Transmitting from the Mojave Wilderness in Joshua Tree, California.

Now is the time for Desert Oracle Radio, the voice of the desert.

Night has fallen on the desert.

And if you are truly out in the wilderness tonight, the real backcountry, one thing you can't help but notice is that every sound is correct for its place and time.

The choruses of coyotes are never out of place, never out of tune, the owl hooting, the wind, or lack thereof.

The fire crackling

the sound of the creek

gurgling around the little bend

where maybe you caught a trout

the afternoon prior

or the tides of the sea

or the little waves of a lake if that's what's nearby the sounds of

earth are one and only home no matter what lies the aerospace hucksters tell you every couple of years.

They make their trillions from constant war and the global police state, and it will always be so.

Until one day not very far from now, and all of a sudden, it's not so.

As the night gives way to the growing light on the eastern horizon, you may be lucky to hear the dawn chorus.

The voices of the songbirds rising up loudest in springtime, but always

strong when the day will be sunny. Biologists down in Australia have even recorded fish singing

a dawn chorus.

We've been saying good morning for hundreds of millions of years, turns out, ever optimistic.

For some of us, it's not enough to visit some crowded national park full of bozos who can't drive or to engage in some hideous online competition to reserve a campsite in the high Sierra maybe eight months

from now and staying in some shoddy overpriced charm stucco speckhouse from a few housing booms back?

...