PAUL CHRISTENSEN

There's a cedar forest near where I live, which sprawls across the slopes of a mountain otherwise covered in what the French call the garrigue. You may know the kind of scrub brush by the name of chaparral, the twiggy, gray-green, often thorny bushes that keep down the dirt in cowboy country. It's harsh country, with long jags of desert-dry weather, and the drone of cicadas all through the heat rages of summer. Hardly anything but juniper and a few species of runty oaks survi

I'm running out of things to do this summer. Shopping for food has lost its thrill for me. I don't like the endless aisles of food, the humming compressors keeping all those packs of meat cool, the produce in bins that lie there in heaps waiting to be picked over. It makes me feel vaguely nauseous to realize how much energy is needed to keep all these shoppers going. I don't want to lug home more bags of supplies, cram them into already stuffed cabinets and wonder what I'll f