I just finished reading The Future of the Wild for Booklist and I have now learned enough about the environmental situation in the U.S. to be really really ticked. I am becoming a person with a lot of hostility in me and nowhere for it to go - I need to start boxing maybe, or shooting tin cans or something.

I wasn't terribly surprised by the chapter on the Everglades - I grew up in Florida and down there it is so hard to make anyone think that any part of that state is worth saving for something other than condos, strip malls or another Walmart. All the beaches I knew are pretty much gone, except the park my father always took us to, which is a park and can't be paved. Still, the hotels and condos surround it and they are only getting worse. I added Cross Creek to my list for next year after reading the Everglades essay and I might be adding River of Grass as well. We used to go to Cypress Gardens when I was a kid and I remember how amazing those big Cypress trees were. I don't even want to think about a world that doesn't know them.

It was at the end of the book, in the essay on Yellowstone, that I read a familiar name. The elk were slaughtered in Yellowstone until a ban on hunting in 1883. Poaching continued however with the support of the neighboring towns which "enraged William Temple Hornaday, an outspoken opponent of hunting, a crusader for wildlife, and a conservationist second in prominence in his day only to Teddy Roosevelt." Hornaday - his name rang a dozen bells in my head until I went into my office/library did some wandering around the nature and reference areas and there he was. "Hornaday's Encyclopedia of Natural History" - 15th Edition, 1925. It came to me after the death of my husband's step grandmother who had a lot of great books that no one else seemed to want. It's basically an encyclopedia of animals, something I've dipped into every not again as much for the pictures as articles. It's a lovely book and now I'm doubly glad to have it. Hornaday sounds like my kind of guy.

Notes: There's a flame war going on between Mark Sarvas and Steve Almond. It has spawned a bit of discussion about what lit bloggers do and why they do it and who the real writers are. I liked Almond's book Candyfreak - I thought it was funny and smart and really a great bit of writing. I also enjoy Mark's blog quite a bit because he follows the literary scene so well and always has fascinating interviews and updates. Who is the real writer? I thought putting your thoughts on paper (or a screen) meant you were writing when you did it, period. I'm not holding my breath for publication to define me, thank you very much. Last time I checked, there was room for all of us in the world.

And I have to agree with John Scalzi that someone should have edited Steve just a bit on this article. I mean really - is he a starved for sex or what?

It's pouring down rain here in the Pacific Northwest and I'm thinking about the girl I am trying to imagine into life who would be standing in this rain and missing her father and wondering what will come next. She is either off onto an urban fantasy or into a family drama or disappearing on a hunt for an Arctic mystery. I don't know her well enough yet to send her in any one direction, but I know how she feels right now, at this moment. She is the loneliest person in the world, and that is as good a place as any to start to tell her story. That is her beginning.