unpacking the car in their driveway near Nevada City, they discover a full-grown coyote snagged like a bug in the grill of the car. Their flying coyote ornament is fully alert, with one cut on a paw and another on its muzzle. After hitchhiking from Utah to the West Coast, it is otherwise unhurt.

Existence.

Meaning of Human Existence.